Lanefan
Victoria Rules
Ignoring B-10 that's a mighty fine series of adventures. What the average party level at?
D&D 5E What does "murderhobo" mean to you?
B10 is my all-time favorite adventure.
As you can see, there are a preponderance of adventures by the UK TSR team. They are really good and have the kind of good location descriptions that engage the players (see that big thread on players rolling for checks before the DM asks. These modules are great for players describing actions as there's a lot to interact with).
I've reduced XP by about 20-25%. The players just dinged level 5 before the final battle of B10. I then lost 3 of 6 players because of life reasons and a fourth who just wasn't having fun. B7 had two players who only lasted that adventure. Then I recruited three new players, a friend and her two teenage daughters who all started at level 3.
In other words, the party went sideways for a few months level-wise as the two initial players who were level 5 had to take on easier adventures with the new level 3 players (and a dog who is statted as a Barbarian and gets 1/2 XP).
We've done one wing of Castle Amber and the old-timers have hit level 6 and the other players have hit level 5 so I can really ramp up the difficulty now.
B7 was the easiest of the bunch as the PCs out-leveled it but they were under a time constraint to get the wedding done by a certain date so the PCs did the entire module (IIRC) without a long rest.
As you can see, there are a preponderance of adventures by the UK TSR team. They are really good and have the kind of good location descriptions that engage the players (see that big thread on players rolling for checks before the DM asks. These modules are great for players describing actions as there's a lot to interact with).
I've reduced XP by about 20-25%. The players just dinged level 5 before the final battle of B10. I then lost 3 of 6 players because of life reasons and a fourth who just wasn't having fun. B7 had two players who only lasted that adventure. Then I recruited three new players, a friend and her two teenage daughters who all started at level 3.
In other words, the party went sideways for a few months level-wise as the two initial players who were level 5 had to take on easier adventures with the new level 3 players (and a dog who is statted as a Barbarian and gets 1/2 XP).
We've done one wing of Castle Amber and the old-timers have hit level 6 and the other players have hit level 5 so I can really ramp up the difficulty now.
B7 was the easiest of the bunch as the PCs out-leveled it but they were under a time constraint to get the wedding done by a certain date so the PCs did the entire module (IIRC) without a long rest.
Kurotowa
Legend
To me, it describes a certain type of adventurer; a group that's both rootless and aimless, wandering from one town to the next looking for quest givers to point them at socially acceptable targets for violence in return for loot and XP. In contrast to a game where the party's adventures are in pursuit of a major goal, or a game where the PCs establish strongholds and accumulate social ties and social power, all they care about is killing things to gain rewards that let them kill more dangerous things for bigger rewards.
If "Hack and Slash" is the genre, "Murderhobos" are the PCs who participate in it.
If "Hack and Slash" is the genre, "Murderhobos" are the PCs who participate in it.
Celebrim
Legend
I don't notice a sharp distinguishing line there. When I use the term 'murderhobo' I've always understood it to mean what you call 'mercenaries'. Perhaps that's because being a student of Medieval history, I've always associated 'mercenary' with being the lowest of the low and worst of the worst in the medieval society. Perhaps in my head, 'mercenary' differs from what's in your head the way the northern European 'Ritter' differs in connotation from the English word 'Knight' - knights are generally positive things that protect you from bandits, whereas 'Ritter' is a generally negative thing little better than a bandit.
Suffice to say that if my PC's would "kill anyone and anything for money" (and XP), then I would consider them murderhobos par excellence. That is the defining trait in my mind of being a murderhobo. Everything else is just gloss.
You stop having murderhobos when the players make decisions on what to kill and why with motivations beyond the acquisition of loot and XP. You stop having murderhobos when you run the sort of game where the PC's tell the boss, "Keep your money. This job isn't worth it." because they've learned that the job is actually stealing medicine from children, or when they are hired to kill the lizard men but discover that the lizard men aren't the bad guys, or when the townsfolk hire them to wipe out the goblins and they discover its the townsfolk that have been robbing the goblins and started the whole mess and they decide not to slaughter a village that includes women and children.
But if you have PCs whose sole motivation is loot and XP and nothing else matters because the players view the whole of the game as achieving a 'high score', then you have murderhobos. It doesn't matter if they are 'honorable' assassins that only kill for money, or 'honorable' mercenaries that only do the job and say things like, "It's just business; nothing personal", that's still murderhobos.
Celebrim
Legend
I think in general you are right, but I can certainly imagine a 'hack and slash' game where the PC's aren't murderhobos. For example, an adventure path like 'Age of Worms' is certainly 'hack and slash', but you can imagine the adventure path played by a bunch of Paladins because the villains are so generally monstrous that there shouldn't be much in the way of moral qualms about killing everything they are expected to kill - much of it being undead anyway. You'd move over into murderhoboism if the PC's adopted the strategy of ruthlessly killing off all the potential allies in order to be as much above 20th level as possible when facing the final boss.
S
Sunseeker
Guest
I disagree strongly for the reasons I explained in the rest of my post.
Mercenaries and murderhobos may share many things in common, but where they differentiate is that a muderhobo, like a muderer kills things on whimsy. They need not be paid and there needs to be no real goal to their killing either. They kill because they have weapons and like to use them. Mercanaries are at the very least, business-people. Mudering, thieving, violent business people but as much as a mercanary likes killing, they also like money. A murderhobo has no love for anything except killing.
I'm not going to get into how it worked "back in the day" since we're talking about how it works in D&D. I've plenty of mercenary players who are just fine to game with, they have motives and desires and a love for killing, but a love that can be directed. Such cannot be done with murderhobos.
To quote you: I don't see the difference.
If killing is killing then motivation matters not. Honor, justice, money, revenge, boredom. Your own argument feels internally inconsistent. Either motivation matters, or it doesn't. I think motivation matters. I think what makes a "murderhobo" a "muderhobo" is the fact that they lack motivation, of any kind, other than killing. Even a lust for loot and XP can be directed away from murderhoboing by simply making things you don't want players to kill worth no XP and have no loot.
L
lowkey13
Guest
*Deleted by user*
Celebrim
Legend
Well, fundamentally we are just arguing over the definition of a slang term. However, I think your understanding of the term is divergent from how the term is commonly used and from how the term is intended.
'Murderhobo' as a term was intended to describe D&D as it was commonly and perhaps most commonly played. It was a term intended to describe the fact that regardless of the nominal alignment of the PC, what they actually did was wander from place to place killing things for money. This was because per the rules what you were rewarded for was killing things and taking their stuff. The PC's behaved that way because the motivation of the players was to 'win' under the terms set by the game.
A party that goes from place to place being hired out to kill whatever the latest problem of the day is a 'murderhobo' party, even if quite arguably there is a good and justifiable reason for killing the bandits, ghoul king, dragon or whatever and they are not even engaged in acts that are technically 'murder'. The term is intended to highlight that in general the reason for killing the thing tends to go by the wayside in the long run, and the thing is instead actually killed because it offers XP and treasure. There might be a color of heroic activity, but this color is generally a shallow means of blessing killing whatever it is and taking its stuff.
While that's an interesting concept, it has nothing to do with the term 'murderhobo'. Not all 'murderhobos' have evil alignment, where as certainly any PC that kills indiscriminately out of whimsy is in every edition of the game is evil aligned. Ironically, these serial killers you describe might not be 'murderhobos', but might in fact be participating in an evil campaign. Whimsy as a motivation, rather than acquisition of XP and loot, implies that at the metagame level, it's possible (though by no means certain) that the player has actually separated the nominal goal of play (leveling up) from the goals of his play and his character. If he's consciously playing his character in a way that involves something other than maximizing the safe acquisition of loot and XP, and instead is focused on exploring the mental space of his character or his character's relationship to society, you might have an evil campaign that features wandering murders but not murderhobos.
That's exactly backwards. The problem with your definition is that as you define it, murderhobo is fundamentally a synonym for murderer. It doesn't describe any game culture artifact that is particular to the game of D&D. Murderhobo's are murderhobo's because the metagame of D&D rewards killing things and taking their stuff as the preeminent and easiest way to succeed. The nominal motivation of the character doesn't matter, because it is subordinated to the player's motivation of killing things and taking their stuff.
The term 'murderhobo' was invented because a term was needed to refers (usually) to nominal heroes, not nominal villains. We could just call villains villains without needing to invent a term.
FieserMoep
Explorer
Uhm, you got a few things wrong here, I wonder - where do you study? (Not implying anything, just wondering because of the differentiation you made regarding the languages)
Especially in late medieval times many Knights were in fact mercenaries. And they were quite proud of that. We have a plethora of vitaes that show the live of Knights in leading positions of mercenary armies and gathered quite the glory and wealth and valued personal honor very high.
Given their equipment that was tremendously better than that of "common" armsmen we also have historical accounts of how effective they were in a time when traditional knighthood eroded.
As for the distinction of Knight and Ritter, those are just the same words in different languages. If anything at all we could argue that due to the influence of the french language the term chevalier had a better connotation in english or german speaking regions.
As for Robber barons, pretty much any feudal medieval european society had them from the early middle ages to the end, that was not a germanic problem as the term "Raubritter" may imply.
As for medieval mercenaries: Their reputation was their capital. If they robbed the land dry, chances were rather slim for them to get hired. This later became a major issue due to the extreme escalation in the Thirty Years' War yet, in the transitional time frame not so much. Also keep in mind that many mercenaries had extremely good reputations, both regarding their skill and loyalty. The swiss guard is a prime example of this.
So the term mercenary can and has covered a broad spectrum of people, if you want to refer to the bottom line, you may instead use an outright derogative term like dogs of war for such a universally bad image of mercenaries does not do them justice in the slightest.
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