Railroading scripts, but being up-front by them.
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Josh_Kablack
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In my experience, even the most obstinately set-in-their-concept of their character'roleplayer will usually accept a heavily scripted extra-railroady game where the DM makes up outright cruddy backstory on the fly for them if the alternative is no game at all.
"But transportation issues are social-justice issues. The toll of bad transit policies and worse infrastructure—trains and buses that don’t run well and badly serve low-income neighborhoods, vehicular traffic that pollutes the environment and endangers the lives of cyclists and pedestrians—is borne disproportionately by black and brown communities."
So basically you want a multiplayer gamebook. That actually sounds reasonably interesting. When playing through gamebooks, I tend to build up a personality around my AFGNCAAP even though it makes no difference to the plot, which is actually the reason why I like gamebooks so much. Good stories are character-driven, and in a gamebook the main characters is whoever you're in the mood for.
The Citadel of Chaos, for example, has your basic adventure plot: Evil wizard is terrorizing the land, you are a pupil of a not-evil wizard who's been sent to infiltrate and/or storm his castle and stop him. The story is pretty much linear (you can have different encounters on the way through the courtyard, but you're always going to end up in the entrance hall afterwards no matter what you do), but I can read the same story twice and get a very different experience, even if I made the same decisions, just by imagining a character based off of Wolverine instead of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Making it multiplayer would be as simple as rewriting the (already incredibly basic) battle system to be more team-focused and having some kind of mechanic for deciding who gets to turn the pages. You could hardcode it, add a chat feature, and put it online. That actually sounds like a cool way to kill an afternoon.
The Citadel of Chaos, for example, has your basic adventure plot: Evil wizard is terrorizing the land, you are a pupil of a not-evil wizard who's been sent to infiltrate and/or storm his castle and stop him. The story is pretty much linear (you can have different encounters on the way through the courtyard, but you're always going to end up in the entrance hall afterwards no matter what you do), but I can read the same story twice and get a very different experience, even if I made the same decisions, just by imagining a character based off of Wolverine instead of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Making it multiplayer would be as simple as rewriting the (already incredibly basic) battle system to be more team-focused and having some kind of mechanic for deciding who gets to turn the pages. You could hardcode it, add a chat feature, and put it online. That actually sounds like a cool way to kill an afternoon.