Change the setting or create a world the feel you want. No need to create adventurer guilds, magic shops or have monsters around every corner.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;998810I have been doing a lot of thinking about the adventuring profession. The things that the typical adventuring party does are straight out of myths, legends and fairy tales. This sets the standard.

What I found weird about the settings I surveyed is that often that standard is considered common or gritty. These worlds do not resemble the Tolkien or pulp fiction that inspired them except in the window dressing. These worlds have adventurers' guilds consisting of many thousands of members and monsters coming out of the woodwork to keep them employed. Traditionally mythical monsters like dragons and demons and whatever are commonplace rather than apocalyptic occurrences, little different from mundane animals and bandits aside from some arbitrary game rule about "magic" versus "non-magic".

When the party is performing the equivalent of the Twelve Labors of Hercules every adventure or two, it trivializes Hercules' accomplishment. Because of this trivialization and loss of perspective, additional progression like "epic", "mythic" or "legendary" (all meaningless terms by now) is often added on to that, which is made out to sound unique but is invariably more of the same or the math breaks down. For example, Pathfinder introduces the "mythic cockatrice" and the 5e MM introduces "legendary dragons", never mind that pretty much everything in the bestiary is straight out of real world myth and legend.

I find the whole situation rather ridiculous. Does anyone have any suggestions for settings that are closer to the original inspirations and don't trivialize the party's accomplishments?

Yep just scale it right back, to a low magic base, is my suggestion. There isnt lots of different coloured dragons, there is The Dragon. Just one. Same for the cockatrice, or maybe there is a unique herd in a particular ruin somewhere. But just the one herd. The players dont need to fight bunches of cockatrices in their campaign - one lot is enough, next adventure move onto some other monster/man problem. Same for dragons, you only need one for a campaign. I think for this it also helps to get buy in on a "region" of the world that the party are going to adventure in, or at least at first. Not hopping around everywhere. To this end, points of light may be easier - most of the realm is uncharted, unknown and dangerous as all f*ck, esp due to the [insert single man eating creature/humanoid race] that plagues much of the wilds. Similarly, there are no adventuring guilds etc - genuine adventurers are reasonably rare - there are only a dozen in a city at any one time. Most die in a ditch somewhere, unknown and unmissed. The few that are successful swiftly retire when they are able and take up normal, safer, lives.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;998815Honestly, make your own.



 In Dave Arneson's BLACKMOOR, there was no such thing as "Raise Dead;" dead was dead.  An amazing number of player characters retired after a few successful adventures.  This mean that the Judge's Guild penchant for such thinks as the innkeeper is a 3rd level fighter with a +1 axe was based on actual play.

I did not know this and like it very much indeed

Quote from: David Johansen;999280There was an Earthdawn article in Shadis that I've always liked.  "Our city is overrun with cutthroats and knaves and the worst of these we call "heroes."

That's really how I see it.  Adventurers might see themselves as noble heroes fighting evil.  Everyone else sees them as dangerous bands of thugs out for their own gain through murder and robbery.  Even the bands of knights errant aren't really well loved or respected as much as feared.

I'm usually the same.  Adventurers are what people call themselves to put a heroic veneer on the fact that they're usually bandits and muscle for hire.  

"There were three of them. They were immediately and absolutely recognizable as adventurers; rogues who wandered the Ragamoll and the Cymek and Fellid and probably the whole of Bas-Lag. They were hardy and dangerous, lawless, stripped of allegiance or morality, living off their wits, stealing and ikilling, hiring themselves out to whoever and whatever cam. They were inspired by dubious virtues. A few performed useful services: research, cartography, and the like. Most were nothing but tomb raiders. They were scum who died violent deahts, hanging on to a certain cachet among the impressionable through their undeniable bravery and their occasionally impressive exploits."
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station.

Earthdawn really does portray this well. So many 'retired' Adepts of lower circles running around. So many strange rumors about Adepts of higher circles. Did you know that Garlthik One-eye, 13th Circle Thief Lord of Kratas has to steal his soul back from Death every night? That dude has to be like 50-plus, and Orks just don't live that long...

If everyone is special, no-one is special.

Just make your own setting. Make it mostly random and tie the random stuff together with whatever crazy shit pops into your head at the time. The players will love it.

The person running this website is a racist who publicly advocates genocidal practices.

I am deleting my content.

I recommend you do the same.

I'll agree there. I hate the whole "adventurers are inherently vile scum" idea, especially in a default D&D cosmology where Good, Evil, Law and Chaos are fundamental forces of the universe and adventurers can be (and PCs are normally assumed to be) good-aligned, or at worst not evil-aligned.

Quote from: Gronan of Simmerya;998815How I handle it in my world is that many, many people have the POTENTIAL to go up levels.  Many never even try; many that try, either give up after a time or two, get 1000 GP and buy an inn and retire at 2nd level, or die horribly.  In Dave Arneson's BLACKMOOR, there was no such thing as "Raise Dead;" dead was dead.  An amazing number of player characters retired after a few successful adventures.  This mean that the Judge's Guild penchant for such thinks as the innkeeper is a 3rd level fighter with a +1 axe was based on actual play.

Rather like Discworld's "Hugglestons" boarding school, adventuring will turn boys into men, but there is a certain amount of wastage involved in the process.

I guess that makes sense. It leaves room for higher levels to cover genuinely mythic heroes.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;999479I'd also suggest taking a slightly closer look at the source material you're talking about: The "adventurers' guild" trope is built out Tolkien's Dúnedain, Leiber's thieves' guilds, and various 18th century societies sponsoring exploration expeditions. The idea that Hercules' accomplishments are trivialized by having a bunch of other comparable heroes might benefit from a quick review of the Argonautica, where Hercules teams up with a bunch of heroes whose careers are studded with heroic deeds.

Weren't the Argonauts princes and demigods and pretty much the most famous people in the mythic world at the time? Not exactly common, were they?

Why is it either/or? They start out nobodies and if they survive, become mythic.

The person running this website is a racist who publicly advocates genocidal practices.

I am deleting my content.

I recommend you do the same.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;999703Depends on your perspective, I guess: There's like 40-50 of them, virtually all from Greece. And they're not even all the heroes of Greece (they keep running into more on their journey, for starters).

But they were considered mythic, right? They didn't have to layer on another set of epic/mythic/legendary/whatever tiers? I never liked those sorts of systems, particularly Pathfinder's absurd claim that standard campaigns are not mythic in the dictionary sense.

The Argonauts were just a big multipart summer crossover.  Stan Lee is that old.

It's certainly true that the Monster Manual makes into standards many creatures that were singular legends. i.e. In D&D, there is a class of beings called medusas who are standardized opponents; while in myth there was a singular being whose name was Medusa.

Similarly, there's a big difference between the Argonauts, who are legendary princes and demigods - and a starting D&D party, who aren't even the most prominent figures in the small Village of Hommlet. By most AD&D scaling, you have to start getting past level 10 at least before being considered legendary on the scale of Argonauts.

Different games have PCs on different scales. Amber Diceless and superhero games have PCs that are already big hitters in their field, while Call of Cthulhu has characters that are much more modest.

For every mythic hero, there are hundreds of wannabes that simply aren't.  How is this confusing?