@eimyr I'm... not very sure how to respond to that. I neither want to jump the gun nor start an argument, so I should probably leave it there. Just, if that's playing on the word I think it is, that is something I'm very uncomfortable with.

@Pixie Sorry if I caused any distress, but I'm failing to see to what you are referring.

With the name, were you playing on a... certain word that begins with a c instead of a k? If not, disregard that (but that word exists and has a lot of baggage).

If you are referring to the name of the elven servant, which I agree is quite obscene, I didn't make it up, but was reminiscing a (in my opinion) well known story of a dude who wanted to spite another player who held elven supremacist beliefs (as a player no less) by creating the described servant.

Seems like a very passive-aggressive way to communicate in-party.

And yes, I think the idea was to use the word, though I have to say I'm not familiar with the baggage. I vaguely know it's somewhat harsher in AmEng than here (I've been called a cheeky c**t before and it wasn't a big deal). I'm sorry if I made you feel offended.

@lisardggY Yes, hence the legend. Of course a sane way of dealing with the situation would be either to quit the group or have a serious conversation. I think the player was set on making the most of already toxic environment by playing to the same rules

If you're into podcasts about language, there's a good episode of the Allusionist podcast about the C-word and its baggage. theallusionist.org/c-bomb

Thanks! I should definitely look into that.

@Pixie here, have my old "bad user scolding image" . Back in the Den, I had to use that a lot, so I thing I could relate. Still, I want also to believe eimyr didn't do that on purpose, or at least didn't give it the right weight.

Still, it is perfectly fine if you want to scold him with that. I approve and so does Rarity.

@eimyr Ah. I wasn't familiar with that story. But for context, in American English it's basically considered the most obscene word there is, and it's a word I've only had used toward me when someone really wanted to hurt me and degrade me.

I see, and I'm doubly sorry for using the word in a public environment then. I definitely did not see it as harsh at all.

Yeeah. We'll call this a learning experience and never do it again.

Yup.

Yeah, I figured it was something like that. Different environments, etc.

"RPG General Chat" - the closes place to Equestria on earth.

Huh. apparently english.stackexchange.com/questions/11981/… does mention the word specifically for both branches of English.

For the record in case anyone's unclear: deliberate use of unreasonably foul language does get flagged here. Repeated offences may result in room bans, but we've never had to go that far yet--most folks who don't want to respect the room's attitude toward language are going to leave for other reasons first. We're very understanding about first-time offenders though, as we know this chat's culture is different from many parts of the Internet.

@Pixie well, anyway, are you planning to fluff your Unseen Servant in a way that's no longer unseen?

@BESW Actually, I was just pointing to that small ending part of your message you just added :P

Also... Internet? Since when it is just Internet ;_;?

@BESW What about "private" rooms? I assume they would be held to the same standard, but who would police that?

@eimyr In theory EVERY piece of the Stack Exchange family needs to be nice. But it's self-policing except in the most egregious and public cases.

So this chat is less vulgar than many other Stack Exchange chats because we're more interested in keeping it that way and we apply social pressure to do so.

Makes sense.

In my group I usually had a in-character swearing noted as acceptable in the social contract.

Now it's no longer the case, since I play at a hobby shop.

We aren't always successful at Being Nice; like most groups we succumb to clique elitism that needs to get scrubbed out from time to time.

But we try and we're receptive to being called out when we fail.

@eimyr My groups are generally held to "Keep it roughly PG-13, with possible R for violence and mature themes."

Lack of clique elitism is the exact reason why I like it here.

Yey!

@BESW My groups are "We are strictly mature with language or violence, we do not roleplay sexual themes and heavy abuse, though such themes might be mentioned".

@BESW Be happy. I had to add a pegi-7 tag on the Sugarcube to avoid someone think it was another "free for all" room.

Let me try to bounce ideas off of you. If you were speaking to a room full of roleplayers, presumably of a wide range of play styles, knowledge and experience, what would you have to say on the topic of the Murderhobo syndrome?

Would it be reasonable or unreasonable to assume that I could use the word "ludonarrative" without getting eyerolls or confused expressions?

My intention isn't to say "D&D is the tool of evil", of course, but to look at it as an existing play style deeply entrenched in the hobby's culture, try to see where it originated, the conflicts that surround the very discussion of its as a syndrome/trend/problem (like this), and some games/experiments that tried to address it, like PowerKill or Violence.

@BESW The day before I'm giving a talk about Metagame Goals and have found myself digging up the French sociologist who coined the phrases used there, like "agon", "alea" and "paidia", in his 1958 book. I think I can get away with anything. :)

You would have to explain what you mean the first time, but assume the audience is intelligent enough to understand you and let you continue using it.

@BESW We're usually narrated a bit more like The Witcher (the books) and worse parts of Game of Thrones than LotR or Skyrim.

@lisardggY do you believe murderhoboing can be "saved"? As in, can there be an ambitious narrative that involves murderhobo mindset?

@eimyr I don't think it needs to be saved. I think it's a legitimate play style, but one that should be distinctly understood to be a form of violent escapism.

I think many popular games implicitly enable it, rather than explicitly referring to it as a play style.

@lisardggY I always wanted to run a murderhobo adventure which would be delivered as a kathartic Greek Tragedy.

I'd talk about combat-as-narrative (with examples like Fury Road), and how not all combat is narrative (with examples like... can't think of one right now, but a film where the story lives in the dialogue and stops for the action sequences).

I'd talk about RPG systems that provide mechanics for "pure" combat without inherent storytelling implications, and how that's a toolset which needs the group to bring its own willingness and expertise to bend the tools to narrative purpose.

(afk for a second. child awoke from nap)

Fury Road is a great example.

Not only is it 99% action focused, it also doesn't require the assumption of heroism from its protagonists.

And Max is precisely the muderhobo archetype.

Yup.

But still can make for a compelling protagonist to a compelling story.

I'd talk about interaction modes between protagonists and secondary/tertiary characters, with examples like the Doctor and the Master.

Elaborate, please.

I think he showed a little too much trust in other people at certain points for that archetype to fully apply to him

yes, in the beginning Max was acting that way, but by the end he was participating in a different way with the group he had joined

he did not, in fact, kill everyone he saw

"you are all sitting in a tavern..." - I think Max actually showed a reasonable amount of trust considering the situation he was in.

The murderhobo mode generally assumes that NPCs fall into one of three categories: dangerous, should be killed to prevent future problems; harmless, should be killed for loot to help solve future problems; lethally overpowered, should be placated until we're powerful enough to kill them to prevent future problems.

yeah

In the same fashion as murderhobos imply a level of trust towards other players

@trogdor Not necessarily contradicting. Murderhobos aren't necessarily "kill everyone, trust no-one". They're just PCs, who are possibly friendly and trust each other, who live in an environment where murder and looting is the norm.

@lisardggY he wasn't part of a group at first though

Seconded. It's the PC/character's attitude towards NPC and surroundings that define a murderhobo. A character that acts like a murderhobo towards other party members is a Munchkin.

The Doctor and the Master have almost a Batman/Joker level of animosity: the Master is a genocidal madman obsessed with controlling as much of the universe as he can, while the Doctor's got this thing about stopping dictators and genocides.

In fact, they might be extremely trusting towards the mysterious quest-giving stranger, because they accept him for what he is, but it wouldn't prevent them from killing him in the alley once he's given them the quest reward, just on hte off-chance he has something else on him.

But when the Master accidentally triggered the heat-death of the universe, he immediately teamed up with the Doctor to save all of existence.

Their relationship is far more complex than "enemies, kill on sight."

@eimyr Nah. I'm cool with it being unseen. That's handy sometimes, too.

My point being (and I'd include a lot more examples in an actual talk) that protagonists' relationship to other characters can be complex.

@BESW That's good, I can add that in the "what murderhobos aren't" section.

But sometimes we just want to know that Green Martians Are Bad.

Which is to say, they're not automatically Chaotic Evil omnicidal maniacs.

(In the John Carter of Mars stories, Martians are colour-coded for our convenience: Green Martians are basically orcs, while Red Martians are allies.)

A murderhobo character can be a LG paladin-type with a strict code of honor and even social roleplaying hooks, but when the party leaves town, the player switches into "wilderness mode" where everything is XP and loot.

That hits close to one of the things I'd talk about!

In language study, there's this idea that we shift dialects depending on context.

code switching.

Yes.

Didn't think to apply this here, but it's a good loan-term.

What you just described is, effectively, narrative code-switching.

@BESW I was just thinking of that trope and similar (handily listed under good and evil for your convenience).

In the town, you behave in X way. In the dungeon, you behave Y way. It'd be wildly inappropriate to apply either "dialect" of behaviour in the other context.

And the colour-coding for your convenience is part of the code-switching.

We've discussed ad nauseum how the alignment system and races like orcs combine to create "morally acceptable genocide."

I need to decide whether to consistently write "Murderhobo" in my slides, transliterate it into Hebrew, or find a good translation.

Concepts like "orcs are evil," combined with setting details like "only half-orcs are in towns, never orcs" signals the game's implicit expectation that we'll do this kind of code-switching.

Now, what happens if we fail to pick up on the code-switching cues?

And additionaly, the fact that the system differentiates between combat mechanics (which come with explicit rewards regardless of justification) and non-combat mechanics also encourages this code-switching.

Right!

But now I'm going to step into video games for a moment to explore that concept further.

With character advancement - a numerical progression that strongly hints that this is the right thing to happen - is closely tied with those explicit rewards.

When I play Thief: Deadly Shadows, I can rob passersby, shank the cops, and then hide in a bush until the heat dies down.

But even if I rob a shop blind and leave its proprietor a smouldering pile of ash, I'm not gonna get anything he had to sell.

The instant I step into a shop with actual items to buy, the game switches interfaces to an enforced nonviolent interaction.

In "unimportant" shops, however, my interface options are all violent ones.

There's enforced code-switching to signal different kinds of interaction and to prevent me from taking inappropriate actions.

D&D doesn't have this.

A shop can be patronised or fireballed.

or both in that order

Pillage, then burn.

The freedom of action that RPGs espouse effectively relegates this code-switching to an implicit, and often unnoticed, recommendation.

Right

This fact, that the implicit push is often more quietly effective than an explicit enforcement is, I think, the reason for the rancor that arises from murderhobo discussions, like the (in)famous meta-post I linked to earlier, or my personal experience of people getting defensive and saying "you don't have to play that way"

Now I'm gonna switch gears kinda dramatically, but it'll come back together.

A lot of stories are badly written.

Go for it. I'm taking notes.

Specifically, they rely on the protagonist being really stupid.

(Managed to defeat the child in a battle of wits and get her to resume napping. Hurrah!)

As much as the Evil Overlord List has traction, we've got a lot of understandable frustration with the heroes who act like total dunderheads and let awful things continue to happen for two more acts of the film/twenty more chapters of the novel/seven more novels in the series when they could've solved everything so much more easily if they'd had two braincells to rub together.

Example: why didn't Gandalf ask the eagles to help earlier?

There are explanations, but the question will always remain.

yeah

when the explanation is "the Author/writers just wanted it to happen that way" it is a bad sign

So when we get a chance to be the heroes, we're eager to "do it right."

That means... well, it means becoming the villain because the most efficient way to stop people from doing things you don't want them to do is to kill them or rule them.

Something like this?

@lisardggY I have that on a t-shirt.

@lisardggY Yeah. Sure, you don't have to. But you are directly rewarded for killing stuff. The more you kill, the more rewards you get, and it's difficult (even impossible) to get the same rewards without killing. It's something the game expects you to do a lot of, and, as previously noted, the game can't or doesn't stop you from doing it in situations where it might expect you to not kill. It doesn't reinforce that.

@Pixie Exactly. The fact that it doesn't force you to be a murderhobo, but instead takes a step back, gives you complete freedom, but rewards you for it is the insidious bit.

Then, systems may empower PCs above a majority of NPCs. This may be especially true with NPCs they're not "supposed" to kill, due to the expected code-switching, which actually equals out to low risk involved when killing them, hence faster rewards.

So it makes sense that the best game I've ever played, in terms of actively supporting the murderhobo paradigm instead of backing into it, has you play Orks.

@Pixie Until you discover a nice joke of the Morrowind team who "forgot" the essential flag on an npc. But trust us, it was a bug, really, just a bug...

And that so many games, satire or otherwise, are simply structured as "all the violence you wanted to do in D&D, but this time you're bad so it's okay."

Kill Puppies for Satan, Kobolds Ate My Baby, and so forth.

@BESW I'm not sure I understood your general point. You're saying that "Good is stupid" is a common enough trope that players who seek to win, or at least to optimize their character's successes, are automatically drawn to the evil path that's usually portrayed as more effective?

@lisardggY Yup.

Ok. Interesting. I'll chew on that.

Kill the minor criminal instead of just chiding him, because we know the trope: he'll come back as a major villain later.

@lisardggY Part of this rests in a narrative quirk that I'm trying to remember the name of.

Basically, whoever our protagonist is, we're more inclined to cut him slack when he does bad stuff.

We're sympathetic to his flaws, rather than judgemental.

Since the PC is the ultimate protagonist--he's not simply sympathetic, he's definitionally empathetic--it's easier to slip into the murderhobo paradigm without noticing.

Also, on this same "practicality is evil" line of thought, I'm put in mind of @Shalvenay's challenges with respecting emotional struggles as a valid source of conflict.

@BESW Isn't that actually true because the evil path is portrayed as more effective in first place since most stories or games do not really show all the consequence of the evil actions he may take?

D&D doesn't really support--or even encourage--emotional or moral conflict as a dramatic narrative arc.

@SPArchaeologist That could be argued, but I think it's tangential.

The D&D 3.5 paladin CAN'T take morally dubious actions or he'll lose his ability to participate in the narrative at all.

For others, shifting alignment is often arbitrary.

@SPArchaeologist That's where meta-games/thought experiments like PowerKill come in.

Which I plan on addressing later on in the lecture.

When moral and emotional struggles aren't given mechanical effect except in the most drastic and character-neutering fashions, cutting down an NPC becomes less fraught than chatting with them.

So, code-switching is contraindicated.

Murderhoboism creates a more harmonious ludonarrative with some editions of D&D than the alternatives.

That'd be my central pitch, really.

In 3.5: you try to use diplomacy on an NPC to get something you want. You fail. They won't give it to you. Too bad. You can keep trying, but that's actually probably going to make it worse (the rules state this outright). Or... kill them (or otherwise disable them with violence), take what you want now, and get experience on top of it. Skip town if it's a big deal.

From the alignment system to XP progression to the overemphasis of combat mechanics, murderhoboism is encouraged and rewarded at least as much, if not more so, than most/all other play styles.

Which is similar to saying "D&D encourages murderhoboism", without the censure implied - you're saying "murderhoboism is the more natural form of play for D&D".

Yes.

And then I'd go back to Fury Road.

And I'd ask if, and how, murderhoboism can be made narrative without turning it into a deconstruction or denouncement of the style.

Because D&D encourages non-narrative MH--or at least, it doesn't encourage narrative MH.

I knew I could count on this room for inspiration. Especially when at a decent hour, Guam-time. :)

@BESW Ah, that's a good point to stress. The combat in D&D halts the narrative.

So, if D&D combat halts the narrative, but murderhoboing your way through life is the most ludonarratively harmonious style of D&D...

That implies muderhoboism also murders narrative by smothering it in the crib.

And THAT? That, for me, would be a reason to neg on MH.

I think that D&D4 might be a pretty strong example of this as well. With the abstract model of combat being explicitly divorced from in-setting realism, it's also divorced from narrative choices. The mechanics assume, for instance, that you will have level-appropriate magic items, regardless of whether they make sense in-character.

So how can we challenge that idea? How can we make combat-driven play drive stories in a system where story stops for combat?

This, I have few answers to.

My groups have done it, regularly if not consistently, but I have yet to distill generalisable insights from the experience.

@BESW Roll 3d6 and hope you don't roll any ones. Anybody wants to add some other dice to his pool? ;)

Hmm.

Weren't you talking about Great Ork Gods?

Yes, but the hmm is something else.

If we go back to D&D's roots, we find a fairly simple question: "What if we take these rules for combat between faceless hordes and apply them to individuals?"

I think I just reverse-engineered an answer: your individuals act like faceless hordes.

Yes, I have a bullet point about the wargaming origins influencing these assumptions, but that's mostly of historical interest. It can explain why D&D evolved into a game that focuses on and rewards combat.

I do play in a D&D-ish game where we can't subvert the existing governments, so being evil is still the best way to get what we want... but it usually ends in us getting catched by unstatted NPCs until we're back in line with our treasure.

So... to make an MH game fun, maybe the solution lies in examining what made its predecessors fun? at this point I'm just spitballing, I have no idea where these ideas will take me.

@Zachiel Unstatted NPCs are a common feature used to discourage murderhoboism, since you can't get away with it.

@lisardggY funnily enough, the first editions rewarded getting treasure instead.

@Zachiel Not instead, in addition to, I think.

From where does the fun derive in wargames?

From winning.

A thing that, in D&D, is given for granted or "not the aim of the game"

Having never played, I don't know personally, but I'm guessing: miniature/prop design; tactical problem-solving within a confined set of procedures and options; competition between friends.

@Zachiel Not necessarily. Going back to my other lecture, this is "Fiero", the sense of accomplishment after surmounting a challenge.

@BESW Kinesis, Ludus and Agon, to use the terms. (I've been going over them a lot these last few days)

Welp, D&D expects us to keep the competition between friends to a minimum, so that's out. Not even MH embraces PvP as a common play choice.

Ludus in D&D is a combat and trap-avoidance thing.

@lisardggY do we really get Fiero in D&D? Maybe in sandbox games, yeah.

Ludus is charop.

You don't get "confined-set-of-conditions" problem-solving from RPing in a tavern.

@lisardggY Then, I fail at ludos. :(

@lisardggY And charop is almost entirely combat prep.

@BESW Yeah.

Kinesis is... an option for D&D, but not inherent.

@Zachiel It's not a matter of failing. Ludus is a motivation - it's an activity you enjoy, and for which you play.

Success is irrelevant.

@lisardggY What does D&D offer which wargaming doesn't?

Sources of fun != fun

@BESW a tale, and freedom to do things that aren't in the rules.

(a thing 4e usually took away)

@BESW Character-related goals, like catharsis or kairosis. And narrative-related goals, like closure.

@Zachiel 4e is very similar to other editions in the sense that, other than in combat, it still doesn't try to regulate your options.

@lisardggY Okay, so this is bringing us back to the question.

...But wait.

This assumes "story" is a goal for the MH group.

Before I go back to work. I'm now playing a cleric that doesn't really think he's worth being given better spells, yet I keep giving him new cleric levels because I need the spells for his build. friend asked me, shouldn't you portray him as more competent? I can't.

(Because otherwise why aren't they wargaming?)

[head explodes]

(Because wargaming is mass combat and it's entirely different, I'd do 4e wargaming if the ruleset was good at it)

Hmm.

So perhaps murderhoboing's appeal could come from being smaller scale and more personal.

I'd probably feel like my talk was best served just asking questions at the end instead of giving answers, but maybe closing on something about... what @Pixie just said.

brb, child is officially post-nap.

If I'm murderhoboing, maybe I don't want to play my faceless masses against the other faceless masses. Maybe I just want to play my singular, personally identifiable character against faceless masses. This could tie in with @BESW said earlier about getting to be the hero.

@Zachiel I played an oracle with a similar issue. Namely, that his backstory was taht he was a cleric that abandoned his faith, but finds himself given spells and powers that he doesn't understand or control.

@Zachiel It was a matter of choosing the author stance, meaning I make choices for my character that the character wouldn't make, or can't understand. In effect, find a reason as a player/narrator for why his powers are improving without his personal competence actually increasing.

@BESW Would you consider the appeal of MH being similar to the appeal of mainstream shooters in video gaming? I'm pretty convinced the mechanism is similar. Both offer little in terms of story, the mechanics are generally set and non-innovative, various products or editions do not differ much from each other in terms of core gameplay, but they remain extremely popular among a certain demographic.

No.

If so, why not?

For one, murderhoboism is often very inventive/creative.

It's a game of "most reward for least effort."

Or specifically, "most XP and loot for the fewest non-renewable resources expended and the least risk to the PCs."

It's not about racking up kill counts; the "tragedy" of murderhoboes is that the murder is actually tangential to their goals.

If sitting in a sunny field petting rabbits all day was the safest and most efficient way to gain XP and loot and to remove threats, murderhoboes would be bunnypetters.

@eimyr If anything, I would compare it to cRPGs like, say, Might and Magic or Ultima (to name some series I've played extensively), where the characters' official motivations and the thrust of the official narrative don't get in the way of killing monsters and looting chests. They're entirely separate.

It's often about gaming the system: not just the specific RPG system, but overcoming expectations about behaviour to find some "better" course of action. Other times it's about feeling forced into a constantly-escalating cold war with the world.

In the first case, it's what I might phrase "narrative disobedience." I'm not going to have any family or friends because the narrative will just put them in danger to get me to do stuff.

What you just said makes it sound like MMORPG. You have all the tools to wage war, but if bunny petting gives you +1 to ATK, that's what you do.

@eimyr This is the insidiousness @lisardggY was talking about earlier.

Yes, I've read it.

@eimyr MH is, I think, an offshoot of that behavior. When gaining XP/GP/bonuses is seen as a goal entirely separate from character or narrative. In shooters, conversely, usually the violence is in line with the narrative goals. You're a soldier/assassin, so killing is your goal.

Good morning

I thought that you are pondering what is the prime motivator for players who enjoy MH. Do you have any conclusions on that perhaps?

@Aaron Hello!

Mostly we're just spitballing ideas around MH with the primary assumptions that it's a fine and valid playstyle.

@BESW Mm. But petting bunnies doesn't carry a sense of adventure and excitement and heroism. The violence we're accustomed to in our narratives does. I think it's a combination of those factors: killing stuff is not only efficient and rewarded, it makes us feel like we're doing something active and exciting.

My current focus (such as it is, there's not much focus) is in how to take the MH-in-D&D paradigm and make it meet player goals. Which means evaluating player goals in the MH paradigm in the first place.

What we haven't touched on is relation to other media.

@Pixie Right. Which is why I put it in the second of the two modes I was starting to explore.

As in, Die Hard brings in more at the box office than Rabbit: the Pettening

It's not narrative disobedience, it's metanarrative compulsion.

(Response is slow, I'm juggling the room, a stuffed dinosaur and an Oscar the Grouch hand puppet)

I've seen murderhoboing as metanarrative compulsion in my own games: as the GM I don't feel like my players are being challenged, so I increase the stakes. They respond by increasing the aggression of their characters to even the smallest of challenges. And so forth.

@lisardggY Rabbit: The Pettening is White Wolf's newest World of Darkness game. You play a cute, cuddly creature who stimulates positive emotions in its victims and then saps the affection and cheer from them through bodily contact.

@lisardggY Yes. I was actually thinking about this toward the start, then got excited about code-switching.

[rewinds brain]

@BESW It's definitely New World of Darkness line. In OWoD it would be Succubus: the Affliction

Action as narrative vs action as obstacle to narrative.

Allow me to present Fluffy Bunny.

@Pixie Do you keep any rabbits? I have two and they are nothing like this.

In Pathfinder: what happens to a spell which changes the environment (like spike stones, dimensional lock etc.) when the caster of the spell dies? do its effects last or are they dispelled immediately?

The only rabbit I ever had an extended relationship with was named Attilla the Bun. It was a vicious bloodthirsty tyrant.

Oh cool I just got my second gold badge. 10k views on my damage reduction question.

@mawimawi That sounds like an excellent main-site question!

@Aaron Grats!

@BESW This, again, has to be central to any attempts to reconstruct Positive Murderhoboism.

@eimyr No, but I have met them. They are frequently not very happy or cuddly. :P

@BESW I don't want to put it there in the next weeks, since my players stalk me on rpg.stackexchange.com, and I want to surprise them...

@lisardggY Good action stories use combat to further the story (see: Fury Road). Many many bad films fail to do this. If professional filmmakers can't do it reliably, and D&D doesn't give us any tools for it...

@BESW But are there games that do?

@Pixie One of my rabbits (well, they are actually my gfs) HATES ME. With a burning passion. Not that it would ever attack me, but the level of stress goes through the roof as soon as I'm around

I... should probably get myself to bed now that my own probable murderhobo is done enough. This will actually be my first time playing 3.5/PF in a party leaning toward evil rather than good. Even our pirates weren't this bad. We'll see how it goes. [rubs hands together]

@lisardggY Fate with conceding the combat perhaps?

@Pixie G'night, then. Have fun storming the castle.

@Pixie care to share the character design?

@eimyr I'm not sure. Doesn't conceding implicitly acknowledge that conflict is a code-switched activity, and you can switch back to non-conflict mode?

@lisardggY Great Ork Gods creates a rudimentary narrative about the Orks and their relationship with their gods.

never mind my question. found the answer regarding spell duration. obviously here: d20pfsrd.com/magic#TOC-Duration

It's baked unavoidably into every action you roll for.

@lisardggY It does give you combat as an option to push the narrative. You don't have to go back to "negotiating outcome of battle" in non-conflict mode, because the act of conceding did it for you.

@eimyr Sure! But tomorrow. There's a bit more I have to do, and I am rapidly losing consciousness.

@Pixie Please remember to poke me, so that I can find it :) G'Night!

Will do. :3

@lisardggY I think the question being begged is, does murderhoboery need narrative added in?

@BESW I'd rephrase it to say "assuming murderhoboery, can I not give up narrative"

Okay, with that.

What sort of narrative are we talking about?

Given competent murderhoboes it's gonna have to be an internal narrative.

'cause everything else that presents conflict is quickly dead.

@BESW @lisardggY could you please explain why murderhoboing would hinder narrative, when we already know it needs to be adjusted?

@eimyr What's "it" in this sentence?

It = the narrative.

Since we already know we have to adjust the narrative to accomodate for MH, it seems to me that the question is "how" not "is it feasible".

This bit talks about it.

Specifically that D&D has formulated combat as a narrative-halting action.

Story is what happens when you're not killing stuff, so how do we (can we?) create story if all we do is kill?

ok, thanks

I think it's pretty obvious the answer is "we can," but framing it as "can we" is a good rhetorical device.

One possible way, inspired by Fury Road, is to take everything up to 11. Always be in combat of some sort, thus forcing you to find room for character and narrative within combat.

I'm not sure it can work.

Here's the thing: I know it can happen because I ran D&D 4e combat-heavy games where the major character pieces were mid-combat.

I'm just not sure HOW we did it, because my players were awesome.

"Have awesome players" is not a helpful conclusion.

@BESW But were they part of combat, or did Free Actions turn into embedded bits of roleplay?

The tactical choices they made in combat were part of the story: their combat actions emerged from characterisation and narrative context, and the effects of those actions caused changes in characterisation and narrative context.

Not every encounter, to be sure.

But often enough that I know it wasn't just a fluke.

But this is exactly the sort of thing that the game rules don't encourage (or prohibit, of course).

Right.

Some tables will expect a character's tactical choices to reflect his character, but others will expect optimization, and will even frown at a player taking non-optimal choices for narrative reasons.

But eliminating "good" and "bad" tactical choices compromises the ludus.

Exactly.

Which is fine for many groups, but they probably don't have murderhoboism to contend with to begin with.

So, if this were my talk, I'd end with questions.

I'd ask people to see what their groups can discover about this paradigm.

I'll have to put all of that "Reconstructing Murderhoboism" after the Jack Vance section./

I definitely have enough for 90 minutes in all we've talked over today. Especially if I let people weigh in.

There may be games out there which do what you're looking for.

Which is always a risky thing to do, and should be done at the end, and tightly controlled.

I generally avoid such things, so I wouldn't be the one to know 'em.

Likewise.

I've never read Kobolds Ate My Baby or Kill Puppies For Satan.

Where does Paranoia fall in the MH paradigm?

Falls outside of it, I think. There isn't really any intrinsic value for combat/mechanical progression.

At least in the editions I've played.

Hmm.

The standard "let's add RP to combat" strategy is the RP bonus.

Get a mechanical benefit for frivolous narration of the action you'd take anyway, usually.

The most valid criticism of that is that it's not "role-playing," but "narrating."

IE, nothing substantive in the narrative has changed, no choice was made because of motive or personality rather than tactical expedience.

You just talked about it a bit more purple.

But if murderhoboism is about ludus, is about efficiently solving problems, then tempting the players with bonuses for motive-based choices is dishonest to the paradigm.

@BESW Have you considered Resonance mechanics from Mage the Ancension as combat-driven (or actually casting-driven) narrative?

I don't think MH requires efficiency.

Just distraction-free focus.

Given that I don't know Mage mechanics very well, no.

All I remember is rolling great handfuls of dice, getting a truckload of paradox shoved where the sun don't shine, and having it not matter because the GMPC had to sacrifice himself nobly despite everyone else in the party being better able to handle things and not needing anyone to sacrifice themselves at all.

@lisardggY Okay, so... narrative that doesn't distract from focus?

My proposition assumes that magic is used for combat, which is the reality of conflict-heavy Mage games. The mechanics says that your magic is such as your magic is, namely if you act in a certain way (by using magic) such act become more natural to you.

Haruum.

"gaining XP/GP/bonuses is seen as a goal entirely separate from character or narrative"

Is our goal to re-integrate narrative and character into XP/GP/bonus gain without compromising or complicating that gain cycle?

In the long run it is realised by Resonance, which tracks magickal actions that carry a lot of weight (emotional or factual) and predispose a character to continue using his magic in his dominant way. Thus, combat changes the character to reflect his actions.

Pilgrims of the Flying Temple does something similar, albeit more abstractly.

And then there's the boomkin scale.

@BESW The what?

Oh, just brainstorming for existing "action/consequence" mechanics that don't offer value judgements.

In World of Warcraft, the Balance-specialised druid (colloquially "boomkin") has two primary kinds of spells: arcane and nature.

And he has a little gauge on his interface, with a mark that moves left or right each time he casts an arcane or nature spell.

Casting an arcane spell moves it to the (let's say) left, and nature spells move it to the right.

Now, the further it goes to the left, the more bonus damage his nature spells have, and vice versa.

So the Balance druid's tactical choices are centred around this idea that the more you do one thing, the better you are at the other thing, but if you alternate them one-to-one you never get benefit at all.

On the other hand, there's PotFT.

In that one, you draw 3 tokens blindly from a bag of black and white tokens, and you choose one colour to put back.

The number of tokens you keep has an immediate mechanical effect on your character: it actually determines what sort of action you take that turn!

The colour of token doesn't matter until the end of the session, when you change something on your character sheet: what you change is based on whether you've kept more black or more white tokens.

@BESW do the tokens stay out of the bag once drawn?

And at the end of the campaign your dominant colour choice over all the sessions of play determines if your character becomes a monk or settles outside the monastery.

@eimyr The ones you keep, yes.

So it also changes the probability of drawing a certain colour, right?

Yes, but not massively. There's 20 tokens of each colour in the bag and the game ends when one person ends their turn with 7 or more.

You'd need everyone in the game to focus on one colour for the probabilities to get really wonky, and it's partly mitigated by "Oh, I drew two black and one white. I can keep one OR two."

Well, I guess it would indeed be a very tiny difference until the end of the game when only a couple tokens remain

Nevermind, do continue.

No, that's about it.

It's a thing where your tactical choices (how many tokens?) have mechanical/narrative repercussions without any judgement being made on the value or morality of the actions.

It's possible that a similar concept might be useful in Murderhoboery.

Might be. Not to indicate that the morality of actions should be discounted. You fall to the Dark Side by using methods of the Dark Side. Even if you can just skip town to escape murder charges you might still bear some mark of the deed.

But I assume you have discussed that already.

Well, no. Murderhoboism is, on one level, about embracing an aggressive code-switch between "actions taken to advance my character" and "actions taken to advance the story."

[ponder] So. Increasing narrative in MH without weakening the code-switching between character advancement and story advancement.

On the face of it, that means increasing the time spent in non-MH "dialect."

@BESW You've just spent some good amount of time pondering how to enable combat to advance the story, but you also say that it's about embracing the fact that combat does not advance the story? I find it difficult to understand.

@eimyr Two things.

First, D&D combat is at best narrative-neutral, and often stops story cold while it goes on.

Second, this is about code-switching.

The idea that the MH mindset is about divorcing "what I do to level up and get loot" from "what my character does in the story."

D&D enables that code-switching, but it's not just a combat/non-combat thing.

It's like... okay, lets go back to the bunny-petting for an extreme example.

Look, I think I understand both of those concepts.

Okay, then the thing we're struggling with is reconciling them.

I just find it strange that you accept code switching as a way to play, but also ponder on how to make combat (or any other thing from level-up mode) influence the narrative (or any other thing from RP-time mode)

Well, that's the query.

The question is, "Can we have more story in a murderhobo game without making it less murderhobo?"

One possible way to do that is to create a bridge between the murderhobo code and the story code, but it has to be done in a way that doesn't compromise or criticise murderhoboery.

It seems to me that a player given a choice "to kill or not to kill" will first decide which mode to use - and if that decision affects both his level and the story and/or his character non-mechanic aspects, is it still murderhoboing?

This is what I'm fumbling around to try and explore.

I don't have answers here. If you're reading what I'm writing as some sort of manifesto, you're going to be confused.

Back to my pondering. On the face of it, the answer to "more story" is to increase the time spent in non-MH "dialect." But that compromises the ludus.