The problem with this idea is who is going to support it after the Kickstarter funds run out? That is, would the creator sell the game engine to would be developers or would they distribute for free? NWN worked well as a modding tool because a lot of people initially bought it to play the official campaign (it ended up being pretty awful but still it meant a lot of people owned it and some of them ended up making pretty good modules for it). If Bioware had tried to sell only the toolset I doubt nearly as many people would have bought it. Same with NWN2 and Shadowrun Returns. And even in those cases, a lot of UGC is unfinished, buggy or just plain not very good (because the people who made it are amateurs doing it in their free time). There's certainly some excellent content out there for NWN but it took years before most of it was finished..
Even though I like the 3.5 ruleset, I don't think I'd throw money at an engine knowing there might never be a full game made with it.. Of course it was truly user friendly I might want to make my own game, but only if I knew there were enough people who would be able to play it. Pledging money towards an actual game is risky enough.
Even though I like the 3.5 ruleset, I don't think I'd throw money at an engine knowing there might never be a full game made with it.. Of course it was truly user friendly I might want to make my own game, but only if I knew there were enough people who would be able to play it. Pledging money towards an actual game is risky enough.