D&D 5E How many adventurers are in your world?

[thalmin]

13 human or demihuman adventurers, five 0 level and seven 2nd level plus 1 retired of unknown level. There are many monster-race adventurers, but they are in the minority for their respective populations. The party has met 2 of these. The first was a low level kobold wizard (deceased) the other is a relatively high level spellcaster homebrew race, basically a large half-lizardfolk/ half-(white) dragon.

 

[Imaculata]

Well, the world in which my campaign takes place is a dangerous one. So even the most ordinary life could very likely be an adventure. My players all play the role of pirates, but their adventures are probably not all that different from those of other pirates. In fact, I often give my players a glimpse of the adventures that npc's get involved in, including their crew. Often the players will some how get dragged into those plots, but it just shows that everyone is on an adventure. We have one particular npc who is currently trapped in the underworld, and the players use a scrying spell to check up on him from time to time. It's an entirely parallel story line to theirs, which will eventually cross over into theirs again.

So no, they are not the only adventurers in the world. I'd say that even the daily life of the average city guard is probably pretty exciting.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I've run it varying ways. My old AD&D campaign assumed certain sorts of adventurers were fairly common and even had their own guilds. There was a guild of 'Delvers' who eked out a living exploring the catacombs beneath a certain city, the least of them glorified rat exterminators, for instance. In the relatively short 3e campaign I ran, the PCs were a group of fated heroes born under a specific astrological configuration 40 years before the campaign started, and the only people in the world with PC classes. In 4e, I tended to assume there were other adventurers, but, again, not with PC classes. In 5e, I assume there are lots of adventurers, many with PC classes or, at least, simplified stat-blocks that mimic them, in part because I run some AL/Encounters which is open entry/exist, so it's expedient to picture the old-school gold-rush economy with adventurers on the Sword Coast as common as prospectors visiting the Barbary Coast.

 

[Imaculata]

I've always assumed that no one considers himself "an adventurer", because what does that mean really? I believe the players are just common folk, to whom unusual things happen. They probably are travelers, or maybe hired swords. They are not looking for adventure or trouble specifically, but adventure and trouble find them.

 

[AaronOfBarbaria]

I've always assumed that no one considers himself "an adventurer", because what does that mean really? I believe the players are just common folks, to whom unusual things happen. They are not looking for adventure or trouble specifically, but adventure and trouble find them.

That's typically the same in my campaigns. The bulk of people that one might refer to as an adventurer are just folks of other life pursuits that circumstances have placed in a situation someone would call an adventure: guardsman/militia rooting out bandits or marauding monsters, academics searching out significant finds within their field, and so on.

Very rarely does anyone actually choose to consider adventure their profession, where any downtime is "vacation" rather than a return to "normal life", and it is usually because that person has nothing even resembling normal life to return to, and it is usually as a result of whatever events lead to their first adventure.

I think thus far in my campaigns only 1 in about 30 characters has actually considered their self "an adventurer' rather than some other profession "on an adventure."

 

[Jester David]

In my game, adventurers are less than 0.1% of the population. Which seems low, but in a town the size of Waterdeep, there'd be 132 adventurers or 30-odd parties. That's a lot.
-edit-
Think of it like this:
In the NHL, NBL, MLB, and NFL there are 122 teams (30+30+30+32) with 20, 15, 25, and 46 man teams for 3,272 league athletes in the Continent. Assuming twice that number in other sports (gold, MMA, boxing, wrestling, etc) that's close to 10,000 professional athletes. Out of 528 million. Or 0.0018%.
That's a hundred times as rare as adventurers in a theoretical 0.1% world.

 

[GameOgre]

Many and the most famous companies are the rockstars of the world, and every farm lad or lass dreams runing away to become one at least once.

In border regions entire towns spring up to supply adventuring (like the gold rush towns).

However adventuring bands can become quite a burden when bored. Towns who in the summer hailed them as heroes pray that they move on in autumn before they become locked in during winter in these towns and cause quite a lot of mischief in their boredom.

Also when on low fortunes the lines between adventuring company and band of bandits begin to blurr.

Then there are the noble sons and daughters playing at being adventurers, aka showing up with a large entourage doing the actual work while they sit in the comfortable tents and sip expensive wines

I'm picturing a adventuring band waking up one late fall morning to find the small tent and wooden village that sprung up last spring when they first discovered The Caves of Chaos empty. The last of the wagonloads of people heading off back towards civilization laughing and singing in the distance.

 

[strider13x]

No guilds. Adventurers are strangers wherever the end up. The PCs always seem to end up larger than life and resolve world shattering events, even if no one ever heard of them.

 

[Tony Vargas]

I've always assumed that no one considers himself "an adventurer," because what does that mean really?

It's not as common as it used to be, but it was anyone going out and 'seeking their fortune,' probably in distant lands, quite possibly by force of arms. Cortez was an adventurer, for instance, but so was Marco Polo. Today, even adventuring has been taken over by big business, so you're not 'an adventurer' you're "a security consultant" or something.


Edit: Wow, modern definitions are profoundly negative.

 

[S'mon]

My Wilderlands campaign has smallish numbers of professional adventurer NPCs, including a defined NPC party. My Mystara/Karameikos game doesn't really, even the PCs are first and foremost defined by their social roles as knight, merchant, thief etc. My 4e Forgotten Realms game I guess has "heroes" rather than "adventurers", both PC and NPC.