Murderhobos

Of all the tabletop memes, the fucking worst one of them all is murderhobos.
Now, I know that it probably has some grounds in reality. In some gaming tables, there were parties that cared for nothing but killing monsters for experience and loot. They then looked at NPCs and saw nothing, but potential loot pinatas that can grant them more experience and loot if killed. They had no backstories, no attachments, no morals.

But not fucking everyone acts this way! Far from it. So why again and again on Veeky Forums, I see people who pretend that every adventuring party, ever, is nothing but bloodthirsty maniacs, who'll rape the whole village to death on a drop of hat?

But I can live with some autists on a mongolian throat-singing forum meming. The worst part is when the meme starts seeping into reality, and the DM starts not only wholeheartedly believing in it, but also pushing it on us. My new DM is exactly this way.

In his setting, you see, adventurers are despised and hated. They are nothing but troublemakers and killers for hire. "Well, at least people hire them" - I've thought. Maybe if we don't CALL ourselves adventurers and just start helping people, we'll be accepted and eventually maybe even hailed as heroes. Right?
Wrong. No matter what we do, everyone hates us. No matter what quest we're trying to pick up, everybody wants to fuck us over and betray us for no reason at all, and everybody is fine with it, because adventurers are bad, so who cares?
The only good part of the campaign was when we entered a huge dungeon for a month, and there wasn't a single NPC inside, who'd call us names. But the moment we left? This shit starts all over again. People with no reason to hate us, do. People with no reason to betray us, do. People with no reason to be anything but thankful to us, chase us away.
And the worst part? This is not an isolated case. I've played with DMs like this before.

I really hate the murderhobo meme.

It's also something bad GM's reinforce, whether through running shitty games like that, or being relentlessly lethal with NPC's to the point nobody wants to get invested in them because anything they care about dies.

This.
>Resolve combat peacefully
>GM doesn't give experience or loot

By the way, I'm running my own campaign, and I'm really hyped about that encounter I've readied. It's somewhat inspired by the 4e with the way enemies synergize their abilities with each other.

The trouble is, this encounter can probably be solved peacefully. In fact, it's incredibly likely, because the players LIKE those enemies, and don't really want to kill them.

So I've been thinking - what if after the peaceful resolution, I'll say - guys, good job, but I really wanted to run this combat. Let's fight anyway - you know, in a OOC, non-canon way. If you win, you get experience, but in the story you've solved this peacefully regardless of the results.

Why not just make combat the part of the peaceful solution? They will only bow to those who prove their strength, or they're compelled to fight but being defeated will break the compulsion, or something else along those lines.

After the fight when the two groups are asleep, the PC group finds that one of the NPC group wants to steal something from them, and when discovered, draws his weapon and starts attacking without a word.

Turns out the fight was a dream sequence created by a third party, a dream manipulating wizard-spirit-thing, who wanted to know the combat potential of the two groups for his own evil purposes; it didn't really happen (although the characters may wake up more tired than usual).

That's actually a great idea, although I'll skip the wizard part. One of the party members will fall asleep and have a dream of what might have been.

sure, just make sure the players are on board because spending 40 minutes on a fight then going "it was all a dream!" would be pretty infuriating

Would anyone play in a campaign about actual murderous hobos? Riding the rails, eating beans, stabbing people?

It's called Promethean: The Created.

>not using milestone

>Villagers don't like mercenaries because they drink all night, piss on the walls, shit in corners, shag their daughters, shag the chicken, shag the horse, then fight each other in the tavern because they're bored.
>B-but we're different! We only fight when we get paid to.

Ever tried eshewing the adventuring gear for some nice clothing and calling yourselves fixers?

You're an ignorant idiot. I've had to deal with murderhobos for years. I WAS a muderhobo a decade ago, when more likely than not your DM would train you to act that way and trust literally nobody. Since I started GMing DnD and other games I've run into my fair share of them, and not all of them can be convinced that they're shitting up the game for other people.

Don't downplay the problem before it's fixed. You'll just make muderhobos think their shit isn't all that bad. Badwrongfun doesn't cover the kind of insane, game-ruining shit these people pull

>regardless of what you do, you only level up when my story dictates

>when my story
You mean our story.

If the DM offers XP for creative solutions to conflicts and varying forms of achievement, then milestones do indeed pale in comparison. However, if the DM only knows how to offer XP for being a murderhobo, which describes a saddening number of DMs, then I'll take milestones any day.

Fucking this. If a group completed their objective they should get xp for it. Doesn't matter that they avoided combat like the plague. Matter of fact they should get extra for it.

I'm guessing that you have tried telling the DM out of character about your dissatisfaction. Why not pull out a different game other than DnD, or offer to run a game yourself that focuses on a quest or some other story instead of sandbox mercenaries?

if everyone is out to fuck you fuck them first , loot pillage burn and salt the earth. If he wants everyone to be a dick show him why peons were nice to people with weapons and the will to use them

You are a bunch of guys go around killing things / people for money, and look bad as fuck, what did you expect?

Traditionally if you save a village then you are celebrated as heroes.

Have you ever decided how much XP players should get? Then congrats, you've used a milestone system. If YOU ration how much XP they get, then YOU decide when they level up.

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Nope. Eat shit, OP. ForeverGM for every group I have interacted with. Players don't give a fuck about you, or how much effort you put into making the world for them to interact with. I ran a campaign with some intrigue aspects a few years ago and the players ended up not only murdering the son of the local matriarch, directly opposed to her explicitly stated wishes, but cutting off his head and carrying it with them in a sack as they travelled the road out of town. Another PC joined our campaign and the established group introduced themselves by throwing the head at the new PC that meant to join the campaign, at which point both parties threatened each other and nearly killed each other like a bunch of fuckup idiots. That obviously wasn't my only experience with murderhobo lulsorandumb PCs, but was the trend despite being different groups with different players in different campaigns taking place over different years. I refused to GM for years because it was the final straw, so I just didn't get to do RP because none of these idiots from any of these groups had ever GM'd before, so if I wasn't hosting, it didn't get played. Now, just this year, I put together a setting to try and get back into GMing. This is in an entirely different city with yet another, different group of PCs, and literally all I did was ask the PCs to read my campaign documentation, look at the world map, roll characters and decide where they want to hail from, and write a little backstory and email it to me because I didn't want them to just HURRDURR START IN TAVERN WAT DO, and we could agree on how their character's motives would tie into the first adventure. I asked them to send me the backstory like 4-5 months ago. I have gotten 2 out of 4 of those. PCs don't give a fuck about you, your time, the world they're in, or anything other than their character's gold and equipment. They're lazy little shits, almost invariably. Murderhobos absolutely exist and are exceptionally common.

Just train players yourself, don't dip into a tainted pool.

Sorry for samefagging

DM creates monsters
DM makes dungeon
DM creates world

If players believe they can control when they gain mechanical rewards in any way, really, then they are deluded.

All milestone XP does it make true what is already known to anyone who has been a DM once. Even if you go off the rails, and DM has to wing it, they is not going to go outside of whatever boundaries he has mentally established for progress. If you don't like it, play a system that isn't scaled and levelled.

The only games I've ever joined were full of murderhobo faggots, and their tagalong girlfriends who went along with anything because randumb

It's a plague. It needs to be eradicated.

Congratulations, you moved the goalposts all the way to the ends of the bloody pitch.

This. If the people declare us evil then by all means, let us do evil.

About the same here. Was in a group where the other members memorized all the game exploits, min/maxed, and spend every moment plotting betrayal and team killing.

The GM needs to take control of the game. If they're not going to reward role playing, create an interesting scenario, or create a decent dice thrower then I guess they deserve scummy players.

I've never been in a game where PCs brought that sort of mentality to the table. You should try not surrounding yourself with terrible people

What if the GM used to read Word Up! magazine?

that's where they fucking belong

fucking bongs

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That's not gangsta, user. Not gangsta at all.

From your description, it is quite easy to discern the true intent of your GM. He is training your group to prefer the environment of dungeons and caves. Actually, you gave this interpretation yourself: the only fun part of the campaign was the enormous dungeon.

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Oh, please. PCs are entitled little shits that just do what they want for giggles. Stop defending them. If it was some sort of one-off, isolated incident, that would be understandable, as all groups of people have individuals that are toxic. But this is a lifelong trend of one group after another, campaign after campaign of blatant destruction and disregard for respect and appreciation of labors. I wish I could get PCs I've played with to read the damn rules for long enough to actually know enough about the system they are playing in so that they could run a game and I could ruin all of their efforts.

Deja vu? Or copypasta?

>play a campaign
>players burn 4 out of the 5 inns they walk into
>the fifth one they just shoved soap into the innkeeper mouth, bounded him with a rope, and run away with the money and his daughter
>regularly killed questgivers
>started a fire that destroyed half a village to cover up the fact they stole some chickens

murderhobos are real.
it's the natural reaction of a 14-20 ( sometimes older) year old to being given unlimited freedom of action without real consequences.Raping, pillaging, killing, stealing are actually the main attraction to most people getting into D&D. all it takes is some DM writing down limits and them caring about the story to mature them into good players.But until you give them that you got murderhobos.

the only thing worse than players are the GMs. Sad!

It's honestly not as bad as noobs complaining about spellscasters not spamming AOE attacks. This is essentially a by-product of the video game mentally that most noobs/new players have.

Embrace it, hire mercenaries, overthrow the local lord and show those dirty peasants who the real boss is?