Thread 96339329

I think the world building concept of an adventurers guild simplifies a fantasy setting and makes little sense, calling them mercenaries, free companies, routers (take your pick) works better imo as they're already established unfortunately due to the medieval system having many flaws. The idea of a group of people setting up an official "adventurers guild" is a bit silly and any noble or town council with a bit of political or economic foresight would laugh at this idea. The "adventurer" a group of heroes who sustain themselves by exploring ancient ruins, clearing out monster lairs, and retrieving lost artefacts. This trope, while narratively convenient really is illogical and if you scale it to any significant size, just leads to societal collapse.

The economic premise doesn't make sense. How does the adventurers guild hold all the thousands of members to a strict code of conduct and training like any typical guild would? How does it enforce standards and prices and prevent mass looting and pillaging? How does it deal with the inevitable scum of the earth it will attract and the legalities of this? If they were a free company or mercenaries it makes more sense as historically this is how many of them survived in between campaigns.

A legitimate adventuring career is a high risk, low frequency occupation. The number of genuinely valuable dungeons or forgotten tombs is pretty low. In a world with a large population of skilled, armed, and motivated individuals, these resources would be depleted with astonishing speed. The first few adventurers might strike it rich, but the thousands that follow would find little more than empty tombs. Not to mention it being considered highly illegal I doubt any noble will accept bands of armed "adventurers" walking through their territory looking to loot a valuable dungeon.

>>96339329 (OP)
Nah, go play games for once faggot.

>>96339329 (OP)
The societal consequences would be another issue, again nobody would allow an adventurers guild to be established. The existing institutions of law and order, local town guards, a feudal lord's standing army are not equipped to deal with a decentralized, highly mobile, and well armed population of adventurers. You only need to look at 14th century France where tens of thousands of unemployed men at arms terrorised the entire kingdom and literally became nicknamed as "The Flayers" since they raped and pillaged entire counties and duchies. These bands of "mercenaries" would just terrorise the countryside but would also become kingmakers, selling their services to the highest bidder in every conflict. The common person has no defence against a group of experienced killers who can demand tribute, pillage harvests, and seize control of trade routes. The social contract, the idea that a noble body provides protection in exchange for loyalty and taxes, would fall apart.

The actual roles within an adventurers guild also don't make sense and seem impractical. A medieval society is not going to support and have niche professions like rope climber, chest opener, trap disarmer. A true adventurer must be a generalist a fighter, a scout, a forager, and a survivalist all in one. The notion of an individual whose entire identity and livelihood are tied to a single, niche task is a failure of world-building. A real-world "adventurer" would be hired for a specific objective (take this fortress, pillage and reave this entire border county).

...So is this, like, a statement, or an invitation to represent our opinion on the matter? Cause you know places like the Royal Society, Explorers Club, National and Geographic Society existed, right?

>>96339329 (OP)
counterpoint: its makes running games very simple and easy to setup

player missing? on a different guild mission
new player? they wanted to join you on your quest
going wildly from investigations to killing goblins and then guarding a president with little down time in between? thats just this weeks client
also, everyone advances at the same rate and have similiar amounts of gold, because of fixed guild rates per job

does it make sense? it makes perfect sense to me as a DM who runs a club where random people all join and leave as their schedules require, but everyone has to be more or less as strong as each other so everyone is guaranteed a game when we start

>but its not realistic
dragons arent realistic either

>>96339354
>The actual roles within an adventurers guild also don't make sense and seem impractical. A medieval society is not going to support and have niche professions like rope climber, chest opener, trap disarmer. A true adventurer must be a generalist a fighter, a scout, a forager, and a survivalist all in one. The notion of an individual whose entire identity and livelihood are tied to a single, niche task is a failure of world-building. A real-world "adventurer" would be hired for a specific objective (take this fortress, pillage and reave this entire border county).
What specific setting do you have in mind where there's an adventurer's guild with that kind of division of labor?

>>96339329 (OP)
We've already had this thread at least once a week for the last several years.

>>96339411
>literally run different flavors of adventuers guilds for years
>no one has ever had a problem with it ever
what makes this board so uniquely autistic about realism? or versimilitude, or whatever mindworm is currently shackled into their head

You can blame the Thieves' World novels for guilds. That's why they were a thing in the AD&D original books.

Now go read the books so you understand what a guild is and why they exist in that world.

>>96339426
adventuers guilds were also a staple in the japanese RPG scene, where they were used to help facilitate gameplay with total strangers, since it provided structure that let you skip the hook and go straight to the action

>>96339420
Probably the fact that none of those people play games, and the only ttrpg related content they consume is jewtube slop that's full of "advice" on how to make your game 1000x better by making it more realistic

>>96339420
It's only some of it. A lot of the reason adventurer guilds continue to exist is function over form, or that their function serves to help grease the wheels enough to get the party to move onto the actual adventuring part instead of getting bogged down in minutiae. I see the same thing in a lot of fiction in japanese comic books which feature adventurer guilds, they only focus on the aspects that ever stay relevant to the main character's journey rather than autistically document everything. Like, if your story doesn't need your character to learn how exactly a guild can have a team dedicated specifically to charting out a path to the monster dungeons as well as their general condition and danger level, why would you need to go into detail about the scouts that get hired for the guild? That's just a waste of time. Same with adventurer guilds. We don't need to know the name and story of the local lord if we never interact with him, he can just exist as a name on a contract handed to the party via a third member, aka a guild.

>>96339329 (OP)
>>96339354
In Heian era Japan, the court posted jobs for local paramilitary formations that were not directly handed to some local dependent Clan at provincial arsenals.

>>96339329 (OP)
Traditional games?

>>96339329 (OP)
Was writing your own shitpost too much for you, anon? Did your head hurt and needed to ask Sam to write your post for you?

>>96339432
they were there because they were in Wizardry, it was in Wizardry because it was in 2e, it was in 2e because it was in thieve's world.

>>96339612
It's also a big part of US culture

>>96339329 (OP)
Yes, adventurer's guilds are setting-schlock that rape suspension of disbelief.

>>96340690
Suggestions for anything that works better than an adventurer's guild while being just as easy to use would be greatly appreciated, anon

>inb4 "you all meet up in a tavern"

>>96340756
Just call it a mercenary organization without changing anything else and see how many people are suddenly okay with it.

>>96340812
"Adventurer's Guild" is weebshit and weebshit is cringe, and since I'm based and not cringe I can't be seen doing weebshit.

As if the average normgroid is going to make the distinction between a fucking nerd pretending to be a wizard, and a fucking nerd pretending to be a wizard that also watches japanese cartoons.

>>96340756
>>96340812
Do you not see a difference between simple hired mercenaries or bounty hunters and an entire organization founded on plundering tombs and fighting monsters, as if such a thing were so routine, mundane, and sustainable that it could last as an institution?

If you absolutely need a lazy, universal solution, then yes: you are a mercenary hired for a specific, albeit unorthodox, job: retrieve <insert macguffin here> from <insert dungeon here>. It accomplishes the exact same thing—forcing together the wildly different player characters towards one goal—without the need of an utterly ridiculous premise.

>>96339369
Yes but they don't walk around armed to the teeth in a society that does not have a standing police force or army

>>96339402
The retards we had in the other thread last night

>>96339420
No one does have a problem with it. Retards like OP who make these threads over and over have nothing else to talk about, but they insist on making these threads anyways, usually with the limp-dicked
>why does /tg/ hate this????
or
>why does /tg/ love this????
Because it's fucking b8 and any moderator worth his tendies would nuke this shit and ban the faggots who keep making these threads

>>96341849
>Don't ick my yum

>>96341179
>Do you not see a difference between simple hired mercenaries or bounty hunters and an entire organization founded on plundering tombs and fighting monsters, as if such a thing were so routine, mundane, and sustainable that it could last as an institution?

Or maybe…just maybe…in this world that doesn’t reflect ours directly one to one, such an organization is possible to sustain due to how there is an endless supply of both monsters and dungeons, as well as people lining up to kill them?

Just food for thought.

>>96342084
Ah, so schlock, then.

>>96342122
Just seems a tad selective to tacitly accept an endless supply of monster societies and crazed treasure hoarders as normal for a world but decree a bunch of miscreants organizing to more efficiently plunder them both is ‘unrealistic’

>>96342151
>Just seems a tad selective to tacitly accept an endless supply of monster societies and crazed treasure hoarders as normal for a world
I would never accept that, tacitly or explicitly. If I wanted to walk into a meaningless monster closet every 10 feet, I'd play Doom or Diablo. Why would you want to demote your party's adventure to something so ordinary and routine? Raiding a tomb of monsters is an exceptional thing, that's the whole point. The fact that such things occur so much in a campaign is because that's what the game is focusing on, not because the world is built around it; If it is, it devalues the act by making it so unremarkable.

Are there any medieval drawings that show the most fun part about sacking a town?

>last thread dies
>repost with slightly different wording

i hope your asshole falls out while you're walking down the street and you lose it down a storm drain.

>>96340970
my beloved negro brother, you are on a site that only came to be because an underage b& nerd 20 years ago got tired of coughing up 10bux every time he wanted to talk about animu

crying about weebshit here is like going to a party and proseltyizing the sober life. are you right? yeah, sure, but fuck the hell off and tell someone who cares, nerd

>>96340970
Based people don't have to declare that they are based. Other people see them living authentically and say to themselves "...Based."

You're just a faggot.

>>96339329 (OP)
>The number of genuinely valuable dungeons or forgotten tombs is pretty low.
Not necessarily. It should be fairly high, but of course they're dangerous, maybe hard to get to or even hard to find.

>In a world with a large population of skilled, armed, and motivated individuals, these resources would be depleted with astonishing speed.
Yes. If it were easy enough that decently capable and brave people could do it, there'd probably be none left; just the really hard to find ones that nobody knows about yet.

>Not to mention it being considered highly illegal I doubt any noble will accept bands of armed "adventurers" walking through their territory looking to loot a valuable dungeon.
This would be true in real life, but a fantasy world should have smaller/weaker governments. With all the other competing races, as well as monsters and magic, having that same control over people and territory should be much harder to attain and maintain. And if a ruler DOES have the ability control that many people/that much territory, they are probably strong enough to not feel threatened by random groups of adventurers traveling through. Adventurers are like freelance pest control, or free-roaming farm dogs; just let em do their thing unless they're actually causing you problems.

Anyway yes, adventurers guilds are a retarded idea that only anime-enjoyers could seriously entertain.

My view is that "adventurers" are a rare breed. It's one thing to have levels in a pc class; its another to use those levels adventuring rather than just the basic shit of that class (for example a rogue just being a local city thief or con artist, a fighter being a guard captain or gladiator, etc). Then, getting multiple such people of different classes into one group, who can get along with each other and share goals; that should be rare enough that you can't reasonably expect to meet any. It'd be like running into a traveling band irl consisting of a special forces soldier, a phd academic who goes out into the field, danny ocean, a vatican priest, and a rockstar.

If your world is going to have "adventuring bands" with any frequency, you should have each of them be suboptimal in some way. They should lack one or two of the party pillars, should be of differing levels, have unoptimal builds, have some kind of discord within the party, and generally not last all that long as a group. The ones that manage to get past all that are ones whose names you know.

>>96342285
>it devalues the act by making it so unremarkable.
people keep saying this, but in my experience it rarely does
most players literally do not care if their characters are common or unique, they are here to play a game first

the ones who do care actually like that they arent so rare
they find quite it quite whimsical

>>96339354
>A true adventurer must be a generalist a fighter, a scout, a forager, and a survivalist all in one. The notion of an individual whose entire identity and livelihood are tied to a single, niche task
These are the "unoptimal builds" im talking about; shit you'd expect a person to have "irl" in the setting. Selfish short-sighted people who don't work well together.

>>96339329 (OP)
The witcher series seems to get closest to justifying a near DnD scenario in a realistic way. The reason regular armed forces don't solve all problems with overwhelming numbers is because of a lack of necessary obscure lore and tracking skill, things which are monopolized by a guild for purposes of jacking up demand and getting paid.

If 4 adventurers can just march up to some threat and kill it then 30 men at arms could have definitely done the same thing.

>>96342990
>>96342995
this thread isnt dying until I get (You)s

>>96339329 (OP)
Has it ever occurred to you op that fantasy doesn't have to make sense or be realistic. It's called fantasy for a reason you autistic smoothbrain

>>96347984
its not just realism, adventurers guilds are also a gay concept

>>96348036
What's gay is having such an autistic obsession over the logistics of a gameplay mechanic for make believe sessions

>>96348127
I dont know why people always try this transparent shaming tactic
you're wrong and you know it, just admit "I like gay shit" and be on with it

>>96347984
I bet you watch anime too, nonce

>>96348175
I do like adventurers guilds. You wanna know why? Because it expedites actual gameplay and adventure.

In the same vein, I also like whatever other idea or system accomplishes that, because unlike you I'm not such an autistic faggot that I feel any actual annoyance or anger at what is essentially a game of pretend. Also unlike you, I don't feel the need to waste a whole threads worth of internet space with my autistic ramblings, hoping for either affirmation to my aforementioned ego driven rambling, or an adrenaline hit from arguing with randos online about nonsense like this

tl;dr: you're the faggot trying to argue with strangers online about the logistics of a game of play pretend. There's literally nothing gayer or more autistic than that

>>96349083
And I bet you've never even been close to third base

>>96349115
The pleasure of a game isn't just about reaching the finish line as fast as possible. For many, the journey, the world-building, and the details are the entire point. It's about creative collaboration, not just 'expediting gameplay.' Your view is valid for you, but it's not the only way to enjoy a game, and it's certainly not superior to someone else's

>>96339329 (OP)

>Gives opinion on adventure guilds and explains why they prefer to use another name for it
>/tg/ has a fucking autistic meltdown

Clockwork

>>96349181
I never said my view was superior. I only pointed out that op is clearly an autistic faggot who doesn't understand exactly what you just said, and is proclaiming such from some undeserved high horse

>>96349233
It's not just that though. Op went on an autistic rant about how he can't understand the logistics of it, therefore proving that he's both autistic and retarded

>>96339329 (OP)
How hard is it to understand how an adventurers guild could work in a fantasy world? It's literally a fictional world with whatever logic and reason you want to give it.

What you're actually mad about op, is the fact that you're so retarded and uncreative that you can't imagine a world in which it would work.

No adventurer guild?

Okay get this. Adventurer....Temp Agency.

>>96342990
That is a very very small wizard.

>>96339329 (OP)
The one thing that's most unbelievable about Adventurer Guilds is how they're all basically these big monolithic corporations/franchises with branches all over the world and an absolute monopoly on all adventuring-related activities, more influential than any king or emperor. I've only ever seen Korean portal-fantasy manwhas try to add nuance by splitting the guilds into different rival factions with their own politics, which is far more believable.

>>96339329 (OP)
>adventurers guild
Overdone, shabby, banal
>mystery cult of adventurers
Intriguing, exclusive, glamorous

>>96349430
its a gnome

>>96349540
Yer a gnome

Me, I'm still going to have adventurers and an adventurer's guild. Adventurers are good guys, mercenaries, and free companies are evil, always.

>>96349115
somebody is gay and autistic

>>96349546
y-you ....wouldnt hurt a gnome, would you?

>>96349561
The only shortfolk we kill on sight around here are kender.

>>96349553
Is that actually the only retort you've got? As dumb as I thought you were

>>96339383
Rather than unrealistic, it's best to call it implausible, which is worse.

>>96349919
seems awfully arbitrary to me
to say nothing of the fact that neither will actually affect the enjoyment my players get

>>96349494
I've legitimately only ever seen that actually happen with the Pathfinder Society and certain video games. Most weebshit I've read keeps adventurer guilds as either exclusively local and in competition with other guilds, or basically being a government sponsored organization to explain how they're everywhere.

>>96342995
I always thought of a band of adventurers being a band of rejects or the lost and damned. Vermis does it well with it's potential classes. A woman looking for her child, a schizo knight hearing voices in a rock, a mutant ratman who lives in a sewer, a hermit kicked out of his village etc.

>>96344061
>If 4 adventurers can just march up to some threat and kill it then 30 men at arms could have definitely done the same thing.

This is why a lot of setting opt for the "the player is the Chosen One with some sort of deus ex machina power" approach. Like Skyrim's Dragonborn, or BG3's Netherite-enhanced brainworms. It's cliche and overdone, but it's cliche and overdone for a reason. There has to be SOMETHING that puts the protagonists above ordinary humans, otherwise why not just send in the army?

>>96339329 (OP)
It's easy to fob off one adventuring party. It's not easy to fob off an entire guide. Go read up on unions.

>>96344061
>If 4 special forces operatives can just march up to some operation and complete it then 30 army grunts could have definitely done the same thing.

>>96354418
Special forces aren't real they're just infantry with a few weeks of extra "training". Operation redwing proved that.

>>96350133
>I've legitimately only ever seen that actually happen with the Pathfinder Society and certain video games. Most weebshit I've read keeps adventurer guilds as either exclusively local and in competition with other guilds, or basically being a government sponsored organization to explain how they're everywhere.
As long as I can pick up a 1st level henchman who looks like this for 1 g.p., I'm fine with it. Heck, she won't even have to leave the inn.

>>96339329 (OP)
>I think the world building concept of an adventurers guild simplifies a fantasy setting and makes little sense.
It's just a 'public' service employment center, fantasy just happens to have a lot of monsters. Some pay taxes by farming the lord's lands others by guard duty, others by killing monsters, others by mining. It's not that difficult to understand, in an ttrpg you mostly do the killing part. TEAs thrive in the modern world, imagine if there were monsters to cull regularly.

>>96349494
>I've only ever seen Korean portal-fantasy manwhas try to add nuance by splitting the guilds into different rival factions with their own politics, which is far more believable.
Name them.

>>96357209
the one

>>96339329 (OP)
>The number of genuinely valuable dungeons or forgotten tombs is pretty low. In a world with a large population of skilled, armed, and motivated individuals, these resources would be depleted with astonishing speed. The first few adventurers might strike it rich, but the thousands that follow would find little more than empty tombs. Not to mention it being considered highly illegal I doubt any noble will accept bands of armed "adventurers" walking through their territory looking to loot a valuable dungeon.
4e doesn't even have an adventurer's guild and it effectively solves this with the Points of Light setting:

You're effectively frontiersmen that just stepped into a fresh border town built on the bones of a fallen grand magical civilization. There hasn't been time to scour for all the treasures and secrets, the nobles are too busy rebuilding elsewhere and can't afford to send their armies into buttfuck nowhere with no guarantee of safety of anything valuable. The world is your oyster and some will absolutely group together to make the most of it.

>>96355982
>>96350133
Food for thought.

Real life guilds would even run out of just.. some guy's house. Particularly an explorer's society (which is just a bunch of bored rich people going on vacations) would run out of one of the member's houses. That's where they meet. An 'adventurer guild' (preferably renamed to something else) could easily run out of an inn or bar. Because why would they have their own government sized building? Unless it was a particularly successful one. Or had a very wealthy and even more excentric patron that just liked having it that way. Otherwise, you're probably renting out some other space when it's not in use or coinhabiting a place a lot of adventurers show up anyway. Like.. a bar.

>>96364696
Yeah, I've consumed enough trashy anime slop to know that they've ironically expanded the idea of the ubiquitous adventurer's guild beyond "cheap excuse for the hero to go on adventures". There's some that lean into the idea of apprenticeships and teach newbie adventurers to at least know how to defend themselves before going into the field. There's some that operate closer to a 2e adventuring party by just cutting out any kind of government middle man and having adventurer parties wealthy enough to rent out buildings as their headquarters and have hirelings to back them up while they go on dungeon raids and the like. I've even read one that went the full opposite direction in which the "adventurer's guild" is so completely divorced from the adventuring side that they basically act more like a financing/insurance group that's makes its profit from adventurer parties paying a portion of the profit from a successful job back to them (though I don't think it's the same series where we see the fantasy irs tracking down adventurers that don't pay their taxes).

It's why I said I've not see the concept of some kind of all-encompassing global spanning guild of murderhobos like OP is complaining about for ages. Even in the laziest slop out of the dregs of Japan, they seem to keep most of theirs as local organizations in their own narratives. Just a weird discrepancy, is all.

>>96361231
America's westward expansion was helped in particular by the idea that if you settled it, you kept it. That's how they got people to do such insane things like ride a wagon to nowhere far beyond any government or societal support. Also why the wild west happened. It takes time for the government to properly move in on the heels of settlers. Till then, it's basically the law of the strongest, but all these people are kind of super badasses in the first place for daring to ride out into the wilderness and remake civilization themselves. So, you know, good luck being a bandit here. Problems tend to solve themselves.

Also an old tv show called Have Gun Will Travel may be great for pulling ideas from.

>>96339329 (OP)
The only reasonable trope is The Frontier, like in Symbaroum or "The Aspect-Emperor" series by R. Scott Bakker (Skin Eater's POW), the Wild West or Cossacks IRL.

>>96365779
Good examples

>>96339329 (OP)
What if the world is not low magic medieval fantasy?

>>96339329 (OP)
Have any of you run your setting where the party are mercenaries that do normal "adventurer's guild" stuff but are also seen as personae non grata by the government? I think it would be cool to have to run out of taverns and dens of ill repute and actually be given a hard time by the town guards and constables.

>>96369077
The sort of grog who makes these threads (assuming that it isn't just chatgpt spam) genuinely cannot comprehend the existence of settings that aren't pseudohistorical mudcore slop.

>>96372562
cry about it, shit-tastes haver

>>96370316
that would be neat
not for a whole setting, but for parts of it