The Fearless DM

I really like 4e’s quest rules because— used correctly and abundantly, you never have to keep creating the justification for adventure at the open of each game (ie, the Tavern scene- I hate the tavern scene)— or worry too much about the clumsy manipulations to get the adventure to end.

The reason is- quests let you avoid all of that clumsy stuff, because they create a natural-but-not-predetermined progression of events. Even if you give one single character a quest..they tend to spread quickly to the rest of the party.

Example: “After dragons raided your home village, you have pledged to personally take part in the slaying of at least one of every type of chromatic dragon, starting now.”

What do the PCs do? Do they start investigating dragon reports? Do they start scouring the land looking for dragons? Maybe they end up making friends with a decent dragon, how does that play out? Well.. you don’t know, because you haven’t played it yet. And neither has the DM.

Quests are also viral: Once a new player arrives in the campaign.. or you start a game up- the players that have been given quests suddenly have an idea of exactly what they want to do, and they can share that. What are we doing?’ Well we’re heading to the haunted abbey.. but my guy is also researching dragons in their library..are you in?’

Even if the adventure turns out to be about something else entirely.. you get little moments where the characters can research and investigate what they are looking for on an individual basis- those little scenes are crucial. And the great thing is, you, the DM didn’t tell them to do it. Or not to do it. And next week, you might come up with something completely different. With quests, you don’t have to pre-write any outcomes.

And sometimes- just through serendipity or accident, quests combine in wonderful unexpected ways.

One of the prevailing schools of thought (I’d say it’s an RPGA-ism, but we could probably lay the real blame on the popular “story path” style pioneered by Paizo)  is that Dms should build adventures as stories- all of our examples guide us to do this— the big companies hire wonderful writers, and get us to think of their adventures as a series of scenes and encounter that logically move from one to the next. LFR is totally like this.

Here’s a not too radical thought: Adventures are not a series of scenes and encounters. It doesn’t matter how great a writer you are, either. You could have  Hunter S Thompson and C.S. Lewis writing the greatest adventure of all time as a team, but it won’t matter. When you play it, all you are doing is playing out the storyline as it has already been written.  We get hung up on terms like “railroad”.. but even that is missing the point. It’s a prewritten sequence. You aren’t playing the game, you are playing the battle system. As Mike Mearls once said..”people don’t play Super Mario Brothers because they like jumping on turtles”. There’s more to it, a bigger picture.

Adventures in their most natural form- are really just a series of quests, sometimes played in serial, sometimes in combination. Having 3 or 4 (or 5 or 7) quests at once- per adventurer— should be common. Those quests might involve encounters, but might also just involve locations, places, movements, NPCs and background info.. without the prewritten “how it plays out” stuff in there at all. Some quests could resolve within the same game session they are given. Some could start at level 1 and not be resolved until you ..kill Orcus.Not every quest even has to be difficult.. quests could be about movement, about gaining knowledge or creating relationships or accomplishing tasks.

The point is- having 3 or 4 plates spinning (and that’s per PC so we are really talking about 12-24 plates spinning) creates fertile ground for creativity - both for you and the players… and you share the burden of weekly activity with the PCs. The really sweet spot for DMing is when I show up and the players already have 3 or 4 ideas of what they want to do before I even get my stuff unpacked.

Once you have that, the adventures practically start to write themselves.