Captain Anorak's Guide to Gaming
Wandering Fantasy Adventurers
You've got a fantasy RPG. Let's call it AB&C. In the background to this game there's a world with people in who have lives and do things. Peasants farm, and lords tax the peasants and use military power to exercise control over the land. Traders trade and craftsmen craft. They all have things to do which make some kind of sense.

Then you have a bunch of player characters, and they're wandering adventurers. What the fuck's that supposed to mean? They go around finding 'dungeons' which are full of random monsters with random treasure, and they slay the monsters and take the treasure. What's that all about?

These people have no homes and no roots. They don't have a place in society; they seem to exist outside the normal limits of the gameworld. In any gameworld, I would expect the player characters to come from that world and to know their place in it. I would expect them to have some sort of normal source of employment. Professional fighters would be soldiers or guards, not 'wandering adventurers.'

Wanderers have certainly existed in historical societies, but they're not like the wandering adventurers of AB&C. In many societies there have been packs of bandits or vagabonds who roamed around, and the hands of all decent people were turned against them. In the film Conan the Barbarian, Conan, Subotai and Valeria are wanderers, but they are openly called thieves and the forces of order are against them.

There is a simple reason why games companies make games like this: it's easy. They have to put no effort into making something more sensible, because the average gamer just doesn't care about this. But there's also a commercial reason. If the PCs are wanderers who go around looking for adventure, then scenarios can very easily be written for them. Wandering characters can go to any place in the world, find a 'scenario hook' and get involved. This means almost that any scenario can be used by any party. This would not be possible if the PCs had some kind of sensible reason for being in the world. If the PCs in a party were, for example, members of a trading house in the city of Akol, or a military unit in the Provincial Guard of the Harung Empire, that party would not be able to play 99.99% of the scenarios published for that game. Effectively, it would be impossible to sell commercial scenarios if all parties played like this, and every party was doing something different.

The way out of this is to make a game where it is written in that the PCs do a certain job, and make this the subject of the game. Thus one might write a game based around the idea of playing a unit of the Provincial Guard of the Harung Empire. Then all scenarios could be published on this premise. Then a supplement might come out, about playing trading characters in the city of Akol (in the Harung Empire) and scenarios could be produced for that. So there is a way of doing it, but it involves writing a game which has this great limitation in the scope of what its characters can do.

Games have been published like this. In Legend of the Five Rings, characters are Samurai who get sent on missions by their Lords. In Paranoia, characters are Troubleshooters (a sort of militia) who get sent on missions by The Computer (which runs the city they live in, Alpha Complex). So it's perfectly possible to write games like this. It's just most people can't be bothered.

The tragic truth is that a lot of roleplayers just don't care about this sort of thing, and they will happily play the standard crap without thinking or caring about whether or not it makes any sense.

See also Character Purpose.