Mad Libs

Tuesday’s post got me to thinking about how to build quests that are not immersion breakers. Long before I decided that modding NWN2 was not how I wanted to build my next world, I commiserated with Thrym, the lead admin of the NWN persistent world Markshire on about a way to make quests that are not dancing elephants. We were thinking along lines of semi-procedural quests. “Mad Libs Quests” was his term. The idea is generally as follows:

• You have a pool of quest boss names, from which you draw one randomly.
• You have a pool of themes:
  • revenge (“bring me a head”)
  • rescue(“my daughter has been kidnapped”)
  • escort(“please take my daughter safely to X”)
  • delivery(“deliver Y to X”)
  • resource(“kill ten rats”)
• You have a pool of quest locations. You would make lots of nooks and crannies in your world. Then, using whatever tools are available for your engine, you flag certain locations as possible quest pool locations. It is probably wise to share these locations with the random encounter system (assuming there is one. That is a topic for another time).
• You have a pool of NPCs that are able to give quests. It is not always the same people who are quest givers. A merchant may one day mention that his daughter was kidnapped to a PC who comes to do business. Some NPCs who are “background flavor” NPCs may be sometime quest givers.
• Sometimes, but not always, the NPCs may use the player’s communication systems to advertise quests. If you have an in character (IC) forum, or an in game notice board, you may create a series of templates for advertising these quests.

We considered ourselves very clever. The only real barrier was the dev time. This kind of solution comes up on a regular basis and whichever designer blogs or forums – be they modder forums, engine forums, etc. you follow always seem to have a thread describing a mad libs scheme every couple of months. Every half baked amateur designer rediscovers this idea at some point

But… all is not well in procedural generation land. Damion Schubert wrote this today on the Mud-Dev2 mailing list:

I’ve worked on autogeneration before, and I now work at a company that champions hand-crafted content, and I can tell you, it is nearly impossible to autogenerate content with the emotional depth and resonance that hand-written content provides. This shouldn’t surprise: after all, we still don’t have algorithms that will write better movies or novels than real humans do. Yet, for some reason we expect this to be true, even though interactive content is far more difficult and subtle to write, and writing for a media platform where consumers are routinely interrupted (logging off, being disconnected, handling another quest, exploring another activity, or helping a friend).

A core problem to solve with the autogeneration is pattern recognition. The best quests in MUDs and MMOs have either interesting stories, interesting activities or interesting characters. One example: a quest in Fallout 3 sends you to pick up the Declaration of Independence, which has a lot of emotional resonance with the player in this post-apocalyptic world. This is not something that a random generator would have created, and if it did, players would likely have also seen quests to rescue the Constitution, the Magna Carta, and the Consumer’s Bill of Rights, all generated with similar explanations and expositions, and that repetition would have destroyed the illusion. Once the players recognize the algorithm, maintaining their emotional hold becomes harder and harder.

The Old Republic is his current project and presumably he means Shadowbane as the game he worked on with procedural content. The man has a point. Nobody has yet created procedural content that could pass a touring test equivalent to what can be hand crafted by a skilled and dedicated designer. If you are building a hardcore deep immersion world, you can get burned by deep, hand crafted quests (as Bioware is doing with the Old Republic and which are always in limited supply and need to be repeated by different players), or once the player has played a few, she’ll catch on to them being created by an algorithm.

We were not nearly as clever as we thought we were and the mad libs approach can kill immersion as surely as everyone repeatedly serially-killing the same bear.

Why do we have quests?

This is a legitimate question I think. In an ideal world, player intrigue would be the main driver of story, with a solid GM team to support them. Second to this is GM driven plotlines. The fact is that a sizable portion, perhaps even the majority of the playerbase, are not play leaders who drive player plotlines. They are consumers of player driven, GM driven and designer created “content”.

In my experience, Quests tend to serve two roles. They give players an alternative to GM mediated plotlines when there is no GM around and they break the monotony of grinding when there is nobody to RP with (assuming small worlds). If you log into a server and nobody is on to RP with, you have five options:

1. crafting/resource-grinding
2. hunting/exploring
3. automated quests
4. parking your PC and going afk
5. logging off

The last two are undesirable from the world’s standpoint, though the fourth is less so than the fifth. Depending on how grindy and diku-like the world is, there may be different emphases on the first two. An alternative to these is quests.

So why do we have quests? Is it to get to know the world better? This would certainly be the case for one-shot, non-repeatable quests for new characters and repeatable delivery quests. Is it there for the players to grind XP? On diku-like worlds, this is common and if it happens on your world, then it is a safe bet that that your players are roleplaying despite your world design, not because of it. Assuming that the world is not a diku and the players are just questing as another form of advancement (a quest grind instead of a mob slaying grind), we still have a place for them I think.

Player intrigue is the best option and GM driven plots a second, but what about low population worlds where players would like to adventure when nobody else is on? What about groups of players with no GM coverage? GMs can’t be everywhere at all times.
What about easing newbies into the world? If they are not coming into a world where they already know other players and unless players are unusually welcoming of strange faces – enough to involve them in plotlines without getting to know them first – then the newbie experience on a roleplay world can be very, very lonely. There should be some mechanism that can introduce them to the world and ideally, this mechanism should encourage them to meet people.

Quests are sort of a poor man’s GM plotline.

At least for low population worlds, worlds without “enough” GM coverage (is there such a thing as “enough GM coverage”?) and worlds that try to be newbie friendly, quests are needed. How can we have suitable quests that don’t involve any elephant gyrations?

The uncanney valley of quests

There is a long running, yet still current debate on the Mud Dev2 mailing list about “the future of quests”. One of the interesting aspects of this discussion revolves around whether or not there is an “uncanny valley” in quests.

One type of quest, that I’d certainly put in the “uncanny valley” of quests, is the story arc quest. This generally amounts to a single player (or group) subgame where the players play through the same series of quests while leveling up; somehow saving the world along the way. Everyone on the server gets to save the world! Generally, hardcore roleplay worlds do not have this type of quest. Another types of quest that I’d rank as being in the uncanny valley, or as dancing elephants, are the short story types. These are similar to the epic quest chains, but on a smaller scale. I’m not talking about the sort of short, fedex, “deliver this package to the smith” types of quests typically put in for newbies. Delivery boy quests can probably be repeated endlessly without breaking immersion.

On one NWN world that I knew only as a player, there was a bear. This bear killed a man. His friend would give a tidy sum of XP to anyone who brought the head to him. This would be nice little side quest in a single player campaign. The problem was that you could complete the quest once per server reset; and NWN servers usually reset their state (but not character persistence) every 24 hours. How many times had this bear died? How many times had this bear killed this man? Were they trapped in some sort of groundhog day scenario? Moreover, the server was configured to automatically reset when empty. Despite being reasonably popular by NWN world standards (10-20 players on at peak hours), it would usually be empty after the North America based players went to bed and the European players had not come home from work/class. This meant that if you were in Europe and home sick from work one morning, you could repeat this quest a dozen times by exiting for a few minutes after each completion.

The standard of RP was very high on this world, but this did not help immersion one bit. Players generally roleplayed around it, but it was forced RP; a form of acting. It did not come from being completely immersed.

On another NWN world, which I’d worked on as a builder, DM and sometime admin, there were several quests that I’d regarded as very nice and I was responsible for creating some of them. Basically, they were long treks to go hunt down boss type evildoers. They would have been great; had it been a single player or multiplayer campaign. Again, these were daily repeatables.
The questions for me where the answers are not at all clear are:

Is there any kind of place for these quests that are well crafted, but ultimately immersion breaking in a virtual world environment? Would they be acceptable if they were only doable once? Under what conditions would they be acceptable?