Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Killing Goblin Kids ok but not Tieflings

So what's the bottom line?
All orcs/goblins/etc are evil due to the fact that they are created by evil gods, which is why even their half-blood descendants must fight evil within themselves or there are still exceptions indicating that the race is not inherently evil ?

Ah whatever. This whole thread is an exercise in silly. It just proves that Law = Order. Chaos = War and Confusion.

Law = Goblins are bad.
Chaos = You decide if goblins are bad. We won't make a decision.

So, now we have an entire 19 pages in a forum where people are arguing and debating over the morality system in a game. If WotC had set a hard/firm rule, we wouldn't be debating. People could just site the rule and move on. Now, anything goes, so people debate it and argue about it.

Is killing goblin kids bad? Is it good? Is killing the illithid tadpole good or bad? I don't know. Maybe we should just accept our fates and let them take us over to become mind flayer mutant Absolute kids. Don't kill any intellect devourers in the game either. They're babies too. Never mind that they'll eat people brains later and take over their lives and lead their loved ones to share the same fate. Their kids, and they're not inherently evil. They're just trying to live too. See? Omeluum's a mind flayer and he's good. Right? So maybe they're not inherently evil monsters.

Dude! It's like the Aliens movies. They are going to use you bodies to breed and they're going to take over the Multiverse! And guess what. The goblins are part of the crazy scheme. The Absolute is bringing innocent people to Moonrise and turning them all into True Soul mind flayer breeding grounds. That's evil. They're ALL evil. Even Gribbo, who isn't quite as bad, or so it seems, as the others, is still cooking people - innocent people mind you from Waukeen's Rest and I'm sure other places.

It always amazes me how much people hate to call evil what it is. Murdering innocent people is evil. Goblins murder innocent people. They are evil. They eat people. That's evil. They torture people for fun. That's evil. Whole towns burned to the ground, like in Wyll's story. Evil. That's not "We're just misunderstood and don't know any better." It's evil. Ask the victims' families and loved ones.

Ah! What am I saying. IT'S NOT REAL! NONE OF THIS IS REAL! You can't ask loved ones because they don't really exist. Goblins don't exist. Tieflings don't exist. Why are we even having this conversation?

Chaos! Chaos EVERYWHERE! Cats and dogs, living together. MASS HYSTERIA!

Why then continue this thread with similar posts?
Why keep going to this thread?
New posts only draw more attention to him.

"I am Bhaal. I love murder. I call murder good. So, if you don't murder, you are evil. You call me evil. I call you evil. Let's fight. See who wins. All my followers are good if they murder."

Hmmm. Are Bhaal and his followers good or evil?

I say neither. They're just misunderstood. Maybe you can be a good follower of Bhaal. Maybe you could just murder only bad guys. But then... Who is truly bad? What IS good and evil? Is anyone ever REALLY innocent? Hmmm? Maybe I call the tieflings in the Grove evil, like Kagha.

It's all based on your personal perspective. Right?

Until Bhaal cultists come to your door. 👹

Well, comparing the cult of Baal (whose service involves killing someone once a ten days) and goblins is not very reasonable, if only because the formers is a religious organization, and the latter is a race.

Meh. Because I'm up in the middle of the night and bored. Besides, it's insane. The whole thing. Honestly, we're debating about something WotC has washed their hands on, like so many other things. So, what we're left with is a whole lot of"you decide."

So lore canon is out the window as are rules and everything.

If you think killing goblin kids is wrong, whatever. If you think killing tiefling kids is wrong, whatever. It's your choice. Anything goes! Bad isn't bad unless you think it's bad. Same with good. All is relative.

Except it isn't. When true evil knocks on your door and comes for you, I guarantee you'll call it evil then. People are VERY quick to call evil for what it is when it hits them. There's nothing relative about it.

Except that the race is evil, serves evil gods, and as a whole is very much like Bhaal.

I believe that killing children in the BG, regardless of race, provides more opportunities for roleplaying, and also, as we found out after reading 19+ pages of the thread, moral dilemmas.
So, we need chow down on the meaty marrow of evil?

I'm bad at taking my own advice...that is why I went from offering two cents to two grand.

Let's go again, are goblins inherently evil or, as Ragitsu wrote about ondonti, are there exceptions?
Serve is a big word. Throughout their existence in D&D, goblins have been slaves and thugs in the service of a greater evil. Often, due to coercion, as well as cowardice and weakness of the goblins. In fact, even their service to the Absolute is dictated to them by the hobgoblin and the drow above.
By the way, what are the similarities between Baal and goblins? I'm just curious.

I thought all playable races have same (or simmilar) description as Half-Orcs:
"Half-orcs are not evil by nature, but evil does lurk within them, whether they embrace it or rebel against it."

Meaning basicaly that while there is some standard to expect ... you certainly can be an exception. O_o

Actually I just wanted to get GM4Him's opinion on this matter.

(It's actually a romantic comedy, just so you know. It's really good, I highly recommend it; very wholesome and sweet ^.^)

Old D&D rules and lore = Goblins/orcs/hobgoblins/Drow are evil. They are born with evil tendencies inherent in their blood.
New D&D rules and lore = You decide. Chaos rules everything.

Similarities? Bhaal likes murder. Goblins like murder. Bhaal is evil. Goblins are evil. But Bhaal might be good sometimes too. It's all based on your perspective. Maybe he and his followers will murder someone bad. That's good. Likewise, maybe a goblin will be good.

And you think it's a problem?
And what good did Bhaal do?
He is literally the most evil of the entire Dead Three. All of them are evil, but Bhaal manages to be even more so than his fellows. While both Bane and Myrkul's domains can be interpreted positively (The Dead is usually a neutral domain, Myrkul was just being a dick about it, and Bane's domain of tyranny also includes authority and order), Bhaal's domain of murder has no positive connotations.
And again, you are comparing a religious organization to a race. Membership in the cult of Bhaal involves murder. Do goblins need to kill in order to survive?

Yes. Problem.

Old rules and lore = no moral dilemma. Kill monsters because they're monsters. No guilt. Monster = evil. Slaughter them all. Orcs, trolls, goblins, vampires... All bad. No question.

New rules and lore = um...should I kill the illithid tadpole in my head turning me into a vicious, vile murderous monster who wants to enslave everyone? What if I become a good mind flayer like Omeluum and wind up helping people. And what really IS good anyway? I mean, maybe the entire Multiverse would be better off if mind controlled by illithids. After all, no more crime. Right? They'd bring law and order to everything. And are goblins REALLY bad? They just viciously murder and eat whole villages of people, but hey, they're a race that needs to survive too. They're not bad. They just breed like crazy and have to kill and eat everything to survive. So maybe we should just let them be because they they aren't inherently evil. Just misunderstood.

Another problem with the new way of doing things is that nothing is consistent anymore. I played D&D for a long time so I come to the game table thinking they are all evil. No questions asked. New player comes to the table and believes that goblins are just a race who are misunderstood and they are neither good nor evil. So it becomes an issue, we argue back and forth just like in this thread, fighting about whether they are actually good or evil.

And yes. Same.

Child raised by Bhaal cultist. Must murder people to be accepted. Child raised in goblin society. Must murder and eat people to be accepted.

Hmmm. Actually, Bhaal cultists might be less evil. At least they aren't eating people.

Oh, and they might murder evil people, this making the world slightly better. After all, he is God of Murder, so when someone assassinates an evil villain, they are still operating in Bhaal's realm. Good assassins are still murderers, they're just killing bad people.

Well, I wrote about the fact that said orcs/goblins/etc are not inherently evil, that their evil comes from the society where they grew up.
It seemed to me that the RPG genre itself should pose moral dilemmas for the player, which sometimes do not have an unambiguously good or bad solution.
But why bother thinking about anything at all? After all, the enemy is just a stat block marked evil.
In general, I was trying to convey the idea that the problem is not in goblins as a race, but in their society.

@GM4Him, and how new the new lore is?
Because, you know... it was decades ago when those redeemable drow first appeared in official material.
Same for half-orcs, same for kobolds... and one goblin was already mentioned in this thread.

I don't happen to think that killing someone who is good or killing someone who is evil are any less morally fraught for the person doing the killing. Unlike GM4Him, I don't see this question of alignment as an issue of escapism, though what I'm about to say might work towards it. It's more an issue of having a world that can have objective evil, with creatures 'evil' without choosing to be so, and one that makes evil a subjective concept, determinant to a character's experience. Creatures in D&D could be born of evil, and born evil, even if exceptional cases could act against their base nature, a base nature could exist, something that doesn't jibe with how people want to see alignment work, where nothing can be taken away from you through a choice you didn't make.

For instance, if I'm a neutral good peasant who through no fault of my own, trips and falls into a pit of infernal ichor. The changes that occur to my character aren't going to be just cosmetic. I might have grown horns, my skin might have turned red, etc. but more than that, being exposed to the infernal plane will effect me on a metaphysical level as well, my alignment might have changed too. Because alignment isn't just something we choose, though you can endeavor to change it. And just because my example uses the infernal plane, it can happen through any kind of magic, planar, divine, arcane. Creatures created through arcane experimentation (like the owlbear) can be inherently evil. There are still magical items in 5e that change your alignment.

I also don't think that intelligence is some kind of get out-of-jail-free card either, I don't think D&D has to operate on a level where, intelligent rational people are somehow better equipped to choose right from wrong.

For me alignment is most useful in a roleplaying game if it's kept totally hidden from the players. That quote from Mearls about choosing your alignment or letting alignment define you, isn't good roleplaying. Alignment should define NPCs and certain races, on a macro level, and there should be consequences for playing against an inherent alignment, but it doesn't sound like good roleplaying if the concept of alignment is what dictates your characters actions. You should be playing in a world the macro alignments have created. This is one of the cases for having alignment prerequisites when playing certain races, if you can't start out as a good Drow, you'll have to roleplay your way into a new alignment. People who want to play an evil race, should be forced to view the world from an evil perspective, and their transition into a new alignment shouldn't be a given.