Quote from: deadDMwalking;689503D&D rewards killing stuff (XP) and taking their stuff (possibly XP, but definitely money that can be used to buy goods and services).  

Choosing not to kill things and avoid taking their stuff is not rewarded.  Even if you accomplish 'the mission' the system is not designed to reward you.

If you 'rescue the princess' without killing anything or taking it's stuff, your only reward is potentially a friendly contact.  

The system rewards murder-hoboism.

Except for the part where this isn't true.

3e includes rules on story awards right in the DMG (though they're left a bit to DM fiat). OD&D doesn't award monster XP at all, only treasure. Some editions reward encounter XP based on survival rather than killing, and pre 3e editions had morale checks that meant monsters might flee instead of fighting to the death, so you only had to rout the enemy, not kill them.

'Murder hoboes' is an idea based largely on a style of play that actually ignores many of the actual rules of D&D as written.

Quote from: deadDMwalking;689503D&D rewards killing stuff (XP) and taking their stuff (possibly XP, but definitely money that can be used to buy goods and services).  

Choosing not to kill things and avoid taking their stuff is not rewarded.  Even if you accomplish 'the mission' the system is not designed to reward you.

If you 'rescue the princess' without killing anything or taking it's stuff, your only reward is potentially a friendly contact.  

The system rewards murder-hoboism.

Quote from: gamerGoyf;689505So the wargamers who comprised the playerbase of "original D&D" just completely abandoned doing combats in favor of tea and crumpets in their fantasy wargame hack. That's some sick revisionism bro.

Once again, for those a bit slow on the uptake, original D&D rewarded the aquisition of treasure by whatever means, with rewards for killing/defeating foes coming in at a very distant 2nd place.

Furthermore, OD&D characters were very fragile at first and prone to dying from a single hit. Getting into combat after combat was thus the fastest way to rolling up new characters and never getting any treasure or decent XP.

Exploring and finding ways to obtain treasure without having to bleed for it was the most optimal path to success. Murder hoboism became more of an option once a few levels were gained and combat was initiated with known weaker foes.

Quote from: jeff37923;689362One Horse Town declared a while ago that the majority of problems people claim in RPG design actually stem from a distrust of the people that are enagaged as participants.

I don't know if its based in distrust, but after a long break from gaming that included totally missing D&D 3e, one repeated statement I've seen that really bought home how much roleplaying gaming had changed, at least as far as D&D went, was "The rules are the medium through which the players interact with the game."  That was a total shock to me, used as I was to the DM being the medium through which players interacted with the game.  Rules, such as they were, were merely structures to aid the DM in that role.

Quote from: Iosue;689510I don't know if its based in distrust, but after a long break from gaming that included totally missing D&D 3e, one repeated statement I've seen that really bought home how much roleplaying gaming had changed, at least as far as D&D went, was "The rules are the medium through which the players interact with the game."  That was a total shock to me, used as I was to the DM being the medium through which players interacted with the game.

Ditto. One of the sea changes was that apparently, players started reading the rules. Cracking the Players Handbook a couple times during a session to look up a spell was about all the rules-referencing my players ever partook in. Rules? Those are for the DM to worry about. Players just concern themselves with what their PCs know and do.

Then when I heard that it has become common for players to read the Monster Manual, I was thrown for another loop. That was flat-out cheating back in the day.

It is disingenuous to stay its a style of play not active in the hobby and particularly early style D&D.
Saying but you only needed to route the monster and you didn't need to kill them is takign murder hobo to literally.

The point is in early D&D a lot of PCs wandered about with no backstory no context and no real concern about characterisation. They met things that they generally tried to kill. If the thing ran away then great you saved resources for later. Then they took their stuff.
Yes hte game was really about taking their stuff as opposed to actually killing them but we all know a monster killed it less likely to come back lookign for its stuff with a dozen mates later on than one that you stabbed a few times.

If people are honestly saying that back in the day they never rolled a PC found themselves at the gate to an underground complex and explored it lookig for treasure and killing stuff that got in their way then .... I have to ask if they are being entirely honest.
Didn't you even find your self in a tavern when a guy annouced he was looking "adventurers" to help him recover a lost maguffin in a nearby catecomb and they could keep everything else they found. By adventurer read travellers just passing through town willing to comitt violence to others in exchange for reward .... sound like Murder Hobos to me....

It's like saying Traveller isn't about "Tinker Hobos" or CoC isn't about "Nosey Busybodies"

Quote from: gamerGoyf;689505So the wargamers who comprised the playerbase of "original D&D" just completely abandoned doing combats in favor of tea and crumpets in their fantasy wargame hack.

In a sense, yes, that's exactly what happened.  The wargamers weren't interested in doing combat.  That's what they had wargames for.  D&D was for doing all the other stuff that wargames didn't care about.

This can easily be seen in how combat has changed over editions.  Combat in OD&D was highly abstract and fairly quick to resolve.  Heck the original rules even said, "Here's a quick-and-dirty alternate system, but you can just use the CHAINMAIL rules for combat."  Combat in OD&D is all about setting up advantageous HP attrition.  In video game terms it was Sid Meier's Gettysburg, or the original Warcraft game.

It was the folks who never got into wargaming that latched onto the combat mini-game.  And like any good company, TSR and WotC changed the game steadily through the years to make it more intensive, more granular, and more fun.  Less Warcraft, more World of Warcraft.  And that's not even a dig at the newer editions.  World of Warcraft is the result of the same impetuses -- both the desire for something more personal than the setting up of forces, such as individual characters taking up quests, as well as a desire for a more granular combat experience.

Quote from: RPGPundit;487719A term I saw used on another forum, ostensibly about roleplaying games but mostly about tangential subjects.  It was being used there to refer to D&D Player Characters, suggesting that D&D is a fatally flawed game because instead of producing great heroes, it produces detached vagrants who kill wantonly.

My question: does anyone seriously buy this crap? Is "murder-hobos" an accurate depiction of how you would define the PCs of your D&D game?

RPGPundit

It's more of a Skyrim character than a D&D character from what I've seen.  In fact, I've rarely seen it in D&D.

Quote from: jibbajibba;689513The point is in early D&D a lot of PCs wandered about with no backstory no context and no real concern about characterisation. They met things that they generally tried to kill. If the thing ran away then great you saved resources for later. Then they took their stuff.
Yes hte game was really about taking their stuff as opposed to actually killing them but we all know a monster killed it less likely to come back lookign for its stuff with a dozen mates later on than one that you stabbed a few times.

I agree. There has a been a shit-tonne of historical revisionism among old-school players in recent years, and a blurring of the lines between OD&D and B/X and AD&D. OD&D was only ever played by a very small number of people. Even by 1979, the number of players introduced by the Holmes set swamped the OD&D player base. And back then we had no way of knowing how Gygax and his crew played.

It's one thing to say you often encountered monsters you had to avoid or run from. It's another thing to say you were never intended to fight monsters, only steal treasure. Or that hack and slash play started with 3rd edition. That's complete bullshit. I'm willing to bet that most groups who played Keep in the Borderlands ultimately put every living monster in that dungeon to the sword.

In AD&D adventures, there was major incentive to kill everything - eventually. How could you know you found all the treasure, all the secret areas, if you left parts of the dungeon unexplored? Why head off to a new dungeon and leave potentially lootable rooms and monsters behind? And of course in B/X and AD&D you do get XP for killing monsters. Quite a bit.

The style of play promoted by many old-school players today isn't the way they actually played back in the day; it's a style of play they read about on forums over the last 6-8 years. And it's a reaction against WotC D&D and modern playstyles. Go back and read the Necromancer Games or the Dragonsfoot boards from 10 or 12 years ago. That's the way most old-schoolers played before the OSR Old Testament reactionary jihad raised its banners and tried to convince younger gamers that before 3rd edition everyone played like Gary fucking Gygax.

Quote from: Haffrung;689530It's one thing to say you often encountered monsters you had to avoid or run from. It's another thing to say you were never intended to fight monsters, only steal treasure. Or that hack and slash play started with 3rd edition. That's complete bullshit. I'm willing to bet that most groups who played Keep in the Borderlands ultimately put every living monster in that dungeon to the sword.

That's certainly how my group and I used to roll.

There's a difference between how the OD&D game was envisioned, the particular form it took upon publication, or the way it was played by different groups in those times.

The game spread like wildfire and was played in a variety of ways depending on regional affiliations, whether the people were into wargames and what type or types of wargames they were accustomed to, whether they were society of anachronism type dudes, or big on Diplomacy variants and whatnot. The end result is that no two groups were playing the exact same game. Some of those groups started to find the game needed addition, or correction, or simply wanted to put their own imaginative stuff out there. That's how stuff like the Perrin Conventions, Judges Guild and Arduin came up. Ultimately, these experiences would lead to new games cattering to specific needs and wants re:OD&D. More "realistic," simpler and more intuitive, etc. So we get Chivalry & Sorcery, RuneQuest, Tunnels & Trolls etc.

The point here is that saying that "most people did this or that" IS revisionism, whether it's "killing things and taking their stuff" (which is actually an expression from c. 2005 invented by none other than Mike Mearls, so it's kind of ironic to see Denners brandishing it like it exemplifies their understanding of the game) or "role playing court interactions at the castle and not doing much dungeon crawling."

These were wild times. D&D was new, exciting, and it was spreading like wildfire.

There is also sometimes a difference between "combat" and "killing things".

For example, I recall in the Giants Keep, we managed to lock the giants in their hall, obtain the roof, create a hole in the roof, and proceed to fireball the interior of the hall (with a wand of fireball) until everything was crispy or a few flaming stragglers bashed down the door only to fall to a rain of arrows as they burst through.

I would not call that event "combat".  It was a coordinated slaughter, but very little was combat.

The GP=XP thing is great piece of games design that served an important function but faded away because people didn't understand it. It is proof that system matters in terms of driving the direction of play.

GP=XP is a standard rule in AD&D, OD&D, and I believe red box basic. You also get XP for monster kills but it's a small % of your total intake. The result is that the game directly encourages and rewards smart problem solving, where players think of ways to accomplish objectives indirectly while avoiding the (incredibly lethal at low levels) combat system. The dungeon (or wilderness, later) is something to explore and ultimately outwit. This is not to say that many people wouldn't have played that way anyway, depending on their backgrounds etc as Benoist points out. But at the very least putting it in as a rule highlights its importance and encourages people to do it more.

By the time of second edition (which is when I started playing) the game is different and the players are different. GP=XP when looked at from the perspective of 'D&D is about combat/realism/story' is a weird, nonsensical rule. 2e reduced it to an optional thief-specific rule which many people ignored, especially as the book offered little to no explanation of its benefits. Combat (and to a much lesser extent 'story' and skill use) becomes the rewarded activity in the game and hack and slash becomes I suspect more prevalent (again, partly due to the new younger generations of players coming from computer games and fighting fantasy books). Fighting three penniless orcs in a room is a worthwhile activity rather than a pointless waste of resources. Finding a way to dodge the easy but unrewarding encounters is now bad play rather than good play.

By the time you get to third edition combat is by far the primary means of generating XP and only very old school people remember about or use the GP thing. Advancement is easier so killing your way to second level is the expected progression. Easy combats are to be sought out and finding clever ways to avoid winnable encounters is actually counter-productive. The combat system itself becomes much more complex and tactical as people are expecting to engage with it regularly (rather than it being a failure condition as it is in some old school play). Noncombat activites are to be defeated by skill rolls because they earn you XP in a way that non-rules based creativity does not. The rules become the game.

4th edition then continues the tradition, arguably making combat even more of a focus, making rules-based solutions to noncombat problems even more prevalent (skill challenges), and defining almost everything in mechanistic rules terms. Combats are also tactical enough now, and the focus of so much of the character sheet, that fights are fun enough to be an ends in and of themselves. Avoiding a fair fight is not only leaving cash money on the table, it's also avoiding the best part of the game. D&D is almost entirely about hack and slash rather than puzzle solving.

5th edition if it wants to approximate old school play needs to go back to GP=XP.

To be honest I find this whole debate a bit silly. Killing things and taking their stuff in games is zero reflection on who people actually are, in defiance of the totalitarians who feel guilty if they don't wipe their asses in a manner approved by the party. The way I played D&D many, many years ago when I still did play it was killing things and taking their stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that.

Indeed entire multibillion dollar industries have been built around killing things and taking their stuff. It's very popular. WoW, almost every FPS PC game, every PC game that involves combat could be accused of the very same thing, and the millions of people who enjoy them daily couldn't give a tinker's damn about what the PC brigade think of it.



And that's shooting your fellow human beings, not some evil entities squatting in caverns, o noes!

In fact I'd wager most of the PC brigade play those games without a second thought.

That there is greater depth available to RPGs has been known from the first, but it wasn't really pursued until relatively recently. Yes the D&D system does give essential rewards for murderhobo-ing and so promotes it, the real question is does anyone see this as a bad thing? Anyone that matters? No, not really.

These days I play a system that doesn't offer any special rewards for killing things and taking their stuff and it has produced a very different and to my mind better experience. When skills progress naturally by using them or training in them, and gold coins are useful only for buying stuff, players become more immersed and act towards goals their character would like to achieve.

tl;dr, yes D&D encourages murderhoboing, what of it? Doesn't stop you getting your roleplaying on if you want to do that.

And lots of people found out that killing things and taking their stuff (any edition) is the best way to advance a character's personal power.  

Even in 3.x (my preferred edition) there is too much emphasis on XP for killing monsters (defeating) and not enough on story awards.  In fact, since advancement is too fast for my liking as written, unless you scale WAY BACK on XP for defeating monsters, adding EVEN MORE XP for story awards just makes the problem worse.  

I'm sure there are lots of people that try to avoid 'murder-hoboism'.  I'm one of them.  But I end up swimming up stream against the rules.  

The same is true for me for magic items.  I don't like the idea of looting people and taking their stuff.  But if I want to kill a wraith, I need a magical sword.  So do I take it from the goblin chief I killed?  If there are no magical item shops, then I'm pretty much forced to do that.  I could choose NOT to and hope that if I'm really good, a king will GIFT me a magic weapon, but the game tends to PRESUME that you'll pick up useful items from people you kill.  

Some people fight against that.  But the rules don't make it easy.

Quote from: Mistwell;689541There is also sometimes a difference between "combat" and "killing things".

For example, I recall in the Giants Keep, we managed to lock the giants in their hall, obtain the roof, create a hole in the roof, and proceed to fireball the interior of the hall (with a wand of fireball) until everything was crispy or a few flaming stragglers bashed down the door only to fall to a rain of arrows as they burst through.

I would not call that event "combat".  It was a coordinated slaughter, but very little was combat.

I see what you mean. I'd call this actual tactics based on the game world versus charging into melee to let the numbers do your imagining for you, but I think this is a similar distinction we're making.

In order to take out foes efficiently, the game (referring to the O/AD&D game here) kind of assumes that you'll avoid straight on "combat in a white room" with monsters to use actual tactics to your utmost advantage whenever possible. It's not letting the numbers in a white room scenario decide for you the outcome of the confrontation, it's playing with the game world in order for the situation to overwhelmingly favor your side of the engagement. Or in other words, tactical confrontations are smart play. "Combat" kills your character.