i'm working on the quest generators for Caveman (an open world sandbox stone age FPSRPG).

there's this one type of quest, a rumor of a great treasure, which seems to need help.

how it works right now:

quests are started by getting a quest encounter while at the shelter of a band of cavemen. "the cavemen here tell you about a <whatever>..."

in this case, they tell you about a legendary treasure, and tell you the general location - what map square its in. the game world is 2500x2500 miles in size, divided into map squares 5 miles across. so the player goes to the map square. while there, they have a small chance to stumble across the treasure, which may or may not be guarded.

problems:

no special action is required once the player reaches the map square. they just have to wait until "you stumble across the treasure!" pops up. hokey - contrived - unrealistic. it also takes a long time to pop up - a number of game days. waiting in an area with no water becomes an issue.

if i place the treasure at a specific location in the map square, and they have to search for it, even if i'm generous and give them a detection range of an entire football field (300 feet, ~100m), it would still take 44 passes back and forth across the map square in a search pattern to search the entire square. on foot at a generous 5mph, that's 44 game hours to search one map square, or an average of 22 game hours searching to come across the legendary treasure. granted you can use automatic cross country travel and accelerated time to make things easier, but you're still wandering around. "Why cant they just say 'here's the treasure, go spend it wisely?'" - Riley from National Treasure.

reducing the size of the area to be searched is a possibility. "the cavemen tell you the treasure is in the northwest part". but too big an area might be tedious, and too small an area would probably just be a joke.

i suppose searching for treasure should be somewhat tedious - i know searching for my car keys sure is! <g>. and the player can abandon any quest at any time - all quests are optional. so they could abandon it if they got bored and go try to find a quest with more action.

perhaps good questions are "how much real world time is too long spent searching for treasure to be much fun" and "how little real world time is not long enough spent searching for treasure to make it believable" ?

running search patterns in silent hunter 5 is probably the most boring aspect of that game. you just keep moving back and forth, waiting for something to happen. i doubt it would be any more fun as a caveman instead of a submarine, although in Caveman you can get random encounters while you search which helps liven things up a bit.

if i can't find a good solution, i may just cut it from the list. 20 of the 50 or so planned quest generators have already been implemented. and with ~50 types of quest generators (compare to skyrim with two: kill bandit leader or dragon for bounty), i can afford to cut this quest if required.

maybe i should leave it in as being more of an exploration type quest?

Alternately, you could tell the player the exact location of the treasure, even mark it on their map, but leave a sleeping dragon/ogre/whatever on top of the treasure.

Player still has to travel to the treasure location, but taking the treasure is no longer "free", as they have to risk combat/use pickpocket/etc.

I'm also in favor of using a landmark. Though a craftable dowsing rod might also be an option unless it's too magical for your game.

Honestly... use a landmark. Lore-wise, it makes sense for the cavemen to give a landmark rather than a set of coordinates

B.G. quite true!

its a quest gen, so i'd need something like a list of a dozen or so types of landmarks to choose from at random... and they'd have to be unique somehow - just another tree model in a woods map square that has 1300 trees in a 800x800 foot area woudn't be much of a landmark.

for the GET_SPECIAL_ITEM questgen, i have a list of ten "special items" to chose from. but they are just a quest variable, IE you have it or you don't, and its type (and thus its name via lookup table for quest dialog text). they're not a world object or inventory item. you can't equip them ir interact with them. just get them, and give them to questors.

but regardless of how the location is indicated, via a physical landmark in the game world, or a mark on the player's world and local maps, or both, once you arrive at the location, there's still the searching to be done.