Adventurers Hiring Adventurers

How might you handle it if one or more PCs wanted to hire NPC adventurers?

Not to do the main adventure on their behalf, or necessarily even to bolster the party on a main quest, but rather to run dangerous errands.

Something like to steal a inique item, or to assassinate another NPC, or to expand one's investment opportunities. Sort of like some video game RPGs (such as Final Fantasy Tactics or Assassin's Creed Blackflag) that let you spend money, hire someone to task, then sometime later receive word of success or failure.

This seems too varied, complex, and campaign-dependent to answer without a full blown GMG chapter. Some older campaign/GMing guides (i.e. 1st ed's DMG) covered portions of this, but ultimately the ones I recall helped mostly w/ basic tasks/hirelings and co-adventurers/henchmen, not so much pivotal tasks. Though there was a chart for hiring assassins and their success chances based on level vs. level. :-)

I guess you could build such a chart based on what level of threat and the expected treasure from overcoming that threat. The PCs would be providing the treasure in this instance (and IMO this should set them back on their WBL, though the deficit would become insignificant after several levels). This would make it a viable time-saving tactic for minor tasks, but cost a pretty (gold) penny to bypass at-level obstacles which they as the protagonists should be tackling.

Well, as you alluded to, this shouldn't be used for major plot points. Maybe as setup or background for scenes that the players are actually going to play in.

So something like hiring a cat burglar to steal a party invitation that the players need in order to get in to the shindig where they will meet their contact to progress their quest.

I would run it like a Skilled Hireling adjusted to an appropriate level for the task. Setting the cost would be the first difficult part.

The second difficult part would be deciding if there is any failure option. If the GM is fine with the idea of the PCs buying their way to success, then there wouldn't be any risk of failure. Alternatively there would be a risk of failure, but that needs to be figured out how do decide whether the hireling's quest was a success or a failure. Flat check would probably be unsatisfying. It would likely be better if it was somehow tied in to the skills chosen by the players rather than the arbitrary skills assigned to the hireling. But that would be difficult to do. I would have to think on that for a bit - and probably the answer would be tailored to each specific quest rather than a general purpose answer.

How might you handle it if one or more PCs wanted to hire NPC adventurers?

Not to do the main adventure on their behalf, or necessarily even to bolster the party on a main quest, but rather to run dangerous errands.

Something like to steal a inique item, or to assassinate another NPC, or to expand one's investment opportunities. Sort of like some video game RPGs (such as Final Fantasy Tactics or Assassin's Creed Blackflag) that let you spend money, hire someone to task, then sometime later receive word of success or failure.

I don't know if I would really want to codify this into fixed rules. This seems like the sort of thing that should be figured out on a case by case basis.

On the one hand, sending an NPC to do a nasty job so your PC is safer makes a certain sense. On the other hand, ask the player "do you not want to play that scene yourself?" because the point of playing the game is to play the game, not to delegate it to offscreen NPCs.

However, it could also be done in some interesting ways:
* The players are planning some complex heist where things need to happen at different places at the same time. They have five tasks, four teams of NPCs, and themselves. They need to decide which thing they're going to take care of themselves and which NPCs to send where.

* Maybe you even relax the very concept of "one player, one character" a bit. Other games like Ars Magica have campaigns where each player contains a wizard (superstar PC), companion (still-potent buddy to a wizard) and a bunch of grogs (decidedly lower level minions). On a typical adventure, there'll be one or two wizards, their companions, and grogs; so not everyone is playing characters of the same power level at the same time. That's not something everyone enjoys of course.

* Slightly less intense: when the players hire some NPC party to do a job, they can play those NPCs, so the whole thing does happen on-screen, just their normal PCs aren't also on camera at that moment. PFS1 did this famously with the Serpents Rise scenario, where the players got to play the bad guys whose secret mission kicked of the season 7 metaplot (and their actual characters got XP for it, because reasons). This can be an opportunity for people to play a different build or even class than normal for a "vacation".

I'd follow the planar ally ritual table as an example, apart from the critical success ( would be off for an assassin to lower your contract by 50% just because reasons ).

Payment always costs at least as much as a consumable item of the creature’s level, even for a short and simple task, and it often costs as much as a permanent magic item of the creature’s level to persuade a creature to fight alongside you.

This assuming the task and the hired assassin are on the same level.

For a "dangerous" task the paycheck would be way higher ( rather than using the target's level, you'll be using the task DC level ).

For example, in a settlement lvl 10 you'll be able to find a lvl 9 assassin which can be hired.

The average price of a worn magic item ( no exploits like using consumables ) would be 650g.

Being asked to accomplish a severe mission ( a dangerous one then ) would switch the cost to 2000g ( which is the average cost for a lvl 12 item ).

Note that if a summoned creature given from your deity always asks for a paycheck equal to at least an average magic item of the creature's level ( even for short tasks ), there's no way a professionist would make discounts or ask for a lower price.