[MUD-Dev] MMO Quest: Why they're still lousy

[Paul Schwanz]

David Kennerly wrote:

> Yes.  There are two problems with quests that change the world:

>      1) No one completes the quest, so the world does not change.
>      2) Someone does complete the quest, so the world does change.

> Okay, so there's only one problem.  :)

> When the world changes, what happens to the quests that only made
> sense when the world was in its previous state?  In computer
> science lingo, if Quest B has precondition X, then if Quest A
> changes the state of the world to condition Y, then Quest B cannot
> fulfill its function.  Since writing a quest is labor intensive,
> it's a nontrivial dilemma.  When the state of the world changes,
> what benefit offsets the labor cost of replacing the
> newly-invalidated set of quests?

If you make the world state mutable enough, then I'm not sure I see
the problem here.  Think of it this way, when undertaking quest B
with the world state at condition Y, you could get two quests for
the price of one by having a quest C that has the ability to change
the world state from Y to X.  Taken to its logical conclusion, the
play moves away from being about static quests and toward managing
world states.  Perhaps this is what a previous poster meant by
removing quests altogether.  Personally, I think this could be a lot
of fun, especially when some sort of community cooperation is
required in order to change more global world states.

--Paul "Phinehas" Schwanz
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