Adventurers are the core of many tabletop roleplaying experiences. They're the guys who go out to find gold, loot, monsters, and glory. And, for the most part, they're the problem with roleplaying experiences in general.

I'm not trying to say that all adventurers are bad, but they're a key part of what become shallow experiences. The core of most roleplaying experiences basically revolves around a gameplay loop, rather than storytelling.

This is a problem. When the focus of adventuring is to hit the next level, the storytelling side can be lost.
It is easy to overlook some of the issues because the core experiences of roleplaying are themselves pleasurable. Assuming that all the players are able to get along with each-other, it's a positive social experience, and the feeling of progressing a character through game systems if nothing else triggers the reward mechanisms of the brain.

But to fully make the experience meaningful (in the sense of philosophical capital-M Meaning, or being able to learn life lessons from it), you need to have a game that takes people beyond just leveling up and hanging out.

This isn't to say that these things should be removed–my personal outlook is that the mechanics of games fulfill their own distinct needs–but rather that games need to have a conscious focus on storytelling and providing tales of growth and triumph (shaping lore, you could say).

So what are the specific problems with adventurers, and how do you fix them?

Aimlessness

The biggest issue with adventurers is that there's a general sense of aimlessness.

I've written in the past about Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, and it's something that characters go through during the process of becoming meaningful.

The sorts of short term goals fostered by "you all meet in a tavern" style play are not ones that work well. There are a few antidotes to this, like having the GM or players determine what long-term, heroic goals characters have, or building a solid goal into the setting. Rowan, Rook, and Decard's Spire (affiliate link), which I keep harping on and on about, has a world where the characters are facing an oppressive regime–even if they want nothing more than keeping their heads down, they may find that people bring trouble to their doorstep. What do they do when their brother gets in trouble with the law? What do they do when their secret identity gets revealed?

The big thing that I think most GMs miss is that simply slaying the dragon is not in itself a task worthy of a Hero's Journey. Too often games revolve around mechanical advancement, with the focus being on characters reaching the right level to confront their foes.

It is all the steps along the path that make the hero. Will they forgive old slights? Will they trust a stranger? Will they help someone who treats them poorly? Becoming a hero is more than simply figuring out what sword will take down the monsters best, it's a process of making moral and practical decisions about how to achieve their goals.

Blandness

Adventurers tend to be bland. I, among with countless others, have found myself falling into the trap of bland characters. They don't have a past, or a future. Their personal connections are limited to those they interact with on a regular basis, but even those are pretty few.

This creates a nice tabula rasa, letting the character work easily into whatever story the GM has planned, but it doesn't give much in the way of other characteristics. One of the important things to note about bland characters is that they aren't necessarily entirely devoid of any detail.

The place where a bland character shows their true nature is when they have to make decisions or are confronted by something unexpected.

Bland characters have one defining trait: maybe upholding the law, or wanting gold, or some other simple objective that has a yes/no outcome. They don't have realistic desires, have no flaws, and have no particular virtues. Bland characters are aimless because their goal is defined as "I will always do X" as opposed to "X is the challenge I must face"; they react to their environment rather than acting in it.

Part of this comes down to effort. It is a matter of time and skill to create a character who is really deeply developed. Story-driven roleplaying can become a sort of method acting, taking on the role and mindset of a character. Fortunately, this is not so hard as people would think, though it is a skill that must be honed with practice.

Good characters are not just on the players, either, the storyteller needs to have their mind in the world, visualizing the environment and providing enough information for the players to respond to, attempting to clarify or avoid miscommunication, and knowing when to roll with players' assumptions when they are appropriate. A deep character in a simple situation has no more options than a shallow character in a complex situation.

There are a couple games that I use as examples of games that help encourage players to really go along with a personality for their character.

The first, Degenesis by SIXMOREVODKA bills itself as a "primal punk roleplaying game" and delivers really well on encouraging players to select a long-term goal. Characters select an archetype, which comes with certain connotations in terms of personality. Although only lightly embedded into game mechanics, these archetypes really help bland characters evolve into more significant and developed ones. I can't recommend Degenesis highly enough in general, but it's a great one to check out.

There's even a trailer (actually two trailers, but who's counting?) on YouTube, and SIXMOREVODKA is a graphic design company first and a roleplaying game company second, so the art and backgrounds in Degenesis are amazing.

The second game I wanted to highlight is a little indie roguelike called GearHead. Where GearHead succeeds and other video games often fail is that it creates a bunch of sliding personality scales for characters that are used organically. Although it is not perfect in this sense, the player character's ability to interact with the world is often shaped by their personality; in prescribed and on-rails methods, but still ways much more diverse than most games to this day.

Invincibility

I had a hard time really figuring out what to call this third undesirable quality, and I ultimately settled on a term that doesn't quite fit. One of the problems with adventurers is that they aren't necessarily able to fulfill a Hero's Journey because they don't have the full set of motives and inspirations, and part of this comes in the form of lacking an attachment to the ordinary world that they come from.

This means that they are not beholden to regular rules and expectations, but it also means that their growth as a character will never result in them leaving their own world and returning to it as a victorious conqueror of the unknown.

It also means that there is nothing for them to lose if the ordinary world suffers. A common backstory for adventurers paints them as the victims of some injustice, but it is increasingly focused on giving them a reason to leave their world, and never a reason to return (except perhaps to wreak bloody vengeance upon their former oppressors).

By distancing the characters from their roots, games often wind up creating a situation where they castrate their characters' growth. The Hero goes into the unknown to return victorious with the power to transform their world.

The flawed adventurer leaves because they don't care about their ordinary world, or because they are not permitted to remain there.

This makes it impossible for them to have a reason to return to the fold, because if they leave in frustration, rather than to complete an objective, they have very little incentive to return.

This isn't to say that they can't necessarily recover from this–or that every plot in which a character is forced to leave their home will result in an aimless character who has a hard time demonstrating Meaning through their journey–but in games where many characters are interacting and players are taking a more passive role than a writer generally would, it is less likely that any one character undergoes the personal development to desire a return as the master of two worlds that Campbell envisages the Hero's development creating.

One of the games that I think really does this well is Modiphus' Mutant: Year Zero, which puts the players in a tight-knit social environment as a result of shared backgrounds. Every session is set up as an adventure into the unknown, with the end goal of returning home, so the Hero's Journey fits well: eventually the protagonists hit the point where they are able to, by a variety of means, transform their world.

One of the interesting things about Mutant: Year Zero as opposed to many tabletop RPGs out there is that it has essentially a pre-canned plot. A certain sequence of events happens as part of a campaign to figure out the truth about the universe. While GMs and players can go in an entirely independent direction, the game itself is custom tailored to one "scenario" (laid out in broad frameworks rather than individual events), and it plays quite well. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in seeing a good interface between mechanics and storytelling.

Wrapping Up

Adventurers are uninteresting unless they have some other quality to their lives, something that makes them have a reason to adventure beyond simple greed or aimlessness. To prevent these problems, consider the things that make characters interesting: just because a game can be played with characters who do not have a fully-fleshed out personal history and life doesn't mean that the player characters should be driven entirely by immediately pressing objectives and reactions to their environments.

Adventurers need aspirations to become heroes and follow Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey, which is what creates deep and satisfying characters.