The Art of Storytelling

Telling a good story in Neverwinter Nights can sometimes be overtaken by the requirement to include quests, otherwise, how is the player to progress? If care isn't taken. quests can suffer from feeling out of place with the story, something that can happen for a number of reasons. Take a non-linear adventure for example. In order to make the module feel free and unrestricted, a quest creator can suddenly find himself making quests that have nothing to do with the main story, and this can have a detrimental effect on immersing the player into the story.

While the "Relbonian Chronicles" will ultimately be linear, the nature of the unfolding story is such that quests are required between accepting and completing the main quest to give the player minor goals before his ultimate goal. The very nature of the main goal means that the minor quests would appear to have nothing to do with the main, so how do we keep the player immersed in the story? This isn't as difficult as one would first imagine. Allow me to explain.

Behind every module should be a main plot, the completion of which will end the adventure. While anything done on route might not be connected or even nescesary, we can tie them together in other ways so that the player is further immersed in their story. Let's take a very basic idea as an example. The player is hired to slay a Dragon that lives in a cave somewhere in the mountains. An obvious side quest might include stumbling across a burning village shortly after the Dragon has attacked it and helping to put out the fires, but what I'm trying to do is include more subtle links, making the player aware that they are part of something bigger without thrusting such obvious quests in their faces. Better to have them stumble across something which on first glance seems to be unconnected. So, in the above Dragon scenario, perhaps they find a farmer who asks for help thatching the roof of his cottage. Simple enough, just collect some materials for him, but if pressed on how the roof became damaged, the farmer blushes and seems reluctant to explain. On further pressing, he'd eventually reveal a cow fell through from the sky in the middle of the night (having been dropped by the Dragon in flight). Better still, he blames some old crone who lives on the next farm, believing she is guilty of witchcraft. Think of the consequences of what's going on in the gameworld and how you can tie quests into it. Perhaps the player encounters a caravan of evacuees fleeing their village through fear of a Dragon attack. The wagon has broken down and the villagers need help fixing it. How about why the Dragon has become enraged in the first place? Has someone in the village suddenly become wealthy through raiding the Dragon lair? Is there a new merchant in town selling suspiciously large eggs?

Okay, so this is a bit basic, but you can see what I'm driving at. If you've frequented these pages before, you probably already know that the main quest in part one of the "Chronicles" involves the God of Death sending the player to a certain location. The main difficulty I faced here was creating things to do on the journey. Initially they should appear to have nothing to do with why the God of Death has sent the player on a mission, which brings a new problem...would the player want to do some irrelevant task while on a mission set by a God? Rather than shy away from the problem, one should think about how acceptance/refusal to do a quest might influence the story, thus further enhancing the feeling of being involved in a bigger picture.

While "The Relbonian Chronicles" are ultimately linear, there are still options to take which can influence what happens around the player. One such example is a reward from the God of Death can differ depending on how the God views the player character, and this can be influenced by both conversation choices and quests undertaken. It's not yet fully implemented, but I mention it here as an example of further enhancing a storyline. I'd love to go into more detail, but don't want too many spoilers on this page, so you'll just have to play it when complete ;) Unfortunately progress is still slow owing to some bad news within the family, but rest assured it is something I intend to complete.

That's all for now. Stay tuned ;)