Why Hire Adventurers?

[BRC]

Or Sheriff Bob could do what people normally did, rally a posse of locals, call on the neighbouring communities for help or bump the problem up to the local nobility or other higher level of government/law enforcement. Unless the land is wracked by plague, famine or civil war it should not take long to get a group together that can kill, capture or drive off the problem.

And mercenaries tended to be a near lifelong career, bouncing from war to war and either not working in between or becoming bandits for a while if they hadn't been paid properly. It's not the sort of thing where you fight for money only occasionally, you invest a lot of money in better equipment that allows you to charge more for your services, so time spent doing something else is time that doesn't justify your prior expenses. If adventurers are doing mercenary work they aren't adventurers, they're mercenaries. Though generally speaking mercenaries work in groups of more than four, so I'm not sure who would actually hire them.

Similarly caravan guards weren't actually a thing, travelling merchants either didn't need guards or were guarded by the local authorities in most places. It's the lord's job to maintain safe roads in their lands, it's not something to leave to private enterprise. Not to mention the general issues with letting landless and liegeless people wander around with military weapons and armour.

Oh sure, in reality. But realism is a dumb standard IMO.

Verisimilitude is where it's at.

For me "There are numerous issues that are best solved by Righteous Violence" and "There exists an industry of wandering Righteous Violence doers who can be hired to solve such problems" makes perfect sense. "Why are there Adventurers?" because these problems exist and people will pay you to take care of them. "Why has society not either collapsed due to these problems, or adapted systems to deal with them?" They did! The system is called Adventurers.

Is is the best system from a quality-of-life standpoint? Probably not. At best you've got a bunch of heavily armed and dangerous murderhobos running around looking for work, likely to turn to Banditry if they don't find anything.

Maybe there are parts of the world where these sorts of problems don't really exist, or where the local nobility and militias are strong enough to deal with these without seeking outside help. Adventurers don't go to such places. They go to the places where there is work to do and people who will pay them to do the work.


and sure, maybe Sheriff Bob will just round up a posse to swarm the deserters, a bunch of villagers will get seriously hurt or killed, but the problem will be solved.

But if there happened to be a bunch of experienced and well armed fighters in the area, wouldn't you try to reach out to them with some money before risking life and limb yourself?


The local Nobility should be taking care of these problems, but we can presuppose that they're not, and think of plenty of likely reasons why "Hire some random violent vagrants" is a better option than "Reach out to Baron Brad Von BlueBlood for help".