As Stormynature said, once you establish the fundamental building blocks of the quests and realize how few there are, then you hand it over to the creative people who hide the limitations through artistic innovation in storywriting. Artists tend to rise to the occasion when faced with limitations.

but unless you get into generating components of the back story, you're limited to like one screen of mission orders worth of the SAME copy (or boilerplate) for ALL quests of a given type.

or you get the madlibs effect: Journey to the (location), there you will find the lair of the (monster). Use the (special item/power) to defeat the (short name of monster). Do this, and I, (name of questor), shall bestow upon you (reward).

location: Isles of Shanarsa

monster: Ancient Kolug-bouk Troll of the Dwarven mines

short name: Ancient Troll

special item/power: Mirror of Medusa

name of questor: Kalgar, Overlord of Valentia

reward: a fiefdom in the fertile fields of the Western Marches

once you plug in the madlibs it doesn't sound so bad:

"Journey to the Isles of Shanarsa. There you will find the lair of the Ancient Kolug-bouk Troll of the Dwarven mines. Use the Mirror of Medusa to defeat the Ancient Troll. Do this, and I, Kalgar, Overlord of Valentia, shall bestow upon you a fiefdom in the fertile fields of the Western Marches."

Can you tell I used to be a DM? <g>.

The field you would be interested in pursuing self-generating stories would be Natural Language Processing.

more research! yeah!

As Stormynature said, once you establish the fundamental building blocks of the quests and realize how few there are, then you hand it over to the creative people who hide the limitations through artistic innovation in storywriting. Artists tend to rise to the occasion when faced with limitations.

unfortunately, i'm the writer. doesn't phase me though. i've learned how to turn out decent copy over the years as needed. with sufficient "madlibbing" each backstory can be made to seem at least semi-unique. but usually only that. as the player runs more and more quests of a given type, they'll eventually detect the patterns.

Stormynature:

on the 36 types of stories:

a quick glance revealed they're all tragedies.

are all quests tragedies? never thought about it. whats your take on that as a writer?

Sorry Norman, I should have thought to let you know that this is merely one type of breakdown.

yes, i noted that while checking out the site. i found it most interesting that muitiple attempts by different persons at different periods in time yielded the same or similar results, and that the list has been in publication since 1916 (as i recall).

time to start checking into natural language processing.

do you think it might be possible to generate a story line first, and then use that as input for generating the associated campaign?

seems to me a "plot" would be picked at random. this would define things like characters, locations, objects, etc. which are then generated. the "plot" would determine the action, possible objects, possible mods, etc.

a test case:

from the 36 dramatic situations:

let's keep it simple: player (avenger) kill person who wronged them (criminal).

action: attack/destroy (specifically: kill)

object: the criminal

modifiers: none

checks: success if criminal dead

rewards: none, other than the satisfaction that the criminal is no more.

orders: Kill "John the Ass".

it gets tricky here. there has to have been a wrongdoing on the part of the criminal towards the player BEFORE the quest encounter.

ok, well lets assume that the game engine can track this somehow.

in fact, we may need to define another assumption:

* its assumed that the game engine implements all features and tracks all info required for a valid quest type for a given title.

so our game engine "knows" what the wrongdoing was.

and the existence of a wrongdoing made it possible to generate this type of quest in the first place, as the wrongdoing is a prerequisite for this type of quest.

so when the questgen rolled the dice, first it said, "do we have wrongdoing? ok, use this table that includes quests with wrongdoing as a prereq then". and the die roll came up "player (avenger) kill person who wronged them (criminal)".

so we can use this extra info to improve the orders: "The time has come for you to eliminate John the Ass, who most treacherously wronged you by (whatever the wrongdoing was)".

but its still boilerplate copy:

the time has come for you to eliminate (criminal), who most treacherously wronged you by (the crime).

i don't see a way around this.

even the list of 36 dramatic situations looks like a bunch of templates.

the goal is to have the PC randomly generate everything, so even the developers won't know what's going to happen next in the game when they play.

so there won't be a tool that generates quest scripts that a writer then uses as a start for writing a hard coded quest or campaign.

there will just be the quest generator that does it all, including the copy the player reads. so all the good back story and "why" stuff a writer would add needs to be randomly generated, or omitted.

actions, objects, modifiers, etc are enough to define goals and orders. so additional back story is technically unnecessary.

but going back to the above example, unless you have a table of reasons "why" now is the time to kill (criminal), or something like that, i can't really think of a good way to add back story.

and the 36 situations don't seem to address this, unless i'm missing something. they're more like a detailed list of the types of tragic quests possible. They will probably be a great starting point for generating quest types, but we're still left with fleshing out the story line using only the features and variables the game uses for quests, and random generation, with no human intervention. IE making randomly generated quests seem like they've been authored by a writer.

but the problem is that every time you complete a "destroy object" quest, you get the boilerplate success message of "You (destroyed) the (object)!".

about all i can think of is you have like 10 boilerplate messages saying the same thing and pick one at random:

1. You (destroyed) the (object)

2. The (object) has been (destroyed)

3. With great valor, you have (destroyed) the (object)

and so on...

any ideas?

i have none at the moment.

I think i'll implement the generator for just one very basic quest type (perhaps just in pseudocode on paper) , and see what happens once i get down to the orders part.

but in all my years building games, i've never seen a good solution to generating back story for quests. that's the one part of DM'ing that computers just aren't good at yet. They can generate dungeons, and encounters, even world maps pretty well. but stories....

You may also wish to give consideration to the creation of false quests i.e. the story teller tells a story but the details are wrong/created/quest is already completed. As well red herring quests (subsection covers video game examples). While it can be a source of frustration to the player it can also be an excellent timesink...as well you can always add in elements that contribute to quests not yet obtained.

yes, yet more types, or perhaps modifiers. up to this point, we've mostly been talking about straight forward quests where there's no dishonesty, deceit or subterfuge involved. actually, these many be "twists" of straight forward quests.