Redesign Urban Events and Points of Interest

[tukkek]

tukkek: i have also removed Points of Interest and Urban Events - i have been unhappy with the state and amount of work required to add more content to those systems, so the time seemed right to do it now. the new quests #247 will replace those, to some extent anyways.

probably for the best. Some were kinda wonky and i couldnt figure out how to complete a few lol

tukkek: yeah they were a worthwhile concept to make the game feel more like a living, breathing RPG world but no matter how many "individual events" I add, they still feel like "individual events" and not like a living breathing world (except for maybe the first time you find them). the new quests will be vastly simpler and fewer but with "infinite" more outcomes since they're more "procedurally generated". i havent removed points of interest and urban events as much as I have disabled them so i might rework those at some point later on to be more on that line... in the end, just another couple things in the "tried and failed" bucket of ideas attempted while searching for the "soul" of the game.

[tukkek]

Urban Events in particular would be a great testing ground for procedurally-generated, open-ended, multiple-outcome roleplaying/dialogue system based, at least partly on the Town's traits - with a few basic scenarios and a whole lot of procedural mutators added to them. This is rather ambitious though so without a source of inspiration or framework to base it off of, it might be a hard sell.

[tukkek]

Points of Interest might easily be reworked as "wilderness Quests", reusing the Fight- based quests. All it would take is to add a Squad or flat EL parameter to Quest#define() and figure out how to place the Marker in an elegant way that doesn't add a lot more complexity to the base class.

The best approach might be to add an alternate #define() method instead, declared in an interface that can be added to quest-types (such as Fight Quests) or individual quests to make them "off-town-friendly".

[tukkek]

A basic idea for role-playing Urban Events would be to have certain base-scenarios such as "tavern brawl" and several actions (bribe, convince, intimidate) whose chances would be affected by the Traits of the NPCs in them. Traits should drawn from a pool of Town Traits and All Traits in a 50-50% draw, with each NPC having a couple.

Traits would also be the source for a number of subjectives and adjectives - so a Tavern Brawl in a Religious City could be "Temple unrest" instead and a Military, Criminal NPC might be described as "neatly-dressed, mysterious figure". It's important that these traits be able to draw from external traits as well because then they will serve as red-herrings for meta-gaming players, to keep them guessing (and add encounter variety, if only fluff).

Most action results would ultimately be determined by Diplomacy rolls, highly favoring parties with that skill, so actions should be divided between those with a DC that scales to the Diplomacy of the Town's Rank or "basic" ones that have untrained DCs only. If not that, have each Action have three outcomes: full-scaled DC success, partial success and failure.

Units with high enough Perception or Sense Motive to take-10 on a full success DC should be able to see the likelihood of a positive outcome, giving the player a measure of their odds if they pick that action.

Having a basic framework here, the challenge is how to make these events engaging and multi-layered. Perhaps having each scenario consist of multiple NPCs and different "win conditions/thresolds" and having NPC actions re-roll (or maybe add a new option per NPC with each action taken) might be enough to make this an interesting mini-game of its own, sort of like a procedurally-generated, text-based, self-contained CRPG area.

Scenarios might not even need to have a win/lose condition at all. A Mercantile "fancy party" might be all about mingling with the upper class, gaining reputation, lore about world locations and dungeons, finding a patron and funding town labors...