Recently, @anim-ttrpgs set off a round of RPG discourse by suggesting (checks notes) that gamemasters should not be expected to transform all the ideas every player throws at them into a cohesive narrative. No, seriously.
It drives me up the freaking wall. Especially with the comparison to Baldur's Gate 3. You should not expect your friendly neighborhood DM to mimic Larian goddamn Studios.
Problem the first: Labor. Larian Studios had twenty credited writers (probably with assistance from other departments) working for six years to create BG3's narrative. Six years of full-time work, not six years of writing on weekends and brainstorming on coffee breaks. Even those fancy Real Play podcasts don't put 120-ish writer-years of work into their stories.
Problem the second: Production pipeline. Baldur's Gate 3 had every aspect of its narrative worked out before players got to create their characters. Every grand narrative arc, every fun little sidequest, every contingency and call-back.
Real DMs have to choose between railroading the players down a preset plot or writing their story on the fly, which each have innate drawbacks that premade video games don't. You can mix the "railroad" and "sandbox" methods, but that doesn't let you avoid those drawbacks, just mix them.
One advantage that all video games have is scope limits. BG3 gives players a lot of freedom, but its structure provides some strict limitations on what players can physically do. If the player starts BG3 and says "I want to play a warforged gunslinger who fell into Baldur's Gate from Eberron," nothing will happen, both because none of that is a character option and because BG3 is not voice-activated.
This perk extends well past character creation. The player characters have a lot of options, but they can't randomly hit on enemies in the middle of combat (even if the player thinks it's funny), so the writers don't have to figure out how owlbears react to horny bards. The player can't attempt to tame random animals they come across, or adopt random children, against the protests of the child's parents.
The player can't try to start a sparring match with plot-critical monks by saying "I'm gonna put you in the ground," then refuse to change his phrasing when asked, then get the party kicked out of the monastery for threatening to murder them, forcing the computer to improvise an alternate way for the plot to continue. (Yes, this is based on something that happened in a game I played in.)
The player can only press the buttons provided. The game devs can simply choose not to provide any buttons that would break their story.
A closely-related problem: Cooperation. None of those 20 writers are gonna come into work one day with an idea for a warforged gunslinger character and expect the other writers to bend over backwards to incorporate it. The writers (and other Larian Studios employees) worked together to create a narrative where all the pieces worked together.
The writing team isn't a hivemind, but they are a committee. They knew the goal they were working towards, and all of them worked towards it.
This is not true of most TRPG groups, certainly not D&D groups. If a D&D campaign has a big overarching plot, the DM is supposed to keep it secret to avoid spoiling the players. But also, the DM is supposed to incorporate "plot hooks" from character backstories into the story. And the DM is supposed to make all those character backstories compatible with one another. And the players are not expected to lift a single finger.
There are many perspectives on what a tabletop RPG campaign "should" be. You can argue that it's just a board game with extra story, where the goal is to use the game's systems to achieve a favorable outcome. You can argue that it's a cooperative narrative. You can argue that it's nothing but an excuse to hang out with some friends and make bad jokes that people laugh at anyways.
But one thing it can never be is Baldur's Gate 3.
