Ah, discussion, I longed for this.
How would the actual kidnapping proceed? Off the top of my head I'd go with: Adventurer speaks with the soon-to-be-kidnapped and choose 'Join', where the victim answers with: "Please don't kill me, I will follow you!", or something along those lines. An easy solution. The victim should be neutral, or at least possible to talk to, regardless of whether or not you're at full-scale war with the rest of the town. That way you won't be forced to kill the bugger, and fail the quest. There's no contractual immortality, though! You could rip out his or her livers, and consequentially fail the quest. Fun on so many levels! 
Perhaps a restraint like a cage can be used, and carried somehow. Other option would be to tie the target or something (that would require setting in-game objects as "restrained" limiting their actions or something...wonder how this could be managed...why? So it can't run away easily, and preventing you from having to chase it around all the time).
Some mobile structure like a cart or cage-with-wheels can be used to keep the prisoner in place. Hopefully they will exist sometime.
I see it as two possible (basic, more can be added) outcomes:
A) Enemy is hostile (possibly the most common one):
In this case, you would need to disable the target instead of killing it, or you can't win the quest. Possibly hammering (since it's considerably not lethal at the moment) or some poison... During delivery of your target, rescue parties can come to you, which will give extra gameplay challenges.
B) Enemy is not hostile.
Perhaps someone already disabled, powerless, or the best, surrendering. The same means of transportation should be required, though, but in this case, considering the person is not forced so much, you would be exempt of pursuit.
Maybe the target is a person of honor and willingly offers to follow you to prevent bloodshed (personality values?).
Delivering messages would be an easy implementation to the current game. Simply give the adventurer an item (which no NPC is capable of at the moment, though. >.<), say a letter, and ask them to give to another person. Preferably from a leader of one civilization to the leader of another. Leaders are relatively easy to locate, in comparison to all other NPC's. Perhaps the adventurer could be ambushed by bad people that don't want the letter to reach it's destination? (Where did that idea come from? ) It could work exactly as when you are ambushed by wild animals on the 'T'ravel Map, under the condition that you're on such a quest and that there are an enemy civilization capable of such ...atrocities. 
I think that a message saying: "You have been ambushed by [goblins/dwarves/elves/humans]. They are after your delivery!" would be a good thing to have, for the sake of coherency and immersion. The item could have a high political or/and monetary value, and the chance of an ambush set by said values.
That's what I had in mind, exactly! Messengers are valuable in fantasy stories, and perhaps a bit overlooked during writing of fantasy works. What a war it'd be without direct communication between warlords/generals or to subordinates? It's internet, phone, postal service, or magic...otherwise it's guys having to travel entire countries, a la Strogoff, within days just to keep communications. The possibility of intercepting random people in the map carrying messages themselves can be awesome too. At times it can be insight on world entities (when the army arc is done), or at times love letters from villagers or stuff that is "important" (to them) but not relevant to the world. Or random silly mail without much "economic" value, such as a friendly letter or confirmation of something ("Father, I have finished irrigating the farm plots as you wanted, I hope you come back soon" or such fluff).
(The idea came from own projects, historic mail delivery and common sense xD)
"So once again, Jones, what was briefly yours is now mine." - Raiders of the Lost Ark 
I really, really want your idea to happen in DF, I absolutely do! But I think it would be hard to implement in the game as of now. We'll hopefully see it in the future. For this to happen there would have to be a place where the artefact would be placed, preferably with functional traps. Caves as we know them aren't the optimal place, due to: no traps, direct connection with the Underground, often inhabited with meddlesome creatures that'll mess up the whole deal by taking the artefact itself and so on. The ruins that are left behind during worldgen aren't much to talk about, just empty and disrepaired versions of the normal one. Dark Fortresses are a good candidate, however. Would the artefact be generated on the spot, or an existing item? Would it be a masterwork item in the ruins? I've visited my ruined fortresses and discovered that the chief part of my high quality items was littered on the ground outside. Would that happen in this scenario? On the subject of the nemesis and his henchmen; It could work, with some work. When the adventurer and its companions become a real organization, the nemesis could very well have their own counterparts with companions of their own. In fact, I think this is a good idea that could and should be incorporated outside of this single quest-concept. With the behaviour of the nemesis, that would be a lot harder. Just to understand his or her motivation, (see above quote ), you'd need to write special dialogue. To add in actual personality into this would be a bit too much for Toady in the current day. I do hope that it'll be feasible soon, though!
Excellent. Again getting my vibe xD
The character of "treasure hunter" tends to be one of my favorites in fantasy stories. Some aren't evil and just annoying, others are noble "rivals", others are just dicks. It would be ideal to allow the player decide what to do with such stereotypes. Generally death, but I can see some of those NPCs being useful.
Hard? Not really, "soul" already exist, the rest is writing some stock sentences and assigning some objectives. I think the current AI can take it with minor modifications, seeing as AI characters have a concept of "orders".
As for interaction with dungeons and areas, I solved this by marking hotspots in the map at generation time (Not DF, something personal) so enemies have a hint of where to build traps and take cover. Perhaps that can be done with DF so treasure hunters can know what the best spots to hinder/destroy/help the player are.
Of course dungeon puzzles and trapped areas can help enhance this a lot, so for this to happen a lot of cores need to be implemented first, which is a shame since it's not really that difficult to code (from experience, but requires everything to work properly first).
Dialogue and such can be left to editable files, pretty much like the current conversation system, but having some more "sections" based on personality. You can have a grand master comedian as your nemesis.
Also non-lethal or partially scripted combat should exist within the game so the nemesis can keep coming for more (either to continue annoying you or to have a change of heart, do something else, etc). The idea is that some enemies could try to ask for mercy or surrender, and letting them live might make them the nemesis, let them run away forever, or such. Like "guess that assassin that you almost killed the other day? Well he's back with a vengeance".
As for items, there are lots of artifacts on entities, and worldgen seems to take account of incredibly trivial events such as "a wild strawberry was stolen on 1049 from the town of BlazingHorses". Hence, it'd be easy to designate some "tracked" object.
This however requires making the objects that are stolen something relevant because who cares if a "wild strawberry" is stolen from a site? But artifacts are a different beast...perhaps worldgen is not weighting how valuable things are. For this to work we need to know which objects are really valuable. Even if there are legendary coffers more valuable than entire forts, I think current "crafts", "equipment" in general and objects of reasonable size and importance (a bed, even if legendary, is odd to find as target...)
Anyway I digress. The game should keep a decent database of valuables at worldgen, hence it'd be easy to pick one, align it accordingly, and deploy the quest.
Of course facilities like hiding objects well or trapping them would be required. Worldgen doesn't do much in terms of adventure mode architecture ouf of caverns and "carved" passages. More dungeon features would make this very effective and challenging.
Genocide sounds absolutely horrible. A must for the experienced DF player, in other words. It would definitely be an endgame quest, i.e. having a lot of named kills, having a title, having completed a lot of quests, etc. The quest could be considered complete after you killing either 90-80% of the population, or all of the soldiers of said civilization. Idea = In the future, if the people actually refrain from going up to you and sacrificing themselves instead of letting the armed soldiers and guards do they job, the questgiver could specify: "Kill every soldier of The Malignant Torments". This would leave survivors, who could arm themselves "offscreen" and go after the adventurer in the same way that I described the ambushers would above. Brilliant! I don't think that the game would consciously hide or remove citizens from the site during the bloodfest. It seems unfitting for how the rest of the game works, somehow. The point of it all is; the genocide quest is a good idea, so long as it doesn't require a 100% purge. There will always be someone in an odd place somewhere. If NPC's actually continues to do stuff after worldgen, there would be some people that are "wandering the wilds" and taming jaguars and so on
The "endgame" is why I mentioned party size. No one would send you to war alone (although it SHOULD be possible IMO). It should be easy to measure relative power of the party and react accordingly.
100% purge, in practical terms, is a bit of a problem, since villagers or citizens are usually too scattered around, hence killing all in sight (90% being generous really) should suffice.
I don't mean "genocide" but specific site attacks based on aligment. I guess you can genocide some goblins if they happen to be inside the same fortress, but...it would be possible, again, by using personality settings (if the warlord is an asshole he might specifically request an attempt at genocide...)
I was more thinking into strategic disabling of a site. Crushing the industry, the military...I wasn't really thinking hate although it would be actually a good idea to consider that during generation too (wars don't need to have "average man" logic).
Agreed, agreed and agreed. The tougher you get, the tougher the world becomes. It would serve as a natural way of progression in the game, and would make Adventure mode seem like an actual game - not just a 'demo'. The frequency and danger of the assassination attempts would progressively rise, altered by number of assassins, their skills and equipment. Wouldn't be an actual quests, more of an important feature.
Exactly, starting like a random nobody and rising to legend with your own army and perhaps town (why not) would take this to levels of "too epic for human beings". You can't expect to piss off several parties and just walk the world like if you just started. Some games call it "good/evil" balance, but if you go around killing stuff randomly, you can't expect to be ignored.
That's enough "punishment" without having to mention "evil actions" at all. (and ETHICS can make up a difference here. Maybe some species don't even mind getting slain by you, sort of like "hey, shame on the dead for not defending themselves!"...the settings are there, sort of). The possibility of shady characters actually
benefiting from some of your actions can be pretty interesting as well. Make the consequences hard to grasp so there's no actual "good/evil" but the player's own definition of such, and the AIs involved as well. (For example I made a harpy mod where their ethics aren't much against thievery (shun, no punishment) and very against oath breaking (punished) and treason is the worst crime...such settings can alter how relations with entities go, keeping things interesting and getting the player to like/dislike some entities more)
Thank you so much for the ideas, I appreciate it greatly! It seems as if there's an important thing about inversion here: If you can do it; so can your enemies. As showcased in the item delivery quest. Therefore I think it would be a good idea if Toady would consider adding NPC adventurers like the one we control, and make them function like them, or at least make it seem as if they do. My fingers begin to numb, and it feels as if I've written a short novel. DalGren,on the subject of the item retrieval: If I'm being too critical, please elaborate.
Do you have any ideas not already here, or thoughts about them?
I guess I covered some now, although too sleepy to think of more, or make more sense at the moment xD
I do games as well, so I really enjoy the creative process, so glad to have posted here xD
As for other ideas, the ubiquitously annoying "DEFENSE" missions. Protect X person or structure against Y enemies for Z time. Such as protect the cart carrying a noble/s or something like that. Locating bandits (coming in ambushes over the designated area) can be another good one.
Police/Bounty quests are one thing, but DF has a variety of non-combative professions and skills. Perhaps being called to mediate in political issues (conversation puzzles? They won't read awesome but they aren't impossible at all), to create an item or structure ("do a bone scepter for us, if we like it we'll pay you X for Y items", "build a cabin of X quality/material in the forest, we'll pay you Y"...) and something like "meet with person X at site Y, then come back and tell us the news (a variant on simple message delivery, more like message retrieval)". (This is all, of course, for when DF mode skills are available in Adventure)
Perhaps, for dwarves..."go to X site and find if there's something of value in there/mine until you find Y" (like native gold or such).
With so much data in the worlds, the possibilities are huge.
Oh, and party members to be issued by quest givers. Like "Go kill the dragon, this warrior will assist you".
By the way, party members should be able to talk, to give insight on their entity, race, current world events and such. This would make such missions deeper (such as you find you are working for pretty messed up guys because the warrior they gave you talks too much).
Ah, too sleepy, I hope I didn't fail to notice some stupid error there xD
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Topic: Adventure Mode Quests (Read 1341 times)