Entry Level Quest Requires 1-3 Levels of Experience
“Most expect candidates to gain the experience through unpaid internships, which aren’t available to many students busy working part time jobs with a Challenge Rating of 0.”
In the city of Heapsbourgh, recent bard’s college graduate Stavis LePorg spends hours in her mother’s basement, scrying for entry level quests that she finds she isn’t qualified for. Not 40 years ago a job seeker with little formal education could find an entry level quest that would provide useful experience and herald a long, prosperous career in the growing field of adventuring.
Times have changed.
“You scry for entry level quests, read the description, and think ‘this is perfect for me’,” says LePorg. “Then you see that it requires previous experience. How can you call it an entry level quest when you have to have 2 levels of experience to be considered?”
Erudite sages who study such mysteries, known as economists, attribute such changes in the labor landscape to various developments. “Quest givers just don’t have the incentive to train adventurers,” wiseman Keynes Maynardious tells The Dungeon Tribune. “Most of them expect candidates to gain the experience through unpaid internships, which aren’t available to many students busy working part time jobs with a Challenge Rating of 0.”
The situation for new bard college graduates is even worse, as the antique curriculum doesn’t teach the skills demanded by today’s adventuring parties. “It breaks my heart,” says head of Human Resources for Runemist Staffing and Mercenaries, Alquart Pelnix. “I hear from many adventuring parties that wide eyed graduates come into interviews with spells like Animal Friendship and Illusory Script, and that’s just not what they’re looking for. There’s a place for liberal arts education, but today’s employers want Cure Wounds. Someone at the college should be preparing them for the real world and not some ivory tower idealism.” (Editor’s note: The Bard’s College of Heapsbourgh has 3 ivory towers, Pelnix doesn’t specify which one.)
Still others have different views of the problem plaguing new quest seekers. “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Charisma beats Intelligence in this economy,” says Haviat Jutiers, members of the city’s economic development council. “Adventuring is a service industry, and you can pick up the skills pretty easy, but you have to know the right people to get a foot in the door before you can check it for traps.”
Whatever the reason, many citizens of the realm aren’t sympathetic to the situation, or refuse to even accept there is a problem. Retired Rogue Swas Kindren entered the workforce back when they were called thieves, and would work for one mercenary company for decades before retiring with a pension and full benefits. He never experienced the freelance quest culture and mandatory class level requirements, but still manages to have an opinion on the current generation’s experience. “They’re just lazy. Kids these days don’t put in the effort,” says Kindren. “They wait around for the perfect quest and don’t want to work their way up. Back in my day we hit the streets and knocked on doors, and we took any quest we could get.”