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The newest from the 4th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide
For those with care to link:
Now, I can hear the old timers quibble: “Come on, Stephen, quest XP is nothing new, I’ve been doing it for years.” And if you quibble thusly, you’d be right. Almost every D&D campaign out there grants a bit of bonus XP for completing story objectives, and this has been going since the first time a gamer lifted a d20 and stared at it in glossy-eyed wonder. The big difference between 4th Edition and older D&D editions is that we designed it into the game; it’s not just an afterthought, an ad hoc idea, or a suggested house rule. We actually took into account that people already do this, then gave better guidelines on how to do it well, and crafted the numbers behind character advancement with quests in mind.
Dungeons & Dragons is both a combat game and a storytelling game. Fighting foul beasts and despicable villains is fun. The grand majority of pages in our rulebooks give you the means and the toys you need to play that part of the game. Storytelling by its nature is more fluid, more natural; it has few (if any) hard and fast rules, but many guidelines and points of advice. While D&D abounds with levels, powers, shifts, opportunity attacks, effects that push, ongoing damage, and grabs, it also features heroes (or, soft-hearted scoundrels) who take chances to achieve goals that we can only dream of doing and in ways that are only as boundless as our imagination. It’s purely in the realm of action adventure. And when action and story fuse perfectly, it’s gaming ambrosia—the perfect way to spend an afternoon with friends.
Quest XP, and the idea of quests as benchmarks for rewards in a larger sense (the story chapter ends where characters gain a pile of rewards in the form of XP, treasure, favors, titles, castles, whatever) is a rare, evocative, satisfying, and natural way for those two aspects of the game to talk to one another directly.
Quests also serve as the DM’s dangling carrot. Not only do they say “fun lies this way,” now they also point to rewards with some amount of transparency. People like to have an idea of the rewards they will get for tasks… or at least the minimum rewards. Your players are no different. Quests are a way in which they’ll have a basic idea of the minimum rewards for what they do, and they’ll appreciate it. You’ll find this very handy if you create a more sandbox approach to quests. Throw a few of them out there, and see which ones they bite at. Using quests in this manner allows you to make your world seem larger than it really is, and let your players make more choices for their characters, encouraging them to invest themselves even further in your creation.
XP Evolutionary Dead Ends
Quest XP is one of the newest evolutions in how PCs gain experience in D&D, but it didn’t get to this point without some other experience point ideas dying off. Let’s take a quick look at three XP evolutionary dead ends that got us where we are today.
Treasure Worth = XP
Isn’t treasure supposed to be its own reward? The problem in early D&D is that it wasn’t. In fact you couldn’t do a whole lot with treasure except for accumulate it and gain XP from it. That’s right; you gained XP just for picking up a gold piece. To be fair, how much you gained was based on how much challenge the treasure’s guardian represented, but a simpler method is to place the challenge XP fully in the guardian (in 4th Edition, this means the monsters, traps, hazards, or skill challenge) and let wealth be the reward wealth is by its very nature—purchasing power.
The Teeny, Tiny, Micro Story Reward
Back in my early days of the RPGA (2nd Edition AD&D), we used to get “story rewards” for the craziest things. Did you talk to the mayor? Gain 10 XP! Did you pick the flower that the mayor told you not to pick? 15 XP! Did you buy a pickle from the vendor on the Avenue of Swords? 25 XP! These story rewards were so pointless, small, and absolutely endemic that you would spend large chunks of the adventure talking to everyone you could just so you would get them all. These ideas were prevalent in a period of time where writers wanted to write wacky guess-what-the-writer-is-thinking stories, not sword and sorcery action stories, and pulled the PCs along a long line of encounters as “helpful” benchmarks. The problem was that it didn’t feel like D&D. This was especially true when you played through adventures based on the lyrics of 70’s pop songs or adventure where you got to play characters that were magic items, children, or furniture (I’m not joking).
The Roleplaying Reward
I’ve seen a lot of games (both in early RPGA and home games) that gave XP for good roleplaying. By good roleplaying do I mean the quality of your character acting? The problem with the roleplaying reward is this: You’re almost always going to give out the maximum to everyone at the table. Why? Because telling someone that they didn’t do a good job of roleplaying in a game where everyone is there to have fun seems overly judgmental, can create hurt feelings, and is… well… just downright crappy. It’s also so very meta and arbitrary that it begs questions about other forms of bonus XP. Why not give similar bonus XP for rule knowledge? Playing well with others? Bringing the most snacks?
--Stephen Radney-MacFarland
Quests are the fundamental story framework of an adventure—the reason the characters want to participate in it. They’re the reason an adventure exists, and they indicate what the characters need to do to solve the situation the adventure presents.
The simplest adventures revolve around a single quest, usually one that gives everyone in the party a motivation to pursue it. More complex adventures involve multiple quests, including quests related to individual characters’ goals or quests that conflict with each other, presenting characters with interesting choices about which goals to pursue.
Using Basic Quest Seeds
When you’re devising a simple adventure, one to three basic seeds are enough to get you started. A classic dungeon adventure uses three: The characters set out to explore a dangerous place, defeat the monsters inside, and take the treasure they find. One simple quest can be enough, such as a quest to slay a dragon.
You can combine any number of basic seeds to create a more multifaceted adventure. The more seeds you throw in the mix, the more intricate your adventure will be. You might add timing elements to one or more of the seeds to create more depth in your adventure.
Once you have your seed or seeds, you can start getting specific. Go back and answer the questions in “Components of an Adventure” on page 100, keeping your quest seeds in mind. Again, you don’t need to follow any particular order. You might come up with a set of monsters you want to use first, you might invent a cool place or item, or you might choose a seed or three. You can then use Chapter 4 and the “Adventure Setting” section of this chapter to help flesh out your adventure.
Major Quests
Major quests define the fundamental reasons that characters are involved. They are the central goals of an adventure. A single major quest is enough to define an adventure, but a complex adventure might involve a number of different quests. A major quest should be important to every member of the party, and completing it should define success in the adventure. Achieving a major quest usually means either that the adventure is over, or that the characters have successfully completed a major chapter in the unfolding plot.
Don’t be shy about letting the players know what their quests are. Give the players an obvious goal, possibly a known villain to go after, and a clear course to get to their destination. That avoids searching for the fun—aimless wandering, arguing about trivial choices, and staring across the table because the players don’t know what to do next. You can fiddle with using another secret villain or other less obvious courses, but one obvious path for adventure that is not wrong or fake should exist. You can count on the unpredictability of player actions to keep things interesting even in the simplest of adventure plots.
Thinking in terms of quests helps focus the adventure solidly where it belongs: on the player characters. An adventure isn’t something that can unfold without their involvement. A plot or an event can unfold without the characters’ involvement, but not an adventure. An adventure begins when the characters get involved, when they have a reason to participate and a goal to accomplish. Quests give them that.
Minor Quests
Minor quests are the subplots of an adventure, complications or wrinkles in the overall story. The characters might complete them along the way toward finishing a major quest, or they might tie up the loose ends of minor quests after they’ve finished the major quest.
Often, minor quests matter primarily to a particular character or perhaps a subset of the party. Such quests might be related to a character’s background, a player goal, or the ongoing events in the campaign relevant to one or more characters. These quests still matter to the party overall. This game is a cooperative game, and everyone shares the rewards for completing a quest. Just make sure that the whole group has fun completing minor quests tied to a single character.
Sometimes minor quests come up as sidelines to the main plot of the adventure. For example, say the characters learn in town that a prisoner has escaped from the local jail. That has nothing to do with the main quest. It pales in importance next to the hobgoblin raids that have been plundering caravans and seizing people for slaves. However, when the characters find and free some of the hobgoblins’ slaves, the escaped prisoner is among them. Do they make sure he gets back to the jail? Do they accept his promise to go straight—and his offer of a treasure map—and let him go free? Do they believe his protestations of innocence and try to help him find the real criminal? Any of these goals can launch a side quest, but clearly the characters can’t pursue all of them. This situation gives them the opportunity to roleplay and make interesting choices, adding richness and depth to the game.
Ah, see, this is exactly the kind of thing the DMG has always needed, but did not often get.
I've very glad to see that Quests are being introduced in to the rules themselves based upon the way we have always played the game and that they are being explained in a very good fashion in the DMG so that new DM's can learn how to do them well.
I also like his discussion on the previous ways to earn Xp, and some of the pitfalls involved in them. Roleplaying XP has always given me the trouble he describes.
I rarely if ever give it out, because that kind of thing really favors the drama majors among us, while punishing the shy and quiet folks at the table. It's strange, gaming is a wonderful way to bring shy people out of their shells, but that can't be done if everyone else at the table is compeating for the Biggest Over Acting Award of the Year.
It's good to see an XP reward for roleplaying that advances the story and doesn't depend on how often Sir Chandler Wiggleworth's player breaks character and calls the Elrond the Green Wizard 'Dave'.
I've always been a proponent of doling out RP XP for great character-acting, as well as "Quest Completed" XP. The problem was that depending on how much the players did, they could take many more sessions to complete an adventure, and thereby get more XP than they probably should.
Anyway, I wasnt bothered by the idea of quest cards. I run two games bi-weekly, so it helps for the players to have an obvious reference to the overall goal. Also, its great for the guy who misses a session, which happened last Age of Worms game when the party forgot the exact reason why they went to the Spire of Long Shadows. Having a card isnt much different then a player jotting some notes on her character sheet, anyway.
What I'm really happy about is that its no longer just a suggestion that a lot of people clamor for: every player I've known (online and off) loves the idea of getting rewarded for doing a great job in-character, and also for wrapping up an adventure or smaller campaign. There's no such thing as too much XP.
Now, its built into the rules. People dont need to worry about if they are giving out too much or too little, which is especially good for novice DMs.
It's cool to develop Quests as part of the rules themselves rather than an option that would throw off XP balance in the game.
The basic implication of handing Quests to PC (here: that's the direction you want to go) really brushes me the wrong way. That's not the type of gaming I like. I prefer to investigate on my own, to find out what's important and what's not by using my brains, rather than being told "this way's the right way to complete the adventure".
I'm perfectly aware this is still possible to play the way I like by not revealing quests to players. This is not the default assumption the excerpt suggests to new players of the game though.
This IMO frames the action field of a tabletop RPG for newbies to the game. It makes it feel more like the "follow the yellow brick road" logic of quest triggers in computer RPGs. I don't like that aspect of it.
I'm perfectly aware this is still possible to play the way I like by not revealing quests to players. This is not the default assumption the excerpt suggests to new players of the game though.
This IMO frames the action field of a tabletop RPG for newbies to the game. It makes it feel more like the "follow the yellow brick road" logic of quest triggers in computer RPGs. I don't like that aspect of it.
I don't know, I get the feeling that they want you to use both kinds of quests.
From reading the excerpt I felt that main storyline quest should be glaringly obvious and a fairly liner path quest type, but the side quests are all the hidden, you have to find them to get them stuff.
That's how the escaped prisoner quest seemed, like if you went and toalked to the sheriff you could find out about the escaped criminal and how much the reward was, or if you asked a couple people in town, but that it wasn't a really obvious just from standing in the town square.
I don't think the quest idea means laying out a specific method of achieving a goal - I think it just lays out the goal. I also think that the players can define their own quests, to some extent. Basically, when the PCs learn that something needs to be done (whether or not they are interested in doing it, and whether or not they end up choosing to do it), it's a possible quest. The ones they decide to do, are the actual quests they can complete.
For the Age of Worms, some very early quests might have been:
- Investigate the Whispering Cairn
- Retrieve Alastor's bones
- Investigate Smenk ('cause we hates him, my precious)
- Earn enough money to get out of this #$^&$ town!
For GameMastery modules, the "quest" is the hook that brings the PCs into that adventure (and the various plot twists that change their course of action throughout). So for the Conquest of Bloodsworn Vale adventure, for example:
Major Quest: Go to Bloodsworn Vale and help/protect the road-building effort there so the road can be completed.
Minor Quests: Many of the individual missions in the adventure could be considered to be minor quests, while others might just be considered to be part of the major quest.
So if the PCs learn that Monster A has been attacking villagers, a child is missing from Farm B, and a merchant wants an escort to Town C, the PCs can decide what they want to do. Once they decide, that's the quest (until then, all these are still quests, just not ones they care about). And how they do it, that's up to them. But knowing that Monster A probably has treasure, Farmer B is poor but is related to someone important, and the merchant is willing to pay (some amount) for the escort, that's all information they would be able to get before deciding what quest they want to pursue.
Bella Sara Charter Superscriber
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It's cool to develop Quests as part of the rules themselves rather than an option that would throw off XP balance in the game.
The basic implication of handing Quests to PC (here: that's the direction you want to go) really brushes me the wrong way. That's not the type of gaming I like. I prefer to investigate on my own, to find out what's important and what's not by using my brains, rather than being told "this way's the right way to complete the adventure".
I'm perfectly aware this is still possible to play the way I like by not revealing quests to players. This is not the default assumption the excerpt suggests to new players of the game though.
This IMO frames the action field of a tabletop RPG for newbies to the game. It makes it feel more like the "follow the yellow brick road" logic of quest triggers in computer RPGs. I don't like that aspect of it.
It's easy enough to just use the quests as a tool and remove some of the transparency. If you and your players prefer to have the quests remain behind the scenes, I doubt it will break the game to remove the disclosure of the quest objective. Not all play groups (or players) respond to the same incentive, and for your players uncovering the quest on their own may be more rewarding and motivating than knowing up front what the reward is.
It's a tool, not a rule.
The basic implication of handing Quests to PC (here: that's the direction you want to go) really brushes me the wrong way. That's not the type of gaming I like. I prefer to investigate on my own, to find out what's important and what's not by using my brains, rather than being told "this way's the right way to complete the adventure".
I dont think its so much like that as more of a general purpose. In Spire of Long Shadows, for example, the players are supposed to go to Kuluth'Mar (ancient city of Kyuss) to dig up some information.
So, a quest card for this might just state the objective: go there and locate information. It shouldnt tell them exactly how to get there, where to go, and what to grab (for example, a book in the second basement level that is located in the southwestern-most room). They shouldnt even KNOW they are looking for a book, unless there is some way for them to know, in-game, that thats what they need to get.
I'm perfectly aware this is still possible to play the way I like by not revealing quests to players. This is not the default assumption the excerpt suggests to new players of the game though.
I think the article is basically saying that it makes for a handy reference to state out what the players are "supposed" to do, when its obvious. They shouldnt walk into a forest and get handed a card that says "Defend the merchants from kobolds", if there is nothing around to indicate as much. Even still, if they did see merchants getting attacked by kobolds, then its pretty blatant.
I also got the notion that you shouldnt reveal optional things that the players dont actually know about. You dont want to railroad the game by telling them where they need to go and how they should do it. Give them a goal, let them figure it out.
In general, if its something that a player could feasibly jot down on a character sheet, you might as well note it ahead of time.
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Yeah... again, we see a very watered-down version of the game shining through here. And it might actually be good for new players to know quickly and clearly what they're expected to do/be rewarded for doing. As for my circle of tenured gamers - such "cards" or obvious railroads are tracks from which we stay clear. I believe there is an art to GMing in a way that allows the context of the situation to drive options for the players, and a skill at handling PC intentions in a flowing story fashion. This art does not seem to be the default explanation of how to DM according to this new game. In fact, a part of good Gamemastery might get lost if replaced with the idea of bullseyes/cards/quests. The characters and the context of their environment and the idiom of the player's response should drive the player choices (at least in my games), not these unmistakable carrots - that's what I expect from video games, not tabletop dungeons and dragons.
Yeah... again, we see a very watered-down version of the game shining through here. And it might actually be good for new players to know quickly and clearly what they're expected to do/be rewarded for doing. As for my circle of tenured gamers - such "cards" or obvious railroads are tracks from which we stay clear. I believe there is an art to GMing in a way that allows the context of the situation to drive options for the players, and a skill at handling PC intentions in a flowing story fashion. This art does not seem to be the default explanation of how to DM according to this new game. In fact, a part of good Gamemastery might get lost if replaced with the idea of bullseyes/cards/quests. The characters and the context of their environment and the idiom of the player's response should drive the player choices (at least in my games), not these unmistakable carrots - that's what I expect from video games, not tabletop dungeons and dragons.
Well, you see a watered down game here. For me I just see a twist on a DM providing a prolonged adventure course, and then having a player take a few notes on who's who, what's where, and the overall goal.
I do like it when the GM can communicate what the players are expected to be doing via the storyline he crafts, but I've played in my share of games where the party essentially wandered about aimlessly, with few goals and fewer aspirations. Was it a failure of the players or the DM? Who knows? But some clear signs of "adventure here!" would surely have been appreciated then.
I suspect newer groups (and especially newer DMs) will like this section a lot.
Cheers! :)
I do like it when the GM can communicate what the players are expected to be doing via the storyline he crafts, but I've played in my share of games where the party essentially wandered about aimlessly, with few goals and fewer aspirations. Was it a failure of the players or the DM? Who knows? But some clear signs of "adventure here!" would surely have been appreciated then.
I suspect newer groups (and especially newer DMs) will like this section a lot.
Cheers! :)
The true usability of this is going to vary by the DM, the group, and even the adventures/campaigns in question. Some groups, new or veteran, might like this idea a lot. Some are already be doing this in one incarnation or other (ie, notes).
A campaign might have a lot of NPCs, locations, and goals that will require cards, notes, or lots of DM pestering about who that guy is, or where they were going again, or what they are looking for.Some adventures are pretty simple and straightforward. Some might seem that way on paper, but end up a little more complicated.
The fact remains that if you want to use cards, notes, a blog, or email to remind the players of this, you can (I email my group at the end of the session to tell them XP received, remind them whats going on so they have a reminder two weeks down the road, and even noteworthy treasure found in case one of them forgot to write it down/lost the loot-list).
If your group doesnt require these reminders for whatever reason, then dont. This doesnt appear to be a hardwired mechanic anymore than role-playing XP was in 3rd Edition.
I do like it when the GM can communicate what the players are expected to be doing via the storyline he crafts, but I've played in my share of games where the party essentially wandered about aimlessly, with few goals and fewer aspirations. Was it a failure of the players or the DM? Who knows? But some clear signs of "adventure here!" would surely have been appreciated then.
I suspect newer groups (and especially newer DMs) will like this section a lot.
Cheers! :)
The true usability of this is going to vary by the DM, the group, and even the adventures/campaigns in question. Some groups, new or veteran, might like this idea a lot. Some are already be doing this in one incarnation or other (ie, notes).
A campaign might have a lot of NPCs, locations, and goals that will require cards, notes, or lots of DM pestering about who that guy is, or where they were going again, or what they are looking for.
Some adventures are pretty simple and straightforward. Some might seem that way on paper, but end up a little more complicated.The fact remains that if you want to use cards, notes, a blog, or email to remind the players of this, you can (I email my group at the end of the session to tell them XP received, remind them whats going on so they have a reminder two weeks down the road, and even noteworthy treasure found in case one of them forgot to write it down/lost the loot-list).
If your group doesnt require these reminders for whatever reason, then dont. This doesnt appear to be a hardwired mechanic anymore than role-playing XP was in 3rd Edition.
I've used similar tactics while DMing, sending out recap emails along with treasure lists. As a player I like to keep a log in a notebook. Another player in my group enjoys keeping a shorthand list of names of anyone we meet for future reference. I've seen other players write down the results of powerful divinations, and then bicker over the precise wording for hours.
It's a strange game we play isn't it?
Anyway, suggestions on efficient ways to manage such information are appreciated, especially to the new guys.
Cheers! :)
An important factor is how into the game people get. Some people are casual players, or prefer action over other elements, and so arent terribly interested in names. Some people are just really bad with names in general.
Notes in some format are helpful to more than just DMs.