tbaMUD Continued development of the CircleMUD core

How hard would this be to add? It is a good quest type and would be useful for tba. Maybe multiple mob killings or a few separate mobs too?

Not too hard. Add a new quest type, alter the way target is handled, and you're good to go.

My biggest problem with this is that this option would promote wow-type grind: "kill 10 mercenaries", instead of "kill the merc leader" and then having the player figure out the best way to do this - with or without killing all the mercs to get to the leader.

This should already be in stock - just checked TBA, and I see:

The 'Quantity' there is the number of items/kills/etc required for the quest (basically, how many iterations of the 'Quest Target').

i was thinking more along the lines of the player turning in 3 of "obj a" and 2 of "obj b" and one of "obj c" and or "mob a" and 3 "mob b"'s

Ahh, I see.

This can still be done with previous/next quests, but then they have to be done in a particular order (2 mob a's, then 3 mob b's). When I made a qedit patch for tbaMUD, which became stock with some minor changes, I used several different versions of the old Circle patch and SMAUG patch, along with one from my own MUD, combining them all to create the ultimate version of qedit, covering every option I could imagine. Guess I missed one - lol.

Not sure on the easiest way to do what you need, without overcomplicating things. If you do get it working, I'd be interested in seeing how you'd done it.

One way that it cold be implemented is to have the concepts of master / sub quests. You could designate one or more quests as being "sub quests" of a master quest. Of course, this would require some enhancements to the current quest code (which I seem to recall developing an earlier version maybe 5 or 6 years ago).

So, as an example, you might want an overall quest "To rid the valley of the troublesome orc raiders", and the first stage (not that the players would know there are many stages) could be three parts - capture an orc and discover the location of their camp, search the leftovers of a recent attack and get some items off the bodies of some killed orcs, and obtain some disguises that will let the party sneak past the guards.

Then, once they have done all three, the next stage is to raid the camp. In achieving this they find some documents and a map... you get the idea.

In the time since I developed the quest system that was one of the inspirations for what we have now, I've also had a bunch of ideas... one day I'll get time to implement them.