Ever notice how most games have npcs that always know if your carrying that vital item or completed an assigned task? So game even go further and allow you to premptivly complete quests. I remember once being asked to kill a warlord who I already had killed and then replying that I had already done it and the npc gave me the reward. Now come on in real life if you asked someone you''ve met to do something for you and they claim to have already done it wouldn''t you want somekind of proof? So what do people think of removing the Psychic powers npcs have and making the player prove they have done something. If they are asked to kill the evil warlord, they would have to bring back proof. This also leads to another problem of false credit or given credit. For instance if the village elder ask you to kill the evil warlord threating the village. How can you prove that it was you who did it? One solution is bring back an item for proof such as ring, but what if you killed him before the quest should the ring be avilable then? Which would regesiter in the players mind that someone somewhere wants it. Or should the ring only appear if they player needs proof? Then there comes the other problem of what if no proof is avilable should you be able to try convice the npc that you where the one who did it? What if someone else already has? ----------------------------------------------------- "Fate and Destiny only give you the opportunity the rest you have to do on your own." Current Design project: Ambitions Slave

This is really just a convenience, but if you wanted to add intrigue, you could have a mechanism whereby you "store" your item in a certain place that''s invisible to the NPC''s psychic eyes.

Re: Proof. Consider the worst case scenario-- You spend lots of effort and resources, complete the quest, and get nothing. How likely is this to occur, and do you want it to even be a possibility? What justifies this possibility? If it is even possible, it should be wholely the player''s fault, not the game''s fault. How would you feel if you experienced this in the game?

You''ll need to build more nuanced social structures if you want the player to be able to bluff their way to a reward with false proof, as well. And what happens when the NPC finds that you lied? More importantly, doing so should yeild some sort of experience or reward totally different from what you could get if you just did the quest.

Since alot of RPGs are kill oriented, proof could get grisly pretty quick: Scalp, finger, head, etc.

btw, this reminds me of a problem I ran into in Fallout: I killed a mobster in a town, then got a mission much later with a godfather who told me not to kill him. When I came back to claim the reward, the godfather ordered my death for disobedience. Bad scripting.

EverQuest has a very simple and accurate solution for this problem.: When the spawn dies, it drops a NO TRADE item which you can loot, which is the token that the NPC wants.

Sometimes, the spawn doesn''t actually drop, or the spawn only re-spawns every 8 hours when there''s 200 people after the same item, but at its base, I find this system both simple and elegant.