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Thread: Why Hire Adventurers?
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2022-05-19, 02:24 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
I'm saying that there are people who want their story to be statistically unremarkable. There are people who want their characters' stories to represent a mostly standard human existence.
There are also people who want their game worlds to be realistic (I know there's a whole thing here about verisimilitude, but realism does have its diehard fans). There are people who want their game setting to be a fairly believable model of how people behave in the real world.
To people who are both the question is important.
To focus in on a single line:
In one world, hiring adventurers is normal, and adventurers are reasonably common, and lots of employers hire adventurers. In another world, it's rare, and only the PCs are adventurers, and only one employer in the world is hiring adventurers.
Now, as it happens, I do think it's fairly realistic given certain start conditions, and I don't really care too much about realism, but that doesn't mean the question is irrelevant.
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2022-05-19, 09:21 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
You and I are talking about two different issues. I will address the one I care about (and that I think is inherent in the thread title “Why hire adventurers?”). Then I will address the one you seem to be interested in.
My point is this: whether it is “statistically unremarkable” or not, whether it’s what the players want or not, whether the goal is realism or verisimilitude or believability or sheer romping adventures, hiring adventurers will happen in any game in which:
A. Somebody hires the PCs, and
B. The PCs are adventurers.
That is totally independent of the question of how realistic or believable it is. Therefore I have ignored the question of how realistic or believable it is (up until now).
I will now address the issue you seem concerned with: how realistic or believable it is.
And first, I need to make a clear distinction that you haven’t made. “Realistic” or “believable” are not synonymous with “statistically unremarkable”. I’m one of the people who want a game to be believable and to have verisimilitude. I want the world to represent “a fairly believable model of how people behave in the real world.” That does not mean I want my PC’s life to be statistically unremarkable. PCs’ lives are only statistically unremarkable in a game of Fields and Farmers, or Markets and Merchants, or Homes and Housework. An adventure is inherently statistically remarkable.
[If you are talking about non-adventure games, like Monopoly or The Game of Life, then you are right, and we have no disagreement, for the simple reason that there is no intersection between your topic and mine.
I want to play an adventurer – a character with a statistically remarkable life. I want to do so in a believable world, but I still want to fight ogres and explore wilderness in that world, not grow turnips. Growing turnips is a mostly standard human existence. Slaying ogres is not.
It follows that I do not mind unlikely events. In fact, in most role-playing games, we skip over the statistically unremarkable parts. We don’t discuss waking up, cooking breakfast, washing dishes, re-packing our packs, and each unremarkable stage in the day’s hike. We skip all that with, “Next morning you get started and continue walking through the forest. About an hour later, you see tracks crossing your trail. Role a Tracking check to determine what creature made them.” We deal with the owlbear tracks specifically because they are statistically remarkable.
So even if a noble who hires adventurers is rare, and therefore statistically remarkable, it doesn’t break verisimilitude. [A king who offers half his kingdom and the hand of the princess to whoever slays the giant is also rare, and statistically remarkable. It was also the basis of the story.]
Have I successfully identified, and addressed, your issue?
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2022-05-19, 10:56 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
That's not quite it. People want to play as relative average - at least in terms of starting state - members of a statistical outlier group. Human storytelling preferentially targets outlier events. In event-based storytelling this is easy - just pick an event, like a battle. There are many movies with one-word battle names as titles for exactly this reason. When telling a character-focused story the approach is to pick a person who will naturally be involved in a larger number of outlier events by dint of their life's circumstances, with career being a common choice. Therefore we have tons of television series about doctors, lawyers, cops, and soldiers. In a TTRPG, 'adventurer' is one form of outlier group, serving similar duty alongside 'superhero' and 'vampire.' The event side is handled by the GM in the form of the campaign structure.
The question, from a game design and worldbuilding standpoint, is whether the outlier group the PCs are part of is a normally occurring part of society, or something that only exists because of event circumstances. That is, are they adventurers: defined by life choices, or heroes: defined by response to imposed circumstances. This has profound consequences because going the adventurer route implies that there are other people like the PCs, lots of them even, whereas going the hero route implies the PCs are largely unique.
D&D, of course, has long tried to have it both ways (so, so many problems in D&D boil down to this). FR novels have adventuring parties that wander around the continent and contend with various problems including other adventuring parties and there are various societal conventions for dealing with them. By contrast Dragonlance centered its storyline around the largely unique Heroes of the Lance and society had no idea how to handle them.
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2022-05-20, 02:33 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Using strange coincidendes as justification is rather inelegant. Because :
- In many cases it just is not a justification at all. Yes, some events are really rare, but whenever or whereever they occur, they occur for proper reasons, not just because they didn't happen at all the other places.
- Focussing on People who are involved in an interesting thing is valid and the interesting thing thus occuring in game does not break versimilitude. But that works exactly once per campaign. As soon as the same guys are repeatedly just there whenever something strange and unrelated happens, it stops being plausible/needs a better justification. It is not hard to give a better justification.
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2022-05-20, 06:10 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
D&D, of course, has long tried to have it both ways (so, so many problems in D&D boil down to this). FR novels have adventuring parties that wander around the continent and contend with various problems including other adventuring parties and there are various societal conventions for dealing with them. By contrast Dragonlance centered its storyline around the largely unique Heroes of the Lance and society had no idea how to handle them.
All that tells me is that you can go either way with the same system and it will work. It's just a matter of taste.
If your metric for being 'realistic' is how people behave in the real world, that has potential to cause problems, because in worlds where the physical laws of the universe are different, people would act differently. So the question of whether something is realistic or not is not some fixed standard, but 'it depends'.
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2022-05-20, 06:18 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Sure, but you only need "proper justification" for the specific instance.
Why Hire Adventurers as a general question is one that is pretty irrelevant.
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2022-05-20, 02:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society
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2022-05-20, 08:00 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
I don't believe that is the case. To continue the TV example, my friend who went to med school likes Scrubs, but physically cringes when seeing clips of Grey's anatomy. Scrubs is exaggerated, sure, but (according to this person, I'm not a doctor) it's fairly believable and relatable.
It's like, if you have a modern-day drama, it's probably going to include some break ups, maybe divorce even, deaths in the family, falling out between friends, probably some infidelity. These are all very realistic events, even if (hopefully) they don't happen very frequently. If one of the main characters were to win the lottery however, the show would be a lot less believable. It's not that people don't win the lottery. Winning the lottery isn't an unrealistic event in the sense that it happens several times per year. It does make the show less believable though.
You could say, "it's not common for people to win the lottery, but the story will follow exceptional people who just happen to win the lottery", it will still be unsatisfying to a good chunk of the audience.
My point is that there are people who want their TTRPG games to be believable, like the example with the deaths, breakups and fights, and not like the example with the lottery. There are people who just like living a normal fictional life. I don't know how common it is, but I can guarantee you there are at least 2 or 3 I know personally.Last edited by Stonehead; 2022-05-20 at 08:02 PM.
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2022-05-20, 09:46 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Do they play games like warhammer fantasy RPG? Because that seems like the kind of game that someone who wants to play somebody that's a normal if exceptional person dealing with believable (in universe) somewhat common occurrence events as opposed to winning the lottery events.
It's a dark world that the events PCs are likely to encounter are believably common occurrences. But by golly, your Rat Catcher will try to deal with them and not die in the process! Or at least fight their way out of the mess to somewhere safer.
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2022-05-21, 06:53 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
But is it?
If something turns out to be a viable way to make money, even if it's inherently dangerous, people will start doing it for money. If duffing up monsters and stealing all their stuff is profitable, then people will be doing it in the world the game takes place in, and that's how the person hiring adventurers knows that there are adventurers available to be hired. It's *not* statistically remarkable for the world they live in. It's a thing that a local lord knows he can find within a reasonable timeframe and cost.
If going on adventures was statistically remarkable for his world, he wouldn't have tried to hire someone to do it because it wouldn't be something he would think of as a viable solution to the problem.
Settings where adventures are statistically remarkable cannot also be setting where adventurers are hired, they need to be settings where the adventures come about from more dramatic causes.
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2022-05-21, 03:01 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
To answer the question “why hire adventurers?” is a question that comes with 2 baked in assumptions.
1) Adventurers exist (in at least sufficient numbers to consider using them for a task).
2) They can be hired.
Not every game setting meets both requirements. In traditional superhero setting the heroes don’t travel and don’t take on quests for coin,
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2022-05-21, 03:43 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
They also aren't settings where adventurers persist. There may be heroic individuals who occasionally undertake some epic quest that qualifies as an adventure, but there won't be people who spend the majority of their lives - usually from the onset of adulthood until they either die or get 'too old for this s***' - adventuring. Depending on how a game is structured the ability to do the latter, to always have the next quest waiting in the wings, may be extremely important.
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2022-05-21, 07:14 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Because game. But you probably already knew that.
Perhaps the local lord wants to appease the advisor who recommended hiring these 'adventurers.' Advisors have family, and perhaps this advisor was sent to oversee said lord and ensure things went his way.
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2022-05-21, 09:18 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
It is not true that only statistically unremarkable people get hired. It just isn't.
- It is statistically remarkable to have a Ph.D. Nonetheless, universities and research companies deliberately hire people with Ph.D.s
- It is statistically remarkable to have been the MVP of a NBA championship team. Sponsors nonetheless deliberately hire such people.
- Fewer than two dozen people have ever been to the moon. Nonetheless, companies have specifically hired people who have been to the moon.
- Thor Heyerdahl was an adventurer. In 1947, he sailed across the Pacific Ocean in a hand-built raft from South America to the Tuamotu Islands. For the rest of his life, he had no trouble getting funding or support for his next adventures.
- Jacques Cousteau was an underseas adventurer. That's why some television companies hired him to film The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.
- Amelia Earhart was a statistically remarkable adventurer. After becoming the first woman to fly across the Atlantic, she has jobs and job offers and sponsors for the rest of her life.
- Meriwether Lewis and William Clark were adventurers who explored the Mississippi. Afterwards, President Jefferson appointed Lewis to be governor of the Louisiana Territory, and Clark to be the brigadier general of the militia in the Louisiana Territory.
And stories tend to be about statistically remarkable people. We have stories about remarkable people -- Beowulf (who slew Grendel); Hercules (who defeated the Nemean lion); Dian Fossey (who spent twenty years living with gorillas). We have no stories about the unremarkable -- ordinary turnip farmers and townsfolk. [We only have a story of a Brave Little Tailor because he wound up slaying a giant.]
Let's remember that "unremarkable" means not worth remarking on.
If a dragon is raiding my lands, and there are only three known dragon slayers in the world, then I want to hire one of those three statistically remarkable people.
People with difficult tasks to be done tend to seek out statistically remarkable people to do them.
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2022-05-22, 12:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
You only need one Beowulf, for Beowulf to be a solution for your Grendel problem.
My sig is something witty.
78% of DM's started their first campaign in a tavern. If you're one of the 22% that didn't, copy and paste this into your signature.
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2022-05-22, 02:23 AM (ISO 8601)
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2022-05-22, 02:41 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Right. To unpack the Beowulf example a bit further, it's absolutely a case where regular troops can't be used. It's just that in this case it's because the regular troops are insufficient to the task at hand. Hrothgar has troops and he absolutely does have them attempt to fight Grendel. It goes very badly for them. Beowulf also contains a representation of the risk of calling in someone so powerful. After Beowulf does his daring deeds Hrothgar, in a moment of weakness, offers to make Beowulf his heir. This is an extremely dangerous situation for a lot of reasons, one that could very well destroy the kingdom. Beowulf refuses, magnanimously, of course, because he's an Anglo-Saxon paragon and he's got a kingdom of his own coming anyway, but the scene shows authorial awareness of the potential problems heroes who are more awesome than everyone else put together showing up.
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2022-05-23, 10:34 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Our recent campaign ran, In World, for a bit over a year and a half. My bard is now retired (Lvl 20) at age 24/25 ish, is about to have a child (the father is a gold dragon) and is part owner/Chief Operating Officer, of a small shipping company. She has a multi album contract with a greedy music company on the astral plane but she does get decent royalties from them. (Her own touring has been somewhat curtailed, by her own choice, but she does offer private performances to select customers/friends).
She has already hired two adventurers to do a few things for her (one was a dead adventurer-cleric who she managed to cast a True Resurrection on) to further her various goals and objectives. In the main, she's not out adventuring anymore, but she keeps her hand in and if something earth shaking arises, she may be available. Her simulacrum does some traveling and information gathering for her, or, does the weapons training for all of the sailors on the company's ships.
Nice.Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2022-05-23 at 10:36 AM.
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society
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2022-05-23, 09:49 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
For a real life example of sending a roaming adventurer on a one way suicide mission to deal with pirates with a promise of half your kingdom if they return successfully we have James Brooke the white rajah if Sarawak.
Whilst the exact details of the promises made are a bit unclear in the end the madman willing to run headfirst into pirates nests got his own principality over the objections of the local lords.
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2022-05-24, 02:23 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Avatar by linklele. How Teleport Worksa. Malifice (paraphrased):
Rulings are not 'House Rules.' Rulings are a DM doing what DMs are supposed to do.
b. greenstone (paraphrased):
Agency means that they {players} control their character's actions; you control the world's reactions to the character's actions.
Second known member of the Greyview Appreciation Society
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2022-05-24, 03:53 PM (ISO 8601)
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2022-05-24, 04:59 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
I think they both qualify as adventurers though. I can see a "Conquer this land in the name of the crown and you can rule it, provided you send me some taxes" approach to a campaign.
This is why this thread annoys me. We have loads of RL examples of "adventurers" being hired by state and non-state entities to do stuff that state institutions like the army or police traditionally do. But when those get brought up, people split hairs to try to define mercenaries or privateers or explorers as "not adventurers"
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2022-05-24, 05:08 PM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Last edited by hamishspence; 2022-05-24 at 05:08 PM.
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2022-05-25, 12:31 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Yup. Have done a couple of those. They are generally quite fun.
I could even see the Cortez-Mendoza dynamics as an interparty conflict. Admittedly Mendoza did not take part in the original conquring so coule be a new group addition or a replacement PC.
This is why this thread annoys me. We have loads of RL examples of "adventurers" being hired by state and non-state entities to do stuff that state institutions like the army or police traditionally do. But when those get brought up, people split hairs to try to define mercenaries or privateers or explorers as "not adventurers"
As for privateers, you only get privateers when you have targets that are less dangerous but rich in potential loot. That wouldn't work for "get rid of goblin bandits" who are assumed to be both a threat and quite poor.
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2022-05-25, 08:56 AM (ISO 8601)
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Re: Why Hire Adventurers?
Could be fun to ransack some wealthy upstate goblins though. Maybe giving offerings of gold to the local river gods, if you want your party to feel decidedly Spanish conquistador.
My sig is something witty.
78% of DM's started their first campaign in a tavern. If you're one of the 22% that didn't, copy and paste this into your signature.