Small bit of a suggestion here...

A few guilds put forth the "c'mon, we must act now!" angle into the dialogue, trying to push forth a sense of urgency upon the narrative for the player to feel like this next quest is important and must be done as soon as you learn of it.

What if they actually added urgency to the quest through mechanics rather than simply through the dialogue.

For example, if you're told "we must get there before they can fortify their defenses!" then you're given some sort of time table in game that actually scales the difficulty, or the consequences, of that mission.

Say, with said urgency they want you to get to said place in... 5 hours, if you reach it in 5 hours (game time) then the defenses won't be properly set. But if you decide to blow it off and get there four days later then you might as well be attacking a well fortified castle.

Or perhaps dwindling rewards... or even worse, a weighted consequence, such as an NPC death or something as simple as the target moving to a new location.

Thoughts?

Yes generally good idea , although with quests have to be careful how and when these are used, it will be easy to mess up and find that you have to be in 4 places at once by a certain time. Of course real life can be like that, but how far do you take real life simulation, too many conflicts and messing up with rewards will simply give more reasons for people to moan! Just keep it to a few main storys and missions, the nearest come to sense of urgency so far is

Not a bad idea, it does make some sense, when I first began I wondered if there was any time limit to quests once started. In one game I used Esbern as a free follower for ages, until by accident I went to Riverwood. I left him and Delphine for days if not weeks before going back to them. When I did go back, I walked into the pub to find them just greeting each other, lol.

The problem I would have is I like to "kick-off" various quests and then decide which one to take forward in the time I have for my gaming session. Sometimes I fancy doing a series of short quests and other times I like to concentrate on one big one.