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.
Ahem. Let me put it this way. I call any creature a monster who:
1. Goes about purposely killing people for fun.
2. Purposely tortures people for fun.
3. Enjoys raiding villages and towns with the sole intent of killing and eating people.
4. Enslaves people and cruelly mistreats said slaves, often eating them when they no longer prove useful or just because they're hungry or just for fun.
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.
