Why Hire Adventurers?

[Lord Raziere]

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.

.....This is a baffling statement to make, as "bounty hunter", "mercenaries", "crusaders" "inquisitions" are synonyms for adventurer. crusaders have the perfect excuse to go ANYWHERE to fight ANYTHING as WH40k demonstrates (and crusaders won't be shy about looting stuff just because they're religious), Mercenaries have been used in this thread as an alternate term to refer to adventurer and there is nothing stopping a mercenary from just.....traveling around. bounty hunters are pursuing people for a bounty and thus might travel long ways as well. and inquisitions have been used by Dragon Age and Wh40k as people with the authority to investigate and explore whatever they want to fight things for the survival/betterment of the world.

this really just seems to be problem of inflexibly defining adventurer more than anything else.