How many legendary Adventurers are out there in-story?

[FJerome]

How many Adventurers are out in the game, in-game, as accomplished as your character? Are you one of many, one of a rare breed or The One?

This debate has popped up in at least two of the active threads so I think it deserves its own.

(Personally, I think it's going to vary from player to player. My characters' continuities are heavily tied-up in the continuity of their RP-based Free Company so in their world the "new" warriors of light are a small group of people better known for their unbelievably good luck than for any sort of courage or prowess.)

[WellFooled]

I'm a little confused by what you're asking.

Do you mean how many adventurers in canon are as accomplished as our characters are portrayed? I don't think any specific characters are equal to us, but I think the game leaves the possibility that there are unnamed adventurers that match us. After all The Warriors of Light from 1.0 are officially part of lore and our character is portrayed as taking on some of the more difficult tasks with teams of other adventurers.

Or are you asking how many other adventures out there match us in-game? In which case I would say a probably a good couple hundred thousand :P Since there are probably that many people taking on tough content at level 50.

Or do you mean how many other adventures match us in our own RP-stories? If so the answers will vary from person to person Sadly, I haven't RPed in FFXIV so I don't have an answer for this one.

[FJerome]

I'm a little confused by what you're asking.

Do you mean how many adventurers in canon are as accomplished as our characters are portrayed? I don't think any specific characters are equal to us, but I think the game leaves the possibility that there are unnamed adventurers that match us. After all The Warriors of Light from 1.0 are officially part of lore and our character is portrayed as taking on some of the more difficult tasks with teams of other adventurers.

This first one, more or less, spinning off from the debates here and here. People seem to have pretty varied opinions about it.

[WellFooled]

I can see where the poster you linked first is coming from, but I would say there are defiantly throngs of adventurers out there. After all, there are whole guilds dedicated to adventurers in every city and there are dozens of adventurer NPCs around the cities (and most or all of Revenant's toll is populated by them) and the whole levequest infrastructure seems to be based around the idea of adventurers.

Just no individual adventurers in lore have done as much as our characters have done. I don't think adventurers make it a habit of defeating Ultimate Allagan weapons and Primals supped up to the extreme by crystals. Most are probably more like common mercenaries and sell swords.

[Skyhound]

Being an Adventurer in Eorzea is essentially being a really powerful mercenary. The profession began after the Autumn War, where the powerful warriors that helped the Alliance push back Ala Mhigo found themselves without any work. Thus, many had to turn to a life of crime to survive. Since they were too strong for the GCs to quell, they created the Adventurer profession so that these displaced soldiers could find some honest work.

So there are countless numbers of Adventurers of every CLASS. What makes the player different is their ability to specialize with a JOB and their connection with Hydaelyn. Essentially our Adventurer is THE ONE, but everyone else in the plot sees him as part of a rare breed akin to the Company of Heroes and the Warriors of Light. Remember, the main character already makes quite a name for him/her self by the time they first leave their starting city. The right to use the airship is not common, nor is the ability to join a Grand Company, or to own property.

[TinyRedLeaf]

From what I understand — correct me if I'm wrong — there are, in ascending order of "legendary" status:

1) adventurers,
2) the Company of Heroes,
3) the Warriors of Light,
and
4) you, ZA SUPESHURU WAN!

To borrow terminology from a particular trading card game, they would rank as Common, Uncommon, Rare and Mythic Rare, in ascending levels of power and scarcity.

That said, I also subscribe to the idea that the player-character just happens to be the lucky one among a handful of adventurers chosen by Hydaelyn after the Calamity. I recall, for example, that in my character's first vision of the the Mothercrystal, he wasn't alone — there were other adventurers in that vision, who were also presumably blessed with the Echo. It just so happens that our characters were the ones who caught the attention of their respective Scion representative, and was thus recruited into the organisation.

As they say in real life, it's not enough to be talented. You'd also have to be in the right place and at the right time to get noticed and groomed for greater things. I daresay there are other Echo-blessed adventurers out there, who may even be part of the free companies that took part in the final siege on the Praetorium. They just didn't happen to be lucky enough to have been spotted by the Scions, unlike YOU.

[Vanifae]

The PC is unique, there are other notable adventurers but we in the general sense have been chosen for some great destiny. It's acknowledged many times that we stand above other adventurers and the Scions rely on us for the most dangerous missions. In the final scenario missions they acknowledge you cannot complete the mission alone but you are the leader of the team to destroy the Ultima Weapon or fighting the primals. They always mention take care in building your party/team; so there are other skilled adventurers but we are acknowledged as living legends and heroes.

[Melithea]

That said, I also subscribe to the idea that the player-character just happens to be the lucky one among a handful of adventurers chosen by Hydaelyn after the Calamity. I recall, for example, that in my character's first vision of the the Mothercrystal, he wasn't alone — there were other adventurers in that vision, who were also presumably blessed with the Echo. It just so happens that our characters were the ones who caught the attention of their respective Scion representative, and was thus recruited into the organisation.

This really does highlight the plot hole in the lore vs. mechanics. If there were several other people with the Echo running around who were also elite adventurers chosen by Hydaelyn, they would all find their way to the Scions eventually, or be getting hunted by the Ascians, or both, yet they are never mentioned. And apparently none of them make their way into your Praetorium showdown group? It's just a different group of elite adventurers? So what's the point of Hydaelyn choosing many champions? Is it like buying 20 lottery tickets to improve your chances that you get a winner?

I see our character as being in an elite class of talented individuals, akin to Olympic athletes. Only a small percentage of people are born with this level of potential, and only some of them ever meet it. You, the gold medalist, are getting that extra little 'oomph' from Hydaelyn and the Echo that pushes you into epic status. Other PC and some NPC adventurers make up the remaining Olympic-athlete tier adventurers like the ones who previously made up the Warriors of Light (other than yourself). But there's still a problem when you talk about 'how many'. There are thousands of PCs running around on a given server. Realistically it looks like we outnumber native Eorzeans. Like if we just got organized we could take over Eorzea for ourselves in a matter of days. Yet somehow nobody notices this dramatic fact, and this population is hardly considered significant enough to even merit any effort to mobilize them against the Empire, where the beleaguered Grand Companies are forced to take up most of the work and only because YOU take the time to go out and take care of some business they couldn't.

All this considered, I think the population of adventurers is supposed to be pretty small, completely ignoring the actual number of PCs. Remember that there is a distinct group of NPC adventurers as well. Eorzean lore seems to be set up to largely ignore the existence of most players except for you. At most, a small handful of your fellow players appear to even exist for game purposes, and these also appear to make up a large percentage of the most skilled and successful adventurers around.

[Urthdigger]

The way I choose to see it, there are indeed many legendary adventurers. Lorewise, you're the one who defeated the primals and marched on Praetorium... but the other adventurers all did equally amazing things. Some of them are the fellow adventurers who helped you on your tasks. Others did completely unrelated, but also heroic, things.

[TinyRedLeaf]

So what's the point of Hydaelyn choosing many champions? Is it like buying 20 lottery tickets to improve your chances that you get a winner?

As you said, I think Hydaelyn was trying to improve her "odds", by seeding as many hyper-talented individuals as she could find.

I don't know if you've played version 1.0. If you haven't, then you might be interested to know that the Path of the Twelve preceded the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, and it was apparently made up entirely of people who possessed the Echo. Even then, not every such individual was destined for greatness. Minfilia had mentioned that many would embark on "paths" of personal discovery, only to end up lost forever. Many even appeared to be simple civilians with no particularly special talent.

So, it would seem that merely having the Echo does not automatically make you a Warrior of Light. There's every possibility that it's a dormant ability that doesn't always manifest itself. It may well be a spark that has to be ignited by moments of personal crises or epiphany. You, the player-character, just happened to be one whose spark was exceptionally bright, just enough to catch your appointment with fate.

There's another way to look at this apparent anomaly, and that is by considering the theme of religion in the story.

Religion plays a very strong role in this particular Final Fantasy, much more so than in previous iterations. And faith is a central tenet of all religions. Minfilia was apparently the first to believe fervently that there had to be a reason for the Echo. This was what drove her to found the Path of the Twelve — she wanted to gather as many Echo-blessed individuals as she could find, and to harness the gift for the greater good.

Why did Hydaelyn choose to work in this fashion? One may as well ask why God works in mysterious ways. For all we know, it could well have been meant to be a test of faith and resolve. Hydaelyn chose as many as she could find but, unlike the primals, she allowed each individual to retain the freedom to choose whether to believe in Her.

There are thousands of PCs running around on a given server. Realistically it looks like we outnumber native Eorzeans. Like if we just got organized we could take over Eorzea for ourselves in a matter of days. Yet somehow nobody notices this dramatic fact, and this population is hardly considered significant enough to even merit any effort to mobilize them against the Empire, where the beleaguered Grand Companies are forced to take up most of the work and only because YOU take the time to go out and take care of some business they couldn't.

That's not quite how I see it. Maybe you'll see it as mere hand-waving on my part, but I like seeing the thousands of PCs running around Eorzea — I literally imagine them to be the hundreds of common adventurers that the NPCs constantly refer to. From my perspective, every other player is part of the supporting cast in my story — and that's also true from your perspective.

As for how adventurers seem to outnumber NPCs, I usually assume that the grunts of the Grand Companies are all deployed on active duty. You'd rarely see them unless you join them as a regular, rather than as an auxiliary soldier, which is what you essentially are when you "sign up" with any of the three Grand Companies.

Likewise, most of the civilians are engaged in the drudgery of daily life and, as an adventurer, you'd see only those few that matter to your adventure.