Posted by Dowanhowee on May 15, 2000 at 08:01:51:
In Reply to: An IC/OOC dilemma posted by Curious on May 15, 2000 at 02:44:52:
Quests are traditionally thought of as character-building, and most characters in books are given only the starting point of a quest and maybe a cryptic hint or two. On that thought, good-aligned characters, with the intent of building a lowbie's character, might direct them to the start and maybe help them with a few hints. Even though the lowbie might get an item out of it, I think the vast majority of good roles would actually be more interested in whatever character it might build. In mud terms, "character" would be knowledge of the game and/or experience interacting with mobs.
I could imagine quite a few roles being able to tell a person to go "talk with so-and-so" if they haven't already done so and see if the person can solve the quest on their own. The main justification I could see would be to test the other playercharacter to see if they are worthy of a group or cabal or whatever. Again, this would not involve giving step-by-step directions.
As to evil, especially lawful evil, they can demand step-by-step directions and code words, and it is within their role. In most tales which have this, the evil character (NE, mostly) gets only a sketchy idea of what they need to do before they go to try to solve the quest. The classic fairy tale of Mother Hulle, who covers one girl in a shower of gold and her greedy sister in a shower of pitch, comes to mind. In the fairy tale, the sister's basic greedy and lazy nature kept her from being able to complete the quest. On the other hand, LE characters almost always take the time to get the specifics before they begin their attempt and are generally only foiled by the hero. (As in - I kill the child with this exact ceremony and I get to rule and live forever? Ok!) I think most LEs would be interested in keeping the quest solution to themselves, though, and would probably claim they just found the item and don't know how to get it. After all, if a LE makes another LE more powerful, it just makes it harder to take them down later or continue subjugating them.
If there was a certain amount of variation encoded into quests, it might help out with reducing the step-by-steppers.