Wholly combat-free Foundry adventures?

hawthornberry · July 2013

With my first Foundry quest barely squeaking past the "eligible for Daily Foundry" criteria (thanks mostly to guild reviewers) and suffering a number of follow-related bugs I can't really fix short of starting over, I am thinking of making a second adventure. Having played a lot of Foundry quests over the last few weeks, I've found a ton of combat, often with stacked encounters, but only a few with puzzles and most of those somewhat cumbersome or limited. (I'm not counting platform-jumpers, which I personally hate, but more power to those of you who like 'em.) So I wanted to try something even more different.

So my next Foundry quest will be essentially one big puzzle, in the form of a murder mystery. I think I've worked out how to make it work in Foundry, with some cumbersomely complex dialog trees, with branches that require objects ('clues') or in a few cases skills (though every skill will have a path to a solution), and a way to make it so you pretty much have to solve the mystery rather than just guessing until you get it right. And a mystery that is wrapped around a genuine logic puzzle that you'll need to work out on paper, most likely. And no combat. Not even one at the end when the mystery is solved. Yeah, I know that'll ensure almost no one wants to play it, but nevertheless, I want to see if I can do it.

As I learned a lot about how not to do Foundry quests with my first attempt, and wished I'd learned a lot of it earlier, I'm wondering if anyone has a quest that does something similar. Can anyone recommend quests of the same sort, that I could try out, to see how other people handled things?

agentjaspor · July 2013

I can't think of any I've played with absolutely no combat, but some of the "story heavy" ones (even among the most popular) are fairly light on combat.

Your idea sounds pretty cool, so I'd say go for it.

I think with no combat, other things will become much more important - like dialogue, environment detail, sound, and general ambiance. You'll want it to "feel" unique and mysterious to pull players in before they go "WTFS, there's no fighting?! lawl, 1 star!!!!"

zahinder · July 2013

What I'm going to attempt to do with my fourth mission is make combat entirely optional -- there will be three phases/areas in which the player can use diplomacy or combat to get through.

The trick will be finding appropriate material so that each style of playthrough is at least 15 mins, but hey, that's why I get paid the big bucks!

thalazar1 · July 2013

combat isnt required for a good quest.. it's just a time sink. (and random loot) I think a combat free quest should do fine as long as there is a fair amount of required actions to replace the combat time sink.

eskarine · July 2013

If you excuse my shameless self-promotion, my next campaign (two quests) will have *almost* no fighting. There will be only one mandatory encounter in first quest (easy one, just for the sake of plot) and only one boss in second quest (no boss for the first one). Any other encounter will be a punishment for <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font> up the puzzles - if player pays attention to plot and hints in it, he will be able to avoid all of them.

That, plus the quests will be a tribute to 'Myst' series - 99% of it will be puzzle/exploration.

thalazar1 · July 2013

ah good old myst.. zork reboot would be cool too

zahinder · July 2013

I actually hope to do Zork at some point. ... Eventually....

raphaeldisanto · July 2013

I've seen Esk's environments for the new quest and they're really good. She has some nice tributes/homages to Myst in there.

To the OP: I'm not sure about "cumbersomely complex", and it's not puzzle-related, but I have some significant dialogue in my current WIP - There's 70+ conversations and almost 1000 lines of NPC dialogue. I don't know how many possible PC responses there are, but .. it's a lot - Almost every NPC line has at least two possible PC responses, often more. I know that I've had a number of people tell me that there's too much dialogue, and people quit half way through the quest because there was too much dialogue. That's okay. Those people aren't my target audience. If you're interested, I can try and compile some screenshots of my trees.

If you do much of your dialogue in Contact Dialogue, not Quest Objective dialogue, you'll get far more flexibility as to what you can and can't do in terms of hiding and showing lines, and much more flexibility in terms of which dialogue prompts you can use to trigger other dialogue prompts. Also, if you're going to do a whodunnit murder-mystery thing, that implies a single map, which will again increase your flexibility with triggering prompts off other prompts (Since you can only do that in a single map)

For me, the challenge is keeping the dialogue flow realistic and sounding like a true conversation as opposed to just an expositional info-dump, or a set of marching orders. (which might be appropriate, of course, depending on the situation, hehe) So often in RPGs some dialogue options might be presented, but the response from the NPC has absolutely no bearing on what option the PC chose. It's very rare for me to find a game where the dialogue satisfies me. BioWare generally do the best job out of most of the dev houses out there, and I think that may be because a lot of the time they employ actual writers to write their dialogue, but even they fall short a lot of the time.

Personally, I think your quest idea sounds awesome, and if I wasn't in the middle of building a huge campaign, I'd try my hand at making one myself. I love the murder/mystery genre, and with the way the Foundry works, you can choose to make it as easy or as difficult as you want. For example: you can choose to only give the player one shot at guessing the murderer correctly, by removing all other options from the dialogue once he guesses, or you can allow them to loop back and try again, etc etc.

I think you should totally go for it!

hawthornberry · July 2013

Just to be clear, I'm expecting to get mostly 1-star reviews and few plays and never be eligible for Daily Foundry for this one. Anything that's a bit off the norm is likely to get a lot of 1-star reviews, and anything that depends on reading the story even more so, and something like this... well, it's just inevitable.

The puzzle that's at the center of the adventure itself takes 15 minutes or more to solve, unless you're really used to this style of puzzle. I bet it'll take at least twice that to gather the clues and figure out what kind of puzzle it is and then solve it. That said, once you've solved it, the solution will be the same the next time, so you can go in and bypass most of it. So if there were players, the average playtime would quickly end up under 15 minutes anyway.

If I were in this to have a popular quest, I'd be making an ANSI-standard dungeon crawl or an exploit map. If I go through with this idea, it'll be just for my own appreciation of having done it, and producing something good. So all I'm looking for is pointers to quests that did similar tricks so I can go in and look at how they did it, what worked and didn't.

neverwinter1776 · July 2013

eskarine wrote: »

That, plus the quests will be a tribute to 'Myst' series - 99% of it will be puzzle/exploration.

Cool, LOVE the Myst series, played EVERYONE of them, and even did URU online (still visit every so often too).

And on that note: IF the Foundry EVER comes back. The quest/world I'm working on is affectionately call Channelwood.

I toyed with the idea of a no fighting quest, but somehow convinced myself that a few skirmishes with some ne'er do wells might be fun. It's basic premise is to "Purify all the corrupted braziers"
It is built on a marsh-like map with boardwalks running a simple maze to get to the braziers. And I even have a graphical throwback Back to the first Myst game as we don't get to animate movement, of you needing to use a boat to get somewhere, and I just set the boat to disappear from where it was to alongside the pier/boardwalk.
Now if we had some of that music...... I digress ;-)

I LOVE that we can create a world that WE can enjoy and visit. Most quests have you running around killing so much or trying to get to point B in such a hurry that you never see any of the detail that was put into the actual settings.

So sorry for that rant hehe, Basically I'm saying, do what pleases you and a non-combat quest would be great!

neverwinter1776 · July 2013

There are clever people and I'm sure ways, of faking a random outcome to some of the puzzle parts.....

fallensbane · July 2013

Expect a slew of ...

wtf where are the monsters?
Foundy sucks...
needs moar enemies..
Too much reading
boring...

and my personal favorite

Loot sucked...

Free to play games tend to attract overwhelmingly large amounts of bottom of the barrel players. One of the reason I am becoming more interested in the few upcoming games that have subscriptions (FFXIVARR and ESO). After awhile the larger amount of them hop over to the next game to whine about.

I do however wish you luck, I may check it out sometime

raphaeldisanto · July 2013

hawthornberry did state that he was expecting that (as I fully expect it with mine)

When you're making a niche product, you aim it at a niche audience. I don't care to cater to mass-market appeal. What the majority of people like, I don't, so why would I make a quest that I myself wouldn't enjoy playing?

drnoesis · July 2013

OP, good luck on developing your quest

You can definitely add me to the list of interested parties that will be waiting to give it a go

I didn't have the guts to make my first quest completely non-combat (and to be honest, Noir kind of demands a certain level of cheesy hostility) but I have been considering it for Noir #2 - it'll be interesting to see how you approach the idea, and how different your approach is from mine

berytak · July 2013

This is perfectly doable. The prolog of my campain is except of one easy encounter totally free of combat. The encounters I placed are just for ambience and can all be avoided. None is harder than easy.
The clue is, that you have to read carefully to solve the quest and there are no questmarkers at all. I think most of the people who would give a 1 star rating have abandoned the quest because they got stuck at some point.

btw ... it has an estimated playtime of 74 minutes

So go on, I'll play it for sure...

hawthornberry · July 2013

For those who are curious about how I intend to do it, the core puzzle is a 4x4 "grid logic puzzle" similar to those found here.

You will have a number of objects to inspect, many of which will produce quest items that are "clues" -- a broken dagger tip, a torn-off piece of a costume, a salad fork, etc. There will also be five NPCs with very large and complex dialog trees, some of the branches of which depend on having specific clues -- you're presenting the clue to someone, or confronting them with it, etc. The result is a series of clues like "the person who wore the bandit costume can't be the one who arrived third".

As an extra bonus, I've provided a twelfth clue that helps make the puzzle simpler, but which requires one of the five skills to get. However, each of the five skills has a path that gets you a bonus clue; for instance, arcana users can inspect an aura, while dungeoneering users can identify a footprint.

Now with the 11 or 12 clues you can solve a grid logic puzzle. The result is that for the four suspects, you know which one arrived when, which one preferred which dish at dinner, and which wore which costume. Another (very short) clue chain allows you to identify that the killer was wearing a particular one of the costumes. So now you have enough to solve the whodunit.

One of the NPCs also has a 64-branch dialog tree in which you make your accusation. There are only four suspects, so if you could just name the killer, you could just try all four, since "failed objective" in a dialog tree only lets you try again. So to correctly solve the mystery you have to not just name the killer but prove it, by providing all the key facts -- their order of arrival and their favorite dish -- which is enough to allow the authorities to replicate your reasoning and thus accept that the crime is proven. It also means that the player will find it too tedious to just try all 64 combinations, and will have to solve the puzzle. (Or not. There's always someone who'll just try all 64, I suppose.)

Because of how dialog trees work, if you guess wrong, the result will just be the guy you're making the accusations towards saying something like, "No, that doesn't make sense" (if I feel ambitious I may actually figure out something he can say in each of the 63 wrong answers that explains why it can't be right, thus providing bonus clues, but that's a lot of work), and you can try again. When you get the right one, we have a classic "parlor scene" in which the criminal makes his confession, explains his motives, and gets hauled off by guards.

Of course surrounding this there's a lot of dialog options to establish the characters and their backstories, to throw red herrings in front of the player, to attempt to explain away some of the arbitrary aspects of the clues, etc.

The entire thing basically falls into one big objective. Almost all the interactions will be with objects and people that aren't the targets of any objectives. There will be a few objectives at the beginning to get the story started, and a few at the end to facilitate the NPCs having dialog without the player feeling like he's watching a play, but almost the entire quest will happen within a single objective.

The whole thing takes place in a single nobleman's house (stock map) so I'm going to get heavily dinged for failure to provide new settings to explore or any evocative ambiance, as well as for not giving any combat. But those wouldn't add to the tone and style I'm going for. Maybe some music would, if there's something suitable; but given how few objectives there will be, if I use music or sound it'll probably be the same thing looping the whole time, which would drive me batty, so it'll probably either have minimal sound or none, which will earn me even more dings. But hey, that's what Foundry allows me.

(Part of me wonders, though, if I'll actually have good reviews for the simple reason that the 99% of people who hate the quest will never finish it, and anyone who'll stick it out enough to finish it is likely the kind of person who'd like this sort of thing. Maybe I won't get terrible scores, but just get very few plays and reviews. Ah well, either way, it'll languish in oblivion.)

raphaeldisanto · July 2013

I don't see any reason why you couldn't build your own nobleman's house, thus giving it the atmosphere and ambience you want. Also, that way, you can structure and design it exactly the way you want, which make me kinda cool, depending on whether or not you want to place NPCs in specific rooms or not.

(I'm a big fan of custom environments. To my mind, it shows that you're treating the presentation of your quest with the same care and value that you give the story, the dialogue and the encounters (not that you have encounters in this specific quest, but in general)

To me, using premade rooms and maps would be the similar to.. well, if Cryptic provided us premade stories and people just put different encounters on them.

If your quest, your story, what you're trying to tell here .. If it's worth you writing a custom story for it, with custom dialogue and custom NPCs.. it should be worth you building custom maps for it, too)

hawthornberry · July 2013

In the first adventure in this campaign, one scene was set in the nobleman's house in question, though it was a small bookend scene at the start and end where you get the job and then get paid. I figured to use the same house for continuity's sake, and it is, ultimately, well suited. I could violate continuity and build a new one anyway, I suppose, but I don't see much reason to. A custom one would just be the same thing with the doors facing slightly different ways for the sake of difference, and that doesn't seem worth the effort. After all, the prefab noble house already was just what I had envisioned which is why I used it in the first place.

thalazar1 · July 2013

raphaeldisanto wrote: »

(I'm a big fan of custom environments. To my mind, it shows that you're treating the presentation of your quest with the same care and value that you give the story

I am way more graphically inclined then I am a story teller, so my environments (to me ) will always be much better then my stories.
every time i enter foundry i just create maps for weeks on end.. then struggle to come up with a story to be able to show case my map. though that is also why i am forcing my self to take my time on 'the ruined temple' I think the environment looks fantastic but i want a good story to go along with it.

*edit* this is also why i love doing story quests. I have a great respect for those who can tell stories as it's one skill I just can't seem to grasp.

hawthornberry · July 2013

In case anyone's curious, it's completed and published. "The Butler Didn't Do It", code NW-DP28IB8OP.

I don't expect many people to like it or complete it. It's zero combat, nothing but a murder mystery puzzle. I wrote it primarily to prove whether it was possible to do a quest like this. So I won't be promoting it very hard -- just telling friends and my guildmates, and this post here, but none of the "review trades" thing I had such bad luck with last time.

That said, if you try it out, I'd be interested in hearing what you think.

beckylunatic · July 2013

I will play this at some point. I really like the idea of non-combat missions.

Wholly combat-free Foundry adventures?

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