Steve Jackson Games - Site Navigation
Home General Info Follow Us Search Illuminator Store Forums What's New Other Games Ogre GURPS Munchkin Our Games: Home

Go Back   Steve Jackson Games Forums > Roleplaying > Roleplaying in General

Reply
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
Old 02-07-2020, 09:57 PM   #1
Donny Brook
 
Donny Brook's Avatar
 
Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: Snoopy's basement
Default Murderiest Hobo?

Okay, so not all PCs are murder hoboes, but nevertheless, what is the highest body-count for any character you've played? What system, and what's their story?

Last edited by Donny Brook; 02-07-2020 at 10:24 PM.
Donny Brook is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-07-2020, 10:13 PM   #2
woodchuck
 
Join Date: Dec 2007
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

We nuked a city a 500k or so it was a long time ago so I don't really remember the body count, don't give your PCs nukes they'll use them.
__________________
Sapor similis pullo.
woodchuck is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-07-2020, 10:36 PM   #3
Agemegos
 
Agemegos's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Donny Brook View Post
Okay, so not all PCs are murder hoboes, but nevertheless, what is the highest body-count for any character you've played? What system, and what's their story?
Traveller, 1981. So long ago that we thought Traveller was a general-purpose SF RPG. I can't remember any of our characters' names, but they were all ex general or flag rank officers, correspondingly high-ranked ex-merchants etc. We had a ship and were commissioned privateers in one of the Man-Kzin wars (third, I think).

We nuked the Kzin homeworld with cobalt bombs.
__________________

Decay is inherent in all composite things.
Nod head. Get treat.

Last edited by Agemegos; 02-08-2020 at 04:13 AM.
Agemegos is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-07-2020, 11:28 PM   #4
Mark Skarr
Forum Pervert
(If you have to ask . . .)
 
Mark Skarr's Avatar
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Somewhere high up.
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

Had a character who once, in a moment of extreme rage, genocided an entire star-faring civilization with out-of-control psionic powers. Not their, uh, best day.
Mark Skarr is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-08-2020, 05:18 AM   #5
Icelander
 
Icelander's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

Y'all are bad.

The only time one of my characters has nuked* something from orbit, it was dark and creepy woods, and only because the GM had made it clear that none of the local people lived near it or even went there, because of all the fearsome werewolves.

I think the GM legitimately thought we'd react to this information by setting off on a fantasy-style overland quest into the Werewolf Woods, forgetting that we'd arrived in a fully armed spaceship. Granted, the dimension-travelling spaceship was controlled by NPCs, but one mutiny later, that little detail didn't stand in our way anymore.

So, I suppose that was a genocide. Of werewolves. Who ate people, which my character considered rude of them, as he was people and so were his friends. Tolerance for other cultures is easier if they don't consider you prey.

Strangely enough, I think that the murder-hoboest PC in one of my campaigns might have been a AD&D Cleric in a Forgotten Realms campaign, a priest of Lathander, the local god of the dawn, hope and renewal. It was a long-running campaign and the magic-using characters had started playing with epic magic from the Player's Option: Spells and Powers supplement for AD&D 2e. That escalated at a reasonable pace.

Randall of Lathander never had much tolerance for Evil and the other players joked that he was 'Most Likely to Lead a Heresy', that of Lathander the Cruel, representing the sun that burns away sins. Eventually, smiting evildoers one by one stopped being enough and Randall started wondering why everyone was so willing to put up with the wicked Red Wizards of Thay ruling a whole realm, spreading their evil ways all around. So... he decided to craft a mighty magic that would drown the land of Thay in a tsunami. Well, at least the coastal parts, where the rich port cities were.

Unfortunately for Randall, he never did manage to amass enough relics and esoteric components to enact his ritual, so the Red Wizards contined their wicked, cruel, predatory, slave-owning ways, but on the other hand, millions of slaves and ordinary Thayans weren't killed in a magical catastrophe that would have accompanied the emergence of Lathander the Cruel.

*Technically, I may only have destroyed the woods with orbital bombardment with energy weapons. I don't think the GM went into detail about the armament.
__________________
Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!
Icelander is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-08-2020, 07:29 AM   #6
Celjabba
 
Join Date: Sep 2006
Location: Luxembourg
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

A star war game (D6 system) with a planet destroyed by sabotaging an imperial superweapon in construction ... to prevent said superweapon being deployed. Billions death. My character (failed Jedi) did not survive the blast. (by choice)

Or, depending on how you define body-count, a few entire realities being retconned by time-travel or reality alteration (Playing a Mega in the French game Mega and also once as a Science officer in Star Trek (LUG)).
Celjabba is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-08-2020, 10:13 AM   #7
Agemegos
 
Agemegos's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
Y'all are bad.
Okay. Leaving aside the use of weapons of mass destruction, I think my deadliest character by actual body count was Andrew J. Armstrong, private detective in a pastel-suits and nickelplated-pistols campaign of serial thrillers that I played in in 1987. I retired Armstrong after realising that he had racked up 176 Nazi conspirators, foreign agents, gangsters, sicarios, murderers, and domestic terrorists with his P7 and his Bren Ten.

I was kind of disgusted. But I also found it hard to suspend disbelief in a single person getting away with so many homicides, regardless of how justifiable each of them might have been individually.

I still have Armstrong's character sheet here. His best skill is Search, followed very closely by Charisma, Groundcraft, and Scan. Then Repair, Diagnose, and Pool. His Handguns skill is good, but nothing special, and I evidently never bought it up during the campaign. His mêlée weapons are listed as "tie" and "roll of quarters".

The system was ForeSight, an SF RPG that we used for everything back then.

Edited to add

Now that I think about it a bit more carefully, it's possible that one of my Bushido characters who took part in battles using the battle system might have bagged more heads than that. His On appears to be 699 and his Budo 136; I forget how that worked.
__________________

Decay is inherent in all composite things.
Nod head. Get treat.

Last edited by Agemegos; 02-08-2020 at 10:26 AM.
Agemegos is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-08-2020, 10:59 AM   #8
Anders
 
Anders's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2005
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

I have a friend who sometimes plays murderous psychos, including a short-lived Star Wars campaign where he played a Twilek* who had a penchant for throwing grenades into fast food joints. She had a short but gruesome career.

* he always plays Twileks in Star Wars
__________________
“When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love ...” Marcus Aurelius
Anders is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-08-2020, 12:01 PM   #9
Icelander
 
Icelander's Avatar
 
Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Okay. Leaving aside the use of weapons of mass destruction, I think my deadliest character by actual body count was Andrew J. Armstrong, private detective in a pastel-suits and nickelplated-pistols campaign of serial thrillers that I played in in 1987. I retired Armstrong after realising that he had racked up 176 Nazi conspirators, foreign agents, gangsters, sicarios, murderers, and domestic terrorists with his P7 and his Bren Ten.

I was kind of disgusted. But I also found it hard to suspend disbelief in a single person getting away with so many homicides, regardless of how justifiable each of them might have been individually.

I still have Armstrong's character sheet here. His best skill is Search, followed very closely by Charisma, Groundcraft, and Scan. Then Repair, Diagnose, and Pool. His Handguns skill is good, but nothing special, and I evidently never bought it up during the campaign. His mêlée weapons are listed as "tie" and "roll of quarters".

The system was ForeSight, an SF RPG that we used for everything back then.
You must have kept very careful notes.

I don't even know who killed whom in the last firefight I was in as a player. And that was last week!

All I know is that Scarlet didn't kill anyone and that after it was over, the (first-time) Keeper seemed very perplexed that insteaad of continuing the adventure, my character was trying to keep the sole survivor of the deputies/kidnappers who'd had us in custody alive. So an allied NPC, Jimmy McBride, Scarlet's hoodlum gentleman friend, ended any chance of a romance between them by murdering what the Keeper assured us was 'a nameless NPC of no importance'.

I don't think I could tell you how many people a single one of my PCs has killed. Well, last two have killed zero, on screen, as yet, so that's an easy number to recall, but one of them was a veteran of five tours in Iraq and Afghanistan (where he was a Special Forces Weapon Sergeant who served as a sharpshooter for his team), so may be safely assumed to have some lives on his conscience in the backstory. But while Chase Taylor was aware that he'd killed and saw some faces when he closed his eyes, I doubt very much that he ever kept count of those he shot in the line of duty. Way too mobid.

Edit: Of course, Chase Taylor did end the adventure by killing the main villain. Murdering, even. Taylor still feels guilty over it, but he's designed to be a much nicer person than I. I tend to feel that mind-controlling rapist torturers who take their inspiration from Dr. Mengele need killing.

---

That being said, 176 kills is less than several real soldiers have killed, even without accounting for air strikes or artillery. It may or may not be less than what the worst serial killers in history are by some accounts reputed to have done.

Certainly, prior to modern forensics, an intelligent, capable, sane, functioning person who killed people without any personal connection or apparent motive could get away with quite a lot. Most real murderers are impulsive and are immediately the most obvious suspects, even when they don't confess right off (which many do).

Quote:
Originally Posted by Agemegos View Post
Edited to add

Now that I think about it a bit more carefully, it's possible that one of my Bushido characters who took part in battles using the battle system might have bagged more heads than that. His On appears to be 699 and his Budo 136; I forget how that worked.
When GURPS 4e came out, I was in law school and two of my players were in med school. They lived together and were recently single. So we played a lot.

I don't think either of them had read Fritz Leiber, but they created a very Fafhrd-like and Grey Mouser -esque characters, in that one was a rugged hill folk warrior with a hand-and-a-half sword and the other was a wily rogue from the big city. They were cousins and the Highlander had come to seek his fortune in the city, immediately looking up his long-lost uncle and discovering that while his uncle was dead, he had a cousin who was similarly at loose ends, with more ambition than sense.

Within a few sessions, they burgled a few houses, been caught trying to rob a sleek-looking schooner and had slain a mercenary warrior who caught them. The warrior was part of a tough-looking crew of privateers, who hunted the pirates of the Unfallen Stars (chain of islands with several loosely allied polities of smugglers, pirates and landless men, sort of Cossacks on sea). Our heroes were impressed into the crew to replace him.

For the next year, we played most weekends, with copious drinking involved, and as the tall swordsman and his cunning cousin reaved and roared over the oceans, we took a drink for every pirate they slew. I honestly think that the swordsman* slew hundreds that first year alone.

It's now at least fifteen years since GURPS 4e came out. The campaign is still ongoing and the player of 'Brash' Mickey, our Fafhrd-like swordsman, is still playing the same character, albeit now fantastically rich, a landed knight and soon-to-be-noble-by-marriage. I couldn't even begin to guess how many people, human or otherwise, he has slain over the years. Thousands. So many thousands.

*Whose Weapon Master and higher ST allowed him to hew down men faster than his more selective cousin, who liked to backstab pirate mages, leaders or captains in the chaos of a boarding action.
__________________
Za uspiekh nashevo beznadiozhnovo diela!

Last edited by Icelander; 02-08-2020 at 12:05 PM.
Icelander is offline   Reply With Quote
Old 02-08-2020, 12:12 PM   #10
Agemegos
 
Agemegos's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Oz
Default Re: Murderiest Hobo?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Icelander View Post
You must have kept very careful notes.
I guess so.

Quote:
That being said, 176 kills is less than several real soldiers have killed, even without accounting for air strikes or artillery.
Very true. But "A.J." Armstrong wasn't a soldier in time of war. He was a private detective in the US in 1987.
__________________

Decay is inherent in all composite things.
Nod head. Get treat.
Agemegos is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply

Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Fnords are Off
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -6. The time now is 03:34 AM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.9
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.