Motivations for Adventuring
A proper understanding of the adventurer class
I've had sporadic luck drawing eyes to my posts over on X. I've always had a hard time understanding what exactly will get people talking or what will upset them. However, when I waded into the discourse around domain play and motivations for adventuring by saying that the only coherent motivation for RPG characters is social mobility, I knew that this would be slightly incendiary. Because of how incendiary this take was, I felt that I should expand on what I mean by this. I believe there are a lot of misconceptions about the idea of social mobility in RPGs and how that would motivate a character. Let’s dig into it.
Social mobility is a phrase that has many connotations in the modern world. When that phrase is thrown around, most people likely envision a Patrick Bateman yuppie schmoozing and kissing ass to climb the corporate ladder. This isn’t what I’m talking about. Rather, social mobility in the context of a medieval world is more about earning power, wealth and adulation through feats of heroism and bravery. In the medieval world, the only way to rise above your station was to distinguish yourself in combat. Otherwise, a peasant would stay a peasant. To put this into perspective, this means that any peasant-born man-at-arms who attained knighthood had to put their physical well-being on the line to shed the blood of their enemies and save their people in order to ascend to nobility. That was the only way to advance your station so it makes sense that very few people sought this out. There used to exist a concept called noblesse oblige which was the expectation that nobility would be moral, courteous and brave. With high status came high expectation of behavior and ability.
To tie this back into roleplaying games, the idea of leaving your farm or your trade to go delving into ruins and fighting monsters is to undergo an ordeal. The most likely outcome is that you will die, so coming out of that alive is to demonstrate your fortitude and skill. To continue to do so and become famous for doing so is to reinforce those attributes. This is why knights errant would go on quests in chivalric romance. They were looking for the opportunity to prove their worth and gain further status. In doing so, they were also helping people. That’s the nature of the concept of adventuring. It’s about putting yourself through the fire to purify your essence.
What would motivate a person to do this? Well, poverty may be a motivator for some. Certainly there would be people who would view the risks as worth it if the rewards are gold, land an title. For other adventurers though, the motivation may be to reach their true potential. This is why I chose a picture of Luke Skywalker for the article. Luke ends up becoming a hero and carrying on the lineage of the Jedi, but his initial motivation to leave his home was a feeling that his potential was being wasted as a moisture farmer. This is the ultimate call to social mobility. It’s an internal realization that you have the potential for true greatness. It is from this realization that all of Luke’s actions spring. It is because he knows that he can’t be the man he’s supposed to be by staying on Tatooine.
As a player character, you are destined to become nobility or to die trying. It’s not a matter of merely gaining power, but of reaching your true potential. This applies across the board to every single class. A true Thief is destined to be a Master Thief. A true Druid is destined to lead a grove. A true Cleric is destined to lead his temple. In doing that, you will climb the social ladder but also fulfill your telos. Along with that, you might have other side goals, but at the core should be your development as a leader, a ruler and a practitioner. It is inherently an act of self-improvement and it is a noble pursuit. The idea of social mobility is so much deeper in a medieval context than it is in a modern one. It is to make yourself elite and the elite of the past were those who could wield power and were respected for it. In other words, to become a noble is also to become noble.
As for other motivations, yes, there are other things that spur protagonists to action, but the core motivation should always be to develop personally. Motivation beyond that generally leads to a villainous outcome as revenge, greed, and desire eat people alive. While RPG characters can certainly pursue an evil route, their ending will likely be a bloody one. This strikes at a core truth about humanity. When we focus on internal development, we see positive external consequences. When we ignore our internal well-being, we rot from the inside out and eventually crumble away.