Sociology of the murderhobo

[Nagol]

We do what we can. Some table pathologies can be allayed by better GMing and better setting design. And sometimes, we just need to find better players.

Pathology doesn't necessarily mean dysfunction. People just need to match expectations at the table. There's nothing wrong with murderhobo play so long as everyone expects it. It only becomes a problem when one or more participants objects.

But my point remains. It is a player-driven situation.

I've had campaigns where the itinerant adventurers have settled down the first chance they got and developed strong ties to the town becoming its first line of defence against the darkness.

I've had campaigns where the PCs refused to return to their castles because they'd have to deal with the 'boring' stuff associated with their rule. No table time would be spent on such things you understand, the players didn't want to 'slow down' their advancement by having hand waved down time and dealing with developing consequence of their previous actions. The best problems are new problems was their motto.

I've also had campaigns that veered from one extreme to the other as the table changed its mind as to what they wanted to do or even just a whim from a pivotal player.

Any PC can become a murderhobo should the player choose. Any murderhobo can decide to stop should the player choose. Social expectations, ties, and any other cruft inside the campaign have very little to do with it.

Now if what you are trying to say is there are distinct literary tropes that map to murderhobo then sure. There are literary tropes that map to almost any stereotype of play -- that's why they're tropes after all. Play style is informed by and only by player choice. Nothing inside the world can alter the PCs' role without restricting/controlling that player choice.

 

[Celebrim]

You are much too sloppy a writer to offer writing advice, especially to someone you don’t know.

If I wanted to limit my conversations to people I knew, I wouldn't visit a public forum. I'd stick to facebook or something. And regardless of how caustic you find my writing advice, you'd be well advised to take it. Your assertion that I can't write well unfortunately comes after hundreds of ego boosting assertions to the contrary that make me indifferent to your claim except to find it humorous. But, if you won't take my advice, at least take the advice of Strunk & White, instead of writing word salad that looks inspired by translations of Jacques Derrida. After all, I'm not the one that said of your writing that it made their eyes bleed. But, it's your blog.

And you are much too inattentive a reader to call anyone’s claims “bunk”.

I had thought of some more fitting words, but they were inappropriate for a public forum.

You misunderstand what I mean by the “sociology of the murderhobo”. Despite the fact that I tell you what I mean in the OP – the situation of murderhobos in the world around them. My post is about characters, not about players. I am not offering a theory about why players play their PCs as murderhoboes. I largely agree with the commenters who stress that such behavior is endemic, and with the various “theories” (having to do with distrust of the DM, overly combat-centered games, etc.) that have been offered to explain why they do. There are sociological analyses of player and player-GM interaction, but that’s not the sociology I’m concerned with here.

So let me get this straight... you believe you are analyzing not play, but the transcription of play, as a piece of literature in which you can analyze the relationship of the characters to the setting from sociological perspective?

Ummmm.... do you have any of these transcriptions of play to actually analyze? And you do realize that attempting to do something like that is something like claiming to analyze the sociology of novels collectively, rather than say the sociology of an individual novel. And worse, it would appear you've done something more like assuming that all characters in a novel are stock characters of the Town Drunk sort, and gone off to analyze every novel as if every character in it were an archetypal Town Drunk. Comedy ensues.

For the purposes of transcription, you can't wholly divorce players from characters, because the characters actions are undertaken because of the motive of the authors - that is the players. You can't meaningfully talk about characters in the RPG as if they weren't actually at some level puppets with arms up their backs, responding solely to external stimulus and not actually animated by the player.

The sociology is simply an observation and a description of how adventurers act in fiction and in history (the subject of later parts of the blogpost, which is unfinished – that was only Part 1).

You seem to be now conflating adventurer with protagonist. You can't analyze the sociology of adventurers or protagonist in fantasy fiction or history as a whole, as if there were no distinctions between those settings and some one conclusion could be usefully drawn from them. You can talk about the sociology of Conan or you can talk about the sociology of Middle Earth or you can talk about the sociology of 16th Century Central Europe, but you can't conflate all those things.

Here, I am contrasting two types of fantasy literature in order to show that even murderhoboes have social roles, fit in with social institutions, and form social bonds – if they operate in a world which is more than a dungeon – tavern – library axis.

Is that even really a point of contention?

I am intentionally conflating murderhobo and adventurer....

Why? The two aren't the same thing.

..., to underline that most adventurer-types tend to have more tenuous links to the rest of the world than most other people

No they don't. And more to the point, within the framework of the text itself, can we really claim this is true? Usually we know vastly more about the connections of the protagonist to the world he lives in than anyone else in the text. So maybe we can infer this statement is true of "The Man with No Name", but it's not even true of Conan and certainly we can't point to background characters in Conan's world and go, "Yes they have more links to the rest of the world.", because we rarely know anything about them and we take up their story precisely when we take up Conan's story of having had his former links to society torn from him by sudden violence and calamity. We find Conan at the end of his career as a mercenary, after his employers city is sacked and he's fleeing its wreckage, or in the aftermath of a battle where all but he were slain, or after the pirate ship he spent years of his life on was destroyed in a savage storm or such like.

, and that they tend to solve problems with violence.

A simplification that rarely tells us anything other than that humans predisposed to enjoy violence.

Aragon rejects his past...

What??? Is this movie Aragorn or story Aragorn we are talking about.

But even so, such adventurers can still be socially grounded, if placed in a good setting.

Again, is this even a point of contention. Conan ends up a king at one point, and some number of his adventures occur while he's on the throne.

Epic fantasy, moreso than Swords & Sorcery constructs worlds which fantasy gamers (who play adventurers) find engaging.

What??? No. You can't make blanket statements like that about the tastes of fantasy gamers. You are inserting your preferences in for everyone's.

If GMs’ worlds are interesting, if the social groups in these worlds consist of more than backstabbers that live only for the purpose of screwing heroes over, the players of the adventurers may find things to do other than kill and take its stuff.

They may. "May" is a very weak assertion. The fact that this "may" be true, ought to make it clear that murderhoboism can occur regardless of the sort of setting the GM crafts for play and not as a direct result of any particular social structure built around adventurers. All I think you can say is the inverse assertion, a setting where all NPCs consist solely of backstabbers that exist solely for the purpose of screwing PC over, won't be a setting where the PC's can relate to NPCs by any means other than violence. But just because PC's have the opportunity to relate to NPCs other than violence, by no means assures that anyone will avail themselves of that.

I am simply suggesting that epic-type fantasy offers more to draw players into a world...

No. Again, you can't make blanket assertions about the behavior of players or characters. Nor can you even make blanket assertions about "epic-type" fantasy. You can have an "epic-type" fantasy where the GM runs the game as if every NPC in the setting exists to backstab the players. It doesn't matter how complicated the structures of the societies or how much depth exists in the setting, the experience of play the players actually experience is only partially related to that.

, and reminding some people (to whom my blogpost is a response) who tend to argue that Swords & Sorcery is a more important inspiration for fantasy role-playing that this isn’t true.

I'm not sure that there is a way to quantify which is the more important inspiration for fantasy role-playing, and again, we can't make blanket statements about the 10's of thousands of highly varied homebrew settings that see play every week.

Finally, to the claim you regard as “complete bunk”. In my post, I helpfully link to a page with information about Tolkien’s search for a foundational English myth, which, by his own testament, England lacked.

I read that link, and it doesn't have any of the information you claim to have drawn out of it. Your statement isn't found in any form in the source you are citing. As for Tolkien's legendarium, and his desire to create a healing and empowering myth for the English people that was reflective of a True Myth, you aren't talking about anything that isn't well known to any Tolkien scholar. The reason the statement is bunk, is not only does it mischaracterize the statements of your source, but Tolkien's methods and goals.

I’m guessing that it’s likely that I reading was about Tolkien’s literary and linguistic scholarship before you were born.

Well, since I was born the year he died and share Bilbo and Frodo's birthday, I'm guessing you are probably wrong about that. That would make you what, at least 60? There wasn't a whole lot of published material on him in 1973, and much of the commentary on him - owing to the scarcity of information about the man and his works - was laughably incorrect.

Anyway, as to your essay, you might could rescue it by stopping the pretense that you can analyze play and settings you have no access to, and instead provide some tools and lens by which GM's might meaningfully look at or design the sociology of their world as it pertains to the "adventuring class" within that world. That actually might be a helpful perspective. Trying however to make assertions about the tastes of people you don't know, the habits of characters you don't observe, and the characteristics of settings you know nothing about, is ludicrous.

 

[Max_Killjoy]

So my first reaction was right, this is epic-level postmodernist "analysis" on the part of the OP.

 

[empireofchaos]

Jesus. And I'm the one who's wordy? Sorry, no time for trolls. See ya.

If I wanted to limit my conversations to people I knew, I wouldn't visit a public forum. I'd stick to facebook or something. And regardless of how caustic you find my writing advice, you'd be well advised to take it. Your assertion that I can't write well unfortunately comes after hundreds of ego boosting assertions to the contrary that make me indifferent to your claim except to find it humorous. But, if you won't take my advice, at least take the advice of Strunk & White, instead of writing word salad that looks inspired by translations of Jacques Derrida. After all, I'm not the one that said of your writing that it made their eyes bleed. But, it's your blog.



I had thought of some more fitting words, but they were inappropriate for a public forum.



So let me get this straight... you believe you are analyzing not play, but the transcription of play, as a piece of literature in which you can analyze the relationship of the characters to the setting from sociological perspective?

Ummmm.... do you have any of these transcriptions of play to actually analyze? And you do realize that attempting to do something like that is something like claiming to analyze the sociology of novels collectively, rather than say the sociology of an individual novel. And worse, it would appear you've done something more like assuming that all characters in a novel are stock characters of the Town Drunk sort, and gone off to analyze every novel as if every character in it were an archetypal Town Drunk. Comedy ensues.

For the purposes of transcription, you can't wholly divorce players from characters, because the characters actions are undertaken because of the motive of the authors - that is the players. You can't meaningfully talk about characters in the RPG as if they weren't actually at some level puppets with arms up their backs, responding solely to external stimulus and not actually animated by the player.



You seem to be now conflating adventurer with protagonist. You can't analyze the sociology of adventurers or protagonist in fantasy fiction or history as a whole, as if there were no distinctions between those settings and some one conclusion could be usefully drawn from them. You can talk about the sociology of Conan or you can talk about the sociology of Middle Earth or you can talk about the sociology of 16th Century Central Europe, but you can't conflate all those things.



Is that even really a point of contention?



Why? The two aren't the same thing.



No they don't. And more to the point, within the framework of the text itself, can we really claim this is true? Usually we know vastly more about the connections of the protagonist to the world he lives in than anyone else in the text. So maybe we can infer this statement is true of "The Man with No Name", but it's not even true of Conan and certainly we can't point to background characters in Conan's world and go, "Yes they have more links to the rest of the world.", because we rarely know anything about them and we take up their story precisely when we take up Conan's story of having had his former links to society torn from him by sudden violence and calamity. We find Conan at the end of his career as a mercenary, after his employers city is sacked and he's fleeing its wreckage, or in the aftermath of a battle where all but he were slain, or after the pirate ship he spent years of his life on was destroyed in a savage storm or such like.



A simplification that rarely tells us anything other than that humans predisposed to enjoy violence.



What??? Is this movie Aragorn or story Aragorn we are talking about.



Again, is this even a point of contention. Conan ends up a king at one point, and some number of his adventures occur while he's on the throne.



What??? No. You can't make blanket statements like that about the tastes of fantasy gamers. You are inserting your preferences in for everyone's.



They may. "May" is a very weak assertion. The fact that this "may" be true, ought to make it clear that murderhoboism can occur regardless of the sort of setting the GM crafts for play and not as a direct result of any particular social structure built around adventurers. All I think you can say is the inverse assertion, a setting where all NPCs consist solely of backstabbers that exist solely for the purpose of screwing PC over, won't be a setting where the PC's can relate to NPCs by any means other than violence. But just because PC's have the opportunity to relate to NPCs other than violence, by no means assures that anyone will avail themselves of that.



No. Again, you can't make blanket assertions about the behavior of players or characters. Nor can you even make blanket assertions about "epic-type" fantasy. You can have an "epic-type" fantasy where the GM runs the game as if every NPC in the setting exists to backstab the players. It doesn't matter how complicated the structures of the societies or how much depth exists in the setting, the experience of play the players actually experience is only partially related to that.



I'm not sure that there is a way to quantify which is the more important inspiration for fantasy role-playing, and again, we can't make blanket statements about the 10's of thousands of highly varied homebrew settings that see play every week.



I read that link, and it doesn't have any of the information you claim to have drawn out of it. Your statement isn't found in any form in the source you are citing. As for Tolkien's legendarium, and his desire to create a healing and empowering myth for the English people that was reflective of a True Myth, you aren't talking about anything that isn't well known to any Tolkien scholar. The reason the statement is bunk, is not only does it mischaracterize the statements of your source, but Tolkien's methods and goals.



Well, since I was born the year he died and share Bilbo and Frodo's birthday, I'm guessing you are probably wrong about that. That would make you what, at least 60? There wasn't a whole lot of published material on him in 1973, and much of the commentary on him - owing to the scarcity of information about the man and his works - was laughably incorrect.

Anyway, as to your essay, you might could rescue it by stopping the pretense that you can analyze play and settings you have no access to, and instead provide some tools and lens by which GM's might meaningfully look at or design the sociology of their world as it pertains to the "adventuring class" within that world. That actually might be a helpful perspective. Trying however to make assertions about the tastes of people you don't know, the habits of characters you don't observe, and the characteristics of settings you know nothing about, is ludicrous.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Next campaign I'm going to have a skald perform the "Ballad of the Murderhobo". It shall be epic tragicomedy.

 

[Max_Killjoy]

Jesus. And I'm the one who's wordy? Sorry, no time for trolls. See ya.

Thing is... he's pretty much right.

"Troll" does not mean "disagrees with you".

 

[empireofchaos]

Players should always have a choice, but I disagree that the situation is entirely player-driven. If PCs run in a world where there is nothing outside the dungeon and other locales where they kill things, then killing things is what they're going to do. If NPCs have no character except as enemies and pools of experience, then that's what they're going to be. If the world's power structure is determined by who has the highest AC, most hit points, most attacks per round, etc., then being a murderhobo is the only possible social link.

But if the world is more complex than a frontier, beyond which vermin to be slaughtered live, then the PCs are more likely to make non-murderhobo choices. Can (and should) they be stopped in all circumstances? No. But to me, that sets an unreasonable bar. Just because some will still act as murderhoboes in some circumstances doesn't mean you shouldn't develop personae (for PCs and NPCs), Backgrounds (now that we have them), and social structures, to which these characters might be attached.

Some players will balk - in that case, a more setting-heavy game is not for them. But I have watched Youtube videos in which GMs complained that all their players want to do is to settle down and farm. But the choices aren't always clear at the outset - they emerge once the options have been outlined. That's why it's collective story-telling.

And it's not a question of certain tropes mapping onto the murderhobo. Of course, that's exactly what Swords & Sorcery does. It's that that particular trope, IMO, reduces the game to the lowest common denominator, and severely restricts choice (for players and GMs both). My point is, giving more socially defined settings like those of Tolkien and Martin pride of place, we may encourage new generations of gamers to develop more interesting playing styles over time. 5e, with the addition of Backgrounds, has taken an important step in this direction. If we now focus on developing non-generic settings, we'll take another step in that direction.

Pathology doesn't necessarily mean dysfunction. People just need to match expectations at the table. There's nothing wrong with murderhobo play so long as everyone expects it. It only becomes a problem when one or more participants objects.

But my point remains. It is a player-driven situation.

I've had campaigns where the itinerant adventurers have settled down the first chance they got and developed strong ties to the town becoming its first line of defence against the darkness.

I've had campaigns where the PCs refused to return to their castles because they'd have to deal with the 'boring' stuff associated with their rule. No table time would be spent on such things you understand, the players didn't want to 'slow down' their advancement by having hand waved down time and dealing with developing consequence of their previous actions. The best problems are new problems was their motto.

I've also had campaigns that veered from one extreme to the other as the table changed its mind as to what they wanted to do or even just a whim from a pivotal player.

Any PC can become a murderhobo should the player choose. Any murderhobo can decide to stop should the player choose. Social expectations, ties, and any other cruft inside the campaign have very little to do with it.

Now if what you are trying to say is there are distinct literary tropes that map to murderhobo then sure. There are literary tropes that map to almost any stereotype of play -- that's why they're tropes after all. Play style is informed by and only by player choice. Nothing inside the world can alter the PCs' role without restricting/controlling that player choice.

 

[not-so-newguy]

And it's not a question of certain tropes mapping onto the murderhobo. Of course, that's exactly what Swords & Sorcery does. It's that that particular trope, IMO, reduces the game to the lowest common denominator, and severely restricts choice

What about guilds and factions? They add complexity to a Sword and Sorcery world beyond just "kill vermin." Lankhmar comes to mind; not only the Thieves' Guild, but the various churches and the powerful entities (Ningauble and Sheelba) too.

 

[MarkB]

Players should always have a choice, but I disagree that the situation is entirely player-driven. If PCs run in a world where there is nothing outside the dungeon and other locales where they kill things, then killing things is what they're going to do. If NPCs have no character except as enemies and pools of experience, then that's what they're going to be. If the world's power structure is determined by who has the highest AC, most hit points, most attacks per round, etc., then being a murderhobo is the only possible social link.

But if the world is more complex than a frontier, beyond which vermin to be slaughtered live, then the PCs are more likely to make non-murderhobo choices. Can (and should) they be stopped in all circumstances? No. But to me, that sets an unreasonable bar. Just because some will still act as murderhoboes in some circumstances doesn't mean you shouldn't develop personae (for PCs and NPCs), Backgrounds (now that we have them), and social structures, to which these characters might be attached.

Some players will balk - in that case, a more setting-heavy game is not for them. But I have watched Youtube videos in which GMs complained that all their players want to do is to settle down and farm. But the choices aren't always clear at the outset - they emerge once the options have been outlined. That's why it's collective story-telling.

And it's not a question of certain tropes mapping onto the murderhobo. Of course, that's exactly what Swords & Sorcery does. It's that that particular trope, IMO, reduces the game to the lowest common denominator, and severely restricts choice (for players and GMs both). My point is, giving more socially defined settings like those of Tolkien and Martin pride of place, we may encourage new generations of gamers to develop more interesting playing styles over time. 5e, with the addition of Backgrounds, has taken an important step in this direction. If we now focus on developing non-generic settings, we'll take another step in that direction.

The question is, when does it stray from giving players choices toward imposing a game style upon them? A GM who buries players in complex setting histories and character interconnections when all they want is to go out and hunt orcs is doing them a disservice - just as a GM who only provides nothing more than a straightforward dungeon crawl is doing his players a disservice if they want a rich and detailed gameworld to explore.

And since humans are complex and varied, not only may you have both types of player around your table at the same time, but the same player may be looking for one experience from a particular campaign, and the other on a different occasion.

There is absolutely a place for a whole spectrum of playing styles, and groups of players should feel free to explore them. But starting from a position that the simpler, more gung-ho 'murderhobo' style of play is badwrongfun that players need to be weaned away from is an arrogant and presumptive position that does them no favours.

 

[Caliban]

My understanding is that the term "murderhobo" was derived from the superficial similarities between the typical adventurer lifestyle and that the (somewhat romanticized) American Hobo lifestyle, when taken to an extreme.

They both have a nomadic lifestyle, wandering from place to place and doing odd jobs for money (hobo's don't beg, that's a bum). The "murder" part refers to the type of "odd jobs" the adventurer does (killing monsters/bandits/etc) in comparison to the hobo (more typically manual labor, cleaning, construction, etc.)

When used as a derogatory term (as it usually is) - the murderhobo adventurers really don't care who they kill to get their loot. It's just about gaining items, XP, and showing of their cool character abilities. More game, less roleplay.

Taken to the extreme, it means that the "adventuring party" has become little more than a highly trained, highly motivated and talented group of violent muggers.