ToME: the Tales of Maj'Eyal

Basically, a text based quest is exactly like it sounds, a quest all in text. The main player chooses options. Success is based on the player's choice and stat/skill score. And there is never a 100% chance of success and never a 100% chance of failure.

Some notable games that used text based quests:
King of Dragon Pass
Space Rangers 2

Pros of text-based:
Once the system is in place, making new quests should be easy to do
text-based quests can be added anywhere (worldmap, towns, dungeons)
knowing the lore of ToME will help greatly with quests

For example:
The "obvious" choice isn't always the correct choice and the player doesn't know what the correct answer is. This is to prevent memorizing the solutions. For example, here's two examples of using "stealth" to try to get in. When you beat the quest, you don't always get a prize. When you win, you can have an 80% chance of getting something or 20% of nothing. Even a failure can give you something good. And there should be multiple ways of winning or failing the quest. The text I have below is short, but we can make it longer and on several pages.
##############

##############

##############

I think this would be a very nice addition to ToME, with appropriate engine support. I can't think of any of the current scripted encounters that wouldn't be enhanced with this sort of interface.

The tricky part is to make sure that it's flexible enough to let players be creative in their responses. Think of an adventurer ambush where you have the choice to evade them, sneak up and investigate, parlay, or attempt to ambush the ambushers. The choice the player makes could determine the encounter distance and might give him/her an extra turn or two to prepare. The latter case doesn't lend itself well to a fixed list of options.

This is a brilliant idea. One of the reasons I like ToME better than other rl is because of the greater roleplaying options with rich background to truly immerse in. This will add greater depth to many aspects of the game and offer new territories to explore in terms of what can be done with the game.

I don't know about overhauling the entire game like that, per se. It might be a weird shift to the game's tone. Can't say I necessarily object to it, mind you, but I'm a little less certain on that idea.

However, I am reminded of Nier when reading this, where they suddenly did a genre change and turned an entire dungeon into a text adventure.

It certainly would make for a really cool dungeon, and if a dungeon was done in that style, it would give people an idea if they'd like the game to be more like that.

Oh, ToME would then be closer to FTL

Seems awfully elaborate for what is essentially a reward generator based on random numbers. I think the slow pacing of interactive fiction is inappropriate for ToME. I also think that procedurally generated interactive fiction is hard to do well.

I wouldn't say it's necessary to have all quests and events have this implemented. Just having certain quests with text-based aspect to it can certainly add an interesting new dimension to what we have now and I don't see that slowing down the pace of the game too much. The game already has plenty of lore and other background information, this would be just building on it to some degree. I think if the developers take care to not make it too tedious and drag quests out, this can add flair to this game.

Looks very similar to FTL, and though I love FTL to bits I hate its dialogue system. It has a lot of randomness in it, it gets very repetitive, and after a while you just click blue options without thinking.

Overall I'd say it just doesn't suit the gameplay of ToME, which is focused so heavily on combat. And if it was done it would have to be done *well*, which would take a hell of a lot of work :/

FTL is a crappy thing to compare it with. I put better examples in my first post. Also, "blue answers" are not always the correct one. Personally, I rather there be no blue answers at all, so the user has to make educated picks on what to do.

The problem with FTL was that it wasn't very engaging. The FTL text-quest were short (like 1 minute long "quests") and choices were short term and didn't affect anything later. FTL quests are junk. Have any of you ever played "King of Dragon Pass"? It's a game based entirely upon text-quests. Every action you do influences what happens later. And the results of your action aren't always readily apparent.

In the above example I gave, sneaking in made things worse. The correct answer for the forest sprites was either arcane eye or just walking in, because it allows the forest sprites to acknowledge your presence. For the magic user situation, sneaking in was the correct choice because it let you gain more info about the situation. Personally, I rather how King of Dragon Pass does it, where you don't have a "blue" answer. It just gave you a bunch of possible choices and you had to choose. The quests were more like "Choose Your Own Adventure" type stories.

pic is from King of Dragon Pass.
Edit: For example in ToME, there is a random tome that drops later in the game. And this tome opens up "Valley of the Moon Caverns." Instead of a random enemy dropping the tome, there could be an elaborate text-quest. Successfully solving it gives you the tome, which can then open up the "Valley of the Moon." In other words, the text-quests are used to enhance the lore of the game. It's not like FTL where they just randomly toss you some crappy quest.

I think I understand the idea but what I dont get is, do you mean the quests would be randomly generated?
Otherwise there would be quickly a mass of spoilers online to know which answer to choose in which situation no?

Yeah, sounds very vulnerable to spoilers. And locking out content like the Valley of the Moon quest because you made the wrong dialogue choice seems unfair... The only equivalent thing in ToME is the assassin's choice, and in that it's clear that you are making a choice between saving the merchant or getting some power relating to the assassin. That sort of transparency of choice is very important in my opinion.

Still, it's definitely doable in the engine. Why not make your own game with this as the central mechanic? :)

Hehe, you could even participate in the contest !

I like the idea, but it would need to be very detailed and convoluted to avoid the problems already mentioned. Making it too simple would make it vulnerable to spoilers, unless the correct choice changes each time (as per your example), but then it becomes a basic random reward. It would need to take into account previous choices, not only in these quests, but elsewhere (have you joined Zigur, for example?)

And of course, as the result of some choices, you could get into random fight (like an adventurer's worldmap encounter) or even a random dungeon (like the "Trapped!" quest)

Why not start by putting some of your ideas into code and making an addon?

What I like:

• A nice lore image. Always enriches games.

What I don't like:

• Reading....