>>88077297
What do you mean sex skills? What game is this?

Because it's basically MMO/anime bullshit. The original conception of the dungeon adventurer assumed a person who is physically and mentally above average, 1% of the general world population.
The idea that there enough of these people walking around and in contact with one another, much less creating one massive guild for one another, conjures the image of a world bustling with adventurers. Which flies in the face of the adventurer being extraordinary and there being any dungeons or ruins left to actually invite adventuring.
>the culture of the in game world and the hobby itself has changed grandpa
Yeah, but none of the trappings have. Where the fuck would treasure even exist to be stolen or monsters to be slain in a world with that many competent people running around?
>Allows an easy way to pass out rumors/quests
A tavern or village works just fine.
>Great place to drop off loot, find trainers etc
Trainers I'll agree with, as the game was always pretty vague where the fuck you'd find a fighter high level enough to actually train you, much less with the incentive to.
The loot thing irks me though, because it implied loot is plentiful and unremarkable, which makes the idea of magic weapons as a reward worth risking your life in some dungeon laughable. Just work as an apprentice for twenty years and buy one at the guild.
>Makes for easy character drama, if wanted
I don't know what this means. Is the danger and mystery of ruins and monsters and treasure at the risk of life and limb not dramatic enough? Or geopolitical/feudal intrigue?
>Easy to transition into an antagonistic force, or just remove the players from entirely if it becomes boring
But then you're gotta constantly explain why this guild hasn't found it already or where they are that they're not butting into or hunting down the players.

TL;DR I'm not super incensed about it, contrary to how much I dislike it. Just to me seems antithetical to the assumptions of most FRPGs.

>>88077297
I find it too game-y, interferes with suspension of disbelief.

>>88077297
People aren't old enough to remember that unions ARE the compromise.

>>88077477
Lona RPG, made by a Taiwanese guy, it's brutal.

>>88077297
I like them, but only conditionally.
If they're prominent enough to control who can become adventurers, and how much said adventurers get to keep, it had better be a case like Etrian Odyssey, where they're centralized around a unique/rare landmark (such as the titular Yggdrasil Labyrinth).
Otherwise, I'm more content with isolated mercenary organizations, where their influence only extends so far in the setting, instead of one organization being responsible for every mercenary in the world ever. This can also make for some neat conflicts where circles of influence overlap. But with this, a big issue pops up when the party is globetrotting; once they travel beyond their guild's range of influence, they become largely irrelevant. Then what? Have the players join another mercenary guild and swear in under their oath? That's dumb.
Make your organizations fit with the campaign goals; that's the main thing I look for (besides actually playing the damn game).

>>88077565
Fuck.
I hate it when I get games in my game, too.

Muh realism. Because apparently everyone is playing a historical campaign for some reason.

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>>88077583
Get fucked, commie.

>>88077477
>The idea that there enough of these people walking around and in contact with one another, much less creating one massive guild for one another, conjures the image of a world bustling with adventurers.
Okay that is an actual reason, thanks. I tend to do a set up like what >>88077590 suggests. Any guild is a regional force at best, and probably only has a few seasoned members at most. I my current game the guild my players were a part of is funded by the royality as a way to extract money from dungeons without risking soldiers. The rules were "adventurers keep any magical items they find, but gold goes to pay guild dues" and they got a cut of it. Being a member of this guild came with several benefits, such as immunity to certain laws and the immunity to "normal" taxes. In reality adventurers payed way more in taxes; But who cares because cool swords and I don't have to pay a gate tax when entering a city.

>>88077297
Too many of them are functionally Adventurer Corporations or Adventurer Unions rather than actual guilds.
Guild members don't answer to a boss, they don't work "for" the guild. The guild is instead their collective lobbying organization. The guild negotiated with the government in order to give its members control over who and how many get to be in their profession, and in return they price fix their goods or services to the public's benefit.
At least in theory, there's a ton of opportunities for corruption and price fixing upwards rather than downwards. It's a different kind of drama than "guild boss says you have to go to the goblin hole today or you're fired. Hop to it, time is money!"

>>88077590
>once they travel beyond their guild's range of influence, they become largely irrelevant. Then what? Have the players join another mercenary guild and swear in under their oath? That's dumb.
Once they travel beyond, they are likely at a power level where a guild is no longer necessary. The next regions guild might not like them operating in their turf unguilded, which could be a fun series of adventures in and of itself. Or the next region doesn't have any analogous orgs at all, and is considered basically a wild west of adventuring.

>>88077675
Oh, and importantly, a guild can consist of as few as two people. One adventuring party could be the entire guild for their city, and they're the only ones who get to legally take contracts for work from people in that city, and the only ones who can train and induct new guild members.

This also has big potential for corruption since they can do things like use and abuse apprentices without actually intending to promote them into journeymen.

>>88077477
To put it bluntly, he revenge rapes them. But it's basically just a gimmick, rape does mostly stamina damage and the victim needs to be on low stamina already (effectively out of fight) to get grappled in the first place.

>>88077297
If you just called it a "mercenary company" it would be 100 times less gay

>>88077530
>The loot thing irks me though, because it implied loot is plentiful and unremarkable, which makes the idea of magic weapons as a reward worth risking your life in some dungeon laughable.
This.

Finding a map for an ancient buried treasure should be an "oh shit gotta have it can't let anyone else overhear us talking about it" sort of moment, not "please take your ticket and wait in line" kind of gayness

>>88077297
it's dull dull dull, by god it's dull, it's so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and desperately dull
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAOQH4xEyhM

>>88077706
>Or the next region doesn't have any analogous orgs at all, and is considered basically a wild west of adventuring.
I love this and I feel bad for not thinking of it myself.

>>88077297
To tell you why I dislike them, I would like to present a hypothetical:
Imagine Frodo is taking a journey to destroy the One Ring. But as he tries to enter Mordor, an orc stops him at the border and asks for his information. So Frodo takes out his passport and shows the orc, but the orc says it's expired. Frodo then has to go to the Hobbit embassy and wait in line to get a new passport and present 2 forms of valid ID, at least one of which has a photo of him, and he needs to call a friend in the Shire to fax over a photocopy of his birth certificate because he didn't bring it with him.
That is what an Adventurer's Guild is. You take a wondrous fantasy world that people would want to escape into, and bring the mundane bullshit of real life that they were trying to escape from in the first place into it.

>>88077477
Cunny game

>>88077530
It's not so difficult to justify.
The typical fantasy setting, despite its medieval window dressing, should be viewed moreso through the lens of bronze age civilization. There are a few, large bureaucratic states who for all their power lack force projection and a number of satellite realms who are economically connected to the aforementioned states, but most of the world is sparsely settled and mysterious.
The impetus for forming an adventuring guild is three-fold:
1) People who live in one of the powerful civilizations are aware of the potential for exploration and forgotten ruins, and "adventuring" is seen as an honorable alternative to banditry.
2) It's a clandestine method for the powerful states to provide face-saving relief to their neighbors; they can provide funding and intelligence for the adventurers, enabling them to find and defeat liches, dragons, and the like before they become a direct threat.
3) The typical extermination bounties for goblins, and collection quests for miscellaneous magical reagents are paid for by the merchants who travel the full breadth of the continent both to ensure that the roads they use remain safe and to provide them with wares which can be sold further afield.

>with that many competent people running around?
There are not, in actuality, that many competent people running around. Being an adventurer is an occupation with a high mortality rate, especially for the people who are just getting started. It's also a job people take up with the intention of retiring from early. Seasoned veterans banding together to settle in the same area, provide training & direction to novices, and being capable of putting together the requisite funding (typical guild behavior) is something that can be safely assumed. Throw in magical telecommunications, and individual guildhalls are in a position to easily network across national boundaries.
>Just work as an apprentice for twenty years
Go be a carpenter. Adventuring is a shortcut

>>88077297
Because why mix the scholarly mages which are usually a significant national investment with farmhands getting big ideas when you can have a mage's guild and fighter's guild catering to their wildly divergent needs? Why would either of them openly integrate an organized crime group into their ranks when the Thieves Guild requires plausible deniability to remain in operation at all?

It's like if the candlemaker's guild decided it wanted to merge with the cobbler's guild arbitrarily, and they both later integrated the fire-fighting service.

>>88083254
Nonsense. All the characters are 65535 years old, all the animals and monsters are just people in costumes.

>>88077297
I like Goblin Slayer's take on the Adventure's Guild where the Adventurer's Guild was set up as a guarantor of the adventurers' trustworthiness to the civilian population. The Guild ensures that when a person hires an adventurer, the adventurer is not a cheat or murder hobo etc.

>>88084830
And also they work exclusively on the outskirts, in the frontiers where adventures happen anyways.
That's actually how I made mine. They're associations based in each region, connected by their documentation, after one too many adventurers decided to take over the country themselves. So if you're registered you get pay, you get quests, hell, you get connections and land even. If you're not, you're seen as a bandit basically.
Also part of the reason why is because "gobnmunt/corpos bad".

>>88083640
Anon, I deeply respect your opinion on this matter. I came onto your post expecting the usual talking points, and your reference to the bronze age alongside the realities that would bring in a fantastical realm was insightful. I like it.

HOWEVER

I would also posit that Adventurers were, historically, merchants and mercenaries who embarked on perilous journeys where they would either face ruin or reward. That was the initial definition of "adventure," a flight from the mundane into an expedition where fantastical wealth or enormous loss. The Great Heathen Army were adventurers. Merchant-Adventurers were where the word came from, and were people who would travel the silk road. Effectively, an Adventurer is somebody that disconnects from the comfortable normalcy of the established economy to seek their riches, or die trying. This means that an Adventurer is inherently expendable - but the Adventurer knows this, because what they're gambling with is their life.

With that in mind, you can really begin to forge an understanding on what an Adventurer's Guild would be.

>>88086506
>With that in mind, you can really begin to forge an understanding on what an Adventurer's Guild would be.
I think this circles back towards point 2. Just as Pharaoh, and the other god kings had an insatiable need for copper & tin to make bronze, causing them to sponsor transcontinental trade routes, so too would your typical fantasy rulers need mithril and magical reagents.
Needing to ensure that the borders remain safe, the local harvest is bountiful, and the standard guilds (carpenters, masons, et al.) stay in line, these rulers can't afford to devote a lot of energy to procuring resources from far afield. So they outsource. The big merchant families already have established routes, and having made it big are highly risk adverse.
Similarly, the vast tracts of barbarous wasteland are a place where bandits, liches and other threats to the status quo can grow their power. Pharaoh can't send his soldiers out into the desert because they're needed to defend from Babylon, and the merchants won't go because the goblins don't have anything worth trading for (assuming they're even willing to trade).
Members of the adventurer's guild are expendable. A notable few will become fabulously wealthy (and most importantly, as far as Pharaoh is concerned, without threatening the status quo), but most will die and be forgotten. The closest its members will have to a "steady job" will be living at an one of the isolated rural communities which dots the silk road, where they kill the goblins who might threaten traveling merchants if their numbers grew unchecked.

If we throw in magical telecommunication, this network of guilds could become a power unto itself which contributes to the magical stagnation so common to fantasy settings. After all, if one nation advances to the point that the trade routes are disrupted, then the cushy lifestyle of those at the top of the AG hierarchy will come to an end.

Because it is a classic dividing line between Worldbuilders and people who are willing to accept minimally logical gameisms.
An Adventurer's Guild is a fucking stupid concept in any kind of world that can function logically. It is *fine* in gameism terms as an excuse to set up a quick gameplay session, but if your DM actually likes doing their part of the game you should never have to have that kind of crutch set up.

>>88088738
>An Adventurer's Guild is a fucking stupid concept in any kind of world that can function logically
I don't see how that can unequivocally be the case. We are talking about a world where large amounts of resources are found in holes filled with monsters. A miners guild would look a lot like an adventuring guild in such a world. The king grants this guild the sole right to extract resources from the dungeons on his land, and that guild chooses who gets to become a miner and where they go to work. They might not call it an adventurer's guild, but it's the same concept.

>>88077297
Mostly because of how Anime does adventuring guilds. They tend to be work agencies more than actual guilds. The actual structure of Guilds also doesn't work for Adventurers in general. Nobody is going to sit through a 5 year apprenticeship program. They might not even live through it. There's also the fact that adventurers often have their own agendas and aren't always looking for long term employment.

And then there's the "Fuck you, I do what I want" crowd that doesn't want to be tied down by a guild."

>>88089628
>"Fuck you, I do what I want" crowd
Part of guild's agenda is disposing of those... disruptive elements.

>>88077297
Personally, i like more "organic" stuff like
>you go to the local deputy
>at the towns hall there is a black board
>at the guard barracks, there are bounty contracts
>rumor has it, the local mage is looking for hired swords to gather spell components
>the town crier shouts about lord XY is seeking capable people

>>88088738
Depends on how common adventurers are. Keep in mind that the party is essentially just armed vagabonds wandering both cities and countryside. People are going to take issue with that.

If you're pretty rare then you're essentially flying under the radar. On one hand, you probably won't face much in taxes and regulations. On the other, expect problems finding jobs, problems with the city guard, and few businesses tailor to you.

If adventurers are fairly common then either there has to be some kind of regulation or every mayor, count, and baron is going to try to kick adventurers out before they murder someone important or pick a fight with a local lord. Just as the meme suggests, nobody is walking away from that fight smelling clean.

>>88088931
The biggest issue with Adventurer's Guilds is how they're often portrayed as being monolithic organizations lacking any political pretentions. It would be more believable if there were multiple (at least nominally competing) guilds which operate within the bounds of particular empires. Even if we assume that they're all working together under the leadership of their own private guild oligarchy, they would still need to take steps to assuage the concerns of the various monarchs in whose realms they operate, and local cultures would naturally bleed into the guild halls.
Along these lines, there should also be a greater emphasis on competition within the guild. The Bactria guildmaster wants more funds for his hall, so he exaggerates the threat posed by nearby Pashtun orcs. A local boss feels threatened by an up and coming party, so he sends them into a dragon's lair to search for an artifact which doesn't exist. Stealing magical crafting ingredients from a rival hall. Dealing with the political blowback of extorting merchants for protection money.

>>88089642
That's one way to do it. I usually just have some half-drunk magistrate hanging out in taverns. His main job is to notarize contracts but he also posts bounties for notable monsters, bandits, and adventurers gone bad.

Much easier to deal with than a full on guild.

>>88089852
This is mostly because most GMs don't like dealing with complex political drama.

>>88089825
The typical game typically has enough economic activity that the party can expect to be able to purchase the equipment, potions, and miscellaneous tools relevant to the adventuring profession. This presumes that there are large swaths of untamed wilderness separating cities which are packed with enough threatening creatures that everyone is operating on the premise that even peasants have a right to bear arms as otherwise they'd be easy prey for trolls and not get any farming done. Historically, under those circumstances, it meant that the power of the ruling class didn't extend far from their castles and they were chiefly concerned with fending off rival claimants.

>>88089852
>Along these lines, there should also be a greater emphasis on competition within the guild.
That actually sounds like a fun campaign. I might steal it for an upcoming campaign.

>>88077297
It's not polarizing. The only people who whinge about adventurer's guilds are already polarized.

>>88077530
>Because it's basically MMO/anime bullshit.
Adventurer's Guild was invented in 1989, before the existence of MMO's. KYS you retarded faggot

>>88077530
We'll set aside that there's trillions of dollars in the real world, and people with billions of them engineer entire wars just to get a few more - with millions of individuals vying every single day just to get a couple bucks more even when they have plenty - completely removing your argument that lots of adventurers would remove enough loot/dungeons from the world to make it meaningless. That's the dumbest shit I've ever heard.
I'll also ignore most of the rest of your points, because they're largely personal taste and enjoy whatever shitsandwich you want. However, I need to address
>a tavern or village works just fine
right after you've gone on a rant about how adventurers are supposed to be the top 1% of the general world population. You arguably care about realism to an extent, since you are arguing that a plethora of adventurers would realistically cause the economy of adventuring to go to zero, so why the hell do you think then that:
>4-6 truly extraordinarily people just so happen to walk into the same tavern/village in a quaint, unremarkable area of the world
when your own argument would mean this has a vanishingly small chance of ever happening? You're essentially saying that adventurer's guilds are asinine because they are unrealistic contrivances, just to say that ancient tropes that are themselves literal plot contrivances are acceptable because Reasons™. You'd have to provide constant explanations for how this happens - a point you use to argue the invalidity of adventurer's guilds.

tl;dr - this is your typical adventurer's guild hating spaz, a self-contradicting nerd who just doesn't like the aesthetics because they can somehow loosely associate it to people they don't like (in this case, MMO players and anime fans)

>>88077297
Adventurers are supposed to be special.

>>88088931
You send the military into unexplored hellscapes that have holes full of resources. Or mercenaries. An Adventurer's 'Guild' is an amorphous excuse to not build a real world.

>>88090151
>here's a real world thing that doesn't actually parallel this fantasy world at all
Okay?
>I'll also ignore most of the rest of your points, because they're largely personal taste
No shit, what tipped you off, the copious "to me's" peppered throughout? I don't need your fickle validation for shit I've already run for decades.
>4-6 truly extraordinarily people just so happen to walk into the same tavern/village in a quaint, unremarkable area of the world
Usually because they know one another. This isn't rocket science and your pointing out that you fundamentally don't understand the trappings of D&D isn't a gotcha. That you're conflating people meeting in a bar with "hundreds of extraspecial donut steel adventurers frequent this guild hall that exists for the sole purpose of commodifying people finding (what are supposed to be) rare treasure in (what are supposed to be) rarer ancient ruins" is honestly really funny.
Try going to the local pub sometime. You'll see "getting a drink" and "socialising" are actually really simple, natural motivations to get people together that don't necessitate some kind of massive "Weekend Alcohol Consumers Association" to facilitate.
>tl;dr - this is your typical adventurer's guild hating spaz
Who said hate? Haha. I just think it's dumb and doesn't fit with the assumptions of the game.
>who just doesn't like the aesthetics because they can somehow loosely associate it to people they don't like (in this case, MMO players and anime fans)
You sound angry. Did a grog kill your parents or something?

>>88090367
And? Guilds are gatekeeping devices.
Carpentry guilds exist to keep the profession special, so that not any retard can just show up and start pumping out chairs. They hoard information and manipulate the market for their collective benefit. Standard professional guilds are small percentages of the total population because a given city doesn't need that many carpenters/blacksmiths/whatever.
An adventurer's guild would be no different. It weeds out the idiots at the nearest troll den, and people who try to operate outside the guild don't receive the training on how to properly butcher an owlbear to get the most out of its magical organs. So if someone manages to survive the harsh privations of the lifestyle long enough, they'll eventually cave and join in order to learn the trade secrets.

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>>88084614
>

>>88077297
Because Guilds are a profession, What profession is "adventurer"?

Also,
What regulations are there?
How do they interact with the government?
How do they pay their member in training and do full fledged members have to pay them for the privileged of calling yourself a member, because what player would agree to give up 50% of their loot for just a title?
Do they rape their competition like guilds did irl?
Will they fuck over the players if they don't pay up?

What do they even do, if they explore dungeons and there are enough of them to form a guild then is there even anything left to explore? Dungeons and ruins are a limited resource.
If they kill monsters, why not call them mercs because that's what they are. And would a kingdom let a free roaming merc company exist, why would they?

tldr. It's lazy world building, yes lazier than they met at an inn.

>>88090384
>You send the military into unexplored hellscapes
King Jerbal-Baine sent his military into an unexplored hellscape. There were no roads, so progress was slow, they were constantly being harassed by the locals, they failed to recognize that the griffons were in heat and lost half their horses, supply lines broke down forcing them to eat the remaining half of their mounts, and they were ultimately routed by geography. Meanwhile the neighboring city state of Gheebes noticed that the border was undefended and ransacked the countryside.
Jerbal-Baine was ultimately deposed by one of the few generals to make it back alive.
>Or mercenaries.
The Bleak Bark company was hired to scout the island of Almiung for mithril deposits but stopped reporting back after eight months. Their final message reported rampant disease and trouble sourcing clean water. Four years later, they sailed back into port, each fully kitted in mithril and fielding kobold auxiliaries. It turns out that their commander lead the men to slay a dragon on the island and pronounced himself king of the indigenous kobolds. The Most Serene City of Chevice never recovered from the sacking.
>Adventurer's Guild
Meanwhile the God King Chungabungablizzar of Qerzia established a guild of young men to patrol his expansive empire and its vassals. They explore uncharted wasteland, slay monsters which would threaten the roads, and constantly bring in fresh monsters for his mage-lords to experiment upon. Though Chungabungablizzar's dynasty would eventually fall, being betrayed by a mage-lord vizier, the institution of the Adventurer's Guild would persist and spread. Some foreign realms distrust the guild, thinking it a source of spies and thieves, but the benefits associated with allowing its operation cannot be ignored.

>>88090441
Carpenters aren't special. Any kingdom will have thousands, at least. Adventurers are supposed to be rare once-in-a-generation geniuses.

>>88077297
Adventurers, by nature, are 'great man' fantasy. To be a special individual who can perform great and meaningful deeds and carve out their own destiny. If there's a guild, you're not special, your deeds are ordinary (there's hundreds of other people doing the same), and you can't carve out your own destiny or decide your own fate, what you get and what you can do is dictated by a bureaucracy.

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>>88077297
>It's good because it's easy
Are those supposed to be benefits? That's part of the problem right there. More to the point the very idea of an GUILD of adventurers runs very anathema to the idea of being an adventurer in and of itself. You're supposed to be the outsiders, the people who are rising above the normal in order to seek fame and fortune or achieve some grander goal. It's not special any more and it's not interesting. You've basically robbed the wonder of going on a quest and replaced it with pure bureaucracy.

Additionally it's a clear sign that, as a DM, you have no clear goal or greater plot in mind for your party, which isn't automatically a bad thing by itself, a smaller scale adventure can work but you've basically found a way to unionize murder hobos. There's no hook. No life. You just go to a quest board and pick the job to kill 10 rats or whatever for a crappy reward. Where's the quest to rescue the princesses? Where the mission from the king to deliver a missive to prevent a war? Where's the job to stop the dark lich wizard from unleashing darkness on the land. Any significant adventure isn't gonna sit around waiting for the right forms to be filled out.

The problem with adventurers guilds is that they rob the spirit of adventure itself and for what? Because you're too lazy to write a real quest or because you saw some shit anime.

>>88090473
How many degrees of adventure are you operating on?

>What profession is "adventurer"?
Monster slayer.
>What regulations are there?
>How do they interact with the government?
Depends on the government, but any place that has a particular need for professional monster slayers is going to make considerable concessions to those professionals.
>Do they rape their competition like guilds did irl?
The GM plays Violated Heroine, so yes.
>Will they fuck over the players if they don't pay up?
Contracts taken on by the guild are negotiated by a guild representative who also handles payment. Members like the players are paid their cut from that representative.
Aside from the initial registration, there are no dues collected. The guild chiefly funds itself by selling monster loot. Adventurer sells the guild the 14 hippogryph tongues for 100 dwarf billon coins a piece. The guild then sells those tongues to various mages and alchemists at a considerable mark up.

>>88077530
> The original conception of the dungeon adventurer assumed a person who is physically and mentally above average, 1% of the general world population.
>The idea that there enough of these people walking around and in contact with one another
Well first of all that's bullshit, you could always end up playing a shitty lowly criminal and thief with mediocre skills and low intelligence even in AD&D.
Second of all, in virtually all of these settings with adventurer guilds, adventuring is an "anything goes" profession where literally any moron can be an entry-level adventurer and do basic bitch errands, it's not prestigious, and is basically the equivalent of being a fantasy ratcatcher or courier if you're lucky. "dire rats in a tavern basement" is a classic level 1 encounter in D&D, the guys who do that for a living aren't glamorous.

>>88077297
adventure guilds take the mysterious/exciting and make it a routine 9-5 pest control job.

you aren't going somewhere because you wanna see whats beyond the next hill, you're going there because you'll get paid. you aren't fighting the goblins because they're getting in the way, you're doing it to get paid. you aren't working together with your party because you have a shared interest or because you happened to link up because of destiny, you're just coworkers at the same company. You don't tackle stronger threats because your experience, skill and luck make you seek and overcome greater threats, you just did enough D rank quests so now you're C rank.

only a country completely buck broken by working 12 hour shifts six days a week could come up with something like this. to the average japanese salarymen the idea of being an adventurer is something they can't even imagine, they just want their corporate grind to be something fantastical and that actually rewards them

>>88077297
This is my setting's take on an Adventure Guild:
>AG was just a bunch of rich nobles exploring all the remote areas of the worlds for kicks and bringing back relics and shit, just like in real life
>Eventually enough of the world gets civilized that AG expeditions became fewer and fewer
>Eventually the AG is just a social club for elderly men reminiscing about the past
[Insert my setting's mega disaster, imagine two worlds merging into one and there's new landmass and animals and plants etc]
>Everyone is freaking out and panicking except the AG
>Old AG members get an exploration boner, they start packing up to explore new land, contact old friends, start making new maps
>The AG have the infrastructure, logistics, and experience to make this work
>Kings and governments who are too busy trying to reestablish order in their own kingdoms contract the AG to explore places
>AG now has more tasks on hand than members; subcontract exploration tasks to outsiders for money or membership to AG
I think it works.

>>88090952
adventuter's guilds being the fantasy equivalent of old british gentleman's clubs who sit in leather armchairs smoking a pipe and bragging about how many zulus and lions they shot on safari is hilarious

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>>88077297

>>88077297
I already have to do menial tasks for money IRL, in my fantasy escapism time I want to do something meaningful and heroic.

In every city and large town, there's usually at least one drinking hole where mercenaries, treasure hunters, hatchetmen, thugs, whores, junkies, thieves, wizards, fugitives, and the occasional self-proclaimed hero are known to congregate.

They are allowed to exist because they serve a number of uses that the powers that be appreciate - deniable assets, concetrating troublemakers in the bad part of town, blackmail, keeping tabs on who's starting shit, rumors from elsewhere, and a secure location where no one asks stupid questions.

This is your "adventurer's guild."

>make a mercenary group or paramilitary organization
>hell sometimes it just is a national military
>slap the term 'guild' on it so that weebs immediately know what trope your setting is built around
>never have to establish any of the logical rules, politics, social effects or logistics of how your military -I mean, Guild! - works because, uhhh, guilds are just modern transactional capitalism
Its fine if you don't want to invest tons of time into your setting and hashing things out as a GM, but it doesn't take that much effort to just bullshit up an individual NPC to enlist the players as mercenaries to do X dungeon/encounter for him. I mean, fuck me, even the DnD 5e starter set module just has the party get hired by some rich fuck; even WotC cared enough to not resort to lazy JRPG and anime tropes despite said tropes being supported in the DMG; that shit has a reputation for a reason.

>>88092079
Right. The problem here is, those are *mercenaries*. That's not what a Guild is. A Guild implies a higher, nation-level degree of officiation and support for the economic activities and social status of approved members of the Guild. The idea of the local fantasy mercenaries in your tavern becomes a problem when all of these people are licensed and registered to be murderhobos that delve into apparently infinitely respawning murderholes with fat l00tz like its fucking Destiny 2 or something. It solidifies that your setting operates on videogame moon logic and not any degree of real thought, like, 'the national government trusts random fucking murderhobos with information about where potential extreme amounts of money and magical artifacts can be looted with no accountability, EN MASS"

>>88092155
The term "guild" is used ironically. like a "Thieves Guild"

>>88092171
But Adventurer's Guilds played straight are bureaucratic capitalistic temp agencies for "Player Characters"
If you're deliberately subverting the trope, that's... whatever? Acknowledging something is stupid is not better than just avoiding the stupid thing. But for most people the Adventurer's Guild concept does behave like a fictionalized version of a medieval trade guild and sometimes societal fraternity. Which is moon logic.
Also, I really hate to break this to you, but most people do the same thing with the Thieves' Guild concept when they use it because they are taking the idea from TES videogames, where simplistic hierarchy and quest systems mesh well with the truncated setting and dogshit game engine. And subverting that trope is, again, not BETTER than just not using it at all.

>>88091675
And then the Zulus and lions land at Dover and nobody can do anything except for the old duffers who keep making casually racist comments while reloading for the next wave.

>>88090694
>Well first of all that's bullshit,
This is all straight from the DMG. Level 0 exists for a reason, and no PC is ever in it.
>you could always end up playing a shitty lowly criminal and thief with mediocre skills and low intelligence even in AD&D.
In which case you weren't using the DMG guidance that avoided this by suggesting characters ought to have at least two 15s to be viable. Ignorance isn't an argument.
>Second of all, in virtually all of these settings with adventurer guilds, adventuring is an "anything goes" profession where literally any moron can be an entry-level adventurer
Then what is the point of a "adventurer's" guild if the people in it are effectively hirelings? Why would people congregate to do menial errands with no cohesive trade? These questions are rhetorical because I already know your answer is bullshit.
You just like the aesthetic or whatever. That's fine. Doesn't have to be logical why you like it (and likely isn't given how impassioned all your all's arguments for it are).

>>88090952
Not bad, anon, not bad at all.

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I imagine Adventurer's Guild as a job agency is gonna go by the book and only pay for the exact assigment given - no extra money for extra work.

But what's the MOST dogshit worldbuilding trope?
Adventurer's Guild
OR
Magic Academy

>>88092535
Magic academies at least make sense, nerds have been gathering together into schools for thousands of years. It's only a problem when it eliminates a more personal master/apprentice style of learning, which historically wasn't the case except for theologians.

>>88092535
100% adventures guild; they are much harder to justify and are usually linked to shitty isekai anime.
Magic Academies, at worse will attract the potterheads crowds or they'll want to play Strixhaven, but you can make it a pretty cool place for some adventures or hooks. The Academae of Korvosa in Pathfinder comes to mind or more recently, Raya Lucaria in Elden Ring. If you just make it a proper place of research & of learning instead of a quirky high school it's all good

>>88077297
It's at the nexus of expectations for fantasy games.
A certain standard of grog is mad that it is breaking their fantasy world immersion and is too lazy a way to introduce things for the players to do. They'd rather you think if a new thing every time but are happy being told to go on quests.
Another is angry that it is giving the players anything to do at all that they didn't discover themselves. They seethe at the notiom of quests amd insist you spend your time breaking in to the underworld of mustard smuggling instead of all that fantasy adventure the game is designed for.
Another, less groggy branch of gamers is annoyed at the lack of verisimilitude they assume it goes hand in hand with. They get mad that you didn't put in as much work as tolkien did over the course of his life in to the weekend before the game.
Another group is just mad at the notion of the GM having any kind of plan at all because they are afraid any structured narrative will turn them transsexual. They are mad because they assume any device that exists for narrative convenience is there to railroad them.

>>88092613
How about people who hate the idea of wearing a bureaucratic slave collar and making adventurer a job instead of a calling?

>>88092554
>Magic academies at least make sense
No, they don't. Academies where maybe some people have a Skull and Bones club that involves magic, maayyyybe. But a full on congregation point for people who can break reality on a whim would either
1: never exist because not enough of these people can keep from killing each other at any given time long enough to form an institution
2: be crusaded by the local government or religion proactively to prevent problem 1
3: be owned BY the local government or religious institution which is just step 1 with extra steps
You can have nice, socially acceptable wizards, you just have to define the line between what is an acceptable level of power imbalance between an individual and the other powerful individuals and institutions around them.

>>88092588
The potterheads are huffing the fumes of the pinnacle of the retarded Magic Academy trope, too. That's why the knockoffs are usually so bad. Making an actual pseudohistorical university/academy setting would require actual thought and historical research, and a setting where the magic has something more to it than just making up cool sounding horseshit, so that's out for most people.

>>88092648
The defense of guilds is always just a pathetic attempt at making the complainers look like grumpy old men. An adventurer be it by choice or circumstance should be guided along by a greater situation than this shit. It's worse than playing a mindless pack of murder hobos because the hobos are at least honest.

>>88092660
How much magic exists in a setting and how strong magic is depends on the setting, anon. You're acting like you have assumed a setting where one in a million people can use magic and are born as level 20 Wizards. Look at Eberron for a setting where magical artifice is part of daily life.

>>88092692
If it wasn't already evident, gonzo kitchen sink magical fantasy places itself intentionally as deep as possible into the moon logic quagmire that what I'm talking about doesn't really apply. I don't think you can write a setting that divorced from reality and not end up stepping into an anklebreaking logic hole somewhere.
Not that I'm saying people can't or shouldn't enjoy those settings, though. Its the tropes that bother me rather than any specific product that uses them.

>>88092757
Just say you like low-magic and be done with it, don't bother jerking me around by pretending this is a logical objection instead of merely a preference-based one.

>>88092787
I like low-magic because the world doesn't instantly smack me in the face like a brick when I try to think through its logical ordering for more than 10 seconds - which I prefer to do as a GM and worldbuilder. For players I recognize that of course that doesn't matter as long as people are having fun (school is not a fun setting though, nobody thinks this) which again is why I say play whatever you want. And I don't have a problem with the player party conspicuously consisting of 3-5 people who just all so happen to have great magical powers even in a setting where that's not common - I think the world should respond to that choice in a way that feels organic and appropriate.
When everyone is special, nobody is. When being a fucking wizard is literally doing homework and defeating the Lich King is your 9-5, you should just be grinding videogames IRL.

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>>88091675

>>88077297
For me, it's the Great Value Megumin.

>>88092912
Tits too big, I need my Megumin to be aerodynamic.

>>88092757
>If it wasn't already evident, gonzo kitchen sink magical fantasy places itself intentionally as deep as possible into the moon logic quagmire that what I'm talking about doesn't really apply.
Unironically, generic Japanese eroge fantasy resolves the logic gaps.
Monsters can proliferate without humans being wiped out because humans are a part of their reproductive cycle. This also creates a political cycle that being constantly repaved, so there's no shortage of ruins to explore. All that mana flowing around allows for mages and powerful heroes to save seed populations from the demon king's machinations allowing for the cycle to be restarted.

>>88093183
Okay, coomer

>>88077583
>A taiwanese guy
He was known as Chink here, he's a fa/tg/uy of eld, an ancient force.
He was fucked up back then and he's MORE fucked up now.

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>>88093285
>He was fucked up back then
he really was

>>88093285
He was a fa/tg/uy? Damn. I'd no idea. Know any more about what he was like?

>>88094777
He drew fucked up porn for us.

>>88094800
God bless that man.

>>88094800
Now he draws fucked up porn despite us.

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>>88094836
fugg, wrong image

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It's conceptually stupid, because any seasoned adventurer would immediately retire rich. Also any world with enough adventurers to form a guild would have a large unexplored frontier or exestinal threat by some other force, but paradoxically organized and independently funded enough to keep records and own the land it's on. But even though it's fucking dumb, it's a game so whatever, if having a bunch of mercenaries in a convenient location is beneficial than do it, who gives a fuck?

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>>88094907
>any world with enough adventurers to form a guild would have a large unexplored frontier or exestinal threat by some other force
That's exactly what I world built.

>>88092912
this Megumin is pretty useless, only good as a distraction and bait for goblins

>>88094777
>Know any more about what he was like?
Odd fella who used to draw porn of pretty much every teej meme that was relevant at the time (though mostly 40k stuff), often violent. Along with plenty of non-pornographic scribbles like >>88094305. He drew some porn of Noh, which at the time was considered reasonably edgy, Noh was not for fuck. He hates 4chan now for some reason, I don't remember why.

>>88097861
I'd forgotten about Noh, fuck. Thanks for the reminder, I needed some wholesome shit today.

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Lona Rpg gameplay is 10/10 survival rpg, but porn wise it is the most foul, disgusting god damn horrible degenerate nonsense I have ever seen, and genuinely the only h-game where I was compelled by the atrocious artwork alone to avoid H-skenes like the plague.

>>88092079
>>88092171
That's clearly not what OP is asking about though.

>>88077675
Basically this in my setting. It's either a club for children of wealthy people to pretend being an adventurer while someone too experienced for the job nanny them through dungeons (that they secretly rid of mortal dangers before) and get them to have fun while murdering easy prey. On the other side it's basically a union that gets more benefits than adventuring by yourself does but still comes with taxes and regulations.

>>88077297
they are just like a mercenary band, except they make manifest that the game master does not understand how medieval mercenaries worked and has only watched anime

>>88077530
>Because it's basically MMO/anime bullshit
And here you have your answer OP.
Retards who should lurk more have strong opinions on topics they have no knowledge of and make posts so counter-factual and obnoxious that others feel compelled to reply.

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I feel like a bigger, but perhaps less talked about, problem is the nature of the dungeons themselves. Where is your city located that it's surrounded by enough dungeons with enough loot to sustain years if not decades of constant dungeon scavenging. I realize that the term dungeon itself has gotten a bit vague but the way so much of this shit is presented it's like the dungeon exists purely because we need a dungeon. They're not the tombs of long forgotten kings, they're not mines taken over my monsters. They're just dungeons. And they're more pervasive than Starbucks.

>>88101269
In the settings I've used, they spontaneously appear a certain distance away from "civilized land" and seem to be created wholesale by a God whose job it is to make dungeons and populate them. In several of these games said God has churches and shrines (usually situated at the edge of town or in a basement somewhere) and even clerics and parishioners. Basically dungeons exist to test people and prepare them for more dangerous, evil things that beset the world from more evil gods or the machinations of evil people.

The whole economy surrounding the matter is of interest to merchants, because it seems like dungeons that appear in areas with well-functioning areas have lesser rewards than those in the middle of bumfuck nowhere.

>>88101342
This is about the level of reality-straining hyperconvenience I expect from people who run settings so closely aligned with anime tropes.

>>88101000
>STOP GIVING THIS (YOU)S
>gives it a (You)
Retard

>>88077297
It's just soulless and lazy, it keeps the DM from having to think up actual scenarios. They can just write their game like WoW.

>>88101342
That's idiotic.

>>88101342
>>88102070
Not that anon but I'm literally writing an isekai webnovel that features a god of art and seasons who does this
>>88102439
Yes, it really is

I haven't set up a real "adventurer's guild" in any of my settings, but the idea I have for them is that adventurer is just a generally nicer word for armed men for hire than mercenaries.
Adventurer guilds are just a political piece for a kingdom to control any potential hero. You need a membership to carry weapons, get access to higher-paying jobs, and some other benefits. In exchange, the kingdom gets a portion of any money you've made and knows about any potential band of demigods who could potentially disrupt their nation.

>>88077297
1. Anime
2. It boils adventuring into another mundane job

I’m fine with adventurers having guilds, but the idea of a general “adventurer’s guild” having enough people to keep it afloat seems retarded outside of an MMORPG where the dungeon has constantly respawning monsters and the merchant’s daughter is always in a state of being kidnapped except when you rescue her. What I would rather do for such a generic high fantasy setting is to let players join specific organization (Knightly orders, Wizard Covens, Monster Hunter guild etc.) they have to naturally explore the world to seek out conflicts. You might go to the bar for your first mission, and then meet a merchant who can direct you to bigger missions, meeting more important people and making more contacts who might come back to you at any point.

>>88103143
You remember in Berserk how Griffith started taking shit jobs for his mercenary group, crazy suicidal missions and shit nobody else wanted to do? And how they kept pulling it of and worked their way up the social ladder because he actually networked (to put it nicely) and got into people's good graces? There was no guild crap. No rank level. No, Oh you grinded out enough shit quests to move up a rank. Guild shit isn't just mundane. It's impersonal. You're not winning the trust of the people. You're not forming allies or gaining enemies. You're queuing up and getting points for a meaningless rank to just take different jobs.

>>88103495
You can do all of that with guilds, though. Most political structures like guilds require you to buddy up and be personally attached, have allies, and make enemies.

>>88103594
You can also do it WITHOUT them and it's frankly all the more immersive and straight forward when you DON'T.

>>88077530
>The original conception of the dungeon adventurer assumed a person who is physically and mentally above average, 1% of the general world population
schizo headbabble presented as fact is a bad way to start a post especially when the rest of the post is predicated on accepting your own assertation is irrefutable gospel

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>>88077297

There is, right now, a Worshipful Company of Wax Chandlers in London. It's a guild with a royal charter. Pic related.

If monsters are common enough in the world that "Person what kills monsters" is a job; there will be some kind of adventurer's guild eventually. This is not to say that the global standardized guild is good. And honestly an adventurers guild is far more likely to send people out to break the party's legs for taking jobs outside of the guild than they are to be a temp agency for adventurers. But it's not absurd, and the quality of it is, like anything going to depend on the work the DM puts into thinking about it.

>>88103833
Right but we're not talking about establishing a hunting license or shit like that. More to point if such a world exists and monsters are such a problem that they need to be dealt with then they would either be dealt with by the local lords as it's in their best interest or by hiring official civilian contractors. Nobody is complaining about the idea of organizations and groups. The problem is the anime idea of a guild that's basically just a tavern with a ranked quest board.

>>88090597
>Or mercenaries.
The Bleak Bark company was hired to scout the island of Almiung for mithril deposits but stopped reporting back after eight months. Their final message reported rampant disease and trouble sourcing clean water. Four years later, they sailed back into port, each fully kitted in mithril and fielding kobold auxiliaries. It turns out that their commander lead the men to slay a dragon on the island and pronounced himself king of the indigenous kobolds. The Most Serene City of Chevice never recovered from the sacking.

This just seems like the most typical PC party desu

>>88103877

We more or less agree. I just think that "Adventurers guild" is a larger concept and some of the dialogue here is tossing the baby with the bathwater.

>hiring official civilian contractors

i.e. creating an adventurer's guild. Mind due it wouldn't be the tavern with a ranked quest board. It'd be like pic related on my post; a group with a warrant from local authority to organize and set standards for a profession. And they'd probably get any such tavern shut down right quick. Officially or otherwise.

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>>88103824
AD&D DMG. p35 and 88.
The assumed setting of the game for 30 years was one where adventurers are exceptional and rare against the larger non leveled population. 3E, while not using their exact values, suggested a similar percentage of the general population.
Again, your ignorance is not an argument.

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>>88103824
>>88104170

>>88104170
You know not him but I just made a connection 1 in 100 isn't that rare. Most real word trades that developed guilds during that era had a lower percentage of the population as members than that, even at the 1000 or 5000 number is still more common than a lot of trades are in the real world.

>>88104245
Eh, I feel like I accounted for that comparison with how I originally summarized it. My "1% of the world are adventurers" is actually the generous interpretation of those passages, because the alternative (which honestly might be the more correct one given the context of 1 in 100 and 2 in 50 values) is for number of just 'prospective' henchman. Meaning that is the percentage of the general population with just the 'capacity' to become an adventurer and attain levels, not the number of adventurers running around.

I don't see it much different from the concept of employment office, calling it "Adventurer's Guild" just feels a bit tacky.

>>88077654
I dunno, deindustrialization and outsourcing of resource production isn't really working out for the UK in the long run.

>>88102902
>I'm literally writing an isekai webnovel
I don't have reaction images saved onto this computer since its a new rig and all, so just imagine I have a really insulting image uploaded of a cartoon character laughing at you with some deep fried text lifted from a different meme format that says ISHYGDDT or something similar at the bottom.

>>88101342
I've got something similar in my own setting. The gods were all killed ages ago by a race of aberrations. Their ruins litter the setting in the form of megastructures like the ring around the planet and the space stations that are currently infested by vampires. Some of these are permanent, like the ring around the planet. Others are more ephemeral, flickering into existence for days or weeks at a time before fading away, only to return decades later on the other side of the planet, if at all.

There's also an ever-shifting maze demiplane they made that periodically spits out entrances into the world, which attracts anyone seeking quick and easy money. The maze openings are only open for a couple of months before they close off, the maze shuffles itself, magically restocks itself with random bullshit, and opens up somewhere else. It's very video game-y, and the DM reason as to why is that the aberrations used it as a form of entertainment before they got bored and decided that deicide was fun.

>>88104245
That's just the number of people in the population FIT to be adventurers. A lot of those people will already be gainfully employed in, say, the military or otherwise set up comfortably, meaning they're not interested in murderhoboing and cave looting professionally full-time.
Adventurers in the sense of player characters are anomalies - they're fit or skilled enough to do something more gainful, but possessed of a unique drive or external motivation to take up a very transient job.
You know what much more sensible real world analogous employment there is for those people? Being mercenaries.

>>88104318
The way I read it 1 in 100 humans 1 in 50 otherwise have the potential to level and become an adventurer of at least the 1st level of those 10% actually become come adventurers in a normal society, 25% in a dangerous one and 2% in a very peaceful one. Which is actually shocking common compared to real world trades.

>>88077297
Because it does not make since, if a town is small enough to be having problems they can't afford it. And if a town is big enough it does not need as the local guards, military can handle any problem.

>>88077297
I'm impartial, but to me an adventurer's guild always seemed like an answer looking for a question. A post-facto explanation to just wanting to impose modern senses of order and structure onto a medieval setting that would find them bizarre.

We want the idea of an adventurer's guild because it makes sense to us, today, to organize some sort of union or even just a club who deal with the very real problem of goblins, monsters, etc.

But to ancient people, you've basically just given a reason why agrarianism would never have taken off beyond the Mesopotamian walled city model where all the workers live inside the walls. Scythians and Aryans are bad enough--now you're telling me there's 200 IQ Dragons out there? Ogres? Orcs, Goblins, Displacer Beasts? You're telling me there's an entire species of INVISIBLE TIGERS that live outside?

The Adventurer's guild is like a retrofitted idea, and I'm fine with that we've got a bunch of them already, but of course it's unrealistic. You'd never get far enough in a world like the one fantasy describes to form one.

>>88104533
>A merchant's or carpenter's guild is trying to force modern ideas into a medieval setting

>>88104672
You don't know how a merchant or carpenter's guild worked.
Protip: it is not at all like whatever you think

>>88104699
ok tell us king

People don't like the name, because it's shitty. If you present them as localized mercenary companies with a fixed headquarters nobody cares.

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>>88104414
Let's break it down:
-To start we have, qualified racially, 1% (1 in every 100) of all humans and half orcs will be suitable to potentially level and adventure. 2% (1 in 50) of all other races are suitable.
-Second we have an adjusted figure of the actual percentage that are not just suitable to adventure and level, but actually disposed to doing so (i.e., they don't have a cushy gig already), which it puts as .1% (1 in 1000).
-Third, we look at how this .1% is adjusted for more active adventuring areas at .5% (1 in 200), and for less active/more settled areas at .02% (1 in 5000).

So the actual figure for people both fit for and amenable to adventuring/leveling is anywhere from .02% to .5% of the population, with the standard at about .1%.
Which sounds impressive when we're say, looking at comparative real world populations and history, but seems much less impressive when we apply it to the intended context, the assumed fantasy milieu etc. Greyhawk's Flanaess for instance has a pretty damn small population (maybe numbering some 1 million and change, maybe a bit more, going by 1983). Which yields what? 1000-2000 adventurers running around over 6.5million sq. miles?
That's certainly less dense and less common than a comparison to real world values would suggest.

>>88104708
https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Guilds/
reading literally anything other than light novels is good for you

>>88104739
At population numbers like that the problem isn't adventurer's being rare the problem is civilized races are absurdly rare, this is a land mass twice the size of the united states with about a 3rd the population of Japan in the year zero.

>>88103940
Yeah. The dividing line between mercenaries and adventurers is rather thin. The only appreciable distinction to be drawn is that the former is used for killing people, and the latter is used for killing monsters.

>>88104753
>https://www.worldhistory.org/Medieval_Guilds/
The big take away I'm pulling from this is that there should be multiple guilds for adventurers to cover each class, subclass, weapon specialization and to have redundant guilds for different regions.
The official "Adventurer's Guild" would be a spin off of a merchant guild, with its members being bankers who treat adventurers as a commodity. Initially, they sourced mercenary guards for trade caravans, but expanded their operations over time. They subcontract with the respective class guilds to find people with the appropriate skills for a given task.

>>88104980
What you're describing is how granular the guild system should be, but you've failed to account for where the actual monetary and societal capital that made guilds function comes from.
Guilds were not unions. Guilds functioned at the pleasure of the national or local government, depending on the era and scope of the Guild - what legitimized major Guilds or networks of interrelated Guilds would be a charter from the Lord or Monarchy permitting them to monopolize a trade in exchange for tightly regulated taxation and other terms.
Now use your brain for this one - why would your fantasy kingdom pay or otherwise subsidize literal legions of murderhobos to go dig up hordes of wealth and magical tools? How is information on the existence of dungeons or etc
A: prevalent enough to be bureaucratically disseminated
B: not entirely monopolized by the government and military
C: not an extreme risk to every single person
You're also failing to account for the fact that the governmental and social legitimacy of Guilds directly conferred elevated social and political standing to guildmembers, which was intentionally abused by real world guilds as an outlet for the burgeoning medieval middle class to get one over on the landed nobility. Many medieval Guilds or Fraternities existed as a means of consolidating social power first and a trade partnership second, which is where institutions like the Freemasons came from. Can you imagine how quickly your fantasy setting would politically unravel if the same shmucks that were pulling magic items out of dungeons as a 9-5 also all had implicit government approval? That system would create a murderhobo pirate republic.
When you mindlessly adapt modern capitalist convenience economy concepts into fantasy murderhobo land, you will inevitably break basic logic. Literally just replace the concept of Adventurer's Guilds with "the nobles hired some disposable shmucks as mercenaries" and your setting becomes less of a bad joke.

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>>88105098
>why would your fantasy kingdom pay or otherwise subsidize literal legions of murderhobos to go dig up hordes of wealth and magical tools?
They're not being subsidized for looting ancient elven ruins. They're being subsidized for killing the various magical monsters which roam the countryside.
The "why" for this is very simple: it frees up the lord's soldiers for military endeavors.
Magical monsters are a threat to peasants in the field, merchants on the road, a threat to lumber and mining industries, and if they aren't sufficiently culled will propagate enough to become a threat to the cities as well. Maintaining a dedicated class of people to deal with these monsters would be necessary for civilization to prosper, and keeping that class of people separate from the military means that the king's army can devote itself wholly to war.
>A: prevalent enough to be bureaucratically disseminated
Nigga just go outside and you find owlbears shitting in the woods. Clerics are literate, have access to magic telepathy, and always help the local lords with their bureaucracy.
>B: not entirely monopolized by the government and military
Tracking and fighting trolls is not the same as fighting a pitched battle. The king has enough problems with the logistics of war; he doesn't want to start losing companies of men to random woodland monsters.
>C: not an extreme risk to every single person
Monsters ARE an extreme risk to everyone. That's why political and economic incentives are made to get people to throw their lives at the problem.
>That system would create a murderhobo pirate republic.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it'd end with the world being dominated by a handful of demigod despots who cultivate their empires like private gardens while everyone outside their realms has to deal with a brutal monster infested hellscape until someone arises among them to demigod status which probably starts a major war and new epoch of history.

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>>88077297
It feels a bit too video game-y.
In a video game it's convenient to have one place you can go back to to get quests, rewards for those quests and hire new people. Pieces of paper just kind of magically spring up there saying 'please kill 10 orcs in this village' and when you've done it the guild master knows you've done it and gives you 100 gold and a potion and 5 good boy guild points.
But in a world where I'm meant to believe these are actual issues that need resolving and the NPCs I'm meant to kill are actually doing bad shit, then I don't really buy that this whole process works: some peasant or local escapes the danger for long enough to go to the nearest guild hall to do all the appropriate paper work and negotiate a reward, the guild ranks it and puts it up on a board, and the situation remains paused and the evil orcs just kind of wait around for a plucky party of adventurers to decide they want to do this D* Rank mission and go to the village and fight the orcs.
It feels kind of sterile if missions are just these groups of monsters or bits of treasure sitting around waiting for a guild approved person to act on them, rather than developing situations that the PCs stumble across or are sought out to solve. You lose the intimacy of helping someone out if there's not unique quest givers and just some piece of paper with a tick box on it.

Plus logistics stuff/worldbuilding autism. Ideally a party is a bunch of people with different skills, backgrounds and their own goals who have through circumstance or something in common, ended up on an adventure together. People who have these amazing skills just relegating themselves to bungling around aimlessly as 'an adventurer' doesn't feel right. Like, why would an ordained priest, a drooling barbarian and a knightly warrior all just drop whatever duties or factional loyalties they have so they can go join up with the adventurers' guild?

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>>88105452
And there's the question of what exactly a guild's reach is or how it monopolises adventuring. An actual guild controlled a trade within a city or town. That's a defined area, it's fairly easy to gather up everyone who does that thing and say
>these are the rules, this is how the market works, get on board with it or we'll fuck you over
But adventures go all over the place. That's what makes them adventures. What authority does a guild hall in one city have over an entire swathe of the kingdom and all the monsters and dungeons in it? If a party of vagabond adventurers rolls through and solves some issues, how does the guild know about that? What are they going to do about it? Does the orc plagued village say
>no sorry you guys aren't guild approved adventurers(tm), I think we'll keep letting them rape our fields and salt our women until the shonen jump protagonists show up
Issues and quests being reduced to jobs to take off a board relies on this idea that everything's very interconnected and news travels at telephone/radio/internet speeds. You could have like, a big telepathic network or crystal spheres or some shit for that but for me it then bubbles down to a level of personal preference; I like my fantasy to feel more like a straight faced medieval (or whatever time period world) rather than that kind of light fantasy wherein society is very familiar and modern with a veneer of timbered buildings and swords.

I'm down with organisations that give players quests but I'd rather they were more specific than a one stop shop. You could have
>A cathedral
>A knightly order
>A wizards tower
essentially serving the same purpose but feeling a bit more believable: different factions and people want different shit done rather than putting all their trust in the local melting pot. An adventurer's guild is fine if you just want a light hearted game but if the setting's actually meant to be taken seriously I'd like to see an appropriate amount of autism put into it.

>>88101269
Just take a note from old Eddy G's book and sprinkle the landscape with micro dungeons like two level crypts or old ruined forts that nobody has the funds or manpower to reclaim so hostile races and monsters move in and start harassing the trade routes.
Although he does have his own problems with the fucking order of wizards dedicated to spreading magic for their god by intentionally hiding wands and scrolls in dungeons to avoid any issues caused by just handing them out on the city streets.

>>88104980
>The big take away I'm pulling from this is that there should be multiple guilds for adventurers to cover each class,
Here's another problem in itself. CLASSES aren't what you are. They're what you do. You don't hit puberty and become a warrior or a hunter. The function of classes exists because a game needs mechanics. But you're not meant to roleplay the mechanics. An archer mechanically needs a rule set but in terms of the role play you're not playing ARCHER Bob, you're playing Bob who made a living off hunting. This is the major problem with so much fantasy anime now. It's the dire inability to separate the game mechanics from what the mechanics are there to represent and support.

>>88104356
NTA but making shit is infinitely better than being some fucking meme-poisoned curmudgeon who's incapable of enjoying things not pre-approved by the collective.
I would take 1000 people pumping out cringe isekai series out of genuine passion and desire than any number of people who avoid cringe to the point that they exude a field of anti-creativity

>>88105318
No offense but your description of adventures just makes them sound like a hybrid between park rangers and police officers.
Really it makes me think that the way it would play out is just a specialized part of the local militia. Groups of locals with fighting aptitude who over the ears have come to deal with their local threats when they arise. Then if something out of their wheelhouse comes along the headman sends a message out to the lord who sends some raised troops and a knight to deal with it if the resources are there.
Like your standard medieval peasant has some training with a bow just on account of supplementing their diets with game and you didn't call the military every time their was a pack of wolves to close tot he village. Instead the local huntsman or a organized group of villagers will just deal with the problem. And if something bigger comes along that's what knights are for.

>>88092535
I think both only really work well at low levels, with a bit more leeway on the guilds, but once you’re mid-high level they should just fade into the bg as your party becomes more influential and they have less to offer you, and at best be a place to recruit hirelings, or maybe that basic new character you rolled up after your last one died if you’re mid level.
>>88092660
The real reality-warping shit you’re talking about that wizards are infamous for should probably require things like high levels of ambient magic or obscure reagents, which would justify a strong wizard setting up a tower as a research station in the middle of nowhere for ease of access. Also because it’s too dangerous to experiment with that kind of stuff in the middle of even a small village, let alone the major cities that active universities would be based in/have built around them.
They’d probably be populated with lower level magicians who know the basics of magic, with far more theoretical knowledge than practical experience. If someone wants more than that they’ll have to apprentice under an actual wizard, as opposed to a professor.
The adventurer guilds (really, mercenary headquarters) are regional, probably spring up in medium sized towns on trade routes near frontier territory, (small villages can’t support them, big cities will have enough guards to not need them) and mainly are populated by people who travel between a handful of towns and can generally handle the average threats you find on the road, but nothing exceptional.
>>88090614
>>88090627
Correction: High level adventurers are like that. IMO part of the point of the game is the journey to becoming those “great men.” If mid-level humanoid enemies are capable of challenging the party without significantly outnumbering them, then you ain’t once-in-a-generation yet.

>>88105318
Why the pic? Second Apocalypse has one very specific trend of adventurers (the Scalpoi) and it doesn't fucking work, the Sranc are still an omnipresent threat on the order of billions. In fact the entire thing was probably a plot by Khellus to ensure that Akka and Mimara actually got to their destination.

It's still a cool setting but it's noteworthy for being the LEAST typical adventurer fantasy friendly story written... Maybe ever. Please finish the goddamn series Bakker.

>>88105886
Putting in negative effort to produce puerile trash does not qualify you for respect.

>>88105894
>a hybrid between park rangers and police officers.
Nah, just park rangers who do a lot of killing. Police work is for the town watch.
Watch deals with thieves. Soldiers deal with armies. Adventurers deal with monsters. Bandits are hostis humani generis and can be dealt with by any of the above according to circumstance.
As you've pointed out, farmers can deal with wolves on their own. Particularly savvy ones might be able to handle weaker monsters, but things like undead and the beefier magical monsters can require more specialized skills. Someone needs to deal with those threats, someone who can put everything down to track down the monster's lair.
>>88107754
>Why the pic?
It was an example of a demigod king.
>In fact the entire thing was probably a plot by Khellus to ensure that Akka and Mimara actually got to their destination.
The specific troupe they travel with might have been (they could have simply been stationed there to babysit Nil'giccas), but the broader phenomena of the scalpers was enacted to thin out the sranc's numbers in preparation for his army's march on Golgotterath
>Please finish the goddamn series Bakker.
It is finished. The cliffhanger ending is intentional.
WHAT DO YOU SEE

>>88077297
It's lazy, generic and uninspired. You can do any other kind of setup and manage to have the same kind of system in place without lazily handwaving it as 'Adventurer Guild!'

I didn't read this thread so I'm sure everyone has said similar shit and will not elaborate further.

I've never heard of it being controversial. It seems like the perfect thing for a setting, and makes sense. There's some things that the local guard can't or won't deal with, but the local people would still like done.

Cave full of goblins? Guard isn't going to risk it since the goblins rarely attack townsfolk. They'll tell you to stay away at best. A merchant who has interest in a resource around the cave though? He'd happily pay to have it cleared.

Bigger. There's a dragon terrorizing a large area. Many towns. Many counties. Many polities. No Lord is going to send his own army, leaving his fief defenseless, to slay a dragon bothering his rival. It's just not in his interest unless the dragon has set up near one of his towns. Who better to send than adventurers (who won't get paid if they die in the process).

I've never heard of it being controversial and can't see why it would be. Must be faggots who insist on reinventing the wheel on everything.

>>88108548
>There's some things that the local guard can't or won't deal with, but the local people would still like done.
Says who? Nobody that's who. You have to purposely write the local guard, lords and army as neglectful and ineffective in order to even begin justifying this shit. More to point if the local guard, who would ideally receive the best equipment and training won't deal with this shit shit why would a rando sign up when he receives neither.

>>88108548
>It seems like the perfect thing for a setting, and makes sense
>Cave full of goblins? Guard isn't going to risk it since the goblins rarely attack townsfolk.
Maybe for a new age setting with no internal consistent, but OD&D and AD&D pretty soundly said to even become a lord and invite people to work your lands, you have to clear those lands you intend to rule of threats like a dragon or a goblin cave and keep them clear to maintain the loyalty of your subjects. The invitation to action on the part of players is not because local lords are just by default ineffectual and somehow maintain rule by doing nothing, it's because the assumed setting of the game for decades was wild lands on the fringes of civilization where small towns have no lord to appeal to and players have the opportunity and incentive to intervene and attain gold, glory, and station.
>Must be faggots who insist on reinventing the wheel
Adventurer's Guilds are a pretty new idea, spurned by modern dilution of the hobby and the subsequent mundanity of the kind of scrappy low level adventuring the hobby was built on.
As I already showed,
>>88104170
>>88104178
>>88104739
the origins of the hobby painted a picture of adventuring as a small fraction of a small population over a large untamed wilderness.
So an AG is the one "reinventing the wheel" by making adventuring bureaucratic and mundane, not the other way around.

>>88077297
I'm not against X Guild but if you have it straight up like that, "yeah let's go to the Thieves' Guild and ask!" it feels like inane pokemon shit. It only takes some real basic effort to transform the Thieves' Guild into some kind of underground organization, the Wizards' Guild into not!Freemasonry/Cultists and other things that pretty much work the same way more elegantly and have far more potential for story and implicit conflict.

>>88077530
1%, huh? So if there was a city of 1000, I'd be able to organize 100? Sounds like a guild.
Do you think Artisan guilds only started because there were enough people who independently knew a craft that they started running into each other on the street and only then did they gather? Rare and skilled people is exactly the case for forming an organization to train and contract them. If your village has a troll problem, what's more useful? Aimless wanderers happening upon it, or an organization of exterminators you can send someone to the city to commission to save your shit stain town?

I find adventuring guilds to be somewhat cartoony (or at least often implemented in a cartoony way), but I don't understand your logic. It seems like you just want to feed your own bias against them, regardless if they actually make sense or could be organic.

>>88109042
You can't make a guild out of 100 volunteers. Guilds are not unions. Also, of those 100 people, the vast majority of them would already be gainfully employed in the MILITARY or GUARD, or PRIVATE MERCENARY WORK because those institutions should actually exist despite your laziness in GMing.

IMO it's just a signifier of tone for settings. Adventurers Guilds are jarring and don't fit into games where "adventurer" is something you can mockingly call a scruffy tomb-robber, where they're on the fringes of society performing odd-jobs and treasure hunts. It's a tone I enjoy working in, and would never want Adventurers Guilds in low/dark fantasy. If being an adventurer is something you do because you couldn't make it work in normal society as a court wizard or a knight in service of a noble, then there being a guild feels wrong. But for the kinds of settings you see in your dragon quest style stuff where the fantasy is commonplace and the assumed power level/presence of magic is much higher, it feels tonally consistent. You've got a large population of powerful, self-motivated warriors and wizards who need direction, bureaucratic support, and corralling so they don't succumb to their worst impulses, that society still respects and views as valuable. In that kind of setting, which I guess you could just call an anime-esque setting, Adventurers Guilds make perfect sense and fit the vibe.

TL;DR no adventurers guilds if I'm playing Conan, adventurers guilds are fine if I'm playing a spiky-haired jrpg dude.

>>88109042
Well, as I stated here >>88104739
later, that was my shorthand of the DMG. The actual accurate value looks like a much lower average of .1% (1 in every 1000). And that's only for individuals with the capacity to adventure, not necessarily who are active adventurers. In more active adventuring areas that goes up to .5% (again who are fit to become adventurers, not who are adventuring).
Which comes out to 5 of your 1000 that have 'potential' to be adventurers. The actual adventurer count I'd surmise from that small percentage of potential amount would be much smaller.
>I find adventuring guilds to be somewhat cartoony (or at least often implemented in a cartoony way), but I don't understand your logic.
Because you're completely ignorant of the firsthand sources I'm citing. These are not references to some guys thoughts on the implied demographics, it's right from the guy who made the hobby.
Which is fine of you think that's dumb and you'd assume more people are adventuring at your table, but don't talk like this is coming out of nowhere when I'm clearly pointing to where this is coming from in subsequent posts, and where it's coming from is the origins of the game.

>>88104739
>Greyhawk's Flanaess for instance has a pretty damn small population (maybe numbering some 1 million and change, maybe a bit more, going by 1983

That's absurdly tiny given the size of the region. Medieval France by itself at the end of the Middle Ages had a population of around 16 million, and the Flanaess is three times the size of all of Europe.

Where the Hell IS everybody?

>>88109276
So there are a few factors that don't go noted with that figure. 1) The listed population numbers are mostly humans and some demihumans which inhabit humanocentric settlements. It does not seem to account for demihuman settlements, or humanoid or monster populations. 2) The random encounter tables for wilderness in Flanaess paint the picture of a pretty wild, untamed, and dangerous land. You can get some pretty rough shit not far from settlements and cities. 3) I think that while it's natural to try and look at medieval demographics and population density for a benchmark, Gary was mostly disinterested in historical simulation (I say mostly because his polearm shit still betrays a medieval wargamer's autism) as much as the trappings of medieval. The fantasy milieu is necessarily one dissimilar from historical counterparts and has considerations and limitations the historical medieval period did not (monstrous and demihuman populations vying for the same resources, monsters populations preying upon settlements, what seems to be a much larger world etc etc).

>>88097861
>He hates 4chan now for some reason, I don't remember why.
He's perma-banned for vocal anti-Chinese sentiment.

>>88077297

You could conjure up any kind of explanation you want for why it works or doesn't. Any of them would be good enough to help suspend disbelief and get a game going. And honestly the in-game situation would probably evolve over time. Get enough adventurers in one place and they'll eventually organize, or be made to organize by the local government. After a while, the organization would plunder all nearby treasure and kill all nearby monsters, then degenerate into another bureaucratic tax haven. Eventually, informal adventuring groups would spring up to operate long-haul raids outside of its reach, leaving it obsolete. Who knows.

I just don't care for the concept from a storytelling perspective. I prefer the idea that adventurers are a small, ad hoc group of ragtag heroes rather than a clearly delineated and organized group of privately-run special forces. The former sounds like freedom; the latter sounds like a job.

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>>88100397
Dammit Elise, I trust the kid genuinely tries and believes to be a good person. Just happens to be so messed up in the head that the very concept of what it means to be a good person is way off. Having no impulse control whatsoever also doesn't help... Correction needed.

>>88104331
Blame the unions.A good example of that is the car industry.Unions caused so much trouble and extra costs it couldn't innovate and became a joke.

>>88077297
>Why is the idea of an Adventurer's Guild so polarizing?
For most educated people it isn't even remotely polarizing. Why do you assume it is? Because a LOT of ppl here are illiterate morons without even the basic research skills to look into "The Age of Exploration when actual honest to fucking god adventurers clubs existed? I mean look up John Cabot for starters....some italian guy who did some stuff for Henry VIII and got a letter of patent to go explore. Dude was a quintessential product of that time and a dyed in the wool adventurer.