Design & Development: Quests

[FireLance]

.. it's my 2 cents, of course. but really... why was news of a new edition - some things of which I think are quite interesting, and YES; they are interesting BECAUSE they are changes - enough to take a bunch of wonderful people like those found on here and make so many of them start rabidly attacking each other? especially when there's nothing to be rabid about...?

Fear
-> Anger
-> Hate
-> Suffering

 

[vagabundo]

I like this idea, but I dont think I will use the cards, thanks..

I like the emphases on helping the DM put more story into their games and giving some structure to the process.

It is badly needed in my game as I have less time to prepare and I seem to have lost my on-the-fly gaming mojo.

Keep up the Good Work WOTC guys and gals....

 

[Plane Sailing]

I've been reading the debate on 4th edition for quite some time on here... I'm an affectionate reader of ENWorld. And I never posted... mostly because it felt like talking about something I knew a shadow of an hint to an hypothesis, and that isn't something I think is right to do.

But right now, after reading several threads (quite a lot considering it's been 3 months since the announcement) I feel like I do have something to say.

Thanks for speaking up, and well said.

 

[Derren]

Player 1: Hey guys, look what I have drawn out of a Quesbooster, a "Slay the red Dragon" quest. And it got two level 5 magic item rewards.

Player 2: Don't get too excited you need to preform a "Locate the lair" quest before attempting that. and this quest is really long winded and gives crap reward.

Player 3: Yes but we are currently doing the "Rescue the nobles Bride" quest and it has the patronage reward which we can use to automatically complete a quest without reward. We can use that to locate the lair and start with killing the dragon right away.

Player 2: Good idea, I just hope the DMs Magic Item card display will arrive next week. I don't want to waste the level 5 item reward on his outdated equipment.

 

[howandwhy99]

I think this is a fine Variant Rule for kids 10 and under. It concretizes things and makes it easier to remember. It also helps lead them around the world to the more interesting parts instead of relying on them to be independently creative with their decision making. Shyness is very common in young children and standing out while in front of your peers is the definition of peer pressure.

For me, however, this was the Red Flag being waved. WotC is no longer in the business of making tabletop roleplaying games. It will be at best a side project. I'm not being facetious here, I am serious. This isn't something I really wanted to admit to myself, but my Ref had it right when he and I spoke earlier.

To illustrate, RPGs are known by over a billion people worldwide as computer games. Mention "Tabletop RPG" and almost always these same folks emit a "huh?" in response. This is simply the world at large not knowing our very niche community's jargon. Instead, "D&D" or "Dungeons & Dragons" are how TRPG'rs have to predominately identify their pastime to anyone outside the tiny hobby. (and plenty of non-D&D TRPG'rs resent it I hear)

With 75-80% of all TRPG sales already going to Wizards where can they possibly grow? Taking into account the sheer fact of ongoing innovation, this percentage is more likely to decline than stay the same. Wizards has to change venue, if they want to show profitability. The obvious answer of course is computer RPGs.

I'm very happy the hobby is becoming more computer accessible. I'm happiest about the new 4 prong initiatives. But, in truth, I think Wizards is going farther than computer-aided tabletop design. I believe they are building a set of rules to be equivalent between TRPGs, MMORPGs, and their own cross over online game hosted at their website.

The exhibited so far have increasingly displayed a lack of expansiveness in the style TRPGs excel at, but MMORPGs do not. This Quests option really switched on the light for me. D&D Online, Digitial Initiave online play, & TRPG D&D will all use the same rules. And IMO the tabletop game will suffer for it. Maybe the community will be better off for profits, but quality by my measure will sink to the lowest common denominator. MMO play is what I'm guessing.

If a game can be played with all its parts on a computer, why bother playing it face to face? Sure, we the diehards will, but I can no longer believe we are the customer base WotC is after. And let's not kid ourselves. If you play a TRPG, you are a Hardcore RPG'r. The niche of a niche game (RPGs not on a computer) is a field only for those purposefully going out to find it. It's a great field and I love it, but it isn't World of Warcraft. Or Wii. Or XBox. How much of the toy market is computer games anyhow?

This course seems an inevitability and a sad one for me. Until VR gets to the point were my imagination can alter its description as fast as my words can in a conversation, computer RPGs are going to be lacking.*


*And that's supremely hard given visuals require predesigned computer animation - the weakest part of all CRPGs.

 

[Jinete]

When you present your players with a quest, (which I would say, is whenever they meet something or someone or do something or DON'T do something: it's a quest to retrieve the scepter for the legitimate prince, it's a quest to find a cure for your mentor, it's a quest to disable the security systems for the building you want to get in) it's suggestible - if you use it for a plot purpose - that you help the players remember it.
One way of helping players remember quests is writing them down.
One way of writing them down is on index cards.
While you're at it, you can also write on the index card that the quest has been proposed by someone who offers a monetary reward. Or the reward of a fiefdom.

I write stuff down IRL too, but it's mostly stuff like "buy a light bulb". I never had to write down "go out on friday".
I have no trouble remembering things that I find interesting and that I want to do. I also tend to remember the names of interesting people I meet. The same thing happens with quests. It's not like I haven't asked "what's the name of the town we're going to?" a hundred times, but I don't think that looking it up on a card should be the solution to this problem.

Quest cards can be a great tool for some games, but IMO tips for the DM on how to make quests and NPC's more memorable and interesting to the characters should be the way the wizards are taking this game.

 

[Naathez]

I understand what you mean, Jinete. It might be that I haven't been clear though in expressing one thing: the usefulness of helping players remember things their characters would surely remember increases with the decrease, for example, of session frequency. In that case, the cards, I think, could be useful, because they are good representation of the CHARACTER'S memory: while the player's memory is unfortunately cluttered, in some cases, with job, school, family, traffic, political issues that happened in the 7, 14, 30 days since the last session. (Yes, even if they REALLY love the game... ) Of course, if players in a group don't need them... no need to use them!

In any case, cards were just a part of the article. I think focusing just on them distracts from finding what good ideas were in the article besides.

As for the advice on how DMing, I agree that should be the main content of a DM guide. But we have no way, I think, of knowing they are NOT doing it: and I don't think we should start out by thinking "they're doing wrong, because they're not talking about what I think they should be doing." Maybe they're doing it but they haven't told yet... or maybe not. In that case yes, it would be a pity. it wouldn't mean 4th ed is automatically a bad game, but yes it would be a wasted opportunity.

On a totally different note, I also wanted to thank Plane Sailing for what he said.

 

[MerricB]

The exhibited so far have increasingly displayed a lack of expansiveness in the style TRPGs excel at, but MMORPGs do not. This Quests option really switched on the light for me. D&D Online, Digitial Initiave online play, & TRPG D&D will all use the same rules. And IMO the tabletop game will suffer for it. Maybe the community will be better off for profits, but quality by my measure will sink to the lowest common denominator. MMO play is what I'm guessing.

You might be interested to know that the reason the D&D RPG and the D&D DI online play will share the same rules is because the online play isn't computer moderated.

The DI online play component will do two things:
* it will allow players from around the world to chat (either voice or by text)
* it will display where their miniatures are on a virtual tabletop.

It's an enablement tool to allow people to get together and play RPGs. That's it.

If you don't have a DM, the computer won't do it for you.

Cheers!

 

[MerricB]

I write stuff down IRL too, but it's mostly stuff like "buy a light bulb". I never had to write down "go out on friday".

And yet, incredibly, millions of people in the real world keep diaries with lists of important dates they need to remember. People write shopping lists - the archetypal quest list.

It gets worse for roleplayers when they only meet once per fortnight, or once per month, or have several games they're playing in. Can you remember exactly what happened every session?

Last week, I had one of my players ask me to list all the tasks his party needed to accomplish in the recent Dungeon adventure, "Tides of Dread". (There's over a dozen of them). So, I'm now going to steal the quest card idea. I think it's going to work.

This is an enablement tool.

And if Wizards also spends time on the other aspects of quests... as I quite expect them to do... this may be an exceptional edition yet.

Cheers!

 

[Jinete]

And yet, incredibly, millions of people in the real world keep diaries with lists of important dates they need to remember. People write shopping lists - the archetypal quest list.

It gets worse for roleplayers when they only meet once per fortnight, or once per month, or have several games they're playing in. Can you remember exactly what happened every session?

And all of these tools, diaries, shopping lists are very useful. But when someone else gives me a shopping list I go to the store and just go from shelf to shelf until I have completed the list. I don't browse, I don't even think about if the list is missing something I just get each item on the list, pay, go home, get the reward

In one of the recent sessions, the barbarian was fighting the barkeep who was standing on the bar. On his turn the player said "I try to push him of the bar". This left most of us (to some extent the DM too) pretty surprised. It's not a bull rush, it's not a trip, it's not a grapple, but it's a fairly reasonable thing to do. However most of us are thinking of our character's in game options based on the rules of the game, so if it's not covered in the rules it doesn't even cross our minds.

My point: just like the many rules for combat IMO limit player creativeness to using clever combinations of possible maneuvers (ToB anyone?), quest cards result in player focus on DM given quests, making it easier to ignore the "unnecessary" NPC's and parts of the campaign world.

And from a player's point of view, these are the ones that give the feeling of playing in an imaginary world, as opposed to playing in a detailedly scripted video game environment.

Disclaimer: I'm not trying to say OMG 4e is an anime MMORPG, I just have that nagging "haven't I seen this somewhere" feeling.