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

Ah, but it is a major breeding ground for evil.

Then again, so can very strict law and order. 😮

What is good? Balance? Neutrality? But if neutral is good, then is good bad? 🤕

Good is law and order abided by in conjunction with love, compassion, mercy and forgiveness.

Without law, anything goes, and it is survival of the fittest. Savage brutes can get away with whatever they want without fear, but those who are weaker must fear constantly.

Law provides conditions where things can flow together in unity, harmony and piece, but only if tempered with patience and love.

There are three ways to rule: the head, the heart, and the hand.

The head is smart, but fails to show compassion. It abides by strict law and judgment without caring for the people the law is supposed to serve. Lawful neutral or even lawful evil.

The heart rules with emotions, which are like the wind or the seas. One day, they are calm, and the next turbulent and destructive.

The hand is action and force. Those who rule by the hand rule through coercion and fear.

But if one rules with the head, heart and hand together in balance, they rule wisely, justly, fairly, and with boldness, courage and strength.

Each individual contains within them the balance of forces - Wisdom, Power and Courage. If any should attempt to rule without their heart in balance, then only one fraction of the true force will remain to them - that which dominates their heart the most. Only if one seeks with all three aspects in harmony, and a balance of Power, Wisdom and Courage within themselves, will the Triforce be theirs, and grant them the true force to govern all.


Wait... Wait, sorry, wrong game series. Never mind. Ignore me. ^.^

Law is equally prone to breeding evil, providing systems and hierarchy through which bad actors can veil and shield themselves while abusing their power over others. It's equally as "survival of the fittest", just favouring slightly different attributes.

That is a common misconception. Altruism, empathy, cooperation, all this is not limited to humans and is observed among animals without the need for human laws. That is because "the fittest" doesn't mean the strongest and nature isn't a shooter game.

In a D&D context, chaos isn't inherently more prone to evil than law is. Chaotic good and chaotic evil are both things.

Neutral is never good ...
Neutral is neutral. O_o

Neutral aligment character is able of both good and evil deeds ... but its still neutral.

In the very first iteration of D&D's alignment system, you simply had Law and Chaos; the good guys generally sided with Law and the forces of evil mostly sided with Chaos, but there were exceptions. Shortly thereafter, Good and Evil were added and then I think Neutral/Neutrality was added after that (or it may have been silently assumed in the background...my knowledge on this is fuzzy). If I had to guess, I'd say the then-contemporary shifting cultural norms in the United States contributed to the breaking away from the notion that "Law equals inherently good" (if the Nixon administration's crimes and the revelation of war crimes in Vietnam wouldn't do that, what would?).

That aside, Neutral Good is the best fit for my ideal society.

Lol! I was actually kinda sorta quoting an old Ewoks Saturday morning cartoon, but Zelda works. 😂

I think it went, "When the head and heart work together, the hand is never wrong," Logray to Princess Kneesaa. 🙄. Showing my age and level of dork.

-I find this line of thinking very interesting. What makes people think that animals don't have their own laws that they live by?

There are laws that govern everything that exists. Down to the smallest particle, there are laws that dictate how things behave. If there was no law, we wouldn't be able to exist. Just as one example, what would any of us do without the law of gravity?

We're not just talking human law here. Certainly not. Human law is more often than not quite fallible. But some laws are natural, are they not?

For example, does a person need to be told that lying is wrong? Does a person need to be told that murdering small children is wrong? If a 5-year-old murdered another 5-year-old, would anyone even question whether or not that was good? No. Anyone who would think that a five-year-old killing another 5-year-old is good, we would think that person had something wrong with them. Nobody needs to tell anyone that murdering a 5-year-old is bad. Instinctively, there is a law within our nature that tells us that that scenario is just wrong.

Likewise, animals have their own natural laws. They are not the same as ours. Wolves have no remorse for killing anyone or anything because there is no law within them that says it's wrong. Likewise, it goes against the natural law of a wolf to not travel in a pack. Pack mentality exists because there are natural laws that dictate to wolves how they should behave. Without those laws, we would not see wolves organize into packs.

Therefore, some animals exhibit similar moral laws to humans simply because the laws that they live by by nature dictate to them that that is how they should behave. Unfortunately, humans don't seem to necessarily like to behave by the nature within them that tells them what is good. Because of our pride and selfishness, we tend to create our own laws that we think are superior to good moral laws so that we can elevate ourselves above one another and manipulate and control one another.

This is why humans are the cruelest species on the planet. Many of us ignore what nature would tell us is good. We do what we want, when we want, and where we want, and we don't like other people to tell us what is good or bad. We want to decide that all for ourselves. We want to be our own rulers and not have other people tell us how to live, including the very nature within ourselves. Pride elevates us to a place where we desire to be our own masters instead of letting any laws dictate that for us.

The human race therefore is actually one of the most chaotic races, if not the most chaotic race, in the world. This is why we have so many terrible, brutal Wars. No other race on Earth devastates the world like we do. Could it be because we are so chaotic?

How does this relate to the topic? Moral lines need to be drawn somewhere. My question is, where do we draw the line? When do we step into the realm of something being too messed up? There is a reason why most video games don't have children in it. The reason is that by nature we humans don't typically like to butcher children of any race.

So, has bg3 crossed the line? Should they just remove the ability to kill any children from the game so players don't have to have that moral dilemma? Should they make it so that you can kill all the children? What is too far? What comes after this? Shall we allow players to be able to beat up, abuse, and torture children? I mean, after all, if some smart butt kid taunts my evil drow sorcerer, wouldn't he retaliate by kidnapping them and dragging them into some sort of dark place and then torturing and killing them? If I'm playing my role correctly, wouldn't that be what he would do? Is that really something they should build into the game just because my evil drow would do that?

You can aswell say that no other race on Earth cultivated so many ecosystems as we did ...
It have something to do with the fact that "humans" are concidered the only (sentient) "race" in the world ...

If you wanted to mean beings ... like including animals ... there is question, they often lack possibilities ...
Can you imagine the havoc that would be on Earth, when there would live 7billion Tigers? Or even 7billion Elephants? Hells, even 7billion Octopuses would probably sooner or later kill everything else in the oceans and then die out for starving.

Sure, humans are capable of immesurable destruction ...
But concidering how many of "us" is there and how fast we (as a species) are reproducing, its a little miracle that this planet isnt completely dead yet ... even tho some claim that we allready passed the point of no return and now its only matter of time. :-/

Lets see:
no
no
yes
dunno, dont care tho
no idea, depends on developers
yes
yes, certainly
yes
yes

See the rule is quite simple ... as long as they give you option, that by deffinition means that you can choose to do that, or choose not do that ... so if you dont want to do anything you just described, simply dont. :P
And you should be fine. :P

Well I'll be, GM4Him, you must be the first genuinely Lawful person I've met.


It's very simple; you say lines need to be drawn – no they don't. There isn't any reason to draw any. There isn't such a thing as "too far", "too messed up" when it comes to fiction.

Murder, rape, torture – all of these are bad because to perform them it's necessary to hurt another person. Describing these things in fiction doesn't inherently hurt anybody. Some people might find some things too distasteful, disgusting, edgy, whatever – that's their prerogative. It's not wrong of them to think that, we can't help our tastes or how we feel, but it has nothing to do with the fiction itself. It's a purely personal, subjective response, and the responsibility to regulate it is on the person themselves. We are responsible for our own media experience, not anybody else. If a piece of fiction doesn't align with a person's tastes to an extreme degree, or touches on a subject that is too sensitive for them, it is their own responsibility to stop consuming that piece of fiction (if they want to).

What that person doesn't get to do is dictate what can and can't be depicted in fiction based on their personal tastes or sensitivities. Someone might find, let's say, any depiction of violence or gore deeply uncomfortable, but I don't, and their feelings on the matter don't hold more weight than mine. Any hypothetical line that can be drawn will by necessity be putting some people's feelings over other people's feelings for no reason other than "but I'M obviously right, MY line is obviously the correct one!". Very self-centered, I think, and unproductive. We've had book burnings, satanic panics, videogame violence hysterias, and more, all due to that line of thinking. Because somebody decided they were going to draw a line for other people. I say, no thank you. The only person allowed to draw a line on a piece of fiction is the author.

As for more options, well, that's up to Larian. In the end, a video game can't accomodate every kind of character players can think up – I often find that none of the options on offer align with what my character would say or how they would react. Larian can only give us a pre-determined number of discrete options, as opposed to tabletop, where the options are only limited by the player's imagination. It has more to do with the limitations of the medium. If Larian ever feel like including an option to kidnap and torture a child for murderhobo reasons, they should be free to do so. Or not to include it, if asked to. They're the ones making the game, after all.

I have no idea what you are trying to say here. If we use the term "natural laws" as in gravity etc., then we are talking about scientific models used to describe the world. It's not the law of gravity that exist in itself, rather this is how we call the model we use to describe what we see in nature. Same goes for the concept of "survival of the fittest"; that term came to be to describe a simple observation: that when you look at evolution of organisms over time, it's the best fit that survive. This doesn't always mean the strongest. Nature isn't some free-for-all battlefield not because of some animal moral laws, but because behaviours like altruism can indeed be more beneficial for the survival of both the individual and the group.

Fly free at last!

Also worth adding, animals are perfectly capable of wrecking their environment if left unchecked.

Herbivores in safe conditions tend to rapidly multiply and decimate plant life, negatively impacting many species beyond themselves. What keeps them in check is carnivores, who thin their numbers down to manageable levels. This is the reason why it's illegal to hunt wolves in most US states, for example, as deer are prone to this kind of damaging overpopulation, and wolves have already been hunted down to dangerous levels in the past.

Another example is rabbits in Australia. Rabbits were first brought to Australia in the 19th century, and ever since then have been a persistent problem for the entire continent. Because they are adaptable and aren't a natural part of the Australian ecosystem, they quickly grew in numbers, which resulted in overgrazing, damage to crops and soil as well as upwards of 300 indigenous species of plants and animals. Rabbits are, I believe, the most dangerous invasive species in Australia to this day. You might say this is the humans' fault, seeing as we were the ones who introduced rabbits to Australia in the first place, and that isn't wrong, but it goes to show what kind of damage animals are capable of when unrestrained by their natural habitat.

And humans are unrestrained in much the same way.

Nature, at the end of the day, isn't a sapient being. It's not a person, it doesn't "tell" or "dictate" anything. Nature is the collective of everything not created by human hands, and it came to be the way it is through millions of years of rolling the dice on every living thing on the planet, not any kind of thought or reason or goal. To ascribe abstract human concepts to it, such as laws and morality, is a spiritual belief. There's nothing wrong with spirituality, but one disadvantage of it is that it might be hard or even impossible to make a point on its basis to people who aren't similarly spiritual.

Fly? Lol. Float and be tossed about by the wind is more like it. 😁

Honestly, it's all about definitions. What does Law mean? A line of computer code is a Law the computer must obey unless it is given a tag to tell the computer to only remember it but don't execute it.

So, even computers obey laws. Laws dictate what the computer can do and how it behaves. No video games would even exist without said laws. Likewise, our universe is similar. It would not even exist as we know it without laws to govern it.

That said, I am a firm believer in law - but that law should serve not rule coldly and blindly over everyone and everything.

So, in a way, I am Chaotic Good. In fact, most "good" characters I create, and my players create, are Chaotic Good. Why? Because Lawful Good, which is supposed to be the epitome of good, or something, tends to create characters who believe the law should rule over people as opposed to the law serving the people.

A Chaotic Good character tends to live in accordance with what's right in spite of whether the law says it's right or not. Thus, they live in more of a way where the law is good, but only if the law is serving the people. When the law becomes abusive, Chaotic Good goes against it because what is more important is the well-being of people.

An example is that the law demands taxes from everyone. It sets a "supposedly" fair taxation amount for everyone. The law demands that everyone pay their fair share of taxes. Lana, the tiefling barmaid, has suffered a tremendous loss. Someone robbed her, and she can't pay her taxes.

The law would demand punishment because she can't pay. It coldly demands recompense. This is the law ruling over people.

Law serving people is when the tax collector comes along and sees she can't pay and discovers that it is true that she's been robbed and that's the reason for it. She didn't squander her money. She was a victim. So, tax collector gets permission from higher up to waive her taxes to try to help her. In fact, tax collector gets permission to dip into emergency funds to help get her back on her feet. That is the law serving people.

But when the law has no such ability to serve the people, the law is not good. Like in the Robin Hood scenario. Therefore, the law creates issues where people must breach it just to survive. Thus, the law is actually evil and people can't live under the burden of it, because there is no provision for which the law can serve. It only dictates and rules.

Animals don't have, if you notice, evil laws. They simply abide by the laws that nature has provided them. We humans are the only ones who develop evil laws. Even wolves, who attack and eat other animals, are not being evil. They're simply fighting to survive. It is nothing personal. They aren't attacking deer or whatever out of spite or envy. They aren't enslaving people so they can build grand monuments to honor themselves. They kill out of necessity.

This is why I said that I don't actually have an issue with killing the goblin kids, but I do with killing the tiefling kids. Killing the goblin kids is done out of necessity in order to save Halsin. They are evil, people-eating monsters who are about to eat poor Brian who is cooking on a spit. On the other hand, killing the tiefling children is done as an act of pure bloodlust and butchery. The kids aren't evil. They might be mischievous, but not evil.

So, yes. I have a problem playing an evil character killing a bunch of not-evil tiefling kids. Can I just not play the evil path? Absolutely. I certainly can. But, that's not the point. The point is that Larian is the DM. If they're comfortable with allowing players to kill the tiefling children, then fine. Let players be truly evil and go about butchering children. They're just pixels anyway. Right?

Do I like killing the goblin kids? No, but I can at least understand that if I don't kill them, they're going to summon more goblins to try to kill me. I can also rest in the knowledge that goblins are evil - or at least they used to be based on previous canon, and at the very least this tribe of goblins is butchering and eating people, so these goblin kids are at least evil.

The tieflings, on the other hand, I can understand Larian not wanting to let you kill them. They are NOT butchering people and eating them. They are NOT trying to kill you - except in situations where they get adults to try to kill you, in which case, I agree that in that case Larian needs to provide some alternatives to you getting attacked by the entire tiefling camp and there's nothing you can do about it but reload or kill them all.

Anyway, bottom line is, and my point is, that when you don't draw a line, you start to slide to a very dangerous place bordering on the criminal. Aside from employees at Larian maybe feeling guilty about things they are forced to do because some people might want to be a bit over the line, I have seen how not drawing the line often ends up. Cross the line too many times, and you fall off the edge of a cliff.

Dude. There's a big difference between physical laws like gravity, and man-made socially constructed laws that govern societies. It is the latter that is relevant for D&D alignments.

Lawful Good is NOT the epitome of Good. Good (Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic) is the epitome of Good by definition.

And the alignment you're describing here is actually Lawful Neutral (getting closer to LE honestly), not Lawful Good. LN characters believe in law over all, whereas LG characters believe in the law to an extent, but not necessarily if it causes more harm than good.

Again, what you're describing is closer to NG or even LG (your first sentence vs your last 2 sentences, respectively). CG characters in general don't respect any laws, whether they are abusive or not. They reject being constrained by laws.

Yes, laws can be evil. But, as you actually mentioned in your tax-collector example where he gets a waiver for that lady, taxes can also be good. Theoretically these taxes can be used to build roads and fund education or arts. Laws are not evil or good by themselves, just as Lawful characters are not automatically evil or good. It operates on a case-by-case basis.

Fixed that for you. Animals are neither evil nor good, neither lawful nor chaotic. They act according to their instince. Unless by "laws" you mean "physical laws," but again that's irrelevant to the discussion of D&D Alignment.

Levity now.



Seriousness later.

First of all, natural law is not understood perfectly. Physics is not understood perfectly. Our laws are far from perfect, and we have yet to create a perfect set of laws and a perfect society, so human understanding and implemetation of law is flawed.

Second, you're just plain wrong about animals. There are animals that kill for pleasure. An entire species of animal we commonly refer to as the house cat kills just for fun. Other examples exist in nature, just not on a large scale, but then you really can't say that humans kill for pleasure on a large scale either. The Tsavo lions were belived to have been two such animals, but there are countless examples out there, this is why we kill any animal that kills a human.

Again, it's hypocritical to make a judgement saying that it's okay to kill one set of children, but not another. Once any type of children are killed, that theoretical line you worry so much about crossing has already been crossed. That being said, it doesn't require a video game to get humans to kill human babies. In war, as well as times of peace, babies are always victims. Either directly murdered, or abandoned to die. This a something that happens in real life all over the world, every single day. It may be sanctioned by a government, or encouraged by a local warlord, or just a mother who discards her baby in a dumpster. It may also be a stray bullet that hits a six year old in the streets of Chicago.

Anyway, bottom line is that censorship starts with people who feel a need to draw a line. You want to fix the world, start in the world. No matter whether you succeed in getting a piece of fiction censored to fit with your moral beliefs of not, it will have changed nothing of consequence. Even in the game it will fail to achieve the goal you seek, because children will still be dying on the streets, just not the children you seem to care about. The message will be that you should only kill the ugly children who misbehave, or perhaps it will be interpreted as the uneducated children, or just poor children. Discrimination is one of our most obvious flaws, yet poeple keep doing it.

Dolphins - those fun-loving cetaceans - are known to regularly engage in rape in the wild. The "problem" is something other than homo sapiens; the "problem" is sentience and/or sapience. Folks who place beasts above their fellow human beings baffle me to no end.

Exactly right. That is the entire point. No hurt is being inflicted on an unwilling person in the process of fictional murder, torture, or any other atrocity. That is the important part, the only part that matters.

Your reasons for accepting one set of dead kids but not the other are your own, I don't think anybody is contesting that. A lot of people would even agree – dead kids are a sensitive subject to many, and most people play good characters. Still, as someone who prefers playing evil characters when given the option, I can't help but lament the inconsistency. It's a small moment in the grand scheme of things, but devil is in the details, and I'd rather Larian not half-ass it, even if none of my characters would go murderhobo on the kids.

Larian, as I said, are free to draw the line wherever they want. "It's okay to kill evil and good adults, as well as evil kids, but not good kids" is already more of a zig-zag than a line in my opinion, but it's not even that, is it? Because the tiefling kids are very much mortal during the goblin raid. What is it about the goblin raid that moves the line, and what good is a line if it can be moved at will? Your character can slaughter the entire grove without notifying the goblins, but it's tattling to Minthara that makes them so irredeemable that good kids become okay to kill? It's not even a zig-zag, it's one of those cat's cradle figures. If Larian are drawing the line at good kids, I expect them to apply that standard consistently, and if they aren't, why block the option at all?


It's strange to see this rhetoric when discussing a DnD game. DnD was, after all, once a victim to much the same kind of moral anxiety, when various "concerned parties" thought that rolling dice and pretending to kill monsters would turn people into devil worshippers.

But please, elaborate what it is you have seen, I am curious. This used to be a very politicized topic (it still is, although to a lesser degree), and as such, there have been numerous studies dedicated to it. Numerous studies trying to link violent fiction in general and videogames in particular to criminal behavior, and they never found anything. It seems humans are, fortunately, capable of distinguishing between fiction and reality. So I am curious what convinced you none of that is worth your trust.