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Soooo, fetch quests. "You there. Bring me 10 rat butts!" Rat butts may not even be useful for anything else. But this guy wants them. "Thanks! 8D!" You are awarded 50 XP and 50 gold. Awesome. Right? Yeah, so those are lame, and we should kill them. With fire, preferably. Right? But, wait... what if they weren't forced into the role of "give player some means of acquiring gold and items and XP," but instead were allowed to actually just be an event in the game world that you had a choice of whether or not to even handle, or even find out about, for that matter? What if, instead of being captured and dressed up and made to dance in a cage, they were set free, and allowed to roam for miles in their natural habitat? What if someone in town needs herbs? And, if you supply them with herbs, they just thank you and go on about their business. First of all, let me just say that herbs should be pretty useful to you, too. Not just some item that's pretty much worthless, anyway, that this person happens to need. Annnywho, back to the example scenario, this person actually needs herbs. Meaning that if you give them herbs, they actually do something with them that somehow comes into play in the rest of the story. Or, to put it more simply than that, at the very least, SOMEthing happens if you give them the herbs they need that's DIFFERENT from what happens if you don't. But it's not about you. You don't even get called over to them as you walk down the street, in "Hey, YOU look like you're skilled at herb-fetching!" manner. Maybe there's not even quest text and all that jazz. You just find out they need herbs. Maybe you know a little more than that. They're some sort of healer, etc. So, you give them herbs, and on down the line, hours further into the game, some crazy shyte is going down in that same area, and you need to garner support to take down some lord. Well, since you supplied that healer with those herbs, it turns out she was working with the local underground to help counter-act the local lord's unbeknownst-to-many-at-the-time cruel, terrible treatment of significant portions of the populous. So, now, not only are more people alive than would've been if you hadn't helped the healer get her herbs, but they're already willing to help you out. If you HADN'T given her herbs, because, who has time for herbs?! Heh... If you hadn't, then, you could maybe still garner support from those same people, but maybe it turns out there aren't as many, because they were thinned out by whatever disease/wounds she was treating. But, they don't HATE you, because they never specifically asked you, in uber-official quest form, to gather some herbs for them, specifically, and you never said "Yes, I will totally do that," and put it down in your "Things I will totally do or people will call me a liar and also I won't get XP or gold" ledger. That's just one simple example. You could give some seemingly harmless old man some wyvern eggs or something, and he could end up creating friggin' medieval Jurassic Park, which you later have to deal with. The point being that people who live in places and exist in the world need things that they may not obtain if someone doesn't help them get them, and those people perpetually exist and actually do something different with what they get when they get it, than when they don't get it. So, it's only really when they pretty much only exist in the game to supply you with a task, just so that they can give you a reward for that task, then warp to another dimension, apparently, that they become the dreaded "fetch quests." I'd love to see oodles of little "events" here and there like this, with bunches of different outcomes depending on how exactly you handle them, or whether or not you even do. I'm also aware I'm not inventing something here. This type of thing can be seen in many other games, but it's most prominently in the form of some optional quest objective or some kind of "hey, invest some money with me, and you won't regret it!" 'quest.' The reason I bring up fetch quests is that, they're so seemingly insignificant (because in most games they're programmed to actually be insigificant) that it would be pretty awesome to actually have them be significant in the long run, in various ways.