need ideas

[manikus]

i am in need of ideas for side quests for an adventure set in the forgotten realms.

i could also use some ideas for side quests for a sci-fi adventure. plus, in a sci-fi adventure, how important to y'all is space/vehicle combat? i.e. if joey tomorrow is good with a blaster and energy sword, does he need to be a hotshot fighter pilot? [img]smile.gif[/img]

just some thoughts.

please be as brief or as detailed as you would like in answering this.

[img]graemlins/mage1.gif[/img]

[Rami Sihvo]

I think more ordinary side quests would be nice. Not that every village that party enter has some evil wizard that must be destroyed
or there is loads of treasures in bottom of dungeon. I mean that
every character class has it own abilities and job besides adventuring. Also there could be some empty dungeons around beacuse PC:s are not probably only adventurers in whole world. Also Wheels
of time-style dungeon could be nice where only treasure in dangerous
dungeon would be other adventurers equpment. Dungeons should also
change in time and new monsters and stuff should appear.

About those ordinary quests. For example visiting in some remote village partys cleric will be asked to keep some kind of ritual, bless the crops, funeral, wedding or whatever. Fighter can teach peasants to fight (like in feodal Japan. Peasants were not allowed to practice fighting and Ronins teach them. "Who teach you to fight?" "Well..oh... it was kenku-demon that showed up!") and act as a blacksmith. Thief can do manual labour and teach useful tricks to villagers besides stealing. Ranger can hunt and tan skins. Wizard can teach people to read and exhange knowledge. Supid characters can get manual labour and intelligent
characters can have more complicated tasks. Charisma and aligment should be notified. Not everybody will give work to someone who doesn´t look honest.

In scifi-games jobs could be found in computer bulletin-board and
be more formal with predetermined goals. Just arrived characters would be asked to unlawful operations, beacuse they have no connections with local criminals. This is just as useful as in fantasy games too. Background and repuation should be more important,
beacuse information is easier to get.

I think space battles are important in scifi games. Just think about
star wars without space battles! Still space battle is quite hard to
program but with few options such as run away or turn to fight could
have major affect to game plot.

[Arrowhawk]

With regard to the Forgotten realms side quests:

1. It depends on the level of the characters. I have more material for low level characters than for high level characters.

2. I assume that this would fit into your Savage Coast theme in general.

Idea #1 The players happen upon a small mining village which is afflicted with a plague of some sort transmitted in their water supply. To make matters worst the miners haven't returned from the last shift at the mine and the home militia members (the few well enough to go) have gone to investigate and haven't returned either. The players are induced to go and investigate both the disappearance of the miners and militia members but also the source of the plague.
There are several hooks possible to suggest that events at this small village are of a larger magnitude than first imagined. (levels 1-2)

Idea #2 The players are asked to go to or happen upon a remote monastery (perhaps the same monastery where the cleric in the party first got his training, maybe he's returning for a class reunion or something). Anyway, the monastery has recently been slightly damaged by an earthquake which has revealed previously excavated passages going directly into the mountain. Several acolyes have followed Brother Jessup into the tunnels to investigate, but no one has returned. The head monk wants you to go see what happened to the previous group. Their is possibility of setting up a very powerful long term enemy for the players in this scenario. (Levels 1-3)

Idea #3 This scenario is more involved than the first two and would be for characters at Levels 3-6 (30 levels for 6 characters). It involves a small farming village, a monastery and dwarven mine in a remote mountainous area of the Savage Coast. It also involves a lichemaster (necromancer) driven from Waterdeep by Blackstaff himself and thought dead for the last 30 years, a long dead (100 years) outlaw band that were known to be especially ruthless and finally were defeated by an army sent from Silverymoon. The characters are asked to go to the monastery by the head cleric of Chauntea (or whoever) to investigate some disturbing developments reported by the Friar at the monastery. This scenario has more twists and turns than the previous two.

If you're interested I can send you a copy of the entire story including encounters, etc. Let me know!

[ 03-08-2002: Message edited by: Arrowhawk ]

[Harri Polsa]

"i could also use some ideas for side quests for a sci-fi adventure."

Sorry. I like to keep those ideas to myself and use them in my own designs... Steal from movies or books, then twist it all into your own special style. That's how I do a lot of stuff. I often have the 'I can do better than that!' mentality when I see something in a movie that I don't quite like. Then I make my own (and better) version of it in some design.


"plus, in a sci-fi adventure, how important to y'all is space/vehicle combat?"

Yeah, every player who has played my sci-fi designs has just been screaming for space combat...
If you think of sci-fi, it -rarely- has any space combat involved. Space opera is another thing... That's where you need all those sexy space fighters going one-on-one and stuff like that. Personally I prefer slow space combat, with huge ships and tactics involving that kind of stuff, if it's really needed.

[/)eathKiller]

hmmm space fights, well as a suggestion, in the game ARES everything was taken from a TOP DOWN perspetive during the space battle sequences, this way a zone of avoidance and combat could be clearly and easily understood, in the GUNDAM MMORPG space is a free zone of well anything! but if you keep flying out into nothingness chances are you might end up running into some other player's armada of Feddie, or if your a Feddie, Zeon ships! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

In PSO, the guild was a screen that people walked up to and god indescriminate jobs from, jobs could come from anywhere, and sometimes you ended up working for criminal organizations too! Credibility however didn't play so much of a role because if you lost you oculd always do the quest over again! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

In one job though, depending on how well the job was done affected the ammount of prize money and the strenghte of the weapon obtained at the end....

some quests in it were just plain FUNNY!
You can go wild with jobs like that if you want!
you can, in one quest, go to save some guys maracas
which were int he mouth of this BIG dragon for some
reason or another! and then you could listen to
samba music the WHOLE WAY THERE! and the
monsters ran around like jumping beans!

Why? I dunow! Blame Sega ! heh!

There even was an RPG with Sonic in it! [img]tongue.gif[/img]

So you can make a COMEDIC RPG if you feel
the necesity to do so! even in seriouse situations
things can be DARN funny! My favorite weapon
is a giant Sledge hammer for Christ sake!

[manikus]

thanks for all of the ideas, folks. [img]smile.gif[/img]

i'm really keen on the notion of adding quests that showcase roleplaying, i.e. the party is faced with decisions other than whether to attack the onrushing monster.

as for sci-fi, i am working more in space opera than straight science fiction. in the star wars universe, it seems almost mandatory for the main characters to have at least one space battle. but, it may turn out that this could be simulated through text events with the proper pictures.

i would love to see more ideas from everybody...

[img]graemlins/mage1.gif[/img]

[Steve McDonald]

It would be cool if you could somehow force, just for one combat, the character's icon and stats to be changed. This would allow a space or vehicle battle - you'd greatly lower AC, change weapons and change the icon to a large space ship, say. This would also be great if you wanted to give the party horses or have them ride on griffenback or something in a fantasy setting.

Unfortunately I suspect this would be pretty complex to implement. It should be way down the list of features to do, if it is on the list at all.

[manikus]

i recall richard saying that we could have multiple icons for a player character- they would be in the same file, so instead of two frames it would be four, for example. you would just tell the program to look at the second set. [img]smile.gif[/img] (sure, i don't know exactly how [img]smile.gif[/img] but i bet i can just look through old messages here or at the yahoo groups to find out.)

as for changing stats, there could be an object given to party members that does what you need it to do, and is taken away again when you want them to go back to being "normal".

i'm thinking that this will all be a lot easier to do with a preconstructed party... [img]smile.gif[/img]

[img]graemlins/mage1.gif[/img]

[CocoaSpud]

Yep, the LogicBlock can select one of a multiple of combat icons available for a character.