D&D 5E How Murder Hobo is Your Party

[Rushmik]

My players are surprisingly well behaved, and still new to the game too... Well, one of them is a hobo and has butchered an orc before, but is that really so bad?

 

[ccs]

In the 3 groups I play/dm in, I'd put us all at about an 8.

Game #1 (player) - 1e, playing the 2e adventure "Night Below". There's RP. But the bulk of the adventure is a seek/destroy mission through the underdark. The party is 100% fine with killing (and looting) every random monster, misc monster, derro, kuo-toan, mindflayer etc that we come to.

Game #2 (player) - PF
We're playing Wrath of the Ritious. A crusade in to the demon controlled chaos wastes of the PF world.
The group is 100% fine with laying waste to anything in our path.
RP is limited, mainly being me playing a pair of evil characters allied with an army of paladins (!) Trying to persuade them to coordinate efforts, not kill me, TRUST me enough to get the goal done. And myself & the dwarf player forcing the other 3 players to interact with npcs.
One guy is fantastic at making effective piles of stats - but you'll never remember one of his characters storywise.
Another is just plain bad at both effectiveness & RP.
The 3rd waffles between rules effective & RP effective. She'll give you one or the other per session, but never both.
None of these 3 really cares what the story is....
Fortunately virtually everything in the waste is something that needs killing.
And the DM doesn't particularly like to play NPCs.

Game 3 (dm) - 5e
The players are ALL about fighting monsters, getting loot, & leveling up. They specifically asked me for mostly dungeon crawls with whatever the minimal lv of plot I deemed neccecary.
RP here is player-player/character - character antics.

 

[Morlock]

Not sure if you were asking for a remedy, but if you were, I suggest TPKs.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

Most of the players in my circle are pretty RP focused, so it doesn't get too high. That being said, it is highly dependent on the adventure/campaign. Also, because we spend sooooo much time role-playing (when my friend DMs, we can often go session upon session with the dice only being used for skill checks), occasionally I think we just jump into a fight when we might have otherwise waited a bit to see how things would go, just out of pure eagerness to add that pillar back in.

Consequently, when I DM, I tend to throw in a lot of combat to make up for it (and to gauge how the 5e system runs). Now that I'm starting my new campaign, and have played around with 5e enough to figure out what I need, we'll see how this brand new group of PCs behaves!

 

[Azurewraith]

May be worth having a chat with the group about there antics. I mean it just gets a bit dull sometimes.

 

[Jan van Leyden]

A solid 6 for my group. They have no compunctions at all about killing all their enemies or residents of the places they invade. On the other hand they at least try to talk with the enemies. And they don't torture at all.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

A solid 6 for my group. They have no compunctions at all about killing all their enemies or residents of the places they invade. On the other hand they at least try to talk with the enemies. And they don't torture at all.

We must be using very different scales. For me, that sounds no higher than a 4. I would say a 5 is "neither especially pro-talk nor especially pro-harm." Your group sounds like it prefers to talk, whenever that's an option, won't ever use more violence than needed for defense (but maybe including "preemptive strikes" in that category), but also won't muck around and try to appease someone that turns down their diplomacy, and probably won't go out of their way not to kill opponents. That seems slightly on the "there's always a non-violent solution" side of things, rather than the other way around.

Edit: somehow I missed the word "invade." Does that mean they are driving legitimate, peaceful occupants from their homes or lands? If the group is highly aggressive in that way, I suppose I can see a 5 or even a 6--it's one thing to simply be adventuring and having to deal with violent situations, and quite another to always/typically being the instigators of the violence.

 

[Waterbizkit]

My group is likely a four or a five. To be fair, they haven't actually killed anything that could be reasoned with. Most of their enemies thus far have been unintelligent undead or wild animals, and the party lacks the ability to speak with or "handle" animals so they had no choice in the case of the latter.

They did threaten an Innkeeper. He hired them to do a job, they did half of it and went back to demand payment, botched the deception roll and immediately started to physically threaten the NPC with what was tantamount to a death sentence. Being on his own with no immediate recourse the Innkeeper handed over payment and the party immediately fled into the surrounding wilderness in the middle of the night.

Now, if the attempt at intimidation had failed would they have actually killed the NPC? Hard to say. The groups actions up to and after that point indicated to me they want to play a bad of charlatans and thieves rather than your stereotypical heroes. They keep walking a fine line and too many more shenanigans and they may find themselves a wanted group, which honestly I think they'd find fun. But no outright murder yet.

Still, I rate them four or five because I just "feel" it in my bones that if push comes to shove they'll kill to get what they want as long as it isn't completely innocent women & children. I suppose if you take my gut feelings out of it they'd be more of a two or three, more prone to lie and threaten... for now.

 

[Demorgus]

So the home game that I DM I'd say they're about a 6.5. One of the players has said they run when they should fight, fight when they should run, but their wrath is fiery and unquenchable.

My work game, they're still pretty new so it's hard to gauge their murder hobo level. I've got a feeling they're going to be like a 5.

 

[Azurewraith]

It seems interesting how most people sit in the middle to me anyway. I thought every adventurous group of guys n gals were serial killers