Why Hire Adventurers?

[BRC]

It being a collection of jobs is the issue, because all those other jobs still exist and are still being done by people, who are generally tied to locations or organisations. No one needs an 'adventurer' to hunt bandits, because that's the job of a sheriff, bailiff or bounty hunter. No one needs them to stop raiders because that's what militias, mercenaries, armies and men-at-arms are for. Cults/hostile religions get hunted down by priests, crusaders and inquisitions.

When you get out to the fringes of civilisation the people who live there don't need adventurers because they are already in a position to stop any threats, or they're dead. Or if they are somehow not dead yet while being too weak to protect themselves, they'll be dead soon enough after the adventurers move on.

Adventurer is in practice just a way of saying 'vagrant,' and we tend to handwave away the people who are actually supposed to be doing the job that we give the PCs to do, and it just results in a world made of tissue paper and blu-tac.

I mean, as I see it, Adventurers are basically highly skilled migrant workers, who seek out places where the need for a service is more than the locals can handle.


Sheriff Bob and his deputies are responsible for dealing with local Bandits. That's fine, because most of the time the bandits are usually just a pair of thugs who decided to start holding up people on the road, and Bob can round up his deputies and his dogs and a few militiamen and overpower them pretty easily.

But this time, it's not just a few armed men looking for wine money, this time the bandits are a gang of Deserters from the King's army. There's about twelve of them, they're organized, and they're well armed.

So Bob hires some Adventurers. He doesn't normally need to deal with gangs of a dozen armed veterans, so he doesn't need a force capable of handling that regularly.


Also, Mercenaries, Bounty Hunters, ect, are just jobs an Adventurer can do. You don't need to be a full-time caravan guard to guard a caravan. Demand for violence-doing is not perfectly steady across everywhere, such that there are always some locals who can handle every problem.