Quest by Adventure Guild

This incredibly accessible intro RPG system made my, "Top 5 Fantasy RPGs That Are Better Than D&D." In this post, I take a closer look at Quest.

Firstly, I have to say that, "Quest" is a terrible name. You might as well search for a book titled, "book," which would be impossible without the author's name. This is why I always type the name of the Quest RPG as, "Quest by Adventure Guild." What were they thinking?

Okay, that out of the way. Quest is a super simple RPG. It has one resolution mechanic. Roll a d20 and consult the very simple results table. That's it. Nothing in the rules ever changes or effects this mechanic. The roll is never modified and the rule is never changed. What changes is your interpretation of the roll's results based on the circumstances of the story.

If this seems too simple, you might be right, but Quest has a trick up its sleeve. Characters in Quest all have special abilities. None of these abilities effect the die rolling mechanic. In fact, most don't involve rolling dice at all. These abilities just give your character something neat that they can do, and there are a lot of these abilities.

Characters are class based. Each class has five or six distinct ability trees called Learning Paths. Each of these contains four or five specific class abilities. The abilities within each learning path grow in power and utility and you have to select each ability in a path in order. There are no levels to limit your choices. You just follow the options of your learning paths. You can pick the first ability in each of your available paths or concentrate on just a few to become specialized.

Each time you play, you get to add a new ability. No levels. No math. Just interesting choices, and something new to enjoy with every new game session. Abilities do have a cost in a resource called Adventure Points. These points are spent like money to activate abilities and they are finite like money too. If you burn through all you've got, you'll need to wait for the GM to give you more.

The GM will generally award 5 adventure points after each game session with bonus points provided for especially good roleplay or exciting adventures. The GM also has access to special Legendary Abilities that they can award, and these are really awesome! 

Quest is a great game for new players, but not for new GM's. Interpreting the die rolls and improvising entertaining results on the fly is probably going to work best for a game master with a bit of experience. 

The only thing that I don't like about Quest is the character worksheets.

Oh, I love the way the worksheets engage the player to create their character narratively by answering questions. It's great! I mean the actual physical paper forms. They are boring to look at, and the electronic versions are only partially enabled with forms. This isn't an insurmountable issue. I've created my own form-fillable character sheet that I am very proud of. 

Take a look at Willard Benjamin, the Mausfolk Doctor that I created for Quest as he appears on the character sheet that I designed! You can see the questions that players answer to create their characters and examples of some of the abilities for the Doctor class (called a "Role" in Quest.)

All of the rules for Quest are available for free at the Adventure Guild website. I highly recommend the game for people who want an easier more casual RPG experience. Quest by Adventure Guild is for people who just want to show up to your game table and play, and not be bothered by the rules. Quest is perfect for this!

Here's a blank character sheet if you want to work on your own character. You can find the form-fillable PDF version of the sheet at our Facebook Group. Come join the discussion!