Quests: A Growing Tutorial volume 1

Step 4: Tasks
What will you ask the Participants to do? How does this pertain to the quest?

There will always need to be some task for the participants to do. This could be something simple like solving a riddle of cryptography, but that is very common and beginning to get boring. More dynamic tasks such as finding a password and interacting with the RPC Items could be more interesting and personal for participants. If you included more RPCs in your quest, you could task them with obtaining an item that you will trade for something they want. Then they would have to find the RPC who has the Inventory item you want, and perform a trade that RPC wants in order to receive the item they need to bring back to you. This could be made into as large a cycle as you want. For example, in a quest I could ask a participant to obtain a carrot in order to receive my prize. The participant would need to find Metal Bunny who may require the participant to do a menial task like answer a riddle, or go get a medal from yrthilian, and so on. In this case, it is not feasible to disallow participants from working together, because they need to all be able to say they’re carrying the item together when only one has it realistically. It also works nicely for a solo quest that involves no other participants at all.

Now that you know the mechanics of your task, you can think about the contents. What item will you send the participant after? Why? Who will they need to go to for it? Have you asked the other RPC to help in some way? Fill in the little details that make the tale interesting. Your quests do not have to be little things that are separate mini-games for the realm. You can also make intricate quests that players find ways to take part in to help change the Realm. Please use extreme caution with these quests and talk to other RPCs about it if you don’t understand very well what you’re doing yet.