Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 108 - Designing Quests

Episode Date: January 16, 2022

In this burboun-soaked episode, Jeremy discusses the different types of quests available, some of the variations on the themes, how to modify them by adding complications, and finally provides some tips and tricks for good quest design.

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. There's usually only a certain number of ways to get from point A to point B. But in these, I always recommend if you're designing one, to give the PCs a choice as to how they get there. Do you want to take the Mountain Pass or the Mines of Moria? Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to episode 108 of the Taking20 podcast, this week all about designing quests. This week's sponsor, luggage. It annoys me how pilots love to talk so much, but they do love to carry on. If you like the podcast, please give us a like, subscribe, and rate us on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, or wherever you found my recorded ramblings into a fuzzy microphone.

If you do a search online, you'll find different counts of the different types of quests that exist. There are only seven different quests. There are nine different quests. There are 212 different types of quests, and they are all wrong. That's way too many different types of quests.

I'm here to tell you at the heart of quest design, there are three different types of quests. I'm here to tell you at the heart of quest design, there are three different types of quests. Now, I hear what you're thinking. Jeremy, that's bullshit. Campaigns, adventure paths, hell, one-shots couldn't exist with only three types of quests. You're high. No, I'm not, dear listener.

I'm not even drunk. Or drinking. Shit, maybe I should be. I'm back. Now with a lovely Jefferson's Reserve bourbon in my hand. No, they're not sponsoring the podcast, but if they wanted to send me some, I won't say no. But back to the topic at hand. There are three different types of quests.

One, go somewhere. Two, kill someone. Three, interact with something. That's it. That's every type of quest that you could have. Now, I can hear you saying, Jeremy, that feels like cheating. Those are so vague.

To which I simply say, shut up. I'm getting to the explanation. Don't rush me. Oh, you can't rush good bourbon. Anyway, almost any quest you can come up with will be a subset or combination of those three. Go somewhere, kill someone, interact with something. Don't believe me? Mr. Bourbon Sippy here is going to prove it to you.

Let's start with the go somewhere quests. In these quests, you have to travel to another location somehow. It doesn't matter where and it doesn't matter how. You may be taking the elevator down below the town of Tristram. You may be traveling via the jump gates to the Shepherd Cluster. You may be riding the wagon to the next town or walking across the region to the Dungeon of Uncontrollable Prolapses. Which sounds awful and may be the scariest dungeon in the land. Sometimes you're going somewhere to defend something, like the module keep on the borderlands, a wilderness fort, a secret glaive where the druids meet and you have to do whatever the hell the druids want you to do.

The defenders will never make it alone. They need help, and you're the only reinforcements they're going to receive. We like them enough to reinforce them, but evidently not enough to send a large contingency of troops. That's why you four PCs are going. The party has to overcome baddies, maybe even waves of them, until the PCs show that they are powerful and helpful and the full contingent of help arrives. Or they could be going somewhere for a fetch quest. In order to accomplish my task, I need the leg from a dead boar. Okay, now bring me these six items. Onion, garlic, rosemary. Now bring me these six items. Onion, garlic, rosemary.

Hang on, are we going shopping for you? I'm just bringing you ingredients for pork shoulder roast, is that what I'm doing? Do you want the experience points or not? Fetch quests are about bringing items, people, MacGuffins back from somewhere to this place to continue the plot moving forward. You have to collect or gather or harvest 20 poppy flowers so the head of the thieves guild can make his milk of dreams or whatever. Another type of go somewhere quest is the go somewhere to talk to someone quest. I don't have the wisdom you seek, but I know the woman who does. She lives high on Mount

Fuckoff on the other side of That's a Long walkville. This is a great quest to move your PCs to a new quest hub or introduce a new area to the PCs or just to get that PCs to leave the fucking town. But the most dreaded subset of the go somewhere quest is the escort quest. Make sure this idiot gets there alive. They have a fixed starting and ending point and the quest is a bit of a railroad in that way. There's usually only a certain number of ways to get from point A to point B. But in these, I always recommend if you're designing one, to give the PCs a choice as to how they get there. Do you want to take the Mountain Pass or the Mines of Moria? Do you want to ride horses to get to the next town, take the Stagecoach, or take the Railroad?

Do you want to take the Jump Gates, or do you want to go there via conventional drive? But no matter how they have to get there, Joseph Von Idiot over here is going with them, and they've got to keep him alive. Hi, I like explosives! Oh man, this is going to be a long session. Another type of subset of the Go Somewhere quest is asking them to explore a cloudy, unexplored area of the map,

where no one knows what's there. These explore quests pull your party into the unknown where you can pull out, damn, any kind of adventure you want. Is it a scary abandoned village? Is it a portal to the Feywild, a lair for the great fire-breathing dragon named Steve? The maze of infinite brothels? Who knows? You do because you're the GM and you can't wait for the party to meet Steve, who also works at one of the brothels. It's complicated. Jumping over to the kill someone type of quests, there's always the traditional kill quests. I'd almost argue this is the most common type of quest that you'll find in

RPGs. Slay the bandits, clear out the infestation of space worms, kill the rats in the cellar. Straightforward to design, straightforward to execute. You probably don't need a whole lot of tips on that one. But I do like a variant of this, the assassination quest. I constantly read stories on various message boards about how GMs and DMs are tired of PCs being murder hobos. Show up, solve a problem, but break a shit ton of laws, sell a bunch of valuable shit, and then move on. If you don't like your PCs to act that way, give them a quest where they have to kill something all quiet-like.

Yes, we do want you to kill someone, but make it look like an accident, or make sure no one sees you do it. And if they do see you do it, just make sure they can't tie it back to the person who gave them the quest. This screams organized crime, crime family. This is a great opportunity to introduce the criminal underbelly of your city to your PCs. A fun variant of this, and only if you're DMing a mature group, is to have the PCs kill someone at the behest of someone else and then realize that they were working for the big bad when they did it.

Show the repercussions of assassinating the blacksmith as his family, whether it's a well-connected family with lots of muscle or just a widow and her two children mourn the loss of one of theirs and either struggle financially or vow revenge on those that did it. Finally, the third type of quest is the interact with something quest. Generally, this is the rarest type because it can feel very mundane. One of the simplest types to start with is the install this there quest. It involves carrying some what's it to somewhere and installing it in the whatchamacallit to make the thingamabob start working again.

The jump gate needs a new hyperflux can-cangenator, and I need you to go there and install it. Don't you have fucking engineers or something to do this menial shit? Do you want the experience points or not? This can look any number of ways, anything from making sure the pipes start flowing again, to the snow removal service, to making sure that the robots that are tending to our oxygen supply actually have the parts that they need. An unusual variant of the interact with something quest is some one, like the training quest. My child wants to become an amazing knight, acrobat, carpenter, murderer, something else the PCs are good at. The PCs have the job to take them on their adventures and train them to become

better at it. The something, by the way, could be themselves. Perhaps the player wants to retrain their character into a new feat, a new class, a new class ability, and you declare they need training from an expert to make that happen. So the character needs to put time and work in, make checks, go do whatever to get rid of that useless feat, and replace it with something the player wants the character to have. Now that we've established a base set of types of quests, where you really make them shine are the add-on components or modifiers to quests. These are conditions, complications, and modifications to the standard quest types. An example of this would be add a penalty of failure modifier.

If the party doesn't succeed, it's not oh well, it's oh shit. It's not that you need to go get the silver sprocket of Gilgamesh, it's that the silver sprocket is the only thing that can activate the Golem of Destiny that will help defend the town from the invading undead army. Or the big bad evil guy has kidnapped little Jimmy and he will feed Jimmy to his pet wyverns if you don't return with this certain wand. Another modifier you can add is the time limitation. The party only has so much time to get the quest completed before bad thing number 22 happens to your party, this town, or someone the party loves. You need to travel through the slingshot gate to speak to the oracle the Nine Moons,

but return within two days or the portal will close forever and you'll be trapped in the galaxy of young, attractive nymphomaniacs. Don't worry, we'll make it back in time. Wait a minute, what was the name of that galaxy again? Just promise me this isn't like a Greenland-Iceland thing where they swap the names to fool us, okay? Another modification that you can make is to throw in the unexpected obstacle. There's something that will slow down completion of the quest. It could be as simple that the intelligence that the quest giver had was incomplete or incorrect. They didn't know that the temple would be guarded when the moon waxes gibbous. They didn't expect the automated defenses

to be online on the crashed ship. The Death Star was fully operational the entire time. The person they are rescuing from the Big Bad Evil Guy is a complete pain in the ass. For example, the movie Spaceballs, where Princess Vespa refused to be rescued without her Royal Highness's matched luggage, one item of which included a giant hairdryer. Maybe the quest giver didn't know that the castle is now in the middle of a giant lake of acid. Or the wagon on the way to town breaks an axle. Anything that requires the party to adjust their priorities and maybe think on the fly and adjust what they are doing on any given moment. Great, Jeremy, but how do I make quests good? Number one tip from me, first and foremost, variety.

If you give characters the kill quests over and over again, then your players will quickly get bored. Plus, that's the only thing the characters will be good at, and that's the only way they'll solve all their problems. If your quests are always kill 10 Ankh-Eggs, kill the dragon of Bear Manog, kill the king, that will make the players eventually want to kill the campaign. Instead, mix up the type of quests that you give and give complications that they can face. Vary them widely if you can. Variety is the spice of life, so throw in different types of quests to keep the players on their toes. Plus, give the more skill-focused and diplomacy-focused characters a space to shine.

Second tip. and diplomacy-focused characters a space to shine. Second tip. No matter how flowery the language is of the quest that you give and how much detail that you provide to the players, make sure your quest can be summed up with the phrase, this person wants us to go there and do this by then. It makes it sound like I'm calling your players idiots, but I'm not. Your players will be keeping notes and make it easy on them

and they'll make it easy on you. Queen Karaya summoned the party to her throne room and offered the party 500 gold pieces to forcefully eject the distant members of the royal family who were unlawfully occupying her royal chalet in the Hoopadoop Mountains just in time for her to return to the chalet on Thursday after the annual Purple Tulip Soiree so she may retire there afterward for her annual Moose Calling contest for her dear friends from secondary school. It's too much. I can't even remember how it started, and I'm the one that said it. Keep it simple. You can give all the detail to the players that you want, but sum it up as, go to Queen Karia's Chalet, get rid of the

squatters by Thursday. Wham, bam, thank you, ma'am. You DMs should have the details, but be able to break it down simply for your players. Third tip, give options on how to solve the quest. Ideally, any quest you give to the players should have multiple possible solutions. Maybe the PCs could murder their way into solving the quest. Sure, that's one way to do it. Maybe they could skill check their way to a solution. Maybe they stealthy stealth where they need to go and take care of things all quiet-like.

Or maybe they come up with an intimidation or diplomacy-based solution. You don't know what the players are going to do. They're a bunch of creative, unpredictable, inconstant, crazy, intelligent people who will do things you never could have seen coming. I've said it before. They zig when you think they'll zag. They run when you think they'll fight. They'll take the subway when the bus is right there. And that's fine. It's actually a good thing as long as you can roll with the punches. Which, by the way, brings me to tip number four. If the PCs come up with a viable way to maneuver through the quest or even solve it with a viable ending,

consider making that the resolution you planned all along. It gains you nothing to show how smart you are as a GM by repeatedly saying, that's not it, nope, that's not it either, nope, but you're so close. There are times when a solution to a quest has to be a certain solution in order to move the plot forward. They have to find the notebook that points to Captain Sondheim as the corrupt cop who's working for the Assassin's Guild. They have to find the bodies in the windmill so they can get pointed towards the real reason the wizard fled the area. Even if the destination is fixed, be flexible where you can. Anywhere along the path to the destination, if you can be flexible and give the players options, do it.

Go with the player's answer or solution to a quest or a challenge. Consider allowing it to be the canonical answer, even if it's not the one that you planned. Tip number five. Nothing says that their solution, whether you make it canonical or not, couldn't also have complications that arise from it. In episodes 37 and 86, I believe, I talked about adjudicating skill checks beyond just success and failure. In those episodes,

I talked about considering the following results. Unequivocal success, success with complications, failure with additional options, and critical failure. Maybe the PCs are trying to confront the mob boss and decide that they're going to kill their way into getting our attention. There may be slight complications in doing so because most mob bosses don't like their henchmen murdered. A lot of crime bosses who are caricatures of actual mob bosses may think like this. They put one of yours in the hospital, you put one of theirs in the morgue. It's the Chicago way. So the PCs murdering two major henchmen may get the attention they wanted, just not with the results they hoped for. They may get the meeting, but instead of being in the crime boss's office,

it's at the end of a gun, or a knife, or a vat of hydrochloric acid upside down face first. Whatever way the mob boss wants to threaten the PCs. And if the PCs come up with a solution that maybe you didn't anticipate, the main thing you need to worry about is what are the realistic possible outcomes of the decisions that the PCs made? What will everyone else do around the PCs as they take the actions that they've taken? Tip number six, give the player space and time to crowdsource a solution to the quest. This is a great opportunity for you to sit back, let go of any reins you may be holding, and let the players run, interact, talk, laugh, brainstorm, and work together. If it's a roleplay-heavy group, you're giving them the gift of exploring their characters, their relationships, and backstories,

revealing secrets about their characters, and enjoying the acting process if the group is into that sort of thing. And if it's a group that's not into roleplaying at all, then you're giving the opportunity to come up with ideas together, interact with one another, talk, laugh, tell stories, bond together closer, which is why we're in this hobby to begin with. Either way, it's a win-win. The PCs get time to interact and spend some time with each other, and you get time to figure out the next step, the next clue, or to prepare the next NPC for how they're going to react to the news of the PC's actions. One of the things that my tables hear a lot is Tempest Fugit, Time Flies. The world doesn't sit still while the PCs take one action or another. During the time the player characters are interacting with one another, think about the way the PCs are trying to solve the quest and how

that would change the big bad's next steps, if at all. Finally, I want to give you a short list that I maintain in an electronic document that helps me to come up with broad quest ideas on the fly. I use this list whenever I'm caught completely flat-footed by my players and they have advantage on attacks against me, or plus two on attacks against me, or I have a minus two to my armor class. Depends on what game system that you're using. This list is meant to give me an idea

of some quest frameworks to improvise a quest to keep the adventure moving forward. And the list is as follows. Assassinate someone. Kill some monster. Capture something or someone. Free or liberate something or someone. Safely escort something or someone.

Find something or someone. Destroy something. Acquire something something or someone. Find something or someone. Destroy something. Acquire something legally or illegally. Frame someone for a crime. Gather information about someone or something. Throw in some complications and customize them to your world, and you won't get caught without an answer to what quest is next and how does it get resolved. Hopefully that list will help you because it's saved my bacon more times than I can count.

And remembering quests always ask the PCs to go somewhere, kill someone, or interact with something, adding in complications and modifications and adjusting the world and NPCs on the fly will result in better, more realistic quests that feel grounded in your game world, and hopefully you and your players will have fun doing it. If you like this podcast,

please consider telling your gaming friends about it. If you don't like the podcast, I'd love to hear your feedback on how it can improve. Feedback at taking20podcast.com. Either way, thank you so much for listening. Tune in next week when I begin the threatened, sorry, promised lore series, this time all about Count Strahd

Von Zarovich. Once again, I want to thank our sponsor, Luggage. Lawyers really hate carrying their bags around the airport. They really prefer it when they can rest their case. This has been episode number 108, all about designing quests. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 Podcast is a Publishing Cube media production. Copyright 2022. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.