The Gaming Den

Help me find a good reason for it. Adventurers gain levels and power. They can gain enough so they can kill or buy any non adventurer and it does not seem that adventurers have a higher career mortality than anybody else due to healing and what not divine power. In fact it is peasants that seem to have the more victims of fatal aggression in D&D world. Ok, now with 5e and bounded accuracy it seems that lower level characters can pose a threat to higher level ones. But what about previous editions?

1. The risk of dying horribly
2. Not everyone has the stomach for killing dozens of sentient things every day, then rooting around in their guts in case of swallowed valuable.
3. People can level up doing stuff besides adventuring, especially if they are NPCS.

Well, in the first place most people never have the opportunity. They don't have the training, seed money or natural talent they'd need to do well as adventurers, and they have families to feed, fields to plough etc. etc.
Adventurers are rare. Heck, even most adventurers aren't "professional" adventurers in most settings I've played -rather, they find themselves in situations where they have to do extraordinary things to reach their goals -find lost mentors, stop a war, defeat a rampaging dragon or what have you. (Often, of course, this then kicks off some larger quest- but it's still not a matter of taking up "adventure" as a deliberate career choice, just of doing what's necessary.)

Beyond that... no, compared to peasants, adventurers have a vastly higher career mortality rate. IME, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60%. It just seems otherwise because the only peasants Your adventurers tend to spend a lot of time around are those who require the aid of adventurers.

xechnao wrote:Help me find a good reason for it. Adventurers gain levels and power. They can gain enough so they can kill or buy any non adventurer and it does not seem that adventurers have a higher career mortality than anybody else due to healing and what not divine power. In fact it is peasants that seem to have the more victims of fatal aggression in D&D world. Ok, now with 5e and bounded accuracy it seems that lower level characters can pose a threat to higher level ones. But what about previous editions?

Housecats.

If its OD&D, its pretty obvious.

Now, assuming 3e or 4e with all those perfectly balanced encounter matchups (and low mortality rates), yeah, I agree with Xechnao its nonsensic.

Schleiermacher wrote:Well, in the first place most people never have the opportunity. They don't have the training, seed money or natural talent they'd need to do well as adventurers, and they have families to feed, fields to plough etc. etc.
Adventurers are rare. Heck, even most adventurers aren't "professional" adventurers in most settings I've played -rather, they find themselves in situations where they have to do extraordinary things to reach their goals -find lost mentors, stop a war, defeat a rampaging dragon or what have you. (Often, of course, this then kicks off some larger quest- but it's still not a matter of taking up "adventure" as a deliberate career choice, just of doing what's necessary.)

Beyond that... no, compared to peasants, adventurers have a vastly higher career mortality rate. IME, somewhere in the neighborhood of 60%. It just seems otherwise because the only peasants Your adventurers tend to spend a lot of time around are those who require the aid of adventurers.

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.

xechnao wrote: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.

And why is that necessarily true? There are plenty of settings where magical healing is available for free or at least affordable rates. If people with PC classes are semicommon, why not just join a church?

...Is this thread going to turn into a 5 page argument about health insurance? Was that the plan all along?

Roll 3d6.

Stat generation doesn't always lead to getting the required stats to become an adventurer.

Where are they going to get the training? Where are they going to get the equipment? The overwhelming majority of families won't have the resources to provide these things. And if they had them, it's better to use them to build prosperity than to gamble all that time, money and effort -not to mention the life of your kid- that he's going to be lucky enough to strike it big rather than either dying in a ditch or becoming just another bandit/mercenary.

You're looking at this from a metagame perspective. In world there is no "CR" or "Level Appropriate" to save your ass. When you go wandering into the wilderness as a 1st level party sometimes you encounter a war party of Trolls or a hunting pair of Dire Bears and suddenly that Cure Light Wounds doesn't mean dick.

Having the players face a gradually increasing series of challenges designed to test, but not best them is a construct set up to produce a fun gaming experience and replicate a "zero to hero" narrative arc. It certainly isn't something the general populace can rely on. Something I heard somewhere is that the normal population distribution assumes each level of adventurer has a 50% mortality rate before reaching the next level. So 50% of 1st level adventurers die before reaching 2nd level, 50% of 2nd level adventurers die before reaching 3rd level, etc. That gives you some idea of why every peasant with a pointy stick doesn't go wandering off into the wilderness looking for monsters to fight.

PCs have the advantages of their challenges being level appropriate due to DM intervention. NPC adventurers do not enjoy such privilege.

Even PCs sometimes have to exercise the better part of valor.

Avoraciopoctules wrote:

xechnao wrote: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.

And why is that necessarily true? There are plenty of settings where magical healing is available for free or at least affordable rates. If people with PC classes are semicommon, why not just join a church?

...Is this thread going to turn into a 5 page argument about health insurance? Was that the plan all along?

Heh, lol no. But you got to admit it is strange that high level characters are so powerful, relatively easily achievable to become one (by the game mechanics) yet so rare. Also with enough adventurers around people could have solved the monster problem too.

Well, it's true that advancement in 3.x is too fast. But it's by no means easy to make it to high level.

I was going to pitch in, but pretty much all the points I would have brought up have already been mentioned.

Youre trying to make sense out of a game that wasnt created to make sense.

Red_Rob wrote:You're looking at this from a metagame perspective. In world there is no "CR" or "Level Appropriate" to save your ass. When you go wandering into the wilderness as a 1st level party sometimes you encounter a war party of Trolls or a hunting pair of Dire Bears and suddenly that Cure Light Wounds doesn't mean dick.

Having the players face a gradually increasing series of challenges designed to test, but not best them is a construct set up to produce a fun gaming experience and replicate a "zero to hero" narrative arc. It certainly isn't something the general populace can rely on. Something I heard somewhere is that the normal population distribution assumes each level of adventurer has a 50% mortality rate before reaching the next level. So 50% of 1st level adventurers die before reaching 2nd level, 50% of 2nd level adventurers die before reaching 3rd level, etc. That gives you some idea of why every peasant with a pointy stick doesn't go wandering off into the wilderness looking for monsters to fight.

That would mean a 0,0005 survivability rate till level 10 and 0,000001 till level 20. So every 1,000,000 adventurers (adventurers not peasants) only one makes it to level 20. That would mean that if 1% of population became adventurers then you would need 100,000,000 people to have one level20 character in the campaign. So if there are twenty level20 people in your campaign that would mean that there is a population of 2 billions. Makes kind of sense in fiction but it is not really supported by game mechanics.

Now think about world of warcraft video game. Obviously, for it to make any demographic sense everyone, every peasant around, should have had adventurer levels of some sort. If not, if there is this D&D demographic rule in play and judging by the big number of high level characters around (players and fiction characters) then the WoW population should have been in the high quadrillions, which I doubt it is. I wonder which kind of approach would make most sense in fiction and in game.

That would mean a 0,0005 survivability rate till level 10 and 0,000001 till level 20. So every 1,000,000 adventurers (adventurers not peasants) only one makes it to level 20. That would mean that if 1% of population became adventurers then you would need 100,000,000 people to have one level20 character in the campaign. So if there are twenty level20 people in your campaign that would mean that there is a population of 2 billions. Makes kind of sense in fiction but it is not really supported by game mechanics.

A bit low, especially because it doesn't take into account characters of "monstrous" races, who get to start a few rungs up the ladder, but that's about the right ballpark, yes. 20th level characters are serious business.

And the game mechanics can support quite a lot of different scenarios depending on what assumptions you make. Keep in mind that to gain a level, an adventurer has to defeat 3.3 monsters or other adventurers who are each equal to him in power, which is no easy task.

Anyone who sets out deliberately to become an adventurer is most likely quite deranged.

Also, let's not forget that only PC's get the juicy PC WBL. NPC's are stuck with their own sucky WBL progression.

In ALL editions of D&D, there are often many dwellers of the world that DO want to be an adventurer. Those lucky enough to do so become NPCs. The extremely rare and lucky become PCs. Everyone else is just screwed by fate to have to be Villager #656 or Merchant #6848.

We live in a world where only a minuscule elite has a college degree. (around 5% at most). It makes perfect sense to expect the same in d&d land.

shadzar wrote:The extremely rare and lucky become PCs. Everyone else is just screwed by fate to have to be Villager #656 or Merchant #6848.

... I'm not sure I'd want my life decisions to have been predetermined by some random guy in a gaming store's back room. Really, I'm lucky that I'm not a PC and I'd imagine a lot of characters would feel the same way.

Societal pressure. Adventurers aren't farmers or carpenters or blacksmiths or guardsmen or hunters or merchants or anything else that makes society actually work. While they can and often do have the skills nessissary to do any of those tasks, that's not what they're here to do, and even if they were, adventurers are nomadic and will soon be moving on leaving you to deal with your own problems again.

Adventurers have power, and universally use that power to take what they want, even the benevolent ones. And since most people don't have Know Alignment, it's often hard to tell if these adventurers coming into town are going to kill you or your family for questionable motives or not.

So in addition to the Adventurer lifestyle being dangerous, Adventurers are also irresponsible, unreliable, and stand a good chance of being an actual threat to you and yours.

Accept, that adventurers do preform the necessary service of "preventing manticores from eating you in your sleep." As for high adventurer mortality rates... is that really in genre? Sure in AD&D PCs died a lot, but not so much any more, and it's not as though D&D is the bards tale, you don't find the bones of all the OTHER chosen ones strewn about the dungeons, accompanied by a quartet of singing goblins when you loot the bodies, sitting a grim sign posts of failed adventure. I don't recall reading that advice in the DM's guide anyway.

darkmaster wrote:Accept, that adventurers do preform the necessary service of "preventing manticores from eating you in your sleep."

Sure. But those are exceptional circumstances. If you have Sleep-Creeper Manticores, or a threat that is equivalent every day, you might want to consider moving to a safer neighborhood. Or you know, throw yourself down a pit and end your suffering.