"everything we touch is a quest"
Major spoilers ahead for Curse of Strahd Reloaded Act II
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I'm facing a(n) (un)expected situation during my run of Curse of Strahd Reloaded. Let's start from the context:
During last session, the party interrogated Milivoj and learnt that Henrik van der Voort, the coffin maker, payed him to steal the bones. They went to speak with Henrik and, along the way, I described them passing in front of Blinksy's toyshop, as a way to introduce the place already as the were planning to visit it to buy Arabelle's birthday gift later that day.
At that point, our monk asked Ireena to join him to the toymaker to get some help in picking a reasonable gift for a 10 y.o. girl. Inside the shop the monk got scared when he saw Strahd's puppet, then he thought Blinsky was suspicious and possibly mad, saw Ireena's doll, didn't ask about it and at the first occasion fled with Ireena, almost bumping into Izek hanging flyers for the Festival.
The remaining 2 PCs with Father Petrovich continued to Henrik's shop, sneakily entered from the back, found the bones and triggered the noisemaker, starting the fight with Violenta while missing 2 people.
End of the session, the players comment: "we thought buying a gift would have been a routine operation, that's why we quickly split. It was supposed to be a nice roleplaying thing with Ireena, having her think of a gift for a young girl. Also, we were just going to talk with the guy at the coffin maker, and instead it triggered a boss fight? How is everything we touch a quest?"
This last question struck me hard. Reading through Reloaded I was loving the amount of stuff to do, all the different storylines made the world feel alive. Now, I'm starting to question whether it's "too" alive. I get that coincidences are needed to have the players play the story, but I feel what they are saying: everything they touch is a "quest" (possibly not the best term but it conveys the idea). Imagine if they knew that with the doll they bought for Arabelle they will start the quest of the missing child that will lead them to Victor Vallakovich and then to the arc of Stella Wachter and to Van Richten pushing them to Krezk or whatever. Or that in just a few hours they are getting the dinner invitation from Lady Wachter to trigger the hit on Izek and change the seat of power in Vallaki.
The amount of material covers so much ground that anything but "we go to sleep" triggers a storyline of some kind (and even that...). Suspension of incredulity and all, of course, we don't think too much about everything happening right now when it's been months of nothing around here, but they are starting to notice it and I fear it starts to feel a bit "videogame-y". Plus, Vallaki being "just one place" amplifies it a lot, compared to the many events scattered along Barovia and the valley.
Has anyone experienced this?
How did your players react to Vallaki?
Would you change anything to account for it?
EDIT: my tone might have been clearer. We are actually having a blast! The comment they made was along the lines of "wow this place is messed up, everything we see is broken in some way" and not "I don't like what's going on and I'm not having fun". Characters are surely overwhelmed, players are enjoying the amount of stuff but, as someone already suggested, they have been writing a shared text file with NPCs info and keeping tracks of deadlines and stuff they need to remember because there's so much stuff. I'm happy to see that a lot of people have experienced Vallaki as a tight-paced keg of gunpowder so I'm not completely crazy, and compared to RAW the hooks are not lacking lol