Murderhobos aren't a problem. The DM is a problem for running a game that caters to murderhobos like D&D.
Murderhobos aren't a problem. The DM is a problem for running a game that caters to murderhobos like D&D.
Murderhobos aren't a problem. The DM is a problem for running a game that caters to murderhobos like D&D.
Murderhobo games are fun as frick and I'm tired of pretending they're not.
They are fun every now and then. Just like everything else, they get stale in to big doses though. Sometimes you want to play a political scheming game, sometimes you just want to solve problems with an ax.
easy fix: have your murderhobos not be hobos.
They are not
Let us not forget that the word "murderhobo" is a shortening of the phrase "itinerant murder-hobo," which was a derogatory phrase aimed at a disparaging D&D, coined on rpg.net. The Pig Burple. It's their narrative. It's aligned with the Forgist "brain damage" slander. It is the language of swine.
The truth is, a "murderhobo" is just any hero unpolluted by railroading, storyshitting questhomosexualry. Conan of Cimmeria is a "murderhobo." Elric of Melniboné is a "murderhobo." The Man with No Name is uno spaghetto omicidio vagabondo.
You should WANT to play a murderhobo in every TTRPG worth playing.
>You should WANT to play a murderhobo in every TTRPG worth playing.
But there are RPGs that entirely eschew violence that are well worth playing. And RPGs like CoC (only slightly younger than D&D itself) takes place in the modern day where just blasting someone who annoys you would get you put away for life, if not shot to death by the authorities.
"Murderhobo" is code for "player who doesn't follow my sacred railroad" and anyone who complains about them is a guaranteed control freak.
>But there are RPGs that entirely eschew violence that are well worth playing.
Name one.
I'll talk to you the same way I did to a player in a game I ran a couple years back.
No, it's not an RP decision to start randomly killing cops and civilians during illicit negotiations and bringing legal attention to your drug deal. I'll treat it as one because I'm explicitly not railroading you but you ARE indeed a murderhobo at that point and you ARE endangering the rest of the party too, against their wishes no less since they aren't murderhobos.
In my experience this is 100% the case. EVERY player I've got from looking on /tg/ has been someone who literally NEVER played tabletop in their life.
>"Murderhobo" is code for "player who doesn't follow my sacred railroad" and anyone who complains about them is a guaranteed control freak.
No, the term "Murderhobo" had nothing to with railroading. It originated as a disparaging description of a campaign style where the PCs would wander town to town and solving the town's problems (usually by killing whatever was causing trouble).
No, it is not "players attempting to express agency." It is a Player/DM campaign desire clash. DMs complain about murderhoboing when players just want to travel from place to place killing stuff and getting treasure rather than interacting with the story of the setting while Players complain about murderhoboing when a campaign is little more than going town to town getting quests to kill stuff.
>is a Player/DM campaign desire clash.
Honestly, what gets me pissed off about murderhoboing is when players ask for an overarching story and more agency and RP...and then do nothing but ask to travel from place to place killing stuff and getting treasure. And then blame me for not giving them a story. Which they refused to interact with in favor of murderhoboing.
Under that circumstance, you're goddamn right I'm going to complain about my players.
Exactly.
>They're the same thing. If players aren't going through the story they want to go through, they complain.
Not really. Problems being complained about are different as are the solutions.
Are you certain your group is making a story anyone cares about? You can give as many plot points or story hooks as you want, but if they don't care about the bait it leads nowhere.
If you haven't before, try having everyone hash out the idea of a campaign from the start in a session zero. Don't craft an entire setting, characters, and story in complete isolation; get everyone on board from the start.
Engage everyone to come up with a good foundation, what type of story they'd want to play, everyone can axe bad ideas from the start, and expectations are set.
>it is not "players attempting to express agency." It is a Player/DM campaign desire clash
They're the same thing. If players aren't going through the story they want to go through, they complain.
>when players ask for an overarching story and more agency and RP...and then do nothing but ask to travel from place to place killing stuff and getting treasure
That's a standard issue with players. They want to live out a fantasy, but lack the commitment or skill to actually get it to play out in game. As a result, they'll suffer if they're actually given agency and RP (unless there are good RPers in the table).
Oftentimes, people looking for agency equates to people wanting to feel like they have agency. If the DM can use smoke and mirrors to provide the feeling without actually providing it, then as far as the players are concerned, they have agency.
>RPGs that entirely eschew violence that are well worth playing.
I don't believe this is a true or reasonable statement
Long before rpg.net, "murderhobo" was a disparagement at a certain type of player who didn't give a thought to the verisimilitude of the setting and would thus go straight from the dungeon to the king's court without stopping to take a bath or buy new clothes. It's almost a non-issue in D&D games that include a monthly upkeep tax, which covers the costs of baths and fresh clothes.
It later came to mean anyone who dungeon crawls, and at that point was just a blanket insult towards anyone who plays D&D at all.
But DnD does cause brain damage, that has nothing to do with your troony internet forum drama. It's been well understood here since at least 2011 that making people play DND before a real RPG permanently scars them and trains them to do uniquely bad RPG habits, and renders them almost incapable of ever leaving their shitty containment game. That's just how it works, and you are in denial.
You seem confused, (real) D&D trains players to be methodical and cautious and to interact with NPC's instead of murdering people who might not be hostile.
'Roleplaying mechanics' are silly and unnecessary.
And that Scotsman isn't a REAL Scotsman either.
The scotsman isn't a fallacy. You're not talking about real d&d, so nothing you say matters.
The Scotsman is an argumentation failure because it's the same as moving the goalposts. Perhaps it's not a fallacy strictly speaking, but you did just concede your opponents point by retreating to a much smaller set of discourse. Everything outside that set is therefore your opponent's ground that you have lost. Nobody cares about your personal castle of "real D&D". We care about the D&D we are likely to run into on the average in the real world.
Oh my dear my darling my love my lovely, I love you, I want you to know that, I don't know you but I know with absolute conviction that you deserve happiness, you have suffered so much, and to that end I have a gift for you. I want you to know the wonderful thing that I have discovered. You may parse what I say as "disagreement," but we are tellers of stories, you and I, so let me tell you a different story: Not a story about two online idiots wasting their lives yelling at one another about the finer points of pretending to be elves, who never were, doing things that never happened, to dragons that never existed, but of one online idiot who has seen something wonderful and wants to share it with another online idiot, for it is our shared special interest. I feel like I am able to share chocolate with an uncontacted tribe. It is as much a gift to me as it is to you, my dear, my lovely.
Roleplaying mechanics are absolutely essential. Try them, you'll see; put in a few hours with a White Wolf game. I've played them, hundreds of hours, and got good enough to narrate them myself. You need Willpower. You need Self-Control, Courage, and Conscience. You need a morality system. In fact, Camarilla games feel limiting to me, because they lack the variety of Conviction and Instinct mechanics, and the variety of moral systems that non-Camarilla games have. Clan-specific merits and flaws! A grand storyarc tying the world together! 300-page splats for every clan and sub-clan and faction! OWoD was made for writers, and write they do: Narrators give writing prompts - xp for every lore-accurate homework! Costume? Acting convincingly? More xp!
Bruh, there were kids who tried to murderhobo one of the Sabbat games I narrated, and I didn't even fricking notice. Seriously! They sat down and broke the mechanics (WW games strong suit is not their mechanical depth) and saw how to best mechanically optimize a strike team with the 4 characters they had between them. I had no idea.
Drop the patronising baby talk, you're mot helping your case by being so overtly disrespectful.
You have not explained why any of those things are 'necessary', drop the flowery language and explain clearly. I've played many RPG's, anybody who needs the crutch of 'roleplay' mechanics is probably not the type of player you want. Those 70's theater kids in Cali went too far but they didn't need 'mechanics' to make them roleplay.
>You need a morality system. In fact, Camarilla games feel limiting to me, because they lack the variety of Conviction and Instinct mechanics, and the variety of moral systems that non-Camarilla games have.
Dumbest take on this thread.
I think I contracted gayitis from reading this.
If this is howtheatre kids think they’ll win over the rollplayers... whew
They're really not necessary at all. Sorry your players suck shit.
Jesus, what a series of painful prompts to type. Brave, AInon, bravo.
I hate short term memory/fun so much it's unreal.
pretty obnoxious making us read all that meaningless nonsense, I wouldn't be surprised if someone broke into your home and shot you
Nah murderhobo games go nowhere on the account of XP being gained from treasure. Tomb raiding is where it is at.
every building is a tomb if you kill the occupants
Define "murderhobo." Chances are you're wrong.
Ive literally only ran murderhobo campaigns for the past decade. Its fun having quest of the week style adventures since my players are morons
I would frick the lisp right out of the tiefling. That is all.
We all would anon. Nixie is /ourguy/, just with more breasts than most of us.
I both watch and enjoy this silly normie DND content.
>If you run different game, murderhobo will repent his ways
Cant' tell if greenhorn naivety, mid stupidity or grog baiting.
Let's just call you a gay and move on.
D&D just fails at the foundational outset to compel that style of play from recurring as the logical default. There's no strong process in place to say you aren't just a fighter, you're a fighter who trained here, worked or works for these people, observe or reject some set of cultural norms, have these duties or obligations that you either take seriously or at least bring with them some consequences for flouting.
Take a short work over to Legend of the 5 Rings. Similar in many ways, it is a high fantasy setting with scope for adventure, politicals, combat, magical intrigue and so on. There's even plenty of material to turn into more of a forgotten realms kitchen sink with a persiona locale, a roman empire, fruity races living in secret societies, a dozen other dimensions...
As soon as you make your character, you are part of a clan. They already have a defined agenda, culture, opinions about other clans, opinions about how to treat peasants, opinions about honor and what is valuable. You already have a social strata within that clan, that means something within and without. You might need imperial papers to travel between territories. Even just these basic details before considering more specifics of the setting, I've found, sets the dial way away from how players default to in D&D. It's certainly not perfect if you're plucking someone who has only known D&D and getting them to make some kind of katana wielding/spell slinging nobleman warrior, but the difference is usually night and day.
>caters to murderhobos like D&D.
like... D&D?
You mean "caters to murderhobos players"?
This shit very much happens in literally any RPG. Unless you're one of those indiegays with the narrow focus hate
Weirdly enough my games tend to be filled with munchkins and yet there wasnt' really much in the wya of murderhoboing because we houseruled property management rules.
ITT: People who never play discuss how you should play
that's a lot of words
I roll for initiative
in my experience murderhobos are created by awful DMs, then said players just move into other groups and clash with the tone and setting
No, they're created by video games were people go around killing everything on sight just because.
Luckily, D&D 5e has just introduced the Bastion system. Now, your adventurers have a home once they reach level 5 and are no longer hobos! (They may still be murderers, however.)
Murder hobos aren't a problem because it's good and normal to want to use violence against lesser beings
I agree to a large extent. The extent to which I do not agree is important to you. For instsance, "caters to" isn't the perfect word to explain what is going on.
D&D or not, the new type of game D&D introduced is "collective storytelling." You would think by the unpublished novels some DMs try to railroad you through it was just regular storytelling, but no, The Players do contribute, not just as a group but individually. Perhaps most important is, as you said, the game itself. Gygax is still with us, still collaborating with our storytelling, a ghost haunting the 300-page $60 tomes we all have to buy.
As the first of its kind, D&D was a prototype, and an awkward missing-link between the wargames that came before and the proper RPGs that came after. There were no roleplay mechanics at all until 5e! That is what I mean by "proper," a roleplaying game that mechanically rewards roleplay, thus encouraging it, instead of something that the players just do spontaneously, or even penalizes it.
Like a cursed book of spells, D&D books try to force the DM and players to murderhobo. Why? That's what it was built to do. The midshipmen training to be officers with naval wargames were trying to win wars, and the game built from the bones of that game does the same. Dwarf wizard? Might as well try to build a submarine that launches aircraft. It's not just unoptimized, it's insane. You don't want to give your warships personality! They're tools, and disposable ones at that! Keep your bearing, sailor! Discipline! Don't talk, eyes on the horizon!
A strong DM can of course bend the cursed book to his will, and creative players will RP whether it's sane or not; together they can force D&D to be a RPG. "Dwarf wizard? Sure. It's just math. Put your 'racial' bonus wherever your 'class' needs it. Just move the numbers around. So long as it all adds up at the end no one gives a shit. We're not paying Gygax to use our own imaginations." And the spectre of Gygax quailed.
Even 5e doesn't really reward you for roleplaying. It has inspiration, sure, but is being able to roll 2d20 keep the highest once every now and again really that much of a reward?
I agree, 5e's mechanical RP bonuses are minor. Inspiration is... a thing that exists, but as it is based on "mommy may I," it's marginal, and its mechanical bonus is trivial. Backgrounds are also a thing that give mechanical rewards, but as you say, it's minor. And the fact it wasn't until the fifth edition of this game that we got even this thin gruel is telling of the state of things. It took 40 years... for this? Like homosexual Erectus, it was the first and worst, and the fact it's hung on this long is kind of amazing. It's just not evolving fast enough. Literal human evolution has occurred faster genetically than this game's memetic evolution. In 40 years, mothers have daughters who turn into lovers who turn into mothers of daughters in turn, each with 60 unique mutations, and D&D is like "inspiration and backgrounds."
Look at the White Wolf boys. Their whole deal was "there's not a lot of RP in this game called D&D that 'identifies' as a RPG, what if we made a RPG with actual RP?" And thus it was so. Unfortunately they also went in the direction of a different and far darker genre. I can see how they would want to do that to avoid competing directly with D&D, but by now they're well-established, and the heroic fantasy genre is ripe for conquest by better games without the memetic backage of ancient naval wargames taught at actual Academies and War Colleges. Can you imagine if some aspiring Lieutenant-Commander at War College told the Captain proctoring his class he had a backstory for the fictional Admiral commanding his fictional fleet in their wargame? He might be given a psych eval - the deathknell of a military career. And yet we're told D&D is a RPG? Of course it's going to descend into wargaming. Of course homosexual Erectus is going to ape out all the time. Clone them, see what happens!
Sorry you need mechanics to use your imagination, loser.
Yeah, it is.
why did you buy a rulebook if you're not going to use it?
Brilliant! Valid! Mechanically, yeah, the D&D rulebook is for murderhoboing, so why could anyone be surprised your games turn into that? Especially if you paid $60 or whatever. (You can get discounts; I did a thing the other day, searched the internet for deals, that indicated you could buy literally everything for 5e for $400 total.) That is basically my argument: A lazy DM, or just a DM who isn't a super-genius, will just use the tools he's been given. One cannot be surprised the Chinese eat rice; it grew in China 10,000 years ago, and wheat did not, in the ages before the Silk Road. It's an old /tg/ saying at this point: "Have you tried not playing D&D?" Even if the DM and the players don't want to murderhobo, that is what their cursed tome compels them to do. Can you imagine taking a White Wolf book and deciding to play mortals enduring life under the masquerade of vampires? Yes it could be done, but the book compels you to do otherwise. "Use the Hunter splat" yes exactly! There is a book for that! The right tool for the right job!
So you don't have an imagination, got it
Imagination is for leftoids. Smart people accept things they way they are, and don't waste time trying to make them something they can never be.
So you’re an autistic shithead.
Good to know.
>Smart people accept things they way they are, and don't waste time trying to make them something they can never be
Peak moron post right here. You can only find out whether something is possible when you try it.
Yeah, if we were to believe this idiot
then we’d all still be hunter-gatherers because the idea of changing the environment from what it is when you find it, into something that is easier to harvest is “stupid”.
It's pretty easy to force a stop to murder hobos, just create a scenario where the players have to choose a nonviolent solution or they die.
>just create a scenario where the players have to choose a nonviolent solution or they die.
Frick your railroading, Greg. We get to do what we want. You're only DM because none of us wants to do it.
Agreed. It's a collaboration. If Greg wants to railroad the players, they can say "no." Likewise if the players want to murderhobo, Greg can say "no." Then they are at an impasse, and must use IRL social skills to resolve it, or no one gets to play D&D at all. Greg can compromise and play the way the players want, or the players can compromise and play the way Greg wants, or everyone can just decide to not play at all.
That said, a different party not comprised of a railroading DM and a party of murderhobos will have a different kind of negotiation. If the players are instead roleplayers and they ask for more RP, the DM (could be Greg, doesn't matter) can plead "there's not a lot of math for that in my book of math copyrighted Wizards of the Coast 2014." He can try to make up rules for it, between sessions and on the fly, but this will be inconsistent and grossly imbalanced because Greg is not a super-genius. Can't fault Greg too much for that. Are you a super-genius? I'm not! My autism diagnosis included an IQ test, but I am only a regular genius, not a super-genius! I am made of flesh and blood! Greg is just trying his best. Don't hate Greg. A great philosopher once said "don't hate the player, hate the game."
Thus we come around full-circle to the need to play a different game. I knew a guy who played a vamper in a Cam game and literally never got into physical combat once. Oh sure he got into social combat and mental combat but he was so slick IRL that he only ever used one blood-point in 3 months of game (to re-test a failed social roll). And he was up to some crazy shit! He got recruited into the Sabbat! He told the Prince, who agreed to use him as a sleeper agent! My character had a built-in lie-detector but this guy was one cool cat and I didn't even think to use it on him. That's not unique: a Cam player diablerized a man and just walked into Elysium with his aura all fricked up, bold as brass, Keeper never checked his aura, no one did!
I actually had a game where my friends and I were going so Antimurder hobo that it derailed the whole campaign. The DM had to do so much work to figure out how to progress the plot, without making the towns jail a revolving door.
Was a fun as hell campaign. Knocking people out, talking them down and such.
I'm glad you had fun! And I'm proud of your DM. He was able to wrestle that ancient tome, The DMG, to be something better than it was. He gave his players what they wanted, for what they wanted was wonderful, and good, and valid, and not "murderhoboing," which is to say, wargaming but at the level of a fire team/5-man-band.
That said I am going to underline the fact your DM had to put in an awful lot of work to make it happen. That is what I mean: What does this tool do? Sure you can use a wrench to hammer nails but that does not mean you should, or that it's a good idea. By "mechanical" I don't just mean the tables in the DMG but the Marxist definition; Chinese people didn't grow wheat 10,000 years ago because wheat didn't grow in East Asia. There was no Silk Road yet. Their material circumstances were mechanically different. Their choices reflected their mechanical circumstance; first they grew millet, then expanded geographically, discovered rice, and now we can't think of China without rice.
Mathematicians view math differently than math teachers in US schools. Math isn't a dreary and unfun class to people who understand it; math is a list of tools for solving problems and understanding the world. It's incomplete too, and the world would be well-served with some new mathematical tools that are as yet undiscovered. (Next time you see a weirdo who says he's talking to aliens, ask them to ask the aliens to solve some of these outstanding problems in mathematics.) I say that to say this: Games are made of math. The math exists to solve problems. D&D math does not solve all these problems. It just lacks the tools to solve RPG problems and thus we can't be surprised that RP is secondary whereas combat, for which there is enormous math included in D&D, becomes the main focus of D&D games. It is, as your DM discovered, genuinely difficult (and requires significant homebrew augmentation of the base game) to play this wargame in a way that isn't wargaming.
OD&D/Basic/1E explicitly discourage murderehobo'ing which is why you used this weird definition literally nobody uses
>wargaming but at the level of a fire team/5-man-band.
The combat takes up more space because combat, traps etc are things that need rigorous mechanics, interacting with the world rarely requires explicit ones.
>interacting with the world rarely requires explicit ones
Disagree. How do you "interact with the world?" In nonviolent or pre-violent or post-violent ways I mean. Certainly there is more even to violence than a weapons table; there is courage, self-control, motivation, stakes, consequences, our principles, and the lies we believe. These need to be written down! They need to be measured! "Charisma" is such a gross simplification of social combat. Your ability to lie and to spot lies is a profound part of the human experience and any game with believable humans in it needs an elaborate system for deception, manipulation, delusion, and ideally a fantasy setting will have ways of making this all more complex and probably horrifying.
why is the idea of "people believing different things" so "dumb" to you
is it really shocking or uninteresting or aggravating to you that someone else could have a profoundly different value-system, and feel pride at what you feel disgusting, because if so have I got bad news for you about the actual planet we live on
Why do they need to be written down? Why do they need to be measured? Be specific or stop posting in this thread. I won't warn you again.
Your value system is wrong and your beliefs are objectively stupid. Cope.
Yes yes all that but you acknowledge that my value system exists, and is different than yours, which is my point. Having a fantasy world where people are different and have different ideas is just verisimilitude. You need it. You already have it! You didn't honestly think the goblins you were killing had the same beliefs and value-systems you did, did you?
bruh this is /tg/ the whole point of /tg/ is "wouldn't it be cool and better if we augmented our imagination and games of playing-pretend with these cardboard token and maps and tables and lore" which is why you buy boardgames and minifigs and splat books, it allows for more storytelling than you could otherwise have by the oldest guy in the tribe telling ancient stories over and over again in front of the campfire and occassionally throwing stuff in that makes the flame burn a different color while you just sit there and watch
I don't understand why the existence of game mechanics provokes such an obtuse and acerbic reaction from people who spend their free time playing different games with different mechanics that do different things differently. I mean is this just how D&D players are? Are they just ridiculous people? Do they really play no other games than D&D, or even one specific edition of D&D?
I mean this is how life is, too. You get paid $20 an hour, he gets paid $100,000 a year, one is a wage and the other is a salary, the economics are mechanically different, this affects how you live your life and whether you will be home in time for dinner. Is this just the free will vs determinism debate? Is the idea that some part of reality is deterministic so upsetting to some people that they don't want to think about it? Is it the sunk-cost fallacy because a $60 book is too expensive (to them) to acknowledge it might lack some mechanical depth in certain areas?
I can't let my mind do this to itself. These are just pithy phrases and thought-stopping cliches from uncontemplative people.
Sorry you have no imagination.
You should really try typing less like a reddit leftoid. It damages your credibility.
Why are you so awful at writing?
boring games breed murderhobos, it's a DM issue at its core.
I insist it's a collaborative game and thus it is a collective issue. The players choices and desires, those of the DM, and the mechanics of the game all collectively determine the course of the game.
its easier to gamify violence.
if you want a non violent party game play taboo or scattergories.
no one wants to play your lewd sex game, unless youre in a brothel swingers party or on your 15th anniversary
>The DM is a problem for running a game that caters to murderhobos like D&D
This is more true than you'd expect. I've found that there are plenty of games where the murderhobo is a symptom of a greater problem rather than the problem itself. Most notably, it's players attempting to express their agency when they are incapable of doing so through more mature means (which is also why they used to be a problem among new players).
t. has been the murderhobo before
I'm running a villain game right now, shit is kino
DM is a problem for not having mercenaries trying to take down these notorious murder hobos whilst they sleep.
Some players just want to solve problems with violence, no matter how badly they pretend otherwise. Part of the reason I dropped an old group is because they would b***h about every game of mine being just hallway murderfests and demanded some variety, but when I gave it to them they'd just kit out their characters for full combat and solve every problem with violence.
>Group demands a murder mystery game
>Decide frick it, why not, it'll be fun to see the whole thing burn down.
>No magic allowed because too many spells would bypass the whole thing and they refuse to play anything but Pathfinder
>Pretty generic set-up: Party has been invited to an old mansion just outside a major city.
>Get there and besides them there's 6 other people who were also invited.
>Blonde haired servant(this part is important) takes them up to see the master of the house
>Hear a scream and a gunshot.
>They get inside just fast enough to see someone leave through the window and the m,aster of the house dead
>After a few minutes of one player fuming because I wouldn't let them basically teleport across the room to stab the killer with his knives, they investigate the room as the maid goes to call the police.
>Several minutes of them standing there doing nothing before they decide to start ransacking the place
>No real investigation, just knocking over bookshelves, flipping the desk over to check for safes.
>One guy decides he should take a look at the body
1/2
>Signs of a struggle, in his grip like a vice is a clump of black hair, and he-
>Ok, investigation over, that black hair is THE lynchpin clue, who do they know who has black hair?
>Well no one because they literally spoke to no one but the maid
>Of course! The maid had black hair, she did it!
>The fact I explicitly said the maid was blonde was apparently irrelevant
>At this point I mention they hear sirens as the police begin to arrive
>They find the maid upstairs calming herself down from walking in on the body
>They can see lights from the sirens outside
>Party opens fire on her with their guns without a word
>Once she's dead, the big guy of the party goes to make sure
>Decides the best thing after this is to throw her bullet riddled corpse out of the window
>Right into the front lawn where the police are gathering
>Get pissed that they're immediately blamed for the murders
>Instead of trying to explain things to the police, they decide getting into a shootout with them is the best course of action
>They hop into their car and flee
>One guy decides he has a bag of grenades in the backseat of the car. I let him have it because I completely stopped giving a shit
>They start lobbing grenades at the police cars chasing them.
>Eventually get caught and die in a shootout.
>Guy decides to blow his entire bag of grenades right then and there because lol why not.
>Next game is a corridor murderfest much to their b***hing once again.
Some players want to just murderhobo. Which is fine, but it tired me out and I eventually dropped them to run better games with a different group.
This has to be exaggerated. You play with people this dysfunctional?
Used to. They were good friends which is why it took so long to drop the group until I eventually stopped giving a shit.
>Group demands a murder mystery game
>refuse to play anything but Pathfinder
You were set up to fail from the start
They are a problem,
Well, kinda…
The idea we have of the traditional murderhobo (a character who goes on a homicidal rampage because their player is a socially maladjusted twit acting out a juvenile power fantasy at everyone else’s expense) probably only represents, like, 10% of cases.
The other 90% of the time murderhobos are not a problem, they are a symptom of a bigger problem, one that’s caused a breakdown in the relationship between the players and the GM.
Some situations that can result in murderhoboing include:
> unclear/overly cryptic direction
Sometimes the players hit a wall where they simply have no idea how to advance the plot and no one, in-game or out, is giving them a clear direction, or conversely, requires the PCs to act wildly out-of-character. At this point the PCs may turn into murderhobos as a last ditch attempt to get SOMETHING, anything to happen that gets the plot moving forward again.
> overly controlling GM
If the players feel like they have no agency over the plot or even their characters, the players may go full murderhobo as a form of rebellion.
> unrelenting cynicism
If every NPC they encounter is inexplicably and flagrantly contemptuous, if not downright hostile, then of course it’s going to result in the players returning the treatment in kind, because frick those ingrates.
> overly permissive GM
Paradoxically, if the GM never allows the players to fail at anything, or suffer any negative consequences for poor decisions, then eventually they may choose to rebel and turn to full murderhobo behavior just to force the GM to make them suffer some kind of consequences for their actions.
Now this is far from an exhaustive list, but it’s at least a few examples of situations that can cause a party that may not have gone into the game with the intention of being a bunch of murderhobos, to possibly choose to become murderhobos.
That can’t be right. That would mean that the GM is part of his own problem.
It's a TTRPG. The GM is *always* part of the problem. No issues can exist without a GM present, therefore responsibility for any and all problems at the table ultimately rests with the GM.
>being this mindbroken by a game
I don't even like modern D&D but this is fricking sad.