You all meet in a tavern...

The classic RPG scenario opening is alive and well in Dungeons & Dragons Online.

I've written before about the sometimes baffling structure of questing in DDO.  Unlike most MMOs which lead the player from one quest hub to the next the adventurer in DDO arrives in Stormreach and... stays there.  The city is one big hub, or rather a series of connected hubs, and finding something to do that's on-level isn't always easy.

At the start of my second day I compiled a list of all the quests in the game, sorted by level and by where they could be found.  Since then I've also added the year when each quest was added to the game, and in the process discovered that I've spent almost all of my time on the oldest content, save for Korthos Island (revamped in 2008) and the Phiarlan Carnival (added in 2010) and I'm okay with that.

While I didn't set out to play this game in more or less chronological order - an approach that most MMOs follow by default due to the usual focus on adding content to the end of the game - it does suit my current mood, which is for short (relatively) and self contained dungeons rather than lengthy campaigns.  So though I have access to almost all of the content I'm still hunting out, for the most part, the free quests.

Hunting being the operative word.  The index I've compiled tells me in which ward of Stormreach each quest-giver can be found, but after touring several of the districts some were proving evasive, until it occurred to me to look in the places where countless D&D scenarios have begun - in the taverns, of which Stormreach has many.  Sure enough there they were.

It's a cliche of course, and the most overused way of opening an RPG scenario that there ever was - ahead even of shipwrecks - but it works, and at least they're inside and doing something rather than loitering on street corners like so many other quest-givers, in this game and in many others.  It's one of the peculiarities of the MMO genre that the most efficient way to get anything done is to stand around and offer passing strangers money to do it for you - whether it's passing on a message, delivering something or killing something.

It doesn't make a lot of sense, and now and again a game will at least try to justify  it.  The quest text in DDO often opens with a few words on how the quest-giver has either beckoned to the character or is otherwise behaving in such a way as to attract their attention.  Some NPCs in Guild Wars 2 do the same thing - only with actual animated gestures and voice acting.

(However if GW2 scores any points for this it immediately forfeits them due to the way it sidesteps standard quest-givers and just hurls a to-do list at the player whenever they enter a new area.  It's certainly efficient, but it's even less plausible than the usual way of doing things.)

There are a few games that go further.  Every NPC encountered in Secret World Legends is doing something when the character shows up, and the writing in that game is so good that the often long (if one-sided) conversations that follow don't feel forced or out of place.  DDO doesn't reach those heights, but it makes more of an effort than some games to set the scene and to give quest-givers some reason for being where they are, even if that reason is only that they're having a drink.