Making "here is a semi-important quest for you, total stranger to this land" more plausible Anonymous Sun 26 May 2024 06:49:55 No. 92900489 View View Report Quoted By:
I have been thinking about an old gimmick that has pervaded RPGs, both in tabletop form and in video game form, for a very long time. It goes like this: PCs enter a new city in a foreign land, PCs are considered qualified to navigate the physical and societal landscape of a place they have never been to before, PCs are immediately trusted with some semi-important quest, PCs successfully complete said quest and earn respect and rewards from the locals. The middle two steps are what bother me, and doubly so for settings that are on the verge of international war, like Eberron. How can it be made more plausible that the PCs are qualified to know the lay of the land and the ways of the local culture? Should there be a downtime sequence wherein the PCs spend ~4 weeks acclimating themselves to the new place? How can it be made more believable that the PCs are trusted with some semi-important quest? You would think that suspected spies, saboteurs, and other malefactors would effectively be quarantined and assigned only menial tasks to prove their trustworthiness, but this is not very exciting from a tabletop perspective (unless integrated with the downtime idea above). It helps if at least one of the PCs is a member of some semi-respected, international organization, like the dragonmarked houses in Eberron, but what if none of the PCs belong to a relevant faction, or the area is so remote that it has no such faction? For example, consider a setting wherein the characters are flying around in a starship and making first contact with new worlds; why should the locals trust these strange aliens from beyond the sky to resolve local problems? I sometimes see this softened with some sort of NPC tour guide, but some player groups might not like having even a GMPC-lite following them around and telling them where to go. One explanation I sometimes see is "They need someone who is not known," but why not ask one of the many under-the-radar locals?