If not for Gold and Glory...?

[DeviousQuail]

One idea that I briefly tried was having my group play as two characters each. One character for each player would be their story character. The story characters were each a member of a council overseeing a small far flung town on the border of civilization. Their characters could "adventure" but the rule was they leveled up by completing major objectives for the town. What constituted a major objective was up to the players with a little help from me as the DM.

Their other character was an adventure character that could be hired to go on quests, defeat villains, and clear out dungeons. They were a revolving cast that handled the dangerous stuff so that the council could oversee the town. One was an apprentice to a story character who never got switched out while the others came and went with each adventure.

The story characters could hire more experienced and better equipped adventure characters by upgrading the town. We did 8 sessions and covered about 1.5 years in game time. Out of game stuff killed it unfortunately and by the time we regrouped others wanted to run their own campaigns and it was time for me to step down and be a player for a while.

Thinking back on it the motivations for the adventure characters were all very one note. Gold and/or glory for most but for some it was freedom from a geas, unravelling the truth about their family, or wanting to do some magical experiments away from bystanders. It was a sentence at most and then they were off. But the motivations for the story characters were wildly different. Sometimes it was the ultimate goal of raising an army to free a neighboring country from a tyrant, while other times it was just trying to come up with a plan to keep everyone fed for the winter. Balancing each character's personal goals with the other characters and the general well being of the town required some inspired play and decision making.

 

[werecorpse]

While in history villagers that did not have adequate Protection may have feared roving groups of armed men the way I see most D&D worlds I’ve Played in or run bands of mercenaries or adventurers aren’t what towns are worried about. It’s dragons, giants, goblins etc.
The towns have guards to protect it but those guards are purely defensive and man the walls and the gates. They don’t go into the forest if goblins steal a child or investigate rumours of a gathering of winged creatures at the mountain edge in exchange for gold from the local lord or guard a sage as he explores an old ruin. That’s done by a motley crew of capable and reliable adventurers.
In one campaign I ran the local lords gave out letters of marque to adventuring parties that lasted 6 months. These parties would be told of local towns with troubles when they wandered into them they would talk to the mayor, show the lords patrol letter of marque and get good rates on lodging etc and get work. At certain times they would gather in the lords halls with proof of deeds they had done and submitted to zones of truth and were rewarded for their deeds.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I do think it's interesting how some settings have the character motivation baked into them..for example, the game Dogs in the Vineyard has all the characters as, essentially, Mormon cowboy exorcists traveling from town to town clearing out demons and punishing transgressions. Why your character chose this life, and the journey they took to get there, are the ways the characters are differentiated.

I borrowed that once for a 5e game I called Plague Dogs. It was a fantasy world torn apart by diseases (we played this about 6 months before COVID hit) which were explicitly caused by transgressions with demons. The characters were all Hounds of St. Hestian, sent out to plague towns to find the transgressors, kill the demons, and enact justice. All the characters had the same path, but their individual motivations varied. One was paying off a debt, another was secretly working for a demon who wanted to clear the competition, etc.

It reminds me of something Monte Cook once wrote about the assumed adventuring day. If I recall it correctly, he said that the 3rd Edition settings taught players that the adventuring day looked like this: learn about a dungeon in town, travel to dungeon, overcome challenged and get treasure, return to town to spend treasure and upgrade equipment, repeat.

I wonder if when building a setting it's less important to worry about supplying character motivations than it is to communicate what an "adventuring day" looks like?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Some people become explorers and adventurers voluntarily, some involuntarily.

By the latter, I don’t mean the common “orphan murderhobo” (OH). Other events can make you an involuntary wanderer. Closely related to the OH are refugees from wars, persecution, or natural disaster.

Some people get abandoned at birth, either in the hopes that they will be found by someone of goodwill…or to die. How they survive shwpes them.

People get lost by accident or otherwise cut off from returning home. A kidnapper or large predator carries off a child, but the child is rescued. Someone exploring the local caves gets lost or survives a cave in, and has no idea where they are when they emerge. (Or the converse for a subterranean dweller.) A fall overboard…

There’s the old standby of amnesia.

Or being transported through time, space, or dimensions barriers.

For those with experiences like these, the urge to return home may drive them to travel the world. For others, unintended exposure to the wider world may kindle a need to see more.

 

[pogre]

I guess a good modern analogy is superheroes? Why do they do what they do? A certain suspension of disbelief is needed.

I lean into this idea, but from a slightly different angle. The PCs are exceptional, because they are fated thus by the gods. Heroes of a future mythology of sorts.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

You know who else goes adventuring? Employees. Hirelings.

Richard Branson wasn‘t up there solo, he had 2 pilots and 3 other employees. Most of Columbus’ crew did the journey for pay. Guards, scouts, cooks, and others accompany virtually every caravan that ever was.

And a paycheck isn’t exactly “for the gold” as thought of by most adventurers.

I actually played my first “hireling“ back in the late 1970s, only a couple years into the hobby. My PC was a human fighter- statted out with maxed physical stats and 6s in all the mental ones. He was the bodyguard for the party thief, who DID have money.

Just because a PC starts with a role as a henchman for an NPC or another PC doesn’t mean he remains one his entire life. (Though he very well could, depending on the campaign.)

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Perhaps they're thrillseekers. Neither altruists, nor rationally pursuing material self-interest, but driven by personal emotional needs. This would explain why they keep looking for greater challenges.

WARNING: you almost reached The Forest Oracle levels of sentence construction!

 

[pemerton]

I do think it's interesting how some settings have the character motivation baked into them

<snip>

I wonder if when building a setting it's less important to worry about supplying character motivations than it is to communicate what an "adventuring day" looks like?

I certainly think there's a lot to be said, when talking about RPGing. to focus on processes of play rather than the fiction that we will imagine, without talking about how we are to actually establish it.

Of classic RPGs, Moldvay Basic and Classic Traveller are pretty good examples of this. And DitV is a modern classic!

 

[Jd Smith1]

Avoid all the clichés.

At the heart of fantasy is Tolkien, which had a richly developed world in decline, which explained why there were a couple ruins for exploring.

I rarely if ever use the 'band of adventurers wandering around'. As noted already, it is junk. What I do is create a title (usually bravos) and a purpose. The purpose varies from campaign to campaign, but often it takes the form of a substance which has been scattered across the land by means arcane, natural (meter shower, for example), or design (cultist activity). To dispose of this material, which if left unattended or misused will eventually cause harm, a bounty has been placed upon its retrieval.

Therefore, your band of wandering bravos now have a place in society, and a reason to wander about obscure areas (obviously, the material cropping up in civilized lands has long since been snapped up) asking questions. It also puts the bravos in a position to help out those they encounter (for a fee). It makes the PCs hustlers, small-time independents trying to make a buck on what seemed like a really cool idea when they were back home herding turnips. They will not likely be well-respected occupation, but a needful one which will not be unwelcome provided they behave themselves.

And why risk the local militia (Local boys with families) when you can send some wandering nobodies to deal with something dangerous? If nothing else, the bravos will thin the threat's ranks before being slaughtered, making the job easier for the militia.

 

[TheTage]

I feel it depends on your campaign set up. If you are playing an adventure path,, the reasons are somewhat baked in. Same could be said of a homebrew campaign with an over arcing story. If you just have some cool adventure ideas and want to loosely string them together then the motivations are less readily apparent. Some of my favorite campaigns have been either sandbox with no main storyline where we were just literally walking around looking for interesting things to explore or enemies to face. In some of those we were part of an 'adventurer's guild' where you could go and get assignments or talk to others about adventure hooks.