D&D 5E Running Phandelver - help me make it less like a video game

[happyhermit]

The hooks and "side quests" make perfect sense with the pre-gen characters, they tie in very organically for a published adventure. If running without pre-gens then you can incorporate some of the backgrounds into the characters and it will work well. Otherwise, I certainly recommend not just dishing out all the "quests" every time the PCs talk to NPCs, it certainly could get a bit "video gamey" at that point.

 

[hastur_nz]

Storm Kings Thunder (and probably other 5e adventures) suffers from the same problem - a large set of seemingly random "quests" that the adventure wants you to hand out as soon as you talk to a certain person. I'm not sure exactly, but I think 4e started using this in adventures, and it seems Chris Perkins still favours it (at least in the adventures he's published recently, although he doesn't seem to DM that way). Personally it's a design style that I really hate, as a DM as well as when I am a player - I think it's terribly lazy design and a terribly bad example for DM's on how to run a good sandbox.

Certainly "back in the day" (1e), published adventures were basically the dungeon, maybe a paragraph of background up-front, but usually the assumption was that the PC's wanted to have an adventure and so there it was. Some might have had the old "rumours table", usually rolled on randomly when PC's talked to people, but those were not quests per-se, they were more like potential plot-hooks / useful information (including false ones). For example I'm currently running B5 (Horror on the Hill, 1983) - there are no quests, not even much of a reason for the PC's to go and go on the adventure - they start in a bar, talk to one or more people, and hear some rumour(s) about a ruin on the nearby hill and what might be there. Then they go and have their adventure, killing monsters and taking their stuff (or the DM pulls out a new adventure module lol). Of course, the way I'm running it, the entire start is different - I actually started with the Nightstone section of Storm King's Thunder, which lead to the PC's heading into the forest to try and find all the villagers who were captured by Hobgoblins etc; various PC's also have backgrounds tied to key villagers. So far, no real "quests" have been handed out - the PC's have sufficient motivation based on their backgrounds, and what's going on, to create an adventure. If and when I do incorporate any of the written "quests", they will be ones that make sense and naturally come up in play with known NPC's, not any of the random "go hundreds of miles to village X, and tell person Y their neice is dead" types of quests that are in Storm King's Thunder...

As noted above, the key to making this work is to make it feel "real", i.e. logical, not simply "go here, talk to bob, get a quest". Especially when a lot of the quests are really side-treks - those ones I try to minimise / delete. Definitely think about how to work what's presented as a quest, into something that ties into the back-story and/or current / future plot points of your PCs. Think of these 'quests' as ideas, for you as DM, to consider on how you *might* include them in some way. Wherever possible, allow the players to stumble into 'quests' naturally, through their own explorations, following whatever takes their interest - only force rumours / quests etc onto them if they appear lost for ideas / direction.

 

[Rya.Reisender]

Usually I just let my players steer the story. My players usually roleplay it out. I won't just give them a list of quests and they won't just say "I enter the tavern and ask all the NPC for potential quests". Instead they will try to gather information by manually talking with people I described to them.

And then it really depends on what they say.

NPCs might mention their worries. If the characters offer to help, they might tell them how they can help. But I never found it feels like working through a quest list. More like you have multiple potential paths that lead to your goal or to a dead end.

If the characters really focus on following the main story, I won't be all like "Well I know you need to save the world and stuff and only have 24 more hours until your friend is killed, but could you maybe quickly fetch that book from the abandoned library for me?"

The more you let players control the story flow, the less it feels like a video game, imo.

 

[sim-h]

Just add in some completely irrelevant fluff conversations in addition to the ones from the quest-givers. Invent some new NPCs, who just have a beer with the PCs and tell them about their boring, mundane (or better still, interesting and entertaining but irrelevant to the adventure) problems .

 

[Moravave]

Everyone this is very good advice, thanks for all the friendly/useleful input.

 

[MarkB]

One thing to bear in mind is that, despite any goodwill they may build up by initially helping out in the goblin lair, the adventurers are still just a band of heavily-armed strangers walking into town and throwing their weight around. Let the townsfolk be slow to trust them, let alone ask them for help, until they've proven themselves.

Take a look at the potential questgivers and see if each of them have any obvious reason why they might trust the PCs (more likely if you're using the default characters and backgrounds). Trim it down to just a handful who would willingly discuss their personal issues. Later, after the PCs have done well by them and word has spread, let a few more people open up a little bit more around them. Hopefully this will feel more like the PCs are gradually winning peoples' trust, rather than everyone just dumping their troubles on them.