The Quest’s the Thing

4E officially introduced the idea of a quest as a trackable thing for DnD, with definite rewards tied to their completion. Sure they have been around for a long time, and sure we have been tying rewards to them for a long time, but 4E actually put it in the rules. One of the suggestions that came with that was putting the quests on an index card, which I admit I haven’t done yet (slacker that I am). This brief article springs from that idea and a few other things that have been floating around my head recently.

When they suggested index cards I nodded along thinking that was a cool idea, but didn’t give it much more thought than that, and to be honest I haven’t felt the need to have them because I rarely have multiple quests going at once. That’s something I’ve been thinking to change as I look at the ideas for a new campaign and future developments for my existing campaigns. These ideas have been feuled by James Wyatt’s Dungeoncraft articles (Here and Here for DDI Subscribers), examining other systems such as Song of Ice and Fire RPG, Dragon Age Tabletop RPG, and most importantly Dresden Files RPG, by random twitter conversations and finally by discussion of the future of the Living Forgotten Realms campaign.

Then the other day I saw these: NPC Cards by @bensrpgpile (Picture | Download | Homepage). Now things have all clicked together for me, those NPC cards or something similar are a great way of handing out information to players! Rare is the item of information that is not tied to something you can give a picture for, and few quests are not tied to some NPC. So make them index card sized, put a picture of the NPC, or the Location, or the Quest Object on the card, and then put relevant information there: what the quest is, if it is major or minor, and a detail about the NPC etc.

Now you don’t just have a “Quest” card you have a little slice of your campaign setting that you can hand to your players and get them to look after and monitor. Something tactile for them to flick through and to trigger their memories about what is happening in the campaign and where they have been.

This relates then to rewards for quests. Quests are a great way to give out rituals, ritual components, and expendable items. Then you have rewards for the quest, but you can pretty much forget them in terms of the treasure of the party for keeping things on the level. (Of course I also give out level relevant magic items for quests as well.) But most importantly if you use quest cards you can start handing out non-gold rewards like favors and such that the players can use for one time bonuses in games or to turn that skill check in the town into a success and so on, even 1 time discounts on items, or with the forthcoming Rarity based magic items to be able to buy an uncommon item of choice and so on. So many things you can do with them, and they are all easily tracked by the players if you are handing out these quest cards.

The trick then is not to go crazy on the quests that hand out non-treasure rewards, otherwise they will loose track of what they have (because they will have heaps). You want 1 or 2 per PC and 1 or 2 for the party as a group. Remember these are complete quests. As they use up their non-treasure rewards then you can add more. Using the LFR idea of level bands I would consider 1 party quest per level, and 1 PC quest per 3 levels as a good average figure for non-treasure rewards. So levels 1-3 would have 4 party rewards, and each PC would get 1 of their own, then levels 4-6 would do similar.

Now while I haven’t implemented this for my games yet, as I gear up for my next excursion with the Red Box and DnD Essentials this is the ideas I’ll be taking into the games. So hopefully I’ll be able to come back and let folks know how it is working out.