Why Hire Adventurers?

[Grim Portent]

Yeah, this insistence that any group or society that can't overcome every problem on their own without hiring outside help is incompetent and will die soon anyways is pretty bizarre.

Others have made the rest of the points that I've wanted to make already, but this one I just find very strange. It's both such a common plot and a relatively regular occurance in real life that I just don't understand it as an argument. It's rarely even "hire adventurers or die" for the hirers, typically its just "hire adventurers or life is gonna suck".

The scenario posited in the op was villages being burned and people murdered, which is very much an outside intervention or die situation. It is also exactly the sort of situation where the local authorities should be able to deal with it before any itinerant mercenaries can even hear about it.

And the simple fact is that Adventurers did exist in our world at various times and places.

Maybe they went by Bounty Hunter or Explorer or they were scout an trappers and mountian men and filibusters and privateers, but they were people with Certain Set of Skills, working generally out on the fringes of "civilization" and doing jobs very much like hunting goblins.

But when you boil it down, they were people who hired out to do jobs that state actors like the army or navy or feudal levies or whatever either weren't available for or specialized to do or weren't seen as worth maintaining when they were only needed for a specific instance.

A government issuing letters of marque and reprisal to private aquatic murder hoboes to disrupt the shipping of an adversary in time of war is exactly a government (like Baron Whatshisname) hiring adventurers (but ones with a boat) to do military adjacent stuff that the regular navy was too busy or widely spread out to take care of.

So I cannot for the life of me see how any of this strains believability. History has shown us much weirder stuff.

The land based version of a privateer is a mercenary, not an adventurer, and adventurers as used in rpgs have basically nothing in common with privateers anyway. Nor do they usually have much in common with realistic bounty hunters, explorers or indeed any of the mentioned professions. As a group they tend to have such diverse skills that calling them by a collective noun doesn't even make sense.

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.

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.

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.

I have a hard time imagining an inquisition hiring a sheriff, who already has a job with a wage, to help them. Or to be more precise, I can't imagine a sheriff (the medieval kind) keeping their position after doing so. Skipping work to do something else is fine when you're self employed or don't technically have a job, but when you're a bailiff or a knight or similar failing to perform your duties without a damn good reason is a big deal.

And while I'm not an expert on the issues Britain suffered in India, I'm pretty sure the snakes weren't actually a problem before the bounty, or at least not one that needed a bounty to try and solve it. Barring unusual circumstances like the Beast of Gevedaun or Paris in 1420, people who live in an area are usually able to deal with the animals that they live near, or they haven't have been living there for long.

As for settlements not dying immediately, I don't consider a settlement lasting ten years before dying instead of three a win, in the circumstances in which I'd find such a village I'd probably tell them to go back to a proper town and move on rather than enable their self destructive desire to strike out. In most contexts I might actually consider the settlement dying to be the win. There's very few situations I can think of where a bunch of people travelling beyond the nominal borders of their realm and building new settlements in lands already occupied is a good thing. In the OPs context of goblins, the idea is clearly that the goblins are attacking lands that have established human settlements, and which should be protected by the same infrastructure used to resist invasions or deal with rebellions or brigands, in a 'fringes of civilisation' context it basically means the villagers are encroaching on the goblins rather than the other way around, and in such a context the village is the bad guys.