In the past, I’ve been feeling kind of guilty for using “the quest queue” which is short is you prep a list of hooks and rumors and jobs and missions from various dungeons and if you’ve placed the dungeon already, that’s great, if you haven’t, there’s a procedural random way to place where it is.
Guilty because it felt a little bit two “tier two” and random.
But now having tried the opposite—i.e. taking a map and dotting it with X’s and writing down what module is at what X—the Quest Queue is super vindicated to a much greater extent than I would’ve ever expected.
“Go east or go west” isn’t meaningful player agency if they don’t have any rumors or info about the locations.
Now, I’m not saying necessarily that the random placement part of the Quest Queue is the good part. Doing both the actual placement and the rumor list is possible and the rumor list is the hard part and just noting down “it’s in G3” doesn’t seem like it’d be that much harder.
All I’m saying is that the players were frustrated because all those X’s on the map were basically equivalent to them.
I don’t know because there are so many video games like The Legend of Zelda or Sentinels of the Starry Skies that do work like what I presented yesterday; a map to explore and you don’t know what’s there until you go there. Did I accidentally create something better than my favorite video games when I made that lazy guilty prep shortcut years ago? I dunno.
Anyway where do I go from here? I have this map of 30 X’s and I’ll try to make some rumor tables I guess!