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

It doesn't ultimately matter which one of you is good, and which one of you is evil. Both of you have been brought up in a society that has given you beliefs and motivations, which mean that when you see the other, you will most likely try to kill each other. It doesn't matter if those kids are evil or not, you can use any excuse you want to justify killing them, because in the end, you are either here to kill them, or here to join them. This linear video game doesn't allow for many other options, unlike actual tabletop. It's also fine if you don't want to kill the goblin children, plenty of morally questionable people don't want to hurt children, and plenty of good people do hurt children.

I once ended up in quite a bad argument with someone for almost this exact situation, except the goblins were actually trying to kill us at the time, not just tormenting small animals. We ended up negotiating with the goblins after we realised that they weren't doing any raiding or stealing and had in fact tried to trade with the nearby town. There were still plenty of other things to kill besides goblins, and we got to feel good about ourselves for using our brains for once. Did I feel bad about killing some of the goblins, not really, they were also trying to kill me at the time.

I also want to note at this point, that this game is pretty hesitant at handing out alignment penalties so far. I've played a lot of other ttrpg video games that love to slap alignment changes all over you as soon as you make even one morally grey decision, but they generally have an extremely black and white view of morality.

This is why I actually don't like the alignment system, haven't for a long time, and find it overly simplistic and without proper nuance, and I'm glad that it has virtually no effect on your player characters in 5e (unless you go plane hopping, but that's a different matter), and that alignment class locking has stopped being a thing.

And I do think you should be able to kill the tiefling children, just because the game gives you the option to side with Minthara and assault the sanctuary. It seems like an oversight, or an attempt at placating the pearl-clutching brigade to have the kids be invulnerable, while you are slaughtering all the rest of the adults.

Why is no one thinking about the mind player children? Will someone think about the mind flayer children? For the love of God! They're people too!

I love the Alignment system...


...it simplifies matters (a fantastic fit for escapism)...


Nooance. NOO-AHNCE. ALL HAIL NUANCE!

*ahem*

...and there's plenty of nuance, both with and without the presence of an Alignment system. I charge that anyone who has problems with nuance in its presence requires more experience with D&D.




They just need a hand up. If only society would stop beating them down and give them a fair shot.

That looks like the goblin cooking Brian in BG3. Lol. You know, because the goblins are about to eat people, sharing said meal with their children. Brian wouldn't be enough, though, for everyone. I wonder where else they acquired food. Oh, right. Waukeen's Rest. All those innocent people, attacked by who? Oh, right. Goblins and Drow.

So, to recap, the goblins, who are not evil, they're just misunderstood, killed a bunch of innocent people and are cooking and eating them, but they aren't like Bhaal at all and they and their kids aren't evil. They're just a race of flesh eating people who prey on people. We should let them live... And their children. I'm sure they won't do it again if we just give them a second chance. Right? Because, as a race they aren't evil.

Getting back to the topic, the goblins in BG3 are evil. Their kids are evil and everyone in that camp is evil who is on the Absolute's side. Innocent people were murdered by them, and they are being cooked and eaten.

Therefore, killing kids is not fun to me, but if the game lets you kill goblin kids in order to purge the world of evil while being "good", they should let you kill tiefling kids while being evil, OR for those of us who might want to you with the evil path to see what it is like, give us the option to command the goblins to kill the kids for you.

I commend people who reject the tautological justification that enables many real-life sociological ills (i.e., "They're bad because they're bad."); I feel pity for people unable to accept a simple premise in a game of make-believe with genuine monsters.

I have no problem with wiping out the goblin camp. I don't need to believe that they are metaphysically evil to do that. They attacked us, and they are killing and eating people. Its us or them. I would hesitate to kill a helpless goblin child, but the goblin children that we are discussing in this thread are actually aggressors. Although... I think it would be interesting to give an option to knock them out, and then be forced to decide how to deal with them after the entire camp is dead. I doubt you'll find any adoptive parents, and you probably don't want to take them with you... Is killing them in cold blood better than letting them starve? Let the player decide.

In any case, I do agree that the ability to kill should be symmetric. Nobody non-essential to the plot should be invulnerable, and the number of essential people should be kept to a minimum.

By the way, BuckettMonkey, the orcs you mentioned were saved/converted by Eldath (a god of peace). If a race requires divine intervention to be shifted away from evil, I'd say that's a pretty significant indictment of the race as a whole.

I don't think you will win this one, Ragitsu, because WotC has pretty much decided that everyone decides for themselves everything in FR and D&D. No lore is Canon and no rules are set and everyone decides for themselves whether alignment drives the race to be good or evil or whether each person drives the alignment.

Are there even good and evil realms anymore? Are devils even evil? What about hags? Mind Flayers? Intellect devourers?

Again - CATS AND DOGS LIVING TOGETHER - MASS HYSTERIA!

You could look up the answers yourself, and they might surprise you, or you could just continue acting borderline hysterical and condescending in this online thread about make believe people.

This whole discussion has got rather nauseous actually, it's been going around in circles with people getting increasingly hyperbolic about it for a while.

A bit of hyperbole is a merited response given the inane arguments, complaints and insinuations floating about on the internet.

Good thing there's no-one like that in this thread then, huh?

A game like this absolutely does need and benefit from 'simple' evil - things that are directly, unquestionably evil, that don't present any moral grey areas and that people can fight directly and feel good about putting down, etc. No-one has ever denied that the game does need and benefit from that.

There's plenty of those things in the game, and no-one is suggesting there shouldn't be!

Sentient, sapient creatures with the capacity to self direct and who don't have that evil literally baked into their very essence are not that; it's a very simple premise, and it's pitiable that there are people here unable to accept that in this game of make-believe. The good news is, those people can play their own games at their own tables with their own DMs and in their own world space where certain free-willed creatures are 'simple' evil, if that's what they want - it's even encouraged.

There are creatures in the D&D lore that are simply evil; always evil, absolutely evil, unquestionably evil, no grey morality, no doubt, no denial - they're just straight up simple evil and you should feel good about fighting them. That's not changed. These are creatures who are evil to the extent that the very concept of one such creature NOT being evil is, itself, a contradiction and an impossibility. They're so inherently evil that if one of them were to, somehow, not be evil any more, it also wouldn't be the thing that it is any more either, that's how impossible it is for these things to be anything other than absolutely evil. Many of these beings are entirely sentient and sapient and will even try to convince you that they aren't actually all that evil, just for extra fun... they're lying, they're evil, and that's a factual absolute ^.^

Goblins are not those things.

It's a very simple fact to wrap your mind around, so it's mind-boggling that some folks here are still struggling with it.

It should be very patently obvious to anyone with an ounce of sense that goblins are not those things... but if you want them to be in your own game, then you're encouraged to run your game space that way ^.^


This is simply not true, but I'm sure you're going to keep on ignoring that.
There is lore and there is canon; DMs and players are encouraged to rewrite and re-rule it as they see fit at their won tables, if it works for them or makes their game more fun, but that doesn't take away from the fact that there absolutely is a lore base that exists nd a canon that goes along with it.

For example... anything that a video game does or says that contradicts, runs against or otherwise does not agree with material in published source books is, strictly speaking, considered to be Non-Canon - so the 'all Lolth following drow have red eyes' thing is utterly non-canon ^.^ Great to know, huh?


Yes. Factually, canonically, absolutely defined as part of the lore, yes there are. There are even goblins living in some of them, and they are very definitely evil goblins. Fancy that.


Yes. Factually, canonically, absolutely defined as absolutely evil, and physically and meta-physically incapable of being anything other than evil, as has been discussed and described several times at this point ^.^


Yes.


Yes, though with the potential for individual exceptions on an exceptionally rare basis - basically, the elder brains are inherently evil and cannot be otherwise. Individual mind-flayers are under the dominion of elder brains and serve them willingly, and are almost universally evil as well - extremely rare cases of illithids that find themselves broken away from an elder brain's influence (for whatever reason), may, even more occasionally still, find that the ability to decide for themselves for once leads them down a different path. Most - the vast majority - who end up parted from a brain's influence simply want to get back to it.


Yes.


This is all very simple.

Goblins?

Usually. Most of the time, in fact. Inherently? No, not at all.

That said, I agree with others that this conversation is going nowhere at this point. The facts have been laid out and explained, people are free to ignore them if they wish - whatever makes your own game more enjoyable, run with it. Anything else I post here would just be me repeating myself again, so I think I'm going to save my energy at this point ^.^

"Divine intervention"?
The first ondonti were orcs orphans raised by the followers of the Eldath. Subsequently, they embraced pacifist ideals and became a peaceful race.
No divine orders, no divine intervention. Just kind people and orc baby dilemma.
Or is parenting already considered divine intervention?

“Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape?. . .If we value the freedom of mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can!”

- Ursula K. LeGuin

I found two great posts over on the Candlekeep forum ->

http://forum.candlekeep.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=18726&whichpage=2

It's funny that the discussion of divine intervention and the alignment of the race turned into a search for posts in other forums.
Tuigan, Thay, Anauroch and other evil imperialistic human nations do not exist in the Forgotten Realms setting. The Many-Arrows also did not exist in the setting. Understandable.
Seriously?
Maybe it's worth remembering about Corellon?
An infamous petty and emotional god whose spontaneous outbursts took a toll on elves, who cheated Gruumsh and the orcs out of a homeland causing orcs and Gruumsh to become the chaotic evil murderers they are known as today.
By the way, he cursed all the elves who did not side with him during his battle with Lolth, essentially giving her the advantage of embittered and loyal followers. He also refuses to create new elven souls, essentially dooming the race to extinction. Oh, and one more thing, killing orcs is one of Corellon's dogmas. It's about provocation.
In addition, orcs, humans, elves, goblins and others have been killing each other for thousands of years without any provocation, so it's not very smart to single out someone from the general bloodthirsty mass.

In your attempt to portray Orcs as mistreated tusked humans, you've only proven my point: certain Human cultures are unrelentingly martial...but some are fairly noninterventionist (neutral) while others are beacons of justice and progress. In the aggregate, Human cultures across the lands are mixed because humans don't tend towards any particular Alignment/morality/ethos. Orcs are savage by nature; peaceful Orc settlements are the oddities.

It's nice to see that your opinion of ocs as an incorrigibly evil race that only good gods can fix has changed and now you consider orcs to be mere savages.

You keep fighting for Orc rights. I consider this tangent to have been a particularly egregious waste of time.

And you keep arguing with me.
I think you're too preoccupied with an argument with an orc rights advocate.

OK. Now it appears I've gone too far. My apologies to those I have upset or offended. I was trying to make it a bit of a joke because it appeared to be getting too serious, and I think people took it as me being serious and condescending and such.

I was only partially serious during most of my posts. In all seriousness and sincerity, this is really what my points are:

1. In the beginning, all monsters were bad. Period. Goblins, orcs, trolls, undead, etc. Everything was evil except halflings, dwarves, elves, and humans. This was largely due to everything being based off of LOTR. Monsters = bad. That's how it all started, and even drow were bad in the beginning.

2. Over time, it's changed until now, it's all relative. So, I was actually agreeing that it is no longer Monsters = bad. WotC has changed their stance on it all. It's up to the DMs and players to decide what is truly good or bad. In the end, according to WotC, even devils and angels aren't locked in. It's all up to the DM. I'm not ignoring anyone's posts. According to true, canon, lore, devils and demons are bad, but even canon is now subject to change based on whatever the DM and players want. In reality, if you want to make a good devil, that's up to you and the DM. But, then again, that's ALWAYS been true really. WotC is simply stating that it is now true, as if giving people permission to do this. In all honesty and fairness, a DM and players could have always made devils good and angels bad if they really wanted to. Nothing was ever stopping them. Would it be considered canon? No. But it still was true that DMs and players could do whatever they wanted. Shoot! I've been guilty of bending the canon and lore and rules so many times, I can't count them. I've made chromatic dragons who were not evil that the players have encountered, and they became good friends with the characters, helping them to defeat other chromatic dragons. I've made entire stories built around this. Oh! What an exception! How fun!

3. That said, canon has changed many times over time. One of my points was that in the beginning goblins were considered evil - no questions asked and no one ever considered a goblin good or just misunderstood or as a race that was evil only because they were taught to be evil. They were, for all intents and purposes, evil like mind flayers are evil. They simply were evil. Now, goblins are in question. Orcs are in question. Kobolds are in question. Are they truly evil or just raised to be evil? But, where do we draw the line in this? Why are mind flayers considered evil without question, but goblins are not? Slowly but surely we are sliding towards nothing being hardcore evil. Even vampires are no longer necessarily considered evil, or zombies. People are starting to create characters hat are vampires and zombies who aren't necessarily evil. So, pretty soon, if we keep sliding in this direction, we won't have ANY actually evil monsters. It'll all just be a bunch of races that are warring with each other like Star Wars or Star Trek with no actual evil or good. Everything will just be blended together. Why? Because popularity of a particular race causes the lore and canon to slide away from that race being evil and it becoming neutral, like all the other races. Soon, because people might like creating and playing brain-eating Mind Flayers, they might make Mind Flayers no longer lawful evil but maybe neutral or something so that players can feel free to play brain-eating monsters who aren't necessarily bad. When you start to shift your thinking to "nothing is evil as a whole but there are some good and evil mixed in for every race" you start to slide towards this total chaos approach where nothing is set. So the point isn't necessarily about goblins in particular, but I was just making a point that there is a slippery slope that D&D is taking, and that's one of the points Ragitsu was making. First, all was bad. Then orcs were not so bad. Then drow. Then tieflings, so people could play not-evil demons. Then dragonborn, so people can play not-evil dragons. Now it's goblins. Tomorrow, will it be mind flayers? Trolls? What's next that we're going to make not-evil? Shall we make all races not-evil anymore even though they are totally vile and evil just by their very definition? The slide is real. The evidence is there, and Ragitsu pointed it out with his comments about half-orcs, tieflings, dragonborn, etc.

4. Regardless of whether a race defines the alignment or the alignment defines the race - we could argue about that forever - I was actually trying to bring it back on topic. The goblins in BG3 are evil. Their kids are evil. End of story. They're killing and eating innocent people. We can kill the goblin kids and still be good guys because they are evil kids. Do I like killing kids of any kind in any sort of medium? No. Would I feel better if they didn't leave the goblin kids in the game? Yes, actually. I don't like killing them. Period. Can I justify it? Yes. Tieflings? No. I wouldn't want to bring myself to kill them even playing an evil villain character. Should I be able to? I guess. If you as a player don't feel guilty about killing good kids who are just a little naughty, then... well... I guess they should let you. Do I agree with it? No. When playing the evil drow character I created, I was relieved that I didn't have to kill the tiefling kids. I had a hard enough time killing everyone else in the grove and being the evil character. I don't like being evil. I had to go against my grain to play an evil character just so I could see the evil character path content. It wasn't exactly fun for me. But, for those who like such things... well... I'm not sure why you'd like such things, but... I guess... maybe... they should let you??? To me, it's kinda sick that you'd want to, but... well... who am I to say what is good or evil. Right? It's all relative. (Note: I don't really believe that, but I'm going with the mentality of many that good and evil aren't actually solid things we can base our morals off of.)

So, on point of the topic, I think the killing kids part of the game is not fun. It's not ideal. I didn't like killing goblin kids. I justified it because for as long as I've ever played D&D, goblins are evil because their alignment is evil. They were created by an evil deity and they serve their evil deity. They murder people and eat them. Goblin kids will ALWAYS grow up to be evil monsters, according to the original lore of D&D and based on the lore that I've always used. Therefore, they are no different than killing cultists of Bhaal who murder people. Did I like it? No. Would I do it again if I had to in the game without having much of a problem with it? Yes. Why? Because they are evil. I can rest in that knowledge. Take away from me that goblins are all evil, and yes... absolutely... I will have a problem with killing goblin kids. If goblins can be redeemed at all, I have a problem with killing their kids especially. So why am I against making goblins potentially good ever in any regard? Because in my fantasy world of D&D, I don't want to have to question whether I'm being a good guy when I'm killing monsters like goblins. This is not ancient Sparta here where maybe I could convince the children of Sparta to be good and not go around invading and butchering people just because they are a warlike society. This is goblins who are monsters who murder and eat innocent people. Why people want to turn them into potentially not-so-bad is beyond me. Why do you want to turn them into just another race that isn't necessarily evil so that you have to question whether or not you're good if you kill all their women and children?

Am I glad I didn't have to kill the tiefling kids when I played an evil character? Yes! Absolutely. Thank you Larian that I didn't have to kill the tiefling kids as an evil character. Do I really want them to make it so that you can kill tiefling kids as an evil character? Actually, no. I don't. I actually think there's something a bit disturbing about it personally. If there was a movie where kids were being killed on screen and people enjoyed going to watch children being massacred, people would - I would hope - generally think there's something wrong with that. Knowing tieflings are not evil, it is hard enough for me to kill the adults. Killing the kids might actually be too much for me. I don't think I could. In fact, when I played the evil drow that I created just to see what it was like to be on Minthara's good side, I got to the cave where the kids were and was trying desperately to psyche myself up to kill the kids because I thought I was going to have to. I, again, was very glad that I didn't. I REALLY didn't want to kill the tiefling kids. Thank you Larian! I VERY much appreciated it. And that is why, I suspect, that they did it that way; because for people like me, there would be no way we'd ever get to the evil path content.

So, if we're being totally serious here, then I'll tell you my honest opinion. They should remove killing kids from the game because there is nothing enjoyable about killing kids of any race. And frankly, in my honest opinion, no games should ever have an evil path where you are going around butchering innocent people. There's something just a bit disturbing to me about people who enjoy going around killing innocent people, even in a fantasy setting. It's creepy to me that people enjoy it. I don't even like doing it to see what the content is on the evil path. It's hard for me, and I can't honestly understand why it ISN'T hard for others. Over time, I've come to understand this a bit. I've known people who do things like this for fun. In their minds, they do it BECAUSE it's just a dumb game and they don't associate it at all with reality. It's just pixels to them. I have a hard time with that myself, but I understand that it's just me. To them, there's something wrong with me because I take it too serious. I put myself in the character's shoes, and the video game characters are very much living people to me. I have to actually remind myself that they aren't. Thus, I was actually even able to play an evil character in this game only because I had to pull myself out of the game and say to myself over and over again that it's just a dumb game. It's not real. I'm not really killing people.

So there's my TRUE honest opinion on the whole thing. Take it or leave it.