D&D General Fighting Law and Order

[Lanefan]

Nearly all my good players were made by me.

While I get what you're trying to say, this still sounds very...Frankensteinian, somehow.

 

[Lanefan]

Look, I hate to break it to you, but 'murder hobos' was a term coined to refer to the standard average trad D&D party, which spends its days wandering the countryside looting dungeons full of monsters and stealing their gold, without seemingly any care or concern or relationship with the world at all. As a rule this meant that PCs might well kill ANYTHING that has treasure, and MANY groups, maybe most at some point or other, did some 'edgy things'. It didn't refer to some kind of specific groups of players, in fact to the opposite it was, in the day, HIGHLY UNUSUAL to find groups where PCs had some depth to them, some attachments to the campaign world, and enough of a personality for it to really make much difference how they behaved.

My anecdotal experience differs re the last bit - our gangs of murderhoboes often have depth, attachments, and well-developed personalities, thank you very much.

What I'm saying is, that it is a product of unsophisticated GMing practices for the most part. If you are running into this sort of play everywhere, you need to reexamine your GMing techniques and toolkit, because its failing you!

Now them's fightin' words.

Murderhoboes can - and I speak from experience here - require every bit as much technique and fancy GM practices to run as non-murderhoboes. It's just that the techniques and practices might not be the same.

The last time I saw play that I would describe as something close to this was maybe around 1986 or so. Its relatively easy to avoid if you know what you're doing (and want to avoid it, which I am not saying people must do). I could probably also put together a game and virtually guarantee that this kind of play WOULD happen, as the causes and such are very well known and understood!

I'm sure you could, but that's kinda not the point. The point is that no matter what type of game you've put together, in the name of player agency my take is that you then want to some extent get out of the way and let the players do with it what they will; and if that means they end up playing in a style you didn't expect then so be it - just keep on truckin' and see where the road leads to. The key thing is that it remains entertaining, for both you and the players.

Charcater turnover is your friend in these cases, as IME players will often come back with something quite different than what they just played, simply for variety. So, if you've got a gang of murderhoboes in a somewhat lethal campaign, sooner or later their lineup will turn over and maybe some different character types will arise. Or the opposite might happen; they might turn over from heroes to slayers, you never know.

 

[Lanefan]

I do not care about alignment. I don't use anything regarding it in my games. This includes the Great Wheel. There's no Nine Hells. There's no Seven Heavens. There's no Bytopia. No alignment is no alignment. Maybe you don't know that's possible, but it totally is, I assure you.

Curious: how do you handle the afterlife, then? Or does/can it even come into play relevance in your game?

 

[Lanefan]

I mean, you CLEARLY REQUIRE TEACHING, that's my response! If you seriously espoused the attitudes put forth on this thread, I can only conclude that your GMing skills are essentially non-existent. Maybe at an actual table you come across differently, but you'd last about 5 seconds in any game I am associated with. Heck, you'd never get in at all.

Not sure if you're replying in jest but I rather suspect the post you were replying to wasn't intended to be taken entirely seriously.

Edit to add...or maybe it was; hard to tell having now read some subsequent posts. Ah, well...

 

[Autumnal]

I happen to be reading Chris Wickham’s 2009 book The Inheritance Of Rome. We can agree, I think, that part of the background for stock feudalism as imagined by non-specialists is that it was a substantial decline from what came before, right? With feudalism as a scrounged together substitute for absent real widespread government, they at best worked okay-ish some of the time? So here’s the opening of Chapter 1….

“‘The guilty thief is produced, is interrogated as he deserves; he is tortured, the torturer strikes, his breast is injured, he is hung up . . . he is beaten with sticks, he is flogged, he runs through the sequence of tortures, and he denies. He is to be punished; he is led to the sword. Then another is produced, innocent, who has a large patronage network with him; well-spoken men are present with him. This one has good fortune: he is absolved.’

“This is an extract from a Greek-Latin primer for children, probably of the early fourth century. It expresses, through its very simplicity, some of the unquestioned assumptions of the late Roman empire. Judicial violence was normal, indeed deserved (in fact, even witnesses were routinely tortured unless they were from the élite); and the rich got off. The Roman world was habituated to violence and injustice. The gladiatorial shows of the early empire continued in the fourth-century western empire, despite being banned by Constantine in 326 under Christian influence. In the 380s Alypius, a future ascetic bishop in Africa, went to the games in Rome, brought by friends against his will; he kept his eyes shut, but the roar of the crowd as a gladiator was wounded made him open his eyes and then he was gripped by the blood, ‘just one of the crowd’, as his friend the great theologian Augustine of Hippo (d. 430) sympathetically put it. Augustine, an uncompromising but also not a naive man, took it for granted that such a blood lust was, however sinful in Christian eyes, normal. Actually, all the post-Roman societies, pagan, Christian or Muslim, were equally used to violence, particularly by the powerful; but under the Roman empire it had a public legitimacy, an element of weekly spectacle, which surpassed even the culture of public execution in eighteenth-century Europe. There was a visceral element to Roman power; even after gladiatorial shows ended in the early fifth century, the killing of wild beasts in public continued for another hundred years and more.”

In the end notes: Primer: A. C. Dionisotti, ‘From Ausonius’ Schooldays?’, Journal of Roman Studies, 72 (1982), pp. 83-125; for torture, see J. Harries, Law and Empire in Late Antiquity (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 122-34. For wider issues of violence, see H. A. Drake (ed.), Violence in Late Antiquity (Aldershot, 2006).

As for medieval times, I recall that in 12th century England the murder rate was more than an order of magnitude higher than it is now, and of course bear-baiting was a widespread sport. And this is, I think, the closest the Middle Ages come to a real-life high-level PC:

John Hawkwood - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The past really, really sucked in a lot of ways. Majoring in history is a big part of why I ditched historical fidelity in favor of genre emulation, where the players and I could make the characters’ world less disgusting.

 

[dave2008]

Oh, ok, if you want to say for this one and only time and reason. As a general way of life, I will never adjust for others.

That is an incredibly odd thing to be proud of.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

So, I am left to reflect on what I have heard here.

There are players, who seem to have been simply young and inexperienced, who were clearly unhappy with how things played out, and their usual DM was surprised that things went as poorly as they did just for the first substitute session.

There is a DM, who openly and explicitly says he never adjusts for anyone else's preferences, ever, not just behind the DM screen. Said DM sees it as an imperative to reach the players a lesson, and that certain outcomes will definitely happen, no matter what the players might think about that. Compromise and consideration are verboten, and the very idea of sitting down to talk to the players about what happened was rejected from the beginning.

I cannot help but go back to all the times I've been told that this sort of thing never happens, or only happens with "bad" DMs that you should simply refuse to play with. What choice did these players have but to be "taught a lesson," and in the process likely driven away from the hobby, possibly forever? I know this isn't a representative game. But it's not hard to look at this and say, "if there had been some reasonable, prudent limits, this could have all been avoided." But trying to get anyone to even consider such things is like pulling teeth—in part because people deny that this sort of thing ever happens.

So what am I to make of it when an example thereof gets presented for us "as it happens"?

 

[UngainlyTitan]

So, I am left to reflect on what I have heard here.

There are players, who seem to have been simply young and inexperienced, who were clearly unhappy with how things played out, and their usual DM was surprised that things went as poorly as they did just for the first substitute session.

There is a DM, who openly and explicitly says he never adjusts for anyone else's preferences, ever, not just behind the DM screen. Said DM sees it as an imperative to reach the players a lesson, and that certain outcomes will definitely happen, no matter what the players might think about that. Compromise and consideration are verboten, and the very idea of sitting down to talk to the players about what happened was rejected from the beginning.

I cannot help but go back to all the times I've been told that this sort of thing never happens, or only happens with "bad" DMs that you should simply refuse to play with. What choice did these players have but to be "taught a lesson," and in the process likely driven away from the hobby, possibly forever? I know this isn't a representative game. But it's not hard to look at this and say, "if there had been some reasonable, prudent limits, this could have all been avoided." But trying to get anyone to even consider such things is like pulling teeth—in part because people deny that this sort of thing ever happens.

So what am I to make of it when an example thereof gets presented for us "as it happens"?

The thing about "reasonable, prudent limits" is that, generally they only apply to reasonable, prudent people. Black Letter Law never stopped anyone from doing the thing there were going to do. Even those that knew better, they just believed that it did not apply to them.
You can only educate those willing to be educated.

 

[Oofta]

So, I am left to reflect on what I have heard here.

There are players, who seem to have been simply young and inexperienced, who were clearly unhappy with how things played out, and their usual DM was surprised that things went as poorly as they did just for the first substitute session.

There is a DM, who openly and explicitly says he never adjusts for anyone else's preferences, ever, not just behind the DM screen. Said DM sees it as an imperative to reach the players a lesson, and that certain outcomes will definitely happen, no matter what the players might think about that. Compromise and consideration are verboten, and the very idea of sitting down to talk to the players about what happened was rejected from the beginning.

I cannot help but go back to all the times I've been told that this sort of thing never happens, or only happens with "bad" DMs that you should simply refuse to play with. What choice did these players have but to be "taught a lesson," and in the process likely driven away from the hobby, possibly forever? I know this isn't a representative game. But it's not hard to look at this and say, "if there had been some reasonable, prudent limits, this could have all been avoided." But trying to get anyone to even consider such things is like pulling teeth—in part because people deny that this sort of thing ever happens.

So what am I to make of it when an example thereof gets presented for us "as it happens"?

Has anyone ever stated that there are no bad DMs? Meanwhile, please explain how someone who doesn't care about what the rest of the players at the table think or feel is ever suddenly going to be transformed into a paragon of GMing with rules changes. If you have a lead story teller type game (whether or not others can contribute) there's still going to be some people who will run the game into the ground.

Heck, start another thread. You keep insisting that this only happens because the DM in D&D is assumed to make the final call on rulings. I'd like to know how it would be different other than "it wouldn't happen" platitudes.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Even assuming a medieval world of our own (and Faerun is not that world) do you think a bunch of Lordless wandering vagabonds could just enter a Saxon Barons keep, murder several of his guards, and that Baron would just shrug and do nothing?

Seems to me that it did happen quite often that a Saxon barony got raided by Vikings and the Baron didn’t do a whole lot about it, because there wasn’t a whole lot he could do.
He certainly generally didn’t take the fight to the seas since as mentioned (1) even finding the Vikings would be difficult; and (2) he would be giving up the advantage of his defensible position.

Now consider a magical world where that Baron has instantaneous communication with other Lords and the ability to Speak with the Dead and use Divination magic to ascertain who the culprits are (he has access to at least 5th level Spellcasters), simply by asking his Court wizard or the local High Priest in his castle to do so.

You’re assuming the Baron has a court wizard or a priest that is powerful enough to cast at least 3rd level spells, which is unjustified. And that’s just for Speak with dead, which wouldn’t be particularly useful by itself in this context.