Design & Development: Quests

[Stoat]

However... using cards could lead to a campagin specific Wall of Fame where you put up all your successful quests. A visible reminder of what you did to reach your current level, and maybe, just maybe, enough for the players to start to link together those plot elements the DM has been laying down since 1st level...

That, my friend, is a brilliant idea.

**YOINK**

 

[jasonbostwick]

I don't think that this is anything that precludes roleplaying or character immersion at all.

I've got a group of players that are very involved in an investigative style campaign (and interested in a story standpoint to the point of helping me detail NPC backgrounds and organizations), all of them with their own individual goals. We use cards similar to these, with portraits of important NPC benefactors on the front, and their motives and requests to the players written on the back.
The players don't metagame too much using them, (oh well, the GM doesn't have a card for this character, she must not be important) as it is fairly obvious that the cards are mainly for the purposes of remembering easily forgotten details and "Quests" to use Wizard's terminology.

The need for visual and physical representations of character knowledge is almost necessary to keep track of minutiae in a campaign with detailed social interactions and interweaving plots - details that would stay at the forefront of a character's mind will inevitably be forgotten in between sessions by players who have more important, out of game things to think about.

 

[EricNoah]

I have had players tell me, explicitly, that they do want to be railroaded (maybe too strong a word for what is described here) or strongly guided. They don't want to flail around in the dark hoping they'll stumble onto the plot.

I am trying to break them of this, actually; I want them to help tell me what the plot is. My job right now is to not hand out cards with quests, but to get them to make their own quest cards (metaphorically speaking).

Actually ... maybe not just metaphorically speaking. Hmm. If at the end of a session they handed me a card or two with a quest suggestion based on what happened during the game, that might be extremely helpful for me as the DM!

 

[Ashardalon]

The difference is "cha-ching". I had a joking feeling D&D was headed toward a hybrid mini-CCG, maybe it isn't so crazy. This is just a test for something much larger I'm sure.

Yeah, I bet the Randomized Blank Quest Cards product will be a great hit.



Seriously, there are areas where a C*G approach can work wonders. Miniatures is one. Most people can't create actual miniatures, many can't paint miniatures for various reasons, some people want out-there figures while many don't... the C*G approach can help with these things in one way or another.
Quest cards ... is not one. A full roleplaying game, even less so. Generic quest cards are easily written by oneself. No market. A campaign-specific quest card can only be used by someone in that campaign. Little market, if any at all. That doesn't even cover the promised in-character rewards that could be changed by the course of the game, reducing what value such a card may have. Unless it is blank. In which case, we're back at the blank cards square. Other game mechanics? Perhaps, but outside of tournament settings, you can fully expect people to come up with their own stuff, sharing their cards, and so on, as there is little incentive to use the actual cards, and any attempt to add an incentive to use them would do nothing but alienate the target demographic.

 

[Rechan]

The other concern is with the conflicting PC quests. If the paladin wants to destroy the book, but the rouge wants to sell it, and therefore makes a fake, replaces the real book with it, helps the paladin destroy the fake, then sells the real one, the rogue gets XP, the paladin doesn't, and the paladin PC therefore knows something is up - while without the quest cards, the fake-out could be handled through notes, email, etc, and the paladin player would never know (at least until the book was used for some horrible ritual later in the campaign and the rogue squirms.)

Except this problem can happen in D&D right now. "You want to find the wands of Control Water to stop the flooding." "But I want to *sell* the wands!"

 

[Odhanan]

Dude, it's just a suggestion in the DMG. THere's no rule that says "Make Quest Cards or you suck".

That's a Design & Development column, for God's sakes. Not a footnote in supplement X.

Design & Development: you know, the column that's supposed to explain the design logic, the intent behind the rules, what motivates the making of this or that aspect of the game. I take it as such. It might not be a hard rule, but it certainly says something about the target customer of 4E.

Don't want me to take this as the design logic behind 4E? Don't put this in the Design & Development column, then!

 

[Tquirky]

I don't really see a downside to this:

1) It suggests that there's going to be more than one option available to PCs at a time, meaning that they may be attempting to bring an end to the railroading culture of D&D.

2) Who hasn't, as a player, lost track of the DM's "subtle" machinations? What may appear to be be really obvious from the DM's POV gets lost in the noise of a lot of red herrings (which aren't put there intentionally, but get there as a result of PCs talking to random unimportant-to-the-quest NPCs and the DM wanting to portray verisimilitude). Putting up a flag like a card fixes this problem, even if it's a bit awkward and metagamey for those who like an immersion feel to their game.

Cool.

 

[MerricB]

Design & Development: you know, the column that's supposed to explain the design logic, the intent behind the rules, what motivates the making of this or that aspect of the game. I take it as such. It might not be a hard rule, but it certainly says something about the target customer of 4E.

Given you've stated you're not the target customer, can I take it as read that you never have quests in your games? It's all about kill monsters and take their stuff?

 

[Chris_Nightwing]

As a veteran Call of Cthulhu player, I absolutely love the idea of quest cards. Collecting the little news snippets, treatises, tome summaries, witness testimonies and most importantly, pictures of the NPCs really enhances the game. It's especially nice to look back over your (brief) career and remember the good times. I think this will port wonderfully over to D&D. Giving out a quest summary and letting the players do what they like with it is a nice touch too - they can write the encounters they defeat, treasure they find, notes, NPCs with information, all sorts of things down on the quest card - something many players do anyway in a more disjointed way. Count me in!

 

[Rechan]

That's a Design & Development column, for God's sakes. Not a footnote in supplement X.

Design & Development: you know, the column that's supposed to explain the design logic, the intent behind the rules, what motivates the making of this or that aspect of the game. I take it as such. It might not be a hard rule, but it certainly says something about the target customer of 4E.

From the article:

One of the suggestions in the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide is to give players a visual, tactile representation of a quest as soon as they begin it. At the start of the adventure, after the baron has briefed the characters on their mission and been bullied into paying them more than he intended, you can hand the players an index card spelling out the details of the quest -- including the agreed-upon reward. In the middle of the adventure, when the characters find a key with a ruby set in its bow, you can hand them a card, telling them that finding the matching lock is a quest.

The article is not "Design and Development: Quest Cards". It's Quests, and mentions something they are suggestiong that goes along with them.

The quest cards make up 3 paragraphs of an 8 paragraph article.