Pokémon Universe > Quests & Plots

Just one quest? Thinking bigger: The pokémon courier service.

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Kalika_Had`ke:
"Trading among trainers in the pokémon world is all well and good, but it has its limits. Trading machines really only excel at one type of trade, the one pokémon for one pokémon trade. Beyond that people have to get a little creative. That's where we come in. We couriers are commissioned by people looking for a specific pokémon or object, usually something rare, to find someone with that object and strike up a deal that benefits both. Generally we earn a fee for each trade depending on the complexity, a portion of which may consist of items that will be useful for the couriers journey or that can be traded to others that are seeking them. And that's just the direct benefits."

The pokémon courier service is effectively a quest hub that can easily be placed anywhere from some to every major city, each containing several singular quests or short quest chains with interesting benefits. The big perk of having such a place from a design standpoint, is to have all your generic fetch quests in a single, yet distributed, place for ease of pick up and turn in, as well as making more room in other hubs for

A singular or starter quest could be a simple commission. A new (NPC, although maybe new PC's may be able to take advantage of this) trainer has requested a specific pokémon from their [authority that gives out starter pokémon]. You accept the quest to go where this pokémon is found and find a suitable partner for a new trainer. Mechanically, any time you are in an area where this pokémon is found you have an X% chance to find a lvl5 pokémon of the species in question that you can't run from. Succeed in capturing it, take it to the commissioner, return to any courier-house, and quest complete. Dead simple. Reward: A moderate amount of poké-cash, 2-3 replacement balls of the type you used to capture the pokémon and maybe an antidote two if it say had a poisoning attack or something, and a chunk of trainer-EXP, repayment of resources and cash for the time spent basically. The real reward is the EXP, like most quests.

Let's turn it into a quest chain then. When you deliver the pokémon to the new trainer they tell you about a friend of theirs that is dissatisfied with their new partner, and that they are looking for a partner that would be more suited to the contest circuit than that just wants to get stronger. But they care enough about their pokémon that they don't just want to release them and find them a new home with someone more suitable. Let's add a twist, their not looking for a specific species of pokémon, just a general type, say for instance, a flying type. You accept the commission fee and Yanma from the friend, then not knowing where to look next you go to the nearest courier-house to ask and turn in the last quest for its commission.

The courier in charge there checks their database (a simple explanation for how they seem to know everybody) and finds a suitable Swablu up for trade and gives you a location to inquire about it at. Go and talk to the NPC trainer and...oh wait you just talked to an NPC trainer. Battle-larity ensues, and oh look a suitable level Swablu is on their team, but they're not interested in Yanma. But one of their friends who is looking to be a bug-type gym leader has a female Combee they've been considering trading for for some time now, but have never had a suitable pokémon for. They call their trading friend and set it up for you. Complete both trades and you get a commission from the Swablus original trainer trainer and from Yanma's original trainer, as well as a chunk of trainer-EXP (As always the real reward of questing)

Details can become important in these quests as well, consider the female Combee. Where did the original trainer get it? They're quite rare. A later quest could very well have someone looking for one, and you go ask the trainer from the last quest, which at this point could be several quests in the chain ago, to ask them where they found it. They challenge you to a battle for the information (and you find a Yanmega on their team), after which they tell you about the Combee Hives honey farm out in an obscure corner of the world (honestly who wants to live next to a beehive, let alone a pokémon beehive). Going there the owner tells you that having too many Vespiqueen in too small an area causes the hives to swarm, a dangerous proposition to be sure, so is always looking to sell female Combee before they evolve. Oh look, now you have a place where you can buy female Combee for evolving your own Vespiqueen. So much easier than hatching hundreds of combee eggs to get a female, let alone a female with good IV's.

This post is getting too long, but the premise holds. I invite others to take this idea and run with it, adding their own twists to the basic fetch quest both to make them suitable to the pokémon world, and make them interesting again.

Yume Tsuki:
A very intresting chain of quests, me likes it. ~

Also, very well thought stuff.

Kalika_Had`ke:
Thanks Yuki >^_^< I like to think they're good, but individually they're simple. The real gold is in the location itself, the Courier Service is something that makes a logical sense in a pokémon world, and a grand excuse to have not only a distributed quest turn-in location, but a singular place for all the basic fetch quests leaving more room in the world for more interesting things.

As an added bonus, these NPC's don't necessarily have to just be for these quests. Making NPC's you already have part of many quests cuts down on objects necessary, making load times for areas shorter. Never a bad thing.

The quests really all follow the same pattern though, acquire object X from an NPC or in the wild, insert a battle somewhere, trade object X for object Y, return to person that gave you object X, return to quest-giver.

Of course even a basic quest type like a delivery quest can have interesting variables. Some that come to mind are..

- The multi-pronged trade : used to good effect in the second example, that variation used all flying types to explain why different trainers were seeking different pokémon. However a more complicated variation could use multiple types, or even have one prong of the trade be for a rare item (maybe an elemental stone?)

-- The Bypass : Some multi-pronged quests may have bypasses built into them, one that comes to mind is someone is looking for an certain rare pokémon that you already have access to, say the aforementioned female combee, you could make a trade for it and go on through the parts of the quest as intended, or do it quicker if you've already got access to the Combee Hives honey farm and purchase one there.

- Training for trading : One could assume that the trainers involved know the levels of the pokémon their trading. If one were a few levels short of even a courier could be asked to train the pokémon to the required level. (5 levels is a fair bit of training, keeping below this point may be wise.)

- The commissioned capture : used in example 1 it makes for a good start for a chain, or a standalone quest. These could very well be repeatable if delivering the pokémon to say a lab to be given out as a starter, and could even be randomized each day..heck if these are the starts of chains you could randomize them so it's not so easy to get the big end of chain rewards..at least not right away.

- The missing pokémon : best used as a second or third part of a chain and best not to be repeatable, this would involve being given a quest item pokéball and searching for an already captured pokémon to be traded.

- Looking for item : Simple enough concept, sometimes you just need that little bit of a boost. Good items for this type of trade are evolutionary stones, or type increasing items (Blackglasses, Mystic Water, Nevermeltice, et.all)

As I think of more interesting variables (or they're suggested, good ideas are good ideas no matter their source) I'll add them to this post. And may very well add Courier quests in bulk to this thread as I come up with interesting themes or locations to play with.

Hit me if I start giving you team members too much work.  ;)  The Combee Hives alone could be a very odd tileset, akin to Castelia Gym with more organic bits to it.

Declan_23:
I'm very impressed, you've obviously put a lot of hard work into this, unlike some others who post on here. I definitely like the courier service idea, and at the moment we were actually planning on having a network of post offices spread across the region (for long distance trading etc.) I believe that what you have here could be worked into that too.


--- Quote from: Kalika_Had`ke on May 28, 2011, 03:49:03 AM ---As an added bonus, these NPC's don't necessarily have to just be for these quests. Making NPC's you already have part of many quests cuts down on objects necessary, making load times for areas shorter. Never a bad thing.

--- End quote ---

That's true, but seeing as I'm in charge of writing the code for the NPCs, this can get quite complicated.


--- Quote from: Kalika_Had`ke on May 28, 2011, 03:49:03 AM ---The quests really all follow the same pattern though, acquire object X from an NPC or in the wild, insert a battle somewhere, trade object X for object Y, return to person that gave you object X, return to quest-giver.

--- End quote ---

Again, I'd thought of this in advance, and came up with the idea of a notice board in the pokemon centre. Here trainers would write a note if they'd lost something, or needed a specific pokemon etc. From here, many of the quests you suggested could be started. A cool down time of perhaps a day would stop players from grinding.

I'm a big fan of your 'multi-pronged trade' For me, the more complex the quest and story behind it, the better. Anyone can come up with simple stuff.

Whilest I make no promises about including any of this, rest assured I will read this, and use some of your ideas for inspiration when I'm writing the postal service quests.


--- Quote from: Kalika_Had`ke on May 28, 2011, 03:49:03 AM ---Hit me if I start giving you team members too much work.  ;)  The Combee Hives alone could be a very odd tileset, akin to Castelia Gym with more organic bits to it.

--- End quote ---
If you have any pixel art skills, be sure to give some of it a try :)

genbor:
 Ah... now that was a good read. I like your ideas, especially since it would indeed make the quests shorter in a sense, since you would have a place of origin to start from.
 
 There were two things that came to my mind. First, sounds a lot like an in-game "non-player" managed Guild. Second, is a sort of Auction house. So it got me thinking, why not have both. Maybe each city could have it's own Courier Office that could be competing with the other ones. To join a Currier Office, you would need to do an Initiation quest, after which you could start working there: hence pick up the quests at the Office. Of course, all Courier Offices can be connected, but their Banners might be different. One could have a flying Pidgey, the other a running Rapidash. That could be shown on the floor (an engraved Emblem inside the Office) and on your badge proving your connection to it.

 About the Auction House part... maybe after a certain amount of quests done, you could advance in ranking at that Courier Office. And with the increasing rank, would come increasing perks. More dangerous but rewarding jobs (quests), and a special Job corner where you can pick up player requests. That would mean that a player places a request on an item/Pokémon along with a reward for anyone who does the Job. So you would go to the Request corner, pick up a request, and head out to solve it.

 To avoid useless competition inside the city's Courier Office, a job can be only picked up once and only by a player. If that player is in a party, the reward would be shared. This would mean that two players wouldn't complete the same jobs, which would cause problems. If one got there before the other with the same job, and got the reward, the other would be frustrated for doing the job for nothing. If a player abandons the job, another player could pick it up. This is where Courier Office competition would come in. A player would - due to human nature - place a request to the closest city's Courier Office, instead of traveling back to another city to do the same thing.

 This might change once a player gets Flying which allows it to quickly travel to any city he already visited, but the competition would still be present: a player would generally turn to a Courier Office he knows works fast. So it would be in the members of a certain Courier Office's best interests to work diligently. (This competition of course wouldn't affect NPC quests)

So about the Initiation Quest, I had this in mind:

 - Trainer goes to a city's Courier Office (Bulbasaur Sigil) and signs up at the Head of that City's Courier Office
 - The trainer is then given a quest to be accepted by the leaders of that CO (Courrier Office)
 - Each CO Leader would then require different things from the Trainer
   >One would want a speedy delivery (deliver withing X time)
   >One would want to obtain a document or some other item
   >One would just dump the quest he was supposed to do due to laziness
   >One would test the player by Battling him
(These are just examples, feel free to add something better)

After the Trainer is accepted, he would get the CO (Bulbasaur Sigil) Badge, and be able to take up the city+ quests)
[City+ meaning the quests of the city, region, etc..]

What about CO Ranks? If you like the idea, go ahead and Decide. :D
                                                                    Cheers, Genbor

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