Quest Design and Regional Economies

Post » Fri Feb 18, 2011 9:03 pm

I was thinking over a few aspects of Radiant story and the expanded scope of item creation (crafting) within skyrim and I figured it would be cool if Bethesda combined them.
What I had in mind was take the typical 'go there and retrieve this' quest and morph it with radiant story to match players that advance crafting skills.

So say you have a quest where some girls in Solitude bemoan the fact that it is so hard to find potent fortify personality potions in town, so it leads you to the local alchemist who tells you how one of the better ingredients for fortify personality only grows in east marsh, and with the war, its imposible to get reliable supplies of it in Solitude. So you can go collect some and bring it back for a reward.. so far so normal. Solitude girls are ugly and need you to fetch some personality enhancers so the towns six life won't suffer...

Now lets apply radiant story over it, radiant story identifies that you are actually a skilled alchemist in your own right, so it adjusts the quest to direct you to the a competitor of the local alchemist, a general store owner. The general store owner cant even brew a cup of tea, but he hates the alchemist and wants to put him out of business. So he offers the PC to stock any fortify personality potions the PC can supply, there by doing the town alchemist out of a profit. to compleate the quest now the PC has to fetch the components AND make up some potions. At the end of the quest the general store owner can be flagged to purchase said potions at a mark-up to the standard price the PC would get, providing the PC with a continued faux trader/profession type role in the world if they chose it.

You could apply this quest extension to all types of crafting using the three skills (enchant/alchemy/smithing).
Even those that don't require skill, like cooking could have radiant story impacts. If you can flag with the radiant story that you have previously consumed crafted food (something that was in the PC stats for FO:NV) then you could have radiant story offer the player entry into a bake-off contest when they enter a town that is in a festive season.

To be clear, I don't want skyrim to become cafe-world, but such quests triggered by the players history, skills and actions could provide some fun variety and life to the world in addition to excellent combat and stealth type quests.

Thoughts?
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Courtney Foren
 
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Post » Sat Feb 19, 2011 7:29 am

I like the idea.

Just trying to generalise this a little: I guess the idea is that Radiant story will identify that you have some crafting skill, and will then activate a quest where you make use of that crafting skill to push the relevant items into a town's economy (or whoever/wherever can make use of the items).

I can see this being put to use in other sorts of ways. Here's an idea. Perhaps you'll get a quest from some merchants to clear out some bandits which have been preying on them as they travel along a certain stretch of road. However, if you've got a high Smithing skill, then if you talk to the bandits, they might offer you a deal: craft them some better weapons/armour, and, because they'll now be better equipped to take on the merchant's guards, they'll give you a cut of the loot.
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Rich O'Brien
 
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