Exa's terrible guide to questing

While there are a great many different genres and types of quests out there, I mostly only have experience with character-driven action-based quests, so that's what I'll be focusing on here. And I'm not very good at them either, I've just been around long enough to learn from a few mistakes, so I'm probably wrong or mostly wrong with all of this advice. Just take it with a grain of salt.

Anyway, so you want to start a quest. Good! Running quests is fun, lets you practice writing on the fly, and lets you stretch your creativity to the furthest.

--- Premise.

When starting a quest, you need a premise. A premise is the heart of the quest; it's the pitch that gets players interested, it's the 'elevator pitch' of the quest, it's the summary of what the quest has been and will be about, and it's simultaneously the easiest and hardest part of making a quest. A premise is made out of three things: a situation, a theme, and a setting. If you already have an idea, just go for it, but keep this stuff in mind.

The situation is the first thing you should decide- why the Main Character is doing all this shit, or why we should pay attention- where their story starts. Is the MC a newly-minted dragoon trying to catch and tame a dragon(girl)? Or are things in their normal everyday life starting to go wrong just now? The situation is an important part of an early quest, because it's up to you to provide early direction for the character and players. The situation is another way of giving the character (and players) a push- if your situation doesn't have much of a push, it's probably not a good one because people won't get interested in seeing where things are going. (A ceremony might be interesting, where you can have the MC's superior make this big speech about 'what it means to be X', which would have the bonus effect of explaining exactly what the MC's new position entails, which is basically you using the superior as a mouthpiece, telling the players what they'll be expected to do.)

The second part you'll want to consider when making your premise is the theme. If you don't come up with a theme and stick to it, then the pacing of your quest will start to falter and you'll find yourself wandering around madly without any idea of where you're going. I ran into this mistake myself with Vale Quest.
But anyway, a theme is the basic ambiance and idea behind the quest. It can be something as simple as ADVENTURE or ruling the world, or something as complex as finding someplace to belong. You should hold the idea in your mind- this is a quest where X character in X situation is trying to 'RULE THE WORLD'- and make sure to keep your conflicts and plots related to that theme. It's pretty simple when it comes to things like adventure, because a monster or puzzle-filled tomb could be conflict enough, but with more complex themes you might have to stretch your creative muscles to come up with important conflicts that relates to the theme in question.
Themes can change, but you should keep it from changing too much or changing wildly, or the quest will lose cohesion. If the adventurers decide to take over a castle and become a ruling lord, you should change the conflicts from 'one wandering monster' or 'one trapfilled tomb' into 'a rival lord is trying to do politics stuff against you because he's a jerk.' or 'monsters are becoming more common in the land to the east, and this threat might grow to your own land!'

Finally, the third thing is setting. Settings have always been pretty second nature to me, so I can't quite put most of it in words, but what I tend to do is take a single generic idea, from a 'generic space setting', or 'generic fantasy setting', or 'generic not!MedievalEurope' setting, and give it a few tweaks and twists. A space setting where humanity is all long-dead and you're the leftover robots, or a fantasy setting where the sky itself is made of crystal- and out there, the eyes of gods look down at you. Give it only very few big tweaks that echo over the setting like that, or it'll be harder for people to immerse themselves, and then slowly give it smaller tweaks as the quest progresses. Very small ones, like most weapons are made of crystals grown from fancy plants, or beasts of burden are giant domestic spiders, or the council that rules nation Y is actually made of three immortal little girls with prescient vision. roughly speaking, the 'big tweaks' should change and control the plot itself, while the 'small tweaks' are just funny notes. However, the the most important part about a setting is to keep things CONSISTANT. If you say magic doesn't exist except for alchemists who make one-use-scrolls out of faerie dust, don't have a bunch of mages show up on a flying island.

(If you're using a setting from other media, I can't really say a lot about that because I don't normally do those quests. Others tend to give the advice to 'take all named characters out and replace them with new ones', and that sounds right to me, but I've never tried and found out.)

--- Main Character

So you have a premise in mind: a situation that will push the players forward, a setting for them to quest in, and a good theme that will echo through the story. Now you just need a main character.

Main characters are the players' window to the world, their way of interacting with the quest and other characters. While you could theoretically have more than one, I tend to stick with only one main character because otherwise players might have to spend time readjusting, or it could totally kill the immersion. There are a few ways to can make a main character:
If you already have a main character in mind, the important part is that you bring that character and their personality across to the players. /tg/ at its heart are roleplayers, so if you give them a role to play, they'll do it. A gruff, military man stuck with babysitting a princess? A young hotshot wizard out to take over the world? If you can get this across to the players through the narration, or through things that they say, then the players will adapt to that and act more in-character.

If you think your setting's strong enough while your themes or situation are too weak, and your quest could work with any old character, you could always let the players chargen their own. While this does tend to make characters all feel the same, Chargen isn't as bad as everyone tends to make it out as, as long as you handle it right or fill in the blanks between what the players choose properly. There's only one very important part about chargen; it should be done QUICKLY. It shouldn't hold everything to a stop, it shouldn't slow things down. Otherwise you won't have any momentum with which to get the quest going, and you'll just drain people by making four or more posts deciding if your character has one eyebrow piercing or two. A few ways you could streamline chargen is to keep it simple, with players choosing nothing but name, general appearance and general profession. It's usually best to do in the process of running the quest itself.

Don't frontload chargen with 'choose a name, a demeanor, your class, your neighbor's name, the breed of your pet dog, and your least favorite food', you should let those things come through during play. If you're writing a long portion of a post, instead of strapping '>continued' to the end of your post you could always ask a question about the main character, even if it's not directly relevant. Alternatively, you could make the main character a blank slate at the start of a quest, by giving them amnesia, some newly-made golem, or a just-emerging AI. That way players don't gen the character by making explicit choices, but they gen the character based on how they act- more organic. Then again, amnesia is a totally overused cliche and makes it harder to come up with proper Situations.

--- Player Interactivity.

A good quest has plenty of option and player interactivity, or else it's not even a quest at all. Let them do most of the things they vote to do, even if they're write-ins, because that kind of freedom means that you're just not writing a preset story, but it also means that the players are writing the story with you. It becomes more fun for them to be a part of something, and more fun for you because they're going to do things you didn't expect. If the players want to fuck off and go on pirate adventures, let them! If they want to steal the mcguffin and use the bad guy's ritual for ultimate power, even better! I subscribe to this line of thought so much that I avoid using prompts at all, but that's not a thing you need to do, or even should do-- prompts will give players direction, and make them less hesitant. Be careful with this, though, because if you leave things too open then they'll flounder around without direction, and if you leave it too closed then you're a railroading jerk and I hate you.

(An idea I haven't been able to play with is a 'LONG TERM GOAL' mechanic, where when a character promises or players vote to do something they can't do immediately, put the goal in the intro of future threads until they accomplish it. I have high hopes for it.)

That said, there's something important to remember. While the main character is theirs and belongs to the players, the rest of the setting is yours. They control the puppet, but you control the theatre. The players can't choose who their enemies are (Unless they insult a previously-friendly NPC or something), only what they do about them.

Despite giving the players a lot of options, you should make sure to keep the concept of the quest what you want it to be. While it seems like I'm just contradicting myself, I'm not really, it's just hard to explain. Roughly, If you're not up for the players to do a certain thing or go a certain way, you're under no compulsion to do it if you don't want to. If doing pirate adventures doesn't sound fun for you to write, you don't have to write it. There are a lot of quests out there, and if someone wants to turn your 'be a mage' quest into 'magical girls!' and you hate magical girls for some unfathomable reason, then they should probably go elsewhere to find a magical girl quest. This is again because of the 'loss of cohesion/focus' I was talking about earlier, with switching themes too quickly. I mean, this totally doesn't count if you really like the idea of the new change, but if you don't like it you should resist it.

--- Shitstorms and Audiences.

Now, assuming someone wanted to turn your quest into a different one and you said no, you probably have upset people your hands. Whenever you make people upset, they'll do one of three things: they'll start whining, they'll abandon reading your quest, or they'll fume quietly and continue reading things until they calm down. Out of these three, the first is easily the worst, and if you make enough people upset, you'll have a shitstorm. Dealing with upset people is pretty simple. If you did something wrong, like miscount a major vote, you should recognize that and apologize for it at least, but deciding if you should retcon or make up for it  is something you should take time and consider based on the context. If retconning would mess with the pacing, or if the mistake was small enough, it's probably not worth it. If the mistake was major enough and would send the quest screeching into an entirely different direction, or if the pacing is already messed up, you should probably retcon.

If people are upset at you or at each other because something bad happened because of the plot or they made a bad choice that had consequences, you shouldn't apologize or retcon, but move on quietly- and maybe, based on the situation, give the players a chance to make up for it or repair whatever had been broken. Moving on is the important part, because then players won't have as much chance to argue because they'll want to participate or try to repair what's gone wrong. Bad things that happen because of plot is just plot, and you shouldn't avoid it for fear of shitstorms at all. Otherwise you'll just end up with a boring quest.

There are other 'QM mishaps' you should definitely stay away from. Posting in /qtg/ with your trip when you're not talking about anything related to your quest is one of them, because then you're not a QM, but just a tripfag, and everything you say will be taken through a negative lens. Putting on a trip should be fine if you're talking about something important like putting your quest on haitus, or starting a new quest, or making some kind of important announcement.

Another mishap is one I've run into more than once, and it's ignoring or miscounting votes or consensus. Just double-check things and you should be good.

Finally, an important thing is to try not to alienate your audience. When you start a new quest, that quest will get the readers who want to read it. Only people who want to read about 'being a vampire' will read your vampire quest, so if you suddenly pervert that by curing the main character, that's going to alienate all those vampire fans out there. That means that if some new fans show up talking about how they want the MC to be cured, then by no means are you obliged to bend to that pressure. Of course, if you make it a long, drawn-out plot, or if the entire quest is about a vampire trying to redeem himself, then being human again might be the culmination of the entire quest, bringing things toward an epilogue.

--- Endings
Honestly, I'm shit at endings. I've only ever ended one quest in a 'good' way, that wasn't just 'quest over, you live happily ever after, maybe there will be a sequel later if I feel like it'. But roughly, there are only three ways I can think of to end a quest.

Epilogues are exactly what you think. This can be as interactive or non-interactive as you want, but an epilogue should show the main cast (and sometimes the side cast) doing things months or years later. Here's where you show that one funny elf making shoes again like he dreamed, here's where you show the BBEG trapped in an insane asylum, here's where that conjured beast is back in his home and ruling his new pack. You're showing off exactly how the cast lives, now that the quest is over- that the adventures in life are done, and that their new, calm life is starting. I ended Near-future Cyborg quest with a marriage between the MC and their fiancée, and didn't even write anything from their perspective- instead writing a bunch of snippets from the perspectives of other characters.

Another way of ending a quest is to make it 'The Adventure Continues'. Where instead of the MC and the cast living their calm lives again, instead you write about how the MC hears a call to another adventure, another quest. Some new dragon captured his love interest, some new dark god has awoken. With a sigh, he picks his blade up again, calls his horse, and sets off over the horizon- leaving the players behind. This is another good way of ending the quest because it's an entire new 'arc', so to speak, that you can pick up later if you wanted.

A third way of ending a quest is the end, where you just put those words after the quest is over or after you get bored. Unlike The Adventure Continues, in which adventures are going on, or the Epilogue, which shows how things happen after the adventures are done, putting a flat, harsh, THE END will halt everything entirely. The MC dies. THE END. The BBEG succeeds and the world sinks into the sea once again. THE END. This is the cheapest, most boring way of ending a quest. It doesn't inspire players to consider what's happening afterward, it doesn't point them down the road, it just shoves a stop sign in their faces. But in other ways, it's also kinder than not ending a quest at all, leaving players to wonder if you'll ever pick it up again.

---

I know I've just been rambling this entire time and I didn't make any structure for this thing, so I might as well write an ending to this wordvomit I made up on the spot because of sleep deprivation, so I'll just go with this, which is pretty much my most important advice in the guide:
Quests should be fun. They should be engaging. You should make players sad, happy, angry, and everywhere in between. They should be interesting, and unique. A quest that wades the same water won't be a quest, but a treadmill. It doesn't matter if it's a one-shot or if it's a 100-thread browser-stopper, a quest should have a story, be a story, that you're making with the players- and one that the players are making with you. Quests are a really interesting sort of media, and even the worst ones have some kind of merit.

Except that one quest you like, I fucking hate that one. You have shit taste, anon.