great idea for replayability/endgame/alternative to mindless farming

a new NPC in each town/outpost, the "magistrate", who gives randomly generated quests. For example: Go to location zone ABC and kill monster XYZ because he is a menace to society/wanted/killing travellers (whatever).

the reward would be gold, experience, and perhaps upon successful completion of the mission, a random weapon.

the NPC would give several choices of quests, from easy to medium to hard difficulty. The harder the difficulty quest you choose, the higher level the mobs will be. this way, level 20 characters can revisit lower level areas and enjoy them again, but with higher level mobs.

for technical reasons, the mob spawns in the areas would not be completely random, they would replace, or be at the same locations, as the mobs that would normally spawn (if spawns are totally random, I'm guessing we would see them sometimes spawn in inaccessible areas).

i don't believe this is a new idea, but I feel it would really help the replayability of the game, and give people more to do in the endgame than just mindless farming.

what do you all think?

Wrong forum for this


its not much of a fix, instead of mindless farming your now doing mindless repetative quests

Mindless NPC killing is more dull than mindless farming.

i had an idea before, about a very special elite NPC who appears in random towns for a very short while.

He will appear to be a player skinned character, but will show up as an NPC. If you invite him to your party, he will send you to a special high level mission.

Sometimes he will reject your invite, say if you have too much money in your storage, or if your level is too low.

Personally I loved the fact that in Diablo (the first one) they had randomly generated quests. They didn't have many of them, but it was a cool idea. And the quests themselves weren't all that shallow either.

There is a difference between quests and farming, and that is that quests have the potential to be more interesting. They don't have to make the generic assassination quest, or the generic fetch and deliver quest. They could make the "fix the mining apparatus" quest, or the "sabotage enemy equipment" quest, or the "ambush the caravan" quest, or the "guard the base" quest, or the "collect the herbal remedy" quest, and so on, so forth.

It takes some work, but not a lot really. Just make lots of quests (like they did with Sarrow's Furnace) but make them randomly generated. Then as the months go by you can add a couple quests here and there to the list to keep it fresh.

I like OP's idea.
One question, how would you handle groups?

Agreed.