It may be simple, and it may be something that a lot of us have been doing for decades anyway, but I absolutely love quests in 4th Edition. The fact that the DM’s guide gives really good guidelines on how much experience to award for quests at different levels, and the fact that that experience is built into the leveling system, is all really good stuff. I’ve taken to designing Quest Cards (similar to my Power Cards) to track quests for the PCs. My plan is, when they trigger a quest’s start, they get the card for that quest. It’ll have a quest name, and a basic rundown of what they have to do (vague enough to allow for multiple solutions, generally), and it’ll say whether it’s a major or minor quest. Oh, and a nice space for the PCs to take notes.

I’ve already created a number of quests for Keep on the Shadowfell, so that I can hand out carrots that draw the PCs toward the parts of the adventure that (I think) are interesting and fun. But what’s really got me excited are the personal quests. See, I gave my players homework. I told them that I wanted them each to come up with a short-term goal for their characters, and that I’d turn that goal into a minor quest. The stuff they came up with is really great, and helps to flesh out their characters quite a lot more. Even better, it gives me an inclination of what they’re interested in doing in the future, which will make it that much easier to create adventures that engage them once KotS is done. I plan on telling them that, any time they think of something important that they’d like their character to do, they can tell me and I’ll make up a personal quest for them. I think that this sort of feedback and shared storytelling is important to RPGs, and it tickles me that D&D is finally incorporating it into the core rules. If you read through the Dungeon Master’s Guide it actually becomes clear that not only are they incorporating it, they’re actively encouraging it. It’s great.

The thing that got me thinking about all this and how cool it is was actually a conversation I had with one of my players over IM. He was the only one who hadn’t given me a personal quest yet, and it kind of felt like he didn’t really have any idea who his character was, other than a race-class combination. So I pestered him about it, and he asked for help. I asked him some questions about his character, and he answered them as best he could. Eventually we came up with a quest for him (a really cool one, too), but what’s even better is that I really feel like his character has become a unique individual, completely differentiated from all the other members of that particular race-class combination. You could actually see the character growing and taking shape in between the lines of text in the IM window, and I’ve gotta say, it’s a pretty rockin’ character. (Don’t worry, I think all of you other guys have pretty rockin’ characters, too.)

This entry was posted on Friday, July 11th, 2008 at 5:42 pm and is filed under 4th Edition, DM's Journal, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.