Quests: A Growing Tutorial volume 1

Quests: A Growing Tutorial volume 1 What sort of things can you offer as prize to those who complete your quests?

This is an important first thing to consider. What sort of reward you have available to offer should influence the quest you create. Common rewards can come with relatively simple quests, whereas rarer, more exclusive rewards should not come as frequent or easily. For instance, a low-level spell document (say 1 or 2) is roughly common knowledge of the spell and should be available often with relatively low amounts of difficulty. In contrast, a high level spell document (5 or 6) should not be as easy to obtain. Quests for it could be rare, extremely difficult, or a combination of the two if you prefer.

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In the figure above, some common quest rewards are grouped to show rough equivalence of difficulty. Of course, some spells have more levels than others, so their difficulty by level will range a little more sporadically than shown here. With Inventory items now available to the Realm, it is possible to create some legacy item of your own and have it as a reward for a quest that someone can then learn to roleplay with. This would definitely need a more difficult quest to achieve.

Note that also telling people what they can expect as a reward is a great motivation for them to try to complete your quest. Of course, an element of surprise can be fun and exciting as well if you have the means to give extra rewards!

Step 2: Roles What is your role? How can you use a variance of that?

Your role is important for determining what sort of quests make sense for you to create. I am the Master Archivist. I make quests such as gathering people to complete the Archives Mansion, and quests for hidden information. SmartAlekRJ, on the other hand, is the Drachorn Master. It wouldn't make sense for him to create a quest to complete the Archives Mansion, but if the "hidden information" pertained to the little people or drachorns he governs, then the quest could work. Instead, he mostly creates quests for people to solve some sort of puzzle and rewards them with a drachorn. Khalazdad the Balanced may not find information about RJ's little people so profound, but instead new discoveries about magic and happenings of the Light will perk his interest. He also is one many people would go to in order to try to enter Necrovion.

Of course, sometimes a role can be very specific and too narrow to create an easy quest from. Not to mention, your quests could become repetitive if you use the same excuse every time. Here's where you would use another aspect of your role that is somehow connected to make it sound more real and interesting. An example is RJ seeking information on his Little People. It is not directly correlated to his Drachorn Mastery. Or, with the example of simplyzero the Ferryman, the quest could be about his encounter with the Deathmarrow instead of always "will you ferry me across the water to x land?" How you choose to use a variation of your role is up to you and by no means a concrete science. Like the entire process of creating a quest, it's a flexible choice.

Step 3: Collaboration What sort of other elements are available for you to collaborate with?

You can easily create a little quest where it's just you, your puzzle, and a participant trying to answer, but that is hardly any fun. A generally good idea is to get as many elements involved as you can. We can make this into a coordinate system that explains how we move by introducing new elements into the quest. The three axes are for increasing the number of: RPCs, participants, and tasks. The axis for the tasks can be peculiar depending on the difficulty, so we'll say more tasks ~ more difficulty.

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In a quest, there many ways to do it. The most common quest is at the origin for RPCs and Participants, but maxed out in Tasks. There is only one RPC; the participants are not allowed to work together and share answers; but, the task is either one extremely difficult one, or several moderately difficult ones. Much less common is many RPCs and only one task/participant. Almost nonexistent is many participants working with one RPC for one thing. When I say one participant, I mean they cannot work as a group. It is a solo quest. A good idea is to try to balance this axis, although purposely leaving out one of the axes could make an interesting quest. Use your imagination to expand the elements as you can. Inventory items can be counted as RPCs or Participants depending on your outlook.

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.

Step 5: Connecting the Dots Have you thought of everything? Is there anyone else that can help you?

There is always more you can do to make your quests more interesting. This tutorial is still growing and not all-inclusive. If you think of something you can add, try it out and let us know what happens! Communication between the RPCs is extremely necessary.

One thing to try to come up with ways to address is cheating. People cheating on quests can be a real problem for quests that do not allow participants to work together. Know that if you are found to be helping participants cheat on another RPC's quest, severe consequences such as demotion and possibly stripping of powers and/or ban may be in store for you.

Another thing is lining your quest up with the Realm. I can help you with that, and I'm fairly easy to contact. Just come to me if your quest possibly addresses a new aspect of the Realm that most people don't know about. This is a personal request because the Archives have trouble keeping up with conflicting stories. We do have a central story that quests do not always accurately address. Please consider this when you make a quest.

Try and make your quests fun, and possibly have opportunities built into them where players could gain a role.

Vol. 2 of this tutorial will be available as soon as more ideas and examples are available.