A good RPG quest should have:
- Proper motivation. As in - offer an adequate incentive/reason to do the quest. Either the chance to receive something cool (good loot, nice cash, abilities, land deeds, etc.), go somewhere cool where there's bound to be stuff that will make it worth your while, or a quest that will further your personal agenda (if you have one).
Completely agree. In fact I would go further and say it should have both of these elements at all times, just at varying degrees. If it's devoid of one you either get flat out treasure hunt type of quests, which is very Ubisoftesque or a quest that if a player personally doesn't care, or that their PC isn't supposed to care, is essentially meaningless.
This is another reason why many PoE starting quests (like Calisca's pregnant sister) were bad - you only did them for the XP.
The motivation here is supposed to be that Calisca helped you and you could return the favour. It's a weak motivation to be sure but there is still one. There is none for grain quest though, which is possibly the worst, most waste of time quest in the game switching loading screens.
In PoE's setting, which doesn't really have an established adventuring tradition, it makes less sense to have random people give you menial, meaningless tasks like that, yet many still do.
There aren't many menial tasks in the game, only a few and they are mainly in defiance bay. Also how is there no established adventuring tradition in PoE's setting? There are adventuring guilds, there are paladin orders, there are colonists, there are treasure hunters, there are ruin looters. All of those are talked about too. That is more on your personal perception and experience. D&D is already and established setting throughout the years so going into it, you expect to be adventuring, PoE is a new setting so you had different expectations and perception.
See this is the problem with new settings, you have to have lore dumps
somewhere, to establish the setting, ideally these would be through books and elements in the game itself and not conversations but that's not always possible. You felt that there is no adventuring tradition in a game that is basically taking place on a colonial frontier which you start by going into ruins which are normally well-protected by natives of the land.
Even if you're a nobody at the start of the game, you're still heavily armed, and, most likely, traveling with equally well-armed companions. People should recognize this, and not bother you with useless shit.
I don't understand this complaint, I can't think of any quest that does not recognise your well-armed capabilities, only problem is people not recognising your title as a (new) Lord. In fact I have noted NPCs telling so on several occasions, acknowledging you as dangerous, as well as just people just running away in some of the encounters, perhaps that was because I was aggressive in general? Could also be because I played with high resolve, which is usually a dump stat but tends to open these type of dialogue options.