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

May be this is applicable to you or to me or to some dude in the street, but the common practice of big corps and names in incredible scrupulousness in any action that can turn into the bad PR paints a different picture. The gaming market grows by the day, so do the developers and publishers and they might prefer to search compromise rather than lose the media support and tons of money. There were situations when the whole markets were closed because of the agenda, the most recent is probably a complete ban on russian gaming market and displacement from most prominent distribution services. Same comes for any sensitive topic, and if Larian has a good PR team it will never allow something controversial and potentially resonant to slip through. Heh, thats why we can't kill tiefling children, btw.

And I don't even like it! It is just the order of things, which may change in the future (I hope it will), but as of now this degenerate stuff needs to be reckoned with.


There have been a lot of compromise done regarding the Chinese segment by many games and devs, like DotA by Valve with its changes in gory character models or Endless Legend by Amplitude with basically adding chinese as a minor faction in a fantasy game, lol. Don't see why Larian must be an exception. If they see some danger of losing sales and can do something about it, like releasing a Chinese version of the game where everyone is straight and anything else - why not? It will be just a matter of investment/reward. Same can go for the children killing matter btw, I'd like to see several options to this interaction in the end.

At your table, you can do what you want to make it fun. Other people can do what they want at their tables. Neither of you are actually wrong and it honestly bugs me how you derride people who you seem to think are engaging with the game "the wrong way." In the examples you presented, it sounds like the players and DM aren't a good match for each other. The DM you present is kind of dickish for ignoring what the players clearly want to do, and the players would be dickish if they steamroll the DM and ignore what they want to play themselves. The solution in the examples you gave would be for the players to find a DM on their wavelength and the DM to find a different group. Or even better, they all should have figured out what they want ahead of time so as not to waste time butting up against the situation you describe. Then everyone gets to have their fun.

In this case kowtow = $$$$ ....no tasting of dirt involved.

In fact from a commercial point of view I'd say kowtowing to Chinese law not only gets them access to the market and $$$ but is probably the only way to have even a slim amount of anti-piracy/IP support from the PRC.

Thanks for illuminating the subject; I wasn't aware of that.

The bottom line: it is not Dungeons & Dragons.


Eliminating the very existence of a subset of people wouldn't give you pause?

Please clarify

Removing people who aren't heterosexual.

Yeah no. I'm out. This went well beyond here. My point was that Larian has clearly established these goblins as evil. Larian, the DM, has set the stage. Therefore, it is reasonable that many players would not view killing evil goblin kids as being an act of evil especially if said kids are trying to get you killed.

You guys are taking this well beyond the thread's intent. Should the kids be killable? That is the question.

Do you mean how do I feel about the developer removing LGBT characters from their game in order to comply with laws in markets that have anti-LGBT laws?

We are talking about little Goblin and tiefling pixelated images, not real people or children. They are fantasy and make believe. If I go around killing a bunch of pixel kids in a video game just for the fun of it, that doesn't actually make me a sick and twisted person because it's just a video game and they are make believe and pretend.

It is all make believe and pretend. Smashing a tiefling kid in the face with a hammer would be no different than me taking a baby doll and smashing it in the face with a hammer. It has no real life.

And goblins aren't real. None of this is real. So let's please not get this thread closed by one of the mods because we are debating and arguing and fighting about things that don't even pertain to the actual thread.

I apologize, you're right. In the spirit of getting this thread back on track. Ultimately, I think the kids should be killable for the sake of consistency, even though I personally would not want to kill them. I don't honestly think that having them be killable will actually cause a meaningful stir. It's certainly possible that having the kids be killable would just flat out make selling it in certain countries impossible, and if that's the case, it's up to Larian to decide if it's worth it or not. I'm not gonna think less of them either way on this issue.

My short answer is "Yes."

A slightly lengthier answer is "Yes, although any resultant repercussions will be lessened or absent if the juveniles are monsters."

By the way, I only added that extra commentary as opposition to two particular viewpoints ->

1.) Some folks objected to the killing because they - in essence - view goblins as funny looking humans (with all the attendant consideration afforded to human beings).

2.) Other folks objected to the option because they're worried about (uninformed and obdurate) spectators who will clamor for the game to fail.

Yeah. I know. I just saw that we were detaching more and more from fantasy and moving into real life and world stuff and politics and I can hear Composer now just chiming in as s/he shuts down the thread.

I honestly can't believe I'm even involved in this discussion. I remember when I first played dark forces 2 and you were able to kill civilians in that game. It really messed with me the first time I accidentally threw a grenade and killed some random pixelated lady who was walking by. I gained Dark Side points for accidentally killing civilians, and I felt all guilty and had to reload.

Then I played with my wife and she laughed. She asked me if I realized that they weren't real. They're just dumb pixelated representations of human beings. Then she shot one in the head just for fun and laughed her butt off. She told me how she would never actually hurt anyone in real life, but because it's a dumb stupid video game she had no problems whatsoever just blowing the crap out of civilians.

Regardless of how you view make believe goblins and tieflings, at the end of the day none of it really matters in terms of morality because they aren't real. We could also argue all day long until the world blows up whether goblins are actually evil as a race or not. There's no way to ever win that argument because in all reality they don't exist.

That's why I was trying to bring it back to how the DM is representing them in this game. They are evil. End of story.

Okay, this is my last post in this thread because I can see that opinions aren’t going to change and I’ve already expressed most of mine.

But in response to the challenge that accepting non-killing of tieflings is just pandering to uninformed spectators and/or bad censorship laws and the apparent implication that’s somehow a slippery slope, I don’t accept that. I’m not fussed enough about the rights of myself or others to kill representations of children in video games not to compromise on that point. Whereas I passionately believe in our right to have and play LGBT+ characters in role playing games so in no way would I support Larian removing that representation to comply with anti-LGBT+ censorship or laws in some markets. I don’t see any inherent problem with that as a position, though as I don’t actually know censorship or classification rules or know if or how much pretend-children-killing would stir controversy in my own country, let alone others, I’m happy to accept that it might not actually be as much of a concern as I and others fear.

With respect to the argument that the goblins aren’t real anyway so the morality doesn’t really matter, I largely agree. I certainly don’t think it can be real-world wrong to “kill” any computer sprite. And I absolutely support the right of people to play games in the way GM4Him says his wife does. But, for me personally, emotionally disengaging from a game (or film, etc) in that way, especially an RPG, sucks a lot of the enjoyment and purpose of the experience out of it, and that’s not how I usually want to play. And, though it’s largely irrelevant to my opinion on the actual subject of this thread, I do have an emotional and instinctive moral aversion to killing representatives of monster children in the game. I can understand if and why others don’t, don’t in any way claim that is the only right way to feel, and can fully appreciate the tensions and problems of having such moral instincts about irredeemably awful beings. I do however expect the courtesy of a similar acceptance of my right to feel the way I do from those who respond differently, or at the very least for it not to be more or less summarily dismissed as a mistaken simplification in a thread where the fact that the claim is actually off topic is a barrier to fair right of reply. But recognising that it *is* off topic, I’ll pipe down unless and until someone starts a thread about what emotional reactions and moral stances it is appropriate to take towards goblins. Which they probably shouldn’t as I can see it ending in tears!

This I totally relate to. I DO actually not enjoy killing the goblin kids or the tieflings - adults included. The first time I played, I seriously struggled with the goblins kids. Halsin killed one before I could 3ven do anything and one got away because I hesitated. I only killed one and felt bad about it. So, it's certainly not something I particularly find fun in the game. To me it was realism. Raw and gritty. I didn't want to do it, and I felt terrible about it, but it suddenly added an element of realism that brought the game more to life for me. Goblins have kids too, and they can be just as nasty. No other video game had done that.

So I totally understand where you're coming from. I personally would like them to make it like other games. Kids are immortal. However! Don't make kids alarm sirens for adults. If you have kids in the game of either race, either let us have the ability to kill them because they are a danger to us or make it so they aren't ever a threat. Don't make them a threat but make it so they can't die. And don't put them in danger if they can't die, like the kid with the harpies. If I fireball a harpy and the kid is too close, he should die. I don't want to kill kids in a game, but the realism is what bugs me - or lack thereof.

Great minds think alight.

Has anybody tried a sleep spell on the goblin kids?

I voted that they should all be killable. I rarely play a truly evil character, but when I do I find it incredibly obnoxious when there are NPCs that are purposefully there to harass my character that the game won't let me retaliate properly against. If the game didn't want me to kill the tiefling children it probably shouldn't make them steal from me and act like condescending little imps that think they can threaten me.

You can get them killed anyway. It just happens off-screen and the game attempts to make you feel bad about it.

The goblin kids are every bit as sapient as the tiefling ones but the game actually makes killing them the optimal strategy. It's a weird double standard. Especially since anyone not well versed in DnD is not going to see an intrinsic difference between child goblins and child devil people.


I am curious if you'd hold to this view if it were Drow children. After all, the Drow do basically everything on this list save for eating people, and even then they feed you to spiders.

I would. Yes. Again. Would I like it? No. Would I still kill the drow children? Yes.

People think that when God, in the Bible, ordered Israel to slaughter the Canaanites that it was a horrible and terrible thing. God ordered them to kill EVERYONE: men, women and children. Spare nothing. In our modern societies and cultures, we believe that's MONSTER-OUS! God is a monster.

Well, if one only looks on the surface, absolutely. That's terrible.

Now take a deeper look. Why did God order this? The Canaanites were child sacrificers, and they did ALL sorts of vile and detestable practices. Their behavior was the worst of the worst of the worst, SIR - with honors!

But why children? Couldn't they have spared the children?

They did. In some places, they didn't do as God told them to. What happened? Those children grew up, and what did they do? They raised armies against the Israelites. They enslaved them. They did all the same things their parents had done and more, and they led Israel to betray God and turn from him to their gods.

ALL of them, though? They were ALL evil and deserved to die?

Yes. All of them. How do I know? Because God spared Rahab the harlot, the direct ancestor of Jesus, mind you, and her family because she turned from her people and the ways of her people in Jericho. If even 1 person was good, God would have told the people of Israel to wipe out everyone BUT said person. He'd done it before. Why wouldn't he do it again? So that tells me EVERYONE was bad; men, women and children. Besides all this, also consider another reason God ordered this slaughter. Let's say they did spare the children - any of them. How do you think the event would scar those children? Here is this group of people who just wiped out EVERYONE they knew - family, friends, loved ones. Letting those kids live would have been actually more terrible than killing them because they would have devastated them. To wipe out the evil adults and leave the kids alive would have been to intentionally create a large number of bitter, angry, mean-spirited, emotionally devastated and crushed children. Is it REALLY better to let the children live after you've totally destroyed their world?

This is why war sucks period. War was only EVER ordained by God when certain peoples were becoming so evil that He actually had to sanction and ordain violence. In fact, He told people over and over and over again that He absolutely detested and hated ANY man killing another man. In His book, the ultimate evil cultures were those who were violent and murderous, and He knew that the only way to bring their evil acts to an end was to wipe them out.

Now. I know you all don't believe in the Bible, but that's what I believe. Also, the same concept applies in this fantasy setting with fictional gods. Take Dark Justiciars - Sharrans. The good gods would command their followers to hunt down communities of Sharrans to wipe them out - ALL of them. Why? They're evil. They go around butchering people, enslaving them, torturing them, kidnapping their children and corrupting them, etc. The Sharrans are the Forgotten Realms equivalant of the Canaanites. They were one of the most vile and terrible cultures in the world of Faerun.

So, if you come to a village of hostile people who are doing terrible things as a culture and they are raising their kids to do terrible things as a culture - and in the case of drow raising their children to serve a DEMON spider queen - there is VERY little chance that said children are going to grow up and NOT be the same as their culture has raised them to be. Spare even one, and they'll find others of their kind and stir them up to hunt you down and get revenge. That is the most likely scenario.

Sure. Absolutely. There is a possibility that someone in that tribe or clan isn't as evil or bad as everyone else. Sure. There could be a child in that group who is like Drizzt who wants to turn from the ways of his people and live a good life. And so, it requires wisdom; LOTS of wisdom and guidance from your deity. If as you are wiping out said evil village (thank God I've never had to experience such things - I frankly couldn't do it, I think, because I have a VERY hard time with ACTUAL violence. I had a hard time kicking a neighbor's dog off of my dog as it was trying to rip her throat out. To protect my dog and try to save her, I had to hurt another dog, and it was hard for me) you come across someone you think actually isn't like the rest, you spare them. You bring them before your deity and you say, "Hey deity. This one seems different. May we spare this one? It seems wrong to kill them?" If said deity is good, they would reply, "Spare that one," if that one is indeed good.

I don't get that vibe at all from the goblin children in BG3. They are evil, vile little monsters who want to get their adults to come kill you so they can eat you. If I was entering a drow city, for some reason, and killing all the parents of said drow village, and I saw their children running to alert a bunch of adults that I'm there, putting me and my companions at risk, I'd probably feel like I did in BG3 with the goblin kids. I have no choice but to shoot them. (Again, I can't reiterate enough, THANK GOD it's only a video game and I don't ACTUALLY have to make such a choice in real life. I'd probably let them escape in real life and they'd warn their adults and they'd all come kill me and eat me.) On the other hand, if those same drow children were cowering in a corner begging for mercy, I'd probably have a REAL REAL REAL REAL REAL hard time killing them - goblin, elf, dwarf, tadpole, etc. There's a HUGE difference between killing ANY character that is running to alert an entire deadly camp to come kill you and a character who is cowering and asking you to spare them - man, woman or child. Heck. They might even be evil and begging for mercy, but it's a whole lot harder to kill such creatures no matter the race than it is someone who is running for help.

That's why I said that if they are going to make the children unkillable, they should 100% NOT put them in situations where they threaten you or can threaten you in any way, shape or form. You can have them in the game, but the moment you try to hurt them they flee and escape and you never see them again. They neither alert adults or try to harm you at all. Nothing they do is detrimental to you. In a video game where I'm trying to have a lot of fun, I'd probably prefer this approach. We really shouldn't even be having this moral dilemma discussion. It's a game. It's supposed to be fun. We shouldn't have to be pondering the morality of killing video game children.

Murder the little shits.