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indentlabs
Plan Quests
Requested by a few of the more DnD-focused users.
It would be great to be able to "create" a new quest, including links to who the questgiver is, if there is an item as a reward, locations they need to go to, etc.
Quests. This would be a great feature to help with building game campaigns and stories. Like other features, it could connect directly to locations, characters, and items. You could describe the type of mission, its start (and end) location, the quest-giver (character), and anything else about it.
It'd be nice if we could figure out a way to make this generic enough to work with campaigns and writing (like rolling it into Plots or something). Just making this issue so we can think about implementation.
We might be able to generify it enough to where creating some other story content could also be used for DnD. For example, Characters are generic enough, and with a DnD "plugin" that can store a few integers, it's suddenly a character sheet.
To me, quests have a narrative chronology to them not unlike History sections of various components. It could be neat to exposes quests as well as history as timelines for editing.
True, I think any story/history/plot thing could be a quest. Quests may have branching points that result in totally different canons, which would require some kind of mechanics that any other story-planning-based feature would not. Or, maybe it would and it would be super helpful for writers to see the branching paths and pick their favorite.
@Cantido instead of generalizing to "quests" and using that to expand on history functionality, expose a timeline where you can add events and reorder them—basically just a list. The timeline feature could be used in quests to begin with but also made available in character history, location history, world history, and possibly even reference other timelines from a timeline event. E.G. in the history of this world, there was a "campaign" event which directly refers to a quest.
I'm just tossing ideas into the hat here. Basically I see an opportunity to flesh out history editing as well as quests in the same way.
@jsonnull I like that a lot. Should a timeline be able to branch? I think that would be important for designing quests, but wouldn't be very useful elsewhere. Would a timeline be better represented as a tree or would that complicate things too much?
I think tree could overly complicate things. As a general rule, I like organizational strategies like this to be as distant from the database as possible—ideally, users have the tools available to intuitively create the structure they need within the app. This relieves the developer from the burden of maintaining a complex organizational scheme on the backend and keeps options open for different strategies later.
Applying this principle here I think the best solution would be if users created branches in quests as separate quests. For instance, if a group of adventurers go into town and from that point on they could set in motion one of several possible chains of events... create a separate quest for each possible branch and at the end of the trunk have an "event" in the timeline that says "Depending on what happens, go to branch one or branch two."
Maybe we can have an explicit "branch" or "subplot" timeline entry type that explicitly references another quest here. This is a great way to pull in these narratives in location or character history timelines too!
As an example, here's what a timeline might look like...
Episode One - The Adventure Begins
- Adventurers escape the prison
- On the road out of town, adventurers confront bandits
- When they arrive at the city, the guards are denying entry
- [REF] If the adventurers find the secret way in, start underground society plot
- [REF] If the adventurers bribe the guards, mention hooks for corruption sub plot
One final thought for now—by having an explicit reference entry, there's groundwork to eventually layer in a tree view or some other kind of interface for viewing child timelines.
What do you all think? Trying to keep this as simple as possible. Add a Quest category, introduce a timeline editing scheme with sortable events, extend history sections to use timeline editing, possibly allow referencing quests and timelines from other timelines.
EDIT: Thinking about it a little more, I think a general timeline-to-timeline reference is overly complex, but being able to reference Quests from other Quests as well as other timelines is okay. This sets up the "Quest" type as the go-to for pulling a timeline into it's own item that can be referenced from multiple locations without interleaving history sections and quests from multiple types. Gosh I hope that doesn't sound too confusing!
I think separate quests linked like that would be great. We have the Campaign idea which sounds like it ought to be the container for a bunch of quests like this. ( #120 and #88 are some relevant issues)