So what's gold gonna be for?

[gizmo33]

There's a pretty good answer. Being an adventurer is hard work, and it's easier to just make shoes.

"Hard work"?! Yea, I'd say losing your nose to frost bite, getting the plague in a foreign swamp and having your nuts snipped off by the King's executioner because you were in the wrong place during an attempted coup is "hard work".

"Easier" IMO doesn't do it justice. First of all the skills required are peculiar - especially in the case of a rogue. In fact you could be a "rogue" in real life, I doubt the reasons that you're not have something to do with being lazy.

Plus, players of the game ingore all of the hardships and realities of such a life. Players come with a built-in background that gives them their skills and yet doesn't include any of the demeaning possibilities inherent in such backgrounds. The players are also handed relatively morally-pure quests with an assumption that they aren't going to be annihilated in the first encounter. In short, basically the only reason that players pretend to be adventurers is that IMO it's nothing like real life, and anyone who is too critical of commoners for being lazy should be made aware of this.

So your choices could be

1. Join the army, get stationed on a border and learn nothing for 10 years except how to survive scurvy.
2. Join the thieves guild, get arrested on your first heist because you don't know what you're doing and have both of your eyes put out.
3. Be a farmer, earn an honest living, sleep on a bed, get married, and live in a village full of people that like you.

 

[gizmo33]

Been there, doing that. As I expect you've noticed, if you don't cut down on the treasure, this will tend to make your PCs become vastly over-equipped for their levels (compared to RAW expectations).

Yea, experience totals were just one of a number of changes I made to 3E to make it compatible in spirit with my campaign.

 

[ruleslawyer]

Presumably, not everyone *can* be a PC class. But the original question still holds even if you restrict it to PC classes, or still further to "adventurers": why aren't most of them 20th level? "Because 99% of them die permanently before they get that far" is a valid answer, but doesn't bode well for the PC's prospects (though Eberron seems to have a workable variant, "They were all recently killed off in a big war").

Well, I think that the explanation for this (as for many other things) is "the PCs are special."

Now, not everyone likes that particular explanation, but it suits me just fine. The PCs are the heroes, and hence have narrative fiat to back up their actions, their survival in the face of desperate odds, and so on. I play D&D in order to indulge my love of escapist fantasy tropes, and in most of my favorite books and movies, it's pretty darn clear that the characters at front and center are supposed to be special. Luke and Vader are the ones that turn the tide of the Force in Star Wars; sure, the Old Republic existed for thousands of years and there were probably heroes back then, but THIS ISN'T THEIR STORY. It's Vader and Luke's story, so that's what's front and center and those are the ones who survive to the ending.

 

[JDJblatherings]

No, becoming a lord with a keep and holdings was never part of the "essence" of D&D.

The essence of D&D is going into dungeons, killing the bad guys, and taking their stuff.

That is the CORE STORY.

It's really not up for debate.

You are ignorant of the origins and early days of the game. Going into dungeons, killing the bad guys, and taking their stuff was not the CORE STORY. Learn about the origins of the game and how early camapigns were played and then tell me what I have been doing wrong for about 30 years now by having campaigns where the CORE STORY was going into dungeons, killing the bad guys, and taking their stuff so one could become a lord of their own domain. 9th level fighters were LORDS not vagabonds.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

"Hard work"?! Yea, I'd say losing your nose to frost bite, getting the plague in a foreign swamp and having your nuts snipped off by the King's executioner because you were in the wrong place during an attempted coup is "hard work".

"Easier" IMO doesn't do it justice. First of all the skills required are peculiar - especially in the case of a rogue. In fact you could be a "rogue" in real life, I doubt the reasons that you're not have something to do with being lazy.

Plus, players of the game ingore all of the hardships and realities of such a life. Players come with a built-in background that gives them their skills and yet doesn't include any of the demeaning possibilities inherent in such backgrounds. The players are also handed relatively morally-pure quests with an assumption that they aren't going to be annihilated in the first encounter. In short, basically the only reason that players pretend to be adventurers is that IMO it's nothing like real life, and anyone who is too critical of commoners for being lazy should be made aware of this.

So your choices could be

1. Join the army, get stationed on a border and learn nothing for 10 years except how to survive scurvy.
2. Join the thieves guild, get arrested on your first heist because you don't know what you're doing and have both of your eyes put out.
3. Be a farmer, earn an honest living, sleep on a bed, get married, and live in a village full of people that like you.

So, yeah. Why everyone is not an adventurer: superlative edition. I think this is much more convincing than the "slow advancement" theory.

 

[JDJblatherings]

I have played DnD with bad DMs, mediocre DMs and a few superb DMs. None of them, not even the best, could run an Empire building game at a level that would interest me. The DMing load would simply be too great and DM whim would become utterly dominant. In a dungeoncrawl there will be 2-3 different factions, with specific relations and intrigues. In an Empire campaign, there will be 10s of different factions, and 100s to 1000s of faction-faction relationships. All respect to DMs, but running that well is beyond any human. Which results in either a "mother-may-I" campaign or a campaign with curiously passive NPCs waiting to get rolled when the PCs get around to it.

Running such a campaign is hardly beyond human. I've done it. I've known a number other DMs who did it as well.

 

[Lonely Tylenol]

9th level fighters were LORDS not vagabonds.

In your campaign, anyway. In mine they didn't bother with all that. They were too busy looking for bigger fish to fry. However, the common element between our two campaigns was the dungeon -> killing -> loot equation.

 

[Irda Ranger]

EDIT: Sure, OK.

Going into dungeons, killing the bad guys, and taking their stuff was not the CORE STORY. Learn about the origins of the game and how early camapigns were played and then tell me what I have been doing wrong for about 30 years now by having campaigns where the CORE STORY was going into dungeons, killing the bad guys, and taking their stuff so one could become a lord of their own domain. 9th level fighters were LORDS not vagabonds.

I think you're just as wrong as Wulf, and for the same reason. There's no "one true core story" to D&D; it can be a lot of different games. That's part of its "enduring brilliance." 9th level fighters may be "LORDS" in your campaign, but maybe they're not in Wulf's or mine; and no one is doing anything wrongbadsuck.

 

[gizmo33]

So, yeah. Why everyone is not an adventurer: superlative edition.

Thanks, I'm not quite sure what you mean by superlative but it has the word super in it so I'll take it as a complement.

(BTW, your sig is hilarious. I'm still laughing about the "half-hearted explanations to a parrot" thing. That's brilliant. )

 

[gizmo33]

And you're a pretentious ass. If I were a mod I'd find a nice way to say that and then really make my point by giving you a timeout from the thread. But I'm not a mod, so I'll just call it like I see it.

"Ignorant" is one of those tricky words that has a plausible and sensible definition but is also a slur and so someone can reasonably pretend to use it one way and mean another. I agree with you and I think it's best avoided lest the person reading it think that you're trying to be weasily about insulting someone while pretending not to.