But I wouldn’t ever have a dude come up and say “Ho now, you look like the Chosen One who is looking fo your ancestral sword, here is a map and some rations and a rope because there will be a pit trap there.”

They’d need to figure out who they need to talk with and where they need to go to gather information about their own personal quests. I like it. I prefer when the players initiate their own adventures because they seem to have a greater stake in them.

Anyway, I find that quest-givers create a chilling effect to player creativity. The players know that this is the night’s adventure, just as surely as if you outright told them. Players are bright. So they know that you have this adventure planned, maybe one or two others. But you obviously want them to go on this adventure.

So if they don’t bite, they’re stuck with nothing to do, or the choice of your other ideas. I hope you came to the table with multiple adventures.

Because of this they’re subtly railroaded into your adventure. Maybe your adventure is very loosely written, but they don’t really have a choice to take it or not. There isn’t anything else, as evidenced by the presence of the heavy-handed Quest Giver.

Now if your players can get creative and self motivated, and find their own adventures, and you can run them on the fly, that’s cool. Why the heck are you using a quest giver? It’s a crutch, like “You Meet In A Tavern”.

Finally if there’s a Quest Giver there’s usually some expectation of reward. Beware the reward! Players often expect increasing rewards for increasing risks, and eventually you’re playing a mission-based game (Hi Charley! Hello Angels!). How often was Indiana Jones, or John Carter, or Frodo Baggins, or Elric, or Tanis Half-Elven paid 300 GP to kill the owlbears? Avoid or subvert the trope because it’s a funky one.

This was a D&D 3.5 game and the players were getting tired of too many combats and limited ways to earn experience points. Therefore, I scoured through their player histories and current events and created 3 quest goals for each player with a xp reward (and in a couple of cases, a monetary reward due to who would pay them for it). I handed these directly to the players — no quest giver at all. Why? Because many of these quests were goals deemed ‘in character’. For example, one character was seeking to find a lost sword and besides getting the sword, I would give him a bonus xp reward.

But that’s an easy one — its an item. I also wanted to encourage role playing, so another player with an intense hatred of a specific enemy religious faction was given a quest to desecrate one of their holy sites for an xp reward. And another person had a secret quest to get membership in a less than popular enemy faction (which gave discounts on poison purchases as well as a one time xp reward).

To also be fair, I also gave them some blank cards and said, “If you don’t like these quests, feel free to propose some and I’ll assign an appropriate reward.” In this way, if I misunderstood their motivations, they could formally make a request that they knew would be meaningful to them. In fact, I was hoping they would start begging for all types of quests just so they would get rewards.

When my group gets past our current problem with SCORL (schedule conflicts of real life), I’ll return to using the system to see if I can refine it.

To summarize and better link to the above article, yes, many of these quest cards were planned to come from quest givers, but I wanted the players to make them up too.

I prefer to only partially use the quest giver. Yes this person gives out the quest, but if he or she knew all the parts of the quest it would be done already. Instead someone comes to the party for help, but the PCs need to find more information before they tackle the problem.

I used “surprise” lycanthropes in a 4e campaign this way. The party was sent to clear out kobolds from a ruined outpost, but there were whispers of lycanthropes in the nearby woods. The PCs ignored that and got hit with a couple diseases, had no good cure methods, no silvered weapons, and were generally unprepared. After that they began to question more for information.

I agree, but I take a slightly different spin: I think quest-givers are absolutely necessary. However, I personally think the most powerful quest-givers are the players themselves.

More typical, “a guy approaches your table in the tavern” sort of quest-givers are alright, on very rare occasion. I think I’d shoot myself, though, if that was the basis (and entirety!) of a GM’s plot/story introduction style.

Sadly, it was a hot day, and I had wife and child in tow, and didn’t pursue any of the quests.

I like quest givers in quest/delve based games. Your advice about mixing up the form of quest giver (rumors, fences, information booths, etc.) is also good to keep in mind.

In general, I don’t like “quest-givers” much, but obviously they need to be used. I try to “backdoor” my quest-giving by asking players what their characters care about, and then putting it in danger. If someone’s little brother or beloved or whatever is threatened, then that person is still the quest-giver, but it’s not a matter of “Hi, I’ve never met you before but I have a need of some kind of arcane service that only a warrior/vampire/demigod/cowboy of your quality can undertake!”

Some of my favorite games are those that build quest-giving right into the mechanics. Check out With Great Power and Dogs in the Vineyard for two of my favorite examples. Honourable mention also goes to any game that tricks your players into making up their own quests, such as Houses of the Blooded and Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies.