I might need to finally make a wiki account for this.

...

...does our wiki even need an account for editing it?

>>325682
Nope. Just need one when uploading images.

A rule of thumb I follow is thus:

Only start a quest if you know how you're going to end it.

That way, you have a goal to work towards, and it helps avoid quitting it before you finish it.

>>325687
That is a solid rule of thumb.

I'm not someone to just change an article. I'm not known here. I would rather give you my ideas for improvement, and let you decide if it's right or not.
In this advice article, I feel it needs to be said, so I'll let you decide where and when.

"The first thing you need to know about a quest is that it isn't something you tell to others. It's cooperative story telling. You may be laying the groundwork for the story, but it's the observers that influence how it goes. How much you let them have a say is up to you, but without any, you will not be doing a quest, but writing a story."

Thanks for your time.

>>325859
This is both very important and surprisingly easy to overlook.

Stickying this so this thread is not simply re-made again just because people forgot/never knew it existed.

Links to older threads in the OP title image make browsing so much easier.
like this http://www.tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/160101.html#160101
Otherwise I have to go into the wiki and search the previous threads down. Simple thing that makes reading the quest easier and more enjoyable.

Also a link to the /questdis/ thread in the op would help too.

The author should set up guidelines for what goes in /quest/ and what goes in /questdis/. A good one to start with would be:
All suggested actions go in /quest/. All reasoning, counterpoints, questions to other players, or non-suggestions go in /questdis/. Backlinks from a suggestion post to the reasoning behind it that is in the /questdis/ thread keeps the /quest/ thread very clean and clutter free. No walls of text in between updates.

To put a backlink to another board, click the backlink in thread A to put it in the message field. It should look like this ">>123456". Then take that and insert the target board, /draw/ /general/ /quest/ /questdis/ /tg/ to make it look like this >>/target board/123456 . Then cut/paste that into the message field in board B. This will create a backlink to the post on board A.

An unrelated tip is to copy a long message you are about to send in case tgchan rejects it for some reason and it was cleared out of the message field when you hit the back button. *copies*

Let's try to be careful about what we add to the article. It's already pretty long, and it doesn't need extra paragraphs that aren't actually advice.

Might be a good idea to toss some basic tutorial stuff in there too, ideally on a separate page. Here's how to snazzily quote suggestion posts. Here's how you properly link to other threads (particularly of the discussion and other chapters flavors). Here's the post limit you need to keep an eye out for when you're going to need to start another of yon chapters. Need to edit that post you just made? Etc. etc.

put a link to this on it
http://tgchan.org/wiki/Plot

A question to the quest authors out there. What resource do you use to draw for your quests?

>>327756
Personally, I use good ol' MSPaint and a tablet. It's simple, yet versatile in its simplicity. I've toyed with the thought of putting an MSPaint tutorial on the wiki.

(My art sucks because I'm lazy, not because of the program I use.)

>>327756
I use Illustrator.

... to the extent that you can call it using Illustrator, with how infrequently I update. :<

>>327756
On those few occasions when I have briefly ran a quest, I have used MSPaint and Fireworks.

Handle With Care is done in Photoshop; single illustrations too. Dungeon Game is done in Illustrator, a tool that proved to be quite suitable for questing. Once you learn how to handle it, naturally.

All my quests are done with a fully legal probably copy of Photoshop CS4.

Anonymous 2010/06/22(Tue)15:14 No. 18199 ID: d560d6
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>>327756
I absolutely swear by Flash 2 as a tool that got vector editing right with its clever CSG-like brush shenanigans.

I used to use it with tweaked lines and fills, especially before the tablet, but these days I find it a lot faster to just make everything out of brushes, even if the lines aren't as steady.

Sai Painter 1.1.0

I use GIMP.

But I don't recommend it, as it takes a while to get used to it.

I'm concerned about railroading players. But I have no interest in running an ultra-vague setting or amnesiac / schizophrenic protagonist. I feel as though I'll still be accused of railroading if I tried a "choose-you-own-adventure" style that details or outlines possible choices. I also feel as though I can't really control anything, which of course means that building satisfying characters and arcs becomes sort of moot. Thoughts?

>>328037
It's only railroading if you ignore the majority of suggestions. Even then often players won't mind a bit of railroading if they get what they want to happen done anyway.

Here's a tip: Don't make your first post an OOC explanation of the plot or that you're new or something. Let your quest speak for itself. The more OOC stuff you put in, the less immersive it is.

Focus on world building, giving the players something to do. As long as the quest maintains it's own internal logic and doesn't devolve into a nonsense quest, you're set.

Is it possible to create a text-only Quest, or are these generally very poorly received?

>>330662

There are some malcontents who don't like them, but some of the best quests are mainly text quests. GolemQuest, in particular, comes to mind as being an excellent example of a successful, well-received, well-written text quest. As long as the writing is good, the story fun, and the quest engaging, IMO it'd be fine.

>>330662
I think the above poster slightly misrepresents the issue. Text/not text is a fairly contentious debate in our community, and a text quest turns off a fair number of readers.

You will get readers that will enjoy your quest, assuming it's good, and they will be pretty loyal, but you will generally have less readers than with a drawn quest (depending. I mean, some drawn quests get almost no readers).

People who spend a lot of time doing the art for their quests will also generally not read text quests.

Golem quest is a pretty good example of a popular text quest and seems to one of the better quests on the board. I don't know about this "some of the best quests are mainly text" business.

>>330674
Only a very small minority of text quests are really incredible. Text quests take a lot more effort to reach the same level as an arted one, hence why I want to finish Gearheads ASAP.

>>330662

Some of us have too short of an attention span to read text quests (myself included).

Getting back on topic, for those of you who run long-running quests, how heavily do you plan ahead, and how much do you ad-lib? For something like Tozol, the players have enough agency that I'm guessing Test is running it pure tabletop RPG style and "just" simulating an environment which is ticking along to Marcus' schedule to some kind of inevitable ending; something with a more directed and segmented narrative like Journey, however, seems to have been largely determined in advance---that Lucid had planned out the high-level sequence of events before posting the first thread. Dive seems somewhere in-between; it gives the impression that some of the chapters have been impulsive additions rather than intended from the start, like #21, but then each chapter itself is more of a tightly self-contained mini-quest that most because of time and perspective skips between them.

I think Steven Brust (author of the Vlad Taltos series) has a theory that works for quests.

"The Cool Stuff Theory of Literature is as follows: All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book (quest) to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool. And that works all the way from the external trappings to the level of metaphor, subtext, and the way one uses words. In other words, I happen not to think that full-plate armor and great big honking greatswords are cool. I don't like 'em. I like cloaks and rapiers. So I write stories with a lot of cloaks and rapiers in 'em, 'cause that's cool. Guys who like military hardware, who think advanced military hardware is cool, are not gonna jump all over my books, because they have other ideas about what's cool.
The novel should be understood as a structure built to accommodate the greatest possible amount of cool stuff."

Corollary: This works in both directions. For best results, suggest things that the author will think is cool.

>>330924 I will assume my quest is 'sufficiently long running' and answer for anyone who cares:

It seems like you are conflating different sorts of planning aheads: For BiteQuest, I started with the main character, map, metaphysics of the world, personalities, abilities and statistics for the wizards as well as the timelines for their schemes, the non-wizard antagonists (Heartsbane and Ashleigh), and "girlfriend" rescuable characters.

I planned the sequence of events that would happen in the world if no player input occurred at all. I then planned little scenes that would occur in certain places if the players went there. (the blood cottage, a few more that have been avoided, Ovriur, the subsequent towns that were eaten if he wasn't dealt with, fatasaurus rex) I never really planned a narrative flow or anything like that - I let the player encounter the scene without any sort of predetermined outcome and extrapolated events accordingly as the player made the timeline deviate more and more from the base, "no Spikesby" timeline. So, I planned extensively, but I didn't plan like you're saying Journey was planned, with some events and narrative twists predestined to occur.

Heartsbane, for instance, was originally intended to be an antagonist that would repeatedly appear to mock Spikesby for the futility of his actions and his deviation from the purpose for which he was created. I never expected the players to attempt to recruit him for a suicidal attack plan in defiance of the Wizard he serves - which is exactly the sort of thing he would go for. So, all of the subsequent Heartsbane scenes got pretty much entirely nixed.

>>331013
That sounds like what I was hypothesising for Tozol; when I say "inevitable ending", I don't mean that there's only one possible outcome (choo choo), just that a clock is ticking (Marcus' actions, Q5 reinforcements or nuke-from-orbit) which means the world state will progress toward a narrative end point regardless of what the players do.

I have tried to start quests in the past, but find myself unable to attract readers after a day or two, which is frustrating and, since I feel like my brittle husk of a thread is unwanted I'll just delete it to keep the board clear.

I've considered that part of my difficulty comes from my preference to focus on characters in comparatively mundane circumstances. Still 'genre' circumstances, but never the featureless void / magical tea party that I see a lot of quest writers doing.

I've tried cold-opens with the intention of building things up, and hot opens into action sequences. But the responses I get don't seem to give much 'interaction' with anything, and tend to just be a response of "next..."

I've read the wiki article; but can any writers or readers suggest how they grab and keep readers?

>>331938
This is a hard question. Personally I seem to have gotten readers in my early quests because I was one of the only games in town and in my later quests because they were ridiculous/I spent a month talking about how I wanted to do it on IRC.

It would help, perhaps, if I knew more about the quests in question. I mean, if they were text quests, that's going to turn away a good bit of your potential readerbase away automatically and probably cause the entirety of the remainder to be somewhat skeptical.

Also, if you're not already an established author, you're going to usually get significantly fewer posts than quests by established authors unless you have really nice art or an extremely unique concept. You will probably go through a period of time after the novelty of a "new quest" goes away and before you garner something of a readerbase where the quest is being kept alive by as little as one suggestion between updates; you'll need to hold steady here if you want the quest to have any long-term viability.

>>331938
>I've considered that part of my difficulty comes from my preference to focus on characters in comparatively mundane circumstances.
I certainly noticed that Drawfag Quest picked up a lot once it went from apparently-mundane object hunt to thwarting an evil scheme. Although, strictly, it'd be more accurate to say that suggestions badly dropped off as the mundane part dragged on with ladder-hunting after some initial enthusiasm. There was a bit of a lull before confronting Greentechmarine, too, which was a bit unexpected. It didn't help that I started responding to suggestions laying out a plan and then that person and others changed the plan, so for a moment progress was thwarted. (This is really horribly common because the time dilation effect of quests murders everyone's attention span. Even batch updaters like Weaver aren't entirely immune since anything depending on a prior update session is subject to lossage.)

>I'll just delete it to keep the board clear.
Well, don't do that. If it's really hated it'll fall onto lower pages and eventually the graveyard anyway.

Reka 2010/08/22(Sun)07:20 No. 22153 ID: 932552
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>>331940
I would agree. KaraQuest squeaked by with one or two suggestions a post at first. It was only much later when things began getting all crazy that I actually started getting a good amount of responses. The important thing is to not get discouraged.
You're new. People don't really know what to think about you. Keep plugging away and rolling with the punches and eventually you'll develop fans.

If there's only one suggestion, go with it. Unless it's a really bad suggestion, in which case you can still respond to it - preferably with the character themselves explaining why it's bad, but it's not required. If you have no suggestions at all, go down a quick list of what might be wrong: Is there no obvious suggestion? Try prompting people with a list of possible options and character thoughts. Is the next suggestion too obvious with nothing much else to do? Just go ahead and keep posting reactions until you get to the next decision point - people would usually rather watch a cutscene than get pulled around on a leash.

But the most important thing is not to get discouraged. A lot of people go through this rough patch until they find their identity, even if that takes awhile. Don't give up!

>>331938
What the above have said is right. It also depends on when you're updating and how often you drew updates.

I mean, I was an established author but some of the Cromanticar chapters had me sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for someone to suggest something. Same with Karen's Heart, same with some of the Bite Quest chapters. I mean, go look. There are whole sessions where it's just been me and one guy. If you keep at it, more people will see it. Besides, some people are always reading and not playing, but if you kept going they'd probably start. If I knew which quests were yours I could possibly offer you more direct advice.

>>331938
Mainly patience and interesting things to play with. Many suggesters enjoy a creation sequence, and if you use that to exposit the world, even better. experimentation, too. But as bitequest said, even the best sometimes have to sit and play with one dude. Don't give up!

Running a one-on-one Quest for a pal via e-mail: bad idea or worst idea?

Has anyone tried something like this before?

>>333090
At that point it's probably indistinct from just like RP or something, is the thing.

Could certainly still work!

>>333106
Well, it'd still be an image-based pseudo-adventure-game -- just with only one suggester.

I was thinking of opening it up to a few more people, but most of my friends probably wouldn't be able to get into the right mindset.

>>333090
>>333133
I've done something similar before with friends, but just to pass the time, not for a long term game. sounds interesting, do it. I mean, if it doesn't work then at least you'll know. Depending on your friends, may want to add a lot of humor they will enjoy, since its a one-on-one.

I'm looking to pick up a Graphic Tablet(thingit) sometime soon, and I'm wondering what you guys use.

Any suggestions for good tablets for quest-mspaint-art or general doodles?

>>335944

I use a Wacom Bamboo. I got it for $70 at Best Buy. It hasn't let me down.

http://www.wacom.com/bamboo/bamboo_pen.php

>>335944
Wacom is the best brand to get. They're the only ones that seem to care about product durability.

Bamboos are the cheapest, and pretty reliable, albeit generally small. If your blood is a bit more rich, I hear good things about the Wacom Intuos line, but most of it seems to be extra bells and whistles. I use a Bamboo and it serves me very well.

Another vote for the Bamboo. Great little tablet.

Be careful: the Bamboo Fun is a different product. Last I knew it cost more and came bundled with some useless crapware.

I didn't think the Intuos was that much more expensive than the Bamboo, and it's a better product. I love mine.

A small Intuos costs around three times as much as a small Bamboo, which is what I have. Can't say I'm thrilled, since it's god damn tiny, but it beats the hell out of a mouse.

My small intuos was ~120 bux and had a significantly larger drawing area than the small bamboos I saw.

Cheapest Intuos4 is 230 USD for 6.2" x 3.9"
Cheapest Bamboo is 70 for 5.8" x 3.6"

'Course, these are what's available now. The Bamboo I use is a discontinued model. Basically the same price and active area, though.

>>335954
For what it's worth, the exact model of mine is a MTE-450A, and I think it was all of £50; seems to have held around that point in the UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wacom-Bamboo-MTE-450-K-DE/dp/B000QUQDXM

I haven't really had much experience running quests, but I've been thinking about the readership and how it related to the quest genre.

From my experience, basically there's two axes of quest success- Idealism and Complexity. In fact I think we can make this an alignment system for all quests- Idealism, Neutral, or Realism versus Simple, Neutral, or Complex.

Complex quests are like Golem Quest, where you have to remember every detail, and where the player comes up with all the stuff. Conversely, quests like, oh, say, Sandwich Quest are the epitomization of simple.

And on the sliding scale of idealism versus realism, well, I guess you already know what's going on. Here, it mostly applies to characterization, so I suppose all those cute anthro quests with lovable protagonists fall on the Ideal side whereas quests with grittier, more hardcore-dark bits fall on the Realist side.

Quests change, of course- but that by itself doesn't really lend itself to making better quests.

The problem is, the two axes really tend to counteract each other. In other words, a quest either tends to focus on the crunch of complex combat and hardcore logistics, like Golem Quest, or it appeals to those who want a daily serving of cute and happy, light fluffy quest, like for example Trap Quest, or Amorphia. You really can't have both in equal amounts at the same time- you can flip between the two with wellmade transitions but you're either focusing on one or the other. Even quests that work both in equally, like most of Shot's quests, flip between the two axes in attracting readers between fight scenes and non-fight scenes. Same with Brom's quests, or anybody else's quests. Really, it's kind of an axiom of writing itself- you can't be developing character and running a hardcore battle at the same time, I guess.

That's basically the entire quest spectrum right there, in my vastly uneducated and probably simplified opinion.

Does this even go here? This is basically my personal theory behind all quests, and I'm not even sure if it's correct.

>>337398
>In fact I think we can make this an alignment system for all quests
Wow. That's the worst idea I've heard all month.

>>337398

>Here, it mostly applies to characterization, so I suppose all those cute anthro quests with lovable protagonists fall on the Ideal side whereas quests with grittier, more hardcore-dark bits fall on the Realist side.

That has nothing to do with idealism or realism. That just has to do with cute or dark. Those are not even remotely the same thing.

>Really, it's kind of an axiom of writing itself- you can't be developing character and running a hardcore battle at the same time, I guess.

You most certainly can, it just requires actual writing ability.

>>337414

>>337493
The advice parts were good.
I really hope the examples given were tongue-in-cheek because that is some of the worst Raymond Chandler-wannabe writing I've ever read, and I've read Jim Butcher and Glen Cook.

>>337518
I agree. The basic principles the guys is trying to get across are good, but the style in which the guide is written is junk. You can tell he's a very weak writer.

How to OP:
1) Make sure your image will produce a thumbnail that is immediately recognizable. The most reliable way to do this is to have your quest name in big letters.
2) Put your quest name and chapter as the Subject. That way we can ctrl-f it.
3) Use your handle for the 'name' field unless there is a good reason not to. Even if you want to use the character's name for the rest, using your own name for the opening post can help clear things up.
4) Remember that the OP will be visible for the lifetime of the thread and beyond. If you use '???' for the name or title, remember that it will still say '???' a year from now when someone finds it in the archive.

http://www.ted.com/talks/elizabeth_gilbert_on_genius.html

In being a poor example of a quest author, I've learned the following. If you don't have a lot of self-motivation, stick to one quest. If you have more than one quest, your sparse updates would be spread across all your quests, slowing all of them down.

If you get an awesome idea that you absolutely have to do, write it down. Then, when you reach a chapter end or something, you can do the idea. It may be frustrating to have a huge pile of ideas you're sitting on, but that's better than a million dead or half-dead quests. It would also give you time to expand upon those ideas before you share them with the world. Alternatively, you might realize in hindsight just how dumb an idea actually is before putting it out there.

If nothing else, having only one currently updating quest eliminates the question of 'which one do I update?' letting you skip to 'how should I do this update?' which can be a task in itself for non-motivated people. It is for me, at least.

I still haven't figured out the 'how to make yourself do it' bit myself yet, so I can't help out there. Hopefully, this little bit of advice helps someone, though. I probably could have used it earlier.

>>341091
Seconding everything said here. Coming from a guy with a dozen half dead threads, yeah, stick to one, even if you have more ideas.

>>341104

i see, so we need more commitment... hey, maybe with this tip, i can stop being a troll-fag :D

I'm not sure if this is really the place to ask, but: Does tgchan block you from reposting the same image multiple times? I've been giving some thought to doing a text-based quest using pictures of the various characters to mark who's 'in control', but like I know 4chan bitches you out for repeating images.

>>341323

yeah, it does.

>>341323
You can use the same talking head over and over, though, which might suit your purposes: >>/meep/13334

It's also a convention to put an @ or something in the subject line so that updates can be more clearly picked out from suggestions.

>>335954
I use a Bamboo Fun and I like it. That comes from a person who was forced to use a Trust for a long time. That one was absolutely horrible.

I'm actually using a Bamboo Fun with a broken stylus. I was lucky I used SAI to draw the first panels of Executioner, because I'm drawing with the eraser.

About quests, I'm not experient with them, but I already learned some useful stuff about writing.

>>341404

( =c=)9 just keep at the quest thing, you'll get better, i believe in you

Okay, so I'm thinking about running a writequest, but I'm having a really hard time deciding on perspective. The current idea is to have one 'main' character that's largely a blank slate until defined by the readers; narration would be in the form of 'you see x, you do x,' and so on. However, when switching to the perspective of another character, narration would switch to 'I see x, I do x'. Is this a good or bad idea? What are people's thoughts in general on perspective?

>>341920
Sounds somewhat interesting. I don't think you need to worry about people being like "Why does the perspective keep changing? FUCK THIS" and then stop reading or anything.

...But by writequest, do you mean a textquest? please no

>>341949
The plan is to do text without images, if that's what you mean. Are text quests really looked down on that much?

Honestly, I'm just trying to play to my strengths; I've been doing various creative writing stuff since forever, but I can't draw for shit.

>>341993
ANY drawing helps. just a map or something. ESPECIALLY on the first post. it makes the whole thread more eye catching which draws more readers.

>>342030

Read: the most vocal elements of this board have the attention span of small children, and will rail endlessly against anything that takes more than a couple of minutes to read.

There are about 12 long-term quests going on, three of them are text only, both of the most popular text only quests have about ten regular players, with the third having maybe five regular players. Seven of the other quests are a combination of shitty art and/or crappy writing, and have six or seven players each (almost all the same players). The remaining two long-term quests have pretty decent art and writing and have ten or so regular contributors.

Everything else on the board is crappy one shots (designed to be crap, apparently), or ideas that are aborted when the author realizes just how small the audience is here.

So in short: do what you want, fuck the whiners. There are not enough of them to count for anything, and they know it.

>>342035
Quit it.

>>341993
You can try a text quest if you want. Just be aware that you're likely to get less attention than quests with art.

>>342035

>There are about 12 long-term quests going on, three of them are text only, both of the most popular text only quests have about ten regular players, with the third having maybe five regular players.

I like how you go out of your way to harass the image quests for having shitty art and/or writing, while conveniently skipping on mentioning that all but one text quest have just as shitty writing (at best) and no art at all.

>Everything else on the board is crappy one shots (designed to be crap, apparently)

a crappy one-shot is superior to millions of words of prose shittier than you'll find on Fanfiction.net.

Why do image quests make you so angry? Were you molested by someone putting forward a modicum of effort?

Better question: why are people derailing the advice thread with this shit when there's a perfectly good thread for text vs image quest arguments over here? >>/meep/13522

>>342049
Good question. The best I can figure, he's being extremely hostile to image quests because he wants to run a quest, but can't draw and is justifying why he himself should run a text quest instead. This is pretty hilarious since he has demonstrated that he can't write for shit either. Hilarity should ensue.

>>342040
If you want an actual audience 4chan.org/tg has more people, and janitors that are friendly to everything but furry porn. If you want to run a furry porn quest I guess this is the place.

>>342047
Hey man, I know it's been a while but Blood Quest was also the other good text quest on this board, not just Sammy. So you've got like two. Still text quests are kinda shit man, writers fuck up the purple prose so often, what's actually fucking happening gets lost in metaphors and bullshit and the audience can't fucking react properly.

>>342103

> janitors that are friendly to everything but furry porn

>>342103
Unless you can do a drawing in like 60 seconds like Weaver, doing an image quest on 4chan is problematic.

Plus the obligatory trolling, spam, bullshit, etc.

But hey, if you can manage it, go for it.

>>342121
...Yeah, you haven't been back there in a while, have you?

>>342151
I must not have come back at the right times, because I've only seen text quests.

>>342153
That's cuz all the image quest authors left to tgchan. Quests are officially protected now, though. Hatin and spamming gets ya banned.

>>342171
Atlas Hugged

>>342171
This doesn't really alleviate the problem of "if I can't run in session format I can't run on /tg/."

>>342199
Yes, there's that.

So umm...I want to do a Quest but I can only writefag. And I want some of the attention of doing it on normal /tg/ if I do.

>>345478
And I want free money forever and a house that doubles as a secret laboratory/lair. Isn't it fun to want the unrealistic?

Considering the userbase here is a tiny fraction of that on /tg/ you are unlikely to ever get that sort of attention even if you had the greatest art and writing skills known to humanity. It's just not a thing that is possible. If it's a text quest, people will minimise it on principle. If you want the level of attention you'd get from /tg/, well, why not go to /tg/?

>>345478

nope, not gonna happen

Did we ever make a point about not having things like "First time doing a quest! It probably won't be very good, and please disregard the crappy artwork!" in the OP of a quest? Maybe it's just a personal pet peeve, but why would you undermine your first quest? First impressions are important, and making your opening line a warning about how bad you're going to be is a terrible way to start.

>>346827

I think a truthful disclaimer is fine. In fact I wish more quests opened with a truthful disclaimer that they're going to be shit and have shit art.

(Let's not just troll art quests again. Shit writing is even more prevalent.)

>>346886

If they're going to be crap, and the author admits it... why would I want to read it?

No, I'd discourage self-flagellation. It just lends itself to a negative start to a quest.

>>346918

There are plenty of people who will tolerate crap as long as it is in a flavor they like. Furries. Transhumanists. Hipsters (though they claim it is ironic). Twilight Fans. I could go on but my point is made.

I thank authors whose first line is "this is going to be shit" for letting me know in advance to hide the quest and its discussion thread.

Although if they really wanted to optimise the process they should not start in the first place, since their aim is so low and they clearly neither care about their quest nor want anybody else to.

this community can be a harsh place, critique and simple mockery are common (these are actually among the reasons I like the site)

this isn't deviant art, people will say when you suck.

I think a lot of people at first (myself included) are afraid of receiving a heavy backlash of hate over poor quality

fortunately for me all my hate was located in the Anon thread and I didn't seen it until weeks after

>>347028
Criticism and mockery are two completely different things. One is focused on identifying flaws so that someone can understand the critic's opinion and improve, the other is focused on being hostile and rude for the sake of being hostile and rude.

Unfortunately, many people commit the latter as if it were the former, because they think bad things deserve to be called bad, even if doing so only serves to be needlessly unpleasant without being useful, or there isn't actually anything wrong with the subject apart from the speaker's personal preferences.

>>347028
>>347038
And some authors receive neither criticism nor mockery nor positive comments and fade away.

>>347038

If bad things are not called out for what they are, standards as a whole begin to shift and stuff that was formerly laughably bad is seen as acceptable.

>>346886
>(Let's not just troll art quests again. Shit writing is even more prevalent.)

Look who is too high and mighty to reply like the rest of us peons! Everyone get a good look. Look. Look. It's this guy. He is too high on his horse to engage in the discussion normally.

>>347067

What's your point?

>>348634
Yes, it's good to be critical of quests, but it's best to be constructive about it. Telling someone "your anatomy needs work" or "you don't develop your characters enough" helps, but things like "this is shit, get it off the board" don't. As the rules page says,

>Make valid criticisms. Don't just say "I hate your quest" or "You are a terrible author", give reasons and preferably, ways to improve. ("Quit questing and go away" doesn't count.)

>>348634

I'm not too high and mighty to respond, there wasn't any need to type up a response when I was already dropping the warning on you. It's just an efficient use of time.

So I have a question: You quest authors, how do you decide what sort of perspective to use? I mean writing rather than art - for example, the traditional adventure game perspective ("You are in a house") versus a first person voice ("I appear to be in a house") or a PC-object dialogue ("Hey shiny ball, check out this house I'm in"). Did you have a reason to use the writing perspective you did, or was it just a matter of personal preference?

>>349486
It will fundamentally alter the style of the quest. The closer the suggesters are to the action, the more leeway they expect the main character to have. For example - if you write a story in third person limited and take majority suggestions, the suggesters will expect there to be less of a filter between what they suggest and what happens. If you have the character directly "hear" the suggestions (most first person quests), they will suggest as if they are talking to the character. The second way usually gets more suggestions, but also more suggestions that are just talking to the character and not really suggesting a course of action. You will definitely have people asking questions and trying to interact with the character instead of moving the action along. So, a more removed perspective will lead to a more streamlined narrative.

These aren't universal, of course. You can run a really close third person narrative, but there will still be a level of separation that is not present in a first person narrative.

I don't know about second person. Not too many quests have been run that way. I would expect it to be even further removed from the character, ironically, because even in a third person quest, many suggesters will suggest as if they are trying to convince the character (which I think is good anyway), but this seems kind of pointless if you are supposed to be the guy running around.

Aside from this, the perspective colors the world. In a third person story, you describe things in a neutral way (or mostly neutral), but in a first person story, everything is colored by the perspective of the character, and their "voice" will make a huge difference as to how things appear. You have an almost-definitionally less reliable narrator.

So yes, I pick it based on how I expect the quest to go, not on any sort of personal preference.

>>349516
>I don't know about second person. Not too many quests have been run that way.
DFQ1 ran that way, partly because I was deliberately matching the style of classic Sierra adventures, and partly becuase it indeed stopped people having conversations with the protagonist for the most part.

Hey guys, you mind if I ask a question? Just a kinda small harmless one.

Recently I got this simple idea for a quest, but I don't know if I should really go through with it or not, mostly because it relies heavily on well...my deviantart journal.

I know that dA sucks and I should find another place to do anything remotely art related, but I recently thought up a kinda neat idea (in my opinion, if you think it's stupid or childish that's okay I guess <:3).

The idea is that I wrote an intro on the journal, and every time someone replies, I give them a different response, ergo, creating a totally different quest for each person that responds. This allows me to test out different settings and stuff without risking ridicule or anything on here because, and I'll admit, anything I can come up with atm wouldn't really hold a candle to anything on here now (or maybe my self esteem needs help or something I dunno). I want to know if maybe I should stick to this kind of 'Quest Easy Mode' if you will, until I can really try something bigger on here.

I'm really really sorry if I'm spamming this thread or asking a really stupid question or something, I just figured that you guys here on Quest would be able to give me a good opinion since you guys are the Quest experts.

>>350280
>and every time someone replies, I give them a different response, ergo, creating a totally different quest for each person that responds.

oh dear god no why would you ever want to make that much work for yourself aaaaaa

>>350284

Actually, considering that most of the other people on dA are too full of themselves or busy worshipping anime and memes, very few people would respond anyways. 83c

And besides, I have a ton of free time on my hands. |3c

Finishing a regular quest is hard enough.

Run a normal quest first, and then think your idea over.

that is not easy mode. that is HARD MODE. depending on numbers. get too many people and it will fall apart as you mix up who gets what.

Actually, and this is kinda sad, I've already been trying the idea out for a few days now. Luckily only two people, who happen to be friends who know how quests even work, actually responded.

Oh, and to clarify a bit, the quests are text only, with maybe a couple pictures relating to them, and right now they center around a single setting rather than completely different stories altogether.

Again, I'm really sorry if I'm cluttering the thread or anything, and I'm really grateful for the advice you guys are giving me. :3

>>350294
Considering that the title of this is
>Quest Advice: All in one place
feel free to post your 'quest'ions here.

>>350284
A Flower did that in a limited fashion during its first thread. Every poster ID was able to create their own custom flower and grow independently. It was pretty awesome.

I wouldn't want to contemplate the work involved in trying something more complicated than growing custom flowers in a closed environment with minimal sensory input, though.

>>350309

Okay, thanks. I just don't want to get on anyone's bad sides for asking stupid questions or anything. <:3

Also, on kind of the same subject, if I was to start a quest on here, would it be alright to kind of switch between text and art to make updates easier, or should I just stick to one or the other? xux;

>>350469
A few quests have done text with art sometimes. I don't think people mind all that much, depending. Pure text quests are sort of not received well, so make sure there are enough pictures.

>>350473

Okay, I'll probably go for the mix then. I can't really do just text because of the negativity they seem to get, plus my writing isn't exactly too verbose or technical or anything anyways.

And I can't really do just pictures because I don't have a tablet or any real art programs outside of MS Paint to make constant pics for updates. Unless I pulled a RubyQuest and did the entire thing black and white with overly simple character designs and backgrounds.

One more thing, you guys don't think using smilies or stuff while posting on here is anooying or anything right? <:3; Because if it is I'll gladly stop using them...maybe.

Again, thanks a ton for all the advice and stuff. I'm really grateful that you took the time to help, and I'm sorry if I inconvenienced you guys in any way.

>Mixed image/no-image updates
You will want to put something on the "no image" updates so that people do not scroll straight past them, since they'll blend into the suggestions, even if it's just the title image, or using the talking-heads thing as an "this is an update" icon.

Yea, I was thinking of doing a quest myself. I am currently planning it out, so it'll be a while before I actually start it.

I have no drawing skills, so that is a bust. However, I know some very good quests that never drew their own images. Namely Golem Quest is the first that comes to mind. Now, I don't expect to make a quest as good as that, but I can certainly make something interesting.

So as long as I post some sort of image every update it should be fine, right? And even better if I can find an image that sort of relays what I want to show.

I'm reading through the "Advice for Running a Quest" wiki page, but is there any other advice you guys can offer for preparation before launching the quest?

Well, as it has been pointed out, text quests are generally avoided by a good number of people(myself included).
1. You need to learn how to write descriptively.
2. Indent your paragraphs if you know how.
3. Have the entire world written out before hand. Atleast 3 major cities with at least 5 minor building descriptions for each one, and ever major building. Likewise, make sure you have several environments described already.
4. An NPC list with descriptions, and don't just pick one thing with the npc or they become flat.
5. While this goes under 'know how to write', I will put it here. Use more then one sense when describing things. Don't just put how they look. How do they feel under your feet? Smell? Heat or cold? Breezy? Taste in the air? Include similes your audience can understand.
6. Keep description written down or someone will point it out when you mess it up the second time you mention it.
7. While this is under writing, I will give it a spot. For the love of god, the main characters need multiple motives. Give them at least 2 pages of background each(10 font single spacing). Personality quirks, reasons for risking their lives beyond simple 'live or die'.
8. Dialog Everyone talks differently. Two people from the same place can have the same accent, but still use different words and experience things different ways. I've got cousins that are twins. You put them in the same room, throw a big bouncy ball to ricochet a million places. Each of them will have a completely separate way of looking at it.
9. Different inferences. Don't have it that every character can get the same thought from one sentence. I'm mangling this, but I got an (bad)example. I am hot. While this could mean that I'm talking about the weather, some cultures would change this to sexually turned on. Some would see it as bragging about looks. Misunderstandings can, and will, happen.


There's tons more advice, so go pick up something on how to write a story book and read it.

>>350626
Thanks for the tips. I was heading towards that for the most part. I know enough not to start until I have the world, and all it's cities, and stuff written up. Thanks for 5-9 though.

>>350561
>However, I know some very good quests that never drew their own images. Namely Golem Quest is the first that comes to mind.
You are beyond help. :V

>>350626
>Atleast 3 major cities with at least 5 minor building descriptions for each one, and ever major building.
This is bizzarely specific, as well as being bizzare in specifying a minimum at all. Spec out the places needed to tell the story. If you can tell a story on a handful of sets, so much the better---see Ruby Quest. Large worlds aren't intrinsically bad (see Bite Quest) but should exist because you have interesting things that are going to happen there, not because you're trying to meet some quota.

My main piece of advice is DELETE, DELETE, DELETE. Once you have written an update, remove absolutely everything you can from it. Edit that sucker to within an inch of its life, like you're trying to fit an entire paper on relativity into the one-page limit of an insane journal.

While he's talking about non-fiction, Orwell's Six Rules worked well for his fiction, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language#Remedy_of_Six_Rules
And he didn't even have to pepper classics like Animal Farm or Nineteen-Eighty Four with Google Image Search results to keep people's interest.

As a borderline coherent writer who ostensibly runs quests at times, here's my input/response to some of these points raised, for the sake of another perspective. This is right up there with Vyt editing the wiki's advice page, though. If you don't know what I'm talking about, disregard this and continue.

(DISCLAIMER: I am probably not the sort of person you should be taking advice from, given that the only way I get readers is to cheat the fuck out of the system when I can actually update, per se. I might explain that at some other time, but for now I'm just throwing my two cents along with everyone else.)

>>350626
1. Yes. Without question.

2. Indentation isn't as key as text separation as a whole. Indentation also tends to be a bastard to get to work reliably on the internet, I've seen, so I tend to work around it by using an inordinate amount of new lines (please see disclaimer).

3. The minimum requirements listed are not even applicable to a large variety of settings. But the value of having the foundation of a world is incredible. That said, my general approach tends to be to have a general framework in mind and fill in details as appropriate. This works for me, and complete plans work for others, so decide what you do better at. Personally, my best ideas tend to come at me situationally, and any large plans I make need inevitably need patching closer to the time, so...

4. Again, I am very much an improv guy here, and I agree with having an NPC be more than a single personality trait. That said, if you're comfortable with developing a character as you go along, you can use archetypes and established traits to loosely define a character initially. I don't believe in having everything written out beforehand, because it implies an NPC is a static thing that will not change over time.

5. Good advice, but I hate it when writers throw all senses all the time into a piece of text. The main thing to take away from this is just to not use appearances of things as the be-all and end-all of description. Please don't go to the other extreme and start meticulously and laboriously detailing unimportant things if they don't help to define a scene, character, widget, citrus fruit or otherwise.

6. This is more of a text quest thing, I guess. When I ran a text quest my number one flaw was poor description of characters (and then I ended up just drawing them anyway). Not intending to run text quests ever again, though. Didn't realise how much I'd miss the amount of information an image can provide until I couldn't provide images due to externally imposed constraints.

7. Falls under oddly specific in defining not just a minimum amount of background, but also a font size. Again, I agree with the point raised, and everyone has a motivation (even if that motivation is just live or die, which it shouldn't be if your characters are complex sapient individuals) but this kind of goes back to planning vs. improvisation.

Aside: Before I started TWIM, I had about two full pages of (incomplete) background written for Sinter. Since then, maybe two things on that background actually correspond to the "actual" background trickling into the quest, and I cannot see the point of rewriting a large chunk of background no-one else will ever see when the relevant information is in other files. Most of my written plans end up thrown by the wayside in favour of a better idea closer to the time, but I guess this is symptomatic of my failures as an author how I work.

8. Yes. Do this. One of my major failings as a writer is a lack of good voice for characters, because they all end up sounding like me trying to speak in a funny voice rather than standing on their own merits. I dunno, if anyone has advice on voice I know I'd sure as hell like to hear it.

9. Also this. I consider another major failing of my writing to be a total lack of miscommunication. Your characters get to share the same headspace in your head, but unless they're actually mind readers (and even then), this should not reflect in your work.

>>350695
Good writing, like engineering, is taking away until there's nothing left to remove. This is why I will never be a good writer.

Instead I recently just try to hide the fact I can't edit by drawing more pictures. I think it's only making things worse, but this isn't the place to ask for comments and criticism. That'd be the job of my rotting, decaying general quest discussion thread.

Then there was the time where I ran stuff by other people and they shouted me down for removing what I thought was useless cruft and what they insisted was the only stuff indicating development of characters, which I guess shows my priorities are all wrong, but, oh dear, there I go rambling again.

>>350561
You might be able to get someone to do the drawings while you write the update. I've always wanted to do something like that since I'm not that great at writing, so if you're looking for someone...!

>>350893
Sure, that sounds tempting. I was getting discouraged from doing this, but having an artist would certainly fix that. How do you want me to contact you, so we can talk about this?

Do you have skype? I can send you the stuff I was planning, to see if you are still interested.

>>350912
I do have Skype, but I'm away from a personal computer until, like, September, so it'll have to wait until then. :V I just wanted to jump on the opportunity, is all.

saging a stickied thread for no raisin

>>350927
Okay... that gives me more time to plan, but how am I going to contact you?

Uhhh, bro, outside of its fans, Golem Quest is generally considered not a very good quest. As are text quests in general. If you can't draw, please try. No one will ever think badly of you for having shitty art instead of no art at all. And the more you draw your quest, you might find yourself getting better and better at drawing.

Ok, Am fairly new here. Could someone explain to me the general bias against text quests? You know, other than not having art.

>>350979
Woah woah woah. Why is it considered bad? I think it is quite possibly the greatest quest I've read here. (I've been here for about 6 months) It's very well written, it's interesting, has some amazing fighting scenes, the suggesters have plenty of impact on the quest.

What is not to like? And it has gone on for a LONG time, something has to have gone right.

As a comparison, could you point me to your favorite quest (current or archived)? And I'll read that.

>>350988

Because quests are generally a visual medium, I guess.

>>350989
no no, it LOOKS well written at a glance, but after reading it for a while it became clear that while wordy it just wasn't well written.

>>350997
Fine, whatever, we'll leave it as an opinion thing. You don't like it. I do. It is pointless to argue further.

I enjoyed it completely and look forward to when he continues it.

But I remember reading some where that something happened in tgchan's past that created a bias against text quests. Could someone shed some light on that, please?

>>350988
>>351003

There have been two text quests that weren't completely terrible and one was abandoned after a handful of posts.

That there were also a bunch of tards who thought 'it's really long it MUST be good!' (Dominic Deegan has been running for 9 years and change) and attempting to attack the intelligence of people who didn't like their horribly-written quest of choice. This created a backlash against that quest, and against the entire medium of text quests (after all, if a quest as awful as that one was supposed to be a GOOD text quest, what on earth would an AVERAGE one look like?). The legion of shitty /tg/ text quests sure as hell didn't help.

>>351004
Long quests are veiwed as good by the fanbase because of the assumption that people need to tolerate it for it to last, while DD is a webcomic and doesn't need fans to like it for it to get posted.

Unfortunately, GQ's main problems are, among others:

* Prose so purple it dyes the wash

* Information that is only available off-quest and the boards in IRC (though this is improving)

* Loads and loads of characters, setting details, and other information that is mentioned once or twice then never used again

* It's enourmous. In the time you finish absorbing it all to present, it's likely you could have read another book, or something.

* Other minor, aggravating things (Overuse of certain phrases in dialogue, Bob trying to write sexual fanservice at one point when he isn't very good at it, formatting errors, etc)

Guns for Hire is a tighter quest, but not by much. THe best text quests on the site have been done by authors who normally use art (Bitequest and Cirr).

Also most text quests are not all that great. Most are pretty mediocre, and I say that as a lover of the medium.

Hmm... I wonder. When you do image-based quests do you draw the characters in many different poses beforehand and then use those with minor modifications to post updates faster? Or do you practice with them until you're able to draw them really fast?
And what about cutscenes? :) I guess they're often made beforehand as well seeing them posted just few minutes after the last update :)

>>351009
>sprites
Personally, I think they make everything look a bit rigid, and try to avoid them (although Buswald at the start of DFQ2 re-used art a few times, but then he's a robot). Well-respected quests like Bite Quest (at least at the start) and Tezakia Quest have used them, though, so it's not a showstopper. Do also consider that placing sprites isn't helping you practice getting the character down quickly and consistently for when you do need to draw them again, e.g. for:

>cutscenes
Batch up all the updates and post them in one go. Drip-feeding doesn't work---people will post in the middle, ruining the flow, and the only thing they could really contribute would be "continue" anyway. (I really fucked this up with DFQ2's return to the mansion, which shouldn't have been strung out as a series of updates with no interesting choices to make.)

Ok some little advice based on rules of Adventure Game design:

1. Always try to give the problem first and the solution later. For example: player is unable to progress because the fire is blocking his path. If the player has a bucket of water in his inventory already, then this will be no puzzle at all. On the contrary if the player has nothing to solve the current problem with, then he will explore avalible locations in order to find a solution - this is far more interesting.

2. Avoid trial and error puzzles like pressing buttons in the correct order without any hints about the correct answer. It will only annoy players

3. Put some sort of warning in places where players can die instantly upon entering them. Example: bones in front of a monster cave. If the player enters the cave with no sign of danger in front of it and dies instantly he will be annoyed because he couldnt know it's dangerous to do so.

4. Try to avoid puzzles that require specialist real-world knowledge. Example: fixing electric wiring. This puzzle is ok if you simplify it like "replace broken wire" or when the main character has the knowledge about electronics. On the other hand when you ask the players to properly solve some electric system so it works properly like it would in real life - then you have pushed it too far.

5. Speaking of main character knowledge - let the players know the character has a certain skill before they need to use it. Example: you try to escape from the building that is on fire and get stuck on the roof. There's a helicopter there and suddenly it turns out the character actually knows how to pilot it. The players will feel cheated. Instead try to show this skill earlier - like the character actually arrives at the first scene with the helicopter or mentions this skill to some NPC when talking about the previous job, etc.

That's all for now :)

>>342103
>If you want an actual audience 4chan.org/tg has more people, and janitors that are friendly to everything but furry porn. If you want to run a furry porn quest I guess this is the place.
4chan tg actually ban anything they conceive as furry even if NOT pornographic... regardless, this is far from the difference between the two sites.
Also I feel that 4chan has a LOT more rapists and trolls in the audience.

tgchan/quest is like 4chan/tg except:

1. Threads are not auto deleted
2. There is no autosage so a chapter continues until finished, even if it takes more than one day
3. There is a built in archive and graveyard (quests reported completed are moved to archive by mods where they cannot be replied to anymore, quests without a post in 30 days are moved to graveyard, can be manually reactivated by author’s request)
4. There is no captcha,
5. Rolls are visible by default
6. Identifier (hash based on IP) is always visible.
7. Posting in a thread takes you back to that same thread
8. there is a built in wiki.
9. Better code. Ex: Hovering over something like >>15457471 will display that post as a tooltip.
10. Has a questdis section for discussion threads relating to quests.
11. has some other sections, namely: draw, general, tg
12. Its only for quests; while in tg most people are not here for quests and tend to dislike them for some odd unexplained reason.
13. clicking on an image’s filename enlarges it in frame to full size without reloading the page.
14. There is an enlarge all button.

>>351281
So basically:
>way better software
>responsible mods
>the entire site is actually dedicated to quests

I wonder if there is any estimate of the active users count?

>>351299
The IRC channel is a fairly good estimate of active users who are not anonymous. There are currently 64 users in there. Some of them do not even visit the site, but some people who visit the site don't go on the IRC.

>>351363

The IRC is a terrible estimate of active users. Most users do not use IRC.

So what's the difference between making a quest on the mspa forums and making a quest here?

The community, MSPA has no porn.

This place is also a bit more tightknit, starved of quality, and has an active IRC. Which means if you do something here and do it well, you'll be a big fish in a small pond (as opposed to the glut that is MSPAFA).

Also there is a different set of memes. From what I have seen /tg/ has more Ripping and Tearing and reading NOTES, and less references to MSPA or well known things on MSPA.

>>351434

The 'starved of quality' thing isn't really a difference.

For what it's worth, the added anonymity (even if it's not really that anonymous) of the board rather than forum approach might make people feel more comfortable putting themselves out there. It's easier to post some doodles you normally wouldn't share with anyone when it's just attached to an ID no one looks at rather than a forum account.

That doesn't mean people don't put in effort or try just as hard, it just means there's less of a pressing need to defend or justify yourself.

>>351429
MSPA has no porn on the forums. They're still freaks about porn. And there's a really disproportionate amount of guro.

>>350929
If you're still interested, I go by 'Citizen' on IRC.

>>351810
Citizen is deaaddddddddddd

>>353606

CITIZEN LIVES

Query (since I guess this is where I ask questions on making quests. It does say "Quest Advice," so I'm going to go ahead and makes this assumption.):

If one were to be considering the idea of starting a quest, exactly what would you consider to be the best approach, image-wise? As in, black and white or color; detailed and slow at updating or sketchy and more quickly updated; in comic form or with accompanying text? I'm a bit of a geek for Weaver's quests, so I've become accustomed to the simple-black-and-white-art-with-accompanying-text approach, but is that the preferred method? Or should I consider something else?

Okay, that was far more than one query. Apologies.

Query (since I guess this is where I ask questions on making quests. It does say "Quest Advice," so I'm going to go ahead and makes this assumption.):

If one were to be considering the idea of starting a quest, exactly what would you consider to be the best approach, image-wise? As in, black and white or color; detailed and slow at updating or sketchy and more quickly updated; in comic form or with accompanying text? I'm a bit of a geek for Weaver's quests, so I've become accustomed to the simple-black-and-white-art-with-accompanying-text approach, but is that the preferred method? Or should I consider something else?

Okay, that was far more than one query. Apologies.

(Speculation from someone who has never actually run a quest:)
In terms of detail, I would think the most important factor is that it not be exhausting over the long term. Successful quests tend to go on for quite awhile before reaching the end of their story, after all.
The second most important thing would be clarity (people can tell what something is by looking at it).
Personally I find that as images get more detailed, color or shading becomes more important. So for a minimalist art style (like Weaver's style) black and white works fine, but as you get into more detail unshaded line art can get really confusing.

(And you can delete posts like those duplicate ones by checking the box on the top-left corner of the post and clicking the delete button on the bottom-left corner of the page {though if you did not make a password yourself beforehand it will only delete if you are in the same browser session}).

Holy crap dude, just press "Reply" once, even if it doesn't look like it's sending.

>>355325
If one were to be considering the idea of starting a quest, exactly what would you consider to be the best approach, image-wise? As in, black and white or color; detailed and slow at updating or sketchy and more quickly updated; in comic form or with accompanying text? I'm a bit of a geek for Weaver's quests, so I've become accustomed to the simple-black-and-white-art-with-accompanying-text approach, but is that the preferred method? Or should I consider something else?

Only a few people do comic-style updates. I think it's inferior to image-and-text. Black and white as to color is a matter of personal preference. If you can actually spend the time to take advantage of the faster update speed, then do that, otherwise, there is no point and you might as well do colored art. It's sort of a matter of preference though. Clean, colorful art is also more likely to attract attention, especially if you are new.

Some questions on character death.

Is character death sometimes a good idea, or is it always a bad one? If it's sometimes good, when should it be used and how should it be handled?

What about giving the audience the freedom to "fail" and wind up getting a character killed (possibly even a main character) because of the choices they've made, a la RubyQuest and NanQuest? Is that always a bad idea, or can it be a good one? If the latter, how should it be handled when used?

Finally, if you choose to make it impossible for characters to die, how can you still generate suspense or a sense of danger in your quests?

>>355359
Joke kill-'em-all endings notwithstanding, I personally don't really go in for character death as a thing in my quests, although others certainly do.

All I'll say is that it's quite possible to have a sense of suspense or danger without the stakes being death.

A two tiered warning for character death is recommended. Make it clear in the quest itself that it can happen. Give a warning that it could happen in the next update unless adequately handled.

An alternative secondary warning would be a character in a critical state. In said critical state it should be warned that anything damaging is likely to cause death.

>>355359
I'd just like to point out that no main characters died because of players fucking up in Rubyquest.

I would certainly say that killing characters isn't always a bad idea. It depends on how good an author you are, and what kind of quest you want to run.

I think you need to know if you're going to kill characters before the quest starts and either plan for it by having alternate protagonists, or not caring if the quest ends permanently through bad decisions from the suggesters.

People will probably get mad about the second one, but that's not necessarily something that should prevent you from doing it.

You should also show that actions have serious consequences before killing a character. Usually, you can avoid having to permanently kill characters by mutilating or seriously injuring them instead. Killing a character on a choice that seems not to be dangerous is a pretty gay thing, and "Gygaxian"-style traps should be avoided.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for the responses!

>>355378
True, no main characters died as a result of player failure in RubyQuest, but it was a possibility. If memory serves, Weaver once said that s/he planned to have Tom die via the spear trap that was later used against Ace if players had him disturb the fetus statue. This brings up another point to consider regarding character death: Knowing that they "earned" RubyQuest's good ending seemed to make players enjoy it all the more.

Not really a question, I know. Just kinda thinking out loud.

Anyway, thanks again for the helpful advice! :)

>>355380
To be completely fair, the players didn't know that until Weaver told them sometime after the quest had ended, and I as someone who read the quest after the fact didn't know that until well afterwards.

As far as ending the quest itself permanently through character death, I'd strongly advise against that in the general case. A lot more people have read quests like Ruby or Tezakia after they were completed than while they were running, and a quest where it's obvious that everything ended horribly and prematurely isn't going to have a lot of value to this secondary audience.

It could be done right, but it's probably telling that I can't think of a single example.

>>355380 We have no idea if that's actually so. You have to take the work as it's presented! (also, Weaver is a dude) I mean, I said in my quests that characters could die, and it's true, but they didn't actually die, so they're not good examples of character death in a quest.

Also, while I somewhat agree with Typo, I also don't think a story has to have a happy ending to be good. I would be more worried about you as author getting frustrated without being able to get to the good parts of your quest than whether or not people will read it after the fact.

So, uh, a few questions for those who have relevant experience:

It is a bad idea to run multiple quests at a time? And at what point does a quest warrant a discussion thread?

>>355410
I imagine that as long as you're okay with the update speed of both your quests being slowed, you can go ahead; and my philosophy is that if you or others have something to say that you want to put on the site but not clog the actual thread with, it warrants a discussion thread.

>>355410
In my experience running multiple quests can be hazardous (especially if they intertwine) But it does help mobilize your attention.
The important thing when running multiple quests, is to pace yourself. The first step is accepting that you will slow down.

don't do it, that is my input.

On quest length, update speed, and completion Slinkoboy 2011/11/21(Mon)06:04 No. 45818 ID: d6ae01
File 132188425282.png - (193.18KB , 500x400 , slissabot after a year of tozzling.png )

One thing I'm seeing a lot is people getting tired of their long-running quests. I compared their quests to my largest quest (which is 1860 images long!), wondering why mine finished when others couldn't. What makes them different?

I then realized that for all its size, my quest only ran seven months.

In a lot of ways I really lucked out with Tezakia. I originally intended it to be a short, simple quest... but I didn't plan for that properly at all. The story I had in mind was way too big to be told in a few chapters, so I created a behemoth of a quest to tell it.

I lucked out because the speed I updated and the length of the quest was absolutely perfect for me at the time. By the time I started really tiring out, the quest was over.

But for the one time someone lucked out, there's a ton of times people haven't. They start a major quest with the idea of making this huge awesome story, but they don't realize that their starting energy and inertia are going to run out as their quest goes. They don't realize they will tire out.

They will update daily. But one day becomes two. then four. then months. Suddenly a quest that was meant to run for 2 months is years old, and still much smaller than the 7 month quest I lucked out with.

So my advice is this. I know you're super excited to start a quest, but take a step back and really think about how long you want to tell the same story with the same characters.

If you draw slowly, an update could take a few hours. Are you really sure that you can spend a few hours a day, every day, telling your story? Keep in mind the nature of quests means your quest could end up running far longer than you intended! People will usually "faff about" as much as you'll let them.


Be prepared to spend a very long time on a quest, even if you're starting out with a short story. There's no telling what could happen!

I think the biggest reason people get tired of their quests is that they enter a cycle. They tire out, so updates slow down. Slower updates makes the quest take longer to finish. The longer it takes to finish, the less you want to run it, until eventually you decide not to run it anymore.

I lucked out with Tezakia... but if we move to Venji, we'll see a quest where I didn't luck out. Like Tezakia, I made a story too large for the time frame, but unlike Tezakia, I didn't maintain my energy and inertia until the end. Venji updates began to slow down, and I became less and less fond of running it. The only reason it finished was because my pride was stronger than my desire to quit.

If you find yourself in this situation, it's pretty tricky to get past it and still finish a quest. Taking a week off can help, but in some cases the time spent not running a quest does little more than make you realize how little you want to run it. Running an unrelated one-shot could be a good break, so long as you ensure it is a one-shot, else it could end up in the same situation as your main quest. Definitely make it something very easy and fast to draw, something to just have silly fun with. Doing this really helped me finish Tezakia, as it was a break from drawing hours a day, and it let me relax and unwind between chapters.

Prevention is really the best solution, though. I would recommend undershooting your plot length. If you want to run a quest for 5 months, design a story that would take 1 month to tell. The other 4 months will be filled in by suggestions and plot events you don't see coming. With Tezakia, I overshot by making this huge map thinking we'd spend at most 2 updates in a room. But the suggestions and character story ended up causing a lot of time spent not exploring at all! In fact, the weakest part of Tezakia was the chapter where I decided to force the characters to move from room to room more quickly.


So in the end, the best thing you can do is consider how fast you can draw, think about how long you want to run a quest, and then design the quest to run half that long.

>>355618
would anyone believe that i read this whole thingand actually learned something from it? woah, like.... yeah, probably worth putting in the wiki maybe?

How to write succinctly:
Proof-read. Delete any word you can that doesn't convey a damn thing. Proof-read. Conveying tone counts, but one good word trumps ten rough ones. Proof-read. Simple words have less cost to defend. Pronouns are free. Subclauses better be worth it. Proof-read. Stop before you reach the threshold of cookery books.

Deleting extraneous words is not removing the fine detailing from your art. It is neatly erasing your sketch layer and pencil marks.

Slinkoboy 2011/11/21(Mon)12:54 No. 45826 ID: d6ae01
File 132190887140.jpg - (28.53KB , 256x255 , 256px-Gsbox.jpg )

>>355625
Obviously I don't need this advice because I learned how to write succinctly from a very reliable source.

Anonymous 2011/11/22(Tue)13:40 No. 45869 ID: 9da432
File 132199802113.png - (45.38KB , 349x337 , you are awesome.png )

>>355652

Slinko you're awesome

ALRIGHT, so i just figerred out a thingamajig.

So, music with picture posts- i would think the music can set the mood for the cutscenes or intermissions or what not.... what do you guys think, is that a yay its good or nay its not so good?

>>355690
Worked out pretty well in Romanticar. The big issue is that there's no real way to sync the images with the music*, so any relevant action has to go with the first few bars. You couldn't, for example, build up to your Big Revel in sync with a musical crescendo.


*potentially flash/video could be used, but that opens a whole new kettle of fish in regards to update length vs. suggestion granularity & control.

Slinkoboy 2011/11/23(Wed)10:14 No. 45901 ID: d6ae01
File Ch1.swf - (641.45KB , 550x400 )

>>355693
Depends on the type of quest you want to run. It's totally possible to have flash animations and keep the quest pretty free-form if you do it right. The only problem I ran into was not being able to use one of my songs because making the animation would force railroading... which is more a product of bad planning than a limitation of the medium!

I don't think I could recommend making overly complex animations, though. The biggest thing to keep in mind is that an animation should be completable in 1-3 days so you minimize railroading.

Or you can generally just have them at the start of chapters, but I've managed to do it both ways, so it's totally possible!

Slinkoboy 2011/11/23(Wed)10:18 No. 45902 ID: d6ae01
File ch9_2.swf - (1.27MB , 550x400 )

If you don't mind spoilers, here's another example. This one isn't an animation at all, but shows how you can use music for a reveal in a more normal style.

I drew it in flash, but you could always import normal ol images, too!

>>355701
>>355702
>railroading
That was the issue I couldn't get past. Using any musical track of significant length while maintaining synchronisation with the 'action'/dialogue/whatever meant you have a de-facto cutscene on your hands. The only solution that came to mind was to 'pause' the action at decision points, have suggestions made, then have the next update play from the start but continuing past the decision point with the new actions incorporated. Unfortunately, while this would make an excellent format for catching up with quests/reading them after the fact, for those participating it would mean watching the same sequence over and over again for a few extra seconds each time. Essentially the quest equivalent of quick-time events. Individual updates of a few seconds each means any extended musical track is similarly split up, making it a bit pointless.
I can't think of a way to have your cake and eat it too: to have action timed with music but maintaining participation from questers. You're stuck with either having a few general suggestions between cutscenes, or using only general area BGM (not entirely a bad thing, e.g. an 'overworld theme').
Short musical interludes and sound effects are not hampered by this though.

>>355703
That is a lot tougher, I admit. I made a song for one of the combats in my quest, but I never got to use it because of that very thing (how do you integrate both and have it still allow suggestions?) I guess the best you can do is judge what has to just not have a song, and what is so super awesome that people won't mind not suggesting for the scene while it plays.

>>355703
I think this depends entirely on the nature of the quest and what decision points you are using. I think if suggestions are happening every few seconds for the characters in the quest (outside of a fight), then there are some issues with how you are running the quest.

Suggestions should come when it makes sense for new input, which probably shouldn't be every few seconds. The only other instance I can think of outside of fights is a back and forth dialogue, and that hardly needs intricate animations. Even then, the suggestions should probably not be every sentence the protagonist says, but enough for a small back and forth each update.

I think animation has nothing to do with granularity or decision-making. See Seal's quest "Fallen Stars" or Prequel (not on tgchan) for examples of frequent animation and heavy user involvement.

Having enough update or animation for music is an issue I can see, but then again, I hardly feel that animation or music would be relevant for every update or decision. If you look at Slinko's quests, he frequently has four or five images per update - that's certainly more than a few seconds of action per instance.

The final session of one of my quests had frequently "animated" updates. My issue wasn't with granularity, more with that it took much longer to produce the animations (they aren't spectacular, I just wanted a little something extra for the end of the quest).

[Your idea of stitching the updates together into a longer animation is pretty cool though - I think a solution could be to stitch them together at the very end of the scene instead of after each update though. That way you would only do a few seconds per body of input, but the whole thing could be put together once that part was essentially "over" with]

>>355713
>I think if suggestions are happening every few seconds for the characters in the quest (outside of a fight), then there are some issues with how you are running the quest.
Poor phrasing on my part: I was thinking seconds of video time, not necessarily in-quest time.
>Your idea of stitching the updates together into a longer animation is pretty cool though - I think a solution could be to stitch them together at the very end of the scene instead of after each update though. That way you would only do a few seconds per body of input, but the whole thing could be put together once that part was essentially "over" with
That still means splitting the update into nearly unwatchable chunks.
Take for example a few minutes from a movie. Imaging splitting each scene change into a separate file, and some of the scenes into multiple blocks of dialogue and action, then watching all these files individually. Breaking up a contiguous sequence into discrete chunks with gaps in doesn't work too well unless those chunks were created to be separate, and mushing the contiguous chunks together creates a final scene that doesn't hang together too well (lots of jump cuts and odd pacing).

This musing only applies to 3-4 minute 'epic' video updates. Shorter animated updates work fine as they are.

>I guess the best you can do is judge what has to just not have a song, and what is so super awesome that people won't mind not suggesting for the scene while it plays.
That's pretty much it. The longer the gap between interaction, the greater the chance of something occurring that some (or most) questers would rather have had a hand in.


A quest composed entirely of video updates could work, but it'd require a very high degree of character autonomy, and for any expectation of micromanagement to be nipped in the bud quickly. It would also have to be pretty slow-paced to keep the level of influence up, but this puts a lot of strain on the person(s) running the quest (depending on how the videos are created) as it would increase the overall length of the quest.

>>355715
This is all essentially guesswork though. It may turn out that, in practice, people are willing to exchange music and dramatic explosions for significantly reduced interaction.

Bamump 2011/11/23(Wed)22:23 No. 45925 ID: aebc1f
File 132211583202.jpg - (21.17KB , 285x320 , one_i_get_my_coffee.jpg )

no no, i mean a hybrid post... image and music...

for example this.


god i hope this works or i would look so dumb

>>355725
That's some goddamn fancy coffee!

I will maintain that video has little to nothing to do with level of interaction. See: the animated things I directly referenced before. I think the biggest difficulty would be the time it would take to produce them. I think they are only confusing and unwatchable if there is no accompanying text, and that would be an entirely bad idea. As far as stitching them together causing pacing problems - yes, that is likely. You're the one that brought it up, and I thought it was a kind of neat idea. In the same way that many quests can be read without the suggestions, I feel that it could be done properly.

Any accompanying image for a quest update usually only represents a sliver of what happens during the update. I don't think I've ever drawn an update that couldn't have been animated in some fashion. Of course, if you are talking about a 1+ minute long animation with music for each one, then yeah, Okay, that's going to be a giant waste of time for most updates, and you'd probably end up showing a bunch of boring things that weren't entirely productive to show. "Micromanaging," to me, is bad quest authorship to start with (with some few exceptions,) though. I do not think video implies character autonomy, or even that long updates do, which seems to be what you are implying.

>>355727
i'm mostly hearing you, the idea is to have an image, music, and text to explain the situations and actions that can be done. Moslty the music is there to accompany the following moments as well, like after the post with the song and first pic the next few pics go music less and they relate to the first pic that had the song relay. Like an interractive... slideshow i guess.

>>355727
>I don't think I've ever drawn an update that couldn't have been animated in some fashion.
See: Dungeon Deeper.

(See also: apparent burn-out within the first thread. :c )

>>355728
except the music would not make the setting at all as people read at different paces. the very first seconds of the song need to be the mood. otherwise it will seem out of places. and having it calm at the start and ramp up or something because someone gets angry in the middle would be impossible because of the reading rates. someone could breeze through the whole thing before the music hits, or be too slow.

>>355727
>Of course, if you are talking about a 1+ minute long animation with music for each one, then yeah, Okay, that's going to be a giant waste of time for most updates, and you'd probably end up showing a bunch of boring things that weren't entirely productive to show.
That's exactly my point. You can have a long video of interesting things happening, but that means that's a bunch of interesting things that questers aren't doing.

Short videos/animated updates are a different kettle of fish and can be handled in the same way as static image updates.

Anonymous 2011/11/25(Fri)19:45 No. 45999 ID: d79ace
File 132227914142.jpg - (68.96KB , 300x340 , table.jpg )

how do i keep my quests active

>>355799
Set goals for yourself. Make it a point to update at least once a day, maybe every two days. Also, try not to burn yourself out. A quest should be fun to both read and create, too.

How does I stop falling into the trap of "Oh god my art is hideous why am I even trying".

>>355799
Draw faster!

>>355804
Drink!

>>355804

Yes, get drunk and then you won't care how horrible your art is. You'll be drunk.

>>355804

Stop giving fucks. Hoard them.

>>355809
>>355799

While it is true you shouldn't worry too much about your art quality, don't take this as an invitation to never attempt self-betterment.

The only thing separating us upstanding questfolk and the scum of DeviantArt is their complacency.

Anonymous 2011/11/26(Sat)15:03 No. 46422 ID: d79ace
File 132234863377.jpg - (51.07KB , 400x400 , japrock3-heavier.jpg )

Also, what would I have to do if I would like to write for a quest but I need an artist

where could I find one that won't laugh at me

>>356222
I heard that IRC is a good place.

Also, co-creating a quest is apparently a lot more difficult than one might think. You have to be in constant contact and not have any disputes.

Furthermore, I'd recommend doing the art yourself. The consensus around here seems to be that "it's okay as long as it's not simple stick figures, so it isn't that hard to do. You could also consider doing a text-only quest.

I would be willing to draw art for a quest if the idea seems good

>>356227
remind me to query you tomorrow

>The 10000 Hour Rule is about crushing dreams. It's about understanding that there are limits to what you can do in the all-too-short period of time we spend on this Earth. It's about giving people who have achieved mastery the respect they deserve. It's about, before taking on a new task, honestly evaluating whether we can afford to give what it takes to complete it.
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/10/10000-hour-rule.html (but the Ira Glass quote and the conclusion quoted above are the worthwhile bits)

 

Immediate warning: This is a lot to read.
Questing
I have told a handful of people the basic strategy I use when putting a quest 'together'. I know that other people just 'fly by the seat of their pants,' and that works for them but I don't recommend doing that. I think a massive part of the graveyard consists of that. An artist had a 'neat idea,' and hoped that the suggestions would take that neat idea and bring it somewhere fantastic without any planning. There might be examples where this works, but you should really reconsider starting out.
I made mistakes in my work that I always try and make light of for new people who want to tell a story.

Characters
Even if you are letting the suggesters create the character, this is still a thing. Especially if you are going to give them control, in fact. Draw your characters. Get familiar with the races if applicable and main cast so you will be ready to consistently express the characters so you are not put on the spot when you realize you are not nearly prepared to work with the people in your story. Know the characters you want to visualize through your work very well before you start, it will make a big difference for you. It will show for your readers as well.

Brainstorm
Just having neat characters will often be enough to keep a story thriving, but there's still important bits like the setting, overarching plots, antagonists, major events and everything in the bigger picture you might want to have ready for your quest even thinking to start. Your characters need goals. The readers need to have objectives that we can push them to meet. With something to accomplish, a story is much more entertaining to be a part of.

Outline
The video embedded is related to this. One minute and thirty seconds or so in TenNapel discusses how he breaks down his stories. This is almost identical to how I've structured my own stories, even before I saw this, and it's a very powerful tool.

Here is the basic breakdown:
Stories are usually broken into three acts. These do not need to be clear acts, by any means.
They can mean, “Beginning, Middle, End,” as TenNappel puts them, or Tarantino's three act system, “The characters know more than the audience, The audience catches up to the characters, The audience knows more than the characters.”
These are not necessarily required, but the basic three acts are a good start for the rest.
You take the three acts, and break that into a beginning, middle and end as well. Then you take all of those and break them into the same. The end result should be 27 or so pivotal moments. This gives you a very strong direction for the story.
Since this is a quest format I am using TenNapel's outline system as the focus because he uses 27 physical note cards. You have to be flexible with a quest by its very nature of allowing the readers to make an impact on the story. No matter how fine you outline your quest, things are going to change. Try and work with the suggesters, rather than against them. Be ready to change or rearrange the outline and restructure your story and especially your ending based on what actually happens.
The 27 Point outline could be an incredible tool to keeping your storytelling on track, but by no means should it cripple you or your readers.

The major benefit is that not only should your characters have a goal, you have a goal. You have a finish line for your quest to make it toward. There should always be an event you can hook into your quest. You can always (try to) smoothly transition from one point to another while suggestions help shape and refine the world you are painting for them.

OP Images
Title your quest. Put your title in the OP. Make it very clear at a glance that the OP is your quest. Make it obvious without a single drop of doubt that the image signifies your quest.
I am very serious. Not nearly enough people do this.

Speed
I am not the best person to tell anyone this, but it is the truth.
More people will pay attention to your quest if you are going to devote your attention to it. People do not enjoy waiting forever. People really don't like when they get into a quest and it stops existing at a whim.
If you are going to make a quest then either you need to try and update it consistently on a comic-like schedule, or you need to plan, announce, and follow through with sessions with a slew of updates for people to actively participate in all at once.
People really enjoy to do sessions, because the fast paced form makes it more like a game and less like a comic they get to give their two cents and wait for several months to get anything out of it.
If you are not willing to devote your time to your work, it is less likely that other people are going to either.

Clarity and Direction
This is a huge problem for people.
People are used to informal language and being able to get instant feedback. When you say something like, “It's over there,” and someone can instantly say, “What do you mean by there?” and after a dozen exchanges you realize you should have said, “The red paddle is over on top of the blue pail.” It would have been much much easier if that sentence was said first. This happens in quests when a quest author draws an update and does not write clearly enough what is going on, what needs to happen, and why the character cannot not do what we want them to do already.
If you want your readers to understand what is going on based on your update the first time, then actually tell them exactly what you want them to know. Artists will draw certain things, or writers will write certain things that make complete sense to them, but if the viewer doesn't see that with any amount of fair consistency then it's not the viewer's fault. It's yours.
It could be argued that the action and story can be succinctly displayed with the picture alone. Unfortunately, everyone cannot dependably do that 100% of the time. Virtually everyone can however, clearly write what they want the picture to show.

Direction is related to clarity, but is not the same thing. When you put an update down for readers to respond to, you can usually tell the difference very easily between a post with no direction and one with a very specific one. 'Sandbox,' is often the excuse or the basis for some of these updates and I can completely accept that. When and/or if nobody suggests anything because of that, it starts to become an empty justification for aimless storytelling.
You want to lead the readers to make a specific action towards a specific problem. Whether that's a multiple choice decision, a judgment call in a hairy situation, solving a puzzle, or determining a plan of action for the events surrounding the protagonist, you need to give people a direction to go. Some suggesters flourish on a dead stage, but from my experience I can testify that people are going to speak up when they know what they are pushing or arguing about.

Consequences
This is one that has shot me in the foot at least one time.
When readers make a decision, as directed in the last part, there needs to be a consequence for it. Consequences are not always bad. People could vote on arbitrary things all day, but if there's no reason for it, then it's pointless again.
If there's no risk in what people do, there's less excitement. This does not need to be life and death risk, although in quests this is often the case. There should be some sort of thrill over what the protagonists are going for. 'Danger,' is an element which can drive interest into the events, and make the suggesters really think about what they need to have the character do. Something BAD could happen. Things are important and serious now, my input could have negative repercussions!
Some people weigh the negative and positive consequences on their own. Some people use tabletop mechanics with dice, and/or structured tables full of information. Some just use logic. None of these are 'right' or 'wrong' but these are an important element that can really hurt you if you do not take them into consideration.
Consequences can be very damaging if you aren't using the right amount of Clarity. Make sure and be clear with the audience as to the amount of risk that is held in your actions, unless you really just want whatever that is going to happen be a surprise.
Ultimately: Try not to punish your readers for being a part of your quest. If something is lost, the main thing that matters is that they got an opportunity to try and protect or save the element that was lost. If there was not an opportunity, make sure they know why.
If someone is constantly 'hurt' for being a part of something they enjoy(ed), they may eventually give up.

Conclusion
Questing is easy to start. It is extremely difficult to do effectively. Storytelling is a long treacherous road. If you really work and put your heart into it, it will show. You better be enjoying it, and likely other people will enjoy it to.
You're going to mess up, but there are few mistakes that are irreparable. So work your ass off and keep an open mind and an open ear and you might create something you're proud of.

Thank you, I hope this helps someone.

>>356223
>Co-creation

I advise against it. Unless you and the artist really, really click, either one of you could drop and then the whole thing is toast.

Anonymous 2011/11/27(Sun)15:40 No. 46455 ID: d79ace
File 132243724005.jpg - (62.61KB , 380x414 , kansas.jpg )

>>356254
this is gonna be hard then

from my experience team projects have always been superior to solo ones

>>356236

That was an interesting and informative read, thank you for sharing.

Anonymous 2011/11/27(Sun)17:13 No. 46458 ID: d79ace
File 132244278028.jpg - (18.76KB , 265x235 , the unrevolutionary adventures of apathy man.jpg )

even if my art looks like this?

>>356258
depends, is that a person holding a ball with a stick figure in it? if so then yes it's fine.

>>356258
It was supposed to be a belt, but baby steps I guess

>>356260
WAY too tall for a belt. be more like fancy corset.

  2011/11/27(Sun)18:52 No. 46462 ID: d79ace
File 132244876894.jpg - (196.33KB , 535x625 , goddamn.jpg )

>>356261
fuck it, i'm just doing a text quest.

>>356262
got some more advice for you. give the suggesters a goal. right now you basically have "here is a guy in a place, what do?"
that never nets any good suggestions. you made this big intro, about how all this crazy shit happens when he is asleep, then have us play him while awake.

>>356262
Alternately, just draw smaller belts. Or do simple stuff. Look at the image at the top of this thread. That's good art, because it represents its contents well.

pudding 2011/12/01(Thu)11:38 No. 46557 ID: 2c1edf
File 132276828339.png - (17.85KB , 839x501 , Immaginere.png )

art for your quest: used paint

>>356357
Hey that actually looks pretty nice.

It's not quite about running a quest, but what's the etiquette about use of outside knowledge to inform suggestions? It appears that Real-World-Experience is almost always fair game, but Other-Quest-Knowledge is not.

>>356394
I don't know how standard it is, but that is generally my stance on outside knowledge. I think that is especially important in crossover fight quests like BattleQuest, because knowing your enemy is half a significant portion of the battle.

The difference is that life knowledge is knowledge that something happens in general (such as explosions being deadlier in confined spaces), whereas knowledge from other quests is about specific characters/factions (such as knowing the strengths and weaknesses of Astranian weaponry).

>>356394

what, you mean metagaming?

Yes, that- thing is we aren't actually the characters, 99% of the time.

Hm. I'm currently puzzling over whether using my vector-art program of choice to create drawings from scratch for each update in a theoretical potential quest would be better or worse than simply taking advantage of my ability to use moderately detailed posable templates.

On one hand, the first option has the potential for much more visually differing updates, and potentially better art. But I know it would take me much longer on a single image, and that it would also have a much larger potential to be of varying artistic quality.

The second option offers the most consistent quality, and update speed after the first drawing of any object or character would also be much more consistent. However, it would have a larger potential to look bland to the readers if each update was essentially copy-pasted and posed, regardless of any gloss.

There is a third option, too, in that I could use the second style except in special situations wherein I might use the first. Things like important updates, cool moments, that sort of thing. However, the lack of consistency might be jarring to some, and if the potential to just use the second style is there, the first style would likely be in rare use.

Personally, I fall more naturally into the second, since I find that it is much easier to achieve poses and things with the templates as opposed to my more detailed styles. I'd probably use that in the end, since I don't think anyone really cares and I'd rather posting was fun and quick as opposed to laborious (even if the potential image quality might be higher), but it's good to see what people might think.

>>357131
he have had several vector art guys. and they have all been nice.

>>357131 For your reference, here are some quests made with vectors.

http://tgchan.org/wiki/Panzermensch made in flash 8 or something
http://tgchan.org/wiki/Gridlock
http://tgchan.org/wiki/Dungeon_Game made with overpriced software.
http://tgchan.org/kusaba/graveyard/res/224034.html

http://tgchan.org/wiki/Bromeliad 's quests had a vector-like style, but were actually done with the help of the polygonal lasso.

>>357137
>vectors
Unless you're talking specifically about manually tracing or drawing an image (i.e. laying out each shape by hand) a vector is just a specific method of storing an image file created using strokes, generally from a Wacom pad or the like. I'm sure there are plenty of quest authors who own one, maybe the majority, though many may choose to use them with raster-based programs.

>>357146
There are actually specific vector art programs out there, such as inkscape, that basically work entirely without raster images. Basically, that means they allow you to work with and draw scalable, rotatable shapes and that sort of thing. It's a fairly different process to opening paint or photoshop and just doing straight-up layered drawings.

>>357149
And then you have Coreldraw and the like, which take tablet input and turn it into strokes (vectors). Inkscape and Illustrator can also do this (as can Photoshop to a limited extent). Hence the distinction I drew between manually plotted vector graphics (essentially technical drawing) and storing of strokes as vectors.

So let's talk about "plot armor".

What's everyone's stance on it? Strictly from a reader's perspective, I feel that it's a terrible thing. Most characters are simply regular people, not godlike damage-avoiders. It gets rather boring when a character escapes a situation with little to no injury. Most of the suspense comes from the threat of serious injury, and when THAT'S not there, what's the point?

I like to think that, in my quests, there is no such thing as plot armor. If the suggesters make the right stupid decisions, characters WILL die. I have no qualms over ending a quest prematurely because, say, the people said to hug a violent burning Nazi. Am I in the wrong?

Bamump 2011/12/24(Sat)02:30 No. 47601 ID: b88147
File 132472263807.jpg - (54.89KB , 365x450 , 210039-Royalty-Free-RF-Clipart-Illustration-Of-A-R.jpg )

so i have a question, i know there are picture quests and picture with text quests and just plain text quests. And i've seen some quests with picture and audio-

but could there be a quest where it was just audio? and the text could be the readable version? Would that be an interesting idea?

>>357401
you would need to have a VERY nice voice, like the narrator for Bastion.

The_Falcon!Z/kS4uKGRU 2011/12/24(Sat)07:39 No. 47604 ID: 51d399
File 132474116839.jpg - (15.58KB , 238x320 , tears.jpg )

>>357402
Oh yes. If any of you have amazing voices, feel free to try this.

Bastion was amazing

bite does an audio quest. neo sex mall is now an audio quest

>>357392 
This is effectively why The Dungeon Crawlers has multiple characters with the ability to interact with the suggesters. I don't think there's any real fun to a quest where the main character is invincible simply because they're the main character - quests run based on user suggestion, and if poor suggestions have no negative consequences there's no reason to actually think your suggestions out. With that said, having three "main" characters (Mark, Lin, Neena) means that I don't have to bring the entire project to a halt should the players decide to make Mark try to hug a Lich or something later on. 

I do think leniency should be provided sometimes, if only to give a waning that certain courses of action are inadvisable in the future. I don't think you should have your main character bumrush a horde or ogres and win just because "bumrush that horde of ogres" was the only suggestion provided and you don't want to end your quest prematurely, but while fatality should always be a threat for the main characters it's just as effective sometimes to have a character injured or knocked out by stupidity as long as there's repurcussions to their stupidity beyond the character waking up and going "shit, that hurt. Time to kill some more monsters." Perhaps a bad guy who the players had a genuine shot at killing gets away as a result. Perhaps a friend is seriously injured saving them and won't be around to help in the next chapter as a result. Maybe with the main character unconscious, the ogres pushed forwards and destroyed a shack that the suggesters would have found important information in. However you do it, there are plenty of ways to punish the suggesters without killing the main character. 

However, in situations where fatality is a possibility, I think its equally important to make sure the suggesters understand that they're in a serious situation and need to suggest seriously. If Mark were to go to a fancy dinner hosted by a noble later in the quest, ordered a soup before the main course at the suggesters' request, and was then shot dead by the noble's guards on the spot because the noble in question secretly hates people who eat soup at his palace, then the subsequent cites of a cheap death would be entirely justified. However, were Mark to overhear a conversation on the way to the palace where one peasant told another "Have you ever been to one of Baron Baronicus' dinners? Motherfucker's crazy! Frank asked for a soup and he shot him in the chest!" and then the suggesters STILL insisted on ordering soup, then the same couldn't be said. It certainly doesn't have to be that overt - a few skulls outside a cave or a few hanged men in a city square should be enough for most suggesters to catch on to the fact that respectively, there's something dangerous in the cave and that town's guards mean business. 

For example, Chapter Three of the Dungeon Crawlers ended with a fight against two Orcs, a fight Mark ultimately won. However, I took effort to emphasize the fact that the first blow against one of the Orcs, an overhead downwards chop with an elven sword that a character had complimented for it's craftsmenship back in chapter two, only cut partway into the target's shoulder and barely phased him. One of the next attacks resulted in the sword getting stuck in the target's arm as he laughed. Mark won the fight, but the whole scene drove home the point that Mark is barely a match for a pair of unarmed Orcish hooligans, and that's with him catching one off guard and getting assistance from his partner on the other. Should the suggesters still then choose to fight a group of several armed Orc warriors head-on later in the quest after that sequence, the consequence is on them. 

Basically, I agree wholeheartedly that giving your ptotagonist's plot armor is a very sloppy move. Choices an consequences are the basis of a quest, so as long as the suggesters are made aware that the situation is dangerous there's no reason why failure to adhere to common sense SHOULDN'T result in an appropriate punishment.

>>357392
Depends on what kind of quest you're writing. Who says you need the threat of death to build suspense?

>>357421
Exactly.

There are things that can be more painful than simply ending with a "Game Over" and definitely more interesting to play out.

For instance: In Golem Quest, the main character is Mordre, a sentient golem. As the quest advanced, we learned that sentient golems were viewed as enders of civilizations, and so made up a story about being a mage remotely controlling the golem.

As time passed, the fear of this secret coming to light was an ever-present fear and worry. Despite the fact that at this point Mordre was, essentially, unbeatable, we all still suggested and worked around this fear of being discovered.

Death is not the threat you should use.

Loss is much, much better.

>>357431
This as well. Though I believe death should be a possibility, especially for blatant disregard of common sense in dangerous situations, there are usually much more interesting ways to puish failure. BAD END should only be reserved for the most fatal of fuck-ups.

Nod 2011/12/24(Sat)18:26 No. 47635 ID: 7290ea
File 132477997813.png - (12.81KB , 441x605 , smoke.png )

I think a much more important reason to have more than one character, even main character, is that interactions between people are what keeps quests approachable and understandable. Suggesters don't have much experience fighting dragons, managing empires, repairing spacecraft or exploring ancient temples to forgotten gods... but every single one of us has cheered up a friend, chastened an acquaintance, given orders, and fallen in love.

Personal interaction between characters gives us access to their fundamentally human inner workers, and no matter how weird their worlds are, that much will keep us grounded.

Plot armor is just part of storytelling, and no number of additional protagonists will make it hurt less when a favorite character is injured or killed. Suggestions are just that: Suggestions. It's neither cheap nor inauthentic to have a character pause, uncertain... and if everybody still wants her to jump into the pit then it's always more interesting if there's something dangerous down there that she may be able to deal with, than if she simply falls to her death.

It may not be on the map. It may not be the way the story was supposed to go. It's infinitely more interactive and more rewarding than either of those.

>>357435
When should plot armor end, then?

>>357441
I'm pretty sure it's completely impossible to come up with a hard-and-fast rule.

>>357441
When the plot demands it.

In a non-interactive story, all injury and death is meaningful. If tragedy is arbitrary and unfair, that should speak to the unfairness of the situation that characters inhabit and either provide or crush their particular motivation to change. Every action and decision should drive the narrative.

In an ideal interactive story, the same things hold true. Try to find meaning in every suggestion, select the options best suited to moving the story forward, and do everything you can to protect your characters from an aimless, plotless existence.

If that involves tragic events, so be it.

>>357444
i've never felt so inspired to do crazy things to my characters

Wanted to run something by you fellas and see what you thought, and this seems as good a place as any to do it.

Would it be a good idea to have a thread where suggesters can talk to Quest authors and ask them questions about themselves and their work? Something in the same vein as Inside the Quest, I mean, but with the questions being directed towards authors instead of characters. Questions like "What got you into quests in the first place?", "I noticed the death of close friends shows up a lot in your quests. Is that deliberate?", and "Which of your quests are you most proud of, personally?" could be asked, either directed toward specific authors or toward any author who feels like answering.

I tried to think of threads that already served this purpose, but none came up. The closest matches were this thread and the various quest discussion threads, but neither quite seems to fit the bill (this thread is dedicated to advice on running quests, with occasional interruptions like this one, and the quest discussions are dedicated to...well...the discussion of individual quests and their contents).

What do you think?

>>358407
I think that could be pretty cool. "Ask the authors" would be fun, especially if people responded with author avatar pictures.

Why not ask in the appropriate questdis thread? Or is it meant to be more... chatty? Less every-word-is-immutable-canon-so-be-very-careful?

>>358423
sounds like more a get to know the author personally sort of things, but i'd think that's a bad idea... some authors you just don't want to konw.

The closest thread to what you've described here was Behind the Quest. It didn't last long.

Also, author avatars are the worst form of attention whoring since trip codes and you're a bad person for liking them.

>>358428
If they're just open questions then that's not a big deal. It could be interesting. I'm a whore so I love people to ask me about anything.

>>358423
>Or is it meant to be more... chatty? Less every-word-is-immutable-canon-so-be-very-careful?
More or less. Sort of a mix between a convention panel and the buddy-buddy conversation that takes place at a kitchen table. The questions could be formal (like the examples I gave) or informal, whichever floats the asker's boat. The same goes for the answers and the conversation in general. Hopefully it would get some interesting conversations started and, of course, satiate our curiosity. Who knows? Maybe it'll even lead to some useful brainstorming and the trading of ideas between authors who ordinarily wouldn't be in touch with one another.

>>358428
>sounds like more a get to know the author personally sort of things
That's the idea. :)

>but i'd think that's a bad idea... some authors you just don't want to konw.
No one would be forced to answer any questions. If you're asked a question that you don't want to answer you can just ignore it. Or you can flat out say "I'd rather not answer that, if you don't mind."

>>358436
This has been tried before? If it has and it didn't turn out well, that could be a problem. I'll leave it to the veteran members here to decide whether or not making the thread would be a good idea. Though I would like to point out that the success or failure of the thread would probably depend on having authors willing to participate in it, and that there may be more willing participants now than there were when Behind the Quest ran.

Oh, and I did think of one potential problem with the idea. Depending on the questions that are asked, it's possible that ordinarily taboo subjects (religion, politics, yaddayadda) could come up. I call this a potential problem because this place seems bizarrely well-mannered for an internet community (seriously, how'd that happen?) and there's a fair chance that the people here would be mature enough to restrain themselves from criticizing or arguing against any stated religious or political belief that they disagree with, even if it's something as heinous as "Babies are an important part of this nutritious breakfast!". Well, beyond saying something like "I disagree, but that's cool. You keep doing your thing.", or something like that, I suppose.

Or we could just forbid the discussion of things like that, though I'm not sure I'd be in favor of that. These touchy subjects often play an integral role in our lives and help us determine "who we are", so much so that knowledge of a person's positions, thoughts, and feelings regarding these subjects can give us deep insight into said person's mind and personality. A level of insight unavailable by other means.

But then, I suppose the preservation of peace can be more important than interpersonal insight.

Gah! I'm rambling.


What are your thoughts about the proposed thread so far?

Or, to simplify things a bit, do you think it's a Good Idea or a Bad Idea?

>>358459
I'm all for it, but I think that it'd fizzle out pretty quickly. It's worth a shot, though! Better to have tried and failed than to have failed to try, ect ect.

dunno, nah- probably fizzle again.

>>328726

yep, found that thing that was similar

>>358468
That does seem awfully similar. I could say that the proposed thread would be more oriented towards getting to know the quest authors, but that may be a negligible difference.

Still, I'd like to at least give it a shot. Which leaves me with two obvious and potentially stupid questions: How do I make a thread, and what could be done about a title card?

>>358511
run it past one of the elder anons here, lawyerdog would give you his opinion and since he's been on the board so long he'll most likely know how it will be

If you do start this up i wish you the best of luck

Call me crazy, but I don't think you need to go through a committee to make a damn thread on an image board. Do what you want, within the rules. If it sucks, it'll fall off the front page. No big deal.

>>358511

How to make a thread: Exactly the same way as you post in a thread normally, except not as a reply to something. Just go to the board you want to post the thread in and act as if you want to reply to the board itself.

As far as a title image, welp, that's up to you to sort out. As long as it's not horrific, it'll work, but an on-topic image is always nice. You can either submit an image from your computer or post one from a URL. You can post an image from your computer with the choose file button below the message box. If you have a URL for an image already on the internet you like and want to use as your OP pic, however, paste the URL into the Embed field and making sure "Image URL" is selected.

Hit the "Submit" button next to the subject button, and you're done!

>>358568
Thanks! One last question before I make it, though. Considering that I more or less never draw, ever, and my attempts at "art" are appropriately crappy, would anyone mind if I just used clipart for the OP pic?

On second thought, it's probably better to just go with it and stop pelting everybody-and-his-mother with questions. So nevermind that last bit. Let's see what happens...

*crosses fingers*

Another very simple question for a different Anon: is there a formatting guide anywhere? Like how to do things like italics and bold in a post?

It's all here. You should probably read it all, it's a huge help.

http://tgchan.org/kusaba/news.php?p=faq

Hey, so further up in the thread, I saw you guys talking about character death. I'd like to know what you think about the way I've approached it - I have informed the questers that it is very possible to fuck up and get the protagonist killed, but if that happens, the quest will sort of be "reset" to the point where they made the decision that got her killed, and they will have to figure out a different choice that'll have a better outcome.
What do you guys think of that? Will that just frustrate readers, or could it be a good way to keep stakes high without risking ending the quest sooner than I'd like to?

>>359544
it's not the death itself, but the consequences. that would give no consequence for actions as we can just try again until we win.

>>359545
Yeah, I didn't think of it that way. Okay, I'll probably rethink that aspect, then.
Also, in this thread, would it be alright to ask for just advice specific to your quest? Like, I feel like it would really help if you guys could point out any problems you notice (or potential problems you could see me falling into). If that would be too much trouble, though, no worries!

Oops, just realized I forgot to mention, I write FudgeQuest.

>>359561
Yeah, here's the place to ask for advice.

Though I don't think you need it. For a first quest, you're doing superbly!

>>359565
Wow, really? That's great to hear, thank you! OwO

Kitsun3 2012/03/01(Thu)16:53 No. 49827 ID: 76f1e3
File 133064958195.png - (85.23KB , 640x480 , example.png )

Quick linings of the main char done in 10 mins.

How does it look? We're hoping to pull out quick updates.

>>359627
That's do just fine for a quest! It's more about the writing than it is the art, anyway. Good luck!

>>359627
The neck looks too thick in that central example... but yeah, that's good enough for questing.

I've been looking into starting up my old Quest again. I got a tablet and have been working with that lately to see how much it changes my style, but I am more concerned about what happens if I just start where I left off. It's hard to imagine that even the most avid reader can remember all that happened so far considering its last update was in 2010.

Should I take the time to go over what happened previously or just let the archives speak for themselves?

>>359734
A recap won't hurt

yeah link the archive and give a small recap.

Anonymous 2012/03/06(Tue)14:50 No. 49974 ID: d84d24
File 133107422363.png - (280.23KB , 1665x564 , sergals copy.png )

Protip: Make a basic model sheet that you can refer to when you're drawing your quest. Even if you're doing something in a simplistic style, this helps your characters to remain consistent. Even if it's something simple like I have here for the sergal patterns

I've put in a good... entire day on this here so far now:
http://tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/391158.html

So far, I think it's been going pretty well, but there's a basic formula that has and will continue to come up:
- Suggesters choose a path.
- The newly entered room is displayed.
- There's an item in it (which will be promptly collected).
- Time to reconfigure the character and start messing around.

Those middle steps are kind of bugging me. I've pretty much written myself into the corner of going long form like I did with the backpack (show room in an update, work on a second update for after the item has been corrected, either toss it up cutscene style or in response to someone going "get that item!" while I was drawing), or the ultra-brief mode I did with the mirror (draw the room, "so here's a new room, there was an item in it, it's in our inventory now, where next?")

The first method bugs me because, well, double author posts. The second though makes me feel a bit like I'm glossing over too much, and if I habitually do it, people will lose track of, well, everything there is to keep track of.

Anyone have a better way to handle this than just, usually going with the quick version, going the long now and then as a refresher?

a cut-scene is perfectly acceptable around here. we like them as long as they never result in YOU LOSE for something that would of been prevented if they were told to by the suggesters.

The long one is better!

>>359774
That sergal model is off-model.
It's too human, try to scale back the anthropomorphism.
'Lean, Mean, Killing Machines' is one of the main cues when feeling out a new sergal design. Less emphasis on the musculature, more emphasis on the bone structure and 'angled' nature of the sergal form.
Also, too much ass.

>>359873
Are you familiar with old age sergals at all?

>>359873
Also, it's missing the tits.

Anonymous 2012/03/11(Sun)06:11 No. 50092 ID: cf49fc
File 133147149682.jpg - (255.14KB , 1024x745 , ___Seriously meatbags.jpg )

>>359891
Yeah. No.

Model is mostly okay.
In this case, you gave em a little too much ass.

>>359873
It looks pretty OK to me. I mean sure, they could be sleeker/lankier I guess? But they look more like sergals than 99 percent of drawn sergals out there.

The base of the tail could be thicker I guess, but that's really the only thing I can see actually "off-model" different here. I don't think there should be a question of butt so much as fluff upon the butt.

>>359873
>Also, too much ass.
You sir, are cray cray.

Hey. I'm thinking about running a quest in the moderately-distant future, and I'd like some advice about how to prepare for it. I've got some specific questions prepared, but I'd gladly accept any additional wisdom you'd like to throw my way (provided it hasn't already been mentioned in this thread). Anyway, to the questions:

1. What drawing medium would be a good choice for my first quest (pencil/paper, MSPaint/mouse, tablet/pen, etc.)? Keep in mind that I'd rather not put much money, if any, into this--especially since I know neither how it'll turn out nor whether I'll ever try it again--and that I virtually zero experience as an artist.

2. Between now and the start of my quest, what would be a good way to practice my drawing (assuming there's any more to practicing than "grab paper, draw shit"), and what aspects of drawing do you think a beginner like me (who has trouble even keeping his doodles consistent) ought to focus on if he hopes to develop almost-bearable art before starting a quest?

3. What would be a good way for me to practice writing and dialog?

4. How long would you suggest I make my first quest? I'm afraid of burning out early, but I suspect the ideas and stories I'd most like to try would wind up taking quite a while to execute/tell.

5. What size scope would you advise my first quest be? One of the potential stories I'm playing with would take place on an entire planet, but I'm afraid that would be too ambitious--certainly for a first quest. Unless I made it a small planet, I guess.

Thoughts or advice for an aspiring, dream-drunk newborn?