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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MoogleEmpMog" data-source="post: 3399015" data-attributes="member: 22882">Yes.Many RPGs are explicitly designed for one-shot play (Savage Worlds is one; Wushu is very vocally this way).  They are not as successful as D&D, for whatever reason.Some people - and in this I would include at least 50% of all RPG players I've known and easily 90% of all people in general - are just looking to go along for the ride, TO BE ENTERTAINED.  When they play and RPG they may want to contribute their character, or they may want to hang out with friends, but they don't come to tell a story.  They come to experience one.  I see nothing wrong with the experience these people are seeking, and am usually one of them.  If I want to drive the course of a story, I'll either write one or GM a game with a strong story element.Right.  It's confined, but it's fun.  Emphasis on the fun.  It has a very specific goal and it executes it to perfection, like most high quality entertainment.Other games (console RPGs from the '90s on, PC flight sims and RTSes of the mid-late '90s, older PC RPGs, etc.) do tell stories - stories the creators paid scriptwriters to produce, often with lavish care.  The best of those stories are easily on par with a quality movie; the *very* best are arguably competitive with a quality novel.  They are highly focused on delivering a good story and on merging story and gameplay in an appealing way.I've seen the typical quality of user-created content; many of the most sparkling levels ever created for, say, Unreal Tournament have a 'story' that boils down to C&Ping a description from an official map and somehow managing to insert grammar and spelling errors.  But of course, with the Will Wright model, you wouldn't even get that.  Any story you get would be your own - meaning those who can't produce a decent story will never get one, and those who don't have the time/energy to do so won't, either.This would certainly be terrible game design from a business perspective - why would anyone ever buy another video game (provided they had the desire to do this free-form story creation stuff; I'd keep buying Final Fantasies and Suikodens and Valkyrie Profiles to find out what happens to the casts the writers created)?I'm willing to bet that it would be just as bad in the actual execution, though.  If I wanted an open-ended city or suburban life sim, Will Wright would be just the guy I'd tap - but a console RPG?  No thanks.  A fighting game?  His team has how much experience with the intricate tick-by-tick balance of those, again?  None?  Thought so.  A turn-based-strategy game?  I'll stick with Alpha Centauri, Civ IV, Heroes III, etc.Unless all the great game designers in the world decided to come together and end their careers and their industry by producing this theoretical uber-game, it would end up as a great many poor games bundled as one game.There are systems that do this better, primarily by shifting narrative control to the players via actual mechanical reinforcement.  The cost of this is a great deal of deprotagonization; if you control the world to some extent, you're LESS in tune with your character-as-avatar.  Either in spite or because of this, I've enjoyed some of those games.However, D&D doesn't do this by the book and if I sign on to a D&D game and find it's a complete sandbox in which I'm supposed to user-create my content, I'll walk away and GM a game of my own.  If I'm going to sandbox, I may as well create a sand castle others can play with.</blockquote>

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