Originally Posted by
SirTheta
I've always held that - the first quest able to be assigned at level 6 - it SHOULD be easy (and for plenty of other reasons beyond that). It was fine in 1.1.1 and every single change applied to it has not come anywhere close to fixing it. There was nothing wrong with getting a rat or what-have-you. I would like to go back to 1.1.1 behavior and tweak from there instead of trying to tweak from the broken builds.
I agree that it shouldn't be overly difficult. But asking for a rat is just a little TOO easy. How exactly does killing a rat prove your valour?
Of course, there's actually two problems with it - the rat, and the valour part. It's not really 'valour' to slay a random creature of Thrundarr's choice.
I can see two solutions to this. First one would be to go with the "valour" theme, and change the quest itself. The other is to change the wording of the quest, and make it more suitable with the current quest idea.
Option 1: Alter the quest itself. I'd like to see the PC proving their valour by rescuing a dwarf currently beset by monsters on one of the nearby levels. This would have a success condition and a failure condition. The success condition would be successfully rescuing the dwarf and guiding them back to the town. The failure condition would be the death of the dwarf. The idea would be that the dwarf would be surrounded by monsters, and thus you would need to find the dwarf, kill the monsters, and then guide the dwarf back to dwarftown. This would be, in my opinion, a more thematically appropriate quest... but it would involve more coding, and some won't like it.
Option 2: Alter the wording of the quest. "I'd like ye to slay a ____ to show your dedication", or something like that. Then, make the target a somewhat uncommon, but not particularly high level, monster. Monsters that you're going to run into within two minutes of getting the quest are too easy, but it isn't about the "valour" of killing the monster, but the effort put in to finding the monster. But it also shouldn't be so rare that it takes hours of real time to find one.
I think a good rule of thumb should be that it should be a monster you're likely to find in the Big Room if you spend about 5 minutes in there killing things (not that this should be the way to do it, since the big room is a challenge for lower level PCs, but the rarity and power of the monster should be about right given that description). It basically says "no basic goblins, rats, kobolds, etc.", but also limits the difficulty of the quest. It shouldn't be too hard to decide on which conditions should be applied given the description I just gave, assuming that probabilities are known (and I assume TB can determine these).