When did adventurers stop being heroes and good guys and start

>>44999753
Ever since The Hobbit.

>>44999753
>When did adventurers stop being heroes and good guys and start becoming murderhobos and bandits.
When people started thinking of the consequences beyond "Hey, the dragon's dead! Hooray!" Murderhobo became a descriptor for what adventurers already were - people calling them heroes were simply short-sighted.

>>44999753
People stopped wanting to be heroes, and started wanting to be rich and powerful even if it meant fucking over everyone else, because it's a game and there are no tangible consequences to being evil. Basically, neckbeards

>>44999793
Now you're just being silly.

>>44999753

I'm not exactly sure when chronologically, but I believe it came around the same time that the meta-process between the GM and players became more adversarial.

Even in old DnD, no matter how vicious, sadistic, and unfair your referee was, it was extraordinarily rare to reject the fundamental premise of the adventure. You went into the dungeon, died a whole bunch of times, complained about how unfair it was, but you (almost) never broke with the premise of the game itself, you still stuck in the dungeon until you got to the end or you wiped.

Nowadays, and I'm not 100% sure when or where this started, but you see a lot more players attempting to distort or escape the parameters of the adventures itself. When the town mayor asks you to go into the dungeon to defeat the dark evil, you'll get that randumb guy who kills him for no reason and runs off laughing.

Because at least the conventional motive for adventure involves a generally good world, a threat arising to it, and the heroes confronting the threat, rejection of that premise usually involves striking out at the mostly good society, and thus, murderhoboing.

But it started, IMO, by players wanting to demonstrate their power/agency by taking a destructive course for the sake of taking a destructive course in the narrative.

>>44999892
See >>44999773

He's right you know.

>>44999753
Kids these days just don't understand the value of a good Adventure. Honestly, you could even say they think too much. Good and Evil became so skewed that one person in a group will always want to do the polar opposite of what the others want.

'There's a dragon terrorizing the town, let's go kill it,' used to be the way an adventurer thought.

Now you have the jack-hole thinking 'But what if we get on the dragon's good side and have him share stuff with us?', and because rolling is utterly random, there's always the chance that aforementioned jack-hole gets away with his plan by stating 'If you don't let me it's railroading' or 'If you don't let me I'm leaving'.

Ruddu twerps aren't focused on being the good guy any more, they WANT to be the murderhobo/bandit, because that means they don't have to act like good guys, and they can get away with their own magical realms.

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Some time around the 8th century BC.

>>45001304
Odysseus was a pretty cool adventurer though. One of the few to end up not fucked up, as I recall. Just sailed off into the sunset with his wife, and left his son in charge.

>>45001561
He was cool, but he was still something of a murderous scoundrel. The good-guy hero is something of a (relatively) recent thing.

>>45001205
Killing endangered species isn't being the good guy.

>>45001590
Greek myths were cautionary tales

Hercules was a pretty OK guy, except that one time he murdered his family because Hera sent a Berserk rage on him, and he spent the rest of his life questing trying to atone and drinking and whoring to try and make the pain go away.

>>45001590
Odysseus was a huge piece of shit, but that's technically only by modern standards. For the Greeks, he was rad, but the guy cheated on his wife every chance he got, sacrificed his own men to save himself, taunted and tortured his enemies for kicks, and loved murder. He really loved murder. Just about the only nice thing about him was that he genuinely loved his son and his dog

i blame all violent video games

>>45001597
I'm pretty sure the important part isn't "It's a dragon, kill it!" but "Someone is terrorizing the town, kill them!" Which is perhaps a slightly brutal sort of justice, I guess, but it's justice.

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If anything, heroes have become more common. People just look at the past with 20 pairs of rose-tinted glasses.

>>45001683
Why not incapacitate them then send them to a speedy and fair trial?

>>45001670
He cheated on his wife like once, with a goddess.

>>45001205
We have our top cryptroligists working 24/7 to figure out what the fuck you just said.

>>45001838

Two seperate goddesses/supernatural entities, whom he lived with the two of them for 9 of the 10 years he was away. He sires quite a few children while he's at it too.

>>44999753
Honestly? People just became disillusioned over time.

D&D started in the mid-70s. The youngsters playing the game at the time had grown up during the Cold War and the conflict in Vietnam and had a real desire to see good guys triumphing over evil because they weren't seeing that kind of thing in the real world. For almost 10 years the "good guys vs. bad guys" dynamic was unquestioned and unchanging, but something happened in the 80s that broke the spell. TV shows and movies questioned the nature and righteousness of authority in a way the hippies in the 60s could only dream about. Governments around the world (the "good guys") engaged in some seriously heinous acts. The Challenger shuttle exploded. Japan looked like it was going to take over the world even though it had lost World War II.

It slowly became obvious from the real world's parallels that dressing up theft and murder as good deeds was not going to work anymore. By the time the 90s rolled around the anti-hero became massively popular as an honest expression of the desire to do good without being constrained by the implicit rules of society.

>>45001597
How do we know the dragon is endangered?

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>>44999753
wtf did u just say 2 me m8?

lets find out how much xp ur worth

>>45001884
It's implied he didnt really have a choice but to give them the dick because goddesses.

>>45002082
Clearly we need to design an adventure around being agents of the magical EPA, employed by the Arch Druid of the world for the purposes of preventing the destruction of the great deal which is bound to the blood of the sacred races (unicorn, Dragon, ???)and every time one of them is killed the seal keeping the Tarrasque asleep weakens a bit

>>45002123

He certainly seemed to be running the show when it came to Circe.

>>45002077
This, so much this. That's why shit like cyberpunk and edgelords came about; the disillusionment turned people into nihilists and make them go against the machine of society. Then, after school shootings, 9/11, and riots, people became disillusioned by THAT too, leading to morally gray everything where there's no right answer and nothing you do really matters.

>>45002138
>running the show
>circe

You mean the lady who turns his men into pigs and keeps him as a stoned fucktoy until he wakes up and oops its been years? I mean yeah greek androcentrism makes it necessary that Odysseus looks like the alpha dog, but I'm pretty sure circe was pretty explicitly a bad bitch. Remember this was the culture that turned the mythological figure of protection for women and prostitutes into a horrible child eating monster (Medusa)

>>45002247
>implying it ever mattered

>>44999753
The middle ages

>>45002123
>dragon attacks countryside
>king hires adventures to kill the dragon
>they actually do it
>get fined 3000 gd for killing an endangered species

Motherfucker

>>45000404
It's always been that way, though. In fact, the ability to go off the rails and deform the game's premise is one of the things that differentiates what we would call a roleplaying game from the form's predecessors.

http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/104/braunstein-the-roots-of-roleplaying-games/

Dave Arneson, one of the guys who made D&D, was known for that sort of thing, as was Gary Gygax's group, particularly Rob Kuntz. Same with Ed Greenwood's groups.

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>>45002247
>people became disillusioned by THAT too, leading to morally gray everything where there's no right answer and nothing you do really matters.

HAHA TIME FOR DADAISM

There was a picture of Arthur Cravan bareknuckle boxing cthulu through time I wanted to pose but the scans were 4 years old and image shack ate them. That made me sad, because The Traveller was a good comic

>>45002451
Fucking brilliant.

>>45002451
Turns out the adventurers were caught in a sting, now they have to help the EPA bring down a mad wizard taxidermist

>>45002712
>>45002451
Fucking love it.

>>45002700
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgHNtzxO0y8
Here to help!

>>45002743
That glorious black man is an inspiration to us all.

>>45002247
>leading to morally gray everything where there's no right answer and nothing you do really matters.
I blame it all on Game of Thrones.

These days you can be a good guy, but you'll end up a martyr.

>>45002538
>http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/104/braunstein-the-roots-of-roleplaying-games/


That's not quite what I was going for, and I'm sorry for being imprecise in how I expressed myself.

Running off the rails has existed forever. Players smashing your thoughts and expectations of the game is part and parcel of RPGs.

I was really referring to a more antagonistic sort of wandering. It's one thing when you want to play a character who wants X, and when the DM tries to nudge you into doing Y, you run along and try to get X going as hard as you can, maybe even wrecking the game.

There's a different sort of player who notes that the DM is trying to get the group to do Y, and then flat out attempts to do anything but Y solely to be contrary and disruptive. There's no overriding goal, no characterization which would lead him in a different direction, it's either an expression of boredom or spite. It's whatever the equivalent of internet trolling is to gaming, and that seems to be relatively new.

If you got Arneson to actually admit to his motivations (good luck), he could tell you why he, OOC, and his character, IC, are acting the way they do. Go try that with "I pull down my pants and hit the king with my penis" That Guy. There is no reason, other than possibly thinking it's funny in a sophmoric fashion. And murderhoboing, at least the way I've seen it, is an expression of that.

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>>44999753
Modern era?
Since Conan.
Seriously, early DnD has a lot more in common with Howard than Tolkien.
And Conan is, among other things: a thief, a bandit, a pirate, and a gangster.
Conan is not out and out evil. He usually winds up on the side of the angels, but he ain't a nice guy. I think that's a fantasy that appeals to a lot of people (men in particular, but men in general too). It's easier to imagine yourself as being the guy who drinks too much and fucks too much but eventually helps save the day, rather than being Gallahad and being pure and noble 24/7.

And for the record, I LIKE Gallahad. I like to play characters who are saintly to a fault. I just think Conan's a pretty natural place to go too.

>>44999823
I can be a dick in real life, but I can only save a country and be a hero in an rpg
I think people just have their priorities pretty twisted and a very wrong image of themselves IRL

If they murderhobo then you sends some heroes to stop them

>>45003715
Hot damn anon, that link was a nifty bit of information, thanks for sharing Dave Arneson is a badass who all players should look up to.

>>44999753
>muh deconstruction, muh realism

>>44999753
STIMULATION OF BODY-MOVING/LIKE-SENSE SINCE OF ELECTRICITY OF CAUSED OF IN OF BODY SINCE 1. tiny metals in human 2. metals moved since of energies striked/hitting metals 3. energies sent/from machine far of miles.

>>45002123
>the Arch Druid of the world for the purposes of preventing the destruction of the great deal which is bound to the blood of the sacred races (unicorn, Dragon, ???)and every time one of them is killed the seal keeping the Tarrasque asleep weakens a bit
I'm stealing this. I mean, I'm likely never going to DM again, but if I do, I'll have this waiting in the wings.

>>45004351
Grar, meant to say "women too".

>>45004351
This. It's easier to imagine yourself as the 'Man, he's a real jerk but he's there when you need him' guy than a pure supersaint.

That said, people probably don't actually think that about you. They probably think you're just a jerk.

>>44999753
>>44999753
197X

>>44999753
>When did adventurers stop being heroes and good guys and start becoming murderhobos and bandits.
Around lvl 1.

>>44999793
>>44999773
>>45000485

That's not what a murderhobo is. A murderhobo is a character with no actual goals, no ties to anywhere, and no focus other than wandering between clusters of enemies and macguffins. They have no home to go back to and no future or desire other than to just mindlessly chop down the next designated foe with no reason other than it seeming like the thing to do at the time. Their only use for resources are to enable more wandering and killing.
A character without character.

In the Hobbit they have goals and things to go back to. Even in the doofy movie version. They finish the quest and then start doing the things they *really* wanted to do.

It starts the minute the DM decides not to give them a heroic quest to save the princess/kingdom/world but instead just some local monster problems and a dungeon or two. Don't blame the monster you made for its deeds.