I'm just planning out my first attempt at DMing a 4th edition campaign. I've mapped out a roughish story covering the heroic tier and fleshed out the first few levels. In general, it's pretty easy to design encounters (though I'm not so confident as to how my skill challenges are going to play out...we'll see).
Where I am struggling though is in deciding which story seeds are worthy of the title "major quest" or "minor quest" and which are just adventure hooks the players may or may not take. I don't like to plan purely linear story arcs so when designing an adventure my preference is for a variety of options which I expect my players to take some but not all of. My concern is that, if I allocate each hook an experience point reward I will somehow be sending a message that I 'expect' each of these to be completed (or at least that they're somehow integral to the campaign story).
I've toyed with the idea of limiting the number of quests that can be completed each level - so if the players discover three quests at a time, they can only achieve the rewards for one of them, namely whichever one appeals to them the most. Alternatively assigning a time limit to each quest making it a practical impossibility to complete all of them.
Has anyone else struggled with this? Any old-hands have any advice they might be able to share?
Don't tell them which are minor and which are major? 4E generally assumes a level of transparency, but if you want it to remain hidden, then the PCs should hopefully be able to judge for themselves which are more earth-shattering than others.
If you anticipate the quest being vital to advancing the plot of your campaign (even if the plot isn't necessarily hammered down to begin with), the quest should be major.
If the quest(s) can be ignored safely without significantly altering the plot of the campaign, minor quests are the way to go.
Do the PCs need or expect to know that these adventure hooks are quests? In a non-linear game like you describe, I would personally work out the rewards for all the hooks, but I wouldn't necessarily let the players know that these rewards exist until they had completed the quests these hooks lead to.
If you are using some kind of handout/quest cards for the players to keep track of which quests they are on, then you could either leave the information about the rewards off the cards, or not give them the card until you judge they have committed themselves to following up on that particular hook.
I'm just planning out my first attempt at DMing a 4th edition campaign. I've mapped out a roughish story covering the heroic tier and fleshed out the first few levels. In general, it's pretty easy to design encounters (though I'm not so confident as to how my skill challenges are going to play out...we'll see).
Where I am struggling though is in deciding which story seeds are worthy of the title "major quest" or "minor quest" and which are just adventure hooks the players may or may not take. I don't like to plan purely linear story arcs so when designing an adventure my preference is for a variety of options which I expect my players to take some but not all of. My concern is that, if I allocate each hook an experience point reward I will somehow be sending a message that I 'expect' each of these to be completed (or at least that they're somehow integral to the campaign story).
I've toyed with the idea of limiting the number of quests that can be completed each level - so if the players discover three quests at a time, they can only achieve the rewards for one of them, namely whichever one appeals to them the most. Alternatively assigning a time limit to each quest making it a practical impossibility to complete all of them.
Has anyone else struggled with this? Any old-hands have any advice they might be able to share?
I don't run any games so take this with however a big grain of salt you like, but this is the impression I got in going over the rulebooks:
A major quest would be the primary reason why the adventurers doing whatever it is they are doing. i.e. rescuing the princess, defeating the dragon or bandit gang that plagues the country-side, etc.
A minor quest would be some incidental goal that could be accomplished in the course of achieving the major quest. i.e. also rescuing the handmaiden that was taken when the princess was taken, or the freeing the other prisoners the captors might have taken, retrieving some item that was stolen by the dragon/bandits, exacting revenge on some villain who happens to be in cahoots or an integral part of the plague on the contry-side.
Another way to think about it in terms of story, major quests = your primary plot. Minor quests = side-plots.
I hope my spin on things helps in some way.
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I agree with an early poster, I wouldn't go out of your way to tell your players that they are on a quest. Of course they are on a quest, they are adventurers, but unless there are ten of them on a cross country trek to whip some jewelry into a volcano, rarely is the end goal so clear when one starts.
Looking at the main adventures that have been released to date, typically there are multiple "major quests" that have the same resolution. As I read them, I understood it to mean "here are some ways to bring them into the sequence of events." Not that they would be writing in their journal that they were on the "Free the queen" quest.
Typically you might have one quest that is: "City is concerned about the strange doings up at the sinister looking abandoned tower" and "your mentor is worried that his son hasn't returned with his merchant caravan from that next town over just under the shadow of that sisister looking abandoned tower."
The point being to get the players into the tower, where they may find evil cultists threatening the town, and the merchants son alive/dead as a sacrifice to their demon patron.
If they stop the cult and save the son, or return with word, they shouldn't received the XP reward for both quests. Maybe the treasure reward, but you should plan to place 1-2 treasure packages with the town, and maybe one with the boy's father. Since the players may not meet the father before they go to the tower, having found his identifiable remains, they may choose to return to town and let the man know, in which case he is sad, but still grateful, but if they just ignore the remains, then they miss a chance at some treasure (quests as a moral fist or what.)
The point being that experience is an abstraction of what you learned in your travels, and your skills getting better. Having explored the creepy tower you now know more about death cults and booby traps, survival and enduring hardship. Your not twice as knowledgeable because two people told you to go in, just like you wouldn't get twice the experience for killing a monster if two people hired you to do it (but you could get twice the gold reward when you return with proof of your success.
So don't worry so much about identifying specific hooks as major and minor, but identify the string of encounters they setup and identify those as major and minor, that way you make sure you don't double the XP reward for that encounter set.
And certainly don't identify before they act that this is a major or minor quest.
Okay now I'm just getting wordy, but here is a thought that popped into my head, if your players talk to a bar maid and she feeds them the hook, and then you as the DM announce "The bar maid has offered you a major quest" or "the bar maid has offered you a minor quest" which hook are they more likely to follow, and would you rather the players investigate because they (and their characters) are intrigued, or because their is more experience?
At the end when you do experience and session wrap up, I might be inclined to say "And for thwarting the evil cultists of the creepy tower you get 720 experience" Just so they correlate "I did something heroic so I got xp" This leaves it more open if they go off script and do something really cool, you can say to yourself "that as a whole is a major quest" and grant some adhoc xp.
Anyways some of this is just stylistic opinion, but it helps to have a few perspectives sometimes.
Thank you all for the comments. I think I'll have to learn on the fly somewhat, but it's good to have some kind of an expectation as to how they'll pan out. Given the expected loosely structured plot, I'm thinking I'll probably abandon a formal quest structure except for the most obvious/critical (ie major) things.
I might start out with no experience rewards for minor quests and add them in later if they seem warranted. It's always easier to give the players something than take it away once they're used to it.
Thank you all for the comments. I think I'll have to learn on the fly somewhat, but it's good to have some kind of an expectation as to how they'll pan out. Given the expected loosely structured plot, I'm thinking I'll probably abandon a formal quest structure except for the most obvious/critical (ie major) things.
I might start out with no experience rewards for minor quests and add them in later if they seem warranted. It's always easier to give the players something than take it away once they're used to it.
This might well work best for you. In the end the quest cards are a convention meant to ease play by focusing players on the story. Very useful if you have players that are either bouncing off the flavor text or players that show up on game night asking "What are we doing again?" then these might be the way to go.
Also if your offering lots of options this can be a handy way to make the options on the table very clear to the players (too much choice can confuse them) but in the end none of this is vital.
I'll be using them heavily next time I DM because I've seen the downsides of to much choice confusing the players as to their goals but lots of DMs don't have that problem.