Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - General Another survey: Childern killing poll.

This is essentially two questions:

1) Should we be allowed to kill children

I remember in Ultima V - in the Hythloth Dungeon - there was a room full of "children" that were hostile and would attack you. You didn't have to kill them, you could evade them or leave but you could also kill them without any penalty. No explanation was given for this scenario - and Richard Garriott later admitted that he put it in to get players to consider their actions. An employee resigned over it and the scenario was to show up in later editions of the game as well.

Fallout 2, and 3 you could sell children into slavery and kill them with impunity.

I understand it was a different time, but I have always been firmly on the side of an RPG being a sandbox and not a crib - but we do need to make a choice, or at least Larian does. Also it's important to understand that there are ways to discourage certain behaviors without destroying immersion by simply preventing it. So yes, you should be able to attack/kill anyone you want - but obviously if you do attack and kill children there are going to be harsh penalties, not limited to people leaving the party, and open hostility from all "Good/Neutral" aligned groups.

2) Is there a difference between killing Goblin children versus Tiefling children?

At this stage the game seems to think so.

The subtext here seems to be racial genocide is ok. This may be unintentional, but it is also unmistakable. Given that Goblins are "culturally" evil (taught evil) but not "inherently" (like demons/devils) evil - this is somewhat problematic.

Anyway, great question.

Totally agree.

Not my point. My point is that in BG1 and 2, you weren't really supposed to go around killing kids. It was possible, but it wasn't like it was a core element of the game. However, you COULD go around killing kids if you wanted to, adding a level of realism and depth. IF you killed a kid, there was consequences for your actions, as it should be.

In BG3, the third game in the series, why should it suddenly be any different? Suddenly, you have children but you can't harm them at all. No matter how much they do to you, attack you, etc., you can't do anything to harm them.

Look. I'm not an advocate for killing kids. I REALLY don't like the idea at all. The first time I encountered the goblin kids while saving Halsin, I struggled with the idea of having to kill the kids before they alerted the entire camp. However, if you are going to make a game where killing kids is impossible, don't have the kids robbing you, smarting off to you, running off to get an entire grove to attack you as soon as you leave their den, and don't make it so that you as a player can pick up a kid's corpse and throw it at harpies to do damage - then have the kid resurrect instantly because YOU did damage to them. Don't allow goblin kids to be killed but not tiefling kids. Have the kids immediately run away and disappear if you try to attack them and DON'T have them be a real threat to you that you can't do anything about.

I REALLY don't like it that Mol and her gang can EASILY cause the entire grove to turn against you. You make one wrong move with Mol and the next thing you know every freaking tiefling is attacking you. So, in a sense, because you can't kill Mol and her gang, you have to butcher all their parents and everyone in the grove. It's a weird state of things. And if you don't kill the goblin kids, they run and alert everyone in the goblin camp. It's the same basic thing.

So yeah. I don't WANT to go around killing goblin or tiefling kids. However, if they are going to be a potential threat to my party, absolutely they need to not be immortal. Also, if I can use their bloody corpses as missiles in battle, don't make them immortal and able to be resurrected even if I throw them.

Good points well made. Was thinking about this over lunch. If you play this game as a role player rather than a gamer observing what's going on in the world, I think the two are different approaches, the more choices you have, the better. To that end, I agree that there needs to be equality built into the game. If I could faithfully role play a Bargest in BG3, I'd need the option to kill everyone to stay accurate to the lore of that monster. Guessing RPers who play Loth sworn Drow might feel the same... Comes down to how deep you want to go I guess. An "Evil" character might have no qualms about killing youngsters but they might so again, choice is key here.
In my 8 play throughs I have only killed the gobbo kids once partly because the idea is a bit repellent to me and also, I play a surface drow at war with Lolth so I prefer a less lethal approach when possible. Again though, I go to my point about how deep should we think this. Intelligent people always look for option, depth and choice so its natural that they do so when playing an RPG that's meant to provoke those things however, I think we risk losing the fantasy aspect of our hobby if we go too deep all the time.....

+1 for consistency: if the game allows us to kill goblin kids, it should also allow us to kill human or tiefling kids. If we can't kill human kids, we shouldn't be allowed to kill goblin kids.

+1 for people in BG3 having different thoughts on what counts as a monster. Goblins are commonly thought of as monsters in D&D, so it's perfectly reasonable that Halsin is fine killing goblin but not tiefling kids. Others may consider tieflings monsters, and thus would be fine killing tiefling or goblin kids. Having both those views (and more) present in the game, where your party can experience and navigate through those views could add an interesting dimension to BG3's world and roleplaying...if done well.
- E.g., you can kill all kids, but while Kagha is fine with you killing tiefling kids, Halsin disapproves and maybe even goes hostile. And both of them obviously won't tolerate killing of human/elven kids.

I feel strong urge to make sure we are on same page here ...

Purpose of topic is to find out what would YOU preffer ...
Basicaly meaning outside agendas, outside politics, outside world, outside any morality, outside any prejudices ...
I mean if anything of that is important for YOU specificaly and your personal prefferences, its perfectly okey to decide whatever you want for whatever reason you want ... thats the point here.

Just wanted to make sure we understand each other that "realistic expectations" are not the goal here.

Not like it matters, since you allready voted.
Just to be clear.

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It stinks of hypocrisy a bit huh?
We cant raise our hand, while Larian freely kills all childern at once.

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Also i just remembered ...
Ther was one more question i wanted to raise in this topic, but as usualy i forgot. :-/

Is it just me, or do you also sometimes get the expression as if NPC know that they are untouchable?
It shines especialy well with Astarion and Mol ...

When you decide to refuse Astarions apology (yes i know i keep repeating this shit over and over) it seems to me as if that bastard is mocking my character, knowing that there is no way to strike him. :-/
I mean okey, well certainly not okey, but "okey" ... Larian refuses to allow us to attack him right there on the spot (and still allows us to attack and kill Gale before he even say anything, who just stepped out the portal ... i wonder if surprising appearance is outlawed in Belgia ... obviously it is punishable by fate much worse than you deserve for attacking someone, put a knife on their throat, and threaten their life ... man im glad i dont live there but i digress )
Why cant we AT LEAST punch that asshole in his face? Just little friendly broken nose, we will heal just after anyway ... so we are even. :-/

Second situation seems even worse to me ... Mol.
I mean come on ... its a small kid, basicaly defenceless, standing against 4-8 (if you mod) fully equipped and quite pissed adult adventurers, who just massacred bunch of armed goblins twice as big as her sory band of thieves.
I completely undersand that she needs to play tough ... but from her perspective, that child is either best actor Faerun ever had, have, and will have in near future ... or that person who writed her lines forgot that her as a character should not be aware that we actualy have no way to harm her. :-/

The fact that some of you are tormented over the killing of monsters - juvenile or no - to the point where you think the option ought to be outright removed indicates to me how insanely inane society has become. Even escapism has become corrupted by an odious level of political influence.

Some people have deeper convictions that some of us. I agree though, escapism should exactly be that.

Nonsense, escapism has always been policed by society.

Ah, the "x always has been" so-and-so. That old chestnut.

Hard disagree: never before has this "Monsters are analogs for real-world ethnic minorities." sentiment been quite so strong and quite so vociferously policed (particularly by people who aren't even engaged in the hobby). Never before have people spent untold numbers of hours trying to justify why a monster is a monster instead of just getting on with the game.

Ah yes, the "never before in the history of man have this many hours been spent on trying to justify why a monster in a video game is a monster instead of just getting on with the game" line. That old chestnut. Well, you've got me there, they weren't discussing this EXACT topic a 100 years ago that's for sure.

Right. ROTK was PG-13 with decapitated heads and ghosts with eyeballs hanging out of their faces. Not exactly kid friendly material. BG3 is Mature which is the equivalent of rated R.
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Context matters though. Fantasy violence against straight up evil, fantasy monsters with barely visible black blood will be treated differently then realistic potrayal of human getting murdered, especially by a protagonist. The same logic is most likely apploed in BG3 to goblin children, though to my taste Goblins in BG3 are far too sentient to count as monsters.

From what I can find at least in USA the danger could be that the game would get AO rating, which is higher then M. Description wise, it really doesn't make much sense to me: M is rated as 17+ and AO as 18+ - so theoretically barely a difference. However, that must quite not be so, as even Rockstar avoided getting AO slapped on its GTA release - a studio and series that thrives on controversy and "mature content". Curiously I hear there are no children in GTA either. If Rockstar isn't willing to cross that line, then I am not surprised Larian doesn't either. I don't think that it is a limitation that will be dicovered by too many players, and might save up Larian headache in a long run.

Yeah, not a parent but agree. Game makes me cringe at times.

It is a matter of degrees; you can find examples of most anything if you go back in time, but...to imply that the discourse (on this particular topic) then was equally as widespread and/or fervent as it is now is mildly ignorant at best and blatantly disingenuous at worst.

It’s fine if you don’t want ethics to be part of your gaming experience, and prefer to take at face value “monsters = okay to kill”. But some of us actually enjoy thinking about things differently and asking what makes a monster, and what about them makes it okay, or not, to kill them. A kind of “escapism” that asked me to turn off that part of my brain and to roleplay characters that didn’t question the moral landscape of the world they inhabit would just be shallow and boring to me. I’m glad there’s room for both approaches.

But I’ve not seen anyone here arguing that the option to kill juvenile monsters should be removed because they are “tormented” by it. The arguments seem to be mainly based on consistency with treatment of tieflings - though possibly you’d argue there wasn’t a moral equivalence so consistency isn’t required - and/or a purely pragmatic case that ability to kill kids would attract the kind of controversy that could hurt the game and given kid-killing isn’t something they’d want to do anyway, they’d rather avoid that and have Larian focus on other things.

Back in the day, we referred to that sort of implication as a "false dichotomy". A campaign where the player characters try to steer away the bandits - in this instance, soldiers without a kingdom who have resorted to robbery as a means of survival - from their activities (as opposed to slaughtering them wholesale) and kill orcs/hobgoblins/goblins/bugbears/et cetera by the score without a second thought is entirely possible.

Okay, fair enough. It’s fine if you don’t want *that particular kind of ethical question* to be part of your gaming, but I prefer both to interrogate the assumption that there are some kinds of creature (let alone sentient creature) it is straightforwardly okay to kill, and/or to ask when it’s okay to kill them, and to be able to roleplay characters who also question that.

I’m slightly puzzled why you’re okay with some kinds of ethical complexity in the game but see introducing others as corruption by real-world politics, but we all have the right within the game world to decide what we do and don’t care to question.

To this, I point back to the aforementioned inane society: people getting in a tizzy over the killing of monsters.

Well, personally, I hope in real life people *would* be up in arms about slaughter of goblin children but fortunately that’s not something we have to deal with. The question of whether it’s okay to kill monsters is different from the one about whether it’s okay to have games which give the ability to “kill” computer sprites that represent juveniles of monsters or any other creature. I’ve not seen anyone here arguing that the latter shouldn’t be allowed in principle, and I think most of us would agree with you that we wish we didn’t have to operate in a world that imposes such restrictions on game content.

More generally, I don’t believe the current world is any more prone to moral panic than any previous one, though the targets have of course changed over time, and wouldn’t agree we are more “inane” now than in the past. But that doesn’t seem useful to debate, so I’ll restrain myself!

If you're going to argue it's a societal problem then I have to point out...how are other people that don't play D&D supposed to know that they're monsters that can be killed without remorse? It's one thing to complain about people who know the setting, but for everyone else, they're just gonna see sapient, self-aware beings. They're not human, but they're as humanoid as Turians in Mass Effect. And they're closer to human than the Geth, also from Mass Effect. I don't really believe that being able to kill children will hurt the game's sales in any measurable way, but your stance here feels...less than firm.

Why are goblins monsters though? What makes them different from, for example, githyanki?
- Both are typically evil, plundering other areas if they have enough strength.
- Both have similar intelligence scores (10-11), implying similar levels of sentience/sapience.
- Both are humanoids.