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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9697450" data-attributes="member: 6790260">This I can certainly grant. A lot of GMs--I'd say at least a third--genuinely either don't realize or don't care that their actions train their players. They do things that, intentionally or accidentally, teach their players a number of bad habits. A significant chunk of "murderhoboism" happens not because the players are inherently drawn in that direction, but because GMs do things that reward murderhobo-ing your way through the world and punish (sometimes extremely harshly) anything that deviates away from murderhoboism.Often it's done in the name of what they call realism, but it's actually cynicism or even outright nihilism instead. Great example: Taking prisoners. I can't tell you how many times I've seen someone declare they're frustrated by the fact that their players ALWAYS have a "kill 'em all" policy (doubly so if the players themselves get frustrated at their enemies following the same policy)....only to then reveal, when I ask them, that because of so-called "realism", any time any prisoner is taken, it is a functional 100% guarantee that (a) those prisoners will make life a living hell for their captors, (b) it will be extremely difficult, if not outright impossible, to actually guard the prisoners in any way, and (c) if the prisoners are released, even if treated fairly and genuinely given a fair shot, they will 100% ALWAYS betray the party, regroup with the party's enemies, and make the party's lives WAY worse as a consequence. In other words, there is no advantage to taking prisoners, prisoners will always be the dirt worst no matter how you treat them, and if you don't kill them without mercy it will guaranteed always bite you in the butt later. Under such conditions, why WOULD anyone take prisoners? It is, in every conceivable way, a bad idea. Even a very morally-upstanding adventurer, such as a sincerely-played, non-jerkass Paladin will have a strong incentive to not show mercy in combat, and to strike fast and strike hard.I will say that I sat down to tell my players precisely how I feel about most of the known "GM trained their players bad" issues--that I strongly encourage taking prisoners rather than KoS, that the world may have some people who will fight to the death but many will prefer survival-with-conditions rather than that, that authority figures may be unreasonable sometimes but most of the time they're just trying to do their jobs and will at least make an effort to work with them, etc., etc. The only player who ever had an issue with this is the aforementioned kinda-not-great-fit player who left for personal reasons. (Before anyone asks, yes, I do know precisely what those reasons were, I am still friends with this person and we still do other non-TTRPG things frequently, so it had nothing to do with me or my GM style. I just won't share the details because it isn't my story to tell.)Possibly! There are still issues here and there (some of my players are very skittish, for example), but by and large we have only rarely had issues of any kind.Frankly, I'll take being fortunate with players, since (based on what I've been told on here) I have been so fantastically unfortunate with GMs that, for some, it strains credulity.</blockquote>

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