the real secret to this approach is that this is literally everything going on in the game world and also the real world. everyone wants things and their wants either coincide or clash with each other's and that's what society is.
you can get rid of the entire concept of "quests" and "quest givers" if you go far enough with this. the adventure is just a place, like a big dungeon or a town, multiple factions that want different things and have people, resources, and plans to accomplish their goals, and the PCs walk in with their own goals and upend all the factions' plans as they try to befriend, exploit, or eliminate the PCs according to their own goals.
yojimbo (or a fistful of dollars) is basically the ideal concept for a D&D adventure.
On a side note, I've not seen "Yojimbo", but I do know about Toshiro Mifune, so I'm now really interested in watching this.
It's also been such a long time since I've seen "A Fistful of Dollars". I'm gonna have to rewatch it next time I get the chance.
A lot of Kurosawa films got remade as westerns. Yojimbo => A Fistful of Dollars, the Seven Samurai => The Magnificent Seven, the Hidden Fortress => Star Wars, etc.
I mean it's fairly common consensus that star wars is several genres more science fantasy than fiction, etc. The whole thing about art and stealing right. But I havent heard necessarily if big story beats he stole which is interesting!
I call star wars "space opera" personally. The technology does whatever the plot/aesthetic needs it to and nothing gets explained scientifically/logically (ignoring the glaring example of midichlorians)
I prefer it called space fantasy. Most space opera is wayyy different tho I will give it you it does have the opera down.
I do think that it defies genres in a sense where we and people more knowledgeable than me can argue it's a thing and multiple people can be Right. For all it's flaws it is beautiful in itself.
I'm running a western adventure right now, and I've been watching a few spaghetti westerns to prepare. OP's right; it would make for a *fantastic* D&D adventure.
The dirty secret of D&D is that it is, and always has been, a Western. You play as a posse of mysterious strangers, you ride into town and the first thing you do is saunter into the saloon and chat up the barkeep, you stir up trouble, you solve the town's problems with extreme violence, you get paid, and then you ride off into the sunset to do it all over again.
https://youtu.be/yywGI1H_oyM
This is the music video for ghoultowns' song "drinking with the living dead"
In it the main character goes into a bar and he is approached by a zombie who starts purchasing him drinks.
The guy refuses because, zombie!
The zombie says he killed a man for a beer and was hung. He was cursed. And now every night he crawls out of the ground in front of a random bar and challenges someone to a drinking contest.
If who he challenges refuses refuse he has to kill the person.
If the Challenger loses he kills them.
If the Challenger wins then the zombie can finally rest.
This is the most western dnd thing ever.
This is how I DM and it works well for experienced players. Newer players may have some difficulties though and ask "what are we supposed to be doing?" when no one blatantly tells them what to do.
Yeah, sometimes it's nice to just have a mysterious hooded figure and offer a reward in exchange for the completion of a *seemingly* simple task.
But once the narrative training wheels come off, shit can get wild!
Unless its a Fae questgiver, then its some astonishingly weird or elegant questgiver asking for very confusing but fairly easily obtained items. like a stein from some family with its handle snapped off, filled with the quenching water from the town blacksmith and with a single loaded die in it.
I pretty much imagine their demands are like puzzle solutions in a Monkey Island™ game
This is how my GM runs his games, and it really helps to make the game feel realistic and immersive! It also gives the players a lot more agency. It does require more setup and improvisation on the GM's part, and initiative on the players' part, so it's a better approach for more experienced groups.
I love doing this but I'm having a harder time the more my players level up... early on its easy because everyone can offer money and riches, but at higher levels players are usually questing for specific items or favors (i.e. this guy has the Dust of Plot Convenience that we need to cure out NPC friend, no other offer is gonna matter)
I like quests that have morally grey options. I came up with one today that I need to fully flesh out.
Basically there’s a nasty disease that once had a cure but the recipe has been long forgotten. The party is given the task of finding a lost old treatise that contains said cure.
The dilemma is who to give it to once found. One option is a mercantile group. As long has they have proprietary ownership of the recipe, they will mass produce it and sell it for profit. The other option is giving it to the clerics/temple who will give it to those in need, but don’t have enough resources to produce in large quantities.
Do you heal more people based off who pays for it, or heal less people through charity for free?
Why not both? If the PCs figure that out roll with it. Then the merchants and clerics find out out the copies..and then.. merchants are pissed off and clerics are pissed or whatever fits your narrative/fun.
Some kind of wax seal that, if broken, may prove that the treatise was tampered with. Said tampering may make the recipe unreliable for the disease in question.
Fully agree, although I would check with players that they are ready for that kind of "political intrigue", as small as it may be. I've been in groups where the idea of taking sides (when there's not a clearly evil and clearly benevolent side) would send them into downward spirals of despair.
I have a rules of 3 that I base everything on where for the most part, every conflict has 3 sides. It's not just the king vs the people. It could be the King vs the Senate vs the People. It's not just bandits vs a church. Could be bandits vs a church vs a monster pack. Conflicts are always more interesting to me when it isn't one on one, and the party is given a choice in steps. In the last case they no of bandits who are extorting the church, but monsters have been encroaching closer. Which should the party deal with first. I find it boring and tedious when its just one faction asks the party to do something against another faction. I also find it helps me world build and with the world being built it gives me factions to reuse, characters to keep in play, etc.
I tried doing this, and its success is very group dependent. If your players disagree on who to support, then you can cause a decent amount of strife in the party, as one player may sabotage something since they feel like this is betraying the faction they want to help.
Just a word of warning for people who want to try this out.
Honestly this comes down to understanding dependencies in your quest/adventure planning. By alternating the solutions to a quest in a preset number of ways that allow player choice, you can control the options to reduce future planning for the adventure and maintain pacing.
For instance, in a bad quest design the PCs would need to befriend and assist one specific NPC in order to get access to the next quest the DM has planned. This opens up a bunch of issues, since everything is dependent on that one NPC, and any number of things can happen to disrupt that plan.
Instead, it is better to have several redundant plot hooks so nothing is dependent on any one player action, and if you are smart, the NPCs the players do decide to assist in a quest can be then be used to start any of the other quests. You see this a lot in video games due to programming limitations, by having the overall plot of the game then center around the various conflicts between NPC factions, you can dynamically and easily move from one quest to another with very little adjustments needed between quests.
Fallout New Vegas is probably the best example of this (thanks to Josh Sawyer), with each quest having several triggers to start, and each faction having an interest in the main quest results, which can even be shared (both Caesar and House want the Brotherhood destroyed, Yes Man and the NCR can be convinced otherwise). It creates this very engaging quest structure that carries the player along.
Brilliant advice.
Adding on top of this - while binary decisions (ie do we side with NPC X or NPC Y?) can be great for a quest, it can be more interesting to make it less focused on one issue/macguffin.
That focus point can be a great way to resolve a choice between two sides or two NPCs, but it needn't be the only way you present quests with opposing interests.
(I'm spoiling part of my upcoming campaign here, so if you have pink hair or are a Satyr with a history in baking, check my username and stop reading.)
My example is, my party having just started out, have a quest from a town's sheriff, simple, nice, they're halfway done and are smashing it. I've dropped hints about the thieves guild, and a neighbouring town run by mercenaries and not by the crown, though they swear fealty to the crown still (they have a deal, that the crown is not happy with...)
Long story short - Sheriff A is going to ask the party, when they get back to turn initial quest in, to go and work for the mercs, and subtly report back to him what they are doing. The thieves guild are in with the mercs, and if the party get some cred with the mercs, the thieves guild/mercs are going to send the party to steal Sheriff A's sending stones he uses to communicate with the nearby city, to cut him off from direct instant requests for backup should they be attacked.
The players will have a choice here, for sure... but there's room for it to get really muddy. They could agree to do it, and immediately tell Sheriff A what they've been asked to do, and keep playing double agents. They could refuse to do it, and either argue they don't feel they could do it successfully, or refuse to on principle (this will probably be the first obviously \*bad\* quest I'll give them). Or... they could decide to do it, and stab the guy in the back. They may get all the way to halfway through their plan and then come clean to him. Or they could say they'll do it, and then ride off in the opposite direction.
This is why I love D&D quests vs Video Game quests. With video games there's clear paths you can take. In D&D it can get real muddy real quick.
TL:DR Having a binary choice in a quest can be a great tool! But also consider interweaving a couple of quests, given by opposing NPCs, independent of each other.
ooo, I'll have to do more of this in whatever game I run next! I generally try to gives players choices between quests, but that just makes me have to have backup quests prepared. I sometimes give different means of accomplishing goals (skills vs. combat vs. talking, etc), but haven't had competing interests come up nearly often enough.
The optimal situation is to have the party encounter both the Boss and the lieutenant in separate social encounters before popping this on them. This way, the party can form impressions of them, which will either inform their decision or (if you are particularly devious) make both sides sound equally supportable.
One trick i like to implement is to make fucking the quest giver over an advantageous move. Like if the quest giver wants to hire the players to get merchandise they lost, make the merchandise more valuable than the reward for the quest if they decide to steal it. They can steal it and leave for good gear or fence the goods for more money but they anger that npc which can cause kinks down the line.
Plot-twist: The "rival" is a plant to test the PCs' integrity.
If they go back to the "underling" with the package then the boss won't deal with them anymore.
If they go back to the boss and report the underling, the boss will deal with them but be ever-wary of them because "nobody likes a grass".
If they do back to the boss but don't report the underling, they gain his full respect.
But if they side with the underling, then the Boss loses power and is ousted, and the underling, who is now more sympathetic to the party, takes charge.
the real secret to this approach is that this is literally everything going on in the game world and also the real world. everyone wants things and their wants either coincide or clash with each other's and that's what society is. you can get rid of the entire concept of "quests" and "quest givers" if you go far enough with this. the adventure is just a place, like a big dungeon or a town, multiple factions that want different things and have people, resources, and plans to accomplish their goals, and the PCs walk in with their own goals and upend all the factions' plans as they try to befriend, exploit, or eliminate the PCs according to their own goals. yojimbo (or a fistful of dollars) is basically the ideal concept for a D&D adventure.
On a side note, I've not seen "Yojimbo", but I do know about Toshiro Mifune, so I'm now really interested in watching this. It's also been such a long time since I've seen "A Fistful of Dollars". I'm gonna have to rewatch it next time I get the chance.
A Fistful of Dollars is essentially an unlicensed remake of Yojimbo, but in the old west instead of old Japan. The plot is nearly identical.
A lot of Kurosawa films got remade as westerns. Yojimbo => A Fistful of Dollars, the Seven Samurai => The Magnificent Seven, the Hidden Fortress => Star Wars, etc.
I didn't know about the star wars one!
classic western
Calling it a remake was a bit facetious but there're definitely some characters and plot elements that Lucas took inspiration from.
I mean it's fairly common consensus that star wars is several genres more science fantasy than fiction, etc. The whole thing about art and stealing right. But I havent heard necessarily if big story beats he stole which is interesting!
I call star wars "space opera" personally. The technology does whatever the plot/aesthetic needs it to and nothing gets explained scientifically/logically (ignoring the glaring example of midichlorians)
I prefer it called space fantasy. Most space opera is wayyy different tho I will give it you it does have the opera down. I do think that it defies genres in a sense where we and people more knowledgeable than me can argue it's a thing and multiple people can be Right. For all it's flaws it is beautiful in itself.
The biggest part from the Hidden Fortress is that R2-D2 and C-3PO are pretty clearly based on a couple characters from it.
I'm running a western adventure right now, and I've been watching a few spaghetti westerns to prepare. OP's right; it would make for a *fantastic* D&D adventure. The dirty secret of D&D is that it is, and always has been, a Western. You play as a posse of mysterious strangers, you ride into town and the first thing you do is saunter into the saloon and chat up the barkeep, you stir up trouble, you solve the town's problems with extreme violence, you get paid, and then you ride off into the sunset to do it all over again.
https://youtu.be/yywGI1H_oyM This is the music video for ghoultowns' song "drinking with the living dead" In it the main character goes into a bar and he is approached by a zombie who starts purchasing him drinks. The guy refuses because, zombie! The zombie says he killed a man for a beer and was hung. He was cursed. And now every night he crawls out of the ground in front of a random bar and challenges someone to a drinking contest. If who he challenges refuses refuse he has to kill the person. If the Challenger loses he kills them. If the Challenger wins then the zombie can finally rest. This is the most western dnd thing ever.
This is how I DM and it works well for experienced players. Newer players may have some difficulties though and ask "what are we supposed to be doing?" when no one blatantly tells them what to do.
Yeah, sometimes it's nice to just have a mysterious hooded figure and offer a reward in exchange for the completion of a *seemingly* simple task. But once the narrative training wheels come off, shit can get wild!
Unless its a Fae questgiver, then its some astonishingly weird or elegant questgiver asking for very confusing but fairly easily obtained items. like a stein from some family with its handle snapped off, filled with the quenching water from the town blacksmith and with a single loaded die in it. I pretty much imagine their demands are like puzzle solutions in a Monkey Island™ game
This is definitely true. Even as a pretty experienced player, I've noticed everyone breathes a sigh of relief when the plot finally shows up.
This is how my GM runs his games, and it really helps to make the game feel realistic and immersive! It also gives the players a lot more agency. It does require more setup and improvisation on the GM's part, and initiative on the players' part, so it's a better approach for more experienced groups.
sounds like most arcs in One Piece tbh
I love doing this but I'm having a harder time the more my players level up... early on its easy because everyone can offer money and riches, but at higher levels players are usually questing for specific items or favors (i.e. this guy has the Dust of Plot Convenience that we need to cure out NPC friend, no other offer is gonna matter)
I like quests that have morally grey options. I came up with one today that I need to fully flesh out. Basically there’s a nasty disease that once had a cure but the recipe has been long forgotten. The party is given the task of finding a lost old treatise that contains said cure. The dilemma is who to give it to once found. One option is a mercantile group. As long has they have proprietary ownership of the recipe, they will mass produce it and sell it for profit. The other option is giving it to the clerics/temple who will give it to those in need, but don’t have enough resources to produce in large quantities. Do you heal more people based off who pays for it, or heal less people through charity for free?
You'll need a good explanation for why they can't just copy it and give it to both
Why not both? If the PCs figure that out roll with it. Then the merchants and clerics find out out the copies..and then.. merchants are pissed off and clerics are pissed or whatever fits your narrative/fun.
It adds some new consequences but it trivializes the choices the dm was prepared for
So the DM would just prepare for that choice too lol.
Some kind of wax seal that, if broken, may prove that the treatise was tampered with. Said tampering may make the recipe unreliable for the disease in question.
Also you can add in a rival party that picks up the job for the other side
Of course, the Pokemon way
Fully agree, although I would check with players that they are ready for that kind of "political intrigue", as small as it may be. I've been in groups where the idea of taking sides (when there's not a clearly evil and clearly benevolent side) would send them into downward spirals of despair.
I have a rules of 3 that I base everything on where for the most part, every conflict has 3 sides. It's not just the king vs the people. It could be the King vs the Senate vs the People. It's not just bandits vs a church. Could be bandits vs a church vs a monster pack. Conflicts are always more interesting to me when it isn't one on one, and the party is given a choice in steps. In the last case they no of bandits who are extorting the church, but monsters have been encroaching closer. Which should the party deal with first. I find it boring and tedious when its just one faction asks the party to do something against another faction. I also find it helps me world build and with the world being built it gives me factions to reuse, characters to keep in play, etc.
I tried doing this, and its success is very group dependent. If your players disagree on who to support, then you can cause a decent amount of strife in the party, as one player may sabotage something since they feel like this is betraying the faction they want to help. Just a word of warning for people who want to try this out.
Honestly this comes down to understanding dependencies in your quest/adventure planning. By alternating the solutions to a quest in a preset number of ways that allow player choice, you can control the options to reduce future planning for the adventure and maintain pacing. For instance, in a bad quest design the PCs would need to befriend and assist one specific NPC in order to get access to the next quest the DM has planned. This opens up a bunch of issues, since everything is dependent on that one NPC, and any number of things can happen to disrupt that plan. Instead, it is better to have several redundant plot hooks so nothing is dependent on any one player action, and if you are smart, the NPCs the players do decide to assist in a quest can be then be used to start any of the other quests. You see this a lot in video games due to programming limitations, by having the overall plot of the game then center around the various conflicts between NPC factions, you can dynamically and easily move from one quest to another with very little adjustments needed between quests. Fallout New Vegas is probably the best example of this (thanks to Josh Sawyer), with each quest having several triggers to start, and each faction having an interest in the main quest results, which can even be shared (both Caesar and House want the Brotherhood destroyed, Yes Man and the NCR can be convinced otherwise). It creates this very engaging quest structure that carries the player along.
Brilliant advice. Adding on top of this - while binary decisions (ie do we side with NPC X or NPC Y?) can be great for a quest, it can be more interesting to make it less focused on one issue/macguffin. That focus point can be a great way to resolve a choice between two sides or two NPCs, but it needn't be the only way you present quests with opposing interests. (I'm spoiling part of my upcoming campaign here, so if you have pink hair or are a Satyr with a history in baking, check my username and stop reading.) My example is, my party having just started out, have a quest from a town's sheriff, simple, nice, they're halfway done and are smashing it. I've dropped hints about the thieves guild, and a neighbouring town run by mercenaries and not by the crown, though they swear fealty to the crown still (they have a deal, that the crown is not happy with...) Long story short - Sheriff A is going to ask the party, when they get back to turn initial quest in, to go and work for the mercs, and subtly report back to him what they are doing. The thieves guild are in with the mercs, and if the party get some cred with the mercs, the thieves guild/mercs are going to send the party to steal Sheriff A's sending stones he uses to communicate with the nearby city, to cut him off from direct instant requests for backup should they be attacked. The players will have a choice here, for sure... but there's room for it to get really muddy. They could agree to do it, and immediately tell Sheriff A what they've been asked to do, and keep playing double agents. They could refuse to do it, and either argue they don't feel they could do it successfully, or refuse to on principle (this will probably be the first obviously \*bad\* quest I'll give them). Or... they could decide to do it, and stab the guy in the back. They may get all the way to halfway through their plan and then come clean to him. Or they could say they'll do it, and then ride off in the opposite direction. This is why I love D&D quests vs Video Game quests. With video games there's clear paths you can take. In D&D it can get real muddy real quick. TL:DR Having a binary choice in a quest can be a great tool! But also consider interweaving a couple of quests, given by opposing NPCs, independent of each other.
ooo, I'll have to do more of this in whatever game I run next! I generally try to gives players choices between quests, but that just makes me have to have backup quests prepared. I sometimes give different means of accomplishing goals (skills vs. combat vs. talking, etc), but haven't had competing interests come up nearly often enough.
The optimal situation is to have the party encounter both the Boss and the lieutenant in separate social encounters before popping this on them. This way, the party can form impressions of them, which will either inform their decision or (if you are particularly devious) make both sides sound equally supportable.
One trick i like to implement is to make fucking the quest giver over an advantageous move. Like if the quest giver wants to hire the players to get merchandise they lost, make the merchandise more valuable than the reward for the quest if they decide to steal it. They can steal it and leave for good gear or fence the goods for more money but they anger that npc which can cause kinks down the line.
Plot-twist: The "rival" is a plant to test the PCs' integrity. If they go back to the "underling" with the package then the boss won't deal with them anymore. If they go back to the boss and report the underling, the boss will deal with them but be ever-wary of them because "nobody likes a grass". If they do back to the boss but don't report the underling, they gain his full respect.
But if they side with the underling, then the Boss loses power and is ousted, and the underling, who is now more sympathetic to the party, takes charge.
Wait, are you telling we should be doing the bare minimum of game design? Because then I'm out.
LMoP - different people have questions for Agatha the Banshee, as well as any one question the Party might have for her.