D&D General Adventurers a distasteful necessity

[Ulorian - Agent of Chaos]

My groups have always preferred the local celebrity perspective. I actually did try a game decades ago now which had a more episodic feel with the heroes always leaving town in a kind of Bill Bixby-Incredible Hulk “gotta move on because I’ll just bring pain to everyone” kind of way (cue the lonely man music), and maybe I was just a clod with the whole approach, but I just found that it kind of fell flat. My players wanted to be loved, or at least appreciated for having saved the town.

Or, if you are a Canadian of a certain age, leaving town in a The Littlest Hobo sort of a way.

 

[Scribe]

I keep failing to save the picture of the Wizard looking like a hobo with a frog...

Adventurers, and adventuring, should be absolutely weird.

 

[Marc17]

Tangentially, I tend to run a slightly different stratagem, especially for a world where adventures are such exceptional people capable of threatening the most dangerous threats (and the local nobility). There are lots of small little rules to follow. Have the adventurers paid for their adventuring tax to get their writ of adventuring? Did they follow proper decorum and tradition when entering a new village or town? These are all little things, but mean much more than just the token tax or effort required, they show if the group is willing to play the game. It's the failure for the little things that put them on the watch list of the local powers. Best to end such threats early than let them thrive. Certainly don't want to give them jobs where they might gain more wealth and experience. If they play along, then later as they get more powerful, they're allowed to buy into the system. They get their bastions, perhaps titles, all so they have an investment in the local power structure. The more powerful they get the more integrated they get so to protect the status quo.

I always liked how the grey box Forgotten Realms played up the idea of adventuring contracts and such. Really, D&D has always needed some sort of Renown system. Also, a lot of the acceptance bit comes from how the PCs act. Do they sneak into town, get rooms at the inn, and don't talk to anybody? Perhaps bandits or no goods. Did they ride into town with a bard leading singing tales of their adventures and go straight to sheriff to show them their Adventuring Writ in front to everybody. Obviously important people on important business.

 

[GrimCo]

While i do like grim and dark, in my homebrew, there are no classic d&d adventurers. PC characters always belong to some organisation, be it part of some noble's household, knightly order, church, mercenary company, royal army etc. There are nations with rulers and laws, factions that operate with permissions from authorities. Some of those factions are national, some are international, but no one looks favorably on solo operators since civilized lands don't actually need them. Then again, number of "monsters" is pretty limited, there are old ruins and tombs, but if you try to go there without permission from noble on whose lands they are or royal decree, you are not adventurer, you are common grave robber and thief.

 

[Piperken]

...It isn’t fair, but it is plausible. What do you think? do you prefer your adventuring parties to be local celebrities or like the above suggests the equivalent of a Witcher?

There can be a tendency to lump small communities with their own histories and wildly different circumstances as having similar behavior towards an "outsider," for lack of a better term. But I feel what is important to an extent, is the tone and themes you and your table want to explore or highlight.

In Deep Carbon Observatory, the adventure opens with an impossible task for the PCs to accomplish. The choices they make in the impossible task frames the relationships they get with different members of the small community for the rest of the adventure.

But say you were to write an adventure whose community was inspired by shtetl culture? An adventuring party would probably be treated with as much genuine hospitality regardless of circumstances, yet parts of locals' daily life would be inscrutable, and very difficult to become involved in.

 

[jmartkdr2]

There are two problems scenario in game that I've seen play out.

Protecting a World that Hates and Fears Them: In such a scenario where the locals find adventurer's a threat, players tend to respond in kind. That is, a merchant who overcharges becomes the target for the group's thief. The sheriff who sends guards to watch them might those guards beat up in an alley. A cruel world makes men cruel. Its one of the hardest issues I had with Ravenloft. How do you balance a game where the characters are supposed to be heroes with a world who hates and fears them? It only works if you are running a game where the PCs have either an unflappable sense of morality (willing to do what's right no matter what the cost) or eventually decide to use the infamy they have earned (You think I'm a problem, I'll SHOW you a problem!)

Pariahs and Outsiders. Until They're Not: The "wandering adventurer with no roots" model works well at low levels. But famously, D&D has asked for PCs to settle down somewhere eventually and has mechanics to support that. AD&D assumed name-level PCs gained followers and strongholds. 3e had the leadership feat. 5e now has Bastions. Many 5e (2014) backgrounds assumed some manner of support from certain groups (folk hero and locals, acolyte and churches, soldiers and former army buddies). Even the notion of groups of classed characters (wizard orders, ranger lodges, bard colleges) assumes enough mutual stability that PCs could find shelter amongst their groups. (Nobody would be stupid enough to offend an adventurer who can call on a whole group of powerful wizards to help them.)

All that to say you would have to really start reworking D&D society to make this work and make sure your players are fine with playing pariahs from society.

Third variant: They're part of a special social class that exists outside the normal chain of command. The best example would be a religious order: people like nuns and friars in theory, and appreciate what they do, but that doesn't normally translate to wanting to spend their free time with them. If those nuns and friars and warrior-monks etc are also killing dangerous monsters and such they're probably both more appreciated and more feared; they'll definitively get a table at the inn and might even get the locals paying for the meal... but they won't actually talk to them except to express thanks and respect. It's a private table even if it's in the middle of the room.

It doesn't need to be a religious order per se, a royally commissioned group of monster-slayers cum law enforcers, a semi-military group, or something of the sort would get very similar treatment to the above.

But that involves worldbuilding an official adventurer's org to oversee them, which also means the pc's have distant bosses giving assignments and possibly taking them to task for misbehavior. But if you get a lot of clerics/paladins/divine subclasses, it can make the game a lot more structured with only a little more worldbuilding.

 

[kigmatzomat]

Yes, but this is also my point. People seem to be treating Adventurers as if they're something the world hasn't had before or as if they have to be outsiders. There's genuinely no reason Bob the Farmer can't be a Fighter of some level and just much prefers being at his farm to going out in the world.

The "roman soldier who bought a farm" story, which is not "a tale as old as time" but is around 2,000 years old. I agree, some of the populace should have PC classes. Some PCs retired at some point.

I liked the 3e DMG because it had a framework for that, as well as for getting the less powerful NPC capabilities. While I suspect few people really used their demographics, the existence of those tables made a lot of DMs actually consider the demographics of their world.

Like, how does this kingdom fight off goblin hordes if there aren't a couple thousand people who can wear armor and use weapons effectively? How about the "ghoul marsh"? What priests do they have to drive off the undead?

As for social attitudes, I use all of the scenarios. Some villages were terrorized by adventurers and fear them with reason. Some villages fear them for no reason. In some cases there is jealousy or some kind of rivalry. Some idolize adventurers, or offer them lifetime discounts or even property. Same gamut for nobility and existing churches, mages guilds, bardic colleges, druid circles, etc, etc.

And I sometimes use all the scenarios at the same time and place, separated by groups/individuals so a locale can all have different views. (Commoners idolize, nobles fear, priests are jealous, wizards hope to trade spells, druids hate them, etc)

Eventually, some noble grants most of my games' adventurers lands. Often a couple days outside of town, near an area that is prone to having problems of the monstrous sorts. A "keep on the borderlands". Let them draw off the adventurous, excitable types as followers and you might cull both the monsters and the troublemakers in a win-win. This can be justified by a whole host of attitudes so even a craven noble ("monsters AND adventurers are scary!") can claim noble reasons ("for their heroic valor...") for granting lands ("....waaaay over there near the scary things where, {my deity} willing, they exterminate each other").