When Making an Adventurer, make sure they want to Adventure
Being an Adventurer is kind of a dumb idea. Risk life and limb for an unknown payday? Face eldritch horrors along the way? No. Definitely not. I wouldn’t be that foolish. And yet… The promise of riches, fame, and excitement draws plenty of adventurers to their peril.
But then the hero’s journey got popularized. The reason that the hero’s journey works in movies and books is that somebody gets to be the main character. At the TTRPG table, the group is the protagonist of your story, not any one character. So if you make a farmboy who’s happy to work on his uncle’s moisture farm, you cause a dilemma for the rest of your party. Do you expect them to stage a stormtrooper attack in order to convince their last party member to get off their ass? Do they go off adventuring without you?
Make sure your adventurer comes to the table wanting to adventure. Here’s how you can do it, depending how much time or effort you want to invest.
level 1: Greed
The easiest motivation for a foolhardy adventurer is greed. There’s gold in contracts to clear out undead, there’s gold in ruins, and if all else fails there’s gold in NPC’s pockets. Lets go get it.
Greed is straightforward, and it doesn’t preclude you from making any other character archetype you want. Just slap “and loves gold” onto the end of any character description you may otherwise have. You can be a noble fighter who loves gold to upgrade their gear, an academic wizard who needs money for spell components, a cleric who gathers gold to give to the needy, or a druid who needs gold to keep a dragon appeased from burning down their grove.
No matter why your character wants it, greed is a good motivator. GM says there is money, and you’re ready to go. Ready for adventure.
Level 2: Circumstance - a debt to be paid
If you want to give your GM new narrative tools, consider a slightly different motivation - a debt. Han solo takes adventurous jobs because he needs to pay off Jabba the Hutt. Make up an NPC you owe something to, and say you are out to fulfill that debt. It could be an actual money debt, or it could be a debt of service to an NPC who saved your town long ago.
This is also where a revenge motivation comes in. Are you searching far and wide for the six fingered man who killed your family? Great! Your debt it vengeance, and the interest is building. Sounds like you’re all ready for adventure. And you’ve given your GM free content. They can say “a man with six fingers has been spotted by the ruins” and you’re all in.
Level 3: Purpose
When you want your motivation to bleed over into your RP, and when you want to take a proactive part in providing your character’s motivation, you can try to come up with a purpose that your character has, or an ideal they dedicate themselves to. It has almost become a joke in RPG circles, but when your Paladin has dedicated themselves to eradicating evil, the simple presence of goblins can be a reason to go adventuring.
Choose what your character has dedicated themselves to, and then make a general plan about how they’re going to do that via violence. Are they collecting artifacts for the church, and so must adventure to find magic items? Are they agents of anarchy, aiming to overthrow the king when they collect enough power? Maybe they are starting orphanages across the lands, and so they adventure to accumulate (and spend) gold in every place where parents seem to go missing. (places with monsters and treasure!)
Just don’t make your party convince you
Whatever you settle on for your character motivation, make sure that your reason for adventuring is never “the rest of my party nagged me into doing it.” Choose a reason your character is out and about, then make it known at the table. The clearer your character’s motivation, the easier it is for your GM to bring you quests, NPCs, and plot hooks that play into it.
Plus, then you won’t bring the whole game to a screeching halt as you wait for your table to come up with a “good reason” that your character would come along and risk life and limb. You choose what you bring to the table, so choose to bring your own motivation.