How do you justify adventurers in your fantasy settings? They are mainstay in nearly every fantays setting, just random dudes who group together and get strong enough to take on dragons, demons and gods. Often its not a one-off thing either like a hero party, but most settings seems to have adventurer economies, and people just taking up weapons to fight baddies to get stronger is common.Do you have a in-setting explanation to why this even works? If it was easy to gain power by simply fighting, that would realistically be capitalized by militaries and rulers. But everyone seems happy to just outsource saving the world to random people. Of course this is a conceit to make the game work and give players them as many character options as possible, but its often a handwaved part of the setting.So what's your favorite way of answering this?
>>98295415I don't have to justify anything, it's a a fantasy setting.
>>98295423Even magic has rules and frameworks in a setting, otherwise it just becomes nonsense. Similarly, the social structures around adventuring should equally have frameworks and some thought put into them.
There is no explanation and no one ever asked about it. It just is how it is. Do you go around and ask why private investigators exist while police is a thing?
>>98295439No.
>>98295415Depends on the setting.
>>98295415The players are special. Most people can't do it and never would and would never want to because living as a vagabond mercenary is generally miserable, often lonely, and frequently ends in unspeakable death.
>and people just taking up weapons to fight baddies to get stronger is common>If it was easy to gain power by simply fightingpure game mechanic, dont overthink it
>>98295423/thread
>>98295459Yet private investigators work to pick up slack where the police do not. They do not meek out vigilante justice or attack dangerous monsters. The fact that people can achieve such power on its own is worth discussing. Are they tapping into cosmic powers, available to only a few? Fated power, or other sources of power? A fairer comparison to the modern day would be a setting where a lot of people had random superpowers, fighting monsters and villains, and how that would effect the world. >>98295473I agree that would be an easy explanation, but most settings seems to establish adventurers as a known fact, and the players are not the only ones who do it. To remove that element would usually remove the economy around them, so no magic shops, adventurer gears, or easy access to quests or adventurers guilds.
>>98295487They're still a minority. Of course source material catered to players concerns itself with these notable minorities.
>>98295487>Are they tapping into cosmic powers, available to only a few? Fated power, or other sources of power?Depending on the individual adventuring party, yes. Keep in mind most of them arent your average sellswords, but some type of already special indiviuals called forth by extraordinary circumstance into larger than life happenings. Especially in high fantasy and/ or epic fantasy
>>98295415Adventurers are a real world phenomenon, that's where DnD got the concept from. Mercenaries are the most obvious point of comparison, but it's more like the Greek army that got stranded in... Syria, I think? And then had to fight and plunder its way back home for a decade. They returned quite rich with loot, despite the dangers. Someone who has a better memory than I do can probably elaborate on the history there. Or Lawrence of Arabia. That's fairly similar in premise to a DnD adventure.
>>98295423FP not BPI mean, yes, you don't "have to" justify anything. But the "it's fantasy, just come up with shit bro" mentality is not a golden standard.
>>98295415It depends on the motivations of the adventurer, which depend on their background, which varies depending on the setting, which varies depending on the game, and race also has an effect on background and motivation, and what races are available depend on the setting, which depends on the game.It depends on the game.It depends on the game.IT DEPENDS ON THE GAME.I TD E P E N D SO NT H EG A M E
>>98295415I usually have something happen to the players if they decide they're strangers in the same location or I just let them decide the initial reasoning. I'll read off like half a page to a page of the setting and what's happening then we figure it out collaboratively. It gives agency while keeping them on some small amount of rails.
>>98295521Well yes, but those are large organizations of thousands of people. The greeks were known as the ten thousands, and yeah they were very cool. Italian condotieri and mercenary companies of the 15th-16th century Europe is the closest I can think of as mercenary captains could range from bands of a few dozen men to hundreds. Who were hired to go fight on battlefields. Any other historical counterpart is basically just bandits, and sometimes perhaps, people who fought bandits. Or roaming bands of young nobles and their retinues in very troubled periods of time(analogous to bandits, just with better gear). So I find that history is not a great comparison, which is why trying to justify it through the social lens of a fantasy setting is more interesting. It could be as simple as saying that the world has so many monsters and is generally so dangerous that you need random people taking up arms for society to have any chance to function. Although I think those kind of societies would probably develop into more collectivist groups banding together for mutual defense, rather than a more individualistic/wild west take of small groups of heroes roaming the world to fight monsters.
>>98295583well keep in mind where your average adventure party usually adventures in. Its in the frontier region. The untamed wild. The Sword Coast and the Dales, Varisia and so on and so forth. It also very much depends on the particular call to adventure, as to why said party banded together in the first place
>>98295544It actually is the gold standard for bullshit like this that doesn't actually affect the game. It only seems relevant to autists that would rather sift through wiki entries than actually play anything.
>>98295619>muh no playing bogeymanPersonally I like to have collective worlbuilding in more speculative games without a published setting. So yeah, a question like "fighter, are there other soldiers of fortune in the world that go, you know, into dungeons and shit more than marching with others into battle" is a nice question.
In the older editions of D&D the authorities were primarily characters of Level 9 or higher, what was at the time known as Name Level. In other words the class of people who acquire superhuman power have most of the political authority either directly as rulers or indirectly as the knights and advisors of the 0th Level ruling class. I tend to use this logic in my games. The hurdle in such writing is to be very clear on the demography and station of such characters and to maintain a certain parity. If the ruling class is so strong, why aren't they solving the problem? The typical answers include the problem being too small for them [and problems of this sort being too numerous]. King Arthur obviously isn't going to save every village from bandits, he'll send knights or mercenaries. Or the problem is outside their expertise. If the mission is a dungeon crawl involving mystic research it may not be suitable to send an 8th Level Paladin to man the expedition. Or it may be simply that you happened upon the problem first.My favorite consequence of this is the fact that it means being of high level puts you instantly on even footing with the authorities. If you're Level 10 and they're Level 10 you're of the same social class, because status in these worlds isn't primarily a matter of blood or lineage but of strength and wealth. You could strangle the king on his own throne, if you really wanted. And the king would know this and treat you accordingly, as not quite a peer but as someone innately deserving of respect. Its a bit like a Greek myth where the heroic class is contiguous with the ruling class and they intersect. A 15th Level character who isn't a lord is only not one because they don't want to be, so the rulers only rule because Beowulf doesn't want to. And if you're only not the one in charge because you choose not to be, then you are the one in charge.
>>98295415I go real psycho with it, Korgoth of Barbaria where everybody is causing a lot of chaos. Keeps player death high and fun, and my settings are usually set in far off new lands: e.g. India, where disgusting dark magic reigns supreme
>>98295415I don't play Pronouns & Safe Spaces so really it's just built in that adventurers aren't common, the world doesn't revolve around them, the greatest ones are rare, and most die barely differently from any other run of the mill mercenary, thug, or robber knight.
>>98295415>So what's your favorite way of answering this?Not doing most of the stuff you listed like >xp only from combat >kingdoms operating like modern nation states >saving the world plot arc >giving players as many character options as possible >needing the world to be a unified all encompassing rational place Free yourself from these things and the rest follows.
>>98295415Nothing needs to be justified, retard. Part of the pretense of playing the game is that you are there to adventure, not to be an autistic doofus nitpicking things existing
>>98295415>all you have to do to get stronger is repeatedly throw yourself into life or death scenarios and win every timewow, why doesn’t everyone do this??
>local lord posting in the big 26bleak
>>98295415>How do you justify adventurers in your fantasy settings?because its fun>They are mainstay in nearly every fantays setting, just random dudes who group together and get strong enough to take on dragons, demons and godsbecause its fun>Do you have a in-setting explanation to why this even worksbecause its fun>If it was easy to gain power by simply fighting, that would realistically be capitalized by militaries and rulersthats not fun>But everyone seems happy to just outsource saving the world to random peoplebecause its fun>So what's your favorite way of answering this?its fun
ITT: Imaginarylets who won't even consider the most basic of worldbuilding to justify a game concept. all you gotta do is say heroes receive special powers from the gods/world/fate. boom. now you can do some fun worldbuilding around it too.
>>98296517>Imaginarylets who won't even consider the most basic of worldbuilding to justify a game concept.heres the game concept: wandering around beating up monsters for gold is fun and needs no explanation> now you can do some fun worldbuilding around it too.heres my world building, its a game invented at the tail end of the 70s where we beat up monsters for gold
>>98295415>Often its not a one-off thing either like a hero party, but most settings seems to have adventurer economies, and people just taking up weapons to fight baddies to get stronger is common.Nah, I despise that whole thing. The party are heroic exceptions, anything else is just trite bullshit for people who've spent too much watching shitty anime and playing mmorpgs.
>>98295415They are all nobles and thus have the money to travel around everywhere.>"But why do nobles go adventuring instead of being decadent niggers?"Their ancestors became nobles because they were the biggest and the strongest and killed monsters whereas all the other weaklings that became peasants couldn't kill monsters, so their culture glorifies going out to kill monsters.
>>98295487>no magic shops, adventurer gears, or easy access to quests or adventurers guildsNon-faggot settings have adventurers without any of these things, including The Hobbit
>>98296587>The party are heroic exceptionshasnt been the case since BX, where you wandering parties comparable to the players have always been on encounter lists
>>98295415>How do you justify adventurers in your fantasy settings?I usually always play as a knight—you know, tournament prizes, jobs for the local lord, and bounty-hunting missions.
>>98296592I like the idea of bloodline powers a lot. What if the ability to become high level gigachads is relegated to bloodlines? Nobility has the blood of heroes, passed down by the gods, very greek style. Maybe the heroic lineage has begun wakening, and them fucking around with the commoners has made these traits start appearing in the general populace, making social unrest more common as theres more of these gigachads around causing problems(and solving them where the nobles are not)
>>98295415Rounding up third and fourth sons and sending them all off on another dumb crusade used to be a pretty useful thing. I guess in a fantasy setting full of thousand year old ruins packed with deadly traps and monsters, encouraging them to go off and get themselves conveniently removed from the family will might become a thing. And if your failson happens to return a level 20 interdimensional dragonmolester he's either going to not be very interested in the family fief or a better candidate for it than his older brother anyway.
>>98295415>Often its not a one-off thing either like a hero partyIn my setting, it generally is.
>>98295415The world calls for wetwork, and we answer.
>>98295415You're not ADVENTURERS. You're an eclectic group of people who are on a quest.
>>98295415I've taken a few different approaches over the years, all very setting dependent. One setting was centered in a region that recently discovered their country was built over the metropole of the Ancient Empire, triggering what was basically a gold rush of looting dungeons for old magitek. Another area treated adventurers as essentially commando teams patronized by nobles to take out competing noble houses and archmages, with loot being part of their payment. Very Shadowrun-esque.Third one positioned them as explorers looking to make deals with, exploit, and/or conquer natives of a recently discovered continent, i.e. what adventurers often were in history.
If you're setting as an Adventurers Guild you're a fucking retard. And I won't play your game.
>>98295415Traditional games?
>>98297193>you'reA fucking retard.
>>98297207YOU ARE a retard
>>98295423>>98295423Fippy bippy/Thread
>>98297193Nobody invited you
>>98297193Same. It's such a shitty conceit.
>>98295415See, before, like, the 1980s, drifters were a thing. Pretty much everywhere, but especially in America. It was reasonably easy to live with no fixed address, moving from town to town, either driving a beater car or catching buses or trains, picking up day labour gigs and living in relative comfort while travelling. Every time you got bored, you’d pick up your last paycheque and hit the road again.Jobs started grilling people and edging for months before picking employees. Cost of rental rooms, motels, etc. went to the fucking moon, every landlord started demanding year-long contracts. The authorities give you trouble if your only address is a PO box.Society killed the drifter by degrees. Now the concept of people who make a living by roving from town to town and taking odd jobs sounds like a silly fantasy.Fantasy worlds don’t have red tape barriers like the ones I mentioned. There’s always people who’d rather pay to have a job done, instead of doing it themselves. Adventurers are just 19th/20th century drifters dropped into worlds of sword and sorcery. As long as there’s affordable inns and odd jobs, you’re going to have adventurers.
>>98297193Best I can do is fantasy Pinkertons.
>>98295415Well, it is simple: They are part of the vagabond -> bandit -> mercenary -> vagabond pipeline.
>>98295423fpbpEverything else is pretentious autism>>98295439>Even magic has rules and frameworks in a setting, otherwise it just becomes nonsenseThis is the fallacy of appealing to ignorance, retard. Not knowing how it works does not mean it's nonsense, it just means you don't know..
>>98295645>Just making shit up is not the gold standard!>By the way, I think it's nice when I prompt my imaginary friends to make things up!Your brain is far below the gold standard, or the silver standard, or even just the average.
>>98295521The concept of adventurers comes from the knight errants from medieval literature. There is historical precedent in that too as knights would sometimes go around fighting bandits, undertaking pilgrimages and competing in tournaments as well.If you strip away the nobility aspect you are left with a fantasy adventurer.
>>98295415That Elmore with the watermark removed.
>>98295415Most fantasy settings definitely don't have "adventurer economies", but it's not like a setting that has monsters also having peopke who fight monsters takes a whole lot of justifying.
>>98295415Bascially just small mercenary bands, really.
>>98295415What do you mean justify adventurers??? How many players do you have? The whole world in my game has exactly 4 adventurers, it not an occupation. You realise this is /tg/ not /a/ or /v/ right?
>>98295607why are a bunch of adventurers in the frontier region? are they chopping trees? but seriously, it's not hard to think of many reasons why minor mercenary groups might be in those regions, but the idea of it supporting a whole social class is pretty absurd>>98295415In my case, as alluded to above, every adventuring party is assembled for a specific reason by someone who isn't an adventurer. They're on a quest, I guess.In my most recent campaign, the players are a bunch of mercenaries that were contacted by a bunch of academics, who wanted to go to an unexplored region to test a hypothesis about there being a long since fallen civilization buried there. Imagine, basically, europe in 700, and the expedition is coming from italy and going to norway. You can't send a massive group of men to go there just to check some shit out, but you also don't wanna go there with just a couple of dudes. So it's the academics + the players + a couple of other warriors directly loyal to the house of the academics (ie., NPCs who will stay around and guard them while the players are doing their shit).But then, just as they're on a ship sailing up the coast about to arrive at their location, a bunch of wild shit starts happening in the sky, then the dead begin coming back to life and swimming up to the boat to attack them. Turns out, the reason the academics wanted to go there was actually to investigate their suspicion that an upcoming planetary alignment might realign some magical mumbo-jumbo in the region. And they were right.So now, suddenly, this distant backwater in the middle of nowhere, with no real populations besides small villages, is going to become the focus of everyone who borders it, meanwhile all the dead in the area are rising from their grave, and also demons are flocking to the place both from the sea and from the uncharted north. So the players have dozens of different options to progress the story.
>>98297734I just find weird how old-ass dnd art tends to be good on landscape/natural environment and amusingly mid, even bad, on the faces.
>>98298024yeah, it's called the army.
>>98295850Easy with the nukes there, Major Kong.
>>98300266>why are a bunch of adventurers in the frontier region?Those natives won't kill themselves.
>>98300290That's fine in a setting with strong, organized nation-states with the kind of revenue that makes maintaining a standing army feasible, but it'd be pretty out-of-place in a lot of settings. Especially if monsters are more of a once a generation or even once every few years kind of threat than a constant one for most places. In that case it'd obviousky make more sense to pay for specialists' services when the need arises than to constantly pay for a standing force, while roaming monster hunters who go where there's trouble could still have enough work for them to stay in business.
>>98295415My setting was developed to address issues I had with standard fantasy setting, where my suspension of disbelief had worn down over the decade to be paper thin at best. In my setting, everyone is essentialy a conquistador, since the justification for adventuring question in particular wore at me.
>>98300896If you're setting is so far removed from at least a standing militia and garrison you have greater problems going on than just monsters. Being able to protect your people and your borders is one of the fundamental aspects of even having a civilization. This applies to even podunk holes in the wall. And if the local militia isn't enough that's a hook for wandering adventurers to do some Solomon Kane shit but there is no logic that justifies a sustained group of murder hobos. It's stupid.
>>98295415It's an institution. A career path. You aren't just random dudes, you're a group out of many groups seeking fame and glory through heroism and exploration. If you're a shitter just starting out, you're saving cats from trees and helping old ladies paint their fences. Work your way up the ranks, and you get more exciting, lucrative, and prominent jobs. Only the best of the best, of which there are very, very, VERY few, you can count the number of elite parties on one hand type of shit, face apocalyptic threats, and are sworn to absolute secrecy as to the nature of their duties.
>>98295415In my setting. Adventurers is just a term who do "quests." Which is just gig work posted by villages and towns. Sometimes a Lord might post a "quest" on a monster attacking people on the road or to explore a dungeon and clear out the monsters that are using it as a lair. However most of the time it's just someone from the village asking for items or needing a escort to take them to the town to sell their wares, etc.
>>98297362Well you're a setting
>>98295415Adventurers are not a thing gygax invented when he wanted to find a different name for grave robbers. They exist and have always existed.>adventurers in your nationPMC, noir detectives, rogue investigative reporters Criminals, spies, terrorists>adventurers in an enemy nationFreedom Fighters, Rebels, Activists>adventurers in unexplored landsExplorers, Pioneers, Conquistadors>adventurers taming the chaotic wildernessheroes>How do you justify adventurersRealism, historical and thematic accuracy.
>>98295415One of the main problems of the last wfrp edition is they can't decide between>the party is made of regular people with jobs and families and abandon them twice a month to do some dangerous bullshit like dismantling a chaos cult>they're weirdos and they're not part of the regular imperial society anymoreThere are loads of weird rules trying to justify the first case and make it "the regular way to play the game" but almost every adventures and sourcebooks written just assume the second one.
>>98302389Why not both. You can have farmers and tradesmen who during their off season do gig/quests for the gold. As well as hobos who make it their job to travel town to town taking the big quests to make a name for themselves and their party.
>>98301913Standing armies haven't been the norm throughout history, and your citizen militia raised in time of need, which, say, the Greek city-states, surely civilized, relied on, may be plenty to take care of mundane threats while still feeling iut of its depth when a dragon or an evil necromancer or some shit appears to cause trouble.>there is no logic that justifies a sustained group of murder hobosWe're talking about mercenaries but more specialized here. Saying that there's no logic that justifies their existence is an outright idiotic take.
>>98301913The entire conquistador system and the contemporary mercenary companies emerged because armies couldn't simply abandon their lands for a decade to go off exploring in far flung places without leaving their charges at the mercy of their rivals, or had deficits in their coverage that needed to be amended eminently. Adventurers might seem kind of anachronistic in a genuine medieval age, but D&D always skewered something close to the renaissance in culture and and politics.
>>98295415they're better than almost anybody elseand a balanced party of them is exceedingly rarean npc with the elite array who has pc class levels isnt all that rare, maybe 1 in 20 npcs, but they get rarer with levela group of such npcs are likely to be the same class or fairly close, are likely of varying quality and level, have npc level gear, and probably aren't spending all their non-downtime looking for dangerous shit to dothe pcs are all elite, with pc level gear, are probably a balanced group or close to it, all the same level with maybe a 1 level difference, and are a motivated and cohesive groupalso the pcs get to choose their build; npcs are chosen by me and as a rule I dont fully optimize them, maybe the main nemesis or rivals are highly optimizedpeople do gain "power" by fighting, thats why battle-tested veterans are better than fresh recruits
>>98297207kekkekao even
>>98302453>Standing armies haven't been the norm throughout history,Neither have dragons and giblins.
>>98305085Indeed. That is, however, completely irrelwvant to my point, and I think it's weird that you ignored the rest of my post to adress part of one sentence out of context.
>>98305109>Indeed. That is, however, completely irrelwvant to my point,It's every bit relevant to your post. Because you do not apply ordinary logic to extra ordinary situations.
>>98297525the fun thing is that with the advent of the gig economy and people working from apps or remote we are slowly seeing a rebirth of the drifting culture
>>98297525Fantasy world should actually have massive barriers like that, though? Read about something like western europe after the fall of rome, and you basically can't travel at all because the roads aren't safe and nobody trusts each other. You can have drifters today (or indeed during the height of rome, although I don't know if they did but they sure had lots of trade so presumably they could've had drifters) precisely because society is so highly developed; when it's less developed you get less of them, not more. If some dangerous-looking guys show up in your town (with big walls and gate guards and all this other shit that isn't there just as a fashion statement) without a really good reason in a fantasy world, they should be told to immediately fuck off and to not look back.Drifters are bad news, they're drifters for a reason, and everyone has always known that.
>>98306366>Read about something like western europe after the fall of romeWhy would I waste my time doing that when it is completely irrelevant to my setting, in which neither Europe nor Rome have ever existed?
>>98306391Because it's about the condition not the specific situation? You fucking moron? What a stupid response.
>>98295415The "Adventurer Economy" and its postmodern cousin the "Adventurer's Guild," derive from game mechanics taken too literally, and especially mechanics abstracted even further by video games.Conan - inspiration to Gygax and thousands of others - doesn't go to the Adventurer's Hall to find a job posted by an authorized quest giver, he just goes out and decides to rob a wizard, or plunder an ancient city, or is promoted by a princess on the word of a god to go lead her army against a sorcerer. Likewise, there isn't some vast array of monsters (documented neatly in the Monster Manual) that justify massed adventurers; the monsters he encounters are in the dungeons beneath a wizard's palace, or buried in an antediluvian pre-human city, or hidden in a fabled island no living man has seen.If you fast forward a few decades to Elric, Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, Kothar, and Cugel, you see the same; there IS no justification for adventurers because adventurers are weirdos who go out and explore the dark and rightly avoided parts of the world in pursuit of gold, glory, and the satiation of their wanderlust. And this means they are generally outsiders, tolerated but rarely liked by civilized folk for their strange ways and tendency to cause trouble.So be careful about presuming that the gameplay rules are the laws of physics of your campaign, lest you end up in the hell of LitRPG where humans on the street know their "level" and what that means. If you fall prey to making your world function like an MMO you'll have to wrangle Adventuring Economies (which are nonsense), Adventurer's Guilds (which are silly), and People Actually Having XP/Levels (which is way too damn meta).Tl,dr; I justify adventurers as the rare lunatics who decide to face monsters and dungeons for plunder and riches. They're too rare for any sort of established economy or cultural expectations to form around them, so the problems you list above don't need solving.
thigh sex at the Adventurer's Guild
>>98295415>>98306486Continued on this point, a lot of these design/storytelling concerns are borne of treating game rules as PREscriptive instead of DEscriptive. To the grognard Indiana Jones, Zorro, Conan, Alan Quatermain, Robin Hood, and John Carter of Mars are all Fighting Men; they choose different armor and different weapons because they live in different eras and places, but defining them beyond "Fighting Man" is a function of their narratives and actions. It's not that one is a "Gunslinger" and another a "Highwayman" and a third a "Savage Warrior." Just as the modern GM must be cautious not to emulate MMO-style adventurer economies (which are, again, VAST abstractions made for the needs of a video game), they also must be careful not to assume that the only things a PC can be are the exact things formally explicated in a rulebook.Why do PCs grow stronger in mechanically significant ways upon acquiring enough XP by grabbing treasure? It's not because the characters exist in some universe where possession of gold pieces gives you more muscle mass or makes you more able to understand the mysteries of magic; it's because it's a game and XP and Levels are a reasonable way to delineate character capabilities and have them grow over the course of a campaign, just like a hero going from a naive farmboy to a respected Jedi Knight in the span of six hours of space opera.So to me there really IS no "in-setting" explanation or excuse for character advancement. The skilled knight who is a veteran of a dozen wars is 3HD, and the plucky band of heroes who defended their village from goblins for the first time last month are 5HD because the latter are the protagonists of the story and their abilities rise prodigiously to facilitate the sort of story being told. They will eventually dethrone god not because that's necessarily a "sensible" thing in-setting, but because it is a consequence of ever-rising competence and ever-rising threat.
>>98295415>>98306507Turns out I'm not done yet.If you DO want to have XP/levels be a thing and have Adventuring Parties (TM) wandering around throwing whole local economies into the blender, well... think on those matters. Look into LitRPG stories which explore those matters, or look at Superhero settings where "random bloke shows up who can blow up half a city" is a well-trodden bit of storytelling. If it makes no sense to you that people bother training with weapons when just stabbing a bunch of rats will make you a better killer or wizard, people will KNOW that and act accordingly.People will be on the lookout for prodigious young scamps who seem to get up to adventuresome sorts of things. Armies will prepare to handle dragons, monsters, and wizards, not just serried ranks of spears held by brave and frightened men. The Gods will rightly know that mortals can become their peers. Kings will go on adventures of peril and danger to ensure they have the martial or magical acumen needed to put upstart adventurers in their place. Cities will be blown up by errant high-level assholes who decided they wanted to do some redecorating and nobody had the means to stop them. "Adventurer" will become a Job you can do instead of a description ascribed to people who choose to go into danger for the hell of it.It'll lead to absolutely nonsensical worlds that obey video game logic instead of the hard truths of reality, but it'll at least be consistent.Just understand that this will inevitably lead to a very, VERY postmodern game.
Eberron presumes that adventurers really are among the few people who are even capable of gaining levels in PC classes, learning to wield powerful magic, et cetera. Most people involved in "powering" the magic-based equivalents of technology in the setting are those with NPC classes like Expert or Adept (in 3E/3.5E terms) or have dragonmarks, which *might* be useful for adventurers but for which the vast majority of existing uses are developed for infrastructure. So, you don't have legions of wizards casting fireballs, you have the equivalent of trained artillerists using magical items to throw fireballs - magical items which aren't necessarily man-portable, and which have to be constructed by specialists using dragonmarked forges, for instance. But then a PC comes along who *can* learn to throw fireballs using just a pinch of bat guano, some gestures, and some strange words, and that's a very different scenario - and yet, not scalable, so they don't replace the artillerists with the special magical equipment for military purposes.Keith Baker called this "wide magic" - magic is part of everyday life the same way electricity/gas/coal/telegraphy/whatever was part of life in the 19th/20th centuries, but "high level" magic is something that only PC types and the antagonists they oppose have access to.That's another part of it - there are no Elminsters who can pop in to save the day, so it's got to be your PCs who do it - but the bad guys out there *do* have access to that stuff.
>>98306737>Keith Baker called this "wide magic" - magic is part of everyday life the same way electricity/gas/coal/telegraphy/whatever was part of life in the 19th/20th centuries, but "high level" magic is something that only PC types and the antagonists they oppose have access to.Huh, I do something similar in my setting, but not nearly to the same extentnpcs can achieve higher level magic by coming together in numbers (like circle magic) and/or using places of power (a druid grove, a bardic college, a mages guild, a holy temple, etc) that were costly to put together and obviously must be guardedthat way, not every town or city needs to have a 10th level wizard hanging around for magic items or certain spellcasting to happenthis way, the majority of people with notable levels in a pc class are going to be adventurers or villains who are out actually doing dangerous shit frequently
>>98295415>How do you justify adventurers in your fantasy settings?I don't.>Do you have a in-setting explanation to why this even works?It doesn't exist in my setting. Never will either.>So what's your favorite way of answering this?The PCs are possibly adventurers, though none of them think of themselves as such. The concept doesn't even exist in my setting. Oh, there are people who are similar to adventurers, for sure. Plenty of grave robbers. Plenty of explorers, scholars and mercenaries. But not a single one would call themselves an adventurer. There are no weird potion shops, weapon stores, or spell boutiques, catering to adventurers. Alchemists make potions because the very rich are willing to pay for them. Weapon smiths make weapons, and will make you a weapon if you pay them. The very rare magic user might be convinced to sell something they own, for a price, or a favour. As you point out, it makes no sense for there to be adventurers, so I simply make it so they don't exist. It's not a category in my setting.
>>98306366>basically can't travel at all because the roads aren't safeTo adventurers, being attacked by a pack of wolves or bandits on the road is literally a walking loot pinata; killing them means you have an easy payday because animal pelts always have value, and in addition to looting whatever the bandits robbed up to that point, you can also collect any bounties on their heads and get rewarded by the local authorities, and while looting clothes like a videogame is unrealistic, taking weapons from people you've killed is 100% the norm for all of history because metal weapons and bows and crossbows have always been expensive, so killing some bandits, cutting off their heads, and looting their weapons and supplies is profitable. Is it dangerous to be a bounty hunter killing bandits? Duh, obviously, that's why the government pays you to do it. In historical China there were often lots of annoying mountain bandits and gangs that had the self preservation to scatter and flee whenever an armed government force came to suppress them and would return when they left to continue robbing and preying on travelers, weak against the strong and strong against the weak, it's exactly this kind of force that "adventurers" as a niche excel at dealing with.
>>98295415>ow do you justify adventurers in your fantasy settings? They are mainstay in nearly every fantays setting, just random dudes who group together and get strong enough to take on dragons, demons and gods. Often its not a one-off thing either like a hero party, but most settings seems to have adventurer economies, and people just taking up weapons to fight baddies to get stronger is common.Merely having an untamed wilderness full of potential valuables to explore does this. Dungeon ruins, a new land to pioneer, take your pick. It's prospecting but with a sword.>If it was easy to gain power by simply fighting, that would realistically be capitalized by militaries and rulers. But everyone seems happy to just outsource saving the world to random people.Because the kind of fighting required for that rapid growth is also incredibly lethal. People always forget but the life expectancy of adventurers is very low, because their mortality rate is very high. They make so much money because no one else is willing to do the job, and because the wealth of the previous failures add to the loot horde.Could you throw an army at conquering a dungeon? Sure. But you'll lose most of them, and then you won't have a standing army anymore, also you'll have extreme enmity with your subjects for sending so many good men to their death in te pursuit of riches and magical power, if they don't revolt in response to the orders to begin with.Adventuring is for the desperate, the insane, and the terminally greedy. It is a lonesome, nomadic lifestyle chronically bereft of creature comforts and safety, and without even a guarantee of pay, though when it does it comes in landslides.
>>98305393No. If there's a standing army anyways, it makes sense to delegate monster-fighting to it. If there's not, you can't just magically will one to exist when a dragon or a rampagin troll or something similar appears, and if such occurences aren't frequent, it makes more sense to rely on already existing freelance specialists than to maintain a standing force just for them.
The mercenary analogy is pretty retarded, really.Yes, the dnd-ish adventuring profession is violent, but the similarities end there.
>>9830006737I like this take a lot actually. PCs are special, even in a magical world. Where magic is made mundane, you get these people who can still perform miracles or feats of unusual or unheard of magic. >>98306532I do like the idea of there being 'something' to the adventurers. Old stories called it fate or prophecy, and it can be any of these things or something else. Not in a videogame style, but more in a metaphysical sense, perhaps it is their will made manifest on the fabric of the world, their growing confidence, or just their deeds echoing through the strands of fate that gives them power to become more than they were meant to be, more than mortal.
>>98295415You tell me
"Adventurer" is never a ptofession in any of my games. Every party is a team of people with a specific job or a group of people who incidentally are forced to wofk together. This isn't even something we've even discussed, it emerged naturally as a product of each of us having narrative instincts above those of LN reading turbo weebs.
>>98295415I don't. The closest thing you have to an adventurer in my setting is more like a pioneer or a settler. People aren't really going out with the expectation of making money or finding something interesting. If they set out, it's more likely they just want to expand and make more of the world livable for humanity.
>>98306419Again why would I waste my time doing that when it is completely irrelevant to my setting, which don't share those conditions ?
>>98306532I dunno, I chalk it down to the fact that not everyone knows that killing a ton of rats can make you into a giga-chad, and those that do won't necessarily be able to muster the discipline to actually go through with it versus keeping their niche as a lowbie, just like easy access to the world's knowledge via the internet hasn't turned everybody into a professor. You are right on the money that any figure of authority would either be an adventurer or have one on their immediate contacts, which ties neatly into the mythological ideals of what a ruler should be, anyway.
>>98295473>Posting my wife on /tg/
>>98295415The same reasons anyone would adventure for:>Fame>Money>Bitches>Power>Revenge>ShelterThere are monsters to slay, cargo to protect, princessess to save, nobility to achieve, assholes to hate, and higher-ups to escape. An adventurer adventures because the world puts adventure between them and what they want.
>>98296458People get pissed at the local lord posting because it exposes how poorly thought out their meme fantasy game settings are.Very based.
>>98295487>no magic shopsWrong.>adventurer gearsWrong.>easy access to questsExtremely, bafflingly wrong. Why the fuck would a world without adventurers have LESS people needing help solving their problems you stupid fucking bastard?
>>98314457We get pissed at it because it's a forced meme, retard-kun
>>98314532Not only are you wrong but also mad
>>98314681Not my problem.
what do you get out of this?
>>98296517Or I could play the game instead.
>>98296909Adventurers.
>>98297193Good, stay out loser.
>>98300290the players.
>>98306532Nah. I'll run a game, and the players will kill monsters in a dungeon.
>>98297193>you'reI only let in people who can properly read and write.
>>98295415>Do you have a in-setting explanation to why this even works?Magical mass media (think public hologram projectors) have made adventurers and ball players into international stars. Everyone on and offworld wants to know what happened to The Holedowners this week. This has, of course, caused several generations of suicidal teenagers to all attempt to become famous by blade and spell.
>>98301611>where my suspension of disbelief had worn down over the decade to be paper thin at best.How do we go back fren?
You can't really justify "adventurers" without justifying their source of power.Because without it, you don't need justification, adventurers are weirdos (or not) doing odd jobsThe problem is their source of power, why are they so strong? Let's say your group killed a hypogriff that was terrorizing the village, that's gonna make waves, you bet the local lord will want to meet the hunters and listen to some stories, you bet some local lasses will be all over them, you bet the local kids will act like a fan-club, hell, stay too long in the village and they'll probably throw a festival for your guys.Power attracts. Do too many feats like that and sooner or later your "adventurers" will catch themselves being the rulers of a band of mercenaries, or married into nobility unintentionally.The question, is how they do it, what's their source of power? Can it be replicated? Are there others like them?The moment their source of power can be replicated the world changes drastically.
>>98319312In my setting, you can either be born with supernatural strength, or reach it through years of diligent training. One country is working on magical enhancements that can get it done faster.
>>98295415They're sellswords, or mercenaries. Next question.
>>98295415>How do you justify adventurers in your fantasy settingsThere wouldn't be a game without them so they exist.
>>98319312>The moment their source of power can be replicated the world changes drastically.I think this the tipping point between a setting having or not the concept of "Adventurer's Guild".
