To be frank, this doesn't go just for DnD, a lot of video games do the exact same thing and it's jarring. Take Skyrim for example. 2 out of 4 songs are about the PC, 1(2 if you count each version separately) about the civil war that the PC can basically end single handedly, and only one song about something else.

This was something I thought about a few weeks ago when I found this amazing youtube channel making original DnD tavern songs. It's something I've been looking for, it's extremely difficult to find a medieval sounding song that isn't tied to something clearly identifiable like christianity, a figure from history or a country(county, city etc, you get the picture). And I will admit, the guy was very talented, but those songs were all unusable for me. Why? Well they all have lyrics depicting common situations adventurers may get into.

This bleeds beyond music of course, if every shop in your homebrew town is catering to the adventurers it gets weird. Why is this merchant in a small village carrying 20 different weapons? Those are expensive and most peasants won't be buying one.

Depending on how magical your world is encounters with magical creatures may be relatively common or very rare for a peasant or a townsman, but either way you slice it, it won't be the center of their existance. Mundane things like harvest, crop cycles and the upcoming festival will be on their mind. Perhaps a bard will sing about the miller's daughter that ran away with the poor fisherman.

When I see a world that bends around the PC or PCs, be it in a tabletop RPG or a video game, it just pulls me right out.

To each their own. My players are the main characters of the story, so I have no problem with the world shaping itself around them.

>Why is this merchant in a small village carrying 20 different weapons? Those are expensive and most peasants won't be buying one.

Because it's fun?

In my experience most people don't want a hyper realistic experience. The players are there to role play being heroes.

Pretty hard disagree on the video game example because that's often a very narrow, tailored experience by design. But I totally get what you mean about generic fantasy towns designed around catering to "adventurers", who are also just called that, or even some stand-in term like "rat-catcher". I abhor the idea of an "Adventurer's Guild", it just boils down any unique traits the party or the setting might have into such a generic premise.

Adventurers is just another fancy way of hiring freelancers or mercenaries.

Plenty of stories include them when the law becomes harder and harder to enforce.

Like in Mass Effect humanity has colonizer the galaxy alongside other alien races. Enforcing the law becomes especially difficult in non-governed spaces.

For most worlds it’s less one man armies and more precision strikes. Like a single Jedi is powerful but there’s only so much a single Jedi can do.

By the time PCs grow to that level of power they have already became legends in the world.

The world bending to the PCs doesn’t seem so much if you steadily progress through tiers of play.

I think you just read the title.

Perhaps a perspective shift would help with this (more so the second part than the part about songs). The world isn't built around adventurers but the adventurers only really perceive the parts relevant to them. A merchant with 20 swords is a lot of things to adventurers. A source of weapons and money, a possible plot hook, or just a fun oddity to mess with. A peasant with a cart full of hay? Not so much. They're more likely to go into a tavern catered towards adventurers and therefore the bard is going to sing about adventurers.

Also dont underestimate the amount of weapons peasants had.

It depends on the table.

The game revolves around adventurers, so that's what most people put their effort into. There's plenty of old school D&D material that goes over the economy of a medieval setting you could dig into you if you like, but honestly it's just a bit boring. I personally don't have villages carrying anything more than general supplies.

I could see a frontier town or village near a popular adventuring site maybe building their local economy around catering to adventurers, so having an armorer/weapon smith/potion maker might make sense in those situations. Think of them as like boom towns that get popular once an unexplored ruin is discovered nearby and adventurers flock to it and pour a lot of their gold into the economy, and once the ruins are cleared out the town's economy and population crashes.

for songs, have you tried bardcore covers?

Then it's not a world, it's a theme park. And you are not main characters, you are the only characters. If the world revolves around you then when players are away does it even exist? That's what pulls me out of the experience.

It is the golden age of adventurers. Adventurers are a dime a dozen. Why not cater to the crazy guy that has tons of money due to raiding all of the dangerous dungeons? He's probably going to be dead next week anyways.

As a world design principle, I totally agree with you. The stereotypical "Adventurers Guild" doesn't work for me, unless the world makes a point of really integrating and justifying it as a lawful brotherhood of mercantile professionals with locally or regionally protectionist goals.

But in a typical D&D game, it ain't that serious. It's fine.

Another person who only read the title or didn’t understand his Skyrim comparison. Video games do this well by not always focusing the songs around the PC. There are one or two songs in Skyrim focused on you, the player, and don’t run unless you have interacted with the main questline or the civil war questline. They are saying that it’s weird for generic tavern music to be discussing adventurers and monsters in most settings that aren’t Faerun.

I hate to break it to you but all fictional worlds are theme parks.