Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General What kind of companions would you like to see?

How evil of you

No, you see if it looks like a devil then it is. And devils are evil. I will just spare the world the misery of their existence.

Well, if you're playing an evil character, then why not?

That's like saying that good people should just sit back and tolerate everthing.
Good =/= tolerance, you know.

This is a very dangerous line of thought lol

Truth is dangerous

Who's truth? Your truth? Hitler's truth? Al quiad's truth? Postmodern us university's truth?

There can be only one ultimate truth. IF there are several, then truth by definition doesn't exist, and as a consequence, neither does good or evil. In which case killing everyone you dislike is just as moral as not doing so, and no-one should care about people's moral outrage about someone genociding tieflings

Responding any further will probably force me to digress into politics and history more than I would have liked, so I'll just say that even if there is one truth, your notion of being so sure you know it and willing to kill people for it is stupid and dangerous.
I'll finish with a small quote I think is appropriate:
Four legs good, two legs bad"

The point of this discussion here is that you either accept there is a truth or you don't. If you do, that gives you the possibility of morality, if you don't, nothing matters anyway.
And saying that goodness is equivalent to tolerance is demonstrably false, as such the idea that if you are a good guy you are supposed to just roll with the flow is also wrong.
Evil wins when good men do nothing.

All true. I'm still not sure how you made the leap into "if it has horns I'll cut it down".

Because it's a video game in which devils demons and stuff like that are evil and seek to cause harm. Exceptions may occur, but they are the exception and not the rule, so your prejudices are actually justified. To treat tieflings as if they were just human is actually a problem because they fundamentally are not human the same way elves aren't.
You are basically reducing an entire species to cosmetics.

And you reduce them to evil because of their heritage, even though if we talk about truth a good aligned tiefling is objectively and factually possible as much as an evil human. I guess we are both racist pricks

Cutting down all tieflings on sight sounds very much like the kind of things a racist, narrow-minded, righteous paladin or other noble knight could very much do (though that's certainly not the kind of paladin I intend to play). Of course, it is evil, from our point of view as players. But for a certain type of character, that would be thought of as a very good deed. In fact, I would see this type of slaughter coming from a misguided good character a lot more easily than a murder-loving-muhaha-so-evil character who thinks they can get away with that since nobody will stand for tieflings anyway.

Possibility doesn't translate to actuality. We are talking about a race descended from demons and/or devils, whose favored class was always thief, rogue or warlock and who have an affinity towards fiends.
Just like with the drow it is very fair to say that they are an evil race despite the fact that outliers may exist.
Also prejudice in a world full of species that want to eat your brain or want to sacrifice you to please some tsundere goddess, is perfectly reasonable and justified.
D&D shouldn't have to try to appeal to our modern sensibilities about morality.

Yeah I think we must understand that when we roleplay we are not supposed to have meta-knowledge of the D&D universe and lore.

But even in universe tieflings are not evil by nature... And it's supposed to be common knowledge isn't it? How is it any different from killing everyone in a village of humans that some of them are evil?

Let's be very careful with ascribing in-game behaviour to real-life and vice-versa.

That way madness, unrest and objectional language lies.

Well I disagree that a race descended from a race of evildoers is not evil by nature. That makes perfectly zero sense.
That's like saying there is nothing elfy about half-elves. I mean maybe there really is no difference between humans and halfelves and tieflings other then appearances, but that's actually bad design in my eyes. Tieflings shouldn't just be "humans with horns and tails"

And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?