Musings on Murder Hoboing

I got into a very interesting discussion on FaceBook about D&D and murder hobos.

First let me explain what I mean by murder hoboing. I don't mean you just murder people randomly and take their stuff. You are a murder hobo not because you murder hobos, you are a hobo who murders. You travel from town to town, village to village, murdering things for hire and taking their stuff (treasure and magic items). When you are done, you move to the next town. You have no home. Your sole purpose is to kill things. When a village sees adventurers arrive, they send you off to the nearest dangerous place, a dungeon full of orcs, a cave with a sleeping dragon, or whatever might be threat to the town because they know adventurers will destroy their town without entertainment and so point the way to adventure, hoping the murder hobos either get killed or eliminate the threat. A win-win situation. D&D when I played it in the 1970s was murder hoboing.

In the 1970s there were no boardgames other than S&T magazines with historical military wargame simulations, so we did random dungeon crawls which is now replaced with computer gaming like Dragon Age and boardgames like Gloomhaven and Kingdom Death: Monster (KDM). I rarely play video games anymore and after years of not playing them, I was convinced to play Dragon Age and I thoroughly enjoyed it and that has been the last video game I've played as of the writing of this blog post. But the game design behind all of these games is murder hoboing, tactical simulation of combat and getting stuff. It becomes a cycle of murder, taking stuff, leveling up, murder, taking stuff, murder more powerful opponents, etc. It just isn't very interesting to me. How these new boardgames keep your interest is by slowly revealing the world, the character abilities, magical items, and new monsters. They do this to keep it fresh otherwise, it'll be like mashing an attack button on a video game and you'll get bored, but underneath all of this is just a combat simulator.

Class abilities, spells, and items all lean toward combat and large area damage. Also increasing Hit Points (HPs - notice they call it Hit Points, not Health, emphasizing how many hits from a weapon you can take) as you level up makes surviving combat easier and easier, thus the escalating spiral of challenges of fighting meaner and meaner monsters.The system/ruleset focus is combat. When I was in my teens, a random dungeon encounter was all I wanted and what my friends wanted. My high school buddies used the Gods, Demigods, & Heroes book as a menu for collecting artifacts - by hunting down and killing Gods and taking their stuff. I built killer dungeons (closets of random overkill) and players brought 485th level Storm Giants, Blackhole blades, A Deck of Many Things with infinite queen of spades, etc. Very Monty Haul (a play on Monty Hall from Let's Make a Deal, where you look behind curtains and boxes to find prizes or Zoinks) and I handed out very ridiculous stuff too and took no mercy in murdering the hell out of any mistake they made. Those were good times and fun for what they were.

We never gave out Experience Points (XP) for Gold Pieces (GP) because we thought it was double-dipping because the more powerful monsters always had more gold and you used gold to buy equipment and magical scrolls, potions, weapons, and armor to better kill things. Daniel N, mentioned that they did award XP for GP, so there was an incentive to steal the dragon's treasure instead of trying to kill it. Now that he has brought this up, the possibility of just stealing the GP without combat and leveling up, a big Aha! lightbulb went off in my head - 40 years too late. We never realized that was an option. We'd rather double-dip, getting XP for slaying the dragon and taking the treasure. Thieves were useful for their trap disabling and backstabbing ability. Hiding in Shadows was for Backstabbing, not for just stealing treasure.

Murder hobos are generally not generic humans as most players pick something unique like a dwarf cleric, a half-orc barbarian, an elf mage, a hobbit assassin. So, the party is always a weird ragtag team of misfits.

In most worlds, murder hobos don't blend into the natural order of things. Rarely is there free travel and most natives, if it is an agricultural society, stay in their local area, so most communities are homogeneous villages (unless it's a big port city), so a ragtag band of misfits carrying weapons, wearing dented armor, 10' poles, large coils of 50' rope, lanterns, multiple flasks of oil, huge bedrolls, overstuffed backpacks, mules, etc, really stick out as outsiders. They're easily spotted as adventurers. See 13 dwarves, 1 hobbit, and wizard go to human village for a beer, hmm? Adventurers? See a dwarf, an elf, two human fighters, a mage, and a couple of hobbits go to an elven forest. Hmm? Adventurers? See a human with a cart of goods drawn by horses with a sign on the cart saying, "Tidwells Tinkerer and Snake Oil for your Ailments." Hmm. Merchant?

The motley crew of Player Characters (PCs) stick out like a sore thumb and if a town had a sheriff, they should be chased out of town instead of being revered like the Seven Samurai. They should immediately seen as murder hobos and trouble makers. And if the murder hobos didn't kill the sleeping dragon, it's going to wake up and set your village on fire. If the murder hobos didn't commit genocide by murdering every Orc in their underground cave complex and just murdered a few Orcs and stole their offerings (treasure) from their holy shrine (more treasure) and blasphemed their god by trampling over everything, a horde of angry Orcs will spew forth and wreak vengeance upon your poor human town (after the murder hobos have moved on, after a drunken celebration).

After 40 years, game development has evolved and dungeons are more organic and not random static closets full of monsters and treasure. KDM, though a boardgame and not a RPG, has embodied the newer philosophy of dungeon design where things are organic. You prepare for the big bad battle at the end throughout the year by making armor, weapons, and equipment from the parts of previously defeated creatures. You level up your village with skill trees. You have generational stories much like King Arthur Pendragon. Monster combat uses a card-based AI, so it's a GM-less game. Descriptive text give more of a unique storytelling favor to combat vs a generic, you take 3 HPs damage. So, RPGs have evolved and dungeons have become more realistic, but at the core, it's still murder hoboing.

Morgan's AetherCon 2017 Adventures

Somehow, this blog post is about what happens when players don't show up and when players do show up.

I hide spoiler sections with JavaScript. If you have JavaScript turned off, you can skip the spoiler sections I have marked. 

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Camp Sunny
System: Call of Cthulhu 7th Ed
Date/Time: Nov 10, 11am
Duration: 5 hrs
GM: Todd Gardiner
Players: 4 (of 6)

You and your friends are taking an impromptu off-season vacation from college and booked a couple of cabins in the Great Lakes. This will be just the thing to combat the stress of coursework and relax! A few days in the wilds full of peace and fun. With college far behind, what's there to worry about? Set in Modern Day (1980's). Pre-gen characters provided. Camp Sunny is an official 2017 Chaosium Convention Scenario written by Paul Fricker with Mike Mason.

The PCs were interesting in that there was an interconnected web of relationships between all the PCs, but unfortunately, we only had 4 of 6 players, so 2 were left out, the 2 PCs that I had the most connections with. My character thought the other PCs were losers and I acted accordingly.

I thought this scenario was a bit odd. Even though at the end one PC got captured, one went insane, and two escaped, we had an inkling of what was going on, but not the whole picture. At the end, the GM told us what was going on and how the clues hooked into each other. I think there was no way to figure out the whole story.

The PC got captured because the player left the game and the GM forced events on the PC as leverage on the other PCs which is a valid technique to increase tension in the game.

I did enjoy the role playing, but the whole scenario left a bad impression on me, I would not run this scenario myself as I didn't find it that enjoyable.

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It was clear at the beginning that the camp owners were Deep Ones and after PCs were comparing notes with each other we knew they were trying to seduce the PCs for some reason and some glamour made the corresponding Deep One of the opposite sex seem alluring, whereas the one of the same sex seemed repulsive. But the pre-gen PCs had no Mythos experience, so we role played as such.

There was a guy who was insane who was looking for a wife that didn't exist. We did find evidence that a woman who he claimed to be his wife was present at the camp, who I saw dancing in the club house with a guy wearing an elder sign ring, but when I went to investigate, the people, lights, and music vanished.

An acid eaten severed hand with elder sign ring found under a rusty sand pail and the dancing people who disappeared were a complete mystery to us. And we weren't going to poke in a half-filled, algae-over grown pool.  After the game, the GM told us the hand, which was pooped out by a Shoggoth, was protected by the elder sign ring - yes the players knew out of game what the ring was, but not the PCs in game. We thought the people were ghosts because they disappeared so fast, but was told it was the Shoggoth impersonating people and it had disappeared down the drain. And the Shoggoth lived in the swimming pool.

We also found some old whisky and beers in the club house basement and there was a lot of decay throughout the premises, so we thought there was some time distortion going on.

In the end, we confronted the two camp owners and they called the Shoggoth to attack us. We killed one of the Deep Ones before escaping. One PC (who turned NPC because he dropped out of the game), got seduced and impregnated by the male Deep One, was captured by the Shoggoth to be returned as breeding stock, as the rest of us escaped. One other PC went insane and ran off into the woods.

Overall, I felt the pacing was very slow in this game as there wasn't much to find as we explored a majority of the camp. We didn't figure out the Shoggoth connection even when it showed up. The severed hand and dancing figures was a mystery to us until the GM explained what had happened.

The seduction, rape by magic, aspect of this scenario was a bit offputting to me. This plus the slow pacing and unsolvable mystery, just made this scenario something I wouldn't want to run.

The most interesting part of the game was the interactions between the PCs.

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Blythburgh, A Town of Darkness
System: White Wolf World of Darkness
Date/Time: Nov 11, 9am
Duration: 5 hrs
GM: Richard Chabrier
Players: 3 (of 6)

On a trip to the coast, six summer vacationing youth take a wrong turn and enter a small town where no one seems to be under the age of fifty. The oddity doesn't stop there as after stopping for gas and directions, the van won't start. Forced to stay until repairs can be done isn't too bad but the town just keeps getting creepier... This game is a survival horror. Players beware: This is not a loot or hack and slash adventure. Be prepared to role-play and solve problems. Stupid decisions and bad responses can/will get your character/team killed.

There's something to be said for designing a scenario that allows you to drop PCs when not enough players show up. In the previous game, Camp Sunny, PCs that weren't being played were dropped from the game which made GMing easier, but the experience for the PCs became weaker as relationships between PCs weren't being played out. In this game, the GM ran all of the PCs as NPCs and he did it expertly. And again there was a complex relationship web.

This was a good game, it's just a shame that we had only 3 players and the GM ran the other 3 PCs as NPCs. The other issue was that we used roll20 for dice rolls and it was cumbersome because you had to click on your attribute and skill before rolling and there were issues with clicking and scrolling, and scrolling, and clicking, and wrong things being selected, etc. It would have been easier to just roll a handful of d10s. The roll20 character sheets we used for rolling were very cumbersome and would have been better with just two dropdown boxes to select an attribute and a skill and a roll button. The clunkiness broke the flow of the game.

The 6 PCs were well fleshed out and interesting to play. Though the scenario wasn't that complex, the solution the PCs had to come up with was difficult and I enjoyed that.

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The PCs had really deep back stories and the GM took us aside to a private chat room to explain our character secrets. The funny part was that none of these secrets really mattered if the other players knew about it, so it would have been ok if it was discussed in public. After the game, we compared notes and discovered some cool stuff about the other PCs that were rarely touched upon during play.

When we arrived in town, we were struck by the completely backwards town and a large angel statue with candles surrounding it. Some old leather-bound book was clutched in its hands.

We found an old large church with old gravestones and no current burials. The inn we were sent to was also very old and the last visitor was 15 years ago, the mother of one of the PCs (who we learned deliberately came to this town in search of her, oh, that must have been one of those secrets). The inn was filled with secret corridors and a murder basement.

Did I mention everyone in this town was old? Well, we only met two residents, the garage mechanic and inn keeper, so we didn't know until the end, except for the spoiler in the game description.

One of the PC/NPCs got kidnapped and as we searched for her, three men came into the inn to ambush us. We beat them up. And they weren't old.

We then noticed a group of townies with lights were approaching us, so we went back to the garage and found our kidnapped friend tied to the angel with ropes, chains, and barbed wire. Her blood was being absorbed by the angel.

Eventually, we found out the Angel, Book, and Candles had to be taken care of in order to break the spell that kept the residents alive. The sacrifice of our friend had reversed the aging of the townies and they wanted to sacrifice us too.

The candles protected the angel and book. So, once the candles were blown out, we could damage both the angel and book. Smashing the angel re-aged the townies as they swarmed us, and finally burning the book, turned them all to dust.

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Ladybug, Ladybug Fly Away Home
System: Call of Cthulhu 7th Ed
Date/Time: Nov 12, 6am
Duration: 5 hrs
GM: James Adley
Players: 5 (of 6)

"Police are searching for a young girl who was abducted from a local department store earlier this afternoon. Witnesses describe a 'horrific scene' at the store, reporting that one of the abductors apparently committed suicide inside the store instead of allowing the police to apprehend him. The mother attempted to fight off the attacker, receiving only minor injuries, but he was able to deliver the child to a waiting accomplice outside the store who made of with the child. The police have not yet released the name of the family or any information on the kidnapping, but we will keep you updated as the story progresses. Next up is the weather, after this commercial break." - WKYC Morning Broadcast, November 9, 2017 This will be a modern scenario using Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition. Imagine this like an episode of Criminal Minds. A small, elite team of investigators working for the FBI has been asked to help with to resolve a kidnapping. Feel free to roll up your own investigator, but please choose a career that would align with the scenario (field agent, psychologist, forensics expert, etc.

Sometimes when all the players show up, you wished maybe someone didn't. In this game one player said she had gamed two days straight without sleep and spoke a mile a minute and in a stream of consciousness, full of non-sequiturs, and odd asides to people in her physical room, but not in our virtual gaming room, and with no wish to mute her microphone. She also claimed she was signed up for another game after ours. Really? And that in one of her previous sessions, no one showed up. Hmmm. I wonder? Did they sneak off to some other room?

That said, this was a great game. Even afterwards, we didn't know if we did the right thing.

=== SPOILER SECTION START ===

We're all FBI agents with no Mythos knowledge. A girl gets kidnapped and all indications is that it's some crazy ATF agent who kills himself at the kidnap scene. Of course, in a meta sense, we figure it's a rogue Delta Green operative trying to solve some Mythos problem, but we pretend it ain't.

I picked being the special agent in charge because I've seen games where the whole thing falls apart when strangers meet to play online at a convention. Also, you get to send problem players away or into dangerous situations. :-)

There's a ticking clock because the girl doesn't have her steroids that keep her breathing. She has a week to live if she doesn't get her medication.

As part of the clue trail, James Alday made a website for the game (and made it available for general use):
Church of the Passover Angel
It is freaking cool. It looks a bit odd and strange out of context, but it contains clues about the cult the missing girl belongs to. There are indications they're extremists, but also that they have knowledge of elder signs, so you're not sure if they're good or bad. And the cult talks about protection and passover when the Passover Angel arrives.

Through our investigation, we find that the ATF agent's niece had tried to take the girl away from her parents before, two years ago, but she was returned. We also find the niece was working with the dead ATF agent. Two years ago and now, the Stars were Right again.

We also find that there's a countdown of localized plagues of Egypt action going on and the last plague is the death of the first born.

We actually track down the niece all the way to a motel with the little girl and try to talk her into giving herself up, but she refuses and it all goes to gun play where the talkative FBI agent takes a shotgun blast to her chest and goes down (-3 HP even with Kevlar). Even though she was unconscious and bleeding out, she kept on talking. An amazing feat. The other agent with her drags her body out to do First Aid, and the niece closes and barricades the door again.

Another PC and I tried to knockdown the door, but fail several times, and the niece tells us she'll kill the girl and herself. Desperate, we try to knock the door down again, and fail. Gunshot. Fail to open the door again. Another gunshot. Yep, it was all over, a murder-suicide. We found the niece had put furniture against the door and actually put sheet metal over the motel room window.

Even with the little girl dead, the plagues continued, but only in a localized form. After talking to the GM, we found out if we returned the girl, the plagues would actually be across the whole USA, so in effect, the murder-suicide was the best solution. Only in CoC, would a murder-suicide be a best solution.

As I signed off the game, that other player was still talking.

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