Everyone is an Adventurer

The very first time I ran B/X for my group of friends, I gave a handout to each player with some basic guidelines to get everyone thinking in the right mindset. Here's the handout: The Super Hexcrawl World Player Guidelines.

I don't use this handout anymore, but much of what is written on it is still applicable to the current campaign, most notably the very first bullet point, "Everyone is an adventurer." I wanted this to be the very first thing that anyone who played in one of my games read. This sentence is as fundamental of a concept to the core game as Hit Points and Armor Class are.

There are plenty of role-playing games where your character can have a wide range of motivations, from political aspirations to becoming a gourmet chef. I've always been of the opinion that Dungeons & Dragons doesn't lend itself terribly well to things outside the scope of exploration, dungeon crawling, and combat. That isn't to say that you can't have a D&D campaign with a heavy focus on political intrigue or espionage, just that there are plenty of other games out there that may be better suited for those styles of play.

Upon hearing about Basic D&D for the first time many players will inevitably ask, "What if my character doesn't care about accumulating wealth?" This bullet point nips that question in the bud right away, by telling the player that their character must have a desire to plunder treasure, because that is simply the game we are playing. It is a game about collecting treasure, and it is a requirement that your character be interested in doing that. There is no "what if"; your character can ONLY be someone who is interested in collecting treasure.

The same goes for risking life and limb traveling through a hostile overworld to reach dungeons -- when you create a character, your character must have some predisposition to explore dangerous environments. It's a game about exploring dungeons, so creating a character that isn't interested in dungeons is antithetical to the game. This is never more true of any edition of any role-playing game than it is of Moldvay's Basic, where there aren't any rules pertaining to anything outside the dungeon whatsoever. Without the addition of Expert, the entire game is the dungeon.

That's why "Everyone is an adventurer" is paramount. It's not to say that characters can't have other hopes or aspirations -- by all means, learn how to cook on your downtime, and once you've saved up enough gold to open your own gourmet restaurant feel free to retire. What the character thinks or believes is entirely up to the player, and can change on a whim. The only requirement is that the character has to be someone who spends most of their time breaking into crypts and ancient ruins to steal forgotten fortunes, because that's what the game is fundamentally about.