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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9795517" data-attributes="member: 4937">I've always hated the term "adventurer" because the word actually means "tourist" and is most closely translated as "danger tourist" or "extreme tourist" today, though at the time the word was coined there wasn't a need for an adjective because all tourism was considered dangerous and extreme owing to the general difficulties and dangers associated with travel and alien cultures and near universal xenophobia.  Rarely if ever are the protagonists of an RPG actually adventurers and rarely if ever would the NPCs within the world think of the PCs as "adventurers".  The more likely term to be employed is "mercenaries" and I think that better captures the sort of sentiment the NPCs probably have about typical murder hobo PCs.  If the PCs acquire a very good reputation and aren't known for being primarily motivated by money, perhaps they'll be thought of as "heroes".  I do love me some long distance travel at some point in a fantasy campaign with some attention paid to the dangers of weather and climate and terrain and getting lost and the problem of logistics and all of that, but there is a fairly narrow window for that in fantasy where the PC are on the upper end of gritty and realistic (and so capable enough to handle the hardships) and the lower end of heroic (action movie hero tier) but not yet at the level of super heroic where such concerns don't really trouble them.And additionally, the one big problem I always have with this is the getting there is always more fun than the getting back.  Tolkien has that upper level gritty to low level heroic feel where the journey is so much of the hardship of the quest, but he typically ignores the getting back because it's boring.  Typically, he solves the problem by having dues ex machina accompany the heroes on the way home.  It's a bit less easy to justify this in a simulation.  Video games always tend to have a back door to circumvent the retracing of steps. But in a TTRPG, I've never been able to easily force the players to take the easy way back.</blockquote>

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