Thread: Quest Design
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Old 09-27-2010, 10:37 PM   #20
silvarilon
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Re: Quest Design

Yep, although those clues need to be specific to the quest, and that allows players to tell each other the solutions. Which is problematic if the quest is significant, but not really an issue if there are plenty of small quests.

A nice middle ground is to provide obvious clues to the obvious solution, but have more subtle clues for the other options.

Possibly, but not necessarily.
Imagine I'm playing a musketeer. I have a quest where I may side with the queen or the bishop. After that's done, I can continue my next quest like normal, regardless of which choice I made. Later, there is a quest where someone is framing me... whenever I'm out on the street the city guards try to arrest me. If I can make it to the queen, she might call off the guards temporarily (for a week, say) while I prove my innocence. But only if I sided with her earlier. If I make it to the bishop, he may give me the choice of taking on the cloth rather than being a musketeer (which completes the current quest, and I'm now no longer a musketeer, and instead I'm a middlingly ranked priest, and instead of continuing the musketter quests, I'll start doing the priest quests) or the bishop would give me some clues as to who might be framing me. Yes, there's more work to be done when setting this up, but certainly not exponentially more work. So the outcomes can be remembered and used to provide or block off options in future quests, or even add complications, without forcing you to branch to an entirely different quest tree.

In a simplified setup for this, you might just have variables. Complete the quest, siding with the queen, and you might end up with a value of king +0, queen +2, bishop -1. Then future quests where you support the bishop rather than the king might leave you with king -1, queen +2, bishop +1. I'd be able to choose to appease individuals before they become my enemies, or focus on really supporting one. That could have social consequences, or lead to extra quests. If I get my support from the queen high enough, as well as the normal quests I might get repeatable quests from her where she asks me to deliver confidential letters. If I get too much negative support from the bishop, there might be additional complications. For example, if the bishop has -5 favor for me, then whenever the city guards are trying to arrest me, the church guards also try to arrest me. But if the bishop has -5 favor for me, maybe new quests appear, either quests where I can torment him (everyone loves an arch-nemesis!) or ones where I can appease him.

It's also possible to have multiple resolutions that lead to the same end goal. For example, if you have the letter to deliver...
... you deliver it to the girl. The letter professes love, so she runs off with the boy to get married, both leaving town.
... you deliver it to the brother. He approaches the lover, and runs the lover out of town.
... you deliver it to the father. In a fit of rage he throws his daughter out of the house, forcing her to leave town.

The end result is that the plot is resolved, one way or the other, and the characters are gone. Multiple endings, the same game result, but a different emotional result.

That emotional result might not matter much to an achiever player, but it could be very important to a roleplaying player.

That's something we need to expect. But, as long as there are clues, that just makes those forks all the more valuable for the few players that do discover them.

Plus, in a text environment, it can be pretty simple to add those options. maybe it's just a few minutes extra typing. I'm certainly not advocating spending significant amount on time on content that nobody is going to see.

Yep. Or if you standardize the possible outcomes. Using the example above, we standardize the outcomes to gaining or loosing support from the king, queen, or bishop. We then have other quests or systems that check your support when deciding what to do. It means we don't have to remember what decisions the player made in any specific previous quest, while still allowing those decisions to have an impact.

It depends how you're playing the game. Personally, I feel that sense of freedom if one of the choices is exactly what I want my character to do. And if none of the choices are what I'm after, I don't get that sense of freedom, no matter how many choices are available. So it depends on how well the quest designer guessed the possible options the player will want to follow.

Agreed. But there can be believable complications.
For example, there could be a "complication" that some NPC sees you're carrying a letter (so it can happen with any item-delivery quest) and offers to trade you <insert possible reward> for it. That could believably be repeatable, and there could just be a % chance that it'll happen during a quest.

Now, you can arrange "accidents" in a setup like that. Imagine if someone offers to trade you for the letter. You make the trade, fail to deliver the letter, same as usual. You don't get the letter-delivery reward, but don't expect something else. Except... you had a -10 rating from the bishop. So, unknown to you, there was a % chance that the guy offering the trade was a spy working for the bishop. He delivers the letter, along with the story of your betrayal, to the queen. She's angry at you, you loose points with her. But it's still a believable, expected, repeatable complication. And it is a direct result of player choices.

Imagine if you got assigned rooms based on your favor. You were highly favored by the queen, so you had a room right near her room. You upset the bishop, then sell her letter to someone on the street. Oh no, that person was a spy for the bishop. You get caught out, and your room is moved away from the queen's room, and she stops asking you to deliver letters. That looks like a very organic, natural response (it looks like the queen is cross at you) - even though there's no real "thought" that went into the quest, and even though every event was a "once off" that didn't chain into anything else.

Heck, maybe you don't even get told that the Bishop is setting you up. You just start noticing that you get asked to sell the letters more and more often. And you start noticing that you are getting moved away from the queen. The player might figure out that the queen is angry about something. Or they might not.

I guess this is the MUD equivalent of "cellular automation" where you put in some very simple underlying rules for how the game functions, but those rules can interact with each other in very complicated ways.

You'll have to decide who you're aiming your game/quests at. Or decide to have a mix of both.
Most players are achievers, and they'll be happy with a quest that points them in a direction and rewards them at the end. If you're making an achievement game, then that's all you want.

You can still add complexity, the king/queen/bishop example still allows achievement, and will channel them into achievement along certain paths, even if the quests are still otherwise all the same. But it's still more work than just having quests with one outcome, and if that's all the players want, you shouldn't waste your time.

There will be a subset of players that want more, and if you're after that niche, you'll need to consider the advanced concepts. I actively want to discourage players that just want the simple quest and reward, as I feel that encourages players away from roleplaying and towards mob-bashing. My quests are aimed to provide some sort of in-game decision that helps define their character, or are designed to have some impact on the larger game world (economy, city strength, guild wealth, etc.)
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