Thread: Quest Design
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Old 03-28-2010, 07:32 PM   #2
silvarilon
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Re: Quest Design

Good article. It's important to take story structure into account, even for small quests.

It's more interesting for the NPC to say "I need five fish for a feast I'm catering tonight" rather than just "I need five fish."

When considering story structure, there are two important concepts for MUDs that I hope you'll address in the future articles.

- world believability
- multiple players

For world believability, what I mean is... if the NPC is always asking for five fish for a feast tonight, then... it's hard to believe. Why is he always catering feasts? For some plots, it's easy. Maybe in that case, it's the royal chef, so he's always needing fish (amongst other things.) In other cases, it's harder to believe. The crying boy who's lost his dog? How often is he going to loose his dog? It could happen a few times, but really... how long until the players go "Find your own dog! Or keep him fenced in!"
Obviously, this is more an issue for an ongoing world. In a single-player world, the dog only needs to loose his pup once. And that ties into...

Multiple players. How many players will get a chance to find the crying boy's dog? If it's an easy (but time consuming) quest, how often will multiple players leave to find the dog, one returns, and the others either waste their time looking for a dog that isn't there, or return with multiple dogs?
There are plenty of solutions. Maybe there's a way to gather the searchers into one group. Or let them each return with a dog (and make it look to each of them like they found the dog, and hope they don't talk to each other about it) or only give the quest to one person, but have multiple similar quests for the different players (another girl has lost her kitten, a young man has lost his horse, a farmer has lost his cow, etc.) - that way, at any given time, only one player is searching for a dog, only one is searching for a cow...

But the easiest solution is to just not care. Many games are perfectly healthy without making the quests believable. They are activities that the player does to have fun. They are not part of the "story of the world" - in World of Warcraft, when I'm told to gather five bearskins and I can have a magic sword, I don't wonder why the trapper has magic swords to give away. I don't wonder why my adventurer is going around gathering bearskins. I don't wonder why only some bears "drop" bearskins. I see it as an activity for me-the-player to do. If I wrote a novel about my WoW character I wouldn't talk about how he started his career early, killing bears, before he traded bearskins for a better sword. It's not a story for the character. It's an activity for the player.

On that topic, I'm constantly musing over "quest activities". The list of activities we get players to do seems very small. Find something. Kill something. Go somewhere specific. Craft a specific item. Surely we can think of more activities that can be done. Except... I can't. So even if there is a story of a village under attack from undead, it really comes down to just "kill something" or the dog is just "find something" - it's great that we can spice these standard quests up, but is it possible to create more standard quest "types"? I don't have an answer for that.

What I do try to do, over my way, is to involve other players in quests. I can't code something that will be different every time, but other players can. So I might code the "lost puppy" quest, but instead of the puppy sitting somewhere in the forest waiting to be found, I might have it come up to some *other* player's character, and sniff or be nice. Then maybe be wary of the quester and unwilling to follow them. Does the quester grab the dog and drag it to the boy (and how does the other character who the dog liked react?) - or does the quester ask the other character to lead the dog back? It's still a very simple quest, but now the relationship between the two characters might have an impact. And even if 99% of the quests are just "walk out and drag the dog back" that 1% might spiral into a large, dramatic story that builds personality and character, and leads to intense roleplay.
Of course, designing quests to involve multiple players is more work. So you end up with many fewer quests, and the quests tend to be less well defined. (Or, in some cases, game culture is built up around the quest. Players may see it as totally normal for questers to drag dogs away, and get very grumpy at someone who would object.)

Last edited by silvarilon : 03-28-2010 at 08:12 PM.
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