A Quest for the Holy Grail... again?

GOD: Right! Arthur, King of the Britons -- your Knights of the Round Table shall have a task to make them an example in these dark times.
ARTHUR: Good idea, oh Lord!
GOD: 'Course it's a good idea! Behold! Arthur, this is the Holy Grail. Look well, Arthur, for it is your sacred task to seek this Grail. That is your purpose, Arthur -- the Quest for the Holy Grail.
ARTHUR: But I just completed that Quest last week!

I've been giving thought to repeatable quests.

A large portion of Clan Lord quests are unrepeatable, like the Hunt Masters ("you shall have 20 minutes to find and kill 30 rats").  Once you complete a quest, you receive your reward and move onto the next quest.  A small portion of quests are repeatable, but with diminishing returns on the reward.  Some of the mystic quests fall into this category: subsequent completion of a quest is rewarded with an attaboy.  And then there is a smaller portion of quests that are repeatable with a full reward, but the quest can happen only under certain circumstances.  The FMOCR is a perfect example of this style of quest.

The FMOCR is a great quest.  It's fun, challenging, and requires cooperation from numerous players.  And the reward for this quest is a pretty cool item.  The FMOCR quest is a good benchmark for repeatable quest because the value of the reward is proportionate to the risk of obtaining the reward.

There is another factor that needs consideration when creating quests, and that is "effort."  Is the effort required to complete the quest still fun on subsequent attempts?  Take an example of a small maze area, six snells in size, where the snells are connect to each other like Tanglewood.  Within this area are new type of orga that feral around and harass players with lightning bolts.  At the end of this maze is a treasure room with a proportionately valued reward.  The challenge of this area is to navigate the maze while crowd-controlling the orga.  Now suppose that with every new moon, the exits of each snell change and lead to different locations within the maze.  The challenge remains the same: navigate the maze, fight the orga, get the reward, but the difference is that the maze can not be memorized.  Is this quest challenging and fun, or is it challenging and tedious?  If instead of six snells, what if the maze was 16 snells in size?  How about 26 snells?  At what point does the effort required to complete the quest outweigh the value of the reward?

The FMOCR quest handles this problem well.  The secret mystic doors scattered throughout the orga camps add a small element of randomness to the quest which impact the effort required to continue the quest, but it does so without reducing the momentum of the fun.  If a wrongly chosen mystic door were to instead lead to locations deep within Tanglewood, then the effort required by players to return to the orga camp would be far greater than the current configuration.  Multiply this effort by each door for each snell of the orga camps, and that adds up to a lot of tedium.

Repeatable quests, I am finding, are a little more complicated than simply balancing the scales of risk and reward.  Balancing a quest is more like balancing a mobile: under each scale hangs another set of scales.  Finding the correct equilibrium between risk, reward and effort takes testing and adjusting, but once we find the right balance, then we'll have ourselves some balanced fun.