New Style Quest: Exploration Triggered Sequence(A Wish for Justice)

boomba66

With my sixth foundry for my campaign I tried to do something different. Instead of using the story triggers that lead a PC by the nose and bread crumbs point to point. I did a exploration map with 7 items to represent the moving forward of the plot and dialogue and reach point triggers to tell the story. It can either be raced through or explored.

I really could use some author feedback if any have tried this type of quest before, or a play test or two and see how you think the flow of the event works.

A Wish for Justice
Found in the "And Justice for All." campaign in the best column.

angrysprite

My Blacklake Luskan quest was done like this.

The good: every single review, except two, of 150 plays were 4 and five stars with glowing reviews.

The bad: because that quest was 90% story/exploratorium and only 10% combat, it was an easy (ridiculously easy) replay for people. So the Daily Foundry "quest-runners" could complete it in 10 minutes, which knocked a 20-minute quest down to 14 minutes average play time, removing the "Daily Foundry" qualification. Now that it does't qualify for the "Daily" - no one plays it.

Which chain-reacts into zero plays for the two add-on quests I've since created to complete a campaign (even though those quests are heavy in combat opportunity).

Until Cryptic adds some kind of non-combat reward for Foundry quests, this type of quest is a losing proposition the way I see it. Unless you plop hoards of encounters, but then it just becomes another stupid dumbed-down hack-n-slash grind-trash.

~shrug~

eldarth

Are they required to complete all 7 objectives?
That makes it easy - drag each objective next to each other and turn off points/area trails for each.
All the objectives will show up on the PC task list.

If any are "optional" then you are out of luck. There are no optional objectives --- unless you start resorting to under-terrain hacks.

For example, if Reach Point (walk thru swamp) OR Dialog Reached (Talk to crazy hermit), you could set up a "room" underneath the terrain that contains a single drow assassin encounter, named, oh, "SwampORHermit" -- then if Reach Point (swamp) is reached, you spawn a hard "guard" mob into the room with the drow, OR on Dialog Reached (hermit) spawn a different hard "guard" mob into the room. Then your "Optional" objective can be Component Complete "SwampORHermit." The tricky part is this under-terrain kill-box must be within 256' of the PC in order to "spawn" the guards which kill the drow.

boomba66

eldarth wrote: »

Are they required to complete all 7 objectives?
That makes it easy - drag each objective next to each other and turn off points/area trails for each.
All the objectives will show up on the PC task list.

If any are "optional" then you are out of luck. There are no optional objectives --- unless you start resorting to under-terrain hacks.

For example, if Reach Point (walk thru swamp) OR Dialog Reached (Talk to crazy hermit), you could set up a "room" underneath the terrain that contains a single drow assassin encounter, named, oh, "SwampORHermit" -- then if Reach Point (swamp) is reached, you spawn a hard "guard" mob into the room with the drow, OR on Dialog Reached (hermit) spawn a different hard "guard" mob into the room. Then your "Optional" objective can be Component Complete "SwampORHermit." The tricky part is this under-terrain kill-box must be within 256' of the PC in order to "spawn" the guards which kill the drow.

I have it as part of the story. So either they can run to the next objective and start a dual with the NPC. Or they can explore the seven different trigger encounters(Riddle, Role-playing, Jump Puzzle, 5 Combat sequences.) As its part 6 of my campaign I figure anyone who has lasted this long would like to see more interaction and exploration.

Thanks for advice on the Blazing through and dropping the ratings. I can see how that happens.