The design of Mismanor: creating a playable quest-based story game

Abstract

Computer role-playing games (CRPGs) have strong narratives, but in general lack interesting and meaningful choices for the player within the story. As a result, the stories are not playable. In this paper we present an existence proof for a new approach to CRPG stories that addresses this, while providing details of our implementation. We designed and created a new playable experience, Mismanor, to test our theories of playable stories. We discuss the design decisions made as well as the details of the CiF-RPG and GrailGM systems used for complex quest generation and story management based on player's traits and the social state of the game world.