Yesterday I completed a quest. I know that doesn’t sound like much but, for me, it was quite an accomplishment. See, I suffer from what I like to call Quest Phobia – a fear of quests.
In theory, I like quests. I like the idea of breaking away from the grind of most other activities and delving into exciting new stories and plotlines with interesting NPCs and humorous dialogue. It would be stupid of me to say that quests don’t play a huge part in many players’ Runescape lives. A lot of content can only be accessed after completing a quest, or series of quests, which means that we’re required to complete some quests to access even some of the most basic content like the Summoning and Herblore skills. Some of the things that we really want to access are trapped behind quest lines and our only solution is to complete them. Many people won’t really mind but, for a person like me, this can be quite a horrible thing.
In simple terms you could just say that I’m scared of quests. I don’t hate them, I like the concept of them, but I extremely dislike having to do them. One of the things that scare me the most about quests is how it is kind of like a step into the unknown.
Quests aren’t the regular activities that you’re used to doing, they’re strange and sometimes difficult events where even with a quest guide, like the ones you can find on Tip.It, you can find yourself feeling helpless. You don’t want to subject yourself to the uncertainty and unfamiliarity of a quest so you put it off for as long as possible until, at some point, you just have to do it. This is how I managed to get to 85 Magic without doing Desert Treasure for Ancient Magicks.
Eventually you pull yourself together enough that you are ready to do the quest. You go to the quest guide and start gathering all the materials you’ll need. You read that there is a monster involved so you bring far too much food with you ‘just in case’. Of course, when you reach the monster you realise you could just pray against their attack style so the food you brought was worthless. You later end up dropping or eating the food since you run out of inventory space.
I’m not the only person that over-prepares for quests like this by bringing extra food or teleport runes ‘just in case’. While it’s not just those with Quest Phobia that do this, I do believe it is a mark of it. Now you’ve got your 10 rocktail and 100 Varrock Teleport rune casts, since you never know if you might need them, you set off on your quest.
Let me bring the article back to what I mentioned at the start. This week I completed a quest, Desert Treasure. It is one of the most important quests for those looking for 99 Magic and, one of the quests that I had been dreading for a long time. The Tip.It guide says that it’s hard and, to someone with Quest Phobia, this is never a good thing. Hard quests means lots of running around, lots of items needed and the worst part – boss fights. I started this quest only to become stumped not very long in. I reached the section of the quest where you must unlock the chest at the Bandits’ camp and retrieve Rasolo’s gilded cross. This seemed like a simple enough job to me. So, I headed down to the camp with a lockpick and anti-poison...
Two and a half hours, one death and a lot of running back and forth to Shanty Pass for food... I still hadn’t managed to unlock the chest. I had even managed to gain three thieving levels from all the time spent pickpocketing bandits for lockpicks.
Eventually, I got the chest open and continued the quest, but this sort of thing was exactly what I didn’t want. For me, I have to be able to get through quests with as little pain and difficulty as possible. While the actual difficulty of the quest can be hard, randomly nightmarish tasks like that is a big no-no. Thankfully, these are few and far between, but they’re one of the reasons why people with Quest Phobia dread quests.
So I hope that this article has enlightened you to the various reasons why Quest Phobia may exist and be something that many Runescape players experience on a daily basis.
