SWG: Defensive Missions

Background: in Dev Chat #6 Holo said that there will be player-created mission types for deliver, retrieve, destroy, kill, maybe escort, "and a few others." I'm really hoping that those others include defensive missions. This is a big deal for generating player content especially in a military situation: you need to be able to set up a mission for someone to keep someone else from doing their competing retrieve, destroy, or kill mission. It's crazy if only one side of the mission is available for player creation.

Holo also explained how missions are built. "You click �new mission� in your datapad, and you drag your tokens into the wizard. You drag in what to get/deliver/kill, where it is, and select by when and what filters there are on the who is allowed to take the mission. You set what bond is required, and that�s about it..."

I thought about "defensive missions" a bit and came up with how to implement them.

Defend (opposite of destroy):
"Don't let anyone destroy this building."

This is one of the most important defensive missions, and one of the easiest to implement. You'll have a token (the same kind that would be used by the "destroy" mission) representing the place to defend. You drag that to the mission wizard. You pick the timeframe for the defense. You pick the bond (the amount of money someone has to put up to accept the mission, which they will lose if they fail) as well as the reward (the amount of money someone gets if the defended structure is still standing at the end of the specified time). This mission might primarily be used as a way to organize military/city defenses, so that the officers have a mechanism for planning and implementing a defense. It has the potential to be somewhat "boring" if no one attacks, and people who accept the mission might try to shirk their duties and just hope for the best -- the mission giver will have to use a high bond and high reward to encourage people to stick around if the defense is really important. An alternate version of the defend mission might also be to defend against a specific "destroy" mission, so that if the destroy mission fails, the defend succeeds; in this case the time limit would be the time limit on the destroy mission.

This mission doesn't require any special combat (PvP) adjustments, since you're on defense.

Escort (opposite of kill):
"Don't let anyone kill this person."

Raph already suggested that this one might be in the works. It works by using the same sort of target token as the "kill" mission, setting up a reward for safe arrival of the escortee. The time limit might be optional since in this case the time involved is largely controlled by the escortee.

Like "defend" this does not require anything special with respect to PvP rules.

Intercept (opposite of deliver):
"Don't let that shipment get through."

This is somewhat tricky, but the basic idea is that if you know a certain item is being delivered to a given area, and you wish to prevent that from happening, there should be the possibility of a mission. For this to work you'd need a token representing the delivered item; I'm not sure of the details of tokens but I suspect this means you'd have to know something about the delivery (perhaps the mechanism used to generate the "retrieve" mission token would be appropriate). Assuming that this token is available, though, the details follow easily enough -- you use the token in the "intercept" mission wizard; the token probably handles the specifics of which item, so the location and timing are up to the interceptor. The time limit is simply the time limit on the "deliver" mission that the interceptor is trying to defeat: if the deliver mission succeeds, the intercept mission fails.

For this mission, the mission giver and interceptor would probably both have to be enemies to the courier in the deliver mission, either by faction or PA conflict.

Protect/Guard/Secure (opposite of retrieve):
"Don't let anyone take these plans."

(Still trying to come up with a clear name for this one. "Secure" is pretty close to what I want.)

The idea here is specifically to foil "retreive" missions. Again the mission creator sets up a bond which is lost if the item being secured is not still available at the end of the time limit set up by the mission creator. The implementation here is almost exactly like that of the "defend" mission.

The PvP situation here might require enemies, as for the "intercept" mission, because it's possible (likely) that many "retrieve" missions won't be intentionally combat-oriented, and the "secure" mission would probably need combat as an option for preventing the retrieval.

For "secure" and "defend" missions, it might be good if the reward could be structured in such a way that some fee is paid for a successful defense even if, in the end, the mission is a failure (for example, if a guard repels 2 attacks but is overpowered by a 3rd, they might still get some reward).