quest system?

[Mikko Lehtinen]

Well that was why in my original thoughts on this idea I just suggested the quest monsters be limited to whatever happened to be on the dlvl at the time. if the player has leveled to the point that a certain dlvl isn't worth exploring and killing those 10 orcs or that specific goblin would be uninteresting, ---- well nobody says the player has! to take that quest, or even if he/she has taken it, to complete it, indeed that's why perhaps quests should be limited to only the floor the player was on anyway, and if your doing a super fast dive you might not bother.

I like what you are proposing. (Fixing the Adventurers' Guild style quests is a separate issue.)

I'd love to have dungeon levels with flavourful missions, like saving prisoners or killing werewolves before they shapeshift, or whatever.

Unangband maintainer Andrew Doull has lately been raving about Brogue-style "quests" that require you to solve complex problems on a dungeon level. You might need to drink a Potion of Fire Resistance to cross a lava river, then use a key that you found earlier on a level to open a locked door, then drop a heavy item on a pressure plate mechanism to open the final door to the treasure chamber. The game makes sure that each of these random quests are actually solvable with items found on the level.

Indeed, this is why Daaj is probably my favourite varient sinse it adds so much to the monster list (I still don't think I've met all the monsters daaj has to offer, even in levels 1-10).

I'll have to take a look at the DaJ monsters. Maybe I'll steal something for FayAngband. Do you have some favorites? (I'd love someone to start a thread on their favorite monsters in variants...)

[Dark]

Well those unangband quests you mention are rather more complex than I was thinking, ---- though could be cool provided what you do to solve them isnt' too obscure.

Actually if Unangband is going that way in developement I probably need to give it another go, especially sinse it had the same very nice big tyles that faangband and oangband did.

Thus far my favourite varients have been Daaj and faangband, though I will confess some varients such as npp and zangband I found more difficult to play due to lack of reasonable sized graphics, while others I've simply not tried extensively, sinse it can get a little confusing when trying many varients remember what does what in each one, ---- this is why I haven't played oangband or unangband as much despite their nice tyle size, though I'm very tempted by what you say about unangband and quests.

For quests in Vanilla though as I said, I was only really thinking quests that involved at most killing specific monsters or perhaps bringing a friendly monster or given item found on the dungeon level back to a quest location, ---- though whether adding friendly monsters and associated Ai is a bit much for Vanilla I'm not sure.

As to monsters, well of course Daaj has many more of them for you to look at even in town, and therefore variety is rather good, I also find Wil has updated some of the descriptions of even standard monsters.

the silver monsters and extra miner demons added in Daaj I thought were a particularly nasty idea, and the themed levels that you can find with different level feeling text and specifically generated types of monsters are pretty cool surprises as you descend I thought.

I also like the way the game added some monsters that were just unique ideas, like the nul, a squid with acidic skin, and the glarx, a two headed golem cobbled together from spare parts, indeed there's a hole new playable race, the hobglibs, human sized and stumpy creatures with rough brown skin like a potatoe who enjoy experimenting with magic and alchemy.

I think my absolute favourite Daaj monster is the greps, which are demons shaped like serpents with a head at either end that fly by spinning through the air and attack by bighting alternately with both heads.

[buzzkill]

Thus far my favourite varients have been Daaj and faangband, though I will confess some varients such as npp... I found more difficult to play due to lack of reasonable sized graphics...

NPP does have a 32x32 tileset, a very nice one, but it's not in the distro yet (but will be very soon). You can get it at www.mediafire.com/buzzkill.

[Derakon]

I will admit to only having skimmed the thread at best, but here's my thoughts on quests:

1) They slow down the game. This can be desirable sometimes, but Angband's already a pretty slow game -- it takes a long time to travel down 100 dungeon levels! Whether Angband should have 100 dungeon levels is a different issue...

2) Most players will play with them, and try to complete them, by default. Even if they aren't interesting and don't provide a meaningful reward. Thus you have to make certain that they're fun to complete because the alternative is to introduce boring gameplay. This is unfortunately one of those areas where you can't necessarily introduce a mechanic and then say "but don't worry; you don't have to do it!"

3) As generally formulated, quests involve killing some number of out-of-depth monsters. Assuming this is feasible, those monsters will tend to give more experience than in-depth monsters, which will tend to overlevel the player. Which in turn makes killing anything besides quest monsters somewhat meaningless.

4) Material rewards for quests are either meaningful or not. If meaningful, then they have to be taken into account when calculating the power curve for the game (read: the game needs to be rebalanced to take them into account); if not, then quests become aggravating on the part of the player because they're accomplishing difficult tasks without any visible reward beyond the experience.

This is all rather negative, I'm afraid. I'll freely grant that quests can create interesting scenarios and encourage the player to get into fights that they would normally try to avoid. And I've played NPP and grabbed every quest I could, played ZAngband / ToME with quests on, etc. I'm just not convinced that we've figured out how to do them properly yet.

[nppangband]

I will admit to only having skimmed the thread at best, but here's my thoughts on quests:

1) They slow down the game. This can be desirable sometimes, but Angband's already a pretty slow game -- it takes a long time to travel down 100 dungeon levels! Whether Angband should have 100 dungeon levels is a different issue...

2) Most players will play with them, and try to complete them, by default. Even if they aren't interesting and don't provide a meaningful reward. Thus you have to make certain that they're fun to complete because the alternative is to introduce boring gameplay. This is unfortunately one of those areas where you can't necessarily introduce a mechanic and then say "but don't worry; you don't have to do it!"

3) As generally formulated, quests involve killing some number of out-of-depth monsters. Assuming this is feasible, those monsters will tend to give more experience than in-depth monsters, which will tend to overlevel the player. Which in turn makes killing anything besides quest monsters somewhat meaningless.

4) Material rewards for quests are either meaningful or not. If meaningful, then they have to be taken into account when calculating the power curve for the game (read: the game needs to be rebalanced to take them into account); if not, then quests become aggravating on the part of the player because they're accomplishing difficult tasks without any visible reward beyond the experience.

This is all rather negative, I'm afraid. I'll freely grant that quests can create interesting scenarios and encourage the player to get into fights that they would normally try to avoid. And I've played NPP and grabbed every quest I could, played ZAngband / ToME with quests on, etc. I'm just not convinced that we've figured out how to do them properly yet.

For some unknown reason, this post made me (in NPP) want to completely remove quests from the main dungeon, and set up a wilderness and alternate dungeons outside of town where the quests can take place. That way they would never distract from the main objective in the primary dungeon to kill morgoth, and could be done at the player's leisure with a much greater variety in objectives and challenge.

(Patches welcome! )

[nppangband]

Thus far my favourite varients have been Daaj and faangband, though I will confess some varients such as npp and zangband I found more difficult to play due to lack of reasonable sized graphics.

NPP does have a 32x32 tileset, a very nice one, but it's not in the distro yet (but will be very soon). You can get it at www.mediafire.com/buzzkill.

In NPP 060 I will update all of the main-foo files to current vanilla, which will include the cabability to do the shockbolt graphics (at least for the terrain/objects/monsters found in Vanilla). The 32x32 NPP tileset and final NPP 0.5.4 will be out as a beta release this weekend.