Lord Byron on Murderhoboes

Blood only serves to wash Ambition's hands!
- Lord Byron, Don Juan











You may be running a campaign in which murderhoboes aren't really a good fit for the kind of game you want to play. How do you discourage that before it becomes a problem?

• Talk to your players and explain what kind of game you're interested in providing. Did you know that most play style dissonance can be solved by just talking to each other like human beings? Crazy!
• It's great when players have ambitions for their characters, but it's easy to make clear in play that random acts of violence are a poor way to fulfill those ambitions. Make sure there are different, and better, approaches within the shared fiction for accomplishing a character's goals. You can also discourage murderhobo-ism by leveraging real consequences for antisocial behavior within the fictive world of the game itself.
• Root the characters in the setting so they are a part of it, instead of being eternal outsiders. This "rooting" could be a "starting town" that you focus on to discourage the violent vagabonds archetype, or you could lean on the characters' backstories (like those generated by 5e D&D's backgrounds) to give them a defined place within the campaign world.
• Give the characters (and players) things to care about. These attachments could be NPCs, organizations, goals, causes, etc. If they feel connected to the setting, or even protective of it, they will be less likely to draw steel as the solution to every problem. Offer a variety of things in the game that a player might take an interest in; take note when a player gets into one of the attachments on offer and make that a more prominent facet of the game.
• Murderlooting at every opportunity doesn't have to provide mechanized benefits. Actions that are rewarded on a mechanical level are incentivized; remove the incentive and you remove the impetus for taking that course of action.

Lord Byron on Servile Reviewers

Rough Johnson, the great moralist,       profess'd,

       Right honestly, 'he liked an honest hater!'-

     The only truth that yet has been confest

       Within these latest thousand years or later.

- Don Juan







If the vast majority of your reviews are "FOUR out of five, nay, FIVE OUT OF FIVE WOULD BUY EVERY DAY," you're not an honest reviewer; you are a fan and I have a lot of troubling taking your "reviews" seriously. No critique? No honesty, either.

Lord Byron on Player Characters

For the man was, we safely may assert,
A thing to wonder at beyond most wondering;
Hero, buffoon, half-demon, and half-dirt,
Praying, instructing, desolating, plundering;
Now Mars, now Momus; and when bent to storm
A fortress, Harlequin in uniform.
- Don Juan







What a strange hybrid is the player character!

For those who like to have a sense of who their character is before play begins—as opposed to letting a character's personality emerge during play—the following list of virtues and vices might be helpful for defining your character's personality. 

Each virtue and vice is arranged in a binary pair that represents a possible tension within the character's psyche; divide 10 “points” between the virtue and vice of each pairing to determine the extent to which the character favors the virtue or the vice. For example, a particularly superstitious character might have: Reason 3/Superstition 7 or a character torn between chastity and lust might have Faithfulness 5/Lasciviousness 5. 

You could even random-roll mechanize this to decide how your character (or an NPC) might react in a situation where you are unsure about what they would do. Alternately, you could use these pairings as the guidelines for handing out inspiration in 5e D&D.

Virtues/Vices:

• Reason/Superstition – does your character confront the supernatural with the light of reason or do they resort to the ancient ways of folk belief?
• Reserve/Passion – does your character exercise control over their emotions or do they give their impassioned impulses free reign?
• Restraint/Excess – when exposed to drink, gambling, and other vices, does your character place limits upon their conduct or do they indulge past the satiation of their urges?
• Faithfulness/Lasciviousness – are your character's romantic entanglements limited to one beloved object of affection or is your character prodigious with their lusts?
• Forgiveness/Vengeance – does your character pass over the many slights offered by the world or do they swear to exact revenge against those who wrong them?
• Authority/Liberty – does your character respect the temporal and religious restrictions imposed by the civilized world or do they value their personal freedom of action above all else?
• Lawfulness/Criminality – does your character follow the laws of the land or are they inextricably pulled toward the underworld?
• Piety/Worldliness – is your character's worldview colored by the hues of spiritual belief or are they instead drawn to the worldly glitter of wealth?
• Valor/Fearfulness – does your character confront the world's darkness with bravery or do they cower in the face of danger?
• Mercy/Cruelty – does your character temper their conduct with mercy for the weak and defeated or do they exult in the agony of others?