RP decisions, branching

[Elwro]

Whoa, I thought you had to use the Howitzer to get inside.

 

[Lumpy]

I'm not referring to the main door, but to the door to the building where the Howitzer shell is. You had to get in there to get inside SAD.

 

[elander_]

On the other hand, if you make certain quests impossible to certain characters, how do you give the player a clue that he can't do a certain quest? Say, there's a quest where you spend hours searching for a dungeon, then hours fighting monsters. Finding out that the chest with the objective is locked and as a fighter you can't open it isn't really fun. So such situations should be avoided, but how?

Every good classic crpg has solved that problem long ago. It's very simple: if you can't do a quest you won't even receive that quest. If you receive it and fail the game should allow you to profit from your failure but your profit is much less and your trouble is much more.

See Daggerfall for example. You won't raise in rank in the Thieves Guild if you don't have the necessary skills and thus you won't receive the most interesting TG quests. On the other side you can fail a TG quest with a minor dmamage to your rep and you will allways get a new one and profit somehow from a failed quest. You usualy get a chance to steal extra loot and many TG quests have twists which is something that unfortunatly has only been tried in Oblivion but with poor results and little concern or none for restricting those quests to chars with the proper skills.

It's also interesting to notice that Daggerfall sometimes gave impossible quests to the player. Sometimes the most profitable side of those quests was not in doing the contract but failing it. It's a different kind of moral dileama.