[MUD-Dev2] [Design] Non-cliche content creation

[Richard Boehme]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2008 at 1:13 AM, Joshua Clausen <clausen at sosproduce.com> wrote:

>  The approximations I am most thinking of are those assumptions on the
>  motivation for the quest.  If the motivation is not an immediate, actual
>  need of that NPC, then there will be a noticeable disconnect between the
>  mission requirements and reality, such as it is in an MMO.  "I need you to
>  kill 10 swamp rats because they're eating grain stores," make sense only if
>  upon completing said quest there is an actual noticeable improvement in the
>  lot of the NPC issuing the quest.  "I need you to go take out the Orc Bandit
>  outpost that has popped up at the edge of the city limits," only really
>  means anything of true substance if that outpost's presence is actually
>  hindering the NPC town's situation- implying that once gone, the NPC town
>  will actually perform better (grow, pay more for goods, etc).  The
>  implication, then, is that the creation of the procedurally-generated
>  mission must be elicited by environmental changes that have actually
>  influenced the state of the mission-issuing entity.  Completion of that
>  mission must actually allow for the issuing entity to experience a net
>  benefit, and this benefit must be [potentially] observable by the player
>  base, though it does not necessarily have to be immediate.


Consider it from another light. The town is having a hard time
(s/town/NPC/ if you want) and then something that could cause that
hardship is created. That hardship-causing thing might also pop up
another few problems when it pops into existence - for instance, the
local economy could be depressed, because something is causing
messengers to vanish. In a backwards way, you have the effect
(messengers vanishing) and formulate the cause (orcs ambusing a given
spot). When was this happening? Why didn't people notice? It happened
when they weren't around.

What can you get when you start from the effect and extrapolate
towards the cause, with that cause itself causing other effects?

Thanks.

Richard