From: goldm@rpi.edu (Mitchell E. Gold)
Subject: Re: Adventurers?
Organization: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 19:05:11 GMT

In article <1992Nov11.014705.60673@cc.usu.edu> sl9b4@cc.usu.edu (Deep Six) writes:
   This is a good point. I think this has bothered me since the first game I
   ever played. Where the hell did this concept of adventurers come from? It
   certainly has no basis in history -- any half-intelligent knight, soldier, 
   mercenary, what have you, would much rather sit in a castle with his feet 
   up in front of a fire than strap on all that cursed armor and take a chance
   at having one or more of his appendages avulsed from the rest of him. And
   the adventurer has very little basis in literature. There are literary 
   examples of ``parties'' who go out into the big wide world and have 
   ``adventures,'' but only in RPGs is the idea of adventuring parties 
   institutionalized. 

   But then again, it's one of those things you just can't really say anything
   bad about. If someone criticizes Sea Wasp because there is an Adventure's
   Union (``So always look for the Union label, when you're adventuring..'') in
   his world, his best and only defense is, ``Well, my players seem to enjoy it
   so I must be doing something right.'' And he'd be right. It comes down to 
   fun, but I really detest anachronisms designed to make games ``funner'' or 
   more convenient for players, because in the long run the players miss out.
-----
(note subject and newsgroups changed)

There are a few differeing ideas here:
  1) What are Adventurers? How do they differ from mercenaries, knights et al.

  Adventurers do the jobs that no one else wants to do. They get paid money
like mercenaries, but they generally have specialized training. Rarely will an
adventurer/adventuring party fight wars on a battlefield. Pay rates being what
they are in the worlds I've played, it's much cheaper to hire mercenaries for
that. 
  Adventurers are supposedly "smarter than your average bear", and are hired
routinely to solve problems that are difficult for combat troops (wizards,
dungeons, hazardous environments, magic) or are politically difficult to
explain as actions of the ruling group (we need you to start an insurrection
in the country to the south).

  2) Adventurers are an anachronism.

  This really depends on how your campaign is set up. In a Warhammer FRP
campaign I was in, the characters looked more like a band of rogues trying
to survive in a difficult world than they did high fantasy adventurers. It
was sometimes difficult to find enough money to eat without having to rob
someone. I don't think we ever used the word adventure in that campaign.
  In another case, where I am in a high fantasy campaign, I am a knight
and a representative of a monastic order. Part of my duties are to find
and make safe archaeological sites. The talents needed to find and secure
these sites won't come easily to a run-of-the-mill mercenary, so I might
recruit a scholar or an adventurer. Adventurer's are often generalists.
  The year is 967 in this era, and possibly 10,000 years since the dawn of
humanity. How can something be an anachronism if that is "just the way the
world is now."
--
 Mitchell Gold     /  middleman of
 sundance@rpi.edu /  rec.games.frp.archives