Why does Veeky Forums hate Adventure Guilds...

Ask yourself what is the guild purpose? Regulation is just asking for a black market.

Not that user, but I prefer the TES Fighter's guild method, where a guild is set up for mercenaries and sellswords to not just provide an easy service to the people, but to provide the Empire with income(portion of all proceeds go straight to Imperial coffers), and allows the Empire to keep its roads and people safe without spending money on extra soldiers for patrol. You could argue that it's the same as an adventurer's guild, and in many ways it is. But what I like about the Fighter's Guild is that there's a history to its existence while guilds in other setting are just there.

The Fighter's Guild also typically prefers beefy fighter or rogue types and has a disdain for other types of adventurers. Obviously if you're a wizard they'll still let you join because player but you'll be the only one there. They meld with the setting well. General Adventurer Guilds don't. They're just a hub of NPCs who act as a glorified Bounty Board. It just doesn't work.

>You characters were once a group of shit posting 4 channers that got sucked into a portal after reading a post on /x/. They're now in another dimension entirely.

Kind of fond of the first example, actually. Have had a recurring NPC who is the noble though. The party ran him down thinking he was an assassination target when it was actually his older brother, scared the piss out of him, nonlethally beat up his guards, then became friends after protecting him from some thugs.
He only developed as a character because the players like him, but he's a young naive idealistic tryhard who doesn't even like being a noble. He's roughly useless in combat, but has managed to make at least one kill in about a dozen encounters.

As I said in the last one of these threads that I saw ( earlier this week), an "Adventurers Guild" should be a low status organisation, possibly even being part of the "Ratcatchers, Vermin Exterminators and Allied Trades Guild".
Thus, most adventurers will belong to a class/professional guild that they meet the criteria for in order to further their professional development and contacts, while keeping quiet about being "adventurers" and using that guild for cross-professional contacts , forming groups to fulfill missions, etc.

I like the idea of a bunch of local nosebleeds starting an "Adventurer's Guild" to sound cool but not really extending beyond basic level one shit. But once it starts reaching higher levels of political influence it becomes more and more implausible.

Members of a commissioned company on a voyage to map an area for whoever's just claimed it.

Like I said, the AG is low social status, which will limit its political influence.
The politicing is done by the professional guilds, some of whose members may also belong to the AG (but not as a social status booster!).

Adventurer Guilds are fine as what they effectively boil down to - collections of mercenaries being regulated by the governments who want to keep the stupid fucks from causing trouble, direct them at credible threats as expendable assets, and gain taxes from their ludicrous wealth.

They shouldn't be ranked or anything dumb like that. It's just a quest dispenser.

>Why does Veeky Forums hate Adventure Guilds?
Because calling a mercenary company a "guild" is dumb.

I hate them because they don't make sense. The world cannot survive its existence

Adventurer Guilds are fun in lighthearted fantasy. Acceptable in serious fantasy if they're limited guilds like mercenary companies.

But a wide-scale organization in a serious work? That implies there are enough jobs to maintain that for all levels of adventuring. Which implies that somehow local caves keep infinitely restocking with monsters and loot. The picture that paints for a society is one that is a monster-ridden hellscape of Australian proportions, where an average farmer can be expected to be raided by ratmen, goblins, orcs, ogres, and a dragon before dinnertime. Seriously, the only way adventuring can be a sustainable business is if the world is under near constant attack and still has the means to pay them.

Once you can solve the logistical problems, you're good to go... or you could just keep it lighthearted and hand-wave all those problems. I don't think most of us will mind.

>MFW merchant guilds, craft guilds and religious guilds exist, but the minute someone Says adventure Guilds Veeky Forums blows a casket.

>Adventurer" being an actual job people have
Oh so you mean Eberron where it makes sense in terms of culture, region, technological trajectory, and economy?

They're called mercenaries, vagabonds, sometimes tomb robbers, murderers, and thieves. Adventuring isn't an occupation.

>literally just "adventuring guilds" by another name

Yeah, great fix guys, bravo. Totally circumvents the "gameist" nature of the adventure guild concept. I'll be sure to page the anons ITT next time I'm worldbuilding.

>I don't know what gentlemen's clubs were or why they existed

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Explorers_Club

They still exist, and they are not for murderhobo job postings

Yes, that's all it takes. Adventure guild is shit.

Reminds me of grosse point blanke where the guy tries to form an assassin union but no one wants to join

>"adventurer's guilds" in any way being like gentlemen's clubs
bruh

actually, that is not more interesting than an adventurer's guild.

There are Unions and organized religions in the real world, but no one going around slaying monsters

>eccentric, wealthy, and restless members of an upper class meet to plan, coordinate, and fund expeditions to far flung and exotic locales while maybe bagging some souvenirs and plowing a local girl

I'm actually unable to tell the difference here.

>He never heard of rougarou

...

Please mention 3 settings with adventurer's guild that are like that, and if possible 3 actual gentlemen's clubs which are like that for that matter

Not him but the mercenary company in Robert E. Howard's Conan stories kind of function like that. Only one I can really think of though.

That. Adventurer isn't a job. Mercenaries, grave robbers, bodyguards, spies, assassins, thief, even mage, all of those are job and can easily have guilds. Adventurer is only a vague term for people... adventuring?

This is the primary issue with adventurer guilds. The lack of definition. Once you give adventurer guilds, you are forced to admit that 'adventuring' is a valid job description. What do they do? They adventure? How are they bringing money? By... adventuring? Adventurers can be mercs or bodyguards or assassins at time, so they are kind of all of that? At the same time?

The Fighter Guild is a guild of mercenaries. This is why it is relatively well integrated in the setting. They do mercenary works for the highest bidder, and that's it.

Because it is video game and anime bullshit that doesn't make sense in most settings.

Eberron, Pathfinder, Birthright.

Explorer's Club, Royal Geographic Society, The Dutch West India Company (at least early when the silver fleets were sailing)

Look just because you had a shitty GM make an "adventurer's guild" with no unique name or history beyond a collection of hits or lootjobs doesn't mean the concept doesn't have some parity with reality, isn't fleshed out in some settings, or doesn't have some utility in the TTRP environment.

posted in another thread, but i'll repeat.

I actually wanted to make a lore about Adventure guild being a forced institution by lords and kings to stop the accumulation of large freelance armies and to force smaller, less threatening companies of mercenaries to outer edges of monster infested frontiers to protect settlements. The idea being it's cheaper to have adventurers take small freelance quests commissioned by local governments than sustaining large garrisons in a single place

All I really know about european mercanaries are the abundant use of swiss mercanaries and the Landsknecht.
i even wanted to have a character be a veteran of larger warfare, who is actually a weak individual compared to the typical "adventurer", but understands some basics of formations and caution. He used to be in a small group of friends who were with him into being grandfathered into the adventure guild and all of them were average soldiers, but through teamwork and formation were able to take on challenging tasks until they wiped and only one survived. The survivor was unable to work for months because he could create another unit that had the discipline to not yolo into a mob of monsters, because of the "hero knight" narrative all up and comers get about adventuring.

>The idea being it's cheaper to have adventurers take small freelance quests commissioned by local governments than sustaining large garrisons in a single place
This is essentially the underlying logical system behind the dual hacienda/encomienda system implemented in the Spanish colonies.

>Explorer's Club, Royal Geographic Society, The Dutch West India Company
Not a single of those is a gentleman's club. Not even the Explorer's Club, despite the name. Actual gentlemen's clubs are places like White's in London, which are just there for rich people to let off some steam and talk to each other at the end of the day within the comfort of a literal sekrit club, and not in service of some grandiose goal. Not to mention the rest of your description in general doesn't apply to any except kinda sorta the Explorer's Club

Gentlemen's clubs are less Pathfinder Society and more Bohemian Grove

So would the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn not qualify as an adventurer's guild?

That's a cult or a secret society

That's a good question.

I'd say they're far more sedentary than most expeditionary groups, with perhaps the exception of a few personalities like Bennett and Crowley.

You know, I would actually want to play a game with MMO anime style adventuring guild taken to its logical end. It would feel weird and unusual, which kinda is the entire point of having a fantasy setting to begin with.

Not a game, and it's mostly background for the actual show, but the Hunter's Association from HxH is a good example of the concept taken to silly extremes

Pretty much.

Once someone delves the Ancient Ruins Of Elfland and collects their Elder Gemstone, it's gone. The next people after the Elder Gemstone of Elfland will need to buy it from a fence or steal it from a museum or something.

Thieves guilds are somewhat sustainable just by stealing back shit off the people you sell it to. Even that's a stretch. Similarly to 'adventuring' nothing is being produced.

I do have an adventurer's guild in my setting, but they're really more like international highway patrol, and most of what they do is just intercept fugitives and clear fallen trees off roads.

Well if the criteria is "traditional gentleman's club", Explorer's does indeed have that designation nationally. And if we're looking for similar then we can admit the Royal Over-Seas League and the Travellers Club.

Thieves' guilds make sense if you take in mind they were originally a way to poke fun at real guilds. The idea was a social order so omnipresent and suffocating you couldn't even steal shit without red tape

What if it's the monsters who keep stealing the Elder Gemstone and taking it back to their lair?

You've been taken prisoner by the enemy navy and their prison boat is currently on fire

The prospects of adventuring against monsters and such is that there needs to be gains from defeating them. Unlike the loot system in RPG it's reasonable to believe there is nothing on the corpse worthwhile unless it's like ivory tusks off an elephant or eggs from some giant bird. Longterm adventuring is impossible to sustain under siege, but not under expansion. There needs to be a wilds being claimed. I belive that the best course for a setting demanding longterm adventuring is if it's an island humans control accounts for 1% of the world land mass and 99% claimed under monster control

You've been pressganged by your navy and your boat is currently on fire

The monsters buy it back from a fence with all the money they made from the Monsters' guild

This. An adventurer's guild in a newly made colony on a new continent just makes sense. They're given tasks scouting new areas and clearing out known monster nests, given letters of commission from the King like privateers. The guild overseers the paperwork, training, and equipping them, while taking a cut of the profits.

If this exists
>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worshipful_Company_of_Tax_Advisers
then I'm not sure whats wrong with Adventurers Guild.

I don't absolutely hate the idea of them because in certain types of settings (mostly in video games) they are very convenient, if lazy way of providing side content.

I don't think that's very conductive to most RPG campaigns because it means the quest or job or whatever is a thing that the players are doing because they just happened to read a piece of paper or were told what to do. Even with more mercenary-type parties or sandbox campaigns it is more rewarding and interesting to provide more context than that.

Most fantasy settings run their economies based on a kind of watered down capitalism rather than mercantile or feudalistic models that the settings otherwise imply. Guilds can exist for a while along with capitalistic economic models, until the government inevitably decides to abolish them or they convert into a more corporate structure, so it is kind of weird for guilds of any kind to exist most of the time.

They also don't act like actual guilds. They never have anything that defines a guild or makes them interesting. They have master/apprentice systems, trade secrets, sometimes mystery cult stuff, MASSIVE internal departmentalization, etc. Sometimes they would act basically like criminal organizations. And they compete and even sometimes fight over (directly or indirectly) contracts and letters of patent to practice their trade in a particular area.

Their existence was also very detrimental to the economy in many aspects, and in some places they were outlawed or highly regulated.

In RPGs they're more like social clubs with work notices.

I actually like the idea of Adventuring Guilds with particular (and peculiar) ways of doing things existing and competing with each other, but the player characters aren't a part of that structure and their legality is questionable, but useful.

Take up any fucking organization that fits in to the world, and the players are part of that.

Railway engineering investigators in a world where magic layline railways travel trough endless fields of clouds from one distant mega city to to the next, all connected in the center to the Rooma, a huge, ancient elven city build around the eternal world tree.

Musical band of bards traveling from town to the next, returning color, life and music with the divine instruments they were given by their music professor.
Mage license inspectors in the city of elder elves. Only mages that have valvira license can call themselves "mage" or "trained mage". Practicing without license is illegal and punishable by law.

Compare these 5 second brain farts to the flavorless G to SSS adventurer rank guilds found in every fucking Isekai novel from Japan.

"Oh, wonder what quest should we do. Oh, I know, let's grab this piece of paper that has words like 'orc cave cleaning' and 'bronze rank' in it, and let us go kill some monster characters. Let us do that again later, when they have respawned". Fucking flavorless mmo Isekai should be purged from this world.

New world games are best games.

They are. There's the sense of exploration, discovering new world, the excitement of unknown dangers. Besides it gives the GM a good reason to restrict the supply of certain magic items - "that isn't produced here in the colony so you need to order it from overseas, it's going to take three months to arrive and has a small chance that the ship gets lost in storm or captured by pirates"

They did exist though. Just Not in a popular period or in Europe. They also were integrated into the regular military-police system.

But you are wrong there user, there are numerous dedicated groups sworn to protect animals from poachers.
The moral of the story is that humans have always been the real monsters.

>The moral of the story is that humans have always been the real monsters
You're not wrong about that.

An adventurer's guild could work in a region that has just been recently colonized as a way to create order.

I don't hate them, but they can be run fairly badly. I'd rather adventure because I chose the adventure, rather than being told to do it by higher-ups.

Self-employed vs Corporate contractor.

Thought about this after posting, but Goblin Slayer is a good example. He wants one thing in the world, and that's to kill goblins. For him, joining the Adventurer's Guild furthers this goal, rather than being a goal in it's own right. The second the Guild tells him he can't hunt goblins anymore is the second he quits because it no-longer suits him.

"Adventurer" is just a polite term for murderhobo after all. The guild exists to channel their murderhoboing towards ends that are either useful or profitable for the guild. You can't have a setting where murderhobo PCs exist without having some murderhoboing that needs doing. The guild isn't so much a gameist feature in itself but a symptom of a completely different one.

For the most part, guild adventurers are just a special type of mercenary. The difference is that regular mercs are typically specialized in warfare and operate in larger groups. Adventurers are more for violent odd jobs.

>I don't think that's very conductive to most RPG campaigns because it means the quest or job or whatever is a thing that the players are doing because they just happened to read a piece of paper or were told what to do. Even with more mercenary-type parties or sandbox campaigns it is more rewarding and interesting to provide more context than that.
How about you start with some piece of paper or guild clerk, likely asking you to go investigate this or retrieve that, but said job inevitably snowballs into some epic quest?

I see the guild as a meeting point for forming parties and a source for campaign breadcrumbs. You might pick up the occasional side job but that's far from the main purpose. In setting it also serves as a regulatory body to keep the murderhobos in check, and those side jobs might often entail bounties on rogue adventurers (better to handle that internally than to go to a dedicated bounty hunter's guild, should one exist).

Corporations, criminal gangs (but I repeat myself), Houses, trades guilds, Clans.

Could a king use Union Busters to get rid of Adventure Guilds?

Because it begs the question of
>If they are so powerful, they can handle liches and dragons, how come they don't just take over?
>The mandate comes from who has the bigger stick, after all (see William the Conqueror), and nobody has bigger stick than high level adventurers, nevermind a whole GUILD of them
>And if the king does have a bigger stick, in the form of armies or knights, why do adventurer guilds exist at all?

And if you ignore that, there are other questions
>Why do they do what they do? How and why did the guild form in the first place? Do they hunt monsters? Okay, fine, what's the definition of a monster?
>Who pays them? Presumably, the villagers can rack up enough money to reward some orc killers, but who pays for much bigger contracts, like lich killing or vampire slaying? Only a really rich person can pay enough money for that.
>Do they complete quests for kings, then? What if a quest gets political, like a lot of them do? What if one king asks the Guild to work against another king? Is the Guild apolitical? Are there many guilds in different kingdoms? Are there factions within a guild? What if the king is a vampire, and therefore a monster?
>What's the hierarchy? If the guildmaster gives you an order, do you have to obey it? If the guildmaster has an opinion on how your contract should be fulfilled, or whom and on whose side you should fight, do you have any say in it?
>Why join the guild in the first place? What benefits and downsides it introduces? What if somebody doesn't WANT to join the Guild? Do you have to pay the adventurer tax if you're not a part of the guild? Does the guild take a cut of your income? What if there's undeclared income? What is the Guild's tax policy?

Now, if you center your campaign around those issues and problems, it could potentially result in a very interesting adventure. However, most of the time the adventurers' guild is used as a lazy cop-out, and NONE of those issues are ever adressed.
It's stupid.

But their worst crime is not being illogical, but killing the sense of adventure despite being an "adventurer" guild. You are not killing undead out of some personal convictions or grudges, or to save somebody - you are completing a C-rank quest from the quest board. My fight against the Dark Lord? Nothing personal, just doing my job. Somebody might oppose the Dark Lord because he butchered their family, or burned down their village, but I just picked an S+ ranked quest from a quest board.

And when your adventure is no longer personal, when the endgame of you collecting the Six Orbs of Power and defeating King Dragon is returning to your office and getting a check from your boss, are you actually an adventurer, or just a glorified corporate drone?

>And if the king does have a bigger stick, in the form of armies or knights, why do adventurer guilds exist at all?
armies and knights don't have the time to deal with the petty problems that adventurers do is probably the easiest explanation
>What is the Guild's tax policy?
go away martin

Most of these are pretty easy to address without needing to dedicate any time to it. You are the one making it harder than it is.

The guild only loosely connects adventurers, and usually only under threat of reprisal from their peers. Rogue adventurers are routinely hunted by guild contracts. Adventurers are never able to organize into a large force themselves, mainly because they are all too greedy or power hungry

As for the King, he certainly has more than enough power one way or another. The problem is his forces are always busy with some foreign politics. Either there's a war on or there's a threat of war and he can never spare the knights to go slay that dragon or put down that cult.

Contract jobs have a tendency to escalate. Orcs have been attacking this village, we need you to protect it. Now that your there, you need to find out where they are coming from. Once you do you find that it's some greater power driving them and you need to go hunt that down. Most of this shit isn't even paid by the guild. The initial defense contract is but that's just a breadcrumb for the party to follow onto greater adventure more or less on their own (there's always plenty of loot). The guild CAN however continue to tax you because of the power it wields to punish those who go rogue.

So, the guild is an opressive, antagonistic force? That's interesting, and that's far more than is usually done with the idea.

An oppressive force keeping murderhobos from running rampant, lesser evil.

they almost make sense in a medieval setting, because if you weren't local, you weren't in a trade, you weren't someone's serf, then you were a vagrant (which was often criminalised and led to banishment), the adventurer guild basically provides a place for the Isekai protagonist to "belong to" and thus whom'st is responsible for their well being and their good behaviour.

It's why the adventurer guilds seem hollow: someone like Kazuma from Konosuba would have been sanctioned or kicked out of the adventurer guild the first time he or his party caused legal trouble, because otherwise the adventurer guild would be responsible for his actions under medieval law as a body that "vouched" for him and his party.

(historically the role of the adventurer guild was the parish (that is, local church parish) run workhouses, but we so think of welfare as a modern thing that the parish system is often left out of medieval settings)

Is it me or does these "Adventurer Guilds" sound more and more like "Private Military Contractors" aka mercenary pillagers but with a PR department?

Adventuring guilds would be tolerable, if we weren't talking DnD (and face it, we are talking DnD). Mercenaries existed at all times in the world.
But adventurers are not simple mercenaries. By the time they hit level 5, they are already capable of doing some ridiculous shit (our cleric lately killed 50 bandits just by herself). Level 5 is not considered to be particularily high at all.

When you imagine some sort of corporate entity that has people of up to level 15 in it, things start to get REALLY insane, and the very idea that some single organization controls about a hundred of high level wizards, clerics, monks and other very distinct classes stretches my disbelief beyond my tolerance.

An adventurers guild implies that society has a fundamental understanding of an 'adventurer' as something that be defined as a career choice. This is a contradiction, as by an adventurer's very nature - their status is suppose to be unique and heroic. Perhaps it's just a name issue and it's really a stand in for a mercenary band.
If you put some thought into it though - what kind of organization deals with fighting monsters, delving into ancient crypts, prospecting and fencing artifacts, and taking up the requests of nobles and the wealthy, AND exploring untamed wilderness? That's far too many things to handle for it to not be more believable that their would be guilds specific to that aspect of an adventure.
There's also the case of them being very 'meta', and that leaves something to be desired for the secondary world. It isn't as wondrous or classically heroic if being an 'adventurer' is so plainly understood and the definition of a quest is synonymous with a job.
I wouldn't mind the idea of an adventurer's guild in a more high fantasy and casual setting - it could be quite comfy. It's not my usual cup of tea, however.

Lets say that this organization is in fact an arm of the State. Let us also say that these individuals are not prone to working together in any kind of grand way. Let us also say that certain heads of state or advanced military personnel are equally high-level. Does it not make a LOT more sense now?

>Let us also say that these individuals are not prone to working together in any kind of grand way.
This defeats the point of having an adventurer guild in the first place.
Not that there is any, mind you.

>their status is suppose to be unique and heroic
Sounds special snowflake to me. In a meta sense the guild exists to combat that.

The guild is part of the government. They aren't working together, they are working under law and contract. There's basically no chance of a large group of adventurers banding together to overthrow the kingdom. However you can always offer one group enough gold to kill another group, that's how you regulate things.

>Sounds special snowflake to me
You mean, like Aragorn was a special snowflake, going to complete a quest without some guild handing him (out of a thousand other guild rangers) a contract from their quest board? Or like Luke Skywalker is a special snowflake, for having a personal reason for facing Darth Vader? Or like Jon Snow is a special snowflake? Or any other hero in any other piece of media?

I feel like I'm being baited here, because what you're saying is "Let's take out all the fun for being too fun, and replace it with a sterile, corporate enviroment - it's how I live in real life, so this is how my campaigns must look like too".

An adventurer is special. It requires a lot skill, courage, and a little luck to be successful at the kinds of the things a typical adventuring hero gets themselves into. Becoming an adventurer is a part of a character's story when they endure hardships beyond what a normal person could withstand and go on quests to thwart evildoers or triumph over some adversary.
It ought to be descriptive, not prescriptive.

You're not special. They're thousands more lining up before you setting out on their own adventurer. The guild is needed to regulate you vagabonds

>>their status is suppose to be unique and heroic
>Sounds special snowflake to me.
Hang on. Being "unique and heroic" is literally the entire point of heroic fantasy. What does "special snowflake" even mean, if that counts?

You sound like a terrible DM.

>They're thousands more lining up before you setting out on their own adventurer.
This is the worst meme of all time.
"There are THOUSANDS! going out in the wild to fight the undead for loot!"
Great, this world is now bullshit and the party might as well be fucking cabbage farmers they are so commonplace.

Sounds like the guilds need to be destroyed then.

Luckily, as a special snowflake, I can do shit like that.

You lose. Roll up a new, less snowflake character, or leave.

Because everyone has to be the true heir or some equally asinine bullshit. Besides, it gives a damn good reason to face enemy adventuring parties (which always makes for some of the best fights AND loot), whether you are working for OR against the guild

Yep, that GM detected. I think we're done here.