Okay, I'm sure I'm not the only one that has heard people say, "I play games for the gameplay," or heard people complain, "What these new game makers dont' realize it that the game is about the gameplay."
Then I got thinking that while I enjoy an RPG's storyline, I don't enjoy the battles, or to be more precise, I don't enjoy having a storyline and battles. They feel like two completely disseperate things mooshed together into an incohesive whole.
Take the original Final Fantasy. Now that I like; of course, I prefer the newer versions of them because the leveling up and difficulty and interface is improved. But my point is that the game provides story at a minimum and has the PLAYER rather than the self-narrating characters create the story in his or her head.
Most RPGs provide the storyline as "sugar" to reward the players for sitting through the "tart" battles. In most games where the STORY is the point rather than the gameplay fighting feels arduous, something that must be done simply to progress further into the presented, predetermined story.
So I now come to the whole point of this post, which is to ask "serious" RPG players if they would still play their games if there were no stories in them, just the battles.
So RPG'ers, would you? Personally, I think I would play them more.