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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9417798" data-attributes="member: 18">The actual gluing together of the words might well have happened then, but calling PCs "killer hobos" or implying they are goes back decades before that.The big problem with the claim of 2007 is that only crawled websites are covered, and only ones post-2004, which means almost all earlier RPG sites aren't included. Also Google Trends can't even find the 2007 instance anymore, AFAICT.It's also something that came up a lot in the '90s. I don't know what terms we used exactly, but we certainly discussed how characters tended to be rootless murderers and this was perhaps, not great.Absolutely.I mean, even in Gygax's own era, he literally became a genocide apologist/approver because he could bear to retreat from the position that genociding/mass slaughtering intelligent humanoid beings was perhaps, not really okay (and that was in like, 2002).Certainly even with the slightest bit of real modernity, and as teenage boys, my group realized this in like, 1991 or so. It felt kind of messed up to kill a bunch of people who you could take prisoner or the like, and then you get the awkwardness of D&D having no real rules or ideas or even spells for dealing with prisoners, because the initial conceit was basically "kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out".</blockquote>