Quote from: Melan;487779So, am I the only one here who has

• not only played in games with murder hobo characters, but
• enjoyed them and
• doesn't find them a guilty pleasure?

Because I think you folks are missing out on something. Playing anti-social lowlives risking life and limb for a fistful of gold pieces in a dangerous, hostile and overpoweringly amoral world is liberating and legitimately entertaining.

Oh, I definitely still dip into murder-hobo-ville, but not regularly.  If a game is going to go that route I'm more likely to use Warhammer than D&D though--and the PCs are likely to be actual hobos.

No, murderhobo doesn't do it for me I 'm afraid. An important part of what makes roleplaying fun is bonding with my character and believing what he does. The typical murderhobo contrast has neither empathy nor any ties or investment in the setting. He's the let's kill the town guard just because we can kind of character.

You can play lowlifes, rogues and ruffians and assorted scum all you like but as long as they are well defined characters who do things for a reason (such as the crew of Firefly) they aren't murderhobos.

"Murder hobo" is used a lot on The Gaming Den, so no, I don't think it's used to denigrate D&D.

Good to see the results. For a moment, I thought TheRPGSite has also gone down the rabbit hole.

Quote from: B.T.;487799"Murder hobo" is used a lot on The Gaming Den, so no, I don't think it's used to denigrate D&D.

As much as I've enjoyed reading TGD at times, I think the dominant mode of reasoning is often convergent and rather reductionist. This post may or may not have denigration as its intent, but it's still something that many D&D fans would object to--rather like the borderline Forgist view that accompanied 4e, in which D&D fans were encouraged to embrace hyper-gamism.

See also. Etc.

Quote from: Cranewings;487748Instead though, I reasoned that the hoplite commander wasn't an all together terrible person, and when faced with a Paladin he fought alongside in a battle, with a high charisma and an aura of good, he decided to do the right thing and take the paladin back to get another ship. No one apologized for face palming on it, but to the Paladin player and to me, it made sense. It is also the kind of interaction you hope to expect as a paladin player - that you can do the right thing and tell the truth because even people of questionable moral character will be inspired by you. That is the whole fucking point of the high charisma and aura of good.

That is fucking awesome, and it is going to be the core mechanic of any set of rules I eventually write.  

Quote from: StormBringer;487815That is fucking awesome, and it is going to be the core mechanic of any set of rules I eventually write.  

Agreed - any time conflict can be resolved without combat (in D&D especially) is a memorable moment, and great gaming. I actually talked down a Beholder once. Oh, and my evil cleric made a deal with a large Green dragon, and sealed the deal with a DeathTouch handshake - DM failed the roll. Was pretty spectacular.

Quote from: Werekoala;487788Seriously though, D&D to me was always about gritty, dirty guys doing gritty, dirty things in gritty, dirty places in seach of loot.

I'd also add "doing some good" in this list. This style of D&D play which is how it goes for most gamers I have talked to reminds me a bit of Rightwing Film Geek's review of The Dark Knight. The relevent bit is this :

QuoteIndeed, the best analogy I can think to the Batman character is from “The St. Petersburg Diaries,” a work by Count Joseph De Maistre — an anti-Revolution French philosopher hardly known (unjustly so) outside the circle of right-Catholic reaction. In that work, among the lather of ironies and paradoxes De Maistre has endless fun with, he describes the executioner as the man on whom society’s order relies but whom society despises.

I'm not saying all D&D games are like this but I do think there's a grey area in D&D where most characters exists. As for "murder hobos", well it's like if you don't like the game, you'll invent all sorts of swell names to denigrate it's players.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;487793I don't think AD&D explicitly rewards anyone emotionally.

I couldn't think of a better way to put it, but if you want to look at what kind of player behaviour you're going to get, look at what the game rewards the players for doing.  In AD&D, players are mechanically rewarded for murder-hoboing (increased player agency through increased PC power via magic items and levels gained via XP earned from killing monsters and snarfing loot), but they are also rewarded emotionally in that virtually all of the game's mechanics are combat focused and somewhat opaque.  Spending the effort to find the combination of rules and loopholes to produce a result beneficial to the character gives the player an emotional boost via a sense of achievement and mastery of a non-trivial task.  Same reason people play sudoku and RTSes.

This is why I don't buy the "later editions of D&D say you don't have to kill the monster to get the XP" argument.  That may be true, but the rules still reward the player emotionally for figuring out how to be the baddest-ass combat monster.  They don't reward the player for figuring out how to be, say, Cranewing's Captain America Paladin.

Quote from: Werekoala;487816Agreed - any time conflict can be resolved without combat (in D&D especially) is a memorable moment, and great gaming. I actually talked down a Beholder once. Oh, and my evil cleric made a deal with a large Green dragon, and sealed the deal with a DeathTouch handshake - DM failed the roll. Was pretty spectacular.

Very nice.

Quote from: daniel_ream;487823I couldn't think of a better way to put it, but if you want to look at what kind of player behaviour you're going to get, look at what the game rewards the players for doing.[....]

 But earlier editions give you XP for gold even if you don't kill the monster. That's point I.

Point II is that you're assuming the "combat-focused" mechanics are where people are going to seek their rewards. I certainly ran into this, we called them "munchkins", but I think it's a mistake to see the game that way, or at any rate to see the game necessarily that way. In various incarnations, the rules of D&D have been so minimal as to be practically not there; playing it like a board game where all the goals are defined and interpreted through the rules is  pretty much missing the point. The real point was simply learning that you could role-play; the rules were just there as an adjunct to handle situations were pure role-play didn't work very well.

Basically, not only did people who started with such-and-such-edition preserve this view of things into later editions, but even in those which are more rule-bound, it's been possible to receive the rules that way--as a simulative adjunct instead of as an incentivizing framework.

This is an argument I've made many times on these boards (e.g. passim in this thread, so apologies to those who've already seen it.

Maybe I'll get lynched for saying this but even in AD&D we gave out XP for stuff other than combat. It's not like we thought we were Shakespearean reenactors-but  clever ideas get some kind of reward. So does great characterization, and great moments of levity and humor.

That said I guess when I look at the original post, as written by El Pundito I don't think of a couple of guys blowing off steam in their game but misery tourist's looking to enact sick fantasies. At work I came across a group of sex offenders whose idea of fun was role-playing out their sick fantasies. That's kind of what I was thinking of.

AD&D says to avoid unnecessary encounters, that your first response to a combat encounter, unless you've specifically planned and prepared for it after determining that it's necessary to meet a certain objective, should be to run away.

Doesn't seem super-compatible with murder-hoboism to me.

I mainly saw this kind of stuff in RPGA tournaments. It wasn't very common in home games, though.

Quote from: Melan;487779So, am I the only one here who has

• not only played in games with murder hobo characters, but
• enjoyed them and
• doesn't find them a guilty pleasure?

Because I think you folks are missing out on something. Playing anti-social lowlives risking life and limb for a fistful of gold pieces in a dangerous, hostile and overpoweringly amoral world is liberating and legitimately entertaining.

In between adventures, my murderhobo PCs draw cards from a stack I made up describing what happens during the downtime. My baseline assumption when drawing up the cards is that the PCs are amoral thrill-seeking murderhobos who naturally gravitate to consorting with other amoral thrill-seeking murderhobos.

The current stack includes:

"It turns out your drinking buddies are a bunch of pirates. They teach you pirate cant. They offer to let you in on where all the secret pirate hideouts are, but it's your head if they find out you've betrayed their trust."

"A man named Wilmer Vassing cheats you at cards. In the ensuing drunken brawl, Vassing dies and you take the blame. You are wanted by the law (but not that badly)."

"You attend a sermon by Doctor Vermandus, a noted priest of Tash. He blesses the congregation, and even you benefit from it. +1 to any one saving throw, once."

"You do well at cards one night, but the Vassing Gang jumps you for it as you stumble home drunk. You lose 200gp and make a saving throw. Pass: You beat them off and get a reputation (but still lose the money). Fail: They beat you ugly -1 Cha"

"You invest your money wisely: in rum-running and tobacco farming. You are welcome in every inn and watering hole in Heshtown. You gain 250gp."

"An elvish conman named Givardi defrauds you in what hindsight reveals is a get-rich-quick scheme. You are poorer but wiser. -250gp + 250xp"