Questing in RuneScape
RuneScape has a relatively simple questing system which really only crudely emulates what a competent GM does already. That is, even while the PCs are currently playing in one “adventure,” they may be aware of others which they intend to find later or which inform the current one. Nonetheless, I’d like to highlight a few things that the RuneScape quest system does well and that it could be worth keeping in mind, if not emulating outright.1
An old RuneScape promotional wallpaper, glitched.
Quests are geographically spread out. Given the high cost of travel in the game, quests provide one of the main reasons to explore.
Quests have discrete beginnings and endings. Once you start a quest, it’s kept track of in a journal until you finish it. This means that they can accumulate and you may end up “piggybacking” one quest on top of another to optimize the use of your travel time.
Once a quest is finished, it is usually in a “stable” state, although some quests unlock further minigames or other quests.
Quests can have prerequisites, including other quests. Rewards from quests can “chain,” revealing new areas, unlocking new abilities, or granting use of necessary equipment, which all further the completion of more quests.
Finally, quests “wait for you.” There is never any time pressure to start, progress, or finish a story line. Honestly, I think this a technical limitation of the medium and consider it a weakness. But the low time-pressure does contribute to the ability to “carry” multiple quests discussed above.
All these factors considered together could lend themselves to a “caravan” model of adventuring, where travel is the main activity and there are multiple competing interests at each endpoint. More generally though, I think just remembering to keep several story lines in the foreground can accomplish the same feeling.
A screenshot from the Cook's Assistant quest, glitched.
The images in this post were glitched in Okteta, a hex editor. When you delete, insert, replace, or swap parts of a jpeg-compressed file, it has cascading effects throughout the rest of it. As with other methods, if you modify the header, you may break the file completely.
Of course, I have attempted to emulate this outright before, in a different RuneScape-inspired project, QuestWorld. I think it’s functional for the minimal space I allowed it, but the goal of that project was to explicitly emulate a video game inside a tabletop game, not necessarily to think about the game play implications of RuneScape especially.↩︎