What a quest-giver wants

Most quest-givers in most games want you to go somewhere and come back. Clear the wolves, find the ring, carry the letter to the next village. The quest is the thing they want, and once you've done it they stand on the same spot saying the same line until someone turns the servers off.

When I started, I wrote a lot of those, and I wrote them that way, because that was what the template asked for. Name, location, objective, reward. There was a field for motivation, and it was one line long. I filled it with things like "wants revenge" and "worried about her son," and moved on to the next one.

What I've come to believe, slowly and mostly by getting it wrong, is that the quest is almost never what the person wants. The quest is what they think will get them what they want. A woman asks you to clear the wolves off the north road. Fine, she wants the wolves gone. But what she really wants is for her husband to stop taking the north road home at night, and she can't make him stop, so she's decided the wolves are a problem a stranger can solve and her husband isn't.

That changes how she talks to you. She isn't handing out work. She's asking a stranger for help with something she's a little embarrassed about, and she's a little angry that she has to. She'll overexplain. She'll tell you the wolves are worse this year, which may not be true. When you come back, she'll thank you, and then she'll look past you at the road.

None of that has to be said out loud. Most of it shouldn't be. The player who wants the wolves and the reward gets the wolves and the reward, and nobody slows them down. But the player who stops and listens gets a person. In my experience a lot more players stop than the people who design templates expect.

So I keep a rule now, which I'm allowed to share because it's mine and not the studio's. Before I write a word of dialogue for anyone who hands out a quest, I write down what they'd want if the player never showed up. What they want on an ordinary Tuesday, with nobody watching. If I can't answer that, I don't know them well enough to let them speak.

There's an old man on my desk right now, in a side quest I can't describe, who has spent three weeks of drafts asking players to fetch something for him. On Thursday I finally worked out what he wants. He wants someone to ask him why. The fetching was never the point.

Is there someone in a game you remember for what they wanted, rather than for what they asked you to do?