REVIEW: Murderhobos RPG
If you're running a campaign using the Murderhobos rule set then you're probably either looking for something to lighten your usual adventuring or something to better fit the play style of your group. The former seems to be the driving force behind the creation of the rule set.
At only five pages and a character sheet to cover the rules, the classes, the monsters, the progression, and the general lore of the world, Murderhobos: a tabletop RPG of adventurers who kill things and take their stuff keeps it as quick and dirty as the players it pays tribute to. There's no doubt fun to be had in a campaign run with the Murderhobos rule set, but I would have to question the lifespan of such a campaign.
The rules cover your basic classes. You have the Fighter(Brutal Fighter), the Rogue(Sneaky Bastard), The Wizard(Mad Sorcerer), and a Cleric without healing(Unhinged Priest). Each class is given a selection of five daily-use skills which they acquire on leveling up. Everything else is relegated to eight stats. Four offensive: Killing, Avoiding being killed, Knowing shit, and Talking your way out of anything. And four defensive: Magic, Traps, Poisons, and Law.
You may have noticed that there's no mention of hit points. When you get into how a game of Murderhobos is actually going to play out is where the problems start to arise. Hit points are literal in this set of rules. Each day you roll your class die and add your level to determine how many hit points you have for that day. Each time an enemy successfully hits you a hit point is lost(unless something specifies otherwise). Combat works like this for both sides so there is no damage on weapons(unless your game master wants to invent weapons that deal more than one damage on hit) and no stat modifiers for anything but your chance to hit or be hit. Combined with the fact that there are only five abilities per class(most are pretty basic but a few are fun) combat becomes simplified to a staggering degree when you consider that the game is made for parties who just want to kill things.
Murderhobos leans on a couple of other random elements to attempt to keep the game interesting. For each health potion you drink, you have to roll a check to see if something bad happens to you and/or your party. Every time you slay an enemy you must roll to see if your weapon breaks, after which you roll to see how much gold you get(which doubles as experience points). If I were looking for a lighter adventure, I wouldn't want my weapons to break or my healing potions to kill me. These couple rules are a bit mystifying considering the purpose of the rule set.
In presentation Murderhobos is humorous and sounds fun at first, but I feel like it kind of misses the point of being a Murderhobo. It simplifies combat down to nothing but rolls of a D20(with the exception of your daily use skill) and removes the growth in power of skills and equipment you come to expect from leveling up. You won't ever feel more powerful than you do at level one, fights will just become longer. In the end Murderhobos feels more like a jumping off point for a group that wants a more relaxed adventure but isn't sure where to start or a one or two day diversion rather than a game to be played by itself.