Silly DM, minor quests are for players

About a year ago, I read a post about sharing narrative control with players over on Gnome Stew that just blew my mind. After my initial reaction of “Are you kidding me? The DM is the narrator, end of story,” I realized that I already did some narrative sharing because I encouraged the players to describe their attacks during combat.

When I read Chatty’s article about using 4E action points to grant narrative control, I decided I needed to explore some additional ways to allow player narrative that I would be comfortable with. As I started preparing for the current 4E campaign I am DMing, it occurred to me that the minor quests mechanic might be an excellent method for sharing narrative control with my players.

Declaring your major and minor
Quests are a new mechanic in 4E Dungeons & Dragons. Well, “new” is a bit of a misnomer. Quests have been around forever in the form adventure hooks. They’ve just been given a little extra bling in 4E in the form of an XP award. This is an obvious nod to a principle CRPGs and MMOs put into practice long ago: reward the players for investing in the story.

There are two types of quests in 4E: major and minor. If you have seen any of the published 4E modules, you’ve noticed that major quests are the central goals of the adventure. Minor quests are subplots that don’t necessarily impact the outcome of a major quest. More importantly, minor quests are tied to individual characters. From page 103 of the 4E DMG:

Often, minor quests matter primarily to a particular character or perhaps a subset of the party. Such quests might be related to a character’s background, a player goal, or the ongoing events in the campaign relevant to one or more characters.

Major quests are pretty easy to implement. You come up with them when you are designing the adventure (or they are provided by the module if you are using published material). Minor quests can be a lot more work, even if, like me, you ask your players for information on their character’s background, beliefs, and goals. That kind of customization requires a lot of analysis and preparation on the part of the DM.

But they don’t have to. Toward the bottom of page 103 in the 4E DMG, there is a little paragraph about player-designed quests. Who better to come up with quests tied to their personal goals and background than the players?

A minor quest for narrative control
In our game, I hand out index cards for the major quests. To facilitate player-designed minor quests, I hand out 3 blank cards to each player. If a player thinks of a goal related to the current adventure that they would like to accomplish, they write it down and pass the card back to me. I then do my best to incorporate it into the adventure. When a player runs out of cards, I will give them another set of 3 blanks.

We had a successful implementation of this in our last game session. One of the PCs is an apprentice in the local mages’ guild. During an audience with the local lord (which produced a major quest), the player noticed the veiled disrespect for his master in some of the NPCs’ comments. He decided he wanted to investigate and uncover the reasons behind this behavior.

Before the party left town for their delve, I had the player roll a Diplomacy check and we did a little spotlight roleplaying where he reported back to his master about his observations. His check was successful, so he learned that the High Septarch of the guild had only just been an apprentice himself when the old guild was destroyed during the Bloodspear War. This, along with the fact that few other arcanists living near or passing though Fallcrest have seen reason to join the new guild, led many to hold the view that the High Septarch has a rather inflated opinion of his abilities.

Completing this quest earned the party an additional 100 XP at the end of the session, which broke down to 20 XP per player. This amount is less than half of what I used to give individual players as awards for good roleplaying back when we played 2E AD&D. More importantly, it gave the player who designed the minor quest a little bit of narrative control, and that’s really what I was hoping to achieve.

Kameron Franklin is a published fantasy fiction author and a 26-year RPG veteran. He is currently DMing his first 4E Dungeons & Dragons campaign, and blogging about it and other explorations of RPG play and design at pathsofadventure.com.