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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Remathilis" data-source="post: 8694215" data-attributes="member: 7635">I will answer with an example from what YouTuber Josh Strife Hayes has said about MMO design. MMO typically falls into two broad camps: narrative driven or open world. Narrative MMOs like WoW, ESO or the Old Republic have a general main story that is augmented with plenty of side quests, raids, dungeons and supplemental systems like crafting or housing to keep players interested. They can go and do other things but they always have a main focus of the story to fall back on. Even if they engage in none of the supplement stuff, there is an engaging story they can interact with. A structure. A sense of purpose.Open world games like New World or many survival/full PvP MMOs give you a big world and tell you to make your own fun. Go craft. Go PvP. Go build houses and form guilds or go raid dungeons and grind for loot. The problem is there is rarely any reason to do any of that besides "you can". The story doesn't evolve because there is no story, except for what you did while crafting or raiding or hunting wolves for hours. You just wander around aimlessly trying to find something fun to do while trying not to die. You have lots of options but none of them matter.Now let's take this back to D&D. When a DM says "in this campaign, you're all pirates" or "you're all on a holy quest for the Sun God" or "you're all working for the super secret branch of the King's spy order", you have set up a storyline that gives the PC focus. A long term goal and an expectation. The day to day stuff can vary; finding a rare spell component for the wizard, doing a quest for a priest who raised another PC, or saving a PCs brother from cultists, but eventually all roads lead back to the main plot. Conversely, if the DM says "here is the town of Townsville, explore it" I find that PCs often don't know where to begin. One will want to go fight orcs, one will want to go after the cultists from in his backstory, one will want to seduce the mayor's daughter and the last will want to burn the tavern down and steal every coin in the place before he does. There is no coherent direction to go, no long term goal beyond "do something" so PCs find their own fun, and it usually involves provoking bigger and bigger responses from the DM.For me, the payoff of having that structure of a set of rails outweighs the boredom of aimless wandering of an open world. I know where the fun is, I don't have to wander around trying to find it.</blockquote>

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