I don’t like them. But I hate all rpgs and spend the majority of time stroking myself over indie rpgs chanting >Have you tried not playing D&D
I actually hate indie rpgs too but love to ruin everyone else’s discussions.
"Adventurers" are just very small unit mercenaries. I don't mind them having access to all the same services that mercenaries did IRL through history including informal "guild" organisations and marketplaces for patrons.
I DO mind the stereotypical treatment they get in dungeon fantasy games, but I don't find it nearly as annoying as gnomes or dum dum giants.
I don't like them when they're actually "Adventurer Corporations" with bosses and assignments and deadlines.
I like them when they're actual guilds that mostly just exist to lobby the government for its members to get a monopoly on certain services.
Why not indeed? All of those can exist along with an adventurer's guild. Some of them will be teaching guilds and not service guilds. Possibly the adventurer's guild itself, acting as a school for spelunking and specialized skills like trapfinding and monster identification, with either the teachers or the students being the guild members (as certain colleges started irl).
The only important thing for guildlaw is that there is some kind of monopoly a city government has granted them and some kind of gatekeeping and quality/price rules they follow. People get too hung up on the idea that they must have some kind of massive bureaucracy that all the guild members are subservient to, or that they must be hyper specialized, but neither are the case. Some guilds irl covered a wide range of random shit, and most of them only loosely imposed price fixing and training standards. The modern equivalent of a guild is something like a Bar association or licensed trade program. The government says only the people who jumped through the hoops and paid the tuition to existing tutors can legally do the thing, and they have to do it right.
There were fighter's guilds in real life, they taught specialized fighting styles. We've got existing manuscripts from what amounted to a zweihander instructor's guild somewhere in Germany. Unsurprisingly, germanic guilds were the most autistic of all guilds.
The moment "adventurers" organize in a guild they are not adventurers but simply a mercenary band/organization. It makes no sense for any state/kingdom to tolerate a bunch of very powerful individuals without any affiliation to organize in a steady headquarter right under they nose. If they are side with the said state/kingdom they are not even a mercenary company anymore but simply the kings greatest homosexuals.
Also the whole idea of "adventuring" is that you are a guy or a group of guys without formal ties to anyone wandering around on your own account. Thats what differs adventurers from mercenaries. Adventuring is not a job. You are not an "adventurer" you are an adventuring mage/thief/warrior/blacksmith/dragon dildo manufacturer and you strolling around the world solving problems of others is not happening because thats just what adventurers do to make a living but because of some underlying, overspanning motivation that made you go to point x where by accident person y wants you to do something while you are at it.
Not giving any motivation at all and just being "you are adventurer" is simply lazy ass storytelling.
>It makes no sense for any state/kingdom to tolerate a bunch of very powerful individuals without any affiliation to organize in a steady headquarter right under they nose.
Mercenaries have been a thing for thousands of years. They are still a thing.
And historically kings did anythibg they could to curtail them, including often disbanding armies while still in hostile territory since unemployed mercs were undesirables during peacetime.
An actual guild is tied to a city government way more than any mercenaries. The defining features of a guild is getting themselves enshrined in law. The typical sort of adventurer's guild that takes on jobs would have a legal mandate to be the only ones allowed to be hired for certain services at fixed price rates. This could be as few as two influential burghers with strong connections.
Actual guilds are very localized though, almost all of them were limited to a single city and had no jurisdiction even in the surrounding rural estates. You could only buy a sword from the swordsmith's guild in town, but every noble in the surrounding hills had blacksmiths who were perfectly capable and willing to make swords without being a member of any guild at all.
You are giving kingdoms too much credit. It's not like a state or kingdom is guaranteed to be able to eradicate shit they dislike. So you're telling me that social ills like organized crime and corruption are tacitly tolerated and only exist because a kingdom or state just hasn't bothered and they are able to eliminate them whenever they want?
They only work for me if Adventurer is just a marketing term they made up for criminal and looter for hire. Also if the setting has Guild members hunt down and shake down unlicensed adventurers.
They're usually way more realistic to include. It's just an acceptance of the actual state of most ttrpg settings, one where monsters and questing is a frequent enough occurrence that your players aren't wasting their time wandering the lands looking for shit to do.
If a group of strangers traveling the world find enough reason to continue on, then it's just the state of the world and it's only realistic that it'd be accounted for. Unless like, every quest is some very specific and personal chosen one story, there's probably other people out there with traveling, monster hunting, dungeon exploring skills that make them valuable in the world.
People who hate adventurers guilds are likely leaning very close to mudcore nothing ever happens games where you go looking for a dragon and don't find one cause they aren't real, don't you all feel stupid?
Most groups don't have a weird subsection of people who waste their lives obsessing about things they hate. It's also super weird when they obsess about innocuous stuff and really need to exaggerate how much they hate those things in order to get attention.
The sort of thing where it goes from "I'm not a fan" to "it's entirely abhorrent and illogical and you need to hate it as much as I pretend to."
I don't know how I could possibly be more clear. Adventurers are more compelling as ordinary people on an adventure. Ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things are more extraordinary for it. Obviously extraordinary people will do extraordinary shit. That's ordinary.
I think that Hunter x Hunter is the only example of a well-done and satisfying "Adventure Guild" in any fiction I've seen / read / played.
Perhaps the Monster Hunter franchise too.
I like adventurers guilds in that it's an organisation who is exploring a new landmass or region. Not in the fantasy adventurer sense.
The fantasy adventurers guild is just a mercenary hub. That's fine, but the name is stupid to me. I can't imagine a farmer hiring "adventurers" to fend off the goblins, but I can imagine a farmer hiring "mercenaries".
They serve an extremely obvious purpose mechanically and narratively. A gathering place for those who would engage in "adventures" and a central hub for requests from countless individuals in the region for targets to slay, people to escort, storied locations to investigate, treasures to reclaim, so-on and so-forth. The notion of their existence is usually justified in the simplicity of a setting having a vast array of fantastical creatures that commoners can't get rid of(but have some amount of money to pay to get rid of), as well as a plurality of armed individuals seeking to earn their keep and hone their skills by fighting those fantastical creatures. I'd only argue calling them an Adventurer's Guild is probably an awkward title, but renaming them to fit the setting isn't a bad thing, and ultimately proves how well they fit into it.
If there is some autistic argument about "realism" being lost in the process, it's ultimately going to devolve into pure pedantry and masturbatory "analyses" about every single fantastical thing being "bad" for not being literally saturated in references to historical (read: Not Fantasy) governments, which then degrades any and all discussion of any and all settings into people pretending they are educated scholars on these matters. Nothing is worse for discussion of games, especially fantastical games, than obsession with things that have nothing to do with games (and in the case of fantastical games, nothing to do with fantasy either).
>I'd only argue calling them an Adventurer's Guild is probably an awkward title, but renaming them to fit the setting isn't a bad thing,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Explorers_Club
None. The only time they pop-up is when some homosexual makes a shitpost thread about them on /tg/. This applies to variety of other things that are supposedly gaming related, but only really exist on /tg/ and have any sort of "application" on /tg/
They're a front being used by the big evils in the setting. One of the main things they need for their long term purposes is the harvesting of high level adventurers. Every guild is merely a front to help adventurers reach the peak of their ability and then lure them into a fatal trap so they can be harvested.
I like the idea when modified to fit the setting. In my own setting, we're in the new world and the place is largely uncharted. Due to the influx of monsters, some settling nations have hired a grand unified mercenary guild comprised of crafters, wizards, mercenary fighters, trackers etc to head into the frontier and establish safe zones for desire settlements. It's been a few years in the setting but some adventurers have found ancient civilizations and treasures, new races, and found fame galore. In practice it's an adventurer guild but it's not one the players *have* to interact with, they're a hire-able force for the rich that can provide quests/work to players but nations still sent their own people and organizations to settle and don't rely on adventurers. They can be found but they're not THE end all be all of adventurers. I think the main issue with the Anime Adventurer guild is that it is exists in response to typically worlds that feature massive constantly appearing magic dungeons full of monsters. It's more of a videogamey approach and is found in other things like TeS series but it can sort of feel too gamey or immersion breaking for some. There's also the preference of how fame is handled, getting adventurer guild rank up is pretty MMO/game like, a new level is reached you're now X level of famous. VS becoming known far and wide for deeds as they're completed and spread via word of mouth like a classic adventure. I like being able to run it both ways personally.
The equivalent in my campaign are clubs for the upper classes to host lectures, eat good food and present their latest artifacts. Plebs need not apply.
I think not only have we had this thread already, you should be able to figure out for yourself what's wrong with them pretty easily if you have an internal monologue.
Always wanted to run a game in a world kind of like FFTA, where there's a bunch of adventurer squads running around and the main party could have friends and rivals and there would be "famous adventurers" out there that were initially out of the party's league.
In any late feudal to mercantilist economy (which should be the economies of most fantasy ttrpg settings) if an activity can be structured to make money, local guilds will be born out of that activity. Anyone that think Adventurer Guilds is gamist shit skipped learning economic history (probably because it is boring compared to learning about warfare or other historical things).
/tg/ hates adventurer guilds
/tg/ is one person and she's trans.
Gamist nonsense that can only exist in postmodern, meta-commentary, isekai settings.
I don’t like them. But I hate all rpgs and spend the majority of time stroking myself over indie rpgs chanting
>Have you tried not playing D&D
I actually hate indie rpgs too but love to ruin everyone else’s discussions.
"Adventurers" are just very small unit mercenaries. I don't mind them having access to all the same services that mercenaries did IRL through history including informal "guild" organisations and marketplaces for patrons.
I DO mind the stereotypical treatment they get in dungeon fantasy games, but I don't find it nearly as annoying as gnomes or dum dum giants.
i dont think
I don't like them when they're actually "Adventurer Corporations" with bosses and assignments and deadlines.
I like them when they're actual guilds that mostly just exist to lobby the government for its members to get a monopoly on certain services.
Why not Mages Guilds for wizards, Thieves Guilds for rogues, Bard's College for Bards and mercenary companies for fighters?
Because then your players will constantly be getting split up by their guilds.
Why not indeed? All of those can exist along with an adventurer's guild. Some of them will be teaching guilds and not service guilds. Possibly the adventurer's guild itself, acting as a school for spelunking and specialized skills like trapfinding and monster identification, with either the teachers or the students being the guild members (as certain colleges started irl).
The only important thing for guildlaw is that there is some kind of monopoly a city government has granted them and some kind of gatekeeping and quality/price rules they follow. People get too hung up on the idea that they must have some kind of massive bureaucracy that all the guild members are subservient to, or that they must be hyper specialized, but neither are the case. Some guilds irl covered a wide range of random shit, and most of them only loosely imposed price fixing and training standards. The modern equivalent of a guild is something like a Bar association or licensed trade program. The government says only the people who jumped through the hoops and paid the tuition to existing tutors can legally do the thing, and they have to do it right.
There were fighter's guilds in real life, they taught specialized fighting styles. We've got existing manuscripts from what amounted to a zweihander instructor's guild somewhere in Germany. Unsurprisingly, germanic guilds were the most autistic of all guilds.
>thieves guild
>guards knock on the door
>all members arrested immediately because they call themselves the fricking thieves guild
Did this historically happen to the mafia as well?
i dont think so, but it doesnt make the concept of a thieves guild in a medieval city any less moronic
Would be no less stupid than the shit corrupt thief-takers got up to or the nonsense that is the fricking yakuza.
Man, almost like they'd try to conceal their presence somehow.
>try to conceal their presence
They're not doing a very good job at it then.
They actually had symbols like this all over Skyrim. It's okay if you didn't notice them, they're pretty concealed.
Don't forget churches for Clerics and Paladins, tribes for Barbarians, gatherings for druids, bloodlines for Sorcerers, academies for Wizards...
The moment "adventurers" organize in a guild they are not adventurers but simply a mercenary band/organization. It makes no sense for any state/kingdom to tolerate a bunch of very powerful individuals without any affiliation to organize in a steady headquarter right under they nose. If they are side with the said state/kingdom they are not even a mercenary company anymore but simply the kings greatest homosexuals.
Also the whole idea of "adventuring" is that you are a guy or a group of guys without formal ties to anyone wandering around on your own account. Thats what differs adventurers from mercenaries. Adventuring is not a job. You are not an "adventurer" you are an adventuring mage/thief/warrior/blacksmith/dragon dildo manufacturer and you strolling around the world solving problems of others is not happening because thats just what adventurers do to make a living but because of some underlying, overspanning motivation that made you go to point x where by accident person y wants you to do something while you are at it.
Not giving any motivation at all and just being "you are adventurer" is simply lazy ass storytelling.
>It makes no sense for any state/kingdom to tolerate a bunch of very powerful individuals without any affiliation to organize in a steady headquarter right under they nose.
Mercenaries have been a thing for thousands of years. They are still a thing.
And historically kings did anythibg they could to curtail them, including often disbanding armies while still in hostile territory since unemployed mercs were undesirables during peacetime.
An actual guild is tied to a city government way more than any mercenaries. The defining features of a guild is getting themselves enshrined in law. The typical sort of adventurer's guild that takes on jobs would have a legal mandate to be the only ones allowed to be hired for certain services at fixed price rates. This could be as few as two influential burghers with strong connections.
Actual guilds are very localized though, almost all of them were limited to a single city and had no jurisdiction even in the surrounding rural estates. You could only buy a sword from the swordsmith's guild in town, but every noble in the surrounding hills had blacksmiths who were perfectly capable and willing to make swords without being a member of any guild at all.
You are giving kingdoms too much credit. It's not like a state or kingdom is guaranteed to be able to eradicate shit they dislike. So you're telling me that social ills like organized crime and corruption are tacitly tolerated and only exist because a kingdom or state just hasn't bothered and they are able to eliminate them whenever they want?
Adventurers don't form guilds. If you want to have a similarly structured organization, call ot what it is: a mercenary group.
They only work for me if Adventurer is just a marketing term they made up for criminal and looter for hire. Also if the setting has Guild members hunt down and shake down unlicensed adventurers.
Guilds are like mini mafias, collecting part of the adventurers money. Join up or they try to shut you down.
They're usually way more realistic to include. It's just an acceptance of the actual state of most ttrpg settings, one where monsters and questing is a frequent enough occurrence that your players aren't wasting their time wandering the lands looking for shit to do.
If a group of strangers traveling the world find enough reason to continue on, then it's just the state of the world and it's only realistic that it'd be accounted for. Unless like, every quest is some very specific and personal chosen one story, there's probably other people out there with traveling, monster hunting, dungeon exploring skills that make them valuable in the world.
People who hate adventurers guilds are likely leaning very close to mudcore nothing ever happens games where you go looking for a dragon and don't find one cause they aren't real, don't you all feel stupid?
A breath of fresh air.
>Agent Milton, Pinkerton Adventurer Guild.
>You can generally split /tg/ into the haters and the rest.
You can split almost anything into the haters and the rest.
Most groups don't have a weird subsection of people who waste their lives obsessing about things they hate. It's also super weird when they obsess about innocuous stuff and really need to exaggerate how much they hate those things in order to get attention.
The sort of thing where it goes from "I'm not a fan" to "it's entirely abhorrent and illogical and you need to hate it as much as I pretend to."
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who formulate binaries and those who don't.
There are actually 10 kinds of people in this world. Those who can count in binary and those who can't.
Sounds like the front for the local lord's embezzlement scam.
It's such a dumb concept, and makes the special feel of being an adventurer feel mundane.
Being an adventurer should be mundane so you don't come across as fricking OC donut steel chosen ones.
Random shmucks stumbling into bullshit is far more compelling as a narrative.
>Being an adventurer should be mundane
Wut?
I don't know how I could possibly be more clear. Adventurers are more compelling as ordinary people on an adventure. Ordinary people accomplishing extraordinary things are more extraordinary for it. Obviously extraordinary people will do extraordinary shit. That's ordinary.
I think that Hunter x Hunter is the only example of a well-done and satisfying "Adventure Guild" in any fiction I've seen / read / played.
Perhaps the Monster Hunter franchise too.
I think there's untapped potential in the concept, but don't care enough about them to try and make that work myself.
I like adventurers guilds in that it's an organisation who is exploring a new landmass or region. Not in the fantasy adventurer sense.
The fantasy adventurers guild is just a mercenary hub. That's fine, but the name is stupid to me. I can't imagine a farmer hiring "adventurers" to fend off the goblins, but I can imagine a farmer hiring "mercenaries".
Not worth talking about with an OP who doesn't share his own thoughts himself.
They serve an extremely obvious purpose mechanically and narratively. A gathering place for those who would engage in "adventures" and a central hub for requests from countless individuals in the region for targets to slay, people to escort, storied locations to investigate, treasures to reclaim, so-on and so-forth. The notion of their existence is usually justified in the simplicity of a setting having a vast array of fantastical creatures that commoners can't get rid of(but have some amount of money to pay to get rid of), as well as a plurality of armed individuals seeking to earn their keep and hone their skills by fighting those fantastical creatures. I'd only argue calling them an Adventurer's Guild is probably an awkward title, but renaming them to fit the setting isn't a bad thing, and ultimately proves how well they fit into it.
If there is some autistic argument about "realism" being lost in the process, it's ultimately going to devolve into pure pedantry and masturbatory "analyses" about every single fantastical thing being "bad" for not being literally saturated in references to historical (read: Not Fantasy) governments, which then degrades any and all discussion of any and all settings into people pretending they are educated scholars on these matters. Nothing is worse for discussion of games, especially fantastical games, than obsession with things that have nothing to do with games (and in the case of fantastical games, nothing to do with fantasy either).
>I'd only argue calling them an Adventurer's Guild is probably an awkward title, but renaming them to fit the setting isn't a bad thing,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Explorers_Club
Honestly a pretty swanky name. I'd definitely feel happy joining The Explorer's Club. Maybe Adventurer's Guild doesn't sound so silly after all.
None. The only time they pop-up is when some homosexual makes a shitpost thread about them on /tg/. This applies to variety of other things that are supposedly gaming related, but only really exist on /tg/ and have any sort of "application" on /tg/
They're a front being used by the big evils in the setting. One of the main things they need for their long term purposes is the harvesting of high level adventurers. Every guild is merely a front to help adventurers reach the peak of their ability and then lure them into a fatal trap so they can be harvested.
I like the idea when modified to fit the setting. In my own setting, we're in the new world and the place is largely uncharted. Due to the influx of monsters, some settling nations have hired a grand unified mercenary guild comprised of crafters, wizards, mercenary fighters, trackers etc to head into the frontier and establish safe zones for desire settlements. It's been a few years in the setting but some adventurers have found ancient civilizations and treasures, new races, and found fame galore. In practice it's an adventurer guild but it's not one the players *have* to interact with, they're a hire-able force for the rich that can provide quests/work to players but nations still sent their own people and organizations to settle and don't rely on adventurers. They can be found but they're not THE end all be all of adventurers. I think the main issue with the Anime Adventurer guild is that it is exists in response to typically worlds that feature massive constantly appearing magic dungeons full of monsters. It's more of a videogamey approach and is found in other things like TeS series but it can sort of feel too gamey or immersion breaking for some. There's also the preference of how fame is handled, getting adventurer guild rank up is pretty MMO/game like, a new level is reached you're now X level of famous. VS becoming known far and wide for deeds as they're completed and spread via word of mouth like a classic adventure. I like being able to run it both ways personally.
The equivalent in my campaign are clubs for the upper classes to host lectures, eat good food and present their latest artifacts. Plebs need not apply.
I think not only have we had this thread already, you should be able to figure out for yourself what's wrong with them pretty easily if you have an internal monologue.
Mercenary groups or warbands are far cooler. Characters can still be adventuring _theirclass_ though. But it's not a standardised organisation
Always wanted to run a game in a world kind of like FFTA, where there's a bunch of adventurer squads running around and the main party could have friends and rivals and there would be "famous adventurers" out there that were initially out of the party's league.
It's a really good baseline if you use that fanmade FFRPG as a template for crunch and handle everything else DM-side.
I think if anyone ever actually brings up 'adventuring guilds' I'm going to set them up and have them mugged in an alley.
that or just have them act as local dupes of the theives guild.
In any late feudal to mercantilist economy (which should be the economies of most fantasy ttrpg settings) if an activity can be structured to make money, local guilds will be born out of that activity. Anyone that think Adventurer Guilds is gamist shit skipped learning economic history (probably because it is boring compared to learning about warfare or other historical things).