Suggestion: mini-quests/more flavour

[Bim]

This isn't so much a suggestion as a request for more ideas. By mini-quests, I mean things like Duvessa and Dowan going berserk if you kill the other one, Boris reanimating (there was previous discussion about him) a few times as a sort of quest to finally kill him, and even the (removed) draining fountains and killing Plords to gain ctele.

I know these aren't really quests (and I would prefer ones with more meaningful consequences/tasks involved) but to me this is something that crawl is lacking, especially in the early and mid game 'grind'. Crawl has obviously always been a primarily strat/tact game, but I think a few extra bits of flavour (which require the player to do something) would take away some of the grindy/samey bits - especially if they actually rewarded you in some way.

Any ideas?

[Wahaha]

This loot chest requires 10 orcish tridents to open.

[mumra]

This idea has come up before and it's generally pointed out that quests don't really fit this kind of roguelike very well in general (other than the overarching quest of Find The Orb of course). Features like Troves have been added as a way to support quest-like mechanics but in a less forced way.

The "Rune Lock" idea would introduce a mid-game quest element but this is highly controversial. An idea was floating around for Vaults where there might be locked rooms and some vault guards hold keys which you need to obtain to get loot or find the stairs. However this idea seemed generally unpopular when I was working on Vaults stuff so I left it alone. The Demigods update promises to add mini quest-like portal elements for Dg games.

Really by "quest" you are talking about "story and gameplay elements that tie together multiple characters and/or locations and/or items". So this would include examples like Kirke and Pikel, and actually many of the portal vaults. I certainly love all these little bits of flavour; some are probably not so keen on them but as long as they're never too intrusive they can be enjoyed by those who like that sort of thing and ignored by anyone else. I'd definitely like to see some new original ideas along these lines.

[Davion Fuxa]

One of the strengths of crawl could be said to be that it lacks any quests and just solid free-flowing choice. You just play the game pretty much and handle challenges as they come up.

[reaver]

Could I recommend TOME4 and ADOM? These are the two major roguelikes with robust questing systems. I've only played Crawl and Nethack, so I can't personally endorse either of these, but you still might want to try them. Both of them have graphical support, but note that ADOM's was added very recently, so there might be some problems. Also note that Crawl's no-spoiler and no-scumming philosphy is unusual among roguelikes. You'll probably have to read spoilers to win at these games. For example, in ADOM:

Spoiler: show

Cats are a very common enemy. Near the end of the game, you run into the "cat lord," an invisible high level monster which will attack you if you have killed any cats. By this time the player will have run into hundreds of hostile cats trying to kill them. There is no indication anywhere this has any effect. If you kept this conduct, the cat lord will instead give you an artifact.

On the note of quests - I think that quests work well in standard games but are hard to get working well in roguelikes. You need a lot of control to design good quests, and that doesn't mesh well with heavy randomization. Part of the reason there are so many spoilers in the games I mentioned is the quest system. I think the Mystery Dungeon manages to do quests reasonably well, but their quests are very simple - kill this one bloke, bring somebody somewhere, retrieve this one item, find this missing person etc. Note that most of your examples involve uniques, which are already the most spoiler-based part of Crawl.

[Utis]

Really by "quest" you are talking about "story and gameplay elements that tie together multiple characters and/or locations and/or items". So this would include examples like Kirke and Pikel, and actually many of the portal vaults. I certainly love all these little bits of flavour; some are probably not so keen on them but as long as they're never too intrusive they can be enjoyed by those who like that sort of thing and ignored by anyone else. I'd definitely like to see some new original ideas along these lines.

I really love those, too. One of my absolute favourites is the vault where you have "hungry Kobolds" around a fire and a couple of hobbits behind bars. Not much more, you have just the very basic elements of a story are there. Your fantasy is massaged, but you're not hitting a wall of text or getting drowned in a story told in flowery words, you're not supposed to do any puzzle solving or tediously running around. I'd really love to see more of that.

[Lokkij]

@Reaver: I think he's looking for more implicit quests: not 'bring character X to place Y and you'll get item Z', but more like 'if you wanted to, you could do X, which may or may not give you some kind of reward'. Like the hungry kobold vault Utis pointed out: you can kill those kobolds if you want to, but you won't really get a reward aside from the XP and the satisfaction of saving those cute halflings. The vault wardens also have an implicit quest built in: they sealed those doors, so if you want to get out of this room, you'll have to kill the warden.

I wish I had some really cool 'mini-quest' ideas. I think they're really great: most of them provide a good deal of flavour, with gaps for you to fill in, and they're just fun to do.

[Sandman25]

The best quests for me are ones where you have excluding choice: you can do A and receive award N OR you can do B and receive award M. You cannot do both quests and receive both awards. It adds to role-playing.
I think such quests can be related to way of killing uniques, for example: kill Mara with club and you will get an artifact Giant Spiked Club with draining, rN+ and evoke Inv. Or kill Mara with Magic Dart and you will get ring of the Mage {Wiz MR Int+3}.

[evilmike]

A quest system is never going to be added to crawl.

[twelwe]

what about achievements. i love cheevos

[mumra]

what about achievements. i love cheevos

Is a special forum colour not enough of an achievement for you

[Davion Fuxa]

what about achievements. i love cheevos

Is a special forum colour not enough of an achievement for you

Once you achieve something, achieve something else.

[twelwe]

what about achievements. i love cheevos

Is a special forum colour not enough of an achievement for you

put crawl on steam so everyone else can see my cheevies and low dates

[Bim]

Quest was certainly the wrong word - I didn't mean RPG style questing with a whole system, fetch quests and multi-level npc tomfoolery - just interactive flavour. My bad for not clarifying - quests is the wrong word.

As has been mentioned, the hungry kobolds and the Kirke are examples of sort of 'active flavour'. I would probably like to see ones that give a bit more of a reward/require more thought, but that sort of level. For instance, maybe to open the snake pit you need to (on some play throughs) kill a unique guardian serpent to open the entrance - this is implicit as the guardian serpent would be at the branch entrance, but it would add a bit more 'meaningful' flavour as players that try to sneak past would need to find a way to deal with it.

Definitely not thinking about fully fledged quests or things that need spoilers/are too difficult to figure out - just something to change things up.

[Marbit]

I don't think that anyone will complain about vaults like the one you mentioned (I'd start by modifying yredelemnul_ordeal and substitute the human by a guardian serpent).
The good thing about crawl is that you don't need to be a dev to contribute with vaults, dialogs, quotes, tiles or ideas.

[dpeg]

Bim: The kind of flavour you have in mind is largely non-controversial; I like to call it "storytelling without words". As Marbit says, you can basically do it without coding! If you are unable to do vaults (or are scared of lua), you can just present ideas here. It is quite possible that someone will actually like them enough to make a vault out of it. The same (although with coding) goes for uniques.

[tasonir]

Flavored vaults are widely supported and pretty awesome. I am a horrible person at heart though and will kill the kobolds who have captured the halflings, and then proceed to kill the halflings as well. It's more exp, and damnit, I'm worshipping Makhleb, he needs more blood and souls. So watch out for overly scummable vaults, although there can be some friendly/neutral mobs.