Unworthy Quest
Way back when we started up The Handbook, Laurel and I made the decision not to include a GM character. As you all know, this comic chronicles an internally-consistent fantasy world, and any relationship to tabletop gaming is purely coincidental. (Shut up! It is too internally-consistent. Stop laughing!) Point is that the heroes of Handbook-World speak Common, and if translating from the interplanar lingua franca to mundane English requires a few game mechanics terms, you can put that down to shoddy translation. (Sincerest apologies from your humble scribe.)
Now that said, I think GMs can sympathize with Quest Giver here. The poor old fellow is afflicted with the second sight, and he knows all the tasks folk must undertake to fulfill their destinies. On occasion, this can make him sound a bit… odd. I know the feeling.
When it comes to handing out quests, there’s a tightrope that GMs walk between clarity and characterful exposition. The back and forth of letting players know what they’re “supposed” to do without sounding like World of Warcraft quest text can be difficult. Case in point, just last session my players needed to retrieve three doppelganger corpses to prove they weren’t evil shapeshifters themselves. It made good sense in my head. If you’re a frightened guard at a barricade wall, it pays to be cautious. But then it came time to actually impart this information to the party.
Party: “How can we prove ourselves to you?”
Guard: “Bring me three doppelganger corpses.”
Party: “What? Two corpses isn’t good enough for you?”
Me: MFW
They let the matter drop after that, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was edging dangerously close to “bring me 5 bear paws and 10 wolf asses” territory. While there are a lot of valuable lessons that tabletop gamers can learn from our digital brethren, stilted dialogue and arbitrary fetch quests aren’t among them.
I suspect that this particular concern is an artifact of quest design rather than NPC dialogue. “Bring me XYZ and I shall reward you with ## gold” might be easy to write, but it isn’t all that interesting. Happily, it’s always possible to change the nature of a quest through RP and diplomacy. PCs’ persuasion skills can alter rewards and quest requirements, and NPCs can always explain their reasoning rather than hiding behind big walls o’ text. You’ve just got to make like Barmaid in today’s comic, and be willing to adapt.
Question of the day then! Have you ever stumbled across a particularly arbitrary quest? What made it so unreasonable? Tell us all about the battles you’ve waged against your own quest givers down in the comments!
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I think I’ve played the same campaign, and this situation turned out very similar. We got that we needed to proof that we’re no friend to shapeshifters, but we questioned why 3 is so much better than 2. I mean if the guard knew that there were exactly 3 shapeshifters in that section, it would make sense he wants to see all of them dead, but he didn’t seem to know that. 3 seemed so arbitrary.
To make it worse, I made the mistake of describing a slain doppelgänger’s blood as black. It was just meant as flavor, but my players seized on it like they had the pounce ability.
“Can’t we just cut ourselves and show that we aren’t monsters?”
“What? Ummm… No. Their blood only reverts when they die.”
“You mean hey maintain control over their blood when it’s out of their bodies?” asks an interested blood kineticist PC
Meanwhile I’m sitting there like what have I gotten myself into? This lie is just getting complicated!
This inspires me to think about how it could work to give the desired result, which I am defining as “can tell wheter someone that just died was a doppelgänger through a cool visual effect, but cannot use this to determine whether someone is a doppelgänger without killing them.”
One possibility is that the thing which turn the blood black is contained inside the body rather than the blood itself (perhaps it is part of the process that allows them to change shape somehow) so that it is only released into the blood once the creature dies.
Another possibility is that a living doppelgänger automatically and unconsciously “retracts” it’s shape-shifting essence from stuff cut off from it so that it becomes “stuck” in whatever shape it is currently in instead of reverting unless said dopplegänger dies in which case there is no-were for it to be extracted to.
This has the advantage of it also being impossible to tell whether someone is a doppelgänger just by asking them to cut of a lock of their hair.
Totally. All cool stuff. WAY more than I was hoping to do on the spur of the moment, lol.
In my campaign, my take on doppelgangers has been that they only start betraying their true nature when they’re approaching death — minor cuts or scrapes won’t do it, but heavy damage/mortal injuries have a chance of breaking their facade.
One doppelganger that the party killed did the whole “reverts to its true form in death” thing, but since the party basically used him to ding-dong-ditch his boss (who needs a doorbell when you have longbow murder?), they didn’t really stick around to watch and only discovered the change after the fact.
It took the party quite a while to figure out that the drow they made friends was another doppelganger, despite her gradually making less and less of an effort. (“Hey, this drow lady you’re traveling with is apparently completely okay with direct sunlight and sleeps at night.” “shrug Okay.”) They finally figured it out after she got badly injured in a fight, and one of them rolled high enough to notice she was starting to bleed blue-black instead of red.
Should have done the hot wire test: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0IAwe_mxSY
My first thought as a DM is to roll with what was said. “Yeah, sort of. They have rudimentary control over appearance of the blood for like a week, but it gradually deteriorates after a while. Still, the magical left in the blood from that connection makes it far more potent with your magic! I’d give you an extra die roll on whatever spell you used it for till it expires if you got some for yourself!” Thus I’ve turned the motivation into a reward, and the party still hopefully goes to hunt some dopplegangers. All I’d have to worry about is them making a slave farm of them… or striking a deal. Though that could turn out really fun too… I can already see the plot forming…
That’s not a bad hook for my kineticist. Timely too.
You see, I felt bad for her after our last session. I’d included a spider swarm as a wandering encounter, thinking it would make the kineticist the natural hero of the encounter since everyone else was reduced to waving torches around. Poor blood-o-mancer couldn’t roll for shit though.
This could be a great way to give her a little extra zip in the next session. Thanks for the idea!
3 Doppelgangers you say? That smells like Strange Aeons 😉
Our GM handled that situation quite nicely, making the guards at the barrier one-uping each other until they got to three.
“Bring us a dead Doppelganger”
“No two!”
“Nonono, make it three!”
Expect more anecdotes from that AP as the campaign progresses. (I’m a little torn on whether to call it out each time due to spoilers.)
Anywho, I like your GM’s solution better than mine. It’s a good bit of show-don’t-tell that justifies the quest while simultaneously highlighting the survivors’ paranoia. My own technique was to have a second NPC emerge and declare that her paranoid-sounding guards were being reasonable given the circumstances. That second opinion was enough to settle the matter, but I suspect a lingering “why three?” remained in the back of my players’ minds.
Looking forward to it! The AP is a lot of fun; as long as you don’t make the horrible mistake of using sanity rules as we did. Abandoned them in book 3 since we would have been Insanity-TPKd multiple times if we stuck with them.
Voted the sanity rules off the island in session 0. There were plenty of “this mess doesn’t work” anecdotes on the boards to make it an easy decision.
Haha, I’ve played that doppelganger-corpse adventure. Of course it was made all the more difficult by the fact that I was playing an Oozemorph Shifter.
“No, see, I’m not an evil shapeshifter, I’m just a regular, garden-variety shapeshifter. You need not fear the fact that my teammates have to carry me around in a bucket for most of the day. I’m just like you guys!”
“…Wait, why don’t you want to let us in?”
Well hey, at least you had your bucket! It’s no fun when you can’t find your equipment.
Also of note, it amuses me no end that the first three comments this morning are, “I know that adventure!” I guess that there aren’t that many “bring me three doppe-shrubbery” quests in the multiverse.
I find it comes up more naturally, and you should word it more naturally.
In the above case, “We suspect at least 3 Doppelgangers are active in town. Bring us their corpses.” Is much less “MMO” than “Bring me 3 Doppelganger corpses.”
Me: “I cut off the corpse’s head.”
Fellow player: “Why!?”
Me: “Do you have any other definitive evidence that we killed him so we can claim the bounty? I’m not schlepping his entire corpse.” (Fun fact: Your head is 7% of your weight)
It comes of running modules. When you see “must do X to receive Y” in print, it’s easy to let the written words do the thinking for you. Always nice to have a reminder that canned adventures are just a foundation, and that it’s on the GM to elaborate on that foundation.
I imagine Barmaid is gearing up for the self-imposed additional mucous-based ingredient challenge
Finally located the strip I lifted that one from;
https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=872
She’s sassy and mucousy!
It was a Shadowrun game, run years ago. Our team was contacted by the Quest Giver (a Mr. Johnson as is often the case in Shadowrun) to retrieve a military McGuffin from a secret island base somewhere off the coast of Vancouver. To give us an idea of the task, Mr. Johnson showed us drone footage of the previous team that he had sent in. A team of battle-hardened veterans, expertly trained and equipped, all prepared in various ways. A much better team than our motley group of shadowrunners.
The drone footage showed them arriving at the island base where they were slaughtered within seconds by an orbital laser cannon. They had no chance whatsoever. The drone footage showed massive defensive installations before it too disappeared in a burst of static.
Our players took one look at the mission and ‘noped’ our way out of the meeting. Our GM game was ended in 15 minutes.
Time to hold up the 7-11, guys!
Did you ever get an explanation out of your GM? Like… Was there some special intel that could have got you in or something? Did he expect you to hack a satellite?
I don’t quite remember – it was the way he presented the mission to us. I think if he had provided more information about the target and less about the way that the elite team was gone in 30 seconds – we might have taken him up on it. The story was one of his self-written adventures and he preferred to be running a Champions (HERO System) game – everything over the top and super-powered.
This might be spoiler-y for Carnival of Tears, I think that’s what the GM was using? Probably heavily modified though.
So in my old Kingmaker campaign, the GM decided to shoehorn in a horror carnival module featuring all sort of fey bullshit and shenanigans. I could go on and on about all the annoying parts of that carnival, but what really stuck with me was this – the whole point, or “goal” to this side adventure was to prevent as many deaths as possible.
Now, this is a Kingmaker campaign as I said, so the carnival was happening… in our settlement. All the people getting killed were our citizens. And it wasn’t a matter of whether we’ll get to save them or not, it was about how many would die before we stop it.
And I don’t know if you can imagine it, but when the variables were set like that, I kinda… lost interest? Like, upon hearing that we’ve basically already failed before we were even set free from the railroad intro, a switch kinda flipped in my head. “I don’t care about those people dying” was the entirety of my feelings about this quest. It’s not like seeing scared hostages being captured by murderous bandits or slave traders – the GM literally described our hypnotized citizens as casually walking into their deaths by the dozens. Every second, more and more deaths everywhere around us. And I’m just sitting there, entirely disconnected to this “horror”, because, I mean… what am I supposed to do, try and process what hundreds of people dying like ants feels like?
The whole thing turned into a minigame almost. There were no feelings or personal stakes, just the NUMBER of casualties. At some point after the end of session, the GM was like “Okay I calculated the death count and it’s 1240, a third of your population. I gotta go consider the consequences”. And all I could react with was “k cool” because anything else I could have said about it would not be very nice.
Seems similar to the plague part of Crimson Throne. You’re trying to keep casualties to a minimum, and the worst case scenario is in the thousands of casualties. That’s more of a background mechanic though, and even though it IS a score card, PRESENTING it as a score card to your players is no bueno. Of course, it also helps that the believable stakes of a plague give you setting buy-in that “hypnotized to death” magical bullshit lacks.
The Hell’s Rebels adventure path has two interesting civilian casualty metrics. (Now THERE’s a sentence.) The open rebellion in Book 4 is pretty similar to what you describe (though the Rebellion subsystem can mitigate it a little bit, as can completing objectives) and it only really affects the XP bonus and mood at the end (only getting 3,000 people killed gets you “Unmitigated Triumph” and 25,600 XP, while 4,500 deaths or more is a “Tragic Loss” with 0 XP.)
Much more interesting is Book 3’s system for an attempted massacre – certain enemies kill one or two dice worth of civilians per round until the PCs engage them, so the party can actually do something immediately about the deaths if they are willing to put themselves at great personal risk, and they have a great incentive to get creative in the search for quick kills. It’s also possible to clandestinely eliminate some of the enemies before the fighting breaks out, and at the end the total casualties are reduced by a number of points the PCs got for taking part and doing well in some social activities earlier in the day. I think this version works a lot better than the others, because the deaths are happening right in front of them (so it’s more personal than a statistic or scorecard) and they can actually do something logical about it. The players also don’t know what the numbers are until the end, which I think reduces the gameyness a bit.
I just let my players learn about the Railroad Cafe.
If they ever decide they need any pushing to get back onto the main quest they can go there.
Currently the sidequest they’re focusing on is finding a stray cat and stopping it from assaulting a fishmonger’s stall.
What kinds of food and beverage do they serve a Railroad Cafe? “Can I get a low fat no-whip clue with a double shot of pepperhint?”
As you all know, this comic chronicles an internally-consistent fantasy world, and any relationship to tabletop gaming is purely coincidental.
And Exalted is all about the Dragon-blooded 😉
(Shut up! It is too internally-consistent. Stop laughing!)
If i could 🙂
Now about the quest. First of all the doppelganger quest was wrong in this, while fetching an x number of corpses is a good token of success it’s not a way to prove loyalty or un-doppelgangerness. If the guard have said: “Well i must do my job and i can’t trust you blindly. So go to town and find some of that dupleagnsteners and kill them. Call a guard and when he tells me of what you have done, then i will let the rights ones in.” This way it’s not a “Fetch me x items”. A quest is somethings the players must do, so focus on the actions not the items. Also “Fetch me 3 doppleganger corpses” doesn’t prove anything. If the players were doppelganger itself they could sacrifice three of their brethren for the cause and get access to the gate.
Well sure, if the doppelgangers are utter fanatics willing to actively commit suicide they can get past it.
If on the other hand they, sentient individuals that they are, aren’t willing to die/to kill their companions (either because they care about the in-group or for pragmatic reasons of wanting to be able to trust each other), then the test works fine
In which part i said three willing sacrifices for the cause? Willing sacrifices are boring and dull, willingness takes away the fun 🙁
But maybe you are right 🙂
Spoiler: there are indeed a bunch of handy doppelgänger corpses in one of the rooms. The actual doppelgängers could get in sans murder by his metric. :/
Great, thanks, now you spoiled the big surprise and the whole campaign is ruined 😛
goddammit
Query: Did Barmaid just watch Summoner get wholesale executed? She has a ‘yeah, that’s not a new one. Just keep pouring drinks’ look about her.
The wait staff in an adventurer tavern has seen some shit. And also would make a pretty good cast for a one-shot.
See, I don’t think that guard thought that one through too well (or he hasn’t met enough suspicious adventurers)-it’s not a big leap to suspect that a dopplegangar might be impersonating a guard to prevent wandering heroes from entering this town, rumored to be full of more villainous dopplegangars… in fact, it really seems like the sort of shifty task that a doppleganger would try to dupe some adventurers into, doing his dirty work of killing anyone else around who could…get in the way…
And you say the only way to tell is when they’re dead, their blood turns black?
…yeah, if I’m that guard, I’m questioning my life decisions up to this point.
When you’re low level, lacking heals, and not regaining hp by sleeping due to adventure-specific mind-fuckery, the five dudes with crossbows make a persuasive argument.
So, given how often we’ve seen the interior of the Handbookverse’s (should we call it that? Is it a separate universe from the HoEF universe?) inn/unnamed tavern (or at least, that one window view of it) and that it is part of a cohesive fantasy world that uses largely Pathfinder mechanics, are we in a position to map out the interior and exterior floor plan of it, much like is done with popular TV households, anime pirate crew ships, kessel run vessels…?
https://www.reddit.com/r/fictionalfloorplans
Unnamed tavern indeed! “The King’s Arms” is called out right there at the bottom of the cast page in Barmaid’s entry:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/role-call
And also on “Diplomacy Check”:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/diplomacy-check
How you managed to miss such an obvious background detail in a years-old comic and the last line of our most popular tavern-related character’s backstory I’ll never understand! 😛
While that was certainly an awkward situation, when I started reading it I thought it was going to be worse. I’d been expecting one of your players to bring up the point that them bringing any number of dead dopplegangers wouldn’t really do anything to prove they weren’t dopplegangers. Because let’s face it, there’s so many ways a doppleganger could acquire the corpse of another to “prove” themselves. Especially if they just decide it’s worth it for whatever they would gain to infiltrate a city. Which could be very easily since they’re evil creatures and probably value each other about as much as a super villain values his minions. But a less “murder your own people”y way would be to just get a newly deceased or elderly doppleganger and make it a corpse. Because it’s not like rando town guard is going to be able to tell a young adult doppleganger corpse from a geriatric one.
And of course the awkwardness of your players bringing that up is that they’re totally right and they could easily find themselves one bad roll away from “you’re right, we can’t trust you, you can’t enter!” Which nobody wants.
So maybe they were just smart enough to know how that would go and avoided that line of questioning.
As for myself when doing quests…. well honestly very few quests I make are about getting stuff really. Or if they are it’s “as much as you can get from X place in Y time” or something like that.
Though I could see some person needing X (or more) of something for a specific reason, what I tend to focus on for quests is stuff someone or more likely a town/city/organization needs done and why. Which pretty handily avoids the whole “fetch me X thingies” types of quests. At least the feel of them anyway. When you say “Please rid the nearby woods of the dire wolves that have been killing all our sheep dogs to get at our sheep and pigs AND COWS AND HORSES TOO!” you may be assigning them a quest to kill 9 dire wolves, but they’re not going to feel like it was a fetch/kill X quest because they weren’t told to go do a thing with a number attached, but to go do a task to completion so that it would affect people’s lives in some way.
An example of a quest I’ll eventually (maybe if the pace ever picks up) give my players is to get enough of three different magical metals to make three big (several feet in diameter) rings, each one bigger than the last, to complete a magical device and to have those rings made and bring them back. Sure they’re technically being asked to “fetch X amount of Y” but it has a specific purpose behind it and again, isn’t told in the form of “fetch X amount of Y, because it’s a thing I want”.
So I guess to sum up, I’ve never had that problem because my approach to quest giving just coincidentally happens to avoid it. Surely there are NPCs in my games who would like to hire someone to get X amount of something, but I’ll probably never bother presenting that to the players in that way. Unless for some reason they go around asking regular people and shopkeeps for jobs. But that’s somewhat unlikely to occur in games I run as even if I’m not keeping them occupied with some more important quests, I’d probably try and throw something more juicy their way before they could settle on something like that.
It’s weird when you’re running out of a module. I have no doubt that the author could have run that encounter in a way that made sense, glossing over logic traps and presenting the request as reasonable given the circumstances. Keep a self-assured tone and it’s amazing how people will let go of their rational objections! It’s just that, as another party looking in at the quest text, I shared some of the same confusion as my players. I think that tends to come through in the presentation, and makes the whole thing less plausible.
Disadvantage to the procedural system there. The easiest way for a computer to understand “task has been completed” is to increment an integer. “8/9 dire wolves have been killed” type stuff. A GM can adjudicate though, and decide that “meh, 8/9 is pretty good. I’ll say they’re finished and the other one runs away.” The simple difference makes for a big experiential shift.
Ah yeah, modules are funny business.
I decided to run myself through one just to test out some homebrew and see how it’d go. Gotta say module designers do not seem to account for the fact that the system allows for flight, invisibility, or the ability to see invisible things.
So I’m not surprised they overlook situations that might become accidental logic traps that lead to derailing the plot.
I assume the intended (or at least semi-expected ideal) experience is that the GM is supposed to read the entire module (!?) before starting to run the game. That way they understand the hows and whats and why of situations and can adjust what they need to say to players to make things work. Because yeah, one group of players might look at “you need X many doppleganger corpses to prove you’re not dopplegangers” and think that’s a weird way of failing to solve the actual problem, another can just as easy accept that as reasonable enough for the word full of magical disguise stuff that has to still function somehow, and another group might just accept it at face value without even thinking about it.
Though other times I feel like it’s pretty clear they just didn’t really think certain things through enough. (The first chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen being an absurdly unreasonable meat grinder comes to mind.)
I make it policy to read through the module once to get a feel for it, then mark up each section before the session where we’re most likely to get to that content. Of course, as in the megadungeon, that can be time-consuming if the party is at a cross-roads. It feels cheap to say, “Which way do you guys think you’ll go? I want to prepare!”
Of course, your observations about flight and invisibility are right in line with my own experiences…
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/flighty
…But those limitations apply to homebrew as well as published products. Players will find a way to surprise you.
What’s interesting to me is that, after going back to the module, the text acknowledges that the paranoid guards are too distrustful to trust logical questioning. As such, it appears that the interaction is supposed to feel unreasonable, which may be the all-important detail that yours truly overlooked.
Have you watched the Glass Cannon Podcast’s Strange Aeons liveshows on youtube? There is a great back and forth between them and and they guard they affectionately named “Crossbow Jackson”. It involves them calling him out in the exact same way and is definitely worth a watch.
Wait… You mean that’s actually available? I thought it was live-shows-only. Links, man!
Clasical tak tertandingkan bagi lawan…
Indonesian says what?
I know this strip was a while ago, but I am about to run the “3 doppelgangers” encounter from the module in question, and I actually had a weird accidental solution to it. Namely, I altered the map so the PCs have to go through the whole doppelganger area BEFORE they meet Crossbow Jackson. I did this because it seemed to me creepier for the PCs to sneak through the monster-controlled hallways for a while before they learn there’s like 20 non-hostile people alive. Yeah, the survivors are in rough shape, but the PCs still have a semi-safe place to sleep and people to talk to and even a Cleric to help if they get really hurt! It seems to me that the horror atmosphere is improved if the players spend more time believing they are utterly alone before they find the survivors. Especially if they get in some tough fights. The guards might make the same demand, but the number is much more irrelevant if the PCs have already cleared the whole sector. Though knowing these players, when the guard asks them to prove they aren’t doppelgangers, they might have an idea crazy enough to work, no corpse-hauling required!
…I can now report that my alteration of the “3 doppelganger corpses” plan was a success! Furthermore, when the PCs attempted to talk their way into the chapel, they independently had the idea to show doppelganger corpses, and so ended up presenting three after all! (After the session I told them about what the book says and we all had a good laugh.)
A smarter GM than I. Well played!
Usually, if there’s a set number of corpses being requested, it’s because there are a known number of creatures causing the problems that are prompting people to request their corpses in the first place. The whole point is that they want ALL of them dead.
Assuming they don’t know the exact numbers, I generally call for a minimum amount, and then include the options for additional rewards to be given if they get more corpses. Let me tell you, as long as player have enough of an incentive to get through the main goal, they’ll happily clear every nook and cranny in order to milk the extra rewards out of a quest.
When 90% of the effort only gets you 50% of the reward, they will be willing to spend 50% more effort to get that remaining 50% (don’t ask where the extra 40% effort comes from. Sheer spite is my guess)