Quests, ala Emerald Spire

[EisenKreutzer]

One of the things that caught my eye in Emerald Spire were the quests. The GM is supposed to hand out little quest cards whenever the players talk to the appropriate NPCs or discover certain things in the adventure.

Now, I'm normally not a fan of mechanics that brings pnp-rpgs closer to crpgs, but this one thing I think could be useful in pnp context. Instead of railroading players into the encounters and events you have planned, a quest card with the promise of xp could serve as an incentive to the players to explore the elements you have prepared.

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Obviously it's a bit meta, but id the players aknowledge this they could use the quest card as a springboard to roleplay their charaxters into the story, instead of the GM telling the players what they can and cannot do, which always felt wrong to me.

[stack]

Well, I play entirely by message board, so having a handy list of quests and plot hooks would be useful given the decompressed timeframe. I imagine it would be similarly helpful if there a great number of tasks that come up in a regular game to remind players after the interval between games.

[Kurald Galain]

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? Obviously it's a bit meta, but id the players aknowledge this they could use the quest card as a springboard to roleplay their charaxters into the story, instead of the GM telling the players what they can and cannot do, which always felt wrong to me.

My group tried them, and in my experience they had the opposite effect: instead of making characters roleplay into the story, the cards encouraged players to complete all sidequests (even the ones that were out of character to them) out of a sense of completionism or a desire for loot. Basically they stopped following the plot until we took away the cards.

[EisenKreutzer]

My group tried them, and in my experience they had the opposite effect: instead of making characters roleplay into the story, the cards encouraged players to complete all sidequests (even the ones that were out of character to them) out of a sense of completionism or a desire for loot. Basically they stopped following the plot until we took away the cards.

Thats really interesting, actually. I'll have to think some more about this.

[Psyren]

My group tried them, and in my experience they had the opposite effect: instead of making characters roleplay into the story, the cards encouraged players to complete all sidequests (even the ones that were out of character to them) out of a sense of completionism or a desire for loot. Basically they stopped following the plot until we took away the cards.

The solution there seems easy to me - put plot hooks in the side quests, even something as simple as a clue, piece of a larger puzzle, or getting to know a key NPC better. Basically, make it so that going on a sidequest does not cause them to "stop following the plot." The Giant does this in OotS - all of his sidequests either relate to the main plot in some way, or bring up important information about one of the characters that will eventually tie into the main plot.