Technically speaking, are adventurers parasites?

>>54612748
More like symbiots.

>>54612748
Depends how you mean "parasites". I assume economically speaking?

I mean, for the most part they're scavengers, right? Their main economic income streams are "kill thing, take stuff" or "find thing that's already dead, take stuff".

Arguably, tomb raiding like that is reinjecting 'dead' currency (i.e. stuff that's just sitting in a dungeon and not actually being used in the economy) back into circulation. Like, if King Shit of Fuck Mountain gets buried with 10,000 gold pieces, that's 10,000 gold pieces that stays out of circulation forever unless someone raids Fuck Mountain. It's like the excessive saving problem, only worse.

>>54612748
Adventurers are to Civilizations, as Oozes are to Dungeons

>>54612806
>It's like the excessive saving problem, only worse.
>fantasy economics 101 lol

>>54612748
Unless they are physically sustaining themselves on treasure and dungeons, they technically aren't

>>54612748

More like a swarm of locusts fucking over every community they run through.

>>54612748
Nope, gypsies are.

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>>54612748
Let's see... civilization enablers, social disruptors, criminals, cosmic antibodies, oddman jobbers, state-founders, nexuses of the ley web, imperial agents, even heroes sometimes, but not parasites as a whole.

At least in my setting.

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>>54613333
>cosmic antibodies

Could you expand on this my good man?
Adventurers serve some cosmic purpose?

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>>54613418
Yeah. God of heroes manipulates things as to stimulate adventurers to appear. In the cosmic order of things, they overall help for civilization to grow, whioch means more souls and thus more energy for Creation.

People with great innate power, once dead, reincarnate as more than one soul. Each level is a new soul.

Powerful heroes which don't die are likely to acumulate so many intense relationships that they may be good candidates to be a ley nexus, helping to maintain and protect the ley web. (A ley line is a strong feeling towards something here. A soul is a ley line so complex as to make a unique knot whose pattern codifies a person)

Really powerful heroes are invited to help Creation against the Leviathans besieging from Outside.

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Are adventurers parasites? By which you mean: Do adventurers take out of a social system or community without putting anything back into it?

People probably think so. Terry Pratchett rather gleefully deconstructed the trope of the adventurer in his early works, describing them as grave-robbers, defilers of ancient sacred ruins, murderers for hire, and lacking any useful skills in a modern society. In Sam Sykes' Aeon's Gate Trilogy, adventurers are literal murderhobos, seen as the least worthy and most expendable parts of society.

And yet, almost every culture and civilization has some form of this extralegal professional.

In "Listen Up, You Primitive Screwheads!" Ross 'Spyke' Wynn likens adventurers to feudal Japanese ronin. Serving no master, they were seen as being less noble than their sworn samurai peers, and yet they were a necessary part of the shadow economy of the era, fighting as expendable assets in the petty wars between the daimyo. Adventurers do the things that others cannot,or will not This makes them a vital part of the society, whether people want to admit it or not. But as such, they're not well suited to settling down. A peaceful province will leave you broke pretty quickly, and people are a lot less welcoming of the guy who was the hero last week if he can't pay the rent this week.
This puts adventurers on the road a lot. They have their own rules and laws, and very little patience or need for the rules the regular folk use. However, in most settings, including future or cyberpunk, this makes adventurers something of a novelty: A middle class. Self-employed entrepreneurs, in possession of enough wealth to effect the local economy in a positive way, and free from any obligations to masters, lords, or executives. Reviled by those who cannot control them, hated by those who would be them, the adventurers are the truly free men of a less-than-perfect society, and that is its own reward.

>>54614250
>Swaggering over-armed thug shows up in the local area
>Meets up with a bunch of similar low-lifes in the local tavern, stays there for a week groping local women, drinking the place dry, brawling and generally pisses everyone off
>Flouts local bylaws but everybody has to meekly tolerate this because they're armed to the teeth and have nothing to lose
>Takes off into the local wilderness and riles up the local wildlife/banditry but won't ever stay long enough to actually make a meaningful difference
>Breaks into your great, great grandfather's tomb, triggers every curse and ward in the place which may or may not effect the surrounding area and/or their descendants, mashes great-grandpop's irrate corpse into paste with a warhammer and proceeds to strip the place bare of valuables
>Comes back into town to barter with you for your own ancestor's grave goods in exchange for more weaponry, alcohol or currency

I...I'm so glad these self-employed entrepreneurs are contributing their wealth to our local economy ;__;

Adventurers in real life would be like the Routiers that were found throughout France during the Hundred Years War; unemployed soldiers or mercenaries who lived as bandits between periods of legitimate mercenary work, most commonly found loitering around city slums looking for work, shaking down travelling merchants for 'protection' money or torturing peasantry to find out where they buried their meagre valuables.

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>>54612748
No, because they are more often than not the "ale and whores" breed of people, and so they dump a lot of cash into the local economy wherever they go, and that's not even taking into account the supplies they are always wont for and the additional benefits of (usually) making wherever they are staying safer due to killing local bandits and monsters and their ilk.

>>54614504
And they you rough up the Vatican and can live comfy and rich for life with a ticket to heaven in your pocket