While discussing RPGs with a friend couple of months ago, he said something like "I don't really want to meet the exact same people in the exact same places, and have them saying the exact same things and giving me the exact same quests". We then briefly discussed what it would be like to play an RPG that based on a main story, generated cities, people, relations between those people, and quests, AND STILL HAVE GOOD DIALOGUES! For instance, take NWN. Really, the dialogues were horrible, compared to Fallout 1&2, and Planescape Torment (of which I've only played a little). And those dialogues are "pre-written". I think it IS possible to create great quests and great dialogues using a random world generator. I've started a small design document for one, but haven't really gotten very far. So far this is what I've come up with: First, generate the world (entire world, a city, a small town or just a house), then generate the... important aspects or parts of it (landscape, city districts, buildings, floor plans) recursively. That means that if you generate a city, you'll also generate the districts, the buildings in the districts and the floor plans of the buildings. Then generate the people living in the world (for example in a bar, there could be an owner, a bartender and a waitress, OR the owner could actually be working there on his own.). Then, generate everyone's attributes (smart, strong, shy, ugly, goes to the bar a lot). Then, generate a list of who-knows-who. Then, generate everyone's relationship towards one another. Then, generate quests. Things that people want done, because they are jealous of this or that person, or they are afraid to buy pr0n mags, whatever. Then, generate the dialogues. There are tons of way to start a conversation, there are tons of way for an NPC to start saying they want something done, there are tons of ways to say EVERYTHING. This could result in millions of combinations, making each conversation sound unique, if done well. Of course to make this, you'd need one hell of a script writer, but hey, you need that if you wanna make a good RPG with deep characters and rich dialogue anyway! Plus, by doing this, you may even get COOLER quests. I mean, if you could get a system like this up and running, the deepness of the relationships between people and objects in the world are only limited by the arguments you supply the generator! When I play RPGs, I always think that quests that involve more than one guy are the coolest. (naturally there are exceptions, but...) Ahh, another (maybe WAY too) long post brought to you by Srekel I hope you don't mind too much EDIT: I just found another link on the subject (via Dwarfsoft's Future of RPG compendium) http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=29666&forum_id=17&Topic_Title=Generating+Random+Missions+%28long%29&forum_title=Game+Design&M=False&S=True I'll try to read it tomorrow cause I'm way too tired now... [edited by - Srekel on July 17, 2003 9:17:20 PM]

I thought of the same thing with changes in the details, but an implementation is horredously complicated in practice.

This is about where I got:

Generate all people who will be used in quests(generating all people in the world is too much and unnecessary). Each person has skills, possessions(including buildings, towns, other people!) a reputation, and desires. Someone who wants nothing is probably not going to give you a quest, after all.

Then the next step, to generate quests, evaluates each character''s situation, comparing themselves with others and their specific desires, and determines what is needed most. From that, a bunch of factors go into the specifics of the quest itself(kind of job, value, locale, objective, difficulty...)

After the quest is completed or failed the whole world has to be reevaluated since the situation has changed.

If you want a "living" world, you can have the quests the player never takes(or even sees) be simulated and marked as a success or failure.

That doesn''t even touch the conversation part of the game, which I had assumed to be a set deal - X(click to view stats) offers you quest: (details) Accept? Yes/No

Though I guess you could make it more sophisticated by generating the quest during the conversation and allowing the player to express the kind of job he''d be willing to take on...

The difficulty in genenerating quests depends on the types of the quests.

Basic quests:
Kill X
Rescue X
Find item X
Take X to Y
Protect X
Retrive X number item Y.

This can be implemented fairly easy buy having the computer choose a quest and an X and Y. With this system you could even implement a system of work houses. In each town there could be adventures guild where you go to get random quests.

I am actually working on such a story system that allows you to write the story framework, and imply what is variable, and where the story can be applied. Then it is just a matter of getting the game to decide whether or not this story is to be executed once it has reached a point in the game.

Being a web of story elements its hard to explain in such short detail, but basically you have your web of stories, and what must be completed for this story element

1. Start execution
   
2. Finish Execution
   
3. Disable execution

I should write up more of this when I actually finish the engine... its nearly there, but I am using the engine for Other purposes at the moment