arazni-github

[arazni-github]

This reminds me of my experience with Heart: The City Beneath, which is probably my favorite setting of any TTRPG I've played. Or, specifically, a conversation that I had on a Discord that fully believes system matters but surprisingly largely believes that murderhoboism is a player problem.

This conversation kicked off when I said the game design kind of enables murderhoboism by having so many nodes and locations to explore that are almost wholly disconnected from each other and essentially no reason to return back to those locations. Most NPCs either come with you or fade away like a nightmare in the daylight. So too does the rest of their village inside of a dead god that they keep rebuilding with flesh and literal money, or the cult around an infinity toilet, or whatever.

We were nervous with dread and figuring out our boundaries early on. We learned that you gain power and become a bit too strong for your tier of the Heart, so you go into a deeper tier to be challenged again. What this meant in practice for us was that the longer we were on a tier of the Heart, the pettier and more violent we became. From prey to predator, descend into prey, learn to become predator again, descend into prey one final time and hopefully make it to the Heart Itself before you die.

Which works well with the theme of the game to be sure! The Heart is intended to bring out the muddy dark chaos lurking in your characters' hearts waiting to be unveiled, twist on their massive egos, and drive them to their ultimate downfall. It's in many ways very good!

But eventually we started solving more and more problems with fire and violence. Because yes, we did pay for it. Our characters were worse off after the battles than they were before them, and these battles didn't even really help us gain advancements, and we had to spend rare resources to recover.

But our characters were, crucially, very alive and very functional. And carrying the fallout from those battles was interesting and meaty. So we were still deeply invested in our goals, but, as a party, willing to burn down a node over petty squabbles because we could.

Ultimately, I was the player who resisted the temptation to murderhobo the longest and who protested the most when it happened and often zoned out until the murderhoboing was over.

But I was also the player who finally doomed us when I gave in and finally chose needless violence within a stone's throw of The Heart and our final goals. (However, I have to admit, this pettiness ending was cool as hell and very likely better than we would've achieved otherwise.)

MURDERHOBO THEOREM

"When the players' characters feel powerful enough as compared to the world around them, their behavior will lean to solving every problem with violence (aka Murderhoboing)".

I've read tons of reddit posts and watched tons of youtube videos on the topic of murderhobos, why they exist, etc. and the most universal answer is "they're just toxic players".

Well, NO.

I watched the same playgroup play several different ttrpg games and noticed the following:

- D&D5e prominent murderhobo behavior. Constantly discussing how to kill every NPC. Constantly threatening NPCs with violence.

- OSR games (shadowdark, five torches deep). Some murderhobo behavior. Sometimes actually getting in fights, but not taking it lightly.

- Mothership. Little to none murderhobo behavior. Avoiding violence even if it seems like a good solution. Almost never being the first to attack.

- Delta Green. After just one game - zero murderhobo behavior. Not solving anything with violence if they see any other way at all.

In my humble opinion, It's not the players, it's the game. Let me elaborate further.

---

I recently had the first playtest of the custom ttrpg that I'm making. It's supposed to be a horror game, but with some action. Combat-medium if you will.

Having played Delta Green and Mothership, the players were very cautious at first, reluctant to fight at all.

However, I accidentally made their characters TOO strong (as in almost invincible). As soon as players understood that, it all turned into a bloodbath. Roleplaying caution went completely out of the window after the very first combat encounter. By the end of the playtest, they were solving everything with violence, including killing the somewhat hostile sheriff and his deputies in cold blood.

The ONLY reason they turned from cautious investigators to bloody maniacs was their power level. They were even fully conscious of it. "Why would we run or talk or surrender when we can just kill em? What are they gonna do?".

---

Now, I have some conclusions...

It's the power level. When you feel invincible, you turn into a fcking Homelander. By default. On the other hand, when a single gun shot can end your character, you play VERY cautiously.

If a certain system encourages combat with tons of abilities and action types and whatever, you feel more powerful. And slowly turn into a maniac. If the system DISCOURAGES combat, you don't get into fights.

That's all. So, if you don't want murderhobos at all in your game, don't play a heroic combat-heavy adventure game like D&D, play some investigation-themed or horror games instead.

That's just some of my observations. I may be wrong of course, but I felt like getting it out there and sharing this simple insight.

[arazni-github]

One thing I think about often is how I quit playing Mass Effect as a series because of the mining minigame in Mass Effect 2. It was very boring and I wasn't really responsibly managing my engagement with the game at the time because of a completionist mindset.

So in a sense, Mass Effect 2, despite all it's characters and plot and mechanics, became mostly a bad mining minigame for me.

I have since changed how I engage with games so this doesn't happen to me much anymore, but I still think of that framing sometimes.

Like, in my experience, "Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth is mostly an expensive Mahjong simulator." (Mahjong is just too good y'all.)

Or, "Pathfinder involves reading a surprising amount of Judith Butler and Ursula Le Guin." (I love this game but I do often read when it's not my turn in combat.)

That said, sometimes it's much less avoidable or self-inflicted and still sort of applies. Like for beloved Virtual Tabletops. "This game is now 20% doing tech support."

[arazni-github]

Hi!

I'm arazni, named after the Pathfinder deity of survivors, and my major hobby and intent here is in tabletop role-playing games. I love discussing them, learning them, supporting them, and analyzing them. But I do play them too!

Blades in the Sheets

I made a character sheet web app for Blades in the Dark with full English and partial French support. It also has Scum and Villainy support in English. I heavily tested the app with the NVDA screen-reader so it should be accessible to blind folks.

If you do use it, I highly recommend using it in a standard browser like Firefox or Chrome and not a Tumblr browser on mobile.

Pathfinder Analysis

I'm currently working on a Jupyter Notebook website that holds a lot of my notes and mathematical analysis of how Pathfinder 2nd Edition is balanced. Right now, the main focus is on the relationship between damage and accuracy for ranged vs melee, limited use and unlimited use, and other categories.

The analysis is run against the currently existing bestiary as it exists on Archives of Nethys.

Eventually, I hope to expand to more topics. One will be to create a sort of dashboard of the bestiary that has graphs for various things, like percentage of monsters with Will as a lowest save that have immunity to mental effects.

The other is to break down an explanation of how to analyze a game, from napkin graphs up to bucket sorting the results of all possible dice values across an entire turn.

Also, I really need to figure out how to make the charts workable on mobile...

Support

You can also find me on Github and Ko-Fi. I'm happy to take requests for other things to analyze and to fix bugs people find.