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.