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My Vampire probably isn't going to rip up his enemies apartment looking to pawn his laptop and guns (which would probably be a terrible idea anyway.) Why is this idea so persistent in a game supposedly about heroes? You don't see the heroes, or even most anti-heroes in other media stripping their fallen foes of all of their possessions to sell.
Why aren't your Vampire character selling his guns? I know I did in Bloodlines RPG.
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Shadowrun is all about killing the other and taking their stuff ... bad guys usually have better stuff than the Pcs.
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Because fantasy RPGs are molded after a period in our history when to the victor went the spoils (money, shizzle, females, sheep).
The concept of private property of dead people/things demanding respect is a concept of ancient Rome, and it didn't make its' way back into the European culture until first French revolution/Napoleon and later German reception of Roman law in XIX century revived several long-dead concepts, including that taking stuff of somebody you just hit on the head is badwrong.
Well generally the idea of grave desecration was removed from Gygax's idea of "good."
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The roots of D&D are in Victorian era thought. I know that sounds weird, but you can even see it in the nonexistent armor types and all that in the original books.
Victorian era archaeology involved traveling to somewhere dangerous nobody really goes, digging around, finding old stuff, getting your low-paid, expendable local hirelings to drag it out, selling the stuff to rich collectors, and retiring a rich hero.
The guy that found Troy actually destroyed most of it on his way down because he expected it to be deeper than it was.
The Victorian era is also the one where the idea of cursed, trapped, haunted tombs and other places began to take root.
Think about it: D&D was originally just that, except the curses and traps were real and the places were full of monsters.
But yeah, respect for the possessions of the dead is kind of a new concept. Just about all the pyramids in Egypt were tomb robbed before the Egyptian Empire fell, which is why it's such a big deal to find one still sealed. In fact, most of the pyramids that still stand were built from rocks taken from older pyramids, because the older dead guys obviously didn't need them anymore.
This was a culture that actually believed the body was important and had to be preserved--they laid out food in tombs so that the spirit of the dead body could eat the spirit of the food--and they still robbed these corpses blind.
The idea of respecting the dead's possessions that we have in modern times, though, isn't actually related to the dead person, it's related to the concept of inheritance. You can't steal from the dead, but you can steal from their closest relative who now owns the dead guy's stuff. That's why most people feel ok looting the corpses of monsters (or savage humanoids like orcs, or creatures from societies that are inherently evil, like drow) because they don't fit into normal society's rules about that sort of thing.
When you loot orc #2, you're not taking money from his son, you're taking money from whatever orc is strong enough to take it and hold it first, which does not feel like a legitimate claim of ownership to us.
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Originally the game assumed that the players would. more often than not, be fighting monsters.
The depiction of orcs as being their own society that favors a warrior culture was originally a subversion-- they started out as bloodthirsty savages with no concept of anything but war. The implication was that any treasure they had, they had stolen from their own kills. You were thus dispensing justice by killing them and re-claiming their plunder.
The ultimate example of this is the dragon-- it lines its roost with mountains of gold and treasure stolen from its victims. The fear of fiery breath and monstrous jaws taking you in the night is why everyone wants the dragon dead, but the promise of first crack at that immense pile of treasure is why YOU want to slay the dragon.
Honestly, Pathfinder is at its core a game about combat, and if your'e not out fighting things, you're not playing Pathfinder. Really it speaks to the character of the average gamer that they're not willing to just go out and fight and kill for the sake of the game-- they have to be bribed into doing it.
It's part of the game balance, and accepted in the game world.
If I'm playing Legend of 5 Rings, my Samurai NEVER will take loot from the dead if its not necessary for the plot. But in a game like L5R, the loot is normally not part of the character advancement. On Pathfinder - D&D the equipment is a vital part of the PC (not that I really like it, but it is).
I think the idea that it is based on some prior period's social mores is a bit of a stretch.
I've been playing the game almost from the very start. In the original campaigns the idea was that goblins, kobolds, trolls, ogres and the other monsters you typically fought were essentially ravenous murdering beasts who had plundered anything they had and that it was best to relieve them of anything since they were presumed to have no moral claim to the stuff they had. Especially weapons and armor.
But it's also based on the idea of foraging mercenaries who claim the "spoils" of combat as legitimate reward for risking their lives.
And on top of that there's the long time generally accepted "salvage rules" which can be decently approximated with "finders, keepers". If you don't know who the item legitimately belongs to, you risked your life to recover it and there's no reasonable way to locate the true owner, then it's yours by right. We actually have laws that put that concept into play in most modern societies.
Now, having said that, the "murder hobos" concept that has become the norm for playing these games has taken those concepts and pushed them to the limit, so far that I've seen players claim the goods of enemies after they've seen exactly who those enemies have plundered themselves.
In a recent campaign my druid led the party through an underground dungeon and after clearing out the dungeon and removing the curse placed on the villagers, discovered a huge room filled with incredible treasures. She decided that the only lawful approach to take with the items was to have the villagers take ownership of it and locate the proper owners. The village mayor appreciated this and gave the party a small reward, but otherwise they "lost" almost an entire village's worth of gold. Frankly my character just couldn't live with having that on her conscience.
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I think the idea that it is based on some prior period's social mores is a bit of a stretch.
I've been playing the game almost from the very start. In the original campaigns the idea was that goblins, kobolds, trolls, ogres and the other monsters you typically fought were essentially ravenous murdering beasts who had plundered anything they had and that it was best to relieve them of anything since they were presumed to have no moral claim to the stuff they had. Especially weapons and armor.
But it's also based on the idea of foraging mercenaries who claim the "spoils" of combat as legitimate reward for risking their lives.
And on top of that there's the long time generally accepted "salvage rules" which can be decently approximated with "finders, keepers". If you don't know who the item legitimately belongs to, you risked your life to recover it and there's no reasonable way to locate the true owner, then it's yours by right. We actually have laws that put that concept into play in most modern societies.
Now, having said that, the "murder hobos" concept that has become the norm for playing these games has taken those concepts and pushed them to the limit, so far that I've seen players claim the goods of enemies after they've seen exactly who those enemies have plundered themselves.
In a recent campaign my druid led the party through an underground dungeon and after clearing out the dungeon and removing the curse placed on the villagers, discovered a huge room filled with incredible treasures. She decided that the only lawful approach to take with the items was to have the villagers take ownership of it and locate the proper owners. The village mayor appreciated this and gave the party a small reward, but otherwise they "lost" almost an entire village's worth of gold. Frankly my character just couldn't live with having that on her conscience.
My Paladin or my NG Life Oracle would do the same.
My Barbarian or Witch? Heeeellllll no!
I think the idea that it is based on some prior period's social mores is a bit of a stretch.
I've been playing the game almost from the very start. In the original campaigns the idea was that goblins, kobolds, trolls, ogres and the other monsters you typically fought were essentially ravenous murdering beasts who had plundered anything they had and that it was best to relieve them of anything since they were presumed to have no moral claim to the stuff they had. Especially weapons and armor.
But it's also based on the idea of foraging mercenaries who claim the "spoils" of combat as legitimate reward for risking their lives.
And on top of that there's the long time generally accepted "salvage rules" which can be decently approximated with "finders, keepers". If you don't know who the item legitimately belongs to, you risked your life to recover it and there's no reasonable way to locate the true owner, then it's yours by right. We actually have laws that put that concept into play in most modern societies.
Now, having said that, the "murder hobos" concept that has become the norm for playing these games has taken those concepts and pushed them to the limit, so far that I've seen players claim the goods of enemies after they've seen exactly who those enemies have plundered themselves.
In a recent campaign my druid led the party through an underground dungeon and after clearing out the dungeon and removing the curse placed on the villagers, discovered a huge room filled with incredible treasures. She decided that the only lawful approach to take with the items was to have the villagers take ownership of it and locate the proper owners. The village mayor appreciated this and gave the party a small reward, but otherwise they "lost" almost an entire village's worth of gold. Frankly my character just couldn't live with having that on her conscience.
My Paladin or my NG Life Oracle would do the same.
My Barbarian or Witch? Heeeellllll no!
Heh, about half of my characters would have done the same, and about half would have assumed the loot was theirs.
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One of the fundamental assumptions that has been with DnD since the beginning is that the heroes break in to these underground vaults, murder the occupants, and take their stuff. People break these assumptions all the time. But the whole practice of stealing from the dead is immensely common. It even spreads outside of DnD/Pathfinder when DnD/Pathfinder players play games that aren't set in a psuedo-medival fantasy world.
Try pointing this out at your pathfinder game and see all the groans when you insist the party not steal from the dead. You don't see it quite as much in other games, like the new and old world of darkness with the possible exception of DnD immigrants or if they are looking for something specific. My Vampire probably isn't going to rip up his enemies apartment looking to pawn his laptop and guns (which would probably be a terrible idea anyway.) Why is this idea so persistent in a game supposedly about heroes? You don't see the heroes, or even most anti-heroes in other media stripping their fallen foes of all of their possessions to sell.
You might want to check out the looting that was done during WWII, on all sides. Uniforms, weapons, money, anything portable was shipped home, or at least carried, eaten or drank. Governments were in on the looting too. The US is still returning art work stolen during WWII. Note that the US did not return the looted rockets and plans and other scientific items.
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I've always wondered why it's ok to loot friendly houses and towns in Final Fantasy games.
Loot off of monsters I get. Loot off of Bad Guys I get (spoils of war). Breaking into a persons house and accidentally killing them while trying to copy/steal a map/ledger/mail and looting them... that's questionable territory. Looting the NPC that the BBEG killed on the docks while surprize attacking you in a busy city, I don't do that usually (when the rogue goes and loots that body after the fight its sometimes jarring).
Honestly, in a world that is so structured around magical swag the way D&D land is it would be a minority that thinks that looting dead bodies is wrong when it's so practical. And you can't expect player characters to much of a stand against it when doing so is not only impractical, but they could very well be putting themselves in a dangerous position. Because their enemies certainly aren't going to leave awesome stuff on the the ground. And you'd be a fool to let your enemies walk into combat with twice as many magical stuff because you were a little squeamish.
If people carried around items that were worth more than fully furnished houses with the regularity that they do in D&D, you can be sure people would be looting corpses with much more regularity. And when something becomes frequent people become desensitized to it. The views would change. If people were more likely to have items as valuable as "masterwork daggers" (never mind +1 do dads). What would you expect them to do? Compare the cost of that dagger to the cost of a heavy warhorse with combat training. That dagger will pay for 2 meals a day at a nice sit down restaurant for months. No not everybody is carrying around stuff like that, but the frequency that they are carrying around stuff like that is much greater.
If you want a setting where people leave the dead alone more often, then you'll have to find a system that doesn't go out of its way to reward you for fiddling with the corpses.
One of the fundamental assumptions that has been with DnD since the beginning is that the heroes break in to these underground vaults, murder the occupants, and take their stuff. People break these assumptions all the time. But the whole practice of stealing from the dead is immensely common. It even spreads outside of DnD/Pathfinder when DnD/Pathfinder players play games that aren't set in a psuedo-medival fantasy world.
Given that most ancient Egyptian tombs were found looted within generations of their being made, I would say this idea has been around for a long, long time.
There is also the point that you have 'right of conquest' from the original concept of chivalry. If you beat somebody in a fair fight, anything they have on them is yours by right.
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Why is this idea so persistent in a game supposedly about heroes?
Because that's how you get all your nice stuff.
/thread
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I find this whole thread funny. If you have watched a family after a grndparent has died, the fighting over money and stuff, then you would know there is no difference between a D&D character and how we as people act today.
One suggestion if you want to discourage looting the dead is to actually give players a source of income. This allows them to continue gaining money for swag and promotes roleplaying, since now the players will put that Profession Skill to use. With Ultimate Campaign coming out with rules for running guilds and stuff, I'd definitely look into that.
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Well this ties into something I posted earlier in another thread. The game wasn't originally about heroes. It was about adventurers out for fortune and glory. While the game had creatures from Lord of the Rings it more closely modeled Conan and other Sword and Sorcery stories. In the Blackmoor and Greyhawk campaigns you weren't heroes trying to save the world, you were exploring the treasure-filled dungeons under an abandoned castle trying to win you're fortune, at least the early part, since after you won you're fortune the game would transition into a different phase, but that's a completely different can of worms. Of course as people started playing it they started to take it in different directions, where some campaigns were more inspired by Lord of the Rings, eventually leading to such developments as Dragonlance and Second Edition, where this was the default. Yet the roots of the game still stuck to a degree.
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ewhm has some very good and historically supportable points. Even today that's how many "advanced" nations deal with maritime rcovery from unknown shipwrecks or finding a chest full of coins.
And even when the wreck is known, such as the Titanic, salvage laws allow for significant profit for the salvagers.
And before we hold Tolkien's "heroes" up as paragons of virtue in this regard, Gandalf and Thorin had no issues taking Glamdring and Orcrist in spite of the fact that the near immortality of elves pretty much guaranteed that there were living heirs to the King of Gondolin and Orcrist's original owner. Yet not only did they make no effort to return them, Elrond essentially blessed their ownership through right of discovery or some similar concept.
All of the hobbits (including Frodo) took ancient daggers from the Barrow Downs, and of course Sting came from the same loot pile as Orcrist and Glamdring and nobody once suggested returning the One Ring to it's clearly known rightful owner...
Part of this is the whole concept of adventuring in mortally dangerous areas where you need all the help you can get. Nobody complains when the hero of an action movie jumps in the nearest car to rush to the location of the ticking nuclear bomb.
To me the real question isn't so much "should heroes loot their dead enemies" as it is "once the heroes get back to civilization, how do they deal with their loot then?"
I've already used the example of my druid handing over a literal room-sized treasure hoard to the Mayor of the local village. I've also had my characters search for any identifying marks on items they recover in the adventure and attempt, within reason, to return them to their owners. In many cases in our games adventurers are required to pay taxes, sometimes up to 1/4 of the value of the looted items.
There actually is some rich role playing fodder here for GMs who care to make use of it. In one campaign I had an amulet recovered in a loot pile belong to the captured, tortured and killed princess of the local kingdom. The amulet itself had little value but the King and Queen valued it highly and rewarded the team handsomely for recovering it and providing news of their daughter's unfortunate demise.
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When you loot orc #2, you're not taking money from his son, you're taking money from whatever orc is strong enough to take it and hold it first, which does not feel like a legitimate claim of ownership to us.
Well, the PC is the guy strong enough to take and hold orc#2's stuff first. So he has a legitimate claim of ownership.
We get almost no loot from dungeons and/or bad guys but in exchange we often get rewards or gifts from grateful people we're helping/saving.
The end result is the same but it leaves the game feeling a deal more 'heroic'.
This isn't a bad idea. My group tends to get a decent amount of loot that way, and then a good chunk of the rest from hoards that had no living claimants.
While I can see "providing restitution to victims from the dragon's hoard" as a worthy cause I also think that the gold will probably do more good equipping the heroes who will go out and defeat the next monster that tries to destroy the town.
I'd find the assumption that people in the past somehow had no conception that it was bad to take dead people's stuff and that we've somehow evolved past that to be insulting if it wasn't so laughable.
Do you really think if one of the early Rockefellers had been buried with millions in gold and jewels thieves wouldn't have been trying to dig it up ever since? Just like thieves dug up the old Pharoah's tombs.
No, if Rockefeller was buried with his stuff, people would totally steal it. I think you misunderstood me.
Because heroes will put it to better use. If there is a mighty adamatine vorpal blade resting in a tomb that can slay the rampaging Jabberwock, you bet that hero is going to take that sword. What does the dead guy need it for?
We quite literally knows what happens after we die in Golarion. You don't get to take material belongings with you. So, do you let Jabberwock murder everyone or do you take the blade.
I'll make it easy for you. You take the blade.
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In Pathfinder/D&D part of the expectations of power levels includes a certain threshold of loot/equipment.
Contrast to Mutants and Masterminds, which is a superhero simulator with a different power level and accumulation expectations. You don't loot the villain when you defeat him, except maybe to put the giant penny in your batcave.
In Pathfinder/D&D part of the expectations of power levels includes a certain threshold of loot/equipment.
Contrast to Mutants and Masterminds, which is a superhero simulator with a different power level and accumulation expectations. You don't loot the villain when you defeat him, except maybe to put the giant penny in your batcave.
Well maybe if superheroes looted the villains more often they wouldn't end up in prison with all their gear in a convenient unlocked store room next to their cell.
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But the whole practice of stealing from the dead is immensely common.
Nonsense! There's no such thing as "stealing from the dead", because the dead can't own things or have possessions!
Or, at least, that's another perfectly valid viewpoint. It happens to be the one I hold in real life. Although, in a world with liches & vampires, I might hold a more nuanced view of who is considered "dead".
So, why did you sayBut yeah, respect for the possessions of the dead is kind of a new concept. Just about all the pyramids in Egypt were tomb robbed before the Egyptian Empire fell,How is "respect for the possessions of the dead" different now, if we'd do the same thing today?
I guess it came out a little jumbled, but the difference is the idea that my stuff belongs to someone else when I die. So, Rockafeller wouldn't have his possessions buried with him, because they'd go to his descendants.
My main points were about the introduction of universal inheritance and property rights and the Victorian mindset D&D was written with.
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This is a fun discussion to grab popcorn and sit watching. The talk back and forth about "what modern people would do", the talk of game mechanics.
A fun read, all in all.
In my mind, taking an enemies things is a game mechanic, pure and simple. D&D/PF is a system built around the concept of "You suck, go learn and get better gear."
Giving a brand new character the best gear ever made will unbalance a game as surely as giving a group who challenges the gods a pile of rusty swords. The +5 Sword of Awesome is only around because the system allows it, and the adventures are "balanced" so the players need it.
If you're running a home game, not a published scenario/module, you can completely play in an L5R style. "The sword you start with will last your characters lifetime."
If you don't want your game, or character, to constantly fall into the Fight -> Loot -> Fight -> Loot spiral then don't. Find a way to break out. "I'm afraid the dead goblins spirit will haunt me." "I won't touch the dead, they are unclean." "Sarenrae provides everything I need."
It's your role-playing game, have fun with it.
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As someone in one of my play groups likes to say "I'm broke,lets go kill something"
I feel like I want to chime in here, but most of what I have to say has already been said. I'm just gonna comment on the one thing I saw that I found most relevant.
*It's not about whether you take the loot, it's about what you do with it.*
Absolutely. Taking the hoard out of the bandit's lair is perfectly reasonable - what're you gonna do, leave it there for the next people to come along? The question is, do you know where it came from? Because that's when you've got a reasonable choice to make. You can return it for a reasonable fee, give it back out of the goodness of your heart, or keep it as your just reward. From here, it's a question of your character's morality. But just leaving the stuff sitting around amongst all the dead bandits? I'm not even sure why that's even a question.
The way I see it, if you decided to kill them in the first place, then these probably aren't people you think the world of. I certainly wouldn't think that stealing their stuff is more objectionable than murdering them, would you? I guess the point, to me at least, is that it matters more what these folks were doing when they were alive. From there you can make your moral stand, one way or another.
Stealing from tombs or graves and the like is a different issue. If you're raiding the ancient sepulcher of a mad tyrant, who once tortured and slaughtered indiscriminately, I'd say thief away. On the other hand, if you're invading the holy crypt of Saint Whats-his-face, I think maybe you're on less stable ground.
I've played many a character who wouldn't be comfortable hanging on to the long-discarded gear of a former great hero, found in the aftermath of a battle with a dragon. Of course, I've also played a few who wouldn't particularly mind stealing the hero blind in person, let alone when somebody else already got around to it. It's all about the people you're pretending to be, and not some inherent goal of the system.
I suppose the only real question I see here is a role-playing one: There's shiny stuff lying about after a battle. Would your character pick it up? If not, that's not a flaw of the system - it's the way the world (ANY world) works. You can use the loot, or leave it there, but then you have to deal with the consequences of not having that magic sword later on.
Does anyone recall Geraldo Rivera trying to find Al Capones Vault and only finding an old coke bottle on live TV? Do you think if they HAD found riches that they were going to return the stuff to the heirs of Al Capone??