Your opinions on Questing.

[Random Member]

I think I've grown to hate the 1d100 roll system. Way too swingy. 5d20 seems better, but I think quests that use that system (well, other systems too tbh) should tool a bit more with their stat and bonus system. I want to see more negative modifiers when MC is bad at something, not get a +5 to a skill roll even though the Charsheet mentions that MC is supposed to be only Subpar at it.

Also, I hate hate hate hate hate write-in systems! They always devolve into questers thinking they can find a way to have their cake and eat it. Don't do write-ins.

 

[BOTcommander]

Eh, I think write-ins are fine. QMs just need to be more comfortable to veto options they don't like/try too hard/etc.

 

[Ralson]

I think I've grown to hate the 1d100 roll system. Way too swingy.

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Is there a specific system we're talking? Or just anything using a percentile die?

Presumably, a percentile is fine as long as people understand a 5% chance will happen one-in-twenty times. :B

 

[your sweetpea <3]

I think exploding dice are a bad mechanic. They can cause events to swerve in ridiculous ways, diffuse events or break the narrative. Largely it forces questmasters to contrive things for the aforementioned contexts when activated.

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Honestly this depends on the type of story your quest is -- I'm somewhat involved in a handful of TTRPG design communities and there's a strong consensus that exploding dice aren't bad, but you need to make sure they fit your game. The same is true of quests, IMO.

I don't like when quests end up constantly picking options that avoid all potential risk or get stuck in a loop of making number go up instead of doing something. It makes the story and the MC incredibly dull.

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Honestly I'd love to poke around and figure out what some good solutions for this are from a questmaster's perspective. Unfortunately questing is fairly obscure in general and it's a major commitment to run a quest so it's not cheap to experiment.

One thing I've noticed here and there is that for quests without any strong "vote leaders" who come in and make these big plans and get everyone else involved, just mentioning something last before the vote makes it more likely for people to address it in the vote in some way, but I suspect if your quest has a strong community and thus has these "vote leaders" you have to actually incentivize it mechanically.

One potentially "obvious" solution is to nix mechanical detriments from failures and have both successes and failures reward the player mechanically (having any detriments be narrative, rather than mechanical), but I'd need to play around with it to feel 100% comfortable with saying it wouldn't have major additional effects that might be undesirable (or if it would even actually work -- players might just tend to be risk-adverse even when failure isn't as bad...). And, of course, it would depend on the type of quest.

 

[Xantalos]

Honestly I'd love to poke around and figure out what some good solutions for this are from a questmaster's perspective. Unfortunately questing is fairly obscure in general and it's a major commitment to run a quest so it's not cheap to experiment.

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Red Flag's quest mechanics guide over on SB has a good solution to this, called evocative mechanics - basically, incentives given by the game systems to make the players act in accordance with the lore of their faction. Simplest example would be his ork (now Krork) quest, where the players get rewarded with increased loot, resource generation, population growth, etc, when they attack other factions, and punished with the inverse if they don't get into any fights for a while - in essence, they're rewarded with Number Go Up for acting like orks, and punished with Number Go Down if they try to turtle or play it safe.

This quickly had the players throwing out turn plans where they were waging multi-front wars every turn in order to maximize said gains - essentially, they acted like orks.

So the principle here is the same with any other thing - figure out what kind of behavior you want your questers to emulate, and then make a way to reward them when they do that, and punish them when they don't.

 

[NSchwerte]

Plan makers dont want to be seen as responsible for failure, which discourages risk taking.

If there is an action that gives 50 Resources 100% of the time and an action that gives 200 resources 50% of the time then the second action will be better on average, but half the time the plan taking the action will fail and reflect badly on the maker.

The people that advocated for the first, safe action will always get their victory, but the people preffering the second action will get a defeat half the time and having a plan fail is a way more intense feeling than having a plan win

 

[Ralson]

So the principle here is the same with any other thing - figure out what kind of behavior you want your questers to emulate, and then make a way to reward them when they do that, and punish them when they don't.

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This applies to all game design. Why even have a reward structure if it doesn't reward the stuff you want to see?

Plan makers dont want to be seen as responsible for failure, which discourages risk taking.

If there is an action that gives 50 Resources 100% of the time and an action that gives 200 resources 50% of the time then the second action will be better on average, but half the time the plan taking the action will fail and reflect badly on the maker.

The people that advocated for the first, safe action will always get their victory, but the people preffering the second action will get a defeat half the time and having a plan fail is a way more intense feeling than having a plan win

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Well, that's just human nature. If you give average people a choice between one million dollars, and a 50% chance of four million dollars, most people will take the former even though it's mathematically suboptimal. They want to receive a lifechanging amount of money, not maximize average benefits across all possible futures.

If anything, it's a positive sign that people care enough to display the sort of risk-aversion you get in real life. In a lot of games, people act like maniacs because they aren't invested enough to care about consequences. Think Space Station 13.

And yet, if SS13 was just a bunch of people standing around doing their space jobs, it wouldn't be as popular. So if you want to manage this, you can try making it more clear that there'll be more opportunities in the future, which will allow average bonuses to accrue. And you can force the issue by making it so they need to average more than 50 resources per choice to achieve long-term goals.

( I'd want to see more specific examples to comment more. A straight up "100% chance of 50 versus 50% chance of 200" isn't really something I'd recommend putting in a quest, but I understand that was just an example. :B )

 

[Artificial Girl]

I don't like it when players/readers try to be Very Clever and create perfect write in/plan votes that will avoid all possible risk and include every possible contingency in one massive wall of [X] Votes. It's dull and a lot of the time feels like a failure to engage with the material where it's at and treating it like a system to be gamed as hard as possible for optimum outcome instead of a collaborative storytelling format.

 

[Wootius]

Quest Runners/Writers/Masters/Whatever you call yourselves.

I am begging you. Begging. You.

Please, please, please, please, include the winning votes at the beginning of each new post. Especially in a narrative-heavy game it can be extremely difficult to determine what won sometimes. And if you make the results obtuse in the narrative, at least do those trying to catch up on your Quest the courtesy of making it easy to follow and understand the vote.

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this man quests. Easily one of the most frustrating things is to have to dig around to find out what won, especially if you're digging through an archive.

 

[Cetashwayo]

Yeah winning votes at the start of a post is something that QMs forget because they simply are not thinking of it from the POV of someone either binging or not paying as much attention. It's a massive quality of life improvement for readers.

 

[chocolote12]

I don't like it when players/readers try to be Very Clever and create perfect write in/plan votes that will avoid all possible risk and include every possible contingency in one massive wall of [X] Votes. It's dull and a lot of the time feels like a failure to engage with the material where it's at and treating it like a system to be gamed as hard as possible for optimum outcome instead of a collaborative storytelling format.

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It could be a response to previous experiences; you're given an open-ended vote and you don't specify everything and then it comes crashing down your ears because the QM had an entirely different idea of what you meant.

But also, it's explicitly a game to be played, and there is winning and losing; bad things happening to you is bad, and good things happening to you is good. You can't really denature that emotional instinct, and it's often intentionally cultivated. That's why the archetypical quest is written in the second person -- "You are the main character".

Players are simple organisms, and it's a mark of success that they view the world of the game in a very realistic sense. Deriding them for following their survival instincts is like neural-linking a plant up into an MMO and wondering why it only thinks about T H E S U N.

 

[Artificial Girl]

It could be a response to previous experiences; you're given an open-ended vote and you don't specify everything and then it comes crashing down your ears because the QM had an entirely different idea of what you meant.

But also, it's explicitly a game to be played, and there is winning and losing; bad things happening to you is bad, and good things happening to you is good. You can't really denature that emotional instinct, and it's often intentionally cultivated. That's why the archetypical quest is written in the second person -- "You are the main character".

Players are simple organisms, and it's a mark of success that they view the world of the game in a very realistic sense. Deriding them for following their survival instincts is like neural-linking a plant up into an MMO and wondering why it only thinks about T H E S U N.

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TBH a QM who uses votes as "trap" options or who decides that failing to account for every possible contingency means you get worst possible outcome is not a good QM.

I don't see bad things happening as losing, necessarily--sometimes there are setbacks and low points, otherwise high points aren't as high, the way I see it. If you do everything perfectly the whole way through, it's boring as fuck. And the wall of text voting plans are a pain in the ass to read.

 

[Derpmind]

It could be a response to previous experiences; you're given an open-ended vote and you don't specify everything and then it comes crashing down your ears because the QM had an entirely different idea of what you meant.

But also, it's explicitly a game to be played, and there is winning and losing; bad things happening to you is bad, and good things happening to you is good. You can't really denature that emotional instinct, and it's often intentionally cultivated. That's why the archetypical quest is written in the second person -- "You are the main character".

Players are simple organisms, and it's a mark of success that they view the world of the game in a very realistic sense. Deriding them for following their survival instincts is like neural-linking a plant up into an MMO and wondering why it only thinks about T H E S U N.

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Some quests lean really hard on the 'game' aspect, but I think quests work best if they're primarily a vehicle for storytelling. (And there are many different kinds of storytelling a quest can do.) A big focus on mechanical/"objective" winning and losing can be really detrimental to any kind of good narrative, since good storytelling requires both successes and failures, high points and low points... but a focus on 'winning' is especially bad because quests extremely rarely actually let you 'lose' permanently. Few authors will want to allow their story to end in a total failure. The desire to pick the most optimal choices and make the most successful plans is largely based on trying to match the story's challenges, but any desire to avoid actual loss is... miss-aimed, I think. Bad plans and bad rolls and, hell, even nasty trap options won't stop the story from continuing and a new update with a new vote coming around. A balance of successes and failure is essential, and that balance can only tip so far before any decent storyteller will turn things around to go somewhere else. Even in a quest like Divided Loyalties, which explicitly will end if the main character dies in combat, the author treats failures as a way to advance the narrative in unexpected directions, not as a way to deny shinies and numbers going up.

The real failure state for a quest is when the QM loses their enthusiasm/muse/free time for writing that quest. And that (almost always) has nothing to do with what players vote on.

 

[ArlequineLunaire]

I've wondered for a while now if stories like Heathers and Utena, i.e., stories where much of the plot revolves around the MC fucking up, could ever work as Quests. This is not to say Questers never fuck up, but when they do it's usually due to bad rolls rather than what makes the most interesting story. Like if either of those two had been Quests, chances are players would've refused to interact with JD or Akio in the first place, thus making for a completely different story if any at all (then again, a story working in one medium but not another is a perfectly natural thing)

If you're wondering why I used Heathers and Utena as examples specifically, it's because Persona: The Beautiful was inspired by the former and got compared to the latter, so I still kinda have both on the mind when it comes to Quests. P:TB was kinda tricky to run as a Quest, as the player character having limited agency was baked into its inherent concept, and sure enough the players kept trying to avoid the JD-inspired Akio-compared character as much as possible

This is part of why I made my latest project Revalkyrie a regular story instead of a Quest, because I wanted to have Charlotte make bad impulse decisions as fit her character, which players would keep trying to avoid in a Quest. Well, that and because I wanted to get back into writing standard fiction after a long while doing mostly Quests (I have considered making a spinoff Quest in the Revalkyrie setting though)

 

[Nyvis]

I've wondered for a while now if stories like Heathers and Utena, i.e., stories where much of the plot revolves around the MC fucking up, could ever work as Quests. This is not to say Questers never fuck up, but when they do it's usually due to bad rolls rather than what makes the most interesting story. Like if either of those two had been Quests, chances are players would've refused to interact with JD or Akio in the first place, thus making for a completely different story if any at all (then again, a story working in one medium but not another is a perfectly natural thing)

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Questers also react extremely poorly to anything bad happening. Doubly so if it's not because of a clear case of bad roll where you can blame the dices. Quests are more like playing a game (collectively) than reading a story and it really reflects on how people take setbacks (poorly).

One way to make things a bit better is to remove any stats (to turn off the maximizers from the get go) and make it clear there's no good options, just equally bad ones and the choice is in how you fail and bounce back, rather than punishment for a specific choice.

I've seen quests with very strong writing and light/no mechanics where the voters get that the character suffering setbacks is good for the story and how they develop, but they're the exception so it's always going to be risky running one of those.

 

[FelOnyx]

I've wondered for a while now if stories like Heathers and Utena, i.e., stories where much of the plot revolves around the MC fucking up, could ever work as Quests. This is not to say Questers never fuck up, but when they do it's usually due to bad rolls rather than what makes the most interesting story. Like if either of those two had been Quests, chances are players would've refused to interact with JD or Akio in the first place, thus making for a completely different story if any at all (then again, a story working in one medium but not another is a perfectly natural thing)

If you're wondering why I used Heathers and Utena as examples specifically, it's because Persona: The Beautifulwas inspired by the former and got compared to the latter, so I still kinda have both on the mind when it comes to Quests. P:TB was kinda tricky to run as a Quest, as the player character having limited agency was baked into its inherent concept, and sure enough the players kept trying to avoid the JD-inspired Akio-compared character as much as possible

This is part of why I made my latest project Revalkyrie a regular story instead of a Quest, because I wanted to have Charlotte make bad impulse decisions as fit her character, which players would keep trying to avoid in a Quest. Well, that and because I wanted to get back into writing standard fiction after a long while doing mostly Quests (I have considered making a spinoff Quest in the Revalkyrie setting though)

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Half-joking solution: mark certain votes as "bad decisions only." Fate has decreed the MC is going to be a dumbass today, have fun choosing how they do it.

 

[Grey Rook]

I'm not terribly fond of quests in general. It seems like every single one I've ever tried to read involves the players doing something incredibly stupid that, regardless of whether it ends the story, breaks my suspension of disbelief and prevents me from wanting to continue. Or poor communication between writer and players causes bad stuff to happen. Or the writer gets bored with the series and stops writing. 🤷‍♂️

 

[Nyvis]

I'm not terribly fond of quests in general. It seems like every single one I've ever tried to read involves the players doing something incredibly stupid that, regardless of whether it ends the story, breaks my suspension of disbelief and prevents me from wanting to continue. Or poor communication between writer and players causes bad stuff to happen. Or the writer gets bored with the series and stops writing. 🤷‍♂️

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A lot of quests would be better written if they were stories.

But then there wouldn't be nearly as much engagement (you need to be really good or in the right fandom to get activity on non interactive fiction) and the writers would stop even earlier. But it sometimes feel like a hack to get people to engage more than what you want to write.

But that's more genre locked, some quests work very well with the players' stumbling around, like civ quests.

 

[Mazeka]

A lot of quests would be better written if they were stories.

But then there wouldn't be nearly as much engagement (you need to be really good or in the right fandom to get activity on non interactive fiction) and the writers would stop even earlier. But it sometimes feel like a hack to get people to engage more than what you want to write.

But that's more genre locked, some quests work very well with the players' stumbling around, like civ quests.

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Don't some writers do that? QM a quest, and then write the results of that quest into a fic (sometimes concurrently)?

 

[Arcus]

"Choose your poison/choose negative consequence to not get" votes are good and we need more QMs that use them.

TBH a QM who uses votes as "trap" options or who decides that failing to account for every possible contingency means you get worst possible outcome is not a good QM.

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Rather than trap options, I would like there to be tradeoffs and problems regardless of which choice is picked.

In fact, as far as I'm concerned most QMs coddle their readers too much.

 

[Derpmind]

I'm not terribly fond of quests in general. It seems like every single one I've ever tried to read involves the players doing something incredibly stupid that, regardless of whether it ends the story, breaks my suspension of disbelief and prevents me from wanting to continue. Or poor communication between writer and players causes bad stuff to happen. Or the writer gets bored with the series and stops writing. 🤷‍♂️

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These are all solved problems:

1. Never give your players stupid vote options, (or worse, trap votes,) and outright veto stupid write-in votes and plans.
2. Have good communication with your players. Clarify things that people found confusing, encourage active communication, etc.
3. Completed Quests Catalog.

Or in other words, it sounds to me like the quests you've found so far have rather big flaws.

 

[BOTcommander]

I feel like as a QM you need to be very open as to what you are actually attempting with your quest, what you will allow and need to constantly assert that fact into the discussion, else wrong impressions develop. Your quest will attract a diverse set of readers with coming in with their own visions of what they might want to do/read and cultivating that audience goes a long way to not burn out I feel. Make it clear you welcome creative write-ins/requests, but assert your right to veto them and explain why from your perspective that genius plan might not work.

That does not mean it is not annoying when people still bring up 1000IQ Genius solutions to problems that have been discussed and discarded already and have been judged/declared nonfeasable or idiotic.

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

I'm not terribly fond of quests in general. It seems like every single one I've ever tried to read involves the players doing something incredibly stupid that, regardless of whether it ends the story, breaks my suspension of disbelief and prevents me from wanting to continue. Or poor communication between writer and players causes bad stuff to happen. Or the writer gets bored with the series and stops writing. 🤷‍♂️

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A lot of quests would be better written if they were stories.

But then there wouldn't be nearly as much engagement (you need to be really good or in the right fandom to get activity on non interactive fiction) and the writers would stop even earlier. But it sometimes feel like a hack to get people to engage more than what you want to write.

But that's more genre locked, some quests work very well with the players' stumbling around, like civ quests.

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Or in other words I think, Quests exist mostly as writing tools rather than games. Players enjoying themselves is purely secondary to the writer having a good time.

 

[Cetashwayo]

Or in other words I think, Quests exist mostly as writing tools rather than games. Players enjoying themselves is purely secondary to the writer having a good time.

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Plenty of quests make no sense as stories. I design some of my quests deliberately around player choice. Magna Graecia doesn't make sense as a story and neither does Kingdom of God. And this can be true of narrative quests as well, tbh.

 

[Nyvis]

Or in other words I think, Quests exist mostly as writing tools rather than games. Players enjoying themselves is purely secondary to the writer having a good time.

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Plenty of quests make no sense as stories. I design some of my quests deliberately around player choice. Magna Graecia doesn't make sense as a story and neither does Kingdom of God. And this can be true of narrative quests as well, tbh.

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Yeah this is important to note. My remark above does apply to some quests that feel like stories with extra step and more engagement. And this isn't bad thing. Both the author and questers get to have a more participative experience even if it can be narratively weaker than if it was a story.

But there are also a lot of quests that really aren't disguised stories, either because they're mechanically heavy or because they're really designed as playgrounds for the player base from the start.

I explicitly mentioned civ quests as an example. Those tend to be very far from stories. Some of those might work as an alternate history timeline or a piece written in the style of documentaries but that's often a pretty dry format.