I have come to the conclusion that a large portion of my long-standing trouble with integrating with narrativist/literary RP is that I expect driven teamplay -- when in a team environment, I expect teams to focus single-mindedly on their declared goal, and all the participants to have the complete picture, or "have the flick", about the surroundings and the path to that goal. In literary environments, though, this declared goal is usually an IC goal (it can be OOC if everyone's set their social contract out ahead of time, but that is uncommon in large-scale community RP environments).
As a result of this, I find myself latching onto the in-character goals of either my own character or another character, and running with them to the expense of the table's out-of-character literary goals. For instance, take the idea of someone going to one of my characters "hey, here's this ring we need you to dispose of" and said character simply chucking it in a fusion reactor and going "done". Yet, if I try to take that drive away, I'm left with no motivation to engage with any RP presented to me. Am I stuck in a catch-22 that means that I shouldn't attempt literary (narrativist-system or freeform) RP as a player, and instead stick with "crunchy" systems, or are there strategies I can use to mitigate this in the absence of a source of clear OOC goals (such as a social contract)?
(Sidebar: this doesn't typically occur to me when I DM because I can adopt a sandbox-simulationist approach, treating the NPCs as walking control panels the party can manipulate in various ways in order to get various reactions, nor does it occur when I play systems like D&D because the party model in a D&D game with any degree of combat focus winds up putting me on the same page as everyone else at the table.)
Original example of how working too strongly towards an IC goal can disrupt the OOC goals of the players at the table:
I once was asked to play the archnemesis of a nobleman; bastard half-sibling bent on taking everything the nobleman had, you know? This triggered me to start dreaming up elaborate plots where my character would impersonate said noble and frame him for crimes, or give politically sensitive orders (such as assassinations or even promotions/demotions) that appeared to come from him.
Furthermore, I had thoughts of building up to possibilities of taking over the noble house by some means -- whether by tricking said noble's fiancee into having a heir by the bastard half-brother, or by kidnapping and impersonating said noble. However, this was rejected out-of-hand by the nobleman's player, because he was after a simple source of drama for his character, not a determined, focused adversary bent on making his nobleman's life a walking hell by any means necessary. My approaches simply went too far in carrying out the bastard half-brother's IC goals, without taking the OOC goals of the other player into account.