Questing

Traditionally we score achievement in the form of treasure looted and enemies defeated. In this post I will argue that we should broaden our scoring to include player-determined quests, and present a procedure for acquiring and scoring quests.

Why quests? Literary progenitors

Money and victory in combat are great, tried-and-true objectives, worthy of scoring. Low-tier pulp fantasy heroes constantly pursue these ends -- Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, Conan as a young man, Cugel when he isn't under duress, Satampra Zeiros.

A pile of gold bullion, a noble goal!

Money and victory in combat should always be scored. They're always useful. When you get money or win a fight, you're always winning at life in these stories.

But any fan of pulp fiction will notice that money and victory in combat are far from the only objectives in pulp fantasy. Protagonists in the mid-tier and up have larger goals. Some examples:

  • Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser at the end of their career, defending Rime Isle
  • Gastel Etzwane from Durdane, seeking to free humanity from alien oppression
  • Conan as an adult, who consciously seeks power rather than a paycheck
  • Corwin from Amber, going after the throne
  • Jirel of Joiry has various goals, none focused on money
  • Clark Ashton Smith's protagonists often want sorcerous power for its own sake, not to get rich. Or they want revenge
  • Elric wants enlightenment and peace of mind, or to save the world
  • Skafloc and Valgard from The Broken Sword want power, vengeance, belonging

None of these goals can be encapsulated by victory in combat + loot raided.

So I think we ought to score quests if we want to play pulp fantasy heroes, because pulp fantasy heroes often went on quests.

Why quests? Game concerns

If we only score victory in combat and loot raided, the game gets silly as it moves into high tiers.

First, characters require ever-expanding piles of gold to progress. Like stupid amounts of gold. A fighter who reaches level 14 in B/X will have looted something like 0.2% of all the gold in the world, including gold that has never been mined. They will have looted 420 imperial tons of gold. In 2025 USD, that's $36 billion. Do you want your characters to be billionaires?

(You can maaaaybe fix this by going to the silver standard. If we convert gold to silver, and cut down coin weights by 1/10th, we wind up with $360 million. That's a lot of money to loot, but maybe it's not too much in your opinion.)

Moreover, if characters are only scored on looting and killing, the character of the game should never change, even as the characters progress. If they're smart, they'll just be dungeon-crawling their whole careers, because nothing else is nearly as lucrative. (Players may decide to join the domain game anyway, but they'll be playing sub-optimally if they do that; the rewards are not commensurate with the risk. To be very clear about my argument, I'm going to say that the rewards should be increased, because the domain game should not be a sub-optimal choice.) There's nothing wrong with dungeon-crawling, but if we're never going to do anything else, we don't need to bother with all this complicated progression stuff.

(Again, to be clear, I think players will do activities other than dungeon-crawling; I have seen and done this myself. But when we do this, whether we know it or not, we're playing sub-optimally, because our activities aren't scored. Since these activities (the domain game, personal vendettas and alliances, relationships with NPCs, powerful magics and artifacts) are fun and challenging, they should be scored. They should not be, mathematically, sub-optimal.)

So I think we ought to score quests to reduce the absurd amounts of money in the game, and to allow play to genuinely evolve as it goes on.

How to quest

First, notice an opportunity for a quest, and declare it. This is very simple: say, "I will go on a quest to X". When you say this, you're saying, "This is very important to my character. They are vowing, publicly or privately, to X." (This may or may not come with a social penalty for failure.) When you say this, you become a primary quest-holder for the quest. A single quest may have multiple primary quest-holders.

We may simply accept the quest as it stands, or we might ask you to roll to see if you have successfully declared a quest; maybe 2/6, with bonus dice for a high wisdom or charisma, or if the quest is especially fitting for your character. Penalty dice if you're already on a quest.

While you're on a quest, you get -20% to all other sources of XP, until you complete the quest or give it up. This penalty is cumulative; if you are on two quests, you get -40% to your XP from sources unrelated to either quest, and -20% XP for the first quest you complete.

You can give up a quest at any time, without any further formal penalty. (You might have a social penalty, if you've made a public vow.)

When you complete a quest, the quest is scored, depending on its complexity and level:


Complexity is a number between 1 and 5, depending on how many sessions of focused work the quest took to complete. Complexity 1 is a single-session quest, while complexity 5 spans many months of real play.

The quest level is determined the same way dungeon level is determined: eyeball the average HD of enemies encountered on the quest and the character skill needed to complete it.

Half of the quest XP goes to the primary quest-holder(s). The other half is divided among everyone who participated in the quest, including the primary quest-holder(s), as usual. (So NPCs get a half-share, etc.)

Example quest

This is a real example of play, with a few details added and tweaked to show the subtleties of the questing rules.

Last week my paladin declared a quest to exterminate some undead in a basement. It's extremely appropriate for him, so I didn't have to roll to declare the quest. He shared the quest with one other character.

On the way to the basement, he ran into some bandits. The party drove off the bandits. My paladin and the other primary quest-holder only got 80% of their normal share of XP from this fight, because they were on a quest, but everybody else got full points.

I didn't know how tough the enemies were in advance, or exactly how many there were. Turned out it was 12 zombies at 2 HD. This was a simple quest, just 1 session, so it had complexity 1. It's appropriate for level 1 characters. Thus the quest was scored at 2000 points. At the end of the quest, the two primary quest-holders (my paladin and another guy) got 500 points each. Then we divided the remaining 1000 XP between everyone who had participated in the quest, 5 characters including the two primary quest-holders, coming out to 200 points apiece. So my paladin walked away with a cool 700 XP. Not bad!

After finishing the quest, he found a valuable necklace in the zombie's tomb. He got a full share of XP for the necklace, because he had already finished the quest.

Acknowledgements

I owe this concept of questing, and the specific scoring rules, to Eero. The 20% penalty (instead of Eero's normal 10%) comes from Tschesae. Thanks!

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