Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 12 - Murder Hobos and Encouraging Role Play

Episode Date: March 22, 2020

Ah, the murder hobo.  Bane of GM existence, right?  Not necessarily.  Jeremy talks about what needs to be done (if anything) about murder hobos in your campaigns.  He also goes over some basic carrots you can dangle in front of players to encourage role playing.

Thank you for tuning in to episode 12 of the Taking20 podcast. Today we're going to talk about murder hobos and encouraging role play. First off, I want to talk about our totally not made up sponsor, Defecation. Without it, you'd be 700 pounds. We do have a Patreon. Please head over to patreon.com slash taking20podcast if you like what you hear. We also have a Facebook page. Do a search for Taking20Podcast and you'll find us there. Feel free to join the discussion.

So murder hobos, what are they? Well, let's start with a few definitions. A hobo is a person who travels from place to place and really they aren't tied down to any particular location. Murder hobos are characters who travel from place to place, remaining unattached, and generally solving problems by killing things. I mean, let's face it, most adventuring parties have no home, per se. They may have a base of operations, they may have a place that they come to to crash every now and then when they're in between missions, but for the most part, they live on the road, or in hotels, or in tavernss or they use space B&B to find a place to crash for the evening. They move to a location, they kill things until the problem is solved, and then they

move on. Think about this from a town's perspective. A group of heavily armed people show up in town. The bar owner hires them to find his son. They trek across farmland to some remote cave in the middle of nowhere. They murder everything that lives there, steal everything that's inside the cave and not nailed down. They come back with the son, and then they leave town. Sure, maybe they're hailed as heroes, but that's gotta be weird from the town's perspective. Uh, yes, uh, Mr. Taylor, how'd you get your son back? Well, um, I paid a group of wanderers to stab the fuck out of the pirates who took him.

You know, we have police here. We would have helped. Now, the term murder hobo a lot of times is used pejoratively. You know, as a character with no backstory, no roleplay, no motivation. At worst, they just kill indiscriminately without regard to consequences. But at best, they use murder to solve most of their problems A lot of the nuance of roleplaying is lost in a purely murder-hobo type character Any sort of insult or injury to the character is generally met with some sort of escalating violence Oh, he talked bad about me? I punch him in the face

Oh, he punched me in the face? I stab him in the throat. The repercussions of these actions are someone else's problem. Now, it's this negative connotation about the term murder hobo that I want to address. And that's where we're going to be focusing for the most part. So, is your character a murder hobo? Well, ask yourself, do you have your character do the things that's described above? No backstory, no roleplay, no motivation, kill to solve all your problems? Must violence always be the solution?

Yes, Mercy, for murder hobos, the answer is yes. Now here's a question I'll ask. Is it a bad thing to be a murder hobo? Not necessarily. How's the campaign design? Is it designed to be video gamey where you really don't worry about repercussions? Then murder hobo your bloody little heart out. Stab the town guard.

What, the barkeep expects you to pay for drinks? Stab him and rob the place. Take a dump on the king's table and then stab him with whatever you produced. Okay, these may be extreme examples, but if you're not going for ultra realism, if the idea behind your role-playing game is just to have a good time, not worry about a lot of the realism, and just go ham everywhere you can, then if your party wants to murder hobo, and if your GM wants to run a murder hobo campaign, then murder hobo. Have a good time doing it. Is the campaign designed where combat is the solution

to most problems? If so, it's not murder hoboing, it's playing the campaign. I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm not disparaging a murder hobo campaign, because I've run murder hobo campaigns, where the players don't want to worry about a lot of the repercussion and realism. They don't want anything complex. I've run murder hobo campaigns for brand new players who are used to things like Skyrim, where you can murder entire towns and then come back later. I've run murder hobo campaigns for

young players who, they don't want political nuance. They don't want to know what the Senate is voting on. They want to go to a cave, kill the bugbears that are living there, come back to town, not worry about whatever repercussions there were or the laws that they may have broken in order to steal things in the cave, and move on to the next town. The issue becomes as if your campaign encourages role play. For example, maybe you have a nuanced campaign that's focused on politics, or the realism of the campaign is one of the focuses. Maybe your players are more mature. Maybe you have players who want nuance and want realism.

And if so, then murder hoboing should have possible repercussions. Oh yes, Mr. Taylor, how did you get your son back? Well, I paid a group of wanderers to stab the fuck out of the pirates who took him. Mr. Taylor, that's vigilantism and that's illegal and you're under arrest. Maybe now the players have to break Mr. Taylor out of prison. I don't know. Just thinking of possible next steps on how that could progress. So advice.

If you have players that are murder hoboing left, right, and center, and you would prefer to have a more realistic campaign, obviously after discussing it with the group of players, one of the things that you can do is have realistic repercussions. So you have this group of people who are unattached to this town in any way, show up out of nowhere, and they can solve problems by killing things. What are some natural repercussions from that situation? Maybe the party is besieged by people who want to pay them to do X, whatever X happens to be. X could be, try to find evidence of my lost daughter. You rescued the tavern owner's son.

Anyone else with a missing kid may also want the party's help. Maybe some of the things they're asked to do are less legal. Look, you guys seem to have no real problem killing things. My business rival, Mr. Towsend, yeah, I'll pay you 500 gold if you'll throw him off his fourth story balcony. So maybe the party is besieged by people who point to pay them to do some legal and maybe some slightly illegal things. Maybe the party's contacted by a political group in town to conduct activities that they could disavow. They could say we had no part in. Maybe this political group or this social group or this economic group want to keep their hands clean, but they also want an arrival taken care of. They could be contacted by the merchant's guild to ask them to collect dues from someone who hasn't paid in

two years. That way, if the party gets caught, then maybe the merchant's guild could say, well, you know this group, you know, they murdered all those people to get back the tavern owner's son, so we don't know anything about it. Maybe the party gets contacted by local guilds about their activities. The example I always think of is from Discworld by Terry Pratchett. You had the Assassin's Guild. They would kill people for money, and if anyone performed contract killings and were not members of the Assassin's Guild, the Assassin's Guild would come and have a chat with them. Maybe there's a mercenary guild who's really upset that the party is taking jobs that they feel like should be the responsibility of their guild. That guild may come to have a talk with

the party about the actions that they're conducting on the guild's turf. The party could be treated as heartless murderers. It could be that the party is given a very wide berth on the street and people give them wary looks and they really try to avoid them because, after all, this party just murdered a group of 25 pirates and they have no remorse about it whatsoever. If you want to get more extreme, maybe the party is actively wanted for the crime of murder and they have to go on the run or go on the lam. Maybe the entire kingdom puts a bounty out on the party's heads. 50 gold ahead for the people that are responsible for killing the merchant's guild of Shadowrun. Listen, there's nothing wrong with a murder hobo campaign. I've run a few. It's fun. It's relatively mindless. You don't have to worry about the real world concerns. And maybe it's exactly

what your players want. But if you want your campaign to, I think, improve, add some realism. If your players are mature, if your players are experienced enough, if your players want this type of campaign, then add some repercussions to murder hoboing. Maybe make them mild annoyances at first, but increase them to major issues should it continue. Now I want to move on to another topic of encouraging players to roleplay. Suppose they start off in a murder hobo campaign and they're just killing to their heart's content

and you discuss it with them and they just say, yeah, we would love to roleplay, but we just don't know how. So let's talk about some ways you can encourage roleplaying out of your players. Let's talk about the basics. Reward them. Give them carrots. Not literally, but you know what I mean. Give them hero points or tokens or bottle caps or advantage sticks or whatever it is that your campaign uses to give a mechanical advantage to a dice roll. Give them additional experience points. Give them something that benefits their character if the player roleplays that character. Another thing you can do is encourage players to come up with habits for their character. For example, maybe Marius paces when he's thinking.

Maybe Lorana sharpens daggers between combats. Have the players give a little something to the character that shows that that character is more than just numbers on the page. Even little nuances like that can expose depths of a character and give them more of a light. Work with a player to write a scene between sessions. Maybe the scene is a flashback to something that happened before the campaign but dramatically affects that character now. before the campaign but dramatically affects that character now. Write a scene with them where they have more interaction with an NPC that happened, for example, quote-unquote, off-camera. These scenes can grant additional insight into the way the character is thinking, and it is a way for players to role-play and not feel like that they have to do it in the moment and on the fly, which

they may not feel comfortable doing. Don't force it, but encourage it because it does make role-playing easier for the player because he or she has a script in front of them. Players who aren't used to acting and role-playing, by the way, they're going to need to take more frequent breaks. Acting is hard for people who aren't used to it. It is mentally taxing and it can be difficult to get in someone else's headspace. And normally you're you, but all of a sudden you're Reginald Thornbottom III. And yes, I'm going to have to act like a pompous nit for the next 45 minutes in this voice. Yes, I am so unhappy you have come to see me and that you are cluttering up my shop with your muddy boots. How can I help you?

It can wear on players if they have to stay in character for extended periods of time. So give them breaks. Give them lots of time to be out of character as well and just be themselves. It really does give them time to rest and refresh, not having to be in character all the time. This is going to be a little bit of a shorter episode, but I think this kind of covers those two topics that I wanted to cover. Please give us a like and subscribe and maybe rate us on iTunes or Google Play or Stitcher or wherever you happen to find us. Please come see us on Taking20Podcast.com.

You can listen to old episodes, you can provide suggestions for future episodes, and you can provide feedback. I'd love to hear from you. Once again, I wanted to thank our totally not made up sponsor, Defecation. If you feel like you're about to blow a vein while you're sitting there,

you're doing it wrong. This has been Taking20 Episode 12, Murder Hobos and Encouraging Roleplay. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game.