[MUD-Dev] Congratulations Horizons...

[Tom]

Friday, January 9, 2004, 11:48:14 AM, Marian wrote:
> In <URL:/archives/meow?group+local.muddev> on Thu 08 Jan, Brad McQuaid wrote:
>> From: "Lee Sheldon" <lsheldo2 at tampabay.rr.com>

>>>   2) Here's one for Brad McQuaid to chew on. His quote: "All
>>>   quests are FedEx." In fact out of several steps (5?) in Trials
>>>   of the Gifted only one step requires you to go obtain items
>>>   and return to the questgiver and that is if you solve a simple
>>>   riddle. The rest are not.

>> In fairness, I'm trying to think back to the exact context of
>> that paraphrase, yet I do recall saying something similar.

>> I believe my point was you are ALWAYS taking something from one
>> place/NPC to another place/NPC, hence it is like 'bringing a
>> piece of mail'.  Whether that 'mail' is in the form of an item or
>> something else (generically, a 'flag' on your character) was
>> simply my point that all quests can be boiled down to that --
>> regardless of all the cool story and setting you can place on top
>> of it, you still need that fundamental mechanism.

[snip]

> What would be welcome is a way to preserve the 'unknown' part of
> the quest between various takers. And perhaps rather than relying
> on persistence make it quite possible to actually fail.

> The first would make it impossible to hand out a checklist of
> actions once the first player finishes it.  The second would make
> taking the quest, and completing it, really meaningful.  You can
> have time to prepare for each stage, but you get only one shot at
> it.

> And of course once you completed the quest the game should
> recognise that fact and treat your character differently from
> others.  If you have become the champion of the gods, you should
> not then (have to) return to exterminating mice.

Well, you've pre-empted a post I was going to make to this list, so
I'll just drop it in here, and if there's enough interest I'll post
the full thing in a new topic.

The question of course is, how about permanent Quest Death?
Following are the random notes I'd made in preparation of the above
topic, but they also follow and build on your own comments and ideas
(excuse typos etc):

--begin--
  allow a player to only perform a quest from an NPC once. use
  immersive text to deal with compeltion/non-completion. have 1000
  NPCs with essentially the same quest, but that's 1000 quests the
  player needs to complete.

  provide differing difficulties by changing quest diffilcuty based
  on npc - example, baker wants bread delivered or flour colelcted,
  diplomat wants documents delivered to far off land, king wants
  dragon killed etc.

  use random mission generator to generate a unqiue mission per
  player per NPC, but save mission seed to re-create same missions
  should player fail/abort

  examples:

    player visits NPC in village, says "anything to do"

    NPC says "yes, can you [take|collect|find] [this|my] [loaf of
    bread|bag of flour|cat|dog] from {other NPC]"

    on completion, "thanks for ..."

    on abort (must be done with NPC), suitable text on asking again,
    gets exact same mission.

    on completion, nice messagem, XP/reward, whatever. on requesting
    a new mission, use seed to recreate mission parameers, use to
    say "thanks for [taking|colelcting|find] etc, i don't have
    anything more for you jsut yet, check back in a week"

  which allows new missions/quests to be added dynamically over
  time, and will encourage players to keep revisiting old
  areas/NPCs.
--end--

SW:G has a variant on this, with some (and only some) 1-time only
quests.

Regards,
Tom "cro" Gordon
CEO, AlienPants Ltd
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