User:Jae/Quest Generation

Inspired by various things: reading Mud-Dev, info on the (upcoming) GW:Eye of North and GW2, my general favoring of changing, living worlds which require automatic generation of at least some content.

GW has an epic battle planned for EoN which will lead into GW2. But what's "epic"?. Epic and Powergaming doesn't mesh... epic means months of struggle. By lots of players.

GW:EoN has a personal "Hall of Monuments", documenting your previous (in GW1) achievements. CoX has Badges. Like both ideas. "Rewards" that people can brag about, but that don't make you more (all-) powerful.

Chronicles of a Character's Exploits

What characters do gets recorded... inside the game! Not just in their own, private, quest journal (basic req for these: they have to record done quests, not just list to-be-done quests), but also somewhere inside the game world. Newspapers, for example (with their archives). Town chronicles. Stuff that can actually then be used to connect seemingly unrelated quests.

Quest: Rats!

A city has a rat problem. A really bad one. The city elders give a quest (or quests) to eradicate the rat plague. This quest (-net) is autogenerated by the system. Maybe you need a group of chars, or multiple chars (not cooperating) to "finish" it.

Now, a GM takes this quest (it's waiting in some queue for a few days before being deployed), and adds a "Rat Queen" or something. A Mother Rat. Which drops a special item, though this item will not be obviously special. It connects this to a greater, more epic (and to some extent hand-crafted) quest, but due to its non-obvious nature, the character(s) who find it won't necessarily realize it.

The local newspaper will report it, the town chronicles will record it, and townspeople will talk about it for some time (about the Mother Rat, not the item, most likely). And after the talking has subsided, they will still be easy to be prompted for it.

Connecting Quests

Now... the GM has will use other waiting-in-queue quests, and/or trigger generation of other, sometimes similar, sometimes different, quests for this big quest. These auto-generated quests will be modified in similar ways. Somehow hints will be dropped. Maybe one of the subquest items if more obviously "special", maybe a group of characters will get a direct or indirect hint from an NPC...

Later, a group on the trail of this big quest will come to the city. Maybe the townspeople are still talking about the rats. Maybe they have to be asked for it. The chars will know (then, somehow :P) that they have to look for some item... or just for something "out of the ordinary". They will have to search the archives of the newspapers, or the town chronicles (a bit of detective work, a bit of thinking... a bit of player skill).