QUEST
Designer: T.C. Sottek | Publisher: The Adventure Guild
If you walked past a group playing Quest you’d be forgiven for assuming it was one of those countless games whose descriptions always open with the phrase “Like Dungeons & Dragons but…”. Linger just a few moments longer, however, and you’ll find a game that carves out a niche of its own; one that ditches number-crunching and tactics in favour of streamlined storytelling laser-focused on getting you and your friends telling tales with the bare minimum of fuss.
The sheer extent of Quest’s devotion to smashing down the barriers between players and stories is mindboggling. It feels like the designers combed countless sessions of more traditional RPGs for every time a rule, conceit or mechanic caused even a moment’s hesitation or confusion, and then slashed them through with red ink. Levels? Gone. Spell slots? Gone. Handfuls of weirdly shaped dice? Gone.
The result retains the shape of classic fantasy adventure but carries very little of the weight. The core pillars of the genre – classes, monsters, treasure – are all still there, but the systems that fleshed them out have been hacked back and replaced with gossamer threads of suggestion and imagination.
This makes Quest a shockingly easy game to pick up and play. The rules can probably be explained in less than a minute and the character sheets are dominated by concepts that drive the story rather than the gameplay. You can use the game to spin some truly wonderful tales without ever worrying about whether you’re playing optimally or using the right rules for grappling.
Of course, this does lose its sheen if you’re the kind of players who enjoys fiddling with the rules and exploring the possibilities of tactical combat. Ultimately, Quest is something for those groups that like the idea of classical fantasy adventures but keep bouncing off the more complicated, more prescriptive rulesets. It’s light, breezy and full of imagination, and there can be few better ways to get storytelling at the tabletop.
RICHARD JANSEN-PARKES
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