A Quest Giver Is You

A way to add a strategic element to a non-Strategy Game is to put the Player Character in charge of an organization and give them the ability to send their NPC agents on non-plot essential assignments, e.g. to secure additional resources or materiel or to level-up the agents themselves.

Two essential aspects of this trope that distinguish it from the Non-Entity General in strategy games are that the player has no control over the course of the missions once they're started and that the "Quest Giver" gameplay exists in parallel with the primary gameplay mode, most often action or stealth game. The agents usually have to be recruited in that primary gameplay mode, and may be available to provide fire support for the Player Character, as long as they are not away on a mission. There may even be agent-specific sidequests for the Player Character to tackle.

Remote missions often occur in real time, even when the primary gameplay mode has Take Your Time trope in effect. The agents sent on missions are unavailable in primary gameplay for their entire duration, although there is sometimes the option of recalling them early with fewer or no rewards. Sometimes there is the option of Bribing Your Way to Victory by spending resources to speed up or instantly finish missions. Unlike the Player Party and permanent Non Player Companions, these agents are often disposable and can be Killed Off for Real if the mission goes bad (the player is usually shown their chance to succeed beforehand).

An inversion of Quest Giver, which is an NPC giving missions to the player character. If the player's organization is based inside a Player Headquarters, the player may also be tasked with improving its facilities, overlapping with A Homeowner Is You. Compare/contrast An Adventurer Is You and Video Game Delegation Penalty.

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Examples:

Adventure Games

• Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure has a rabbit who you send out on treasure hunting. You initially need to visit a stage in order for him to return.

Idle Games

• Crusaders of the Lost Idols has missions, which you can send your benched crusaders on for a variety of rewards. The mission's chance can depend on required tags, high levels, and gear quality, and if the mission fails, crusaders may become injured and unavailable for a day.

RPG — Eastern

• In Ever Oasis, you can send your non-Seedling townsfolk out into the overworld and dungeons to collect resources for you. This helps you avoid backtracking when you need items only found in certain dungeons to stock your shops.
• Final Fantasy Tactics has propositions; sending party members to complete them leaves them unavailable for random battles, but they earn a small amount of Job Points and occasionally money and special treasure (or discover special locations) if they succeed.
• Final Fantasy Tactics Advance has missions that can only be completed by sending out party members. The items they bring, their levels, and class determines the likelihood of success.
  • The sequel, Final Fantasy Tactics A2, expands this, so that most non-story missions can be done by a dispatch party or by simply playing the mission.
• Genshin Impact:
  • You can send characters on expeditions, and after a period of time they'll return with some resources.
  • The "Vishaps and Where To Find Them" event expands on the expedition system. You can send teams of up to four characters special locations, and they'll return after some time with some gacha currency. Each location also has a bonus reward, and the odds of getting it depend on the levels and elements of the team you're sending out.
• Mega Man X: Command Mission allows you to find and repair Mechaniloids scattered across the levels and bring them back to the Resistance Base. From there, you can send them to previously completed levels in order to improve their stats and find items you won't normally be able to acquire.
• Pokémon
  • Pokémon Sun and Moon: Players can send their Pokémon to Isle Aphun to complete missions to collect items after 24 hours and can spend Poké Beans to speed up to complete in half the time.
  • Pokémon Sword and Shield: Poké Jobs allow the player to send their Pokémon on jobs to gain experience and rewards. Certain jobs have restrictions depending on Type and players can choose how long jobs will last.
• In Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale, the primary gameplay revolves around improving the eponymous store, but you can also hire adventurers to gather materials for you. You are required to control them during the adventure, however.
• Shin Megami Tensei Liberation: Dx2 has Demon Dispatch, where you can send up to six demons to complete a task over time. You can reduce the time needed by sending demons of the requested race, but all dispatched demons passively gain experience regardless of their race.
• Sword of Elpisia: You can send Partner Animals (effectively your Mons) to scour previously-completed dungeons for items and equipment. Each dispatch takes one, three, or five hours in Real Time. Pets level up as they complete these missions, and the higher their stats, the more likely they will get rare loot from tougher dungeons. Naturally, you can't use these pets in battles during this time.
• In Touken Ranbu, you can send teams of swords to do Expeditions in real-time for resources and XP.
• The mercenary group in Xenoblade Chronicles 2. Once you're given command of the mercenaries, you can send your blades off on missions in the background while you play the game normally. This provides all sorts of miscellaneous rewards, gives you something to do with the dozens of blades you have but aren't actively using, and makes filling out their affinity charts a passive task.

RPG — MMO

• The main purpose of Support Partners/Auxiliaries in Phantasy Star Online 2 is to automate Fetch Quests by assigning Client Orders to them and have them bring back items that are needed for said Client Orders. The more you send them out, the more COs they can hold on their docket at once, and using this function repeatedly also grants them a portion of the EXP and improves their Relationship Values, which in turn allows you to give them a Personality (as they are otherwise generic blank slates).
• Star Trek Online has the Duty Officer and Admiralty systems, which allow the player to dispatch junior crew members or owned ships on assignments to acquire EXP and resources. Assignments are completed in real-time, with longer assignments generally having higher rewards. Rewards for Admiralty missions also tend to be larger since the system is unlocked at a higher level.
• The Crew Skills/Missions fulfill this role in Star Wars: The Old Republic: as you can only have one recruited Non-Player Companion with you at any time, the rest can either be sent on remote missions to gather resources/gifts or craft items for you. This takes place in real time, even when you are logged off.

RPG — Western

• Downplayed in Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, where you meet a low-level (computer-controlled) "Player Party" much like your own at the beginning of the first game, and can send them on an impossible quest—which they complete, to everyone's surprise, bringing a few nice artifacts back to you. The whole subplot is poking fun at the RPG questing conventions.
• Dragon Age: Inquisition allows the Inquisitor to send rank-and-file agents of the eponymous organization on missions. This is in addition to Player Party members who also work for the Inquisition but instead fight alongside the Inquisitor in normal gameplay. At some point, you will even be able to outfit an RPG-standard adventuring party (Sutherland and Co.) and send them on a sequence of missions for you, watching them play out every Player Party trope ever.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In Morrowind, the leaders of Great House Telvanni are primarily millennia-old, rather amoral sorcerers who can't be bothered with things like actually running the House's affairs. Instead, they leave those affairs to their "Mouths", representatives who meet and govern like the councilors of the other Great Houses. If you join House Telvanni and rise to the highest ranks, you too will get to hire a Mouth. You can send him off on a couple of quests to gather unique items.
  • The Oblivion DLCs "Thieves' Den" and "Vile Lair" give you minions that you can send to either "go out and plunder" or "murder in the name of Sithis", respectively. In the Shivering Isles expansion, after you become Sheogorath, villages will sometimes come under attack from monsters, and you will be given an option to either go there and slay them yourself, or send some of your soldiers to do it for you.
• The Suicide Mission in Mass Effect 2 requires you to assign squadmates to various tasks^note One tech expert, one biotic expert, two fire team leaders, and an optional escort for the Normandy Crew if you got there in time to save them., making them temporarily unavailable to fight alongside Shepard and potentially getting them killed if you choose poorly or forget to do their Loyalty Mission. You cannot assign Shepard as a specialist even if their class or skillset would make them a viable option, because they're leading the charge and providing cover fire while the specialist does their thing.
• Once you are in possession of a stronghold, Pillars of Eternity allows you to send your recruited companions who are not in the active party on solo missions, during which time they cannot be moved into the active party or defend the stronghold itself.
• After you are bestowed ownership of Crossroads Keep in Neverwinter Nights 2, a party of adventurers will arrive at the Keep and ask you for leads on any quests they could go on. You can give them false information and send them on a Snipe Hunt (which gets them killed), or ask them to find information on the King of Shadows, which results in them sending you several humorous letters and, eventually, an item.

Simulation Games

• The Majesty series has this trope as its core gameplay mechanic; the only way you have to directly influence the behaviour of your units is to place "reward flags" offering a financial reward for either exploring a particular location or destroying an enemy creature or building.
• In My Time at Portia, you can put in requests at the Civilian Corps building to send the Corps to explore dungeons for you. They can help you gather valuable resources from the dungeon. However, if you ask too much of them, there's a chance your request will fail.

Steath-Based Games

• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Assassin's Creed: Revelations have this as their main schtick: walking around Rome/Istanbul, Ezio can save citizens bullied by the corrupt authorities and then train them in the arts of The Hashshashin. These assassin recruits can be then sent, alone or in groups, on missions across Italy/Mediterranean to level them up and take control of cities for additional revenue (or left at home to support Ezio on his own missions).
• Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker has the Mother Base mode, where Snake can recruit soldiers and procure vehicles to then send them on Outer Ops, remote missions to secure resources. This is in addition to missions that Snake does on his own. A similar mechanic is implemented in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain.

Third-Person Shooter

• The Bureau: XCOM Declassified has a mechanic for sending agent teams to perform some side-missions on their lonesome to get experience (and their chances of completing said mission depending on how much experience they already have).
• Warframe: Players can send Extractors to every planet (except for Void) to collect resources after a certain period of time. There are the Titan and Distilling Extractors (and their Prime counterparts for each) which take 4 and 8 hours to extract resources respectively, with the Prime counterparts having a higher chance of getting uncommon and rare resources. Higher level planets have a greater chance of damaging Extractors (but not to the point of severe damage in a single deployment) and should their HP reach 0, they are unusable and can be scrapped for credits. Extractors do regenerate HP when not in use. Players can deploy up to 3 Extractors at a time, with additional ones with Prime Access and the formerly available Founder Package.

Tabletop Games

• This can be done by high level PCs in Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Once you have enough money, you can hire NPCs to do jobs for you. You can even hire bands of adventurers to clean out dungeons and carry out other special missions, just as NPCs did to you and your fellow PCs when you were low level.
  • 1st Edition Dungeon Master's Guide
    • There were extensive rules that allowed a PC to hire NPC assassins to act as a spies, with several tables determining chance of success and the effects of failure. You could have an entire spy network if you had enough money.
    • All characters gained special followers when they reached high level (thieves and assassins became head of a thieves' guild and assassin's guild, respectively). You could train your followers and send them on missions.

Turn-Based Tactics

• Fire Emblem Heroes: The Lost Lore mode allows the player to send their Heroes on missions to collect pages after a certain amount of time (although deployed Heroes are still usable in other modes), which will reward the player with loot for a number of pages collected in addition to the mission being completed. Additional pages are given if a corresponding Hero related to the event is sent. The final mission of this mode involves sending 4 Heroes to fight against 4 unknown enemies who will be slowly revealed after each mission completes with only a hint given beforehand to give players an idea of which Heroes are ideal to be sent.
• In the Enemy Within expansion to XCOM: Enemy Unknown, you can send one of your units to infiltrate EXALT (alien sympathizers). The unit does the work without your input, but will need an evac a few days later. You re-gain control of the unit for the evac mission, although they have limited equipment, having been disguised as a civilian.
• The War of the Chosen expansion for XCOM 2 adds Covert Operations, where you can send your soldiers on various ops like supply runs, experimental weapon trials, sabotage of research facilities, or Training from Hell, and covert ops increase the Relationship Values between the soldiers you send in the fight, gives them Experience Points, often give a small permanent raise to one of their stats, in addition to the mission reward. Operations often require a soldier with a high enough Rank (level), and have odds of negative outcomes ("Injury" means one of your soldiers will get injured in the mission, and will need recovery time, "Ambush" means they will be ambushed by ADVENT squads and thus battle will start with your soldier needing to reach the Evacuation zone, and "Capture" means the Chosen captures one of your soldier). You can eliminate odds of some negative outcomes by assigning extra resources (supplies, scientists/engineers...), and once you have killed a chosen for good, operating in their areas cannot result in random captures anymore.

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