I''d like to see more RPGs that had, to some degree, time critical tasks with consequences. And I''m not talking some arbitrarily set time limit design, but a more realistic ''It''s urgent we complete this task because...'' type of design. For example.... A local town is being plagued by orcish raids (Ok, sorry for the orc stereotype) and the town Mayor has hired your band of merry adventurers to handle the problem. Now, these raids are ongoing while you go about your business. As time goes on, more folks fall victim to their blades, more crops, livestock, and manufactured goods are stolen or destroyed. The town becomes more despaired, more vacant, more vulnerable to further attacks. The quicker you resolve the conflict, the better off the town is. Consequences include certain people no longer alive to aid you in whatever ways they were able to (repairing equipment, selling items to, providing information about, etc.) The reward for completing the task slowly diminishes as you take more and more time to complete the task (Not necessarily because you''re taking too long. The townsfolk would never presume to tell you how long it should take as they are obviously unqualified to perform such a task themselves, but your own conscience should be your guide. The reward goes down simply because as time goes on, they have less to give) Even further expansion would include certain other side quests only becoming available if it takes you a certain amount of time to complete the quest. A simple idea being, after some time, one of the local farmers is killed in a raid. His wife has 4 very young children. When you have finally put a stop to the raids, this widow will now ask you to find her brother in a distant town and ask him to come help her with the farm and her children (and you escort him back to the town, since the distance between the two is dangerous) This quest will not be available if you stop the raids before this farmer with a wife and 4 kids is killed. And on the other side, if you stop the raids in a very short time one of the local shop keepers will be very impressed with your speed and efficiency and ask you to perform another time critical task for him. If you''re slow, he either won''t be impressed or perhaps won''t even be alive. Such a system of quests would obviously be very complex, detailed, and intricate, but it would really add to the feel that you''re in a dynamic and ever changing world where your actions can have a substantial impact on the people around you. RPGs today have no sense of urgency. I don''t want to see them go to the extreme of requiring you to complete the task in a certain arbitrarily predetermined amount of time, but rather gradually increase the severity of the consequences for the amount of time they do take.

That''s why I''m specifically against arbitrary time constraints. You have 10 hours, 10 days, or 5 seconds to complete this task. That doesn''t properly portray a sense of urgency within a game world. The urgency NEEDS to come from the consequences of delaying the task at hand. These consequences should never end the storyline abruptly, but nudge it down this path or that path. In my original example, even if you never fully stop the raids, they should just fade off as the town is completely ravaged and all you are left with is a basic skeleton town with barely enough townfolk and resources to keep it running. Maybe you''ve cut off many, or just some, of your side quests as a result.

Regardless, the fact that other games haven''t done it right is no reason to believe that it can''t be done. As I said, it would be a complex quest system involved, and the more complex a system gets, the tougher it gets to do it right. I''ve experienced similar adventures in Pen & Paper, and I would love to see such diversity eventually make it in CRPGs.

I''d like if there where some raiders that are running away and if you don''t catch up to them then it''ll become impossible to get back what they''ve stolen. Or something like this. Chasing after the crooks for rewards etc.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

If you fail to catch up to the raiders, that should open up alternative conclusions to that storyline. Perhaps you now need to seek out what happened to the items that were stolen. Perhaps they were pawned off, and eventually ended up as the property of some less then moral nobleperson or rich merchant. At this point you need to use diplomacy or stealth/trickery to regain possession of the stolen items. Or alternatively you''re assigned to find, or have made, a suitable replacement to what was stolen. This all stems off the old concept of providing multiple logical ways of successfully completing the assigned task.

What''s that saying again. A stitch in time saves nine

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!

Ok, then you need an easy logical way of keeping track (or predicting) movement. Some sort of XY location counter being used in the background whilst your beating the bageeba''s out of a pack of skeletons. Its very straight forward really.

I love Game Design and it loves me back.

Our Goal is "Fun"!