MurderHobos

[Arlough]

I actually prefer "Transient Genocidal Superhuman Kleptomaniacs"
In fact, I think that is what I will call game night from now on. TGSK

Anyway, I was looking for artwork of adventurers looting corpses, and I put in the phrase Murder-Hobos, and I found a forum [The RPG Site] from back in 2011 that was a bunch of people being outraged by the term MurderHobos to refer to adventurers.

Some made claims that they had never heard of this, that this must be only since 4th ed, who would play like that, must be people who are religious and hate D&D, etc.

What about you?
What do you think about the term Murder-Hobo?

 

[billd91]

It's kind of funny, but along with assertion that D&D is about killing things and taking their stuff, overused of late.

 

[Arlough]

First off, I have been affectionately referring to any adventuring group we have as MurderHobos for a little over a decade, and I would have been even longer had I thought of it prior to that.
Secondly, ever since I found D&D [2nd edition and on] that has been the incentivized way of operating.

1. Find appropriately aligned creatures [sacks of XP]
2. Fight them [cut open sacks]
3. Loot the bodies [find any non-XP treasure the sacks were holding]
4. Go to step 1

As far as I can tell, that is the purpose behind an alignment system. It is to take a morally questionable situation [murder], and make it not only acceptable [it's okay], to preferred [goblin genocide is necessary for the protection of all "good" peoples].
This way, you are allowed to get XP without feeling conflicted about it.
Seriously, very few adventurers own homes (prior to high levels it isn't usually plausible to do so), and most XP earned comes from killing.
Am I just way out of the, relative, norm here?

 

[am181d]

Am I just way out of the, relative, norm here?

It's my understanding that many people play Dungeons & Dragons that way. That has never been my experience.

(I have never heard of MurderHobos before. It's sort of funny as a term, but I wouldn't want to play a game in this vein.)

 

[Arlough]

It's sort of funny as a term, but I wouldn't want to play a game in this vein.)

Mind you, I like non-killing plot and character advancement. When I put a room full of goblins in the path of my group, they get XP for achieving the goal (getting past the goblins, usually). It doesn't matter if they sneak, negotiate, or kill, so long as they have overcome the obstacle. But, that is a house-rule. According to the books, I should only tally the XP that lies dead on the floor.

I have been, of late, looking at modules to run for the next little while instead of sandbox (we haven't played for a few months simply because of time constraints, so I think we will move to a "whoever shows up" format where each adventure is started and finished in the same session) and just about all of them, be it Wizards, Pathfinder, ENWorld, or other, the adventure is rife with deadly enemies that pretty much need to be killed. If there is one that breaks that mold, could you please direct me to it?

 

[Storminator]

Am I just way out of the, relative, norm here?

Like you, this was our SOP for my first decade of gaming. And I too would have used MurderHobos had I thought of it.

I don't have any desire to go back to those games, but that was how we rolled.

PS

 

[Libramarian]

As far as I can tell, that is the purpose behind an alignment system. It is to take a morally questionable situation [murder], and make it not only acceptable [it's okay], to preferred [goblin genocide is necessary for the protection of all "good" peoples].

Goblins are going to be acceptable to kill in a fantasy game whether it uses a morality system or not. Alignment is supposed to draw attention to the moral dubiousness of killing or torturing imprisoned goblins. Like so:

As for MurderHobo, almost no one uses it in a seriously pejorative way, so I don't find it offensive.

It doesn't surprise me that theRPGSite would be overly sensitive about it because being overly sensitive to perceived slights against classic D&D gameplay is kind of their thing.

 

[Ahnehnois]

I've never heard the term (must not be used much here, among other places). It doesn't strike me as being wildly offensive, but does seem distasteful and I don't see the need for it.

 

[RangerWickett]

My group uses "Firestab Hobo," after the PCs of one particular player, which always seem to have no family, to set things on fire, and to stab people a lot. Even though they all have novel backstories and aren't intended to be crazy, the player roleplays his PCs in a way that they always react poorly to danger.

Well, maybe by 'poorly' I mean 'properly.'

 

[Jester David]

Never heard it before.

I was mildly displeased with the term at first, thinking it referred to the party killing hobos. Which is uncool.
But describing most adventuring parties... it is disturbingly accurate.