Exchange of Realities

Happy Labor Day to all my American readers (and anyone else who feels like celebrating Good Old Hard Work)!

In honor of the occasion, I’m going to ask a question that stands as one of the greatest Suspension of Disbelief Issues in the gaming world (and the writing world, occasionally): Do your heroes have a way of supporting themselves when they’re not heroing? Or, for that matter, when they are?

Now, some people don’t really worry about this, particularly when dealing with systems like D&D or Exalted, or stories in similar worlds. This is Heroic Fantasy, after all, and that implies a focus on, well, Heroics. I’ll admit, I’m not too fond of this perspective. It always seems to me that it leaves a large chunk of the character missing and brings up a few too many questions. After all, how does the character eat? If they live in a house or similar, how do they handle upkeep? (I really wonder about that after some of my own misadventures with houses.)

So, work. This is easier in some systems than in others. D&D has the simple failsafe of monsters with treasure, though that’s just as much for the sake of getting better items as anything; when that fails, how well a character can find a job is pretty much based on skill points, which gives the low skill point classes a harder time in that regard (ironically enough, the high-skill classes pretty much come with their own downtime income sources anyway). If you’re considering working that sort of thing in that system, I highly recommend houserules. In a point-buy, it’s mostly a matter of having the appropriate skills. Either way, this is something you’re going to want to discuss with the group early. If it’s your own world, either in freeform or because it’s a novel—well, since everyone can do what you say they can do, what’s stopping you?

The next question is what sorts of things one of the main characters might do to keep food on the table. The most obvious, for the martially inclined, is mercenary work. Got a sword, know how to use it, may as well get paid for those sorts of skills. This can be signing into a band or army, working as a personal guard, or similar tasks.

Or what about skilled labor? This sort of background can also be good for characterization; most people had to have been doing something before they went off on their path to greatness. Moreover, it does highly entertaining things to people’s viewpoints—crafts can give you a way of looking at things that you might not ordinarily think of. A carpenter, for instance, pays a lot of attention to how things are put together. Gardeners tend to focus on small signs of greater problems; doctors likewise.

And then there’s performance. It’s not quite as reliable day to day, but if you can get a cheerful audience with deep pockets, you’d be amazed at what you can draw out of them. And it puts its own spin on the world—a performer starts hearing patterns where they might not be otherwise, and soon learns that if you’re going to be able to work the crowd effectively, you need to be able to read them.

What about entrepreneurial endeavors? Maybe they have a trade route. Or apply magic to situations nobody’s applied magic to before. There are a lot of ways to find new uses for existing effects: heck, one of my favorite tricks in an Exalted game I played involved using market spirits as a price guide for a speculative trading endeavor.

Best of all, the hero’s quest for a living can give plenty of opportunity to introduce new plotlines, create connections with a different set of characters, and otherwise create a story that hadn’t been there before. It just takes a little inventiveness.