Monday, November 02, 2015

A Short Note on Adventurers' Guilds

For some reason, adventurers are much more capable of dealing with monsters and demonic threats than standing armies. From data compiled by the royal historians, of the last 100 threats rated as "Kingdom-threatening" and above, 90 were defeated by adventurers, and only 10 were successfully resolved using armies.

The obvious realization should be that soldiers and knights are a waste of money, and ineffective at dealing with such problems in the first place. In fact, in many small kingdoms and independent city states, it has become increasingly popular to reduce the army to a small core of soldiers, and to use the resulting savings to establish and fund "Adventurers' Guilds". For the unacquainted, Adventurers' Guilds are state sanctioned bodies to organize adventurers and channel them towards useful work. The most basic guilds can be as simple as a bulletin board to advertise monster bounties and a clerk to handle bounty claims. On the other hand, the more elaborate guilds offer other services such as training, healing, and equipment maintenance.

Of course, several mistakes were made in the initial iterations of Adventurers' Guilds. Open bounties that could be attempted by everyone had the tendency to attract people attempting to make a quick fortune, but who were not sufficiently skilled for the task. While this did not drain the state's resources, as no payout was made to failed bounty attempts, it resulted in an overall loss to national productivity as labor was lost to failed adventuring, not to mention the possibility of lives being lost in reckless bounty attempts. After undergoing much experimentation, the majority of Adventurers' Guilds today incorporate some kind of tiering system for adventurers, gating the scope of available quests for adventurers of different skill.

No comments: