Quest Management in RPGs

Vinny-ish. I mainly go for side stuff in service of making the main quest a cakewalk.

I can too easily get sucked into trying (and then burning out and failing) to 100% a game, so I've started to set the limitation on myself on only doing side-quests as they come to me, or if I need the resources/experience they would provide. I think Bethesda games are an exception here because I typically enjoy those more than the main story.

I used to do everything available before moving on with the story, but The Witcher cured me of that with all of those question marks.

Quest management for me really depends on the game I'm playing. I think the main way I try to play is that if I like the game a lot, I'll generally play more side quests. I did this in Dragon Age II. Sometimes I just move on through the story because I know I'm near the end and just want to finish, regardless how many side quests I've completed. Then there's a game like Wind Waker HD where instead of trying to find all the hearts and treasures, I wanted to take my chances and try to finish with what I had already found.

Depends on how many side-activities are in the game. If there's not many, I'll do a small handful between each story quest. If there's a bunch, I'll probably do like five or six between each story thing. Basically whatever way allows me to smoothly progress through the game without building up a backlog of quests.

I'm not quite Vinny bad but I'm close. Example: I'm 110 hours into Xenoblade X and still haven't done chapter 12 because I'm busy doing Basic/Normal/Affinity missions.

I do every side-quest available at the time before moving with the main. This often breaks the flow of the story, especially if i end up in a new area and i run around doing everything for hours/days before resuming with what i was supposed to do ("here is the new city! Go to the mayor house/inn/church/whatever for help agaiinst this powerful evil force" "emh, i'm gonna do that only when i have explored every other square inch of the city. See ya!"). The problem is that if i'm enjoying an rpg I simply cannot have the feeling of having missed some quest, because "what if that was the best ever???". My brain has been rigged that way since Baldur's 2, which had some amazing and completely missabile side-content

Very minor fallout spoilers below.

I try to play the game so it suits the story. Been playing Fallout 4 since Christmas and I pretty much mainlined it until I had to cross the glowing sea. Then I went back and built myself a base at Red Rocket and started constructing a suit of lead covered power armour. To get the components for that I wanted to get some vendors in my base so I started pumping perk points into Charisma etc. After I had a few bases (farming, water, supply trade hub) I joined the Minutemen and set up a town in Sanctuary.

Being made general when I already had a substantial force under me and 3 bases in the NE of the map (and having 30 hours of play time) made a lot more sense than doing it 15 minutes after coming out of the Vault.

Playing games this way makes them flow a lot better for me :)

i go with whatever my character would do. different q's for different dudes. not being able to design my character kinda ruins the whole thing for me.

Depends on the game. Im not farming lazy ass sidefillers in Dragon age inqusition but i happily tick off the sidestuff in any Witcher game.

I'll go with the flow, in the case of The Witcher there wasn't a clear system for me whenever I got back into the world. I just wandered about and whenever I came across something on the way to a mainquest objective (sometimes ignoring the fast travel so I could stumble upon something) I would do that side quest. Problem for me with that game was that the difficulty was all over the fucking place. Either I was fighting a 'very dangerous' monster that was level 6 or it was a group of lowly bandits that were 10 levels above me.

Depends a little on what kind of game it is, I guess, but when it comes to bethesda games it's absolutely C. Their main stories are pretty much never interesting at all, so I play their games for the side content and stop playing at all when I'm satisfied with that. For other games it's usually the Vinny route.

I usually clean out all the side stuff before even TOUCHING the main quest. The Witcher 3 made me do it differently, which is just one of the reasons why I absolutely love that game.

I make the same mistake every time of occasionally burning myself out going through any side quest available to complete at that point in the game. Once I'm finished with those I go back to the main story.

This occasionally irks me because you sometimes come across a quest that the game seems to have wanted or expected you to complete later in the game. Or would have been better if I had more story context of events that you would've learned if I waited to do it later in the story. But unless they block me from doing a specific quest at the time, it's getting done before I go back to the story!

If I enjoy doing the side stuff, I'll usually do all of it before moving forward with the main story. Mostly because side quests will give you gear/xp/story that makes it worthwhile. When a game like Xenoblade Chronicles comes along with a thousand side quests for "kill 5 slimes" and the reward is 2xp and some trash-tier loot, I don't even engage with it because c'mon.

Although, if there's endgame superbosses etc., I usually do the endgame before doing that stuff so I'm not completely trivializing the final fight(s).

I choose my quests based on the location I am in/want to go to. I guess it is a method of efficiency and also like hey I'm travelling to point B for more than one (possibly menial) ordeal.

I try to roleplay and do what I feel is appropriate for the character. In The Witcher 3, that means I would stop what I'm doing and help someone if they call for me while I'm riding somewhere. I'll take all the contracts and try to complete them as I come by within the vicinity naturally. However the main quest (to find Ciri) makes it a little hard to justify doing some of the more mundane side quests where there's a large threat looming. The only justification would be that Geralt still needs to earn some coin to survive the journey to find Ciri, so he needs to take a break from the search once in a while.

If I love the game I do what Vinny does and often burn myself out. See this bad habit was beat into me by JRPGs with their frequent unforgiving point of no return. If I love a game I want to experience everything, and really don't want to miss anything. but I tend to over do it.

If I just enjoy it, I alternate and probably finish the game.

Pretty silly way to do things but it's how I play games.