Handling "Expansion Pack" Style Side Quests

[SovelsAtaask]

In a PbP game that I'm about to start I have a Player Suggestion thread, and one of my potential players suggested doing something like working in "Expansions" like Fallout New Vegas has. Quests that could be used as "genre shifts" and tell stories that wouldn't really fit in with the main plot or world.

I actually really like this idea, but have no idea how to work it in. Some players will be against the idea of tossing in things that don't fit and getting into long side quests, and some like the person who suggested it love the idea. I had the idea of running these "Expansions" as sort of sub-games, give it it's own folder and thread and allow players who want to to participate in these side quests independently while also keeping up with the main game. But if I did this, I'd have all sorts of issues like extra items and experience being gained, so how could I make this work?

[Bayar]

I have no idea how to make it work, but would make a good excuse to send your players on an "Expedition to the Barrier Peaks".

[SovelsAtaask]

I also have no idea how it'd work, but yeah stuff like Barrier Peaks is what I had in mind.

There was a huge magical disaster in the past so I could handwave things as taking place in an alternate universe created by this event. That way I don't have to worry about characters dying, but I also don't want to give the players no sort of reward.

[Cosi]

Obviously, you should drop XP from those quests. I'd drop it in general, but whatever.

Having done that, make the mechanical rewards minor. Have the quests pay off in titles, or lands, or castles. Maybe even make the rewards things like access to unique teamwork benefits, which benefit the whole party even if only one person completes it.

[daremetoidareyo]

Does your campaign have any dream elements? If yes, you can run the expansions as forays into a coterminus plane of dreams. The players can bring all of their equipment into the dream, but they can only ever bring a single material item back into the main campaign from the expansion, and only once per level. Take it as a symbol of fate shining on them.

It's also a great excuse to do stuff with fey gangsters.

That is if the PCs want to play their main characters in the expansions.

If the PCs want to play different builds or test different personalities, just run the expansions as concurrent to the game world you are already in. This saves you the work of world building and helps you to do the really rewarding work of worldbuilding for your main campaign. Maybe the players run a detective agency on the side, investigating murders in the capital as a grimdark detective noir. Maybe the players want swashbuckling on the astral plane robbing rich psions as they travel in astral caravans.


or maybe the players want more of "beach day episode," which you can totally run in your main campaign by introducing the concept and telling them the rules:all conflict must be squashed using beach festivities and possibly cheating at them, beach day is over after the big race and luau and the "king and queen of the beach" are named.

[ATHATH]

+1 to dreaming. I did it once, and it was actually quite nice.