Whenever the party sets a significant goal for themselves or are assigned one by a third party, they will receive a quest. Quests serve two purposes in campaigns. The first is to ensure that players always have a thread they can follow in order to advance the plot. The second is to create quantifiable story milestones they can cross that will grant them XP regardless of what else they accomplished along the way. Every quest the GM assigns to the players will have a definite series of stages, which are subtasks that, when completed, will net them 5 XP. The completion of a quest that has more than two stages will net players an additional 10 XP.
At minimum, every quest has three components: a quest giver, a task or set of tasks, and an expected reward. GMs should encourage players to decide on their own quests over the course of the campaign. Perhaps they learn Lore about a Monster and want to track it down, or perhaps they decide to take down the corrupt mayor of a small town. Every new quest the players take on will have a clear set of conditions under which the quest is resolved, as well as a set of conditions under which it can no longer be completed. Due to the natural unpredictability of tabletop roleplaying, GMs should keep the tasks assigned to players both simple and specific. In addition, if players are able to resolve a quest without completing all of the planned tasks, they will still receive all of the additional XP they would have received if they had completed it the intended way. However, if players fail a quest, they do not receive any additional XP. That being said, it’s bad GMing to simply lock the players out of continuing the story if they fail a quest. Instead, failure should make the narrative more interesting by creating new quests for the players to complete and having tangible consequences that are reflected in the game world.
Whether a quest is given to the players by a third party or they decide on one themselves, they will also come with rewards besides XP (and the satisfaction of a good tabletop session, of course). Unique equipment, battle items, and heaps of cr are all additional incentives that characters who hire the players will offer them as a reward for completing tasks. GMs should be aware that higher tier enemies are balanced around the assumption that characters will be facing them with equipment of at least the corresponding item rating. While balancing rewards in a tabletop context is not an exact science, a good rule of thumb is that the amount of cr and/or equivalent cr value of the reward for a quest per quest stage should be approximately one to six multiplied by 100 multiplied by the characters’ current tier. The way that players acquire these rewards ought to vary wildly so as to avoid a feeling of video gaminess that tends to result from round numbers. For example, player characters may come across an old weapon on the corpse of a dead adventurer in a dungeon, while in the woods they may be granted an item or set of items as a boon from a forest spirit.