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  1. - Top - End - #211
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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Easy e View Post
    Crassus was pretty famous for that!

    I was thinking more of doctors, but entertainers would also fit the bill too.
    Also tinkers and blacksmiths in some times and places, though they tended to wander through a few specific places rather than far and wide as I understand it.


    My issue with the goblin raiders example presented is where are the goblins coming from? How are they in an area where they can even raid towns? Border settlements are generally fortified because cross border raiding is just part of ordinary life in a medieval context, and important roads are guarded by keeps and watchtowers and so on. If they're from inside the kingdom then why are villages in their vicinity not fortified, and why hasn't the kingdom put in the effort to wipe them out?

    To me the line between them being more threatening than highwaymen and the barony deserving to fall because it hasn't rallied to stop them is very thin, to the point that if I found out that a Baron wasn't gathering his knights and men-at-arms to stop goblins from razing entire villages to the ground I'd be more concerned with getting rid of the Baron than the goblins. Hell, if the goblins are organised enough to ransack multiple villages in the time it takes the local knights to muster a force capable of stopping them I'd actually be in favour of putting the goblins in charge, they at least seem capable of military organisation.
    Sanity is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Tanarii View Post
    No, player -character separation is a myth, an attempting to force it is actively metagaming. Making decisions for the character in the fantasy environment is roleplaying, but it can't be done by ignoring player motivations unless you intentionally try to metagame to do it.

    Certainly in-character motivations can be considered by a player against any other knowledge and given precedence if it conflicts, or find a compromise. For example, if your character is a mercenary who wants hard cash up front, you're likely to look for ways to get XP that also get hard cash up front first. But in the absence of that, or even when it's not a total conflict, player motivations will influence decision making for the character.

    It probably doesn't.
    I mean, after a quick google search I got
    role-playing: [noun] an activity in which people do and say things while pretending to be someone else or while pretending to be in a particular situation.
    Maybe that doesn't fit the experience of any of the games you've played in, I'm not going to tell you what you've experienced. But in exchange, you shouldn't tell us what we've experienced. I don't think most groups even track xp these days, at least, most of the one's I've seen haven't. It's a pretty hard argument to win telling other people they haven't done the things they have.

    Once someone reaches the age where they have a theory of mind, it really isn't that hard to put themself in someone else's shoes.

  3. - Top - End - #213
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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    and have their own special rules (ex. tiered realms) equivalent to comic book logic that allow their stories to function even as the setting backdrops, in the same way as Marvel, DC, and other comic book universes, make absolutely no sense.
    You mean like how D&D has special worlds that are full of hostile environments and powerful natives? The idea that it would make absolutely no sense for people to mostly ignore parts of the world that are incapable of producing anything they care about, either in terms of resources or threats, is frankly bizarre. That's exactly the way people behave historically!

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    My issue with the goblin raiders example presented is where are the goblins coming from? How are they in an area where they can even raid towns? Border settlements are generally fortified because cross border raiding is just part of ordinary life in a medieval context, and important roads are guarded by keeps and watchtowers and so on. If they're from inside the kingdom then why are villages in their vicinity not fortified, and why hasn't the kingdom put in the effort to wipe them out?
    There's always going to be a point between "a threat is worth wiping out" and "that threat is actually wiped out", and a mechanism by which that threat gets wiped out. It's not really unreasonable for "adventurers" to fit in there, especially for things less mundane than "a tribe of goblins". If the problem is that a cult has set up shop in the woods outside town, it's pretty easy to understand why that won't necessarily correlate with existing borders. Nurgle (or Orcus or Ruin or Cthulhu or whoever goes around setting up cults in your world) doesn't have a material kingdom he sends out envoys from, he just shows up in people's dreams and tempts them with promises of power.

  4. - Top - End - #214
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    Quote Originally Posted by RandomPeasant View Post
    There's always going to be a point between "a threat is worth wiping out" and "that threat is actually wiped out", and a mechanism by which that threat gets wiped out. It's not really unreasonable for "adventurers" to fit in there, especially for things less mundane than "a tribe of goblins". If the problem is that a cult has set up shop in the woods outside town, it's pretty easy to understand why that won't necessarily correlate with existing borders. Nurgle (or Orcus or Ruin or Cthulhu or whoever goes around setting up cults in your world) doesn't have a material kingdom he sends out envoys from, he just shows up in people's dreams and tempts them with promises of power.
    That's much more the sort of work that should be getting done by witch hunters, an inquisition or similar semi-centralised agency of government, not a bunch of random people who happen to face peril for pocket change.

    The issue for me boils down to; if adventuring is common enough to be a profession as opposed to sellsword/mercenary/bounty hunter/bailiff/busybody, the land must be so riddled with problems it probably doesn't deserve to be saved even if it can be.
    Sanity is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    The issue for me boils down to; if adventuring is common enough to be a profession as opposed to sellsword/mercenary/bounty hunter/bailiff/busybody, the land must be so riddled with problems it probably doesn't deserve to be saved even if it can be.
    But.....aren't all of those things literally professions? Rare professions for sure, yet they still exist even in a world without goblins.


    Like, I'm not even sure what the argument is anymore. Just that they're too common? The lines drawn all strike me as somewhat arbitrary and too much based on a very specific experience of our own world. And heck, by what measure are they common? What setting are we talking about? Genericfantasyshire is so vaguely defined that we can only make assumptions.
    Last edited by Theoboldi; 2022-05-12 at 02:21 PM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Theoboldi View Post
    But.....aren't all of those things literally professions? Rare professions for sure, yet they still exist even in a world without goblins.


    Like, I'm not even sure what the argument is anymore. Just that they're too common? The lines drawn all strike me as somewhat arbitrary and too much based on a very specific experience of our own world.
    That adventurer as a fantasy profession is too generic and overlaps with multiple jobs that should be part and parcel of any given society by one name or another. It's basically a goofy name for a collection of much more specific jobs, and those specific jobs by nature make adventurers redundant in all but the most ramshackle societies.
    Sanity is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    That adventurer as a fantasy profession is too generic and overlaps with multiple jobs that should be part and parcel of any given society by one name or another. It's basically a goofy name for a collection of much more specific jobs, and those specific jobs by nature make adventurers redundant in all but the most ramshackle societies.
    Okay, but why? If its a collection of a bunch of more specific jobs, doesn't that just fix the issue? Usually a party of adventurers is a group of specialised individuals already that travels to explicitely find places where their skills are needed, usually in less settled parts of the world or where corruption and criminal activity are plentiful and the law is weak.

    Or they're just groups of highly specialsed explorers delving into places outside of society to get rich. Seems to make sense to me in a setting that has such ruins.
    Last edited by Theoboldi; 2022-05-12 at 02:29 PM.

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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    That adventurer as a fantasy profession is too generic and overlaps with multiple jobs that should be part and parcel of any given society by one name or another. It's basically a goofy name for a collection of much more specific jobs, and those specific jobs by nature make adventurers redundant in all but the most ramshackle societies.
    Or, alternatively, "Adventurer" isn't a Job in itself, so much as a catch-all term for a bunch of different jobs with similar skillsets, and so people who drift between those jobs as employments warrent are "Adventurers".

    Adventurers are Guards you hire to protect your caravan, they're Exterminators you hire to clear the ghouls out of the town crypt, they're Mercenaries you hire to fight off goblin raiders, they're Bounty Hunters, they sell all sorts of secondhand weapons and armor from enemies they kill, they sell wolf pelts and exotic treasures.

    These jobs have overlapping skillsets, so why is it odd that a group of people with those skillsets might drift between these different jobs as needed?
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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    IME, "mercenary adventurers who are recognized as such" and "campaign that covers a significant part of the level range" seldom go together.

    There've been plenty of (usually shorter) games where we're hired / mercenaries, which usually don't involve changing level much - we've been everything from "disreputable vagabonds the baron offered a few coins to investigate the cursed ruin because we're disposable" to "elite agents personally sought out by a demon lord and offered unique payments to facilitate an Abyssal coup", but not in the same campaign.

    Meanwhile there have been campaigns with a significant power curve over the course of play, but we weren't generally mercenaries in those, rather people who either have a genuine allegiance to a nation / organization, or who just get caught up in major events by being in the right place at the wrong time. And not people who were in-setting known as "adventurers".

    So it avoids the issue that the way society relates to "skilled mercenaries, but nothing superhuman" is going to be substantially different than how they relate to "potential one-man army" types.

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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by BRC View Post
    Or, alternatively, "Adventurer" isn't a Job in itself, so much as a catch-all term for a bunch of different jobs with similar skillsets, and so people who drift between those jobs as employments warrent are "Adventurers".

    Adventurers are Guards you hire to protect your caravan, they're Exterminators you hire to clear the ghouls out of the town crypt, they're Mercenaries you hire to fight off goblin raiders, they're Bounty Hunters, they sell all sorts of secondhand weapons and armor from enemies they kill, they sell wolf pelts and exotic treasures.

    These jobs have overlapping skillsets, so why is it odd that a group of people with those skillsets might drift between these different jobs as needed?
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    Quote Originally Posted by Theoboldi View Post
    Okay, but why? If its a collection of a bunch of more specific jobs, doesn't that just fix the issue? Usually a party is a group of specialised individuals already that travels to explicitely find places where their skills are needed, usually in less settled parts of the world.
    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.
    Sanity is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.
    I mean, as I see it, Adventurers are basically highly skilled migrant workers, who seek out places where the need for a service is more than the locals can handle.


    Sheriff Bob and his deputies are responsible for dealing with local Bandits. That's fine, because most of the time the bandits are usually just a pair of thugs who decided to start holding up people on the road, and Bob can round up his deputies and his dogs and a few militiamen and overpower them pretty easily.

    But this time, it's not just a few armed men looking for wine money, this time the bandits are a gang of Deserters from the King's army. There's about twelve of them, they're organized, and they're well armed.

    So Bob hires some Adventurers. He doesn't normally need to deal with gangs of a dozen armed veterans, so he doesn't need a force capable of handling that regularly.


    Also, Mercenaries, Bounty Hunters, ect, are just jobs an Adventurer can do. You don't need to be a full-time caravan guard to guard a caravan. Demand for violence-doing is not perfectly steady across everywhere, such that there are always some locals who can handle every problem.
    Last edited by BRC; 2022-05-12 at 03:15 PM.
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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.
    Last edited by Lord Raziere; 2022-05-12 at 03:09 PM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by BRC View Post
    I mean, as I see it, Adventurers are basically highly skilled migrant workers, who seek out places where the need for a service is more than the locals can handle.


    Sheriff Bob and his deputies are responsible for dealing with local Bandits. That's fine, because most of the time the bandits are usually just a pair of thugs who decided to start holding up people on the road, and Bob can round up his deputies and his dogs and a few militiamen and overpower them pretty easily.

    But this time, it's not just a few armed men looking for wine money, this time the bandits are a gang of Deserters from the King's army. There's about twelve of them, they're organized, and they're well armed.

    So Bob hires some Adventurers. He doesn't normally need to deal with gangs of a dozen armed veterans, so he doesn't need a force capable of handling that regularly.


    Also, Mercenaries, Bounty Hunters, ect, are just jobs an Adventurer can do. You don't need to be a full-time caravan guard to guard a caravan
    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.
    Sanity is nice to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there.

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    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".
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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    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.
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    Default Re: Why Hire Adventurers?

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.
    Again you seem to overly focused on narrowly defining adventurer. adventurers can do more than mercenary work even if they can be mercenaries.

    like they could do actual exploring for one: new continent gets discovered, adventurers are probably the exact kind of person you want to send to scout it out, as armies as generally expensive to transport across the sea and are generally made to defend the lands they come from. adventurers on the other hand, probably have the most experience with exploring the wilderness, fighting whatever new thing they run into, and adapting to whatever new town or civilization they find.

    also a sheriff rallying the townsfolk to fight wights? or something like a flying dragon? them villagers are dead. you might have point when it comes to something like goblins, but DnD worlds are dangerous things and if its anything that has magic or requires better tactics than basically trying to mob them with normal weapons, they're doomed.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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".
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    Quote Originally Posted by Theoboldi View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Mike_G View Post
    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.

    Quote Originally Posted by Stonehead View Post
    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.

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    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.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.
    I mean, I'm not going to tell you what you find believable, but the historical precedent is there. Both for governments putting out bounties on problems they aren't equipped to solve (without the entire country collapsing), and for individuals doing whatever jobs needed doing, without settling on one trade skill. A knight who kills 10 goblins isn't "failing in his duties" just because there are 100 goblins this month. And it isn't blasphemous to temporarily hire some people to deal with the rush.

    As for the goblins, I don't think your average medieval town was equipped to stop all of the bandits who harassed them. The fact that banditry was common in medieval Europe, (and consequently in DnD) kinda hints at the fact that they just didn't have the infrastructure to resist invasions or deal with brigands.

    I think foxes in the American Southwest are a perfect analogy for goblins. The local governments tried really hard to drive them to extinction using whatever means necessary, because foxes kill livestock. They never succeeded though, because foxes adapted to live on the outskirts of the cities, and because they have some mechanism to reproduce more quickly if their numbers drop. This effort lasted quite a long time (around a century if I remember correctly). It mirrors how most fantasy settings treat goblins too, a pest that kills people and damages property, but is too persistent to wipe out completely.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Stonehead View Post
    Once someone reaches the age where they have a theory of mind, it really isn't that hard to put themself in someone else's shoes.
    Sure. But we can't also actually stop being ourselves to do it. We don't replace ourselves with the other person. We can't actually stop knowing what we know. At second best, we can't pretend we don't know something, which doesn't automatically result in the same choices as if we didn't actually know it. Who we are and what we know always influences our decisions, one way or another, even when we're pretending to be someone else.

    On not using XP, totally agree if some other method is used to gain character power, that will instead have some level of influence on player decision making for their PCs.

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    Quote Originally Posted by SteveLightblade View Post
    Instead of calling on your military resources, why not outsource it to these rowdy and dangerous looking strangers you have no reason to trust, and give them authority to kill things in your land?
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    I would point out that there have been various occurrences historically where governments or feudal lords have resorted to hiring not only mercenaries and bounty hunters, but also pirates (known as "privateers" in the context of working for a legitimate government), ninjas, and mob thugs. (unfortunately the forum rules prevent me from providing specifics, but if you do a bit of digging you'll find them)
    Last edited by Bohandas; 2022-05-13 at 12:28 AM.
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    Quote Originally Posted by Bohandas View Post
    I would point out that there have been various occurrences historically where governments or feudal lords have resorted to hiring not only mercenaries and bounty hunters, but also pirates (known as "privateers" in the context of working for a legitimate government), ninjas, and mob thugs. (unfortunately the forum rules prevent me from providing specifics, but if you do a bit of digging you'll find them)
    Plausible Deniability is certainly a reason not to use regular military forces. It's one of many. Ultimately it's all part of the same overarching framework. The question: why hire adventurers? includes the prefacing question: why aren't regularly military forces being used for this task? There are numerous possible answers to that question, some of which are more plausible than others depending on the specific circumstances of various cases. It is important, for world-building reasons, both that there be an answer, and that the implications of said answer be considered.
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    Also the new lord of NextDoorShire is paranoid about you because of your relationship with his uncle who just tried to usurp him and will definitely notice if you muster troops and march towards his border.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grim Portent View Post
    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.
    Nope. That village doesn't exist in a vacuum. Likely origin of it is a charter by a nearby lord who is trying to increase that amount of land under cultivation. That's how a lot of places grew: push back the edges of the wilderness and increase the amount of arable land under cultivation.
    Quote Originally Posted by Witty Username View Post
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mechalich View Post
    Plausible Deniability is certainly a reason not to use regular military forces. It's one of many.
    Regular military forces in feudal/medieval period is a bit of a backward pushed anachronism: the 'regular' were available usually for about 40 days per year. It's a limited resource, not the always on regulars that we see in 20th and 21st century nation states.
    Quote Originally Posted by leenaHed4 View Post
    Can't muster the peasantry for a serious fight because it's right in the middle of harvest season, pull six hundred peasants or even minor nobility
    This is related to my point above.
    Quote Originally Posted by GloatingSwine View Post
    Also the new lord of NextDoorShire is paranoid about you because of your relationship with his uncle who just tried to usurp him and will definitely notice if you muster troops and march towards his border.
    Yeah, the politics of it is another wrinkle that may call for
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    Quote Originally Posted by KorvinStarmast View Post
    Regular military forces in feudal/medieval period is a bit of a backward pushed anachronism: the 'regular' were available usually for about 40 days per year. It's a limited resource, not the always on regulars that we see in 20th and 21st century nation states. This is related to my point above.
    Adding to this, if this is a local lord like the prompt suggests, the regular forces might be as many as 20. Usually enough to loosely police ones holdings and keep your tax collectors safe. A proper warband would nessitate outside help, either from neighboring lords, mercenaries, or pesant conscripts. All assuming the local lord hasn't been called to respond to a war of some sort (send all your knights 6 to 8 months away for a few years, and get back maybe half of them).
    In the mind of the lord, hiring adventurers could be a matter of buying time for their allies to muster, to their only viable option depending on their surrounding circumstances and obligations.
    Last edited by Witty Username; 2022-05-14 at 01:15 AM.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Witty Username View Post
    Adding to this, if this is a local lord like the prompt suggests, the regular forces might be as many as 20. Usually enough to loosely police ones holdings and keep your tax collectors safe. A proper warband would nessitate outside help, either from neighboring lords, mercenaries, or pesant conscripts. All assuming the local lord hasn't been called to respond to a war of some sort (send all your knights 6 to 8 months away for a few years, and get back maybe half of them).
    In the mind of the lord, hiring adventurers could be a matter of buying time for their allies to muster, to their only viable option depending on their surrounding circumstances and obligations.
    Adding to this, most people in feudal societies spent most of their time making food. If you have already lost some villages, and since agriculture is so manpower intensive, how many more people can you afford to lose? Whereas adventurers are a compact powerhouse. 5 or 6 people who can punch way above their apparent weight class. (Compared to non-leveled folk)

    Also your ready troops are constables and your personal guard--not likely to be useful here.

    Finally if the threat already took out standard troops (villages), why would sending more of the same help? Youd be better off sending 1-2 scouts, or adventurers, to find out more info before doing anything more.

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    Quote Originally Posted by CapnWildefyr View Post
    Finally if the threat already took out standard troops (villages), why would sending more of the same help? Youd be better off sending 1-2 scouts, or adventurers, to find out more info before doing anything more.
    This is an element in a lot of D&D (and D&D like) modules: you hear of Problem X and your party goes out there and discovers that what seemed to be problem X is actually problem Y, Z, or Ɵ. (Secret of Salt Marsh being but one case of this).

    Spoiler: digression into "not what it seems" stuff
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    The way I ran Forge of Fury a while back for our group was that the initial reports of orcs raiding from the stone tooth was tied into a nasty little deception going on by the Succubus/Incubus near the end of the module.
    She had been traveling back and forth to the local village (using the ethereal plane) and appearing as a male dwarf (mostly humans and dwarfs in the mountain village) trying to talk folks into creating half dwarf (half elf analogue) to better unify their peoples. She/he was also the (male) dwarf who planted the "there's this loot deep in the caverns" idea in the PCs heads.
    The succubus had convinced the local life cleric (Priest(ess) NPC) that this was a great idea, and two acyolyte NPCs were pregnant with the first two successful "dwarf human" - kids to soon be born (except they were actually little fiends gestating in the womb of the two acolytes).
    Succubus had also made a deal with the young black dragon at the deepest cavern: they had a certain detente as long as succubus lured occasional food and loot (adventurers) into the caverns. That twist informed what the party had to deal with once they came out of the caverns after taking on the duergar and such...made for an interesting epilogue after they'd figured out how to defeat the dragon
    Last edited by KorvinStarmast; 2022-05-14 at 09:07 AM.
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