[crossfire] Quest-based leveling?

[Kevin R. Bulgrien]

> Hello.
> 
> I'm wondering whether it'd be nice or not to have some "main quests", maybe
> related (like Scorn's nobility quest), that would enable a player to level
> through them.
> 
> The idea being that instead of leveling, one would do the quests, and level
> almost like a side-effect.
> 
> Of course that'd require quite some work to rebalance things, and write
> many quests.
> 
> Especially since one can imagine quests forbidding to do others,
> variations, and thus.
> 
> How does that feel?

It sounds like an intriguing way to bolster the game play experience for 
people who aren't as much in to the hack/slash/grind.  It also sounds like a
lot of work, though probably not the kind of work that makes balancing the
rest of the game harder, so probably not a big deal.  Conceptually this kind
of thing could feed a class... dunno... bard, adventurer, or something, and
the class could make one of the less used races more valuable by having
pluses to questing (vs fighting or magic, etc.).

Then again, I'm not sure the recent half-way done "balancing" and adding
new features is the way to go with crossfire. There seems to be a lot of
new code but little follow through that may not really do much for the
game.  There seems to be a huge split in whether people actually want to
play "trunk" over "branch".  It might do the project good to figure out why
people have trouble with trunk and work on resolving those things.

I'm not saying that working this kind of enhancement is bad per se.  It
could be a way to actually put into use some of the features added over
the past few years.  It does, however, seem important to at least mull
over the problem of why branch seems to be preferred by a segment
of the game-playing population.

I think I'm much more for this than for a lot more sweeping changes to
established crossfire characteristics that are very hard to balance for
fun and whatever else.