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[Tiler]

Problem: Since the new army arc has been released, adventure mode has had some issues in terms of quests. Semimegabeasts and megabeasts have become far too powerful for early level adventurers to kill, and towns have become populated with actual competent guards and half a dozen heroes capable of ripping your face off with their pinkies. So the two general quest themes, "Kill beast X" and "Kill enemy X" have both become rather painful.

Now, I know this will all change in due time, and that this arc is going to end up helping to create actual interesting and integrated quests. However, in the short term, it would be nice to have some quests that don't involve having your guts strewn across the realms.

My ideas:
Ability to challenge people to duels, or other ways to kill someone without having the site turn on you, like being able to Shove people a few squares, presumably off a nice cliff face while nobody is in visual range. Of course, this would require a way to check if anyone else can see you, which would be helpful regardless...

(On that note, the ability to pick up some backup on your quests would be cool. And I'm not talking drunks or permanent companions. After you take a quest, you could ask the quest giver to 'Join' or ask for assistance, and the game would check your strength against your target's strength, and assign a _____-master or just some ______-men to back you up, with a quote like "Since you are no match for your foe, I will tell Urist Smashhappy, my finest Hammer Lord, to assist you. Once rewards are stuck in for quests, this would presumably cut into your profits by quite a bit)

Rescue mission: Since there are now slaves and prisoners of war, being asked to go into a place, talk to them, and bring them back alive to the questgiver would be nice.

Item recovery:There are a lot of badasses running around, and there are a lot of them that singlehandedly slay hundreds. So what I think would be neat is that after an NPC kills X amount of enemies or wins X amounts of battles they command, an artifact item is created called something like "Urist Smashhappy's Iron Hammer", and is either passed down their family line, or given to their killer and passed down their line. A questgiver would tell you to find the item and bring it back to them, for motives such as finding their great great great uncle's son's left low iron boot, getting a nice trophy from someone that troubled their entity before, or just to collect nick-nacks.

Reconnaissance: Asked to go to a place to look at something, and then head back. Things could be enemy towns, temples, ruins, caves, places where people have died recently, abandoned fortresses, interesting geographic features, etc. Can also involve finding a person and talking to them.

Preform a feat: Bring 100 goblin heads, burn 50 trees in a forest reserve, swim across an ocean, scale a mountain to drop a flag on it, steal 20 rope reed socks, kill someone with a thrown head, kill everyone at location X, talk to everyone in town, sleep in a Dragon's cave without being incinerated, kill a lion barehanded, jump off a 20 z-level cliff into a body of water and survive, smash someone into a bottomless chasm, kill 30 people in 1 hour, go from location A to B without using [T]ravel, eat 25 kinds of food, etc. Basically, 'achievements' for Dwarf Fortress.

And with that, I'm out of simple ideas.

[Neonivek]

Semimegabeasts and megabeasts have become far too powerful for early level adventurers to kill

That technically should have always been the case. Ive always considered Megabeasts to be Fort destroying monsters however so far apperantly only the Bronze Collosus seems to actually be capable of doing so to my knowledge and Semimegabeasts were sometimes a bit too much of a pushover and I especially remember when I Wrestled a Minotaur as my first kill as an adventurer. Anyhow back to what you also said.

Duels = Yes
Rescue = Yes?
-The fact that fighting Bowmen is more deadly then some Megabeasts makes these missions the most difficult.
Item Recovery = Yes
-Though conditions apply...
Reconnaissance = No
-"Just go here" is kinda the staple of boring quests... and "Go talk to him" is also refered to as such
Preform a feat: No
-AKA "Xbox360 Achievements"... While I wouldn't mind people in the game noticing you are "Frank the man who collected 100 goblin heads" I think it would be rather crazy for someone to give you a quest as such.

[thvaz]

I think Mayors shouldn't be be the sole quest givers. People on the streets could give quests for the death of someone who killed a loved one, for example.

[PenguinSeph]

Maybe enemies of the elf's could ask you to go into the elf's territory and burn a certain number of trees?

Temples could ask you to sabotage other temples.

Maybe when it becomes possible for rulers to be overthrown, you could find people that want to overthrow the current leader and help them or profit, or protect the existing leader?

Escort missions? Take these people to here so they can do x?

[Overdose]

How about working as a Caravan guard? Do it Fallout style, and only have it stop the map when you run into trouble (just as it is now when you come across dangerous stuff while [T]raveling).

You'd probably only get some really meager wages for your trouble, but you get the opportunity to fight creatures for exp without having to wander around looking for them. In other words, you get paid per trip, and are allowed to keep some spoils and such you find off of corpses. Just imagine fighting off kobolds, goblins, undead, harpy,  giant predators, the occasional deadly giant or ettin, a raid by an unfriendly civ to the caravans civ leading to human/elves/other dwarfs ambushing you, or even a minor-megabeast if your really unlucky.

[Granite26]

I think Mayors shouldn't be be the sole quest givers. People on the streets could give quests for the death of someone who killed a loved one, for example.

Ooooh, and you could see which people had quests, because they'd be in a 'quest giving' mood and be flashing !

[Tiler]

I think Mayors shouldn't be be the sole quest givers. People on the streets could give quests for the death of someone who killed a loved one, for example.

Ooooh, and you could see which people had quests, because they'd be in a 'quest giving' mood and be flashing !

Hey, that's a pretty neat idea. Not flashing !, since that means 'Engraged', so a different color.

Mayors should still give out quests to kill semimegabeasts and stuff, which would allow people to easily find higher-level quests if you need to.

And I figure rescue missions would work if you could tell the person you're escorting to 'sneak'. "THIS IS A SNEAKING MISSION". Or telling them to hang back for a minute while you scout ahead. And make it so they don't seek death at the hands of the enemy every chance they get. Otherwise, it'll be a classic video game escort mission, which tend to suck royally.

[thvaz]

The flashing ! is a convention of mmoprgs and shouldn't have its place in this game. If you want to know if a given NPC has a quest for you, you should talk to him.

This would be useful later when you start to gain favors of npcs. You wouldn't want to be well liked just by the mayor, after all.

[Tiler]

It's differing design philosophy, I suppose.

I see it as this; a ! is needed to prevent a player from wandering around aimlessly and having to talk to 100+ NPCs, all that look alike and move around, to get a quest. As unrealistic as it is, it's not fun to wander aimlessly and gradually grow frustrated at an inability to find a quest.

A quest bulliten board may help, or just have questgivers hang out in the tavern, but have some way to help players reach their goal of finding a quest as quickly and painlessly as possible.

[Draco18s]

The bulletin board would work.  I've been playing Elona and that's how they do it.  Though the recipient of a delivery quest does have a blue ! above their heads (in a speech bubble), but without it you'd never be able to find them unless they worked in a shop (even then it's hard).

[perilisk]

The flashing ! is a convention of mmoprgs and shouldn't have its place in this game. If you want to know if a given NPC has a quest for you, you should talk to him.

Of course, you could always just ask other NPCs where you can find work (ideally you could look for either adventurer work or mundane work) and they would direct you to him.

If you were famous enough, and the NPC was bold enough, he might seek you out and save you the trouble.

[Techhead]

Maybe a flashing !. Also, if you ask for a quest and they say that someone in the same town has something for you, make it flash on the mini-map as well.

On a side note, grocer merchants should offer a quest to fetch X butcher-able non-rotten corpses, which might later show up as merchandise. Perhaps other shops could also request supplies as well, except that other supplies might be hard to find.

[PenguinSeph]

You could always make the ! an init option.

Also, message delivery? You could be asked to take letters to different towns for a small payment.

[Othob Rithol]

We need a quest to cut down the mightiest tree in the forest...wiiiith......


oh nevermind.

[Granite26]

Yeah, no, seriously...  The '!' thing was sarcasm.

I kind of like that the small town mayor/whatever knows what the people in his town need or want.  Would you go to every person in a town asking them what they want?  ('Fetch me a spoon')  Or would you just go to the boss and say 'hey, what are the big problems in your town?' and let the mayer filter the crap for you.  (Possibly by level.. he knows about how strong you are and how tough the various critters are...)