NCCA, DK9 and Cat Express router
Use the assigning organization, role verbs and expected city pressure to predict the shape of a mission.
Operational objective
NCCA, DK9 and Cat Express are not three quest-givers with different logos. Who assigns a job tells you what kind of job it is — what you will be asked to do, how much of the city will notice, and what counts as finishing. This page turns the sender into a prediction you can make before reading the brief.
Decision route
- Identify the sender before the objective text. The organisation sets the register — official, covert or commercial — and the register predicts most of the brief.
- Translate the sender into an expected city pressure. Official work is watched, covert work punishes being watched, and commercial work mostly cares whether the thing arrived.
- Pick the city role that matches the register before you pick the route. A covert brief run with a uniform on is a harder version of the same mission.
- Ask what the sender considers finished. Delivery, discretion and documentation are three different endings, and only one of them is usually being graded.
- Keep a note per organisation, not per mission. After a handful of jobs the sender becomes a reliable forecast, which is worth more than remembering any individual brief.
Failure review
- Reading every brief from scratch, and never noticing that the sender already answered half of it.
- Carrying the approach that worked for one organisation into a job from another with the opposite tolerance for attention.
- Treating faction identity as flavour text when it is the most predictive field on the assignment.
!
Unreleased: the full list of organisations, whether reputation with each is tracked, if missions are gated by standing, and how failure is handled per faction. What is written above uses the three senders shown publicly and the roles demonstrated alongside them.