What bare-bones mission objectives / quests / tasks can you think of that you''ve been given (or could be given) in a game? Can you add to the list I''ve got so far? (This is for a brainstorm on making random missions) Destroy (something) / Assassinate (someone) Damage (something) / Wound (someone) (by a certain percentage) Capture (something) / Kidnap (someone) Guard something / someone Find something / someone -------------------- Just waiting for the mothership...

Rescue someone.
Deliver something / information.
Complete something (with last required part / information).
Prevent an event from happening.
Trick someone else into doing something (maybe political)
Obtain information about something.

BTW, thx bishop_pass!

...man, I''m not scoring too high on the reply-o-meter...!!!!


(something I said??????)

--------------------
Just waiting for the mothership...

Another layer of conditions upon these would add some more variety, like:
Assassinate (something) and return to (somewhere) without being seen. (or without being seen by [this group])

Preventing (something) would be as easy as:
Steal (the_cannon) by (1600).

or- Destroy guerilla_Platoon while base is not destroyed.

Also, simple concatenations of the base objectives could work:
Steal (something) while gaurding (someone).


Hell, if you could modularize the concatenation even, you could get dependant mission objectives, like
Be (at the ally behind Smitty''s) by (eleven pm) to accept (a package of high grade hallucinagens) to be delivered to (DrugDealer Dave)

Specific in-context examples like the one above would have to be generated through a smart module that tracked individual/faction motives, like DrugDealer Dave wants drugs, plus some individual facts, as are useful in your case, like illegal activities are usual done at night, plus the knowledge that drug-dealing is illegal in this particular country.

This kind of smart mission generation (generating the missions from the output of the culture/city builder, run that into an NPC/motive builder, and analyze the output of the motive builder to generate likely missions w/in the setting. Tracking the status of each mission element to produce dependant elements would be an added bonus, as it would naturally generate dynamic missions, w/out you having to generate that from w/in the mission builder.

But of course its 1:00am here, and counting, so I could be wrong. . .






If you see the Buddha on the road, Kill Him. -apocryphal

AP, you have captured the exact essence of what we (I at least) want to do.

So far we have (in very broad catagories):

• Ensure the existence/non-existence of [something]
  This covers destroy, guard maybe wound
  
• Get [something] in [someone''s] possession
  This covers find, capture, kidnap, deliver, inform, obtain. With a little stretch this includes get [something] to [somewhere].
  

Hmm.. only two types of missions. Any others?

Also, we can concatenate or we can add modifiers:

• Before [event]
  [event] could be a time (before 3:00 AM) or a condition (before/without being seen)
  This covers prevent, and time limits.
  

Anything else? I think I have covered every example given so far, in only three (broad) catagories.
For example:
get [hallucinogens] to [behind Smitty''s] before [11:00 PM].



Think outside the dodecahedron

Infiltrate.. sneaky like..

Perhaps similar to ''find,'' that we''ve got to get ourselves to the goal, but this implies an avoidance of contact, (normally violent).

The AP really needs to register He has some very good ideals. (HINT, HINT)

Something that I would like to see attempted is something like this:

You select a mission, anything will do, lets say you choose to Assasinate someone. But, when you get there your discovered. Now, your asked to assasinate your original employer for more money.

I know this isn''t answering your question.... but, these types of games tend to be linear... meaning that the task is what you see. There are no twist and plot turns in most cases. AND maybe this is how you could bring more depth to the game.







Dave "Dak Lozar"Loeser

There''s always the combined mission types such as;

talk to [someone] who tells you to find [something] which you then take to [some location] to fix[something] all of this before [a specified time/date] has been reached.

This is pretty flexible and a deadline would give a player the feeling that we get at work everyday of an immenent deadline. :-)

-Ben

This one might be kind of difficult to implement.

persuade/corrupt

Convince a monarch to conquer a relatively peaceful country/township/whatever.

Get someone to form an alliance with you against your enemies.

Basically beg, trick or threaten someone into helping you or in some instances to do your dirty work for you.

WOO HOO I still rember VB! I was ment to be studying for a Systems exam last night but i was board so I made this. It''s a mission objective generator. It gos, Your mission is to [do somthing] to [something or some one]. [time limit?] [sneaky or not]. I was rather happy concidering I did VB for 6 months in year 9, ummmm 6 years ago . Let me know what you think.

ps, it was late so ignore all the typos :-)

Click here or get it from here: http://yallara.cs.rmit.edu.au/~sojames/cs549/MISSION.EXE

As Mr Cup always says,
''I pretend to work. They pretend to pay me.''