apparently brod and eb were discussing quest ideas last night, and it got me thinking a little bit along those lines. here are the issues that seem relevant to current quest-making:
a large chunk of mud night turnout is made of imms and avatars
brod and eb bear the lion's share of the workload for quests (no offense blue ).
newbies aren't likely to appreciate quests with only one prize or that require knowledge of BR geography or trivia
there are probably more, but i can't think of them atm.
anyway, the ideal quest would:
1. be runnable by non-imms (except for prize maybe)
2. be open to and appeal to imms/avatars
AND
3. appeal to newbies
of course not every quest can meet those standards, but at least it's something to shoot for. here are a couple of my ideas; i'm sure you guys can come up with some better ones.
wheel of bamf: contestants get bamfed then tracked from recall or some other place. the number of steps required to reach them is converted into some kind of point value, with special situations (e.g., bankruptcy, jackpot) for deaths, rooms not contiguous to the mud, and maybe clockwork laboratory or other odd places. after a few rounds ppl get prizes according to their point totals. this could probably be made more fun by adding in an element where people guess how far they've been bamfed.
skits with charmies: people pick a mob to charm and then get divided into troupes to put on a short skit with the mobs acting in character. maybe they get a chance to confer before or after they pick mobs or maybe it's improv. oh and maybe they don't pick at all but get assigned their mobs. i have a feeling this wouldn't turn out too well however it was set up, but it might look cool if the puppeteers were invis and the audience had see-invis off. the troupe with the better skit gets the better prize. this would obviously be best for high lvls with access to charm person/glare.
last lowbie standing this is a simple one that i mentioned to eb before. someone carries/drives a de-charmed aggro+see invis mob randomly around the arena as the players run for their lives. this aggro needs to be able to 1-shot all the contestants, so the lvl range for players will depend on the level of the carrier. there might be a way to spice this up by throwing in a non-see invis aggro, invis contestants, and faerie fog, but i'm not sure how it would be done. also, everyone gets prizes.
as you can see, these are pretty rough and don't really meet my criteria. so everyone post improvements or new ideas plz.