Public service announcement for all the funny Game Masters out there: please don’t chide your players for killing the monsters you purposely set out as obstacles on their quest. Seriously, cut it out.
I’m not advocating on behalf of murderhobos here. There are plenty of creatures in your world who aren’t there to be defeated (aka murdered). If an adorable little goblin child approaches the adventuring party and asks them to please help find her beloved toad Gherkynne who escaped while she was trying to get it to wear a dress, and one of your players grins and says, “I attack the goblin with my sword!” you should tell that player to cut it out.
There are three broad categories of creatures that your players will encounter during an adventure:
Monsters intent on murdering the party. Roll for initiative and kill these things!
Beings meant for peaceful interactions. Make friends or disagree, but don’t murder!
Creatures who straddle the line between these first two categories. Tricky!
When I say don’t chide your players for murdering opponents, I’m specifically referring to the first category. I’ve heard this bad GM tactic popping up lately in two of my favorite Pathfinder actual play podcasts: Glass Cannon and Roll For Combat. And I get annoyed when their respective GMs, Troy Lavallee and Stephen Glicker — who are otherwise pretty good at what they do — taunt their players to make them feel bad for earning tactical combat victories against evil monsters.
For example: during the recent Glass Cannon Live! show in Dallas (and I pay $5/month on Patreon to hear these exclusive recordings, so this is not just me punching up at a big visible target), the heroes roll for initiative against a trio of invisible human cultists of Hastur intent on assassinating them. Bad guys! Time to fight back!
In the first round of combat, the heroes hit one of the bad guys — and remember, these are cultists of Hastur, a very evil Cthulhian outer god intent on devouring entire cities — with a bomb and a longsword, killing the cultist. The crowd cheers!
But then GM Troy halts the action to describe a cut scene taking place in the nearby village. A woman in a tenement apartment, imagined into existence by Troy, wonders:
“When is Steve coming home from work? … I’m sure he’ll be back with all that money to feed our four children” … and now those children are fatherless … I hope you feel good about yourselves.
The live audience groans. So, in round two of combat, Troy — who is a good GM but also an unapologetic insult comic and often quite mean — wisely doubles down on his hacky schtick:
Skid, it’s your turn. You’ve killed one guy. Left his family without a head of house. Who would you like to murder now?
Crickets from the audience. And here’s why: these people paid money to watch a live Glass Cannon session for the same reason your friends show up when you invite them over to play a game of Pathfinder. They want to roll dice (vicariously, in the case of the audience members) and feel rewarded when the luck turns in their favor.
And the main time this dice-rolling happens in Pathfinder is during tactical combat, a numbers game — my hero versus your villain — where the mechanics are tilted in the players’ favor. Because winning a game is fun.
I have all kinds of very lovely friends with big hearts and kind souls who enjoy coming over to my house to murder monsters. Or more accurately: to describe how their imagined fantasy avatars murder imaginary monsters.
Actual murder is terrible. There’s always too much of it happening in the real world. Our actual hearts ache. Separately, it’s fun to roll high numbers on a d20 and hit an imaginary bad guy with your imaginary sword until the bad guy is no longer an obstacle on your quest.
There's also, if you’re careful about it, a cool added layer of richness to tabletop roleplaying games like Pathfinder wherein players can explore the world of making hard moral choices in tricky situations.
Perhaps you’re set upon by a pack of hungry tigers who’ve escaped their cages at a big-game menagerie, and the thorny owner of said tigers has already told you not to murder her tigers in the process of advancing your other quest, or else you’ll need to compensate her monetarily.
This scenario actually happened to my barbarian in a game this week, and Pathfinder has a clever mechanic for this: I can attack the tiger with my sword non-lethally, so that instead of killing the beast I just knock it unconscious!
But my non-lethal attacks are less accurate than my lethal attacks would be, and meanwhile the tiger is hangry and has my neck in its jaws and is pinning me to the ground. Should I go easy on the tiger and risk being mauled to death in the meantime? Or should I full-steam murder an animal, plus cost myself some gold pieces later on? Hard choices!
I enjoy these sorts of scenarios, because I get to explore an interesting question: what kind of person is this barbarian who I’ve invented? How will the decision she makes in the heat of mortal combat with a ravenous tiger impact her future choices down the line? How will murdering or not murdering this animal cause her to change as a person?
The writers did a good job in this instance of clarifying that the tiger fight fits squarely into the third category of encounter I describe above: maybe this is a moment where murder is called for, or maybe it’s an opportunity to attempt a more peaceful solution. Tricky!
What’s not interesting is what GM Stephen likes to do to his players in the Roll For Combat play-through of the Extinction Curse Adventure Path. The bad guys in this Adventure Path are an army of xulgaths aka troglodytes who are intent on SPOILER ALERT ending civilization for an entire populated region of the imaginary world of Golarion via magical doomsday device. It’s always something with these bad guys.
To be fair, the evil xulgaths have semi-legitimate gripes with the surface dwellers they’re trying to erase from the map. And, having run this Adventure Path for my friends in our weekly home game, I can say that the Paizo team who developed this adventure puts a lot of work on the GM to clarify to the players when murder is justified and when they ought to instead navigate fun moral choices. I had to do a fair bit of editing and signaling so that my players could enjoy our sessions untainted by too many icky moral decision trees.
Sometimes the kindest thing you can do as a GM is to make your Big Bad Evil Guy unquestionably, irredeemably bad.
In any case, the heroes of Extinction Curse end up fighting evil xulgaths. All the time. That’s the game. And unfortunately, GM Stephen of Roll For Combat frequently deploys the comedic bit I so despise, saying things like:
Oh geez, it looks like you’re murdering these innocent xulgaths who are just trying to live their best lives. Haha, shame on you for doing murder. Haha.
No! Cut it out, Stephen. You’re the one who told your players, “xulgaths with weapons prepare to attack you … roll for combat!” The evil xulgaths are your bad guys. So please stop taunting your players for doing the imaginary murder you invited them to partake in.
The actual world can be a brutal place to navigate on the best of days. In my opinion, playing Pathfinder should be a salve for the rigors of life. We all just want to hang out and eat snacks and roll dice and kill bad guys for a few hours on a weeknight to feel better about being alive.
Is that too much to ask? Adventure!