The best way to design a quest with multiple paths?

[bhlaab]

I'm just wondering what you all consider to be the most accepted standard for designing complex quests?

For example: Flow charts? Excel spreasdseets? Written out as narratives?

 

[racofer]

Flow charts obviously.

Multiple quest outcomes is just like programming a software that outputs different answers based on user input, so the easiest way to organize all those possibilities is to spread them out graphically. Then all you have to do for linking separate quests together is linking the specific outcomes and so you make a web of possibilities.

 

[soggie]

I'm halfway designing a game right now and I can share the details of one of the quests "Family Ties".

First, you think about the entities involved in the quest. Mainly, you need to have a list of people that will be involved in the entire quest, including all the pre-conditions and consequences. In this case, these are involved:

1. The corpse of the slave master Ronan
2. Ronan's journal
3. The bar tender Jane
4. The deceased wife of Ronan, Aria
5. The leader of the bandits, Caine

You need to keep this list in a separate area, because when you're designing the quest you will tend to add to or cut off entities from this list. And oh, it need not always be humans.

Quest Overview

You need to define the overview of the quest next. First, define what the quest is about, in a short summary. In this case, it is:

It involves family affairs between a daughter and a father (Jane and Ronan), and finding out the location of a secret military depot as a reward

It don't have to make sense for now, as it is but an overview. Keep it simple, abstract, don't lock yourself down too much so that you can expand from there. Now, start asking questions.

What family affairs? What happened between Jane and Ronan? What do they have to do with the location of the military depot?

Now, start drafting out a simple backstory for each character. Jane is a tough-as-nails girl, who owns a bar in a town. Ronan is a slave master, buying children from bandits and selling them to merchant caravans. Ronan is Jane's father, and Aria is his deceased wife.

Expand on it.

When Jane was still young, she was overtaken by a terrible fever. Ronan works as an officer in the recruitment office, and had to leave to another town to find a doctor for a cure. However, on the way he kind of got distracted and ended up gambling off his money in a shady town. In the mean time, the fever caused Jane to become unreasonably aggressive, resulting in her murdering her mother Aria and then falling into a coma. When Ronan came back with a cure, he was almost too late to save Jane's life, who had been in a coma for three days without anybody noticing.

While Jane had been healed, her memories of that event was suppressed. Unable to find the heart to tell her of the incident Ronan kept quiet, but soon this silence turned inward and began chewing him out from the inside. Torn and broken by all that had happened and partly feeling guilty for wasting his time gambling instead of making haste in the first place, he placed Jane under the care of his god-brother Luth and left town, hoping to walk into the wasteland until he met his end as penance for his "sins".

He stumbled into the depot in his journey, and was saved by a bunch of slavers later on. Then on, he took on the slave trade, but never did went back to that town to explain things to Jane.

Jane however was led to believe that her father murdered her mother and abandoned her and hated him for that.

Quest Flow

Now, having done that, start a flowchart. Not a typical flowchart though, but first, you need to define the pre-conditions first.

This is where you list down three things:

1. List of quest triggers
2. World events that is related to this quest
3. Local events that is related to this quest

In this case, you can get the quest in 3 ways:

1. Reading the journal on Ronan's corpse
2. Talking to Jane and making a successful memory skill check, remembering that Ronan, during his death, uttered her name
3. Meeting with Caine and receiving the quest to retrieve Ronan's journal (which will trigger the first trigger)

There are no world triggers in this case, nor are there any local triggers. Therefore it is a pretty isolated quest, which makes it much easier.

After defining the pre-conditions, you create a starting node for each pre-condition in the flowchart. From there, you start designing the quest, and slowly make your way to the end. I'll attach the flowchart for this quest in a later post.

 

[DraQ]

Flowchart for pre-scripted solutions. Just creating believable situations for emergent ones.

 

[bhlaab]

Flowchart for pre-scripted solutions. Just creating believable situations for emergent ones.

What exactly do you mean by that?

You mean like, if it was for Fallout just say "Obtain the coffee mug" instead of creating different paths for "kill the guy and steal the mug" "pickpocket the mug" etc

 

[DraQ]

Flowchart for pre-scripted solutions. Just creating believable situations for emergent ones.

What exactly do you mean by that?

You mean like, if it was for Fallout just say "Obtain the coffee mug" instead of creating different paths for "kill the guy and steal the mug" "pickpocket the mug" etc

It means, that if the game is sufficiently simulationistic, it might allow for unscripted solutions. For example, if a game has alchemy system allowing you to brew various poisons, drugs and whatnot, apart from scripted conversation, you could for example spike someone's drink with some sort of sleeping powder and pickpocket him easily, or cut down any tree to create a bridge, etc. This would both broaden the available range of choices and free devs to make more/better of those that have to be scripted (dialogue, mostly).