>>6328505>For me, and I hope this comes through in my quests, stat advancement serves as an RPG-flavoured way to develop a character's personality and approach, and to help build a sense of competence and preference in how they solve problems.Yeah, this is 100% my same desire and thing I'd like too. One of my favorite non-vote comments from one of my quests was from the Sheep Cultivator one-shot I did; where a player said that we aligned with wood elemental chi we could maybe grow mushrooms out of the MC's wool to be used as various forms of attack or defense. That kind of character building concept is really cool in a fantasy game or setting; perfect for the sort of TTRPG interactive fiction space, but it's very rare in questing because of the inherent difficulties in getting multiple people to agree with something that isn't the most effective and simple/loss and risk-averse plan you can. In those instances, QM fiat and deciding what you want the character to be like already (if you think something specific is interesting) is better then trying to angle the players into making an interesting character for you.
In a couple of quests I did this by allowing some limited character generation at the start which helped narrow down what the MC would end up as or like but also give the players some control and make it more interesting for me. I can honestly say these were really fun; players choosing the Dual Tonfas for Max in CSQ, or people choosing "just lemme hunt whales for deaths' sake" in Black Ocean quest were both fun surprises that I had no idea would be what the character would identify the characters.
I can certainly see the challenge though. One of my biggest QMing hurdles is creating the GOOD fantasy quest scheme for the future; of which I wanted to strongly make the game feel similar to an MMORPG world or an Elder-Scrolls type game in scope and feeling; in which players create a specific character they want to play as. Letting players pick if they want to be a magician, or a warrior, or a thief, perhaps with multiple "lives" or multiple MCs they can cycle between to keep it from being too boring. My main issue is as above; the difficulty for forcing quest players to assign stats or specialize in a specific school of magic and having everything be set towards this character outline. I often imagine my quests as a video game, or the type of idealized ideaguy "oh it's a video game with good graphics but you can also do anything lol no idea why game developers haven't made a game like that yet!" in which I'd want to be able to "play" the quest by picking my own choices, path, and skills; and representing this as a player facing Quest. But the format of Quest and the community means it doesn't really work that way; adjusting it for the medium is the greatest challenge since it will never be quite as good, freeform, or open as you imagine.
