KS Idea: ToEE-like Game Engine?

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.

Fair enough. I guess what I had in the back of my mind was an open source-like effort, with the Kickstarter getting it started. If that was successful in building a community of interested people, then the modders and coders in the group could collaborate to enhance and maintain it. If not, well so it goes...

Oh I was suddenly reminded of the existence of the Iceblink Engine. While it doesn't use OGL, the ruleset seems heavily D&D influenced and of course inspired by the Gold Box games… From the looks of it, there have been a few modules made with it, but all appear to be WIP (demos for projects that might be completed in the future). Now granted the engine / toolset was only publicly released back in mid-December, but I wouldn't be surprised if none of these projects ever see completion.

I love the idea in theory (combat in ToEE is pretty awesome), but in practice I just think it would result in a bunch of half-finished demos… which incidentally is what actual ToEE feels like (and the now abandoned "Keep on the Borderlands" project). I maintain my position that an actual game with a user friendly toolset is the only viable way to go.

That's the point of allowing the engine to run modules from NWN/NWN2. You already have actual games, including the OCs.