The Quest for a Quest

It's challenging to develop a quest.  It's more challenging to develop a quest and then discard it.

I have been developing a linear quest, meaning it's similar to the alchemy bowl quest.  I chose a linear format for this quest because I wanted to tell a short story.  I created some new areas and expanded some scripts to support this quest.  As work developed on this quest, so did some problems.

One problem was the lack of impact players had upon its story.  This particular quest had a repeating story: if, for example, the player were to rescue a princess, then the princess would need to be recaptured so that the next player could have an opportunity to rescue her.  Such stories make for better events – onetime short stories that happen over the course of a couple of hours – rather than having a quest with a story that repeats itself.  How does one explain this type of repetitiveness within the context of its own story?

Another problem was that the story was a little forced with respect to the reason of the quest.  It was little more than a quid pro quo quest: do something for me and then I'll do something for you.  These types of quest are fine, but it was not fitting the situation of the story, and forcing this style of quest into the already-questionable story was beginning to feel more than a little heavy-handed.

A solution to these problems came to me while I was chatting with ServerGM.  We were talking about an unrelated scripting problem when I became inspired with a new idea.  The solution was to simply throw out what was done and start over.  The new quest is now simpler, broader and is a better fit to the related story.

As for the old quest, I'll shelve it for now.  I may reuse the new areas for something else, or redevelop the quest for another use.  I'm just glad that I saw the faults of this quest while it was still in development rather than see its faults in practice.