If the troops are being fed obviously its from the farmland under the empire's rule.
If I burn their crops and massacre their farmers, is that therefor a legitimate tactic to strike ablow against the empire, or does resorting to such activities go beyond the pale into murder hobo dom?
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Usually it's serial killer shit, yeah.
A single adventurer generally isn't going to be able to scorch enough earth to matter, so it's not going to meaningfully weaken their armed forces. Actual military leaders might have more of a case, but attrition is a very specific form of warfare, not something you do halfassed while doing other stuff.
Likewise, most people in a position to slaughter defenseless townsfolk have better options at their disposal. Even assuming starving their armies out was an option, most militaries and almost all adventurers are going to be striking at specific targets rather than burning it all to the ground and hoping that pays off.
Finally, even assuming razing farmlands is a viable strategy being pursued for military victory, it's a profoundly destructive and malicious act. The host empire performing evil slavery is a dubious justification if you yourself are committing massacre and starvation, but even if it's justified you're still a piece of work yourself.
So absolute best case scenario, it's ruthless and callous. Virtually all other scenarios are some form of evil for the sake of it, with a narrow band of ineffective or needlessly costly practicality.
don't listen to this anon, burning an entire cities supply of food or even taking a chunk of it will force the city to send out for help making it easy to ambush food convoys coming through which actually feeds more of YOUR troops.
if you're mostly a solo rebel or party of them, it'll add a ton of heat on you and it'll be essentially as effective as terrorism.
But what if they're 'evil' defenseless townfolk? If the farmers are all willingly partaking and benefiting from the act of exploiting the helpless, then reliving them of their twisted existence that is a parody of society is not only righteous but more merciful than letting them continue to exist in a state that at best is materialistic and hollow and at worst actively agonizing to their souls.
I think OP should worry more about harming slaves in the crossfire and should have them evacuated before going scorched earth, but if they're able to get away with it by all means reenact Sherman's March to the Sea.
For the matter, do slavers count as civilians? I think declaring someone is property for the sake of your policy is equal to taking up arms for it.
>Usually it's serial killer shit, yeah.
It's more terrorist shit, from the sound of it. Murderhobo/serial killer shit is killing for it's own sake, especially the killing of defenseless innocents. Killing defenseless farmers because they feed the Legion of Rape and Evil...is still morally south of Good, but not random or meaningless asshattery.
Are you trying to prove a point to your DM that the warcrimes you're pulling are hero behavior? They're not.
what are the Geneva conventions of the Forgotten Realms and where do they make it clear that you can't attack civilian infrastructure?
>so it's not going to meaningfully weaken their armed forces.
that's not an argument against trying
You're not playing with the Geneva Convention you moron you're playing with whoever will put up with you. Which is going to be one less table sooner than later if you're half as petulant over getting called out with them as you are here.
nah, you are
>what are the Geneva conventions of the Forgotten Realms and where do they make it clear that you can't attack civilian infrastructure?
Your goalposts are wandering. What central authority or documentation did you think governed murderhoboness?
>so it's not going to meaningfully weaken their armed forces.
>that's not an argument against trying
It literally is.
>If it was manslaughter, it's not murderhobo behavior.
That is not how that works. Plenty of murderhobo behavior involves zero deaths and lawfully owned property. Well, maybe not plenty, but the point is meaningless bullshit rather than homeless murder specifically. Carelessly arsoning people to death would certainly count, subject to the motivations of the arson itself.
Law and Morality are separate subjects.
>that's not an argument against trying
The argument is whether it counts as "murder hobo behavior." Stay on track, moron.
>Trying to fight evil is murderhobo behavior
>what are the Geneva conventions of the Forgotten Realms and where do they make it clear that you can't attack civilian infrastructure?
There are actual Gods in the setting and they make their will known though scriptures and prophets.
If you don't know if a specific act is considered evil in your world, talk it over with your DM.
Burning fields and razing buildings is fine.
Purposefully killing the workforce is only fine if the workforce voluntarily supports the regime (which slaves probably don't).
>Burning fields and razing buildings is fine.
>Purposefully killing the workforce is only fine if
burning and razing fields is undoubtedly killing the workforce. that's the reality of the situation
Key word being "purposefully", if you set a building on fire and some people happened to be inside that you didn't know of, shit happens. If you set a building on fire knowing there's people inside, it's a murderhobo thing.
It's literally in the name, if the death of an innocent or a bystander could be ruled as murder it is murderhobo behavior. If it was manslaughter, it's not murderhobo behavior.
Pipe-bombing big oil- err, I mean evil slaver empires in a roleplaying game is always morally justified, murder hobo behavior implies that you are directionless and only solve your problems with murder.
That being said, you can undermine evil slaver empires without violence, but its harder to do typically and doesn't get you any street cred.
Frick with their money any way you can, sow discord amongst its top execs, peel away the competent people that actually contribute to the entities well being to either a rival of the entity or yourself.
If all you can get away with is just attacking the way the evil slaver empire gets to spend its money, you can also force the evil slave empire to spend massive amounts of its resources patching holes or solving non-existent problems and spread rumours about the people/organization you can't sway or undermine to keep their social capital in check. Social capital is just as good as actual capital when everybody involved is already uber-rich.
cringe tankie post
>NOOOO YOU HAVE TO NOT FIGHT AGAINST EVIL PEOPLE UNTIL AFTER THEY ALREADY DREW GUNS ON YOU CUS...YOU JUST DO OK?
You would have agreed with me if I didn't include a joke Freudian slip, also
>tankie
people here dont give a shit about plebbit terms
This website was better when it was anarchist. You're drunk on boot polish.
You do not understand the depths of bootlust I sometimes find myself in
Ganker was never anarchist in the gay way that you mean
what kind of Anarchy are you thinking of?
the kind that assassinates archdukes
Anon, gasoline costs $3.43. A man, however reasonable can only be pushed so far.
People always say that you should use sneaky gorilla tactics and "sow discord" and then they get surprised when their cool band of political radicals are 90% feds.
>gorilla tactics
like throwing poo?
I'm now thinking more screaming and biting their face and hands off.
Who the frick needs a group to be an annoying little shit who costs organizations a lot of money? Making prank phone calls is disruptive and perfectly legal.
You can't break a man the way you break a dog or a horse. The harder you beat a man, the taller he stands. To break a man's will, to break his spirit, you have to break his mind. Men have this idea that we can fight with dignity, that there is a proper way to kill someone. It's absurd. It's anaesthetic. We need it to endure the bloody horror of murder. You must destroy that idea. Show them what a messy, terrible thing it is to kill a man, and then show them that you relish in it. Shoot to wound, then execute the wounded. Burn them. Take them in close combat. Destroy their preconceptions of what a man is, and you become their personal monster. When they fear you, you become stronger, you become better. But let's never forget: It's a display. It's a posture, like a lion's roar or a gorilla thumping at his chest. If you lose yourself in the display, if you succumb to the horror, then you become the monster. You become reduced. Not more than a man, but less, and it can be fatal.
I can't tell if the people calling it murder hobo'ing are being moronic on purpose or on accident.
The person in the OP seems like an oldperson and a newbie that isn't embroiled in Ganker lingo, I am afraid. They use titles and shit.
You're supposed to. Not doing it is the real newhomosexualry.
You only add titles if its a general thread, otherwise you just get a bunch of threads clogging up the catalog with a question in the title and a recursion of that same question in the body.
You don't have to take twitter-brained moronation as a given. You can assume that people are capable of having an actual topic and an opinion on the topic they're raising. A better world was possible and could be again.
general threads should all be pruned
>Does razing the farmlands of an evil slaver empire count as murder hobo behavior? the troops are being fed obviously its from the farmland under the empire's rule.
If I burn their crops and massacre their farmers, is that therefor a legitimate tactic to strike ablow against the empire, or does resorting to such activities go beyond the pale into murder hobo dom?
It would honestly depend on whether you're actually affecting the war effort, or you've just found a random farm in enemy territory and decided to burn it.
Think of it like this: You are in enemy territory, and find a gas station. The owner of that gas station is scared, but otherwise neutral. If you were to burn that one gas station, you'd not make a dent in anything. You go blow up ten refineries, however, that's a dent.
this "killing one person is murder but killing ten million is just victory" logic does not cotton with me
I will tell you this: it will not be the *soldiers* who go hungry. It will be the common folk, and indeed many of the slaves. Perhaps this will aid in destabilizing the empire. But know that there will be innocents who starve.
That's not to say that you should do nothing, but be mindful of the consequences. Also, there are other ways to fight tyranny than to raze crops - for instance, have you considered raiding and disrupting the supply lines used to keep imperial armies in the field?
Given the amount of context you've given I'll have to go with "yes."
Yeah.
First and foremost, terrorism never works in any meaningful way. At best it polarizes the working class against you until they've had enough of your shit. All you will do is get yourself killed, but after committing needless crimes.
Secondly, even assuming you could destroy enough property to damage the kingdom, you're still targeting innocents and damaging private property. Whatever moral justification you use to commit warcrimes is immediately undermined by the fact that you're still committing warcrimes.
Finally, it's just mindless lolrandum bullshit
If you really wanted to screw over an empire, you would fill their water wells with corpses and create cholera outbreaks. Do that enough times and you've effectively created a self-propelling genocide. But that would likely piss everybody off at your table.
In the context of generic fantasy roleplaying, you will soon have enough hirelings/men-at-arms (or the modern equivalent, your own Adventuring Company) to be able to run your own guerilla war/Einsatzgruppen against an enemy kingdom. Attacking isolating homesteads and farming communities is easy, but have you considered threatening them into letting you use their hamlets as weapons caches and a base of operations instead? You can disguise your men among the civilian population, empower the people who hate the Empire as much as you do and the opportunists who are just as willing to help so long as you give them a bigger slice of the village pie to run the place for you and disappear into the hinterland when someone dobs you in to the Empire. Once they leave to fight the shrubfire of your insurgency elsewhere, you get to stroll right in and that rat's relatives and burn his home to the ground to show people what happens when they mess with the good guys.
It's something Hannibal of Carthage did. And it was a very successful tactic, he did it in part to lure the Romans into a fight on his terms which he had routinely won time and time again, the current Consul was trying to wait Hannibal out. So Hannibal also ensured to never burn the farms of the Consul to further rumors that the two of them had some sort of secret deal going on.
I'd argue it's brutal, but it's entirely within the rules of warfare.
>evil
>slaver empire
Which is it?
It's a war crime territory, but they have a reason and sound purpouse.
Is it good? nah
Ist it for the sake of killing for lulz? nope
Are they trying to find a reason for killing for lulz? You tell me, it's your grop
You've just made the empire look better by comparison, congrats. Slavery is significantly less evil than the shit you're considering.
>free the slaves
>slaves starve
Brillaint.
Ten starving wretches are easily made into one dead and nine fed.
Not as much as shitting up hobby boards with useless threads
Find me a single, SINGLE thread that is objectively worthy of being here and staying here.
btw If you think any of the general threads fit that bill then you are new and your opinions are worthless.
I mean, if you're in an evil slaver empire, why not, instead of burning the crops, free the slaves who are tasked with harvesting those crops, and then give all the food to the slaves?
That denies the empire resources in multiple ways as well as actively helping people, and likely only requires killing actual slaveowners, rather than indirectly starving the slaveowners and all of their slaves.
If you're just butchering random homesteaders and burning everything in your wake, then it's murderhobo behavior. Much in the same way that killing a shopkeeper to rob him is muderhobo behavior.
Murderhobo behavior can still advance the party's goals while being a shitty thing to do for other reasons.
... you realize you just condemned every slave you "helped" to death as collaborators, yes?
That would be a concern is we lose, but I plan to win, so it's literally irrelevant.
Name a single successful slave revolt.
>muh slave revolt
> a foreign army rolling in, punishing the masters, and delaring emancipation
What he described is nearly directly analogous to Federal troops freeing slaves in the occupied South during the American Civil War rather than something like the Servile Wars. I don't think it qualifies as a slave revolt unless the slaves...revolt. Waking up and walking out of your slave hut and finding out that the bluejackets done took massah away doesn't really cut the mustard.
Haiti.
>is razing war crime?
If you're concerned about being judged, you've already lost.
Winners answer to no one.
Guerrilla warfare is a totally legit kind of warfare. Leading a spec ops team into enemy lines to frick with the supply, the economy, the morale and force the enemy to divert forces is extremely valuable in terms of strategy.
Now, it can have consequences. War crimes can actually have bolstering effects on the enemy's morale and it's very difficult to totally destroy the production capabilities of your enemy, people adapt after all. Depending of the method you use, it can also be a waste of resources, using your mana/ammo to kill random civilians instead of more high value targets is not cost effective. It's also a waste in the sense that you could do way more damage if your faction has an actual plan and/or you are given intelligence.
TL;DR It can work but you have to know what you are doing.
Honestly, if you are thrown behind enemy lines without easy extraction and the GM doesn't want you to go murderhobo you can tell him he can go frick himself, because it's very likely you will end up killing civilians just to protect yourself.
How big is your army to raze the food supply of an empire? That's a lot of farmland and farmers over a huge span of land.
at the right season most crops can be pretty damn flammable
Just send in your specop high speed, low drag operators in their yoga pants. They'll sus out the best arsonists of the land and shoot up a couple gas stations to kit those out and then they'll have the country ablaze in no time.
Don't think about the logistics of it.
Burning localized farmland can disrupt local supply lines and lower combat readiness of the troops in that region, increasing the chances of an ally breakthrough. To supply those troops now you need to use longer lines, which are less safe, slower, more complex and more expensive.
It doesn't need to be a systematic effort is what I am trying to say. Depending of the situation, burning all the camps of the empire might not even stop supply, they could buy the grain elsewhere.
>you're a murder hobo for doing tactics that most polities and rebel forces throughout history did to larger empires
i thought being a murder hobo was unrealistically just killing everything you came across
It is tactically sound and a good idea when attacking an entire empire. It is pure buttholery and will lead to the deaths of a lot of the slave and peasant population though. So really what it comes down to is that alignments are for c**ts so the only thing that matters is would your character do this to win?
Depends on if you have a plan to rescue the slaves afterward. Leaving them and only them deprived of their only source of food is a short-sighted act if you'd wish to play the part of their would-be liberator. Ideally, you'll want to have established a service capable of accommodating them so they don't just starve in their former homes.
Slavers in most modern settings are not only guiltless targets on par with wildlife, but sometimes even raise the good alignment score in slaying. You can do anything short of eating them (due to cannibalism penalty) and it would be morally right and just. Need to test a new weapon on a humanoid? Slavers. Want to vent your frustrations? Slavers. Need a human heart or two for your spells? Nobody will miss a Slaver or two.
Nope. Slavery is a sin against God and all mankind, and no price is too high to pay for it's eradication
We should have made an tradition of ritualistically marching to the South, maybe that would have kept things from getting as bad as they are.
that's so moronic that I'm curious what you actually think that would fix. Is it supposed to fix the border?
Even Mohammad the Liar knew it was wrong to destroy fields and crops.
It would be the equivalent of killing blacks and burning cotton fields just to own the slavers in the american civil war.
Not necessarily. I mean, my party often uses targeted arson to win potential encounters without direct combat. For instance some coffinmaker stole these bones from a church and seemed shifty when we confronted him, and wanted us to go upstairs with him. So we doused his shop in oil and told him he had less than a minute to bring us the bones or we'd torch his shop with him in it. He brought us the bones, we tied him and torched the place with him in it. Turns out that was the right solution, because a bunch of vampires jumped out the upstairs windows and took off. We were like level 2 or 3 at the time, not resorting to arson would have likely led to a TPK. We try to use strategy as much as possible
it's faster to burn the granaries than worry about the fields themselves