In praise of Heroic power-scale play

[Ignimortis]

Funny thing, I think murder-hoboing comes about equally from bith directions. The DM can quash or force it for sure (most systems), but players often seem to go out of their way to avoid anything remotely involving talking to NPCs if it isn't buying gear or "that quest dude in that one town". Yeah, I really had a player say that one time in a sandbox game with very few defined "quest' situations. I couldn't even figure out what he was talking about becaise he couldn't point to a town on a map or name/describe an NPC.

Generally if the game lacks any sort of reputation or social bearing/status rules & effects I find that most non-DM players who are long term mainly 3e & later D&D, will only un-hobo if the DM actively pushes something in the setting that does it. They'll go around killing a dozen major dragons, but only ever talk to NPCs to buy/get more gear & maybe find the next dragon. They pop back into a city they left 6 months and 12 levels ago now decked out in a fortune of magic items, sleep in a cheap inn on the edge of town, buy potions & diamonds & ****, then fade back into the wilderness. It goes down in history as "this year a bunch of dragons on the continent died and all their treasure disappeared" and the PCs are... murder hobos.

Be sure, a lot is with how the DM runs the setting too, but that's leading into some ideas I have for a different thread.

That's an extremely rare experience for me, but I've heard enough reports about it.

However, in my experience, players generally get disinterested in the setting when it does not mesh with their expectations from the game. My first two 5e games back in 2014-2018 were set in a setting loosely based on medieval Europe dynamics, except south was China instead of Africa, and while the DM provided long descriptions of cultures, historical events, slightly grimderp politics, even gave us our small domain in campaign 2, etc - except nobody really cared about that stuff aside from one player. That player took center stage, and everyone else kinda tagged along trying to have fun in their own way. We weren't murderhobos, but we did have an attitude of "that guy in that city" towards things, except we were polite enough to remember the names - in part because 90% of named NPCs ended up on our hit lists for being smug and unpleasant to deal with, and you need to remember what exactly you want to shank a guy for.

I can honestly say that by 2017 onwards I mostly showed up for sessions due to a sense of obligation and unwillingness to inconvenience the DM (my character technically did have a major part in the story, but I didn't really feel able to interact with it).

The next setting the very same DM made in late 2018 was noticeably more fantastical, and by that time he was less annoyed by requests for stuff that would be derided by him as "anime BS" back in 2015. So it garnered a much warmer reception from most players (funnily enough, the player who used to be center stage left soon after the switch), and has been a mainstay ever since.

During the same time (2015-2018) I was also in a long-running VtM game with a different GM, and let's just say that the D&D DM scarcely believed me to be capable of initiative I've showed in VtM by my own description, but it was later confirmed to him by the VtM GM that I wasn't exaggerating.