SMART Quests

Welcome Everyone to Sol’s Roles, today I’m going to talk about improving your quests.

While running a module is pretty straight forward, designing a good homebrew adventure is tricky and putting together a quest on the fly is even more difficult. Today I’m going to give you a few tools used outside of gaming that will rapidly improve your ability to improvise a quest or adventure. For those of you on the player side of the screen these same tools will allow you to develop your own side quests, or help you dig deeper into the story hooks you happen to run into.

SMART Basics

Breaking it down to basics, a quest or adventure hinges on a goal, or multiple goals. Thankfully there is a lot of literature on goal setting in the non-gaming world that we can steal for our own use here when we play. Specifically we are talking about the SMART Goal concept. It is used to define a goal parameter so that it can be actualized. By keeping these criteria in mind when playing you will be far more prepared to develop an adventure on the fly, or to dig into a story hook you’ve come across as a player. 

Briefly SMART stands for

Specific

Measurable

Attainable

Relevant

Timely

Sexy lava cave?

Let’s begin with a less than stellar start. You’re laying in bed at 2AM and you get the idea for an epic encounter in a lava cave; now how to get the players there? The starting premise is “explore lava cave and fight something?” Now let’s get on to refining that quest.

Specific means that your quest should have a clear, concise, limited goal (and failure point.) Generally if you have a quest that is high and wide like “Explore the cave” you won’t have a great time running it or playing it out. Getting into the details, even if the players may not have all of them will allow you to build a better quest. Define who wants this done, why they want it, where it is, how it will be ‘finished’, how it can fail. The more questions you can answer the better off you will be. Don’t be surprised if as you get more specific your quest starts breaking down into smaller quests, this is normal and a net positive. Lets just refine that quest from before with a who, where, why and what.

King Murtak wants you to explore the lava cave in the north and kill Iron Heart Dragons that have been attacking the Goodvale Estate.

Measurable links back to Specific along the way. When defining what a quest is you’re often going to run into some metrics that -can- be measured. You see a -bad- example of this in fetch quests, but it is a useful example. Go get 10 wolf pelts doesn’t have a lot of narrative weight but it is certainly something that can be measured. You might be tempted to use numbers to measure things, but that’s not always going to fit your needs. Consider instead the following example. Adjusting the mood of an NPC is something you can measure, it can be specific, and doesn’t even require combat! Knowing what your measurement for success is will give you and the players critical information on when the quest is complete, and when it might be failed. In our example we didn’t have a metric to go by, if they kill some dragons does that count? Probably not.

King Murtak wants you to explore the lava cave in the north and kill all of the Iron Heart Dragons that have been attacking the Goodvale Estate.

Attainability is also pretty important, since unwinnable missions have a tendency to upset players. Having a sense of balance and fairness is built into a lot of the social contract for gaming. Running your quest past a quick gut check of “Is this reasonable?” is always a good early step, and crunching numbers afterwards to be sure is a luxury if you have time for it. Knowing your players and the system well enough to throw something at them with minimal prep takes some finesse but it’s something to experiment with in the meantime. In our example, maybe a cave full of dragons is a bit much, let’s scale that back while keeping the cool environment.

King Murtak wants you to explore the lava cave to the north and kill all of the orcs from the Iron Heart Clan that have been attacking the Goodvale Estate.

Relevant links into Specific and normally gets answered there but I strongly suggest digging into this on a second pass. Why do the players care about this quest? Specifically the players, the actual people at the table. You can make a character hooking quest that the players really aren’t interested in, in which case the whole thing isn’t relevant. Linking back to the characters, make sure there is something in the quest that hooks their attention and emotions. This is where you look at backstories, prior sessions, and your notes on what they have invested in and care about. Take advantage of their weaknesses and vices too! So let’s revisit that hook again.

King Murtak calls upon you to honor your promise to explore the lava cave to the north and kill all of the Iron Heart Clan Orcs that have burned Goodvale Estate, your ancestral lands.

Timely quests deliver tension and drive that I see lacking in a lot of cases. Make sure that whatever you deliver has a time frame baked in, either in itself or because of outside events. Something you need to take care of -now- before X happens, or before you can do Y. Anything lacking this will tend to have less punch and be easy for the players to push aside for side quests, shopping trips or other ephemeral. Those things aren’t in themself bad, but you need to keep that in mind when building a quest. So let’s touch that hook one last time.

King Murtak calls upon you to honor your promise to explore the lava cave to the north and kill all the Iron Heart Clan Orcs responsible for burning down Goodvale Estate (your ancestral lands), provided you can return in time to marry his son on the next feast day.

Following this process for your quests can really help streamline and improve your GM skills, but it’s also useful practice for a player to consider the same. Asking for details that support a SMART Quest can prompt your GM that you are invested and interested. Pushing your own player character goals can also be lifted up using this. A sketchy backstory of “I want revenge!” can soon be built into the tale of a master swordsman hunting for the six fingered man who killed his father when he was still a young boy.

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