When I was in High School a couple of friends and I set out to create a short film. We had some pretty cool high level ideas and some neat visual gags. We had good concept art and a basic plot outline etc.. but when it came time to constructing the actual script and in particular writing the dialog we got pretty stuck.

No one on the team had written a script before.

So this is what we did.
And I bet it works for writing RPGs too.

First of all we wrote up backgrounds for each character and gave them a personality with likes and dislikes. If any of the characters knew any of the other characters prior to the time-window of the film we defined what that relationship was. Were they long time friends? Enemies? One-way crush perhaps? If any of the characters were parodies of inhabitants from the real world we would write that down. If they had any qualities loosely based on some of the people we knew in real life, character traits or the like, we’d write that down too.

Once you have all the relationships between the characters sorted, it is very easy to create dramatic tension simply by playing the “What if” game. “If this character said such and such to so and so, how would they react? What would the consequences be? What would they say back?” If you’ve done all the background stuff it’s pretty easy to come up with several possible scenarios. And the construction of dialog can flow much much quicker.

How to use this technique to create quests.

Fleshing out this kind of detail for your NPCs can offer up all kinds of possibilities for quests. For example: Lets say we have a village in our game and two villager NPCs. We can decide that there is a relationship between these two villagers - Say they’re brothers. If we like, we can also decide that their parents died sometime not too long ago - maybe less than 5 years. And the oldest of the two brothers recieved more than the lions share of the estate - inheriting a large prosperous farm. The other brother only inherited a small shack on a not-so-productive-much-smaller piece of land. The reasons why the inheritence where split up this way is largely unknown. Needless to say, there has been some kind of tension that exists between the brothers since that day.

There are a number of possible quests that can come out of this small bit of information that largely consists of A) A relationship and B) Background history. Note I haven’t even gone into any sort of detail concerning the character traits of the individual brothers, but doing so would offer up more specifics and would flesh out the quests in more detail.

Some possible quests include.
- On hearing of his parents death. The elder brother broke into the library of records and altered his parents will so that he would inherit the lions share. The player can discover this by visiting the library of records and showing the forgery to the key administrator.

- The smaller piece of land has some special significance which was discovered by the parents but not reveiled. For example it might contain an access point to a long forgotten mine. The parents obviously thought that this special extra would offset the seeming unbalance in the inheritence. Its the players job to find this special extra and reveil it to the younger brother.

- The brother who inherited the larger piece of land did so because the other brother never really had much to do with the family and was a bit of a trouble maker. This ‘evil’ brother killed his parents in order to get his hands on the families fortune (for whatever reason) only to find post-humously that his inheritence amounted to little because of his rougish ways. He is now ploting to kill his brother, the player may choose to help him or hand him in to the authorities.

There are many many other possible senarios and quests that you could devise from this kind of technique. And these kinds of quests can be a lot more interesting than playing postal deliveryman. It can also offer a much more rewarding experience for the player, who can probe deeper into your world and through their actions actually change the lives of your virtual inhabitants. Not just by stopping foozle the evil magician from destroying the world. But also by getting Jimmy, the blacksmiths son into the Royal Academy just by putting in a good word with the administration.