The Gaming Den

What kind of people become mercenaries in real life?

Like Landscknects and such. How much info do we have about the environment that lead to booms in mercenary bands?

OgreBattle wrote:What kind of people become mercenaries in real life?

Like Landscknects and such. How much info do we have about the environment that lead to booms in mercenary bands?

Any time that an active military goes on the march, PMCs (private military company) will pop up. How they implement themselves will vary.

So, "what kind of people become mercenaries in real life?" depends on the circumstances:
(1) Profiteers: where there is war, there is room for profit.
(2) Rebels
(3) Military rejects who want a piece of the action, but want to "follow their own rules"
(4) Actual former military who want to stay in the action, but want to "follow their own rules"

Seriously, modern PMCs like Blackwater are just "officially sanctioned" mercs. Also, just read through the news about any major civil unrest, and mercs will be all over the place.

This is D&D land, a place that apparently has enough monsters to keep adventurers in level appropriate encounters four times a day no matter where they travel. There's almost certainly enough monsters anywhere any villagers may go to necessitate armed protection. Villages and towns have to be armed encampments, probably founded by adventurers. Which means the idea of adventures being frowned upon by society seems doubly strange, since the majority of places are probably run either by retired adventurers or their decedents.

Desdan_Mervolam wrote:Or you know, throw yourself down a pit and end your suffering.

Suicide is probably the greatest sin in D&D, it means you're taking XP out of the system.

This is D&D land, a place that apparently has enough monsters to keep adventurers in level appropriate encounters four times a day no matter where they travel.

What in the world? Nonsense. You find monsters by going into remote and marginal regions, ancient, hidden dungeons and other obscure places. or if the monsters are social and intelligent, the "monsters"' own homelands. And even the most diehard career adventurer doesn't do that every day. Possibly the monsters come to you on occasion as part of some scheme or other, or the symtom of a larger problem, but they're not just sitting around Final Fantasy style on the county roads.

Schleiermacher wrote:Possibly the monsters come to you on occasion as part of some scheme or other, or the symtom of a larger problem, but they're not just sitting around Final Fantasy style on the county roads.

Actually, according to page 95 of the 3.5 DMG a "Heavily Travelled" wilderness area has a 12% chance per hour of some kind of random encounter involving a monster, whereas in a desolate wasteland the chance is only 5%. So in fact monsters are sitting around on the county roads, hoping for a wagon full of tasty peasants to happen by.

In Eye of the Beholder, you did literally find the remains of failed adventurers (along with their equipment). You could gather the pile of bones and eventually have those characters raised. You also found a few living characters who could join your group.

Since your Party started with 4 characters, and you found at least 4 skeletons (iirc), that'd indicate a 50% casualty rate over time, rather than from level to level.

I think a high mortality rate at 1st level, with it generally decreasing afterward makes sense (not counting natural causes). By the time you hit 3rd level, I'd rather expect that 90% survive - whether that is to the next level or until non-adventuring death catches up to them.

darkmaster wrote:Which means the idea of adventures being frowned upon by society seems doubly strange, since the majority of places are probably run either by retired adventurers or their decedents.

I always took it as they didn't mistrust you because you were adventurers, but because you weren't THEIR adventurers. The Order of the Stick has kept peace in this city for the better part of the decade, you can count on them to uphold things the way they have been so far. A bunch of wandering strangers could be the next set of heroes, or they could be a bunch of brigands that the Order is going to have to take down. The devil you know, and all that.

I don't know, that seems rather flimsy, sure maybe the local party has settled down to keep the peace, but they started out as wandering adventures and even if the new guys try to overthrow society stab all the high level adventurers running things and replace them, unless the new guys are the advanced party of the orc hoards and, therefore, on team monster, they probably don't burn the town to the ground and kill all the townspeople.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:1. The risk of dying horribly...

A horrible death is not the worse thing that can happen to an adventurer. Getting transformed into undead or some other abomination, mind-controlled, cursed, stoned for millennia, sent directly to Hell without the benefit of dying and getting a god to look after you, or just getting an enemy who is willing to kill everyone you know just to give you a bad day... the possibilities of things that could happen to you in DnD Land when you piss off powerful people is pretty awful.

Is that really different for peasants though? Sure being an adventurer draws attention, but so does having a moderately useful magical item. I can imagine a village getting raided because word got out one of the farmers had a ring of minor vigor.

Sure it's only 1 hp/second. But that keeps your battle ready pretty much all day. Seriously, get beat up but win, and a couple minutes later boom bam you're battle ready again. And hell, as serfs demons will come to your village specifically to turn you to evil so they can kill you and get your delicious soul juices.

xechnao wrote: Are you sure about that? Adventurers have access to healing magic, while peasants do not. I mean as an adventurer you can heal and resurrect people. It really seems logical that every family should invest in a kid or two becoming high level adventurers.

do you know what usually happen to the family members of high level adventurers? They are either killed in revenge or kidnapped for ransom, to keep the adventurers in check or to be used in some kind of unholy ritual.

and this if they aren't already dead and their death is what made him become an adventurer.

(Why do you think adventurers have such silly names and/or 'sparse' backgrounds? To keep their families safe, of course.)

darkmaster wrote:Is that really different for peasants though? Sure being an adventurer draws attention, but so does having a moderately useful magical item. I can imagine a village getting raided because word got out one of the farmers had a ring of minor vigor....

Adventurers actively stick their dicks into things while peasants don't. It's kind of like how cops are more likely to get shot compared to everyone else.

K wrote: cops are more likely to get shot compared to everyone else.

As a curiosity-based tangent, do you have a source for that?

fectin wrote:

K wrote: cops are more likely to get shot compared to everyone else.

As a curiosity-based tangent, do you have a source for that?

I'm not going to provide links because I think everyone should have the joy of going through NRA propaganda sites in an effort to find verifiable statistics on gun violence and police officers. Hint: look at FBI crime stats and government occupational stats.

That being said, the odds of a normal American dying to firearms is like 4 per 100,000 while cops die by guns at about 10 per 100,000, around half of all police deaths (at around 19 per 100,000, being a cop is the tenth most dangerous occupation in the US, but sometimes don't even make the top ten. Who knew that loggers were more hardcore than cops?).

Stubbazubba wrote:

fectin wrote:

K wrote: cops are more likely to get shot compared to everyone else.

As a curiosity-based tangent, do you have a source for that?

Here you go.

That's for 2014. You know, the year that's not done yet and for which no statistics could possibly be drawn. Also, the FBI does not agree with the stats since they have only most recently released the 2012 stats.

Try again, grasshopper.

That being said, we should drop this before it becomes a clusterfuck gun violence thread.

It's the general page that then has links to year-by-year breakdowns. But I deleted it because I realized it doesn't compare them to the civilian death rates, so it's not actually the information being requested.

K wrote:Who knew that loggers were more hardcore than cops?).

I did.

I'm a lumberjack and I'm okay!
I sleep all night and I work all day.

Unless there is an obvious meta game reason why killing monsters makes people more powerful (like absorbing their mana or some such) then exp is an abstraction and npcs may not always have the option of leveling up. The farmer does not level up because they story is not about them.

K, you forgot to mention the VPC or any other Joyce Foundation-funded organization. If you're going to mention a source of propaganda on one side of an issue, give an equivalent source from the other side. Or preferably cut the propaganda entirely and just point to the least biased sources available, as you did with the FBI.

erik wrote:The farmer does not level up because they story is not about them.

He absolutely should.And leveling up should let him plant better crops. Start with wheat, rice, and corn. Move on to devil fruits and senzu beans. Hit giant beanstalks of different varieties for mobility enhancement at inappropriate levels.

And at level 20, potatoes.

I would play that class.

erik wrote: The farmer does not level up because they story is not about them.

I have NPCs level-up all the time - even commoners, shop keepers, farmers, etc. That's not to say that all NPCs level-up; but reoccurring one's definitely should. I've been told by my players that this is one of the big things that help to give the setting a sense of being alive.
They obviously shouldn't be leveling-up anywhere as fast as the PCs, though. But if the party returns to a particular town after a year or so, maybe their favorite tavern owner expanded his operation, and is now a level 7 expert instead of a level 5. That's actually kinda cool.

hyzmarca wrote:

erik wrote:The farmer does not level up because they story is not about them.

He absolutely should.And leveling up should let him plant better crops. Start with wheat, rice, and corn. Move on to devil fruits and senzu beans. Hit giant beanstalks of different varieties for mobility enhancement at inappropriate levels.

And at level 20, potatoes.

Nah. At level 20: http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=3312

I always thought that people with Commoner or Expert levels were the heroes of thier own sitcoms or family dramas, but sometimes there is a cross-over episode with a big-budget fantasy adventure movie and Ross and Rachel get eaten by a manticore.