Characters Hiring Adventurers

[Dagger75]

I was sitting talking to my players about item creation. In my game you need this thingmabob and whatchmacallit to help build magic items. Anyway one of the players said "We have this castle we built and this small village growing up around it, why don't we hire some adventurers to go get some giant eagle feathers for us? We can pay them a few hundred gold."

Has anyone else had players hire adventurers to do some work for them??

 

[Privateer]

Well, it would neatly explain the reason why the retired adventurer turned Baron hires out first level, first session of the campaign recruits from the tavern to quest for him, that's for sure

 

[Mark]

In a game I used to run I kept pretty good records of all of the NPCs who had intereacted with the PCs. I used to reintroduce a lot of them further down the road as NPCs who had been inspired by the PCS to take up adventuring, and wanted to be like them...sort of a Hero worship syndrome.

This could be key to your situation because you wouldn't have to concoct NPC adventurers whole-cloth, but could slip in some folks they already trust or whose lives they have touched, make these side trippers incidental but not totally inconsequential, and in this way not have to take the focus off of the PCs while they're having some now mundane tasks being handled by underlings.

Be sure to mention to the players out-of-game that a leadership feat or two among the group would go a long way toward attracting the "right kind of followers" so that it doesn't all seem as if these hirelings as being dropped into the campaign just to fill a role.

 

[the Jester]

I love it when that happens.... yeah, the high-level pcs don't really need to go fight kobolds. That's what their hard-earned gold is for: hiring adventurers.

 

[Chimera]

In my last campaign, the PCs (who were quite willing) were frequently called upon by their superiors (within their respective organizations) or by their friends and allies to take lower level NPCs under their wings for "training missions". Once these NPCs had gained a few levels, they returned to higher positions within their home organizations, or went out seeking new positions.

What this made for was a LOT of friends and allies in influential positions, spread across the countryside. If at any point they had need of such a party of low level types, they could quite easily have called in a few favors or asked for more "trainees".

 

[S'mon]

I like this idea - in 3e especially, high-level PCs fighting goblins & kobolds can be boring, take a long time, and net little or no XP, so hiring low-level NPCs to deal with nuisance threats sounds like a sensible plan _and_ actually lends versimilitude to the fantasy world!

 

[Tonguez]

Had a game once in which the PC were the leaders of a village and on a couple of occasions they decided to send out some of the village warriors to 'deal with things' (like a marauding dire boar and a few goblins).