RPGMemes

They get arrested, and for community service, they have to do the quest or get hanged..hung.

Then there needs to be consequences for that. Now they’re in jail and the quest is to escape before the party is executed.

My DM always says, you can do anything you want, but there will be consequences.

I had something like that happen. I had to rewrite the whole story on the fly and kept hinting at the big, important mystery that they missed out because they killed the people necessary for the initial hook of the quest.

One of the things I like about the CofD games like Mage is it has a mechanical tracker for doing vile stuff. "Sure, you can curse him to vomit forever but that's going to call for a Wisdom check." Losing wisdom means you're worse at containing spell miscasts. Uncontained spell paradoxes will ruin your day. And hitting wisdom 0 means the character is unplayable.

I've stopped a lot of nonsense with "that'll be a wisdom check, if you're sure you want to do that"

ah yes, the "no-shot"

"The Quest giver speaks some unholy last words, your entire party faints, a unknown amount of time passed, your party wakes up in some kind of dark and cold cave, you can't find your belongings, you just have the clothes you wore last time you remember, one party member finds a magic torch, you can see you are in a dungeon, from the color of the stone you estimated to be pretty deep inside it..."

One shot, my shot, you're shot, headshot.

A quest is only truly yours if you paid the iron price