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<blockquote data-quote="MarkB" data-source="post: 5819830" data-attributes="member: 40176">I remember in Planescape: Torment, when you meet Mebbeth the witch, the first character who can teach you to take up the Wizard class. She's this absent-minded insane old woman, and she starts sending you out on these seemingly stereotypically pointless fetch-quests for the most inane, irrelevant items - her washed linens, which have been over-starched, an old picture frame that's missing its picture, a bag whose contents have all been lost save for a handful of dried-up thorny seeds.It's pretty much designed to be annoying, and just when you're getting really frustrated, she turns all this random stuff around into something else - stripping the starched surface from the linens to form papery sheets, stretching them across the picture frame, using a drop of your blood to grow a seed into a vine that grows around the frame to hold the sheets in place.The result is your first spellbook, with a few spells already scribed into it, including a thorny plant-based one derived from those seeds, and even much of the seemingly-trivial dialogue you had along the way is transformed, through a few key phrases from Mebbeth, into insights as to how wizardry works - not only in-universe, but game-mechanically, so that the quest series becomes a tutorial on the wizard class.It's just brilliantly presented - the typically annoying, trivial fetch-quest is transformed into both a representation of the hard work and dedication required to learn the magical arts and a genuinely useful tutorial into the use of magic in-game, and at the end of it you have an absolutely unique spellbook and some unique spells to cast.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="MarkB, post: 5819830, member: 40176"] I remember in Planescape: Torment, when you meet Mebbeth the witch, the first character who can teach you to take up the Wizard class. She's this absent-minded insane old woman, and she starts sending you out on these seemingly stereotypically pointless fetch-quests for the most inane, irrelevant items - her washed linens, which have been over-starched, an old picture frame that's missing its picture, a bag whose contents have all been lost save for a handful of dried-up thorny seeds. It's pretty much designed to be annoying, and just when you're getting really frustrated, she turns all this random stuff around into something else - stripping the starched surface from the linens to form papery sheets, stretching them across the picture frame, using a drop of your blood to grow a seed into a vine that grows around the frame to hold the sheets in place. The result is your first spellbook, with a few spells already scribed into it, including a thorny plant-based one derived from those seeds, and even much of the seemingly-trivial dialogue you had along the way is transformed, through a few key phrases from Mebbeth, into insights as to how wizardry works - not only in-universe, but game-mechanically, so that the quest series becomes a tutorial on the wizard class. It's just brilliantly presented - the typically annoying, trivial fetch-quest is transformed into both a representation of the hard work and dedication required to learn the magical arts [i]and[/i] a genuinely useful tutorial into the use of magic in-game, and at the end of it you have an absolutely unique spellbook and some unique spells to cast. [/QUOTE]

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