Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
I am a busy man with 300 pages of readings a week. I'll deal with it within the month since I've finished this semester.
-
For all readers and writers
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An Analysis of Original Quests on SV (Draft, under discussion and revision)
- Thread starter Cetashwayo
- Start date
I am a busy man with 300 pages of readings a week. I'll deal with it within the month since I've finished this semester.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
I'd make a snarky remark about how History majors have to read way too much, but thinking about it, I read one or two hundred pages a week myself between Audit and Tax- or, well, I should be- and the only reason it's not more is that because of my minor I'm taking programming courses which are lighter on the whole 'Read textbook' thing and heavier on the 'Here is what your homework should do, now write the code' thing.
Oh I am slain!
Wynaut?
- Location
- Tatooine
xD
And this is in part why I said there should have just been a checkbox for all the people who wanted their responses released, for everyone to make use of.
Well, besides the my main thought that the details of the responses themselves might prove to be more useful for QMs than any overall analysis.
Hmm. I dunno if anyone even kept track of the dozens and dozens of people who posted in the thread saying they gave permission for their responses to be released. Would it still be possible to release those?
And this is in part why I said there should have just been a checkbox for all the people who wanted their responses released, for everyone to make use of.
Well, besides the my main thought that the details of the responses themselves might prove to be more useful for QMs than any overall analysis.
Hmm. I dunno if anyone even kept track of the dozens and dozens of people who posted in the thread saying they gave permission for their responses to be released. Would it still be possible to release those?
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Chandagnac
Broken Robot
- Location
- Nowhere
I didn't bother to fill in Cetashwayo's survey; at the time, I was stuck in a pit of depression.
As usual, I'm late to the party, but I've been thinking a lot about this recently and I finally have something to say. I want to talk about my own experiences of running original quests on this board. Maybe I can share some tips and tricks of the trade with anyone who's reading this and thinking of starting an original quest of their own.
Yeah, I can never see a passing bandwagon without realising a few years later that maybe I should have jumped onto it.
I used to run a quest called A Hedge Maze Is You (AHMIY). There was a time when it was quite popular. Compared to Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest, Terrene Spire, or the majority of quests based on Bleach, Worm, the Gamer, Naruto, or A Song of Ice and Fire, it was never massively successful. Even at the height of its popularity, the number of "Users Who Are Viewing This Thread" never rose about twenty (and was usually far less). There were maybe a dozen people who regularly voted and/or posted comments. Still, if the only criteria for success is the number of views it got, at one time, it was one of the most successful original quests on this board (and that's an overly narrow superlative if ever I've heard one).
I'll admit, towards the end, I did get bogged down in the game mechanics: I started taking them too seriously and I had these massive battles taking place where I recorded everything that was going on in minute detail and... Yeah, I hated it. That's one the reasons why I decided to bring AHMIY to a swift and unsatisfactory end.
AHMIY was certainly the most successful quest I've ever run. What do I think were the reasons for its relative success?
AHMIY started off as a joke. I saw a quest entitled "A Hedge Mage Is You", misread it as "Hedge Maze" and eagerly clicked on it, hoping to read about the exciting adventures of a hedge maze. Alas, I was disappointed: "A Hedge Mage is You" turned out to be the adventures of a petty wizard in a fantasy city. However, a few weeks later, the idea of "A Hedge Maze Is You" was still floating around inside my head. I knew nobody else was going to write it, so I decided to write it myself.
I had two ideas for how a hedge maze might gain enough sentience to be a viable player character: 1) The story would take place in a fantasy world in which there were gods and spirits of rocks, trees, mountains, cities, and just about everything else you can think of; 2) The hedge maze was in the grounds of an old wizard's tower where, over the years, enough magic seeped into it to make it very strange place indeed. I decided to use both of these ideas because I thought I could get some interesting storylines out of them.
When I posted the first chapter of AHMIY and people started to participate, I then had to come up with an actual plot. I did this by recycling the plots of some of my unfinished fantasy novels I'd given up hope of ever being able to publish.
I think people enjoyed reading AHMIY because it had such an intricately-detailed narrative and setting. It had a huge cast of characters I tried very hard to make memorable, interesting, and sympathetic. Its storylines were wide-ranging, encompassing the homely and humdrum as well as the epic and fantastical. Often, it was funny and sweet, but at times it could be very dark, bleak, and miserable; I put a lot of myself into my writing, intentionally or not, and when I was writing AHMIY there were times when I was severely depressed. I think people found that fascinating in a "what the hell is wrong with you?" sort of way, but also they wanted to make things better: they wanted to use their choices to bring light into a fantasy world that often seemed filled with darkness. The plot wasn't on rails: the options people voted for really mattered and resulted in a very different story to what would have happened if they'd voted differently. 'Write in' votes were always allowed and led to some of the most cinematic events of AHMIY.
There are plenty of quests on this board that are more successful than AHMIY ever was. It's 'success' was actually rather modest. Still, it reached 333 pages altogether, I usually got around 15 likes for each new chapter, and the number of "people viewing this thread" often reached double figures. I'd occasionally wake up to find that someone had likebombed AHMIY while I was asleep. I enjoyed that: it was always a nice surprise when that happened. I got a few posts from new reader raving about how great the story was and how they'd definitely be taking part in the vote from then on. Usually, that was the last I ever heard from them.
In the end, I got to a point where writing AHMIY stopped being fun and started to feel like a chore. I felt bad about how grim and angsty some of the earlier storylines were and I couldn't think of a way to fix them. I'd made a mistake in allowing the players to have too many "instances" which meant that the protagonist could be in six places at once and therefore it took months for me to write what happened in a single day. Yeah... I had a lot of regrets.
So, I decided to finish AHMIY with an ending that some people have described as "rocks fall, everybody dies". The big bad, a wizard who was trying to become all-powerful, finally confronted the Hedge Maze God who'd been an annoying thorn in his side. He opened a portal to the sun, which destroyed the hedge maze and everything in it. My intention was that one of Hedgy's friends, a water spirit who'd accidentally become a goddess of time (yeah, just roll with it), would travel back in time to fix things that had happened years before, in an attempt to make sure that her friend would be born into a better world. However, some of my readers were very upset by the ending. There were harsh words and angry accusations bandied about, and a few people vowed to never again read anything I'd written. So that may have been a mistake.
A few of my most loyal readers followed me to the sequel/prequel, which I initially called "The War-Torn Kingdom" and later changed to "The Tinpot Princess and Her Many Travels" (TTPaHMT). It's the story of a little girl (whose parents are the king and queen of a tiny island) growing up to become an adventurer. It's meant to be much lighter and softer than AHMIY was, but there are still hints of darkness and horror around the edges. It's certainly much faster paced: I've been writing it for four months and, in the story, eight years have passed. I enjoy writing it, but by any measure it's not as popular as AHMIY was. Currently, TTPaHMT is on page 36; by the time AHMIY was on Chapter 53, it was on page 78. I usually get around 5 or 6 likes for each new chapter and the number of "people viewing this thread" very rarely goes into double figures. By the end, AHMIY had more than 400,000 views; TTPaHMT has fewer than 26,000. Yeah, maybe it's not fair to compare my four-month-old quest to one which lasted a year and a half, but I still find it a bit disappointing.
My newest quest is called "Terminus Est". It has no connection with AHMIY or TTPaHMT; it's set in an entirely different fictional universe. It's a story about time travellers trapped in a mysterious city at the end of time. It's meant as a pastiche of the JRPGs I've played (particularly Chrono Trigger and various Final Fantasies). It has a diverse cast of characters armed with peculiar weapons, lots of puzzles to solve, and it's been suggested that it will end with the protagonist using the power of friendship to kill God. It's a shame that hardly anyone's bothered to read it. I've posted twenty-three chapters so far and it's on page seven. It's had just over 4000 views altogether. I had to appeal to the readers of TTPaHMT to get anyone to look at it, which I consider cheating. Now, there are five people who regularly vote and new chapters usually get two likes. It's my least successful quest so far and I'm wondering why that is.
What advice do I have for other people who want to start writing original quests?
1. Don't. Instead, write a quest based on a popular anime or videogame. Or Worm.
Base your quest on something that already has a readymade fanbase and soon you'll have dozens of people flocking to vote, post comments, and likebomb your new quest. Much later, when that quest is finished, you can move on to writing something original; hopefully, a significant number of readers will want to look at your new, original quest because they enjoy your writing and want to see more of it.
So why don't I do that? Well, I'm almost pathologically unable to write stories about other people's characters. I worry too much about whether they're in-character or not. I've written fanfiction in the past, but it usually ended up as 'original characters and scenarios in someone else's setting'. And then I deleted it all. Also, the series I want like to write about are already so popular that they have reams of fanfiction devoted to them and I feel like I have nothing new to add.
2. Your title needs to grab the readers' attention.
Seems obvious, right? But it's something I don't always get right.
Before they click on your quest thread, prospective readers will only see the title and a few tags. There's a long list of quests on this board and it's going to be difficult for you to make your quest stand out from the rest. A really good title should help you with that.
"A Hedge Maze Is You" was a good title. Admittedly, it sounds so silly that there were probably more than a few prospective readers who looked at it and thought, 'That sounds cracky as hell. I'm not interested in reading that.' On the other hand, it was so bizarre that I'd imagine there were very few people glancing at it for the first time who didn't do a double take. It was weird and wonderful and different from anything else – I mean, how many quests allow you to roleplay as a sentient hedge maze? I'm sure there were a few people who clicked on the AHMIY quest thread out of curiosity, started reading and didn't stop until they reached the end.
After AHMIY ended, I started a new quest set in the same world. Because of time travel, it's both a sequel and a prequel. I named it "The War-Torn Kingdom". For a number of reasons, that was a mistake. It sounded like it should be a CK2-style quest where the players would get to control a kingdom in the middle of a horrible war, whereas in actual fact it's rather light and fluffy and focuses on a small group of people (who happen to live in a country that was split apart by war). I imagine people who wanted a grim and violent CK2-style quest were disappointed when they saw what "The War-Torn Kingdom" was actually about, and that some of the people who might have wanted to read something light, fluffy, and character-driven were immediately put off by the title. So I renamed it "The Tinpot Princess and Her Many Travels", which is a better title. It conveys a sense of light-hearted whimsy and it states who the quest is actually about. However, it's not a great title. In fact, it's rather generic. There are plenty of princesses in fantasy.
I think part of the reason why "Terminus Est" has been so unsuccessful is the title. To me, it's very meaningful and full of significance. (The quest takes place in a city called "Terminus", which is surrounded by a post-apocalyptic wasteland; "Terminus Est" is Latin for "This is the end"; and it's a reference to Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.) However, I think most people looking at the title dismiss it as meaningless or pretentious twaddle.
3. You need to write a lot.
Again, this is common sense. If you want your quest to be really successful, you need to be posting new material almost every day or for your chapters to be so long that your readers think they're worth the wait. If you can keep pumping out new material, your readers will keep coming back for more.
This is something I find really difficult. I mean, I wrote more than 250,000 words for AHMIY, but that's because I spent such a lot of time working on it. I agonize over my writing. It takes me hours to write a few hundred words. I mean, you have to write a lot, but you can't just write whatever comes into your head. Because...
4. Your writing needs to be of a consistently high quality.
I spend ages thinking about my writing. I spend ages rewriting each word, each sentence, everything I write, and as often as not I end up changing it back to what it was originally. Or I give up and leave in something I think is not very good because I can't think of anything better. I write for fun, in the evenings, after a hard day's work, as a hobby. If you want to be truly successful, you can't do that: you have to treat it like a second job. I find it difficult to write very much. Each word is carefully chosen, each sentence is painstakingly crafted, and still I get it wrong. I don't have any faith in the quality of my writing. Often, I look back at what I've written and I have no idea if it's any good.
If you want to be a successful quest writer, you need to be like The Laurent: his writing is of a consistently high quality and he has written 1.8 million words in the last year. He has a lot of fans, but still I don't think he gets as much praise as he deserves.
5. Advertising works. Sort of.
When I was writing AHMIY I was lucky in that someone created a banner for it which was included in the first round of "thread advertising", back when they were testing it out to see if it worked. I got a few people who dropped in because they liked the amusing banner ad. Not many, but it was something.
These days, thread advertising seems to have died down. Recently, I've seen ads for The Practice War, Uncle Grubb's Mysterious Mansion, SV Artist Registry, "Thread advertising works: become a subscriber to make your mark!" and nothing else. Possibly this is because you need to be a subscriber in order to take part. I'm not a subscriber: I'm poor, I can't afford it, and anyway, in my experience, thread advertising didn't get me so many new readers that it was worth spending money on.
Another form of advertising is Private Lee O'Malley's Quest Recommendation thread. I'm sure that more than a few people have taken a look at some of the quests which got a really good recommendation in that thread. I know I have.
6. Give your readers something they already like.
There's a school of thought which says that no work of fiction is truly original. Everything is based on something else, to a lesser or greater extent. If you're writing an original quest, you probably can't help but reference works of fiction which already exist. The trick is to use that to your advantage.
One of the reasons why Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest was so massively successful was that, even though it featured an entirely original setting and characters, it was heavily based on anime that the majority of its readers were already very familiar with and used a lot of the same tropes and character archetypes.
Similarly, AHMIY is fantasy. It makes a lot of references to Greek mythology, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and so on. If you don't like fantasy fiction, you probably won't like AHMIY.
On the other hand, it's best to...
7. Give your readers something they can't get anywhere else.
Dexexe1234's Terrene Spire is an incredibly popular and successful quest because it has something no other quest (that I know of) has: the story is presented entirely as cartoon-style panels of beautiful artwork that make it look almost like a videogame. There are no walls of text to wade through. It's unique and very well done, and it has a massive fan base because of that.
I sometimes wonder if AHMIY's relative success was because of its novelty, because there wasn't much else like it at the time, or because it was the "only game in town". It had an unusual protagonist, a very character-driven story, and for a long time I think people felt confident that I wasn't going to abandon it like so many other quests. I've seen a few people say that that AHMIY made them realise that quests didn't have to have the CK2-style format and that it inspired them to write something in a similar vein. Actually, I think that's the greatest compliment anyone could give a Quest Master and it makes me feel a lot better about my writing.
8. Don't worry too much about Skinner boxes.
When I first read Cetashwayo's analysis in this thread, I was convinced that Skinner boxes were important and I needed to have one. However, when I tried to implement one in AHMIY I ran into problems.
Because the game system I use is based on D6s, when I gave people +1 bonuses for their participation it proved unbalancing. Many quests on this board use a D100 game system. When you're rolling D100, an extra +1 or +5 bonus here and there doesn't mean much, so you can feel free to hand them out like candy. However, when I gave people +1 bonuses it was the equivalent of a +10 bonus in one of those other games. Because I didn't want to unbalance things, I gave out these rewards sparingly. I think that was kind of defeating the point.
Most of the game systems on this board measure experience in hundreds and thousands. The xp system I use is deliberately very simple. Often, you only need 2 or 3 xp in order to level up a skill. When I give people a +1 bonus xp as a reward for an omake (or whatever) that's probably the equivalent of +1000 xp in quests that measure experience in big, impressive numbers.
If you want to implement a Skinner box, consider having game mechanics which use big, impressive numbers. That way, when you give people 50 or 100xp as a reward for their participation, you'll seem really generous, even if that's only a tiny fraction of what they need to level up.
But seriously, before long, I realised that Skinner boxes are only useful if you've already got a popular quest that people want to discuss and write about. If someone writes a long analysis of what exactly going on in their favourite quest, they might feel good when they see that the QM has noticed what they wrote and given them a little bonus for it, but they didn't write it for that: they wrote it because the quest is something they really enjoy and they want to discuss it with other people. Yeah, it's nice to reward people for their effort and maybe Skinner boxes help keep the wheel of popularity spinning, but they're not going to help you get lots of new readers if you don't already have a lot of readers.
It's the same with fan content. People write omakes and draw fanart when they want to. It's not really something you can encourage.
9. If you're sick of writing a quest, it's better to abandon it than give it an unsatisfactory ending that your readers will hate.
People abandon quests all the time. They just stop updating and readers tend to accept it. Later on, if they start a new quest, nobody seems to mind.
I gave AHMIY an ending which many of my readers hated. It was supposed to set up the sequel/prequel (yeesh, time travel is really awkward), but it annoyed some people so much that they ragequit. So yeah. Don't make my mistake. If you want to stop writing a quest, just abandon it.
Hmm. I think most of the advice I've given here is common sense. But considering how many mistakes I've made, maybe it's not always easy to do what you know is common sense. I hope people will read what I've written here, and think about it, and maybe they won't make some of the mistakes I've made.
Thank you for reading. Good night to you all.
Chandagnac
As usual, I'm late to the party, but I've been thinking a lot about this recently and I finally have something to say. I want to talk about my own experiences of running original quests on this board. Maybe I can share some tips and tricks of the trade with anyone who's reading this and thinking of starting an original quest of their own.
Yeah, I can never see a passing bandwagon without realising a few years later that maybe I should have jumped onto it.
I used to run a quest called A Hedge Maze Is You (AHMIY). There was a time when it was quite popular. Compared to Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest, Terrene Spire, or the majority of quests based on Bleach, Worm, the Gamer, Naruto, or A Song of Ice and Fire, it was never massively successful. Even at the height of its popularity, the number of "Users Who Are Viewing This Thread" never rose about twenty (and was usually far less). There were maybe a dozen people who regularly voted and/or posted comments. Still, if the only criteria for success is the number of views it got, at one time, it was one of the most successful original quests on this board (and that's an overly narrow superlative if ever I've heard one).
Well, Cetashwayo was right about the "amusingly odd setting", but he was wrong about the game mechanics being important. AHMIY may have ended up with a lot of mechanics, but they were just tools I used to facilitate the story. Mostly, I was making them up as I went along; there were a few times when I changed or ignored rules that just weren't working. I never thought the mechanics were very important except as a way of keeping track of what each character was capable of.
I'll admit, towards the end, I did get bogged down in the game mechanics: I started taking them too seriously and I had these massive battles taking place where I recorded everything that was going on in minute detail and... Yeah, I hated it. That's one the reasons why I decided to bring AHMIY to a swift and unsatisfactory end.
AHMIY was certainly the most successful quest I've ever run. What do I think were the reasons for its relative success?
AHMIY started off as a joke. I saw a quest entitled "A Hedge Mage Is You", misread it as "Hedge Maze" and eagerly clicked on it, hoping to read about the exciting adventures of a hedge maze. Alas, I was disappointed: "A Hedge Mage is You" turned out to be the adventures of a petty wizard in a fantasy city. However, a few weeks later, the idea of "A Hedge Maze Is You" was still floating around inside my head. I knew nobody else was going to write it, so I decided to write it myself.
I had two ideas for how a hedge maze might gain enough sentience to be a viable player character: 1) The story would take place in a fantasy world in which there were gods and spirits of rocks, trees, mountains, cities, and just about everything else you can think of; 2) The hedge maze was in the grounds of an old wizard's tower where, over the years, enough magic seeped into it to make it very strange place indeed. I decided to use both of these ideas because I thought I could get some interesting storylines out of them.
When I posted the first chapter of AHMIY and people started to participate, I then had to come up with an actual plot. I did this by recycling the plots of some of my unfinished fantasy novels I'd given up hope of ever being able to publish.
I think people enjoyed reading AHMIY because it had such an intricately-detailed narrative and setting. It had a huge cast of characters I tried very hard to make memorable, interesting, and sympathetic. Its storylines were wide-ranging, encompassing the homely and humdrum as well as the epic and fantastical. Often, it was funny and sweet, but at times it could be very dark, bleak, and miserable; I put a lot of myself into my writing, intentionally or not, and when I was writing AHMIY there were times when I was severely depressed. I think people found that fascinating in a "what the hell is wrong with you?" sort of way, but also they wanted to make things better: they wanted to use their choices to bring light into a fantasy world that often seemed filled with darkness. The plot wasn't on rails: the options people voted for really mattered and resulted in a very different story to what would have happened if they'd voted differently. 'Write in' votes were always allowed and led to some of the most cinematic events of AHMIY.
There are plenty of quests on this board that are more successful than AHMIY ever was. It's 'success' was actually rather modest. Still, it reached 333 pages altogether, I usually got around 15 likes for each new chapter, and the number of "people viewing this thread" often reached double figures. I'd occasionally wake up to find that someone had likebombed AHMIY while I was asleep. I enjoyed that: it was always a nice surprise when that happened. I got a few posts from new reader raving about how great the story was and how they'd definitely be taking part in the vote from then on. Usually, that was the last I ever heard from them.
In the end, I got to a point where writing AHMIY stopped being fun and started to feel like a chore. I felt bad about how grim and angsty some of the earlier storylines were and I couldn't think of a way to fix them. I'd made a mistake in allowing the players to have too many "instances" which meant that the protagonist could be in six places at once and therefore it took months for me to write what happened in a single day. Yeah... I had a lot of regrets.
So, I decided to finish AHMIY with an ending that some people have described as "rocks fall, everybody dies". The big bad, a wizard who was trying to become all-powerful, finally confronted the Hedge Maze God who'd been an annoying thorn in his side. He opened a portal to the sun, which destroyed the hedge maze and everything in it. My intention was that one of Hedgy's friends, a water spirit who'd accidentally become a goddess of time (yeah, just roll with it), would travel back in time to fix things that had happened years before, in an attempt to make sure that her friend would be born into a better world. However, some of my readers were very upset by the ending. There were harsh words and angry accusations bandied about, and a few people vowed to never again read anything I'd written. So that may have been a mistake.
A few of my most loyal readers followed me to the sequel/prequel, which I initially called "The War-Torn Kingdom" and later changed to "The Tinpot Princess and Her Many Travels" (TTPaHMT). It's the story of a little girl (whose parents are the king and queen of a tiny island) growing up to become an adventurer. It's meant to be much lighter and softer than AHMIY was, but there are still hints of darkness and horror around the edges. It's certainly much faster paced: I've been writing it for four months and, in the story, eight years have passed. I enjoy writing it, but by any measure it's not as popular as AHMIY was. Currently, TTPaHMT is on page 36; by the time AHMIY was on Chapter 53, it was on page 78. I usually get around 5 or 6 likes for each new chapter and the number of "people viewing this thread" very rarely goes into double figures. By the end, AHMIY had more than 400,000 views; TTPaHMT has fewer than 26,000. Yeah, maybe it's not fair to compare my four-month-old quest to one which lasted a year and a half, but I still find it a bit disappointing.
My newest quest is called "Terminus Est". It has no connection with AHMIY or TTPaHMT; it's set in an entirely different fictional universe. It's a story about time travellers trapped in a mysterious city at the end of time. It's meant as a pastiche of the JRPGs I've played (particularly Chrono Trigger and various Final Fantasies). It has a diverse cast of characters armed with peculiar weapons, lots of puzzles to solve, and it's been suggested that it will end with the protagonist using the power of friendship to kill God. It's a shame that hardly anyone's bothered to read it. I've posted twenty-three chapters so far and it's on page seven. It's had just over 4000 views altogether. I had to appeal to the readers of TTPaHMT to get anyone to look at it, which I consider cheating. Now, there are five people who regularly vote and new chapters usually get two likes. It's my least successful quest so far and I'm wondering why that is.
What advice do I have for other people who want to start writing original quests?
1. Don't. Instead, write a quest based on a popular anime or videogame. Or Worm.
Base your quest on something that already has a readymade fanbase and soon you'll have dozens of people flocking to vote, post comments, and likebomb your new quest. Much later, when that quest is finished, you can move on to writing something original; hopefully, a significant number of readers will want to look at your new, original quest because they enjoy your writing and want to see more of it.
So why don't I do that? Well, I'm almost pathologically unable to write stories about other people's characters. I worry too much about whether they're in-character or not. I've written fanfiction in the past, but it usually ended up as 'original characters and scenarios in someone else's setting'. And then I deleted it all. Also, the series I want like to write about are already so popular that they have reams of fanfiction devoted to them and I feel like I have nothing new to add.
2. Your title needs to grab the readers' attention.
Seems obvious, right? But it's something I don't always get right.
Before they click on your quest thread, prospective readers will only see the title and a few tags. There's a long list of quests on this board and it's going to be difficult for you to make your quest stand out from the rest. A really good title should help you with that.
"A Hedge Maze Is You" was a good title. Admittedly, it sounds so silly that there were probably more than a few prospective readers who looked at it and thought, 'That sounds cracky as hell. I'm not interested in reading that.' On the other hand, it was so bizarre that I'd imagine there were very few people glancing at it for the first time who didn't do a double take. It was weird and wonderful and different from anything else – I mean, how many quests allow you to roleplay as a sentient hedge maze? I'm sure there were a few people who clicked on the AHMIY quest thread out of curiosity, started reading and didn't stop until they reached the end.
After AHMIY ended, I started a new quest set in the same world. Because of time travel, it's both a sequel and a prequel. I named it "The War-Torn Kingdom". For a number of reasons, that was a mistake. It sounded like it should be a CK2-style quest where the players would get to control a kingdom in the middle of a horrible war, whereas in actual fact it's rather light and fluffy and focuses on a small group of people (who happen to live in a country that was split apart by war). I imagine people who wanted a grim and violent CK2-style quest were disappointed when they saw what "The War-Torn Kingdom" was actually about, and that some of the people who might have wanted to read something light, fluffy, and character-driven were immediately put off by the title. So I renamed it "The Tinpot Princess and Her Many Travels", which is a better title. It conveys a sense of light-hearted whimsy and it states who the quest is actually about. However, it's not a great title. In fact, it's rather generic. There are plenty of princesses in fantasy.
I think part of the reason why "Terminus Est" has been so unsuccessful is the title. To me, it's very meaningful and full of significance. (The quest takes place in a city called "Terminus", which is surrounded by a post-apocalyptic wasteland; "Terminus Est" is Latin for "This is the end"; and it's a reference to Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.) However, I think most people looking at the title dismiss it as meaningless or pretentious twaddle.
3. You need to write a lot.
Again, this is common sense. If you want your quest to be really successful, you need to be posting new material almost every day or for your chapters to be so long that your readers think they're worth the wait. If you can keep pumping out new material, your readers will keep coming back for more.
This is something I find really difficult. I mean, I wrote more than 250,000 words for AHMIY, but that's because I spent such a lot of time working on it. I agonize over my writing. It takes me hours to write a few hundred words. I mean, you have to write a lot, but you can't just write whatever comes into your head. Because...
4. Your writing needs to be of a consistently high quality.
I spend ages thinking about my writing. I spend ages rewriting each word, each sentence, everything I write, and as often as not I end up changing it back to what it was originally. Or I give up and leave in something I think is not very good because I can't think of anything better. I write for fun, in the evenings, after a hard day's work, as a hobby. If you want to be truly successful, you can't do that: you have to treat it like a second job. I find it difficult to write very much. Each word is carefully chosen, each sentence is painstakingly crafted, and still I get it wrong. I don't have any faith in the quality of my writing. Often, I look back at what I've written and I have no idea if it's any good.
If you want to be a successful quest writer, you need to be like The Laurent: his writing is of a consistently high quality and he has written 1.8 million words in the last year. He has a lot of fans, but still I don't think he gets as much praise as he deserves.
5. Advertising works. Sort of.
When I was writing AHMIY I was lucky in that someone created a banner for it which was included in the first round of "thread advertising", back when they were testing it out to see if it worked. I got a few people who dropped in because they liked the amusing banner ad. Not many, but it was something.
These days, thread advertising seems to have died down. Recently, I've seen ads for The Practice War, Uncle Grubb's Mysterious Mansion, SV Artist Registry, "Thread advertising works: become a subscriber to make your mark!" and nothing else. Possibly this is because you need to be a subscriber in order to take part. I'm not a subscriber: I'm poor, I can't afford it, and anyway, in my experience, thread advertising didn't get me so many new readers that it was worth spending money on.
Another form of advertising is Private Lee O'Malley's Quest Recommendation thread. I'm sure that more than a few people have taken a look at some of the quests which got a really good recommendation in that thread. I know I have.
6. Give your readers something they already like.
There's a school of thought which says that no work of fiction is truly original. Everything is based on something else, to a lesser or greater extent. If you're writing an original quest, you probably can't help but reference works of fiction which already exist. The trick is to use that to your advantage.
One of the reasons why Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest was so massively successful was that, even though it featured an entirely original setting and characters, it was heavily based on anime that the majority of its readers were already very familiar with and used a lot of the same tropes and character archetypes.
Similarly, AHMIY is fantasy. It makes a lot of references to Greek mythology, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and so on. If you don't like fantasy fiction, you probably won't like AHMIY.
On the other hand, it's best to...
7. Give your readers something they can't get anywhere else.
Dexexe1234's Terrene Spire is an incredibly popular and successful quest because it has something no other quest (that I know of) has: the story is presented entirely as cartoon-style panels of beautiful artwork that make it look almost like a videogame. There are no walls of text to wade through. It's unique and very well done, and it has a massive fan base because of that.
I sometimes wonder if AHMIY's relative success was because of its novelty, because there wasn't much else like it at the time, or because it was the "only game in town". It had an unusual protagonist, a very character-driven story, and for a long time I think people felt confident that I wasn't going to abandon it like so many other quests. I've seen a few people say that that AHMIY made them realise that quests didn't have to have the CK2-style format and that it inspired them to write something in a similar vein. Actually, I think that's the greatest compliment anyone could give a Quest Master and it makes me feel a lot better about my writing.
8. Don't worry too much about Skinner boxes.
When I first read Cetashwayo's analysis in this thread, I was convinced that Skinner boxes were important and I needed to have one. However, when I tried to implement one in AHMIY I ran into problems.
Because the game system I use is based on D6s, when I gave people +1 bonuses for their participation it proved unbalancing. Many quests on this board use a D100 game system. When you're rolling D100, an extra +1 or +5 bonus here and there doesn't mean much, so you can feel free to hand them out like candy. However, when I gave people +1 bonuses it was the equivalent of a +10 bonus in one of those other games. Because I didn't want to unbalance things, I gave out these rewards sparingly. I think that was kind of defeating the point.
Most of the game systems on this board measure experience in hundreds and thousands. The xp system I use is deliberately very simple. Often, you only need 2 or 3 xp in order to level up a skill. When I give people a +1 bonus xp as a reward for an omake (or whatever) that's probably the equivalent of +1000 xp in quests that measure experience in big, impressive numbers.
If you want to implement a Skinner box, consider having game mechanics which use big, impressive numbers. That way, when you give people 50 or 100xp as a reward for their participation, you'll seem really generous, even if that's only a tiny fraction of what they need to level up.
But seriously, before long, I realised that Skinner boxes are only useful if you've already got a popular quest that people want to discuss and write about. If someone writes a long analysis of what exactly going on in their favourite quest, they might feel good when they see that the QM has noticed what they wrote and given them a little bonus for it, but they didn't write it for that: they wrote it because the quest is something they really enjoy and they want to discuss it with other people. Yeah, it's nice to reward people for their effort and maybe Skinner boxes help keep the wheel of popularity spinning, but they're not going to help you get lots of new readers if you don't already have a lot of readers.
It's the same with fan content. People write omakes and draw fanart when they want to. It's not really something you can encourage.
9. If you're sick of writing a quest, it's better to abandon it than give it an unsatisfactory ending that your readers will hate.
People abandon quests all the time. They just stop updating and readers tend to accept it. Later on, if they start a new quest, nobody seems to mind.
I gave AHMIY an ending which many of my readers hated. It was supposed to set up the sequel/prequel (yeesh, time travel is really awkward), but it annoyed some people so much that they ragequit. So yeah. Don't make my mistake. If you want to stop writing a quest, just abandon it.
Hmm. I think most of the advice I've given here is common sense. But considering how many mistakes I've made, maybe it's not always easy to do what you know is common sense. I hope people will read what I've written here, and think about it, and maybe they won't make some of the mistakes I've made.
Thank you for reading. Good night to you all.
Chandagnac
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- Location
- My own little world...
I largely agree with you here, so will share my own QMing thoughts.I didn't bother to fill in Cetashwayo's survey; at the time, I was stuck in a pit of depression.
As usual, I'm late to the party, but I've been thinking a lot about this recently and I finally have something to say. I want to talk about my own experiences of running original quests on this board. Maybe I can share some tips and tricks of the trade with anyone who's reading this and thinking of starting an original quest of their own.
Yeah, I can never see a passing bandwagon without realising a few years later that maybe I should have jumped onto it.
I used to run a quest called A Hedge Maze Is You (AHMIY). There was a time when it was quite popular. Compared to Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest, Terrene Spire, or the majority of quests based on Bleach, Worm, the Gamer, Naruto, or A Song of Ice and Fire, it was never massively successful. Even at the height of its popularity, the number of "Users Who Are Viewing This Thread" never rose about twenty (and was usually far less). There were maybe a dozen people who regularly voted and/or posted comments. Still, if the only criteria for success is the number of views it got, at one time, it was one of the most successful original quests on this board (and that's an overly narrow superlative if ever I've heard one).
Well, Cetashwayo was right about the "amusingly odd setting", but he was wrong about the game mechanics being important. AHMIY may have ended up with a lot of mechanics, but they were just tools I used to facilitate the story. Mostly, I was making them up as I went along; there were a few times when I changed or ignored rules that just weren't working. I never thought the mechanics were very important except as a way of keeping track of what each character was capable of.
I'll admit, towards the end, I did get bogged down in the game mechanics: I started taking them too seriously and I had these massive battles taking place where I recorded everything that was going on in minute detail and... Yeah, I hated it. That's one the reasons why I decided to bring AHMIY to a swift and unsatisfactory end.
AHMIY was certainly the most successful quest I've ever run. What do I think were the reasons for its relative success?
AHMIY started off as a joke. I saw a quest entitled "A Hedge Mage Is You", misread it as "Hedge Maze" and eagerly clicked on it, hoping to read about the exciting adventures of a hedge maze. Alas, I was disappointed: "A Hedge Mage is You" turned out to be the adventures of a petty wizard in a fantasy city. However, a few weeks later, the idea of "A Hedge Maze Is You" was still floating around inside my head. I knew nobody else was going to write it, so I decided to write it myself.
I had two ideas for how a hedge maze might gain enough sentience to be a viable player character: 1) The story would take place in a fantasy world in which there were gods and spirits of rocks, trees, mountains, cities, and just about everything else you can think of; 2) The hedge maze was in the grounds of an old wizard's tower where, over the years, enough magic seeped into it to make it very strange place indeed. I decided to use both of these ideas because I thought I could get some interesting storylines out of them.
When I posted the first chapter of AHMIY and people started to participate, I then had to come up with an actual plot. I did this by recycling the plots of some of my unfinished fantasy novels I'd given up hope of ever being able to publish.
I think people enjoyed reading AHMIY because it had such an intricately-detailed narrative and setting. It had a huge cast of characters I tried very hard to make memorable, interesting, and sympathetic. Its storylines were wide-ranging, encompassing the homely and humdrum as well as the epic and fantastical. Often, it was funny and sweet, but at times it could be very dark, bleak, and miserable; I put a lot of myself into my writing, intentionally or not, and when I was writing AHMIY there were times when I was severely depressed. I think people found that fascinating in a "what the hell is wrong with you?" sort of way, but also they wanted to make things better: they wanted to use their choices to bring light into a fantasy world that often seemed filled with darkness. The plot wasn't on rails: the options people voted for really mattered and resulted in a very different story to what would have happened if they'd voted differently. 'Write in' votes were always allowed and led to some of the most cinematic events of AHMIY.
There are plenty of quests on this board that are more successful than AHMIY ever was. It's 'success' was actually rather modest. Still, it reached 333 pages altogether, I usually got around 15 likes for each new chapter, and the number of "people viewing this thread" often reached double figures. I'd occasionally wake up to find that someone had likebombed AHMIY while I was asleep. I enjoyed that: it was always a nice surprise when that happened. I got a few posts from new reader raving about how great the story was and how they'd definitely be taking part in the vote from then on. Usually, that was the last I ever heard from them.
In the end, I got to a point where writing AHMIY stopped being fun and started to feel like a chore. I felt bad about how grim and angsty some of the earlier storylines were and I couldn't think of a way to fix them. I'd made a mistake in allowing the players to have too many "instances" which meant that the protagonist could be in six places at once and therefore it took months for me to write what happened in a single day. Yeah... I had a lot of regrets.
So, I decided to finish AHMIY with an ending that some people have described as "rocks fall, everybody dies". The big bad, a wizard who was trying to become all-powerful, finally confronted the Hedge Maze God who'd been an annoying thorn in his side. He opened a portal to the sun, which destroyed the hedge maze and everything in it. My intention was that one of Hedgy's friends, a water spirit who'd accidentally become a goddess of time (yeah, just roll with it), would travel back in time to fix things that had happened years before, in an attempt to make sure that her friend would be born into a better world. However, some of my readers were very upset by the ending. There were harsh words and angry accusations bandied about, and a few people vowed to never again read anything I'd written. So that may have been a mistake.
A few of my most loyal readers followed me to the sequel/prequel, which I initially called "The War-Torn Kingdom" and later changed to "The Tinpot Princess and Her Many Travels" (TTPaHMT). It's the story of a little girl (whose parents are the king and queen of a tiny island) growing up to become an adventurer. It's meant to be much lighter and softer than AHMIY was, but there are still hints of darkness and horror around the edges. It's certainly much faster paced: I've been writing it for four months and, in the story, eight years have passed. I enjoy writing it, but by any measure it's not as popular as AHMIY was. Currently, TTPaHMT is on page 36; by the time AHMIY was on Chapter 53, it was on page 78. I usually get around 5 or 6 likes for each new chapter and the number of "people viewing this thread" very rarely goes into double figures. By the end, AHMIY had more than 400,000 views; TTPaHMT has fewer than 26,000. Yeah, maybe it's not fair to compare my four-month-old quest to one which lasted a year and a half, but I still find it a bit disappointing.
My newest quest is called "Terminus Est". It has no connection with AHMIY or TTPaHMT; it's set in an entirely different fictional universe. It's a story about time travellers trapped in a mysterious city at the end of time. It's meant as a pastiche of the JRPGs I've played (particularly Chrono Trigger and various Final Fantasies). It has a diverse cast of characters armed with peculiar weapons, lots of puzzles to solve, and it's been suggested that it will end with the protagonist using the power of friendship to kill God. It's a shame that hardly anyone's bothered to read it. I've posted twenty-three chapters so far and it's on page seven. It's had just over 4000 views altogether. I had to appeal to the readers of TTPaHMT to get anyone to look at it, which I consider cheating. Now, there are five people who regularly vote and new chapters usually get two likes. It's my least successful quest so far and I'm wondering why that is.
What advice do I have for other people who want to start writing original quests?
1. Don't. Instead, write a quest based on a popular anime or videogame. Or Worm.
Base your quest on something that already has a readymade fanbase and soon you'll have dozens of people flocking to vote, post comments, and likebomb your new quest. Much later, when that quest is finished, you can move on to writing something original; hopefully, a significant number of readers will want to look at your new, original quest because they enjoy your writing and want to see more of it.
So why don't I do that? Well, I'm almost pathologically unable to write stories about other people's characters. I worry too much about whether they're in-character or not. I've written fanfiction in the past, but it usually ended up as 'original characters and scenarios in someone else's setting'. And then I deleted it all. Also, the series I want like to write about are already so popular that they have reams of fanfiction devoted to them and I feel like I have nothing new to add.
2. Your title needs to grab the readers' attention.
Seems obvious, right? But it's something I don't always get right.
Before they click on your quest thread, prospective readers will only see the title and a few tags. There's a long list of quests on this board and it's going to be difficult for you to make your quest stand out from the rest. A really good title should help you with that.
"A Hedge Maze Is You" was a good title. Admittedly, it sounds so silly that there were probably more than a few prospective readers who looked at it and thought, 'That sounds cracky as hell. I'm not interested in reading that.' On the other hand, it was so bizarre that I'd imagine there were very few people glancing at it for the first time who didn't do a double take. It was weird and wonderful and different from anything else – I mean, how many quests allow you to roleplay as a sentient hedge maze? I'm sure there were a few people who clicked on the AHMIY quest thread out of curiosity, started reading and didn't stop until they reached the end.
After AHMIY ended, I started a new quest set in the same world. Because of time travel, it's both a sequel and a prequel. I named it "The War-Torn Kingdom". For a number of reasons, that was a mistake. It sounded like it should be a CK2-style quest where the players would get to control a kingdom in the middle of a horrible war, whereas in actual fact it's rather light and fluffy and focuses on a small group of people (who happen to live in a country that was split apart by war). I imagine people who wanted a grim and violent CK2-style quest were disappointed when they saw what "The War-Torn Kingdom" was actually about, and that some of the people who might have wanted to read something light, fluffy, and character-driven were immediately put off by the title. So I renamed it "The Tinpot Princess and Her Many Travels", which is a better title. It conveys a sense of light-hearted whimsy and it states who the quest is actually about. However, it's not a great title. In fact, it's rather generic. There are plenty of princesses in fantasy.
I think part of the reason why "Terminus Est" has been so unsuccessful is the title. To me, it's very meaningful and full of significance. (The quest takes place in a city called "Terminus", which is surrounded by a post-apocalyptic wasteland; "Terminus Est" is Latin for "This is the end"; and it's a reference to Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun.) However, I think most people looking at the title dismiss it as meaningless or pretentious twaddle.
3. You need to write a lot.
Again, this is common sense. If you want your quest to be really successful, you need to be posting new material almost every day or for your chapters to be so long that your readers think they're worth the wait. If you can keep pumping out new material, your readers will keep coming back for more.
This is something I find really difficult. I mean, I wrote more than 250,000 words for AHMIY, but that's because I spent such a lot of time working on it. I agonize over my writing. It takes me hours to write a few hundred words. I mean, you have to write a lot, but you can't just write whatever comes into your head. Because...
4. Your writing needs to be of a consistently high quality.
I spend ages thinking about my writing. I spend ages rewriting each word, each sentence, everything I write, and as often as not I end up changing it back to what it was originally. Or I give up and leave in something I think is not very good because I can't think of anything better. I write for fun, in the evenings, after a hard day's work, as a hobby. If you want to be truly successful, you can't do that: you have to treat it like a second job. I find it difficult to write very much. Each word is carefully chosen, each sentence is painstakingly crafted, and still I get it wrong. I don't have any faith in the quality of my writing. Often, I look back at what I've written and I have no idea if it's any good.
If you want to be a successful quest writer, you need to be like The Laurent: his writing is of a consistently high quality and he has written 1.8 million words in the last year. He has a lot of fans, but still I don't think he gets as much praise as he deserves.
5. Advertising works. Sort of.
When I was writing AHMIY I was lucky in that someone created a banner for it which was included in the first round of "thread advertising", back when they were testing it out to see if it worked. I got a few people who dropped in because they liked the amusing banner ad. Not many, but it was something.
These days, thread advertising seems to have died down. Recently, I've seen ads for The Practice War, Uncle Grubb's Mysterious Mansion, SV Artist Registry, "Thread advertising works: become a subscriber to make your mark!" and nothing else. Possibly this is because you need to be a subscriber in order to take part. I'm not a subscriber: I'm poor, I can't afford it, and anyway, in my experience, thread advertising didn't get me so many new readers that it was worth spending money on.
Another form of advertising is Private Lee O'Malley's Quest Recommendation thread. I'm sure that more than a few people have taken a look at some of the quests which got a really good recommendation in that thread. I know I have.
6. Give your readers something they already like.
There's a school of thought which says that no work of fiction is truly original. Everything is based on something else, to a lesser or greater extent. If you're writing an original quest, you probably can't help but reference works of fiction which already exist. The trick is to use that to your advantage.
One of the reasons why Battle Action Harem Highschool Side Character Quest was so massively successful was that, even though it featured an entirely original setting and characters, it was heavily based on anime that the majority of its readers were already very familiar with and used a lot of the same tropes and character archetypes.
Similarly, AHMIY is fantasy. It makes a lot of references to Greek mythology, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, and so on. If you don't like fantasy fiction, you probably won't like AHMIY.
On the other hand, it's best to...
7. Give your readers something they can't get anywhere else.
Dexexe1234's Terrene Spire is an incredibly popular and successful quest because it has something no other quest (that I know of) has: the story is presented entirely as cartoon-style panels of beautiful artwork that make it look almost like a videogame. There are no walls of text to wade through. It's unique and very well done, and it has a massive fan base because of that.
I sometimes wonder if AHMIY's relative success was because of its novelty, because there wasn't much else like it at the time, or because it was the "only game in town". It had an unusual protagonist, a very character-driven story, and for a long time I think people felt confident that I wasn't going to abandon it like so many other quests. I've seen a few people say that that AHMIY made them realise that quests didn't have to have the CK2-style format and that it inspired them to write something in a similar vein. Actually, I think that's the greatest compliment anyone could give a Quest Master and it makes me feel a lot better about my writing.
8. Don't worry too much about Skinner boxes.
When I first read Cetashwayo's analysis in this thread, I was convinced that Skinner boxes were important and I needed to have one. However, when I tried to implement one in AHMIY I ran into problems.
Because the game system I use is based on D6s, when I gave people +1 bonuses for their participation it proved unbalancing. Many quests on this board use a D100 game system. When you're rolling D100, an extra +1 or +5 bonus here and there doesn't mean much, so you can feel free to hand them out like candy. However, when I gave people +1 bonuses it was the equivalent of a +10 bonus in one of those other games. Because I didn't want to unbalance things, I gave out these rewards sparingly. I think that was kind of defeating the point.
Most of the game systems on this board measure experience in hundreds and thousands. The xp system I use is deliberately very simple. Often, you only need 2 or 3 xp in order to level up a skill. When I give people a +1 bonus xp as a reward for an omake (or whatever) that's probably the equivalent of +1000 xp in quests that measure experience in big, impressive numbers.
If you want to implement a Skinner box, consider having game mechanics which use big, impressive numbers. That way, when you give people 50 or 100xp as a reward for their participation, you'll seem really generous, even if that's only a tiny fraction of what they need to level up.
But seriously, before long, I realised that Skinner boxes are only useful if you've already got a popular quest that people want to discuss and write about. If someone writes a long analysis of what exactly going on in their favourite quest, they might feel good when they see that the QM has noticed what they wrote and given them a little bonus for it, but they didn't write it for that: they wrote it because the quest is something they really enjoy and they want to discuss it with other people. Yeah, it's nice to reward people for their effort and maybe Skinner boxes help keep the wheel of popularity spinning, but they're not going to help you get lots of new readers if you don't already have a lot of readers.
It's the same with fan content. People write omakes and draw fanart when they want to. It's not really something you can encourage.
9. If you're sick of writing a quest, it's better to abandon it than give it an unsatisfactory ending that your readers will hate.
People abandon quests all the time. They just stop updating and readers tend to accept it. Later on, if they start a new quest, nobody seems to mind.
I gave AHMIY an ending which many of my readers hated. It was supposed to set up the sequel/prequel (yeesh, time travel is really awkward), but it annoyed some people so much that they ragequit. So yeah. Don't make my mistake. If you want to stop writing a quest, just abandon it.
Hmm. I think most of the advice I've given here is common sense. But considering how many mistakes I've made, maybe it's not always easy to do what you know is common sense. I hope people will read what I've written here, and think about it, and maybe they won't make some of the mistakes I've made.
Thank you for reading. Good night to you all.
Chandagnac
You are definitely correct that writing for an existing fandom will get you a lot more readers very quickly. My Mass Effect quest got more attention in its first day than my original quests did in their first month. You aren't wrong that writing existing characters and in existing universes is very hard though. You need to really know the universe you are writing in. That said, I wouldn't offer a blanket suggestion to never write an original quest. They can be done extremely well, and while they might never be as popular as a derived quest popularity is not always the objective.
2, 3, and 4 are things I agree with wholeheartedly, and 5 I have no experience with one way or the other. I will say for the record that while I'd love to use ads to try and get more readers, I definitely don't have the cash to pay for them. I suspect most QMs are in similar boats.
6 and 7 overlap a bit, but are extremely true. If you want to run a good quest you have to know what your players want and be willing to give it to them. You also want to be at least somewhat unique, as with all media seeing the same stuff gets old fast. The trick is being able to deliver the things people liked about other quests or media but in a unique way. Writing style and perspective can be useful here, as the same sort of story told from a different perspective or in a different way can make all the difference.
I also agree that Skinner Boxes can be a lethal trap if you aren't ready for them. They are good for getting players more invested, but they also result in lots of extra work for the QM and players will try to use them to break the game. Not always bad, but use with caution.
As far as whether to abandon or end a quest, there is no shame in leaving a project. So many quests just fade out due to lack of interest or RL complications that most people just sort of roll with it. This isn't your job, you (probably) aren't getting paid, so if it's not fun then you shouldn't be doing it anymore. That said, players do appreciate resolution when you can give it. I wouldn't say that @Chandagnac's advice is bad so much that it's a bit narrow. While I wasn't there for the blowup, it seems the biggest issue players might have is that all their work was arbitrarily invalidated. The character they liked and worked so hard to power up died instantly due to no fault of their own with nothing they could do to prevent it. Instant Bad End. While a sequel hook that might allow players to prevent the tragedy in another quest wasn't a bad call, it's still very frustrating for players to see everything they worked for and got invested in come to naught by authorial whim.
A possible solution might be to either hold a final vote saying you're moving on from the project and giving players a choice of which sort of ending they'd like (or make it a roll, with better endings having harsher odds and failure leading to the Bad End). Another might be to just screw it and give them something of a happy ending instead of a downer. Sure, no obvious sequel hook but unless you are going to jump straight to the sequel quest this might be the better option than promising that 'someday' they might get to fix what has gone wrong.
There's some middle ground between abandoning a quest forever and nuking the board. If you think you can wrap up a few of the bigger plot points and then just write 'And the Adventure Continues...', people might be annoyed but likely won't try to lynch you. Even if you do want to really, really end the Quest in a final and lethal fashion you can at least go the Conan Doyle route and have the PC take the villain with them, leaving the other characters the players connected to and liked behind to continue the fight.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
On the one hand you're right. On the other hand: my adorable slice-of-life monstergirls.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
Skinner Boxes reference an experiment in which a small animal- such as a rat, or a pigeon- is isolated in a box with a mechanism which they can operate to release food and/or drugs.
In context of quests, it's a mechanic that pushes the players to become more invested in the quest in exchange for a reward. For example, giving people bonuses for writing omake or drawing fanart could be considered a skinner box, as it incentivizes further engagement with the quest.
Extra Credits has a good video explaining Skinner Boxes and the issues with using them:
The only thing I disagree with enough to point out is 4. Your writing needs to be readable and it needs to communicate both the essence of each scene and the information quest-goers need to make decisions, but it doesn't actually need to be high quality in the least.
- Location
- St. Petersburg
I would like to give an example of that, actually.
https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/itinerant-a-pilgrim-quest.31951/page-42#post-7680546
People thought it was a great way to wrap up the quest.
Granted, there weren't a lot of plotlines in need of resolving given the nature of the story, but open endings could be quite satisfying.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
My ending wasn't completely open, but I did sort of 'cut off' in a way when it could have continued in KCS?
- Location
- St. Petersburg
You told a full story, which had a beginning, a development, and a climax (and what a climax it was - the fate of the world came down to the last, single die - I can't remember a battle so clutch as the one we fought off the top of my head, the entirety of Death March was an epic).
It has a great ending, even though it required a dozen epilogues to truly wrap up the humongous amount of running plots.
Rose's life continues and new challenges arise, but as far as I am concerned, the story is over. Even if it may pick up where it left off, it'd be a new one, a sequel.
It has a great ending, even though it required a dozen epilogues to truly wrap up the humongous amount of running plots.
Rose's life continues and new challenges arise, but as far as I am concerned, the story is over. Even if it may pick up where it left off, it'd be a new one, a sequel.
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- Location
- My own little world...
True enough. Not every sentence must be painstakingly crafted and honed to perfect for a Quest to be successful and enjoyable, and obsessing over quality is a great way to indefinitely delay updates and give yourself a nervous breakdown in the process.
That said, I think we'll all agree that writing quality is at least a factor in how fun a Quest is to read or participate in. It doesn't have to be Shakespeare, but especially if you are going with a narrative focus or aiming for a longer Quest superior writing will improve the quality of the game considerably. I would not suggest that novice writers abandon the idea of QMing because they don't think they are good enough (quality comes with time and practice, which means going out there and making lots of mistakes), but at the same time the better you are at plotting a narrative and writing a scene the more well-received your work is likely to be.
A good writer can make anything fun. A bad writer can make the most interesting concept seem dull.
I actually disagree with that. Writing quality is of course a multi-faceted thing, but once you're past the point of readability I think you face vastly diminishing returns, making pure writing quality not a useful metric to judge your own or someone else's quest on. Yes, higher quality quests attract more readers but those same quests would do just as well if they updated twice as often at lower quality.
I also differentiate the quality of the writing itself to the ability to plan a narrative. Those are separate skills in my experience, and quests can work fine with or without planning.
It's also a source of endless frustration for me that beta readers focus on things like typos and word choice. No one reading the quest will care enough about those things to affect their participation unless it was genuinely unreadable in the first place. Talk to me about plot and flow and feel instead.
I also differentiate the quality of the writing itself to the ability to plan a narrative. Those are separate skills in my experience, and quests can work fine with or without planning.
It's also a source of endless frustration for me that beta readers focus on things like typos and word choice. No one reading the quest will care enough about those things to affect their participation unless it was genuinely unreadable in the first place. Talk to me about plot and flow and feel instead.
Cetashwayo
Lord of Ten Thousand Years
- Location
- Across the Horizon
I found that out the hard way in Sworn to the Scythe- I really did feel like I had diminishing returns when I wrote 3K word updates rather than 1 or 2K word ones; spellchecking, fixing problems and such, all took longer, and that just bled more voters. Long hiatuses didn't help and more or less killed a lot of interesting. Rapidly made stuff seems better at first than slow, steady updates for a quest. That's what I found with MG.
Xantalos
Turtle-Speed Writing
I can corrobate this - I'm getting more discussion in my own quest ever since I started releasing what are basically short snippets of the turn results as I write them. Even though there aren't any participation options - which are what really drives it, I'll get into that in a bit - people still like to read it and comment and speculate and all that.
Quests are somewhat like web serials or webcomics from what I've seen - all of them have a different style of art and how the author creates it, all of them focus on different things as a matter of course, but as a general rule the ones that update frequently and have a lot of content are the ones that generate the most interest and discussion. Hell, just look at Paths of Civilization by Academia Nut or Dynasty of Dynamic Alcoholism by torroar in its heyday before life sunk its fangs into him. Their updates as a general rule aren't much over 2k words, but the feel of them are engaging and more importantly there's a lot of updates. People are drawn to that.
I have a tendency to write massive updates. 2k words would be small, the last major update was 10k. I'm going to be trying to split things into smaller updates in the future, but keeping the pace rapid enough doesn't only depend on updates.
I make a post with the rolls for the upcoming update.
There's a post in the middle of the vote with a table comparing the voting plans.
There might be secondary votes I hold after locking the first one.
Really short interludes that I have pre-written that I can post at any time.
Some quests that are less narrative can really keep things up by having regular turns. The best mixed narrative / empire quest example might be To Boldly Go, which has quarterly and yearly regular features that happen at the same point every in-quest year. You know that coming up will be the shipbuilding post, so it doesn't matter what's happening in the story or how long the QM is taking with the narrative, you can talk about shipbuilding.
In fact, that might be one of the benefits of the more mechanical systems that we haven't yet discussed in the thread: discussion of mechanics or of posted mechanical resolutions can keep things going while the QM works on writing.
I make a post with the rolls for the upcoming update.
There's a post in the middle of the vote with a table comparing the voting plans.
There might be secondary votes I hold after locking the first one.
Really short interludes that I have pre-written that I can post at any time.
Some quests that are less narrative can really keep things up by having regular turns. The best mixed narrative / empire quest example might be To Boldly Go, which has quarterly and yearly regular features that happen at the same point every in-quest year. You know that coming up will be the shipbuilding post, so it doesn't matter what's happening in the story or how long the QM is taking with the narrative, you can talk about shipbuilding.
In fact, that might be one of the benefits of the more mechanical systems that we haven't yet discussed in the thread: discussion of mechanics or of posted mechanical resolutions can keep things going while the QM works on writing.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
Honestly, simple readability is the cornerstone of quality IMO- sure, elegant and florid turns of phrase can have their place, but if the writing is unreadable for one reason or other, that doesnt matter.
- Location
- Somewhere!
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Character building seems to be the lowest hanging fruit, for this?
If you have anything of a skill system and XP buy, you're going to end up with a lot of competing plans for that, and it takes very little to throw out an 'update' that's just a list of training options in between arcs or when you're going to be late or something. I've never seen a quest that had that and didn't get at least a few competing plans and it seems to spike votes and discussion a little bit because there's more flexibility for arguments than like, votes on where to go next or what to do.
And it usually means you can list out options pretty easily, since you just list out your skills, so you don't get the write in problem where people are scared away from suggesting things?
I think it comes down that a quick quest is simply far easier to participate in as a player... It is easier to establish a emotional connection with the characters and most importantly keep up to date with the relevant information that is necessary for me to participate in the quest when you have a continuous stream of a new information. If you only update every other week most players have most likely have forgotten the majority of what happened before which basically means that they will have to invest a lot of effort in every single update which isn't that attractive. I mean the GM might spend most of his free time thinking about his quest but the average player will quickly forget about it.
I can only speak for myself but a quest competes with a large number of other activities for my attention and there is a limit for how much I am willing to invest into it.
- Location
- Pittsburgh PA USA
- Pronouns
- She/Her
One 'mechanic' that I have been contemplating as a way to get readers participating without actually needing to wait for their input before writing, is having multiple main characters but having the players vote which character they want to see some backstory or introspection or other 'icing scene' about. Then as a writer you can write some of these scenes for every character, reward te players with the one of their choice, and have the others in reserve for whenever you don't have time or inspiration to write more of the main story.
Talos
Has Completed: Three Quests
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Well, what I tend to of to keep things flowing in my own quest is to write a ton of omakes. Initially, this was mostly just because I had some free time and wanted to expand on the setting a bit, but it turned out really well because my players got invested in things and stories that they never would have seen with their limited point of view. Eventually, this even ended up with me merging the omakes into the story proper, and using them to show the players the results of their actions as they spread out and rippled through the game world. It lets the player see their agency actually effect and change things, making them feel powerful as a character within the setting at the same time as allowing me to colour in details that they wouldn't get on their own.
Of course, my update schedule is pretty regular anyway, while it's not quite every day, there are multiple updates a week, and that's in addition to the omakes, so it's a very rare day when the thread doesn't have some sort of activity to it. Generally, it pays just to keep things active.
Of course, my update schedule is pretty regular anyway, while it's not quite every day, there are multiple updates a week, and that's in addition to the omakes, so it's a very rare day when the thread doesn't have some sort of activity to it. Generally, it pays just to keep things active.
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ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
Might as well toss my hat into the ring, as I myself am an infrequent quest voter.
It's primarily because of disillusionment with the other voters, which itself was probably caused by both the experiences I've had in quests where people write-in exactly what to say, and various quests where it feels like the GM feels that in order to make a great quest or whatever, that they have to make their players micromanage.
The first frequently results in stilted dialogue, and people assuming what people are going to say in response to them, which feels really, really cringey, as I can speak from personal experience that it doesn't work like that. Micromanaging the character's voice also makes it feel like the voters are trying to force the GM to give them the cake and have them eat it, too, even if their choice happens to be wrong. The second causes way too much undue stress, and it drives me away from quests super fast.
It's primarily because of disillusionment with the other voters, which itself was probably caused by both the experiences I've had in quests where people write-in exactly what to say, and various quests where it feels like the GM feels that in order to make a great quest or whatever, that they have to make their players micromanage.
The first frequently results in stilted dialogue, and people assuming what people are going to say in response to them, which feels really, really cringey, as I can speak from personal experience that it doesn't work like that. Micromanaging the character's voice also makes it feel like the voters are trying to force the GM to give them the cake and have them eat it, too, even if their choice happens to be wrong. The second causes way too much undue stress, and it drives me away from quests super fast.
I think this honestly says a lot about my quests, I think. My readers can probably attest to the fact that my updates easily range from five thousand to ten thousand words.
EDIT: That, and - you know - not having written anything in a while.