Someone (* looks at melliores* ) asked for my crappy view about RPG and quests. I will therefore develop a long and noxious argumentation, which you will hopefully find delicious.

You all know how quests  are important in litteracy, and if you don't, well, you should. Since Gilgamesh and greek authors, quests are probably the most favored story plot. Actually, you should consider most theological myths to be build upon quests schemes. Quests mean basically having heroes and seekers, travels and obstacles. And while we're speaking about a 5 000 years old idea, it's still on your screens everyday : Christopher Vogler's work  explains pretty well how most movies use ( and abuse ) of it.

Anyway, let's consider our CRPG domain, now. Son of the RPG, son of Wargames. Wargames have no such quests, usually. They have simple objectives as "defeat opponent" or conqueer a given part of the board.  These objectives are here to define an end, set constraints, and somehow interest and later reward the player. But since wargames don't have "heroes", they have no quests. First RPGs were "dungeon crawling", which was primarely inherited from the wargames objectives. First CRPGs, like nethack, pretended to have a quest plot ( Get an item )... but looked like a door - monster - treasure game.

Later came games with more willing, better defined, environment customised and NPCs features. Which opened the way to Quests. A quest somehow requires plot characters and a land to travel on. So, that became the way to occupy players in RPG. A way to motive their will for slaughter laughters, by asking them to seek items, persons, secrets or whatever.

Quests mean paths and obstacles. A linear scheme grew well on the "Item - Monster - NPC" sheme. You find that in any tunnel shooter or tunnel RPG, more or less. Put the three in any order, and you have a scenario for main or sub-quests. Resulting in universes where all citizens wait for you, the hero, to solve every problem for us, from Get Us Rid Of The Evil Fiends to Get Kittens Down The Tree. Loosy, but it works pretty well.

That's opposed to a more "wandering" roleplay. A friend told me recently how a "Vampires" DM one night got his session screwed up by players who missed the quest hook... And played two years upon that first "missed" party, living their PCs life in an immersive environment, which resulted in excellent and inventive game sessions. This is typical of open structures which often get rid of quests, because there is no "ending" to such structures.

So what ? Shall we get rid of heroism ? Do we have to play on Second Life, because there are no quests there and we find the motives for playing without quests in chatting through 3d rendered avatars ?

What's your feeling ?