Quote:
Originally Posted by malloyd
There's a reason reality provides few examples of professional adventurers. I suspect the harder you work to make the compensation for adventures make economic sense, the more likely you are to discover why that is, which kills your game if the PCs were in it for the money in the first place.
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History is full of professional adventurers who engage in serial hairbrained schemes such as
Colonel Thomas Blood and
Lola Montez, but they usually spend most of their lives making a living from a trade: sailors, printers, soldiers, surveyors, founders of cults and secret societies, dancers, actors ... a few are independently wealthy. People like the American mountain men, Uzbek slave-traders, and Caribbean pirates are probably closest to the D&D sense of people who earn their living from the killing, but even the old buccaneers were mostly hunters, rum-traders, and slave-drivers who went on the account every few months or every few years.
They are professionals like a professional criminal (who builds houses or runs a slot machine store by day and breaks houses or legs by night) not professionals like a professional soldier.
Novels by L. Sprague de Camp and George Macdonald Frazer give names to look up.