[crossfire] map design guideline

[Juergen Kahnert]

On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 07:34:45PM +0200, Nicolas Weeger wrote:
> > For example you solve a quest where you have to slay a dragon and
> > rescue a princess. If you leave the dragon hoard behind and you
> > enter the dragon cave a second time (after map reset), you shouldn't
> > find treasure nor the princess there. The left behind treasure
> > vanished, because others took it after the dragon is dead and the
> > princess, because you rescued her.
>
> But then how do you handle parties?
> Player 'dragon' does the quest, then later parties with 'dwarf' who
> didn't yet do the quest - what happens?

Good question, I don't know. Depends on the implementation. The most
logical way would be to clear the map for 'dwarf', because 'dragon'
already solved it.

But you can't avoid that 'dwarf' enters the map first, and after that
let 'dragon' join the party.

Because we don't have an infinite number of quests, we have to allow
every player to do every quest. This is just a technical aspect of the
game, no chance to solve it.

A solution could be somthing like that. If 'dragon' enters first,
'dwarf' also gets the empty map [until map reset and without 'dragon'].
If 'dwarf' enters first, deny 'dragon' to enter with 'cave closed' or
something like that. I admit it's not all over satisfying, but at the
moment I don't know a better solution. We have to life with that paradox
because we reuse the quests for different characters.

But it's not a bigger paradox than having a characater doing the same
quest over and over again...


> Code, that's boring, let's first define what we want ;)

We're not coding anything like that right in the moment, don't we? We're
still defining what we want, isn't it? ;)


> Having "chained" quests, like Scorn royalty, sure.
> Ideally, we'd have many many quests, influencing each other - if you
> get back some item for someone, you can't do another quest requiring
> you to have destroyed the item.
> But this requires much content writing :)

Wow, I didn't thought that deep to have different strands of a story
mutually excluding each other.

So far I just thought about having each quest being playable by everyone
exactly once.

Influencing the storyline by individual choices, yes, nice idea. Having
for example a quest to get a powerful life sucking artefact. You could
either bring it to a follower of Gaea and destroy it or to a minion of
Devourers who likes to use it.

Maybe for CF3 or CF4. ;-)

For the beginning I would be happy to see more role playing coming to
CF. It doesn't need to be a full featured mega plot. :)

    Jürgen