Why Hire Adventurers?

[Stonehead]

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.

I don't really get the issue. Is there some problem with calling a bounty hunter "an adventurer"? Is there some problem with a sheriff being recruited by the local priests who are short on man power? People can do multiple things. Especially before the modern era where we get to be so hyper-specialized.

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.

I don't think I've seen ever seen a civilization "in a position to stop any threats", especially on the outskirts of society. IRL, American cities in the west put bounties on wolves. It wasn't exclusively professional hunters who took those bounties. The British snake bounties in India are a super well-known example that clearly didn't go as planned, but it still illustrates that they weren't equipped to deal with a threat as mundane as snakes. The snakes weren't what led to the end of British rule in India though.

Historically, settlements into new territories didn't collapse immediately. I know some of the early attempts at settlements in America took a few years to collapse. In that time, they clearly weren't dead, and they clearly didn't have the power they needed to survive.

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.

My official job title is Software Engineer. I'm not a technical writer, but I write plenty of documentation when they're busy. I'm not a QA Engineer, but I write tests when they're busy. You could say "Software Engineer is actually a collection of other jobs like developer, technical writer, and QA." but that's not going to stop people from using the term, because it's a useful term.