Why does Veeky Forums hate Adventure Guilds...

>Chill, it's not a bad topic
It's being spammed and leads to circular conversations since OP didn't ask about campaign seeds but a specific implementation of one type of idea.

I'm gonna give you benefit of the doubt and assume you're not baiting, and you're just new and really, really retarded.

No, adventuring guild is not an organization of any kind that gets the plot going. It's a very specific thing - a large, all-encompassing organization that every adventurer is a part of. It's main function is giving quests to people, because DM is too much of a lazy shithead to figure out any other way to do it.

Adventuring guilds mainly originate from japanese media, such as Dragon Quest. Naruto is also a good example of this cancer, with it giving S+ rank quests to ninjas and all.

If the setting in question is handled well (like my own) all of those can be answered. Just because barely anyone implement the idea well doesn't mean that the idea itself isn't good.

Especially since-
-this is retarded copy pasta that has been torn to shreds several times, but rather than actually learning something, he just decided to double down and spam his thread again.

If OP was simply continuing the discussion from the previous thread, I would be of the same opinion. However, given that he started this thread with the exact same loaded question, and given that there have been several threads with this week with the exact same subject, I somehow get the impression that discussion isn't OP's goal.

Some people don't like the idea of an adventurer's guild because "adventurer" isn't a real profession. Some people like it *because* of that very reason. There's nothing really to say beyond that.

Also, discussion about how to start a campaign can support a thread by itself. It doesn't need to be appended to this shit show.

I would argue that it would be improbable and illogical to not break it down into more specialized guilds and organizations in most settings.

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

Only OP does. Veeky Forums isn't a hivemind, and only OP throws a babyfit.

>Adventurers need to be regulated
You're pitching this sort of guild as a way of protecting everyone else from the adventurers. But guilds were more of a way to maintain trade secrets and protect skilled craftsmen from competition.

Thing is, even if you accept that "adventurer" is a valid role in a world--which, frankly, it isn't, but whatever--a single, overarching "Adventurer's Guild" makes very little sense. That'd be like having a combined Tailors and Stonemasons' Guild because, hey, they both MAKE things! In practice, the trade secrets and needs of the wizards are going to be so wildly different from those of a warrior that belonging to the same organization would achieve very little.

Consider this: Florence had separate guilds for:
>Merchants, finishers and dyers of foreign cloth
>Wool manufacturers and merchants
>Silk weavers and merchants
>Furriers and skinners

And that was in Florence. Other cities had those same guilds, but the organizations were different from the Florentine ones. Which would be awful for adventurers because they can only quest in the domains of the city of their guild.

>That'd be like having a combined Tailors and Stonemasons' Guild because, hey, they both MAKE things!
its called the craft guilds.

Gasket. Blows a gasket.

There were multiple craft guilds, segregated by the actual skilled labor involved. The point stands.

Just make it a guild of similiar occupations working together. Like the term physician, and how it's an umbrella term for a lot of professions.

There were not monolithic "craft guilds" but a plethora of seperate guilds for nearly every kind of craft.

A physician is a much more limited profession than an "adventurer", which could and is broadly applied to nearly any job in a pre-industrial fantasy setting in which the person faces unknown danger

Doctor's Guild

Sure, fuck it. I would buy "healer's guild", though even that's a bit sloppy

It's a lazy hand-wave that unsuspends disbelief (makes no logistic or political sense) when their are even lazier hand-waves available () that don't.

Could be just an umbrella term

I just have adventurer's guilds be "middlemen" guilds that supply the larger guilds like Blacksmith guilds and Mage guilds with supplies and services. Due to their nature as strongarms, they are utilized by the government to do tasks that they do not want to commit their soldiers to and are utilized mostly for how quick they can be called upon when an incident does occur. In my games they are typically phased out past the early levels by having the government or powerful groups recruit them into their own service.

I'm beginning to believe that /tg really is just one person, a reverse Truman Show where one guy pretends to be an entire community, his autism has finally destroyed his capability of independent thought and now he can do nothing but communicate the exact same fucking posts with the same fucking typos back and forth between himself. Like watching a fork bomb go off on a computer, powerless to stop it as it destroys itself by it's own willful refusal to do anything but repeat the same shit over and over and over.

well, I don't hate them, I'm just not big on the idea of adventurers being SO common in the world that it's treated like a legit profession.

especially when, if you or the players want the party to be involved in a guild, there's probably a number of overlaping guilds or organizations that could be used.

Bitch, you don't know me.

Because we believe in the Feee-Market.

get in here

You just got me thinking with those questions, so I'll answer them with a particular setting in mind for the fun of it and to worldbuild.

>How come guilds don't take over?
First off, "guild" is not the proper term for these groups. Merchant and crafting guilds are more like unions/cartels organized to lock down economic and political power. Adventurer guilds are technically more like very small but generally elite mercenary companies. They only exist in large cities, and there are always several per a city. They don't get along, and the emperor's vassals are far more powerful.
>If the emperor does have a bigger stick why do adventurer guilds exist at all?
The empire cannot be everywhere. Adventurers generally live on the Marches, where the land is wild and the enemy lurks behind the Old Wall. Out there, the adventurers do make their own petty castles and towns, but inside the wall, they just clean up after the Imperial army. The most elite adventurers either move to the Marches, or join the feudal structure.

>How do they begin?
Usually, a merchant or an old retired adventurer (if the fresh blood is lucky) will have the cash to build/buy a hall, get some basic gear, pull together some family and friends, grab supplies, and be the frontman for the guild. The whole point is to get paid for questing or organize their own quests to areas that promise rewards to the brave.
>What do they fight?
Monsters, bandits, perhaps other things if they are unscrupulous. Really, whatever needs doing could be a target. Assassination, "professional item retrieval" (thievery), guarding, and intimidation are all possible tasks for adventurers.
>Who pays them?
Whoever can. Poorer folks want simple things and give simple rewards. A guild could easily take payments in grain or livestock since it is responsible for feeding its members. Rich folk have harder tasks with better pay.
...

...
>Internal and external politics.
Guilds can split when internal fights break out. Rulers could pay for services too, there's no reason for a guild to be separate from politics. Guilds are powerful, but not the ultimate power.
>What's the hierarchy?
The guild master is the leader, but adventurers are very free-spirited and unruly. Disobeying is not so much of legal issues as it is a disgrace. You are not punished by the state, but the guild may collectively do something to you.
>Advantages of joining?
You get the protection of your guildmates and the hierarchy the climb while being safe. Why not strike out on your own? Freelancing as an adventurer is like being an artist with no friends: you die.
>What if somebody doesn't WANT to join the Guild?
They don't. Next question.
>Do you have to pay the adventurer tax if you're not a part of the guild?
Taxation only affects two things: land and the movement of goods. City land is immune to property tax, and most adventurers lack farms or castles, so there's no land tax. Moving goods is designed to tax merchants, but bringing gold, other precious goods, etc. will be taxed whenever the adventurers enter or leave a major city.
>Does the guild take a cut of your income? Taxpolicy.meme?
It's more like you get a cut of the Guild's income. Payment goes the the guild master, and the adventurers get a large chunk of it. In return for this, the guild houses, feeds, gives medical attention to, partially equips, guides, trains, and gets contracts for their members. Don't like it? Make your own guild.

>Naruto is also a good example of this cancer, with it giving S+ rank quests to ninjas and all
It operates actually pretty close to a normal guild with master apprentice systems & is a state-backed one at that. Furthermore, there are plenty of unregistered & explicitly "missing-nin" which are outside that system.

Not an argument

It doesn't need to be an argument. It just mentions how differently they function & are portrayed.

In my setting "Adeventurer's Guild" is a euphemism for "Unemployment Office"

Why not have a sorcerers sanctum, bards bar, rangers range and gladiators Colosseum instead?

Check out the legend of heroes bracers guild, they are free citizens with no allegiance to any country (unless they are a national of that nation).
They co-exist with the military and royal guard by only picking up the slack they cant handle/cant be fucked to do. However in this universe military commanders are high level heroes who could easily hold their own against an adventuring party so maybe that is why the bracers don't take over.

>not gladiators' gladitorium
>barbarians' bonfire
>druids' dankness
>fighters' fight club
>paladins' palace
>clerics' church
>monks' monastery
>pastamancers' pagoda
>cow punchers' corner pavilion

Because that still an adventure guild no matter how you look at it

They're right-wingers who don't want to allow adventurers to unionize

What are hedge/errant knights and ronin?

Not an argument.

Adventurers in such case are virtually no different from mercenaries, except they are willing to take on more unusual tasks, work their profit into the loot they take and are more unpredictable based on what they are like.

there is nothing wrong with there being adventurer Guilds, but if that is the case, then the PCs must absolutely meet rival groups that perhaps do the same quests or are after the same treasure - a Guild that facilitates only the player group is in effect a vacuum used to manage the players somewhat, not a realistic part of the game world.

ok weeb

>that has been torn to shreds several times
No, it hasn't been. You just put your fingers in your ears and shouted "Lalala, can't hear you, it doesn't have to make sense, it's fantasy". I can provide direct post IDs, if you like.

>My post became a pasta
Please post the second half, about guilds making adventures less personal and meaningful too.

Adventurers guilds are the middle management of guilds- each class / profession / archetype has its own guild or equivalent organisation, and manages its own members.

If people have a relatively simple task, they submit it to the relevant guild- "my household guard needs training- fighters guild" "We've got an illness in our town- healers guild"

For more complex tasks, they either get submitted directly to the adventurers guild, or the other guild forwards it to the adventurers along with the candidates they think are best suited for it.

Adventurer guilds use the details of the task and the records of guild members they have to assemble a party they think is suitable for the task.

They serve as arbitrators and liasons between the different guilds to let them work together more efficiently.

The only acceptable "Adventurers' Guild" is Merchant-Adventurers and if you run games where adventurer is a legit profession rather than a result of circumstances you deserve all the retarded murderhobo shit your players pull.

>Merchant-Adventurer
Go on.

Didn't we have this thread yesterday?

Adventurers Guilds provide licenses and certification for adventures, making sure that the adventurer market doesn't get too overcrowded. It represents the interests of existing members by making sure that competition between them is regulated on the understanding that there are only so many adventuring opportunities around at any given time in any given place.

You can always hire an adventurer that hasn't been accredited by a guild, but only the use of guild certified adventurers guarantees you don't get a visit from people with big clubs and few qualms about using violence to solve disputes.

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.

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

Literally just the name for merchant guild that dealt in the foreign shipping part of trade in Tudor England (which varied from actually adventurous shit like handling north sea shipping up to Russia to unadventurous shit like overseeing the wool trade between Dover and Calais)

>Sounds special snowflake to me.
Literally the term exists to describe the kind of marginal conmen, mercenaries and other transient people who were common across the trade routes and major cities of Europe and the Middle East. That you need to inflict your cubicle drone bullshit on a game about adventuring says more about your lack of imagination.

>Sounds special snowflake to me. In a meta sense the guild exists to combat that.
Have we fallen so low, we are literally repeating the previous thread, word for word?

Yes, we have.

>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".

Would that requires the adventurers in question to learn how to read and write.

Good questions. Let's say it formed to oppose a certain threat in the past, a guild of warriors and explorers to reclaim the ruined lands, devastated by the invasion of some horrors, can always say "undead", it's a popular scapegoat, or beastmen, or mind-flayers and their engineered goblinoids and giant-kin slaves.

>learn how to read and write
>implying most RPGs even bother to remember most people were illiterate in the pre-modern world

Thanks for ruining my point user.

Glorified mercenaries and/or brigands.

Yeah, you can stop samefagging now. You're not the one who posted it.

No, not really.

You take some physical tests and, if found to be competent at the stuff required to be an adventurer, you get your little badge and your details are kept by the Guild. The licensing of adventurers isn't really there to enforce any kind of standards beyond the bare minimum, but to make sure that there's a barrier to entry so as to help keep adventurers scarce, thus protecting their value. There are only so many monsters to slay, dungeons to pillage and rats in basements to clear out. The Guild recognises that there's a limit to the amount of adventurers any given locality can realistically support, and so limits the amount of adventurers available through licenses and fees on the adventurers side, and through threats of violence on the side of people who might hire non-licensed adventurers.

Christ almighty it's the exact same thread from yesterday.

Because Veeky Forums hates anything that isn't like D&D/Tolkein

Look, if you want to play pretend corporate drone you can always do shadowrun or like, go outside

Wouldn't be surprised if OP is the same posters as those posters. It's just one giant conspiracy of OP wanking to his shitty thread and thinking he's going to get salt.

>so common
blacksmith guilds in a city are often no bigger than 10 dudes, and they would be 2-3 guys in a small town. Guilds don't mean big numbers, it just means they are organized and have a reputation to keep, also if one is attacked everyone is attacked, its a tiny community.
>, there's probably a number of overlaping guilds or organizations that could be used.
Like what?

It's fairly obvious at this point.
It's not unfair to assume every post that bumps this thread is just OP.

I like how this thread assumes Adventure Guilds MUST BE about killing liches and dragons, instead of just focusing of average shit like goblins and wolf packs.

The PCs are suppose to be the heroes and extraordinary beings of your setting, the average joe even in your "adventure guild" is meant to be considerable weaker than the eventual power your PCs are meant to have.

Wrong! Only I want to be an adventurer. Having others diminish the rarity

What does that even mean

>goblins and wolf packs

that's just the other half of the argument, tho. those are for farmers, village militias and mercenaries like knight-errants or small warrior bands.

trying to lump so many different groups under a single heading of "adventurer's guild" is bland, totalizing pseudo-modernity.

What's the difference between an adventurer and a knight-errand?

One is a corporate drone. The other is something all should look up to

the knights are honorable is a meme, knights just like samurais, were just assholes

That adventurers being marginals is the nature of adventurers even irl.

Why the fuck would a kingdom keep that as anything but a liability when mercenaries, troops and marechaussee can handle it without getting ideas about how much they deserve the princess' hand?

Knights have ties to the setting/background, like fighters getting land and followers in AD&D.

Adventurers just pop into existence one day like a shitty JRPG.

Casanova was basically an adventurer, the problem is usually player expectations

Adventurers are the people who for one reason or another end up being transient in a society that's largely sedentary and do things that are often above their walk of life.

Three words: Anti Union Propaganda.

>Casanova was basically an adventurer, the problem is usually player expectations
While you can call him an adventurer the reality is he had specific names for the things that he was doing across his life like being a member of the clergy, being a military officer, a socialite, Etc. But the main thrust of complaints that I see here and I agree with is that 'Adventurer' itself is not an occupation; is it a description for what somebody does regardless of that occupation since numerous occupations can lead to an adventurous lifestyle.

So the difference between an adventurer's Guild and being a knight-errant is that a knight-errant is actually a job that someone can take that has some stake in the world Beyond something very vague and meta. If you want to use an adventurer's Guild in your setting go right on ahead but it is worth bearing that there are better ways to get your players on adventures that will tie them more directly into the game World then creating a nebulous organization that oversees dozens of occupations.

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?

Actually, the same question got me thinking, how come Knight Templars existed at all?

> If they are so powerful, they can handle moslems and infidels, how come they don't just take over?
> The mandate comes from who has the bigger stick, after all, and nobody has bigger stick than the templars, nevermind a whole THREE ORDERS of them.
> And if the king does have a bigger stick, in the form of armies or knights, why do Knight Templars exist at all?

>> And if the king does have a bigger stick, in the form of armies or knights, why do Knight Templars exist at all?
That's why they don't. Was this supposed to be an argument?

Folks whose defining trait is not banding together.

>What is the Guild's tax policy?

>If they are so powerful, they can handle liches and dragons, how come they don't just take over?

>Why does Veeky Forums hate Adventure Guilds?
Do we?

> And if the king does have a bigger stick, in the form of armies or knights, why do Knight Templars exist at all?
user, I...

They stopped existing the moment a king decided that he didn't like the size of their stick approaching the size of his own.

I don't.

The problem is really more in the way "adventurer's guilds" are handled then the idea of them. They're rarely something that really resembles a guild and are more like some sort of government institution that manages a bulletin board
The concept of people who go to the woods or ancient ruins to fight monsters having apprenticeships or taking measures to protect their business or whatever is perfectly fine to me though I do think "adventurer" is too vague without giving the word's use a lot more context

Even though it was just a throwaway joke, "Acquisitions Incorporated" makes more sense. Need an artifact acquired? Well, come to our Acquisitions Guild and our members will seek it out.

It's more specific than just "adventure" at least.

Wrong

The adventurer's guild concept is stupid for different reasons, and definitely not any less so than the other ones you mention. The "wandering hero" and the "ordinary person caught up in the extraordinary" at least have precedent in literature and mythology, rather than being born from game development constraints, unless you stretch it to an absurd degree like those anons earlier in the thread calling the Round Table an adventurer's guild