Having stats for every stage of growth encourages killing of dragon children? [Archive]

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Domino Quartz

2013-10-04, 12:48 AM

In 629, the mother Black Dragon says "Humanoids. You think that just because we have stats for every stage of growth, it is perfectly acceptable to murder our children." How does that work? How does the fact of dragons having stats for every stage of growth encourage murder of their children? What does that mean? Please keep in mind that I have very little knowledge of D&D outside OotS.

One Step Two

2013-10-04, 01:03 AM

In DnD for most monsters, there's only one set stat-block, giving their standard abilities for adulthood.

Dragons are one of the very few that have stats from Egg to Ancient.

The meaning of her rant was that, despite having stats or not, he was still a child, no matter how powerful he might be to others.

DarkLadyNyara

2013-10-04, 01:06 AM

Okay, so I don't have a great deal of D&D knowledge myself. But here's what I suspect she means-

Having a system that says "okay, this is what you need to know to kill a juvenile or baby dragon" paints them as a valid target. Whereas if you look up "Elf" in the monster manual, there are no age categories. The assumption is that of course you'd only be fighting an adult. Elf (or human/halfling/dwarf) children aren't seen as an acceptable target. /2cents

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-04, 01:45 AM

BroomGuys

2013-10-04, 01:57 AM

The reason for the age categories, of course, is so that dragons can be used as monsters/bosses at various levels. Adult dragons are so powerful they would seldom appear in games. The younger age categories enable actual game use of the creatures, while maintaining the idea that dragons are some of the most powerful beings in the game.

Yes, this is basically it. Imagine the Oots as a group of players in the forest looking for the starmetal, and they encounter the ancient black dragon as the final boss. Probably a total party kill, even if V is not turned into a lizard at that point. A level-appropriate boss is a dragon that isn't so powerful, which in this system means a youth dragon. The system is basically set up so that dragons of all ages can be opponents in a D&D campaign, as I understand it, but that naturally begs the question of where a young dragon's parents are.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-04, 02:08 AM

Yes, this is basically it. Imagine the Oots as a group of players in the forest looking for the starmetal, and they encounter the ancient black dragon as the final boss. Probably a total party kill, even if V is not turned into a lizard at that point. A level-appropriate boss is a dragon that isn't so powerful, which in this system means a youth dragon. The system is basically set up so that dragons of all ages can be opponents in a D&D campaign, as I understand it, but that naturally begs the question of where a young dragon's parents are.

That's true, but only if we assume that dragon families and psychology are identical to humans. What if dragons view all other dragons as potential rivals, and therefore drive out their young as soon as they are capable of taking care of themselves? There needs to be some mechanism to keep these massive predators from overrunning the world, and their being flung out shortly after they grow enough to not be totally helpless would help to achieve that.

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 02:12 AM

4E takes the approach that chromatic dragon parenting techniques vary a lot.

Younger ones tend to lay lots of eggs spread out over various locations, and abandon them- with the dragon being independent from hatching.

Older ones tend to lay a few eggs, and raise the offspring a long time.

3e Draconomicon may say something similar.

factotum

2013-10-04, 02:35 AM

That's true, but only if we assume that dragon families and psychology are identical to humans.

Which they are, at least in the case of the one dragon family we've seen in the Stickverse. As for a mechanism that keeps dragon numbers down, they live a long time and breed very slowly--it doesn't need many to die via heroic action (or even in accidents--a black dragon could be killed by a massive landslide nearly as easily as a human) to keep the numbers down.

ti'esar

2013-10-04, 02:42 AM

Domino Quartz

2013-10-04, 02:51 AM

Thanks for the replies. That answers my question, I think.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-04, 03:22 AM

Debates about draconic child-raising habits miss the point: the basic point that the ABD is talking about (and Rich is criticizing) is that, since dragons of all ages - unlike humans or elves or even something like orcs - have D&D stats, and stats matter primarily for combat, there is an implication that young dragons are acceptable targets for PCs.

Which is true only if we assume a precise equivalence between the species. If a juvenile dragon is a ravening predator on sapient species, and an adult dragon is a ravening predator on sapient species, then the main difference is in size and power. In which case, yes, they are acceptable targets for PCs.

If a juvenile dragon is playing with blocks and making paper butterflies and going "goo goo," then I'll accept it as an innocuous noncombatant.

If it's a fire-breathing savage which has just dominated its first group of lizardfolk followers, devours the local terrified frogfolk and the occasional fisherman, and is proud and lethal as Lucifer, then I don't care if it's technically juvenile, it's still a legitimate combatant.

D&D clearly assumes the latter. It's fine if Mr. Burlew doesn't in his world, but to portray RAW D&D as encouraging PCs to kill "dragon children" in the sense of "cute harmwess wittle dwagons who wouldn't hurt a fwy" is completely off the mark, IMO.

Again, I'm not arguing against Mr. Burlew's ideas. I'm simply pointing out that the age category concept of dragons in D&D doesn't change their basic ferocity and peril. And that a juvenile elf is a good deal more harmless and helpless than a juvenile dragon, by RAW.

ti'esar

2013-10-04, 05:31 AM

Which is true only if we assume a precise equivalence between the species. If a juvenile dragon is a ravening predator on sapient species, and an adult dragon is a ravening predator on sapient species, then the main difference is in size and power. In which case, yes, they are acceptable targets for PCs.

If a juvenile dragon is playing with blocks and making paper butterflies and going "goo goo," then I'll accept it as an innocuous noncombatant.

If it's a fire-breathing savage which has just dominated its first group of lizardfolk followers, devours the local terrified frogfolk and the occasional fisherman, and is proud and lethal as Lucifer, then I don't care if it's technically juvenile, it's still a legitimate combatant.

D&D clearly assumes the latter. It's fine if Mr. Burlew doesn't in his world, but to portray RAW D&D as encouraging PCs to kill "dragon children" in the sense of "cute harmwess wittle dwagons who wouldn't hurt a fwy" is completely off the mark, IMO.

Again, I'm not arguing against Mr. Burlew's ideas. I'm simply pointing out that the age category concept of dragons in D&D doesn't change their basic ferocity and peril. And that a juvenile elf is a good deal more harmless and helpless than a juvenile dragon, by RAW.

Like I said: missing the point. All I was saying is that RAW, for lack of a better term, encourages DMs to use young dragons as opponents for PCs to fight in a way that it does not do for young humans or young elves or young goblins or the children of most any other creature, regardless of the actual details of how those dragons are otherwise portrayed. This isn't the main argument that I would make when arguing against "killing dragons because they are dragons" (and it's probably not Rich's either, really) but then that's not what I was actually doing. I was trying to answer the OP's question about what, specifically, the ABD was talking about before the thread went down the rabbit hole of Another Morality Debate.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 06:14 AM

I'm sure a storm giant toddler can level a village, but we'll never know because no one will ever publish combat stats for one. Because we all understand that no matter how potentially dangerous that 3-year-old storm giant could be, it's more than a little uncomfortable for a bunch of grown men and women to sit around a table and pretend to kill a child. The only difference between a baby giant and a hatchling dragon is the exact point you start to feel bad about it. Remember, there are also stats on baby gold dragons, so every argument about how dangerous they are and need to be fought to protect the town sort of goes out the window right there.

Basically, I've never argued that the baby dragons in RAW D&D are "harmwess widdle dwagons." I've argued that there should not be baby dragons in RAW D&D at all. There shouldn't be published newborn stats on anything that is sapient, period. It's creepy and weird and actually encourages exactly this sort of debate when I think we'd all be better off not spending our time debating under what circumstances it is or is not cool to murder alien babies.

At any rate, this isn't much of a fight worth having since even Wizards realized that it was sort of an uncomfortable idea. That's why in 4e they make a point of calling out that even the "young" dragons in the book are still mature specimens. And all they had to do was scale down the front-end difficulty so that they could start showing up around 5th level. It's a rare case of figuring out that they could sidestep the unfortunate implications without actually sacrificing any gameplay.

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 06:18 AM

The Giant

2013-10-04, 06:27 AM

johnbragg

2013-10-04, 06:27 AM

While the 3.5 MM didn't publish a full statblock for them- it did provide rules for "downsizing" a giant's statblock all the way down to very young and 2 sizes smaller than an adult.

Were those giant-specific, or were those the generic "recipe for homebrewing a Large-instead-of-Humongous REmorhaz" or whatever?

BEcause I remember rules for scaling monsters up and down in size. You want a man-sized Purple Worm? An ogre-sized Rust Monster? OGre-sized elephant? We've got rules for that.

That's not quite the same thing, even if you _could_ use it to stat-block Storm Giant toddlers.

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 06:29 AM

Giant-specific (in this case)- separate from the "monster-scaling" rules.

Interestingly, those Giant Ages rules never made it into the SRD.

Everyl

2013-10-04, 06:49 AM

There was a saying I used to hear in my college gaming club: "If it has stats, you can kill it." It was usually invoked in reference to gods, eldritch horrors, and other entities that you generally don't want your players to kill, and basically meant, "If you don't want your players to be able to kill something, don't give it stats. If it has stats, they'll find a way to kill it." This generally applied to powerful creatures, but it basically applies to things like babies, as well: if you don't want players killing sentient babies, don't give stats to sentient babies. From a game design perspective, it doesn't sound that complicated, and I'm glad they've apparently fixed it in 4e. I hope that change carries over to later editions, as well.

Kish

2013-10-04, 06:53 AM

Did it really? Ugh. That's just awful. Who thought that was a good idea?
Probably the same person who decided all giant types should be described as evil antagonists, instead of nearly half of them being nonevil-by-default characters who might inspire more complex interactions.

Gwenovier

2013-10-04, 07:21 AM

allenw

2013-10-04, 07:24 AM

Probably the same person who decided all giant types should be described as evil antagonists, instead of nearly half of them being nonevil-by-default characters who might inspire more complex interactions.

Are you referring to 4E? The poster's statement was about the 3.5 MM, in which about half of the giants are indeed nonevil-by-default.

Kish

2013-10-04, 07:27 AM

I was, and yes, I misread that. Thanks.

(Still could be the same person, but that's kind of a stretch. :smalltongue:)

Xelbiuj

2013-10-04, 07:40 AM

I don't see the taboo tbqh. I get that it's not necessarily a critique about the internal pragmatism in the fantasy world but one of why we would create and run fantasies that lead to "child killing"

Personally I think it's no different than Aliens, no creature quite (justifiably) provokes the phrase, "kill it, kill it with fire!" like a facehugger - a baby alien.

Killer Angel

2013-10-04, 07:49 AM

Having a system that says "okay, this is what you need to know to kill a juvenile or baby dragon" paints them as a valid target.

There are stats even for gods, if this means something.

I'm glad the Lady of Pain isn't statted. :smallcool:

War-Wren

2013-10-04, 07:49 AM

Personally I think it's no different than Aliens, no creature quite (justifiably) provokes the phrase, "kill it, kill it with fire!" like a facehugger - a baby alien.

Nope. Facehuggers implant an egg/embryo into a host, which then grows into the Alien.

The facehugger dies after it's done that. The facehugger is fully grown and has one purpose in its brief existence - implant a victim to continue the Alien race. The chest-burster however... that's a baby Alien, but should still be killed with fire :smalltongue: :smallwink:

Storm_Of_Snow

2013-10-04, 08:04 AM

Various editions have had some stats for other races (1st edition gave HD for orc children and mothers if the players ran into their camp, for example). And to address the Giant's specific point, I think it also mentioned using the stats for ogres for young giants in similar circumstances. But I don't think there were ever any official stats for handling humanoid children, only in specific modules based around settlements.

Part of the problem I think is that if the Dragon's a big enough threat that PCs are getting involved (especially if they're called in to sort it out, and let's not forget that the YBD was a serious danger to the Order), then it's probably mature, likely to be within it's territory, and the PCs will look to find it's nest. Given that, there's a chance that there's babies in the nest, and they will be in the line of fire at some point, whether accidentally, or getting involved actively, so they will need some stats to handle those situations. But most of the problem is that the rules pretty much say you have to kill something to get the most experience from it, and most players also tend towards "slaughter everything, then hoover up anything that looks valuable". All justified with "they're monsters, they're a threat to whoever".

Are there other ways to deal with them? Yes, even if the dragon wouldn't acceed or stick to them. Do most players use them? No.

I've kind of been looking at extending the dragon species for a potential 1st edition campaign into what I'm terming gem and stone types - gems being lawful versions of the chromatic dragons and stones being chaotic metallic (the biggest problem's actually going to be to get enough in the campaign world that there's obviously a difference, but not too many that they're clashing with each other or the rest of the world).

I wonder if something like that might shake up a few people's views when the firebreathing "CE-Red" dragon actually turns out to be a LG Ruby one.

And it might actually be worse that various editions basically put a price on dragon's eggs and other young creatures. And if you get into creating magic items and alchemy, well, someone's going to go and attempt to procure a red dragon's gall bladder or whatever.

DarkLadyNyara

2013-10-04, 08:05 AM

There are stats even for gods, if this means something.

Given some (most) of the gamers I know? Yeah... stats = valid target definitely still applies. :smallbiggrin:

The Giant

2013-10-04, 08:14 AM

Given that, there's a chance that there's babies in the nest, and they will be in the line of fire at some point, whether accidentally, or getting involved actively, so they will need some stats to handle those situations.

Here are the stats you actually need for a hatchling dragon:

Movement: Gets away if you let it.
Saving Throws: Miraculously survives all accidents.
Armor Class: You hit.
Hit Points: Congratulations, Baby-Killer.
Special Qualities: I hope you can live with yourself.

Coincidentally, these are the same exact stats for every other species of baby.

Arcite

2013-10-04, 08:22 AM

How does that work? How does the fact of dragons having stats for every stage of growth encourage murder of their children? What does that mean? Please keep in mind that I have very little knowledge of D&D outside OotS.

This reminds me of something I read about Gary Gygax. I don't have a source, but supposedly he said he did not want to give stats for angels, because if there were stats then players would want or be able to fight and kill angels. And he found the idea of killing angels awful. So he did not want to give stats.

Considering how according to the talk, the Deities & Demigods book got treated like a Monster Manual, this sounds like what would happen. Although the descriptions were certainly written with combat in mind, like the deities were to be fought.

I do not know how true this is. Because in Monster Manual 2, stats for Devas, Planeteers, and Solars sure enough appeared. But I think it shows the thinking of how having stats for young dragons implies that those stats are there to be used (in combat).

Coat

2013-10-04, 08:32 AM

The Giant

2013-10-04, 08:33 AM

You missed one.

Alignment: TBD.

Normally, I'm against listing alignment in stat blocks, but for that I'll make an exception.

Tryfan

2013-10-04, 08:41 AM

Chronos

2013-10-04, 08:43 AM

Quoth Storm_Of_Snow:

But most of the problem is that the rules pretty much say you have to kill something to get the most experience from it,...
The rules don't "pretty much say that", and I have no idea where so many people get that idea. In fact, the rules say the opposite: You get XP for overcoming the challenge posed by an encounter, and they specifically give "sneaking past guards" as an example.

Back to the topic at hand, I agree that killing infants of any sapient species is icky, but I don't actually agree that that applies to dragons. The thing is, dragons really don't have an infancy. Most varieties of dragons are already as smart and aware as the typical human, as soon as they're out of the egg. They don't need to learn how to walk or talk: They're hatched already knowing that. A thing that you can discuss philosophy with is not an infant, in any meaningful sense. They're also powerful enough to be an apex predator, right from the start, in most environments.

Tryfan

2013-10-04, 08:53 AM

Back to the topic at hand, I agree that killing infants of any sapient species is icky, but I don't actually agree that that applies to dragons. The thing is, dragons really don't have an infancy. Most varieties of dragons are already as smart and aware as the typical human, as soon as they're out of the egg. They don't need to learn how to walk or talk: They're hatched already knowing that. A thing that you can discuss philosophy with is not an infant, in any meaningful sense. They're also powerful enough to be an apex predator, right from the start, in most environments.

But if you can discuss philosophy with it you can determine if it is good/ evil / trying to rip your head off. Attacking it on sight is still not acceptable (unless of course it's going for option 3).

Say you burst into the BBEG's lair who is a human lord, normal stereotype and defeat him. You then encounter his, lets say, 11 year old son who he's been grooming from birth to follow in his footsteps. The son is clearly intellegent and can discuss philosophy very well but agrees with his fathers views. Is it still ok to kill him without a thought? Even if he's got a sword and is attacking you? That's a situation that few DM's would create beacuse it's so complicated yet it's ok to do it with dragons?

Remember this is a world that has many different intellegent species some much more so than humans: humans, elves, dwarves are all treated the same in this respect, why should dragons be different?

littlebum2002

2013-10-04, 09:06 AM

Say you burst into the BBEG's lair who is a human lord, normal stereotype and defeat him. You then encounter his, lets say, 11 year old son who he's been grooming from birth to follow in his footsteps. The son is clearly intellegent and can discuss philosophy very well but agrees with his fathers views. Is it still ok to kill him without a thought?

Of course not!

After all, there is no stats for 11 year old humans. What's his challenge rating? How much experience would you get? Does he have any magic items? These are all questions every adventurer must know before entering battle.

Maybe we need another splatbook: The Codex of Children: An Adventurer's guide to defeating the tiny terrors

Everyl

2013-10-04, 09:08 AM

And it might actually be worse that various editions basically put a price on dragon's eggs and other young creatures. And if you get into creating magic items and alchemy, well, someone's going to go and attempt to procure a red dragon's gall bladder or whatever.

Have you seen the playtest materials for the new edition? Armor made from the flayed skin of sentient beings (dragons) is cheaper than most heavy armors made of ordinary metal.

I really hope that doesn't make it into the actual print edition.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 09:11 AM

You don't even need those, there's only a chance of running into a hatchling dragon if the DM says there is a chance of running into one - and what kind of DM puts a baby human in the tavern you've just burnt down? or puts random elven children into the area you're fighting in and rolls for collaterol damage?

At the end of the day this is a made up world and there is no need to make up situations that require child murder. The only place for kids is in situations like being rescued from the BBEG (who for some reason doesn't kill them) or in scenes where there is no chance of fighting and if fighting does break out they instantly get teleported away by their nanny or something.

Complete agreement. I was just making a joke by way of the idea that you might "need" those stats someday.

Back to the topic at hand, I agree that killing infants of any sapient species is icky, but I don't actually agree that that applies to dragons. The thing is, dragons really don't have an infancy. Most varieties of dragons are already as smart and aware as the typical human, as soon as they're out of the egg. They don't need to learn how to walk or talk: They're hatched already knowing that. A thing that you can discuss philosophy with is not an infant, in any meaningful sense. They're also powerful enough to be an apex predator, right from the start, in most environments.

Dragons are made-up. We made them up. Every detail that you just wrote was made up by a writer working for TSR or Wizards. Saying, "It's OK to fight baby dragons because they're intelligent right out of the egg," is like saying, "It's OK to fight baby dragons because they made it OK to fight baby dragons." Maybe that's true but it doesn't really address whether or not they should have made it OK.

pendell

2013-10-04, 09:13 AM

snikrept

2013-10-04, 09:25 AM

Affording protection to all Recently Created Sapient Beings regardless of species seems to me to be a strange projection of human traits onto other (fictional) creatures. Human babies are helpless and unable to take responsibility for their own actions. This is not a trait shared by many real world types of animals, let alone fictional alien ones.

I think the upthread example of the alien chest-burster is a good one. The Xenomorphs in that universe were shown to be cunning, and possibly sapient ("they cut the power!") but it would have been quite strange to hear, for example during the scene in the second film where the team finds the lair, a character declaring "you monster, how could you live with yourself" when they burn one up.

If an alien sapient actively desires your death/ enslavement/ any other activity for which the typical in-universe response would be deadly force, and works toward that end, the length of its prior lifespan is, IMO, irrelevant with regard to the resulting combat. Especially so for an alien species with a lifespan measured in millenia, for whom the Recently Created relative period might span decades or centuries of personally-responsible actions.

EDIT as Brian P. has already written! Well said

Tryfan

2013-10-04, 09:29 AM

That doesn't necessarily mean it's the right thing to kill a sentient creature because of the threat it MIGHT present -- not just for moral reasons but for the pragmatic reason that killing a baby dragon probably means angry parent dragons -- but it does mean, to my mind, that you shouldn't treat a hungry baby as a helpless non-threat, especially if mama feeds creatures like you to its babies in the first place!

ETA: Were I an adventurer and encountered a dragon nest, I would do my best to avoid it. Not only do the babies present a threat on their own, but alerting them may mean they make noise which their parents might detect, bringing down the wrath of mama. And of course, you really, really don't want to face angry mama dragon over the corpses of her infants.

I think what you've written here is correct, but still doesn't address should this be a situation your DM has created in the first place? Plus attacking something that is attacking you is different to 'it has stats, lets go get it lads'

In the case of the young black dragon in OotS the order was justified in killing the young dragon but the question is should they be in that position in the first place?

With the being justified as far as I can tell the sequence went something like:

1. Magical darkness is cast
2. Haley gets out of the darkness and spots the dragon and tries to run away
3. We see everyone in a pitched battle.

so the order probably weren't the aggressors and could be argued to have been defending their lives, even V at the end as they had no reason to assume the dragon wouldn't resume its attack. Were they went wrong was assuming that young dragons exist in a vacuum with no angry mama dragon.

EDIT: the case of alien etc. is a bit different as there is never any attempt to give them a personality, talk to them etc. By creating a creature that can talk and has is somewhere on the good-evil axis or lawful-chaotic you've created something with some human values (greed as we understand it, for example). We're not projecting human values onto them, they were created with those values in mind.

snikrept

2013-10-04, 09:44 AM

EDIT: the case of alien etc. is a bit different as there is never any attempt to give them a personality, talk to them etc. By creating a creature that can talk and has is somewhere on the good-evil axis or lawful-chaotic you've created something with some human values (greed as we understand it, for example). We're not projecting human values onto them, they were created with those values in mind.

Hm, let me clarify: My post was not intended to be about values but rather the state of mental and physical helplessness human infants experience, which Recently Created aliens might or might not share.

Also, IMO attaching must be able to talk and converse with me to receive protection seems extra weird. Plenty of ordinary humans on my planet don't satisfy that criterion, despite being nice folks.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 09:45 AM

In DragonLance, this was not true. In one of the books, the characters had to make it through a black dragon nest. I believe they survived, but it was a near run thing. Being beset by a large number of very hungry meat-eating little babies with teeth was a life-threatening encounter.

When my position is that something shouldn't be portrayed a certain way, pointing out the times that it has been portrayed that way is not much of a counterpoint.

A "baby of any alignment has the following stats" only makes sense in the real world , where humans are apex predators. In a world where humans are one prey animal among many, the children of an apex predator deserve serious respect. An encounter with a baby dragon, or a baby tarrasque, or for that matter a baby cobra is NOT the same as an encounter with a baby human, because not all species, in either the real world or in fantasy worlds, are as helpless and pathetic as human babies are. We can get away with that to some extent in the real world because we so completely dominate the natural world.

I would still put it to you that sitting around a table fantasizing about killing the babies of such a nonexistent apex predator is weird and we'd all be better off if we stopped doing it. You're making an appeal to some idea of realism, and as far as I'm concerned realism can suck it. I don't care if it's realistic that a baby dragon would be a physical threat; I still don't think we should have stats for it in the Monster Manual.

If an alien sapient actively desires your death/ enslavement/ any other activity for which the typical in-universe response would be deadly force, and works toward that end, the length of its prior lifespan is, IMO, irrelevant with regard to the resulting combat.

To be clear: This is not some conversation about what anyone thinks should be done should we, the real humans in the real world, encounter real alien sapients. This is a conversation about what we think should be done when we, the real humans in the real world, sit down to our dining room table with our dice and our books and tell each other stories about our pretend humans meeting pretend dragons. We're not saying don't kill them if they're a threat to you; we're saying stop pretending to be in situations where a baby is a threat to you.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 09:56 AM

The Giant's stat block is really clever (and even poignant), as is Coat's addition to it. I don't agree with the point, however.

Our taboo not to harm babies (which should of course remain sacrosanct) is based on the innocence, utter helplessness and dependence, and developing intelligence of our own newborn. However, much of the appeal of fantasy is that it introduces us to strange lands and strange creatures, and demanding that these creatures cannot diverge considerably from a development and identity cycle that we are accustomed to is a weakness, not a strength.

If dragons that hatch have fully formed brains (and vices), and are neither innocent, nor helpless, as well as completely sovereign, then they are simply not "babies" at all and the taboo does not apply to them. Saying that the writers who make up such dragons are at fault because they "implicitly" support infanticide seems close-minded to me. Or it simply confuses univocity and equivocity.

Aolbain

2013-10-04, 09:58 AM

I think what you've written here is correct, but still doesn't address should this be a situation your DM has created in the first place? Plus attacking something that is attacking you is different to 'it has stats, lets go get it lads'

In the case of the young black dragon in OotS the order was justified in killing the young dragon but the question is should they be in that position in the first place?

With the being justified as far as I can tell the sequence went something like:

1. Magical darkness is cast
2. Haley gets out of the darkness and spots the dragon and tries to run away
3. We see everyone in a pitched battle.

so the order probably weren't the aggressors and could be argued to have been defending their lives, even V at the end as they had no reason to assume the dragon wouldn't resume its attack. Were they went wrong was assuming that young dragons exist in a vacuum with no angry mama dragon.

What I saw was a teenager trying to defend himself against and then being murdered by armed home invaders.

Kish

2013-10-04, 10:02 AM

If dragons that hatch have fully formed brains (and vices), and are neither innocent, nor helpless, as well as completely sovereign, then they are simply not "babies" at all and the taboo does not apply to them.
As Rich has said--more than once, now--his point is not that the author could not or did not contrive a means by which killing babies is justifiable within the setting. His point is exactly that the authors did, and that was at best an extremely questionable decision.

I would venture that no one ever learned anything worth learning from an alien race which was designed to be sufficiently evil that they could and should be slaughtered on sight without hesitation. That is not an "strange" species in any worthwhile way, and to what extent "part of the appeal of fantasy" is being able to tangle with such walking targets without engaging one's higher brain functions, fantasy in general is poorer for it.

Ghost Nappa

2013-10-04, 10:03 AM

The other problem with comparing dragons and humans and other forms of life is that in terms of Aging effects in real life, Mammals are the exception, not the rule. Most creatures (especially reptiles (http://www.cracked.com/article_18483_the-5-creepiest-serial-killers-who-were-animals_p2.html)) do not get weaker with old age. Human babies are incredibly poor at defending themselves and compared with other species, really very desperately need care and protection. Other species who give birth to fewer children are also like this. Species that give birth to MANY children at once - like insects - have higher infant mortality rates as many of them die from a lack of food, disease, and predation.

The problem lies in the behavior of adventurers being under the impression that everything is trying to kill them... (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EverythingTryingToKillYou)which may or may not be (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ProperlyParanoid) true depending in your DM. And may or may not be a required character trait of Level 20 Wizards (see that one person's signature for the original quote.)

As an example: The DM of the game I'm playing right now was quite surprised when we didn't try to kill an entire fortress full of elven heretics who were hiding from the government. This was despite the fact that we had two people who were new and were just going with the flow of the group, and the other three people (including me) had in-character reasons for not indiscriminately slaughtering groups of other sentient beings.

That being said, as much as adventurers have a penchant to be big game hunters, they are sort of Dirty Harry-racists. It's not that they kill sentient beings discriminately, they just kill EVERYTHING (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HatesEveryoneEqually).

Which leads me to the question of whether or not Vaarsuvius' character plots are intending to deconstruct the sociopathic hero (as an conscious authorial decision). Belkar has been the sort of "straight" example of the Sociopathic hero and is sort-of-kind-of-maybe-in-reform, while Vaarsuvius is shocked at the consequences of such actions (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0843.html) (that may or may not have seemed reasonable) and is now trying to repent for them. (Which makes moments like this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0645.html) or this (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0835.html) just a touch more ominous.)

Tryfan

2013-10-04, 10:03 AM

Hm, let me clarify: My post was not intended to be about values but rather the state of mental and physical helplessness human infants experience, which Recently Created aliens might or might not share.

Also, IMO attaching must be able to talk and converse with me to receive protection seems extra weird. Plenty of ordinary humans on my planet don't satisfy that criterion, despite being nice folks.

Maybe I should have made clear - 'could converse with me' is part of what makes the created creature have human values and therefore makes inventing a situation to kill it's babies wrong. I also intended it to be an ability, clearly stated, to converse at some point in it's life cycle. I haven't spoken to an awful lot of people but I have the ability to (with a translator if needed).

If dragons are assumed to be brought up by their mothers then the most 'good' option on meeting a black dragon wrymling after killing its parent (that lets say has destroyed 4 villages in the last month including the people) might be to subdue it and go on a quest to find a mature gold dragon to bring it up. Then it can grow up, decide its own course in life and there's a very powerful lawful good creature to act as a mentor. That could be a quite cool storyline, but until all players can be trusted not to go 'we kill the baby' the whole situation should be left well alone.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 10:06 AM

As Rich has said--more than once, now--his point is not that the author could not or did not contrive a means by which killing babies is justifiable within the setting. His point is exactly that the authors did, and that was at best an extremely questionable decision.
You probably shouldn't have cropped out the rest of the paragraph you quoted where I brought up exactly that. I believe that storytellers that create alien creatures (like intelligent monsters without childhoods) are not blameworthy.

snikrept

2013-10-04, 10:10 AM

To be clear: This is not some conversation about what anyone thinks should be done should we, the real humans in the real world, encounter real alien sapients. This is a conversation about what we think should be done when we, the real humans in the real world, sit down to our dining room table with our dice and our books and tell each other stories about our pretend humans meeting pretend dragons. We're not saying don't kill them if they're a threat to you; we're saying stop pretending to be in situations where a baby is a threat to you.
I agree with this, I think.

Hm, I guess this might be an issue of labels? Specifically, I agree that it's a bad idea to assign baby, toddler, infant, etc descriptors to hostile monsters in a fictional game universe, as those terms carry over a lot of weight from their use to describe Recently Created humans in the real world.

On the other hand, pretending to encounter hostile Recently Created sapient monsters that aren't tagged with these labels might solve this problem. Stop encountering fictional babies then becomes an injunction to stop calling Recently Created fictional monsters (dragonspawn, etc) "babies" if they are a self-reliant and capable threat. Since the term baby connotes a lot more traits than only Recently Created.

This would allow things like roleplaying soldiers in the Aliens fictional universe, which the quoted passage above calls strange on account of the characters' frequent encounters with fictional baby chestbursters.

pendell

2013-10-04, 10:10 AM

I think what you've written here is correct, but still doesn't address should this be a situation your DM has created in the first place?

Why not? Is a DM required to do nothing but give PCS morally unambiguous decisions and choices? It's perfectly plausible that if you enter a dragon's lair you might encounter immature dragons. Since a combat encounter is highly likely in such a circumstance, it makes sense to stat it out rather than have the DM make it up on the fly.

I think part of the reason baby dragons, unlike baby goblins or baby humans, present a credible threat to an adventuring party, at least to a low-level one. The fact that any sane adventurer should try to avoid combat with such creatures does not obviate the fact that combat IS a possible outcome, and therefore should be modeled. It's the same reason we stat out solars and devas and gold dragons -- the fact that a good adventuring party *shouldn't* find itself in combat with such creatures doesn't mean the potential for combat does not exist.

In the case of the young black dragon in OotS the order was justified in killing the young dragon but the question is should they be in that position in the first place?

Why not? Again, is the DM required to ensure that PCs only encounter fully mature creatures? I should think a world where you only encounter full adult specimens with treasure hoards would be less plausible than a world where dragons have a full life cycle. A life cycle in which they represent a *potential* threat to adventurers at all stages. It does not follow that , just because the creature presents a threat, the adventurers must therefore engage it in combat. Perhaps it is better to avoid it. Or perhaps it is better to bargain with it.

The real problem to me is not the fact that D&D models immature dragons, but that the D&D system rewards combat over diplomacy or avoidance.

To me, the acme of skill is to accomplish the mission with a minimum of hassle. In the real world, any unnecessary combat is to be avoided because even if you win you are taking wounds and resources that you won't have for later. Also setting off alarms and causing noise which will draw even more attention to what you are doing. D&D teaches the opposite lesson -- because D&D rewards combat, most parties participate in combat even when it isn't strictly necessary, rolling through the dungeon like some predator looking for something to kill -- except the "food" isn't nutrition, but XP and wealth.

To my mind, many of the problems you bring up would be solved if the party viewed every combat encounter as "a hassle to be avoided" rather than "opportunity to for XP and loot".

This could be done by eliminating or greatly reducing the rewards for successful combat while greatly increasing the rewards for completing the quest. If I were DM I would prefer to give one big award for accomplishing the mission which would be equal to winning every combat encounter in the dungeon. When people can get the same or better reward without fighting as they can with, they will do all they can to avoid combat encounters as unnecessary risk. It's only when the rewards of combat far exceed the penalties that adventuring parties start treating every roving monster encounter as a collection of uncollected XP and loot with a stat block attached.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

War-Wren

2013-10-04, 10:13 AM

If dragons are assumed to be brought up by their mothers then the most 'good' option on meeting a black dragon wrymling after killing its parent (that lets say has destroyed 4 villages in the last month including the people) might be to subdue it and go on a quest to find a mature gold dragon to bring it up. Then it can grow up, decide its own course in life and there's a very powerful lawful good creature to act as a mentor. That could be a quite cool storyline, but until all players can be trusted not to go 'we kill the baby' the whole situation should be left well alone.

I like that scenario and next time I'm running a D&D I may use it as a sub-plot (if that's alright with you?)

As for the "we kill the baby" response... there's nothing stopping the DM then saying "You approach the baby, weapon in hand. As you prepare to swing, it spits, flicks dirt, casts darkness etc. When your vision clears it is nowhere to be seen." [Dun Dun Duuun!]

And you have a shiny new villain to attack them with in some time to come in the distant future :smallbiggrin:

Kish

2013-10-04, 10:14 AM

Why not? Is a DM required to do nothing but give PCS morally unambiguous decisions and choices?
You know...

Rich (and I, et al) believe killing black dragon babies is a morally unambiguous decision, in the direction of "evil." Others believe it's a morally unambiguous decision, in the direction of "neutral at worst."

If you can find anyone alive who thinks it's a morally ambiguous decision*, I'll give you a nickel.**

*Morally ambiguous; "It would be correct to make them stop existing but it's unwise because the mother dragon will come after you" doesn't qualify.
**Minus shipping and handling charges.

Ghost Nappa

2013-10-04, 10:18 AM

Why not? Again, is the DM required to ensure that PCs only encounter fully mature creatures? I should think a world where you only encounter full adult specimens with treasure hoards would be less plausible than a world where dragons have a full life cycle. A life cycle in which they represent a *potential* threat to adventurers at all stages. It does not follow that , just because the creature presents a threat, the adventurers must therefore engage it in combat. Perhaps it is better to avoid it. Or perhaps it is better to bargain with it.

The real problem to me is not the fact that D&D models immature dragons, but that the D&D system rewards combat over diplomacy or avoidance.

To me, the acme of skill is to accomplish the mission with a minimum of hassle. In the real world, any unnecessary combat is to be avoided because even if you win you are taking wounds and resources that you won't have for later. Also setting off alarms and causing noise which will draw even more attention to what you are doing. D&D teaches the opposite lesson -- because D&D rewards combat, most parties participate in combat even when it isn't strictly necessary, rolling through the dungeon like some predator looking for something to kill -- except the "food" isn't nutrition, but XP and wealth.

To my mind, many of the problems you bring up would be solved if the party viewed every combat encounter as "a hassle to be avoided" rather than "opportunity to for XP and loot".

This could be done by eliminating or greatly reducing the rewards for successful combat while greatly increasing the rewards for completing the quest. If I were DM I would prefer to give one big award for accomplishing the mission which would be equal to winning every combat encounter in the dungeon. When people can get the same or better reward without fighting as they can with, they will do all they can to avoid combat encounters as unnecessary risk. It's only when the rewards of combat far exceed the penalties that adventuring parties start treating every roving monster encounter as a collection of uncollected XP and loot with a stat block attached.

Bolded emphasis mine. The game has combat as a significant aspect of the game and thus tunnels most of it's rewards into it. While Diplomacy is possible and encouraged, the combat system is far more fleshed out than Dilpomacy will ever be. This brings in mind sets specifically towards fighting which are a major contributing factor of indiscriminate murder and conflict in campaigns.

Theoboldi

2013-10-04, 10:20 AM

You know...

Rich (and I, et al) believe killing black dragon babies is a morally unambiguous decision, in the direction of "evil." Others believe it's a morally unambiguous decision, in the direction of "neutral at worst."

If you can find anyone alive who thinks it's a morally ambiguous decision*, I'll give you a nickel.**

*Morally ambiguous; "It would be correct to make them stop existing but it's unwise because the mother dragon will come after you" doesn't qualify.
**Minus shipping and handling charges.

Doesn't the fact that some people believe it's evil and some people believe it's okay already pretty much mean that opinions on it are split, thus it is ambiguous? It's not like people have to agree that an issue is ambiguous for it to be so. Or is this some weird joke that I'm not getting yet again?

Kish

2013-10-04, 10:22 AM

Doesn't the fact that some people believe it's evil and some people believe it's okay already pretty much mean that opinions on it are split, thus it is ambiguous? It's not like people have to agree that an issue is ambiguous for it to be so. Or is this some weird joke that I'm not getting yet again?
There is no joke. I think your definition of ambiguous is wrong and would make every moral judgment ever an ambiguous one. (Never mind black dragon babies, is any murder wrong? Generally, there's at least one person--the murderer--who would say "no.")

Theoboldi

2013-10-04, 10:24 AM

There is no joke. I think your definition of ambiguous is wrong and would make every moral judgment ever an ambiguous one. (Never mind black dragon babies, is any murder wrong? Generally, there's at least one person--the murderer--who would say "no.")

Well, what is your definition of ambiguous, then?

Kish

2013-10-04, 10:28 AM

Something that makes at least one person (ideally, a lot of people) go, "Uh...I don't know what the right thing to do here is."

Coat

2013-10-04, 10:32 AM

I would venture that no one ever learned anything worth learning from an alien race which was designed to be sufficiently evil that they could and should be slaughtered on sight without hesitation. That is not an "strange" species in any worthwhile way, and to what extent "part of the appeal of fantasy" is being able to tangle with such walking targets without engaging one's higher brain functions, fantasy in general is poorer for it.

I have. In Kerberos's 'Sword of the Stars' 4X space strategy game, the Zuul. The Zuul are both extremely evil, and extremely dangerous. They were created to be both, deliberately, by their in-game creators, the Suul'ka.

What I have learnt from this is that to create an intelligent race that is incapable of anything but creating and enduring suffering is probably the greatest crime imaginable, and that an 'always evil' race, more than anything else, is a victim of its creator.

Both these points have profoundly changed the way I think about Artificial Intelligence, and are not unimportant.

Slightly more on topic, with the right players (i.e. players capable of responding to a challenge with something other than fire and the sword), I think a giant infant/infant giant rampaging in the countryside could be fun. I mean, how would you control something like that without hurting it? How do you find, and warm, that much milk? How do you change it's nappy?!

Why introduce an infant/juvenile of a sentient species as a threat, if you're not doing it to explore the moral questions that come with it? There's plenty of level-appropriate threats without baby-killing for fun. Dragons are famous for their low birth rate - not having any infants in the chamber is very plausible.

Theoboldi

2013-10-04, 10:33 AM

Something that makes at least one person (ideally, a lot of people) go, "Uh...I don't know what the right thing to do here is."

Well, I don't know what the right thing to do is on this topic. Even after reading arguments from both sides. Does that mean it is ambigious, according your rules (which I don't agree with, but I don't want to get into an argument about semantics, so let's just agree to disagree.)?

SavageWombat

2013-10-04, 10:33 AM

Something that makes at least one person (ideally, a lot of people) go, "Uh...I don't know what the right thing to do here is."

OK, a nest of black dragon babies are tied to a railroad track, and you're standing by the switch as the train full of goblin accountants heads for it ...

The Giant

2013-10-04, 10:34 AM

If dragons that hatch have fully formed brains (and vices), and are neither innocent, nor helpless, as well as completely sovereign, then they are simply not "babies" at all and the taboo does not apply to them.

Agreed, which is why they should not exist in our fantasies. Because the taboo is so critically important that we cannot permit any opening to form. That we are even sitting here having a discussion about when it is or is not OK to kill babies is kind of disgusting. That this hobby led to this conversation is a problem. And that we hand a game that is capable of leading to a conversation that says, "Sometimes, it's OK to kill a baby," to a twelve-year-old is just not acceptable to me.

Basically, your freedom to imagine whatever you want about dragons doesn't matter to me at all. It's not something I am going to spend even one moment defending. Because you'll always be able to make up whatever stuff you want at your gaming table, just like right now you can depict rape or incest or cannibalism at your gaming table and I can't stop you. I'm worried about the hobby as a whole and the general population playing it. I would rather force you to have to invent your own stats if you want to go kill dragon hatchlings than have a 7th-grader open up the encounter table, roll dice, and say, "Oh, looks like you're fighting a dragon hatchling, roll initiative," without ever questioning why they would fight a newborn or whether or not it's OK.

What's in the manuals influences the way the game is played, and it doesn't NEED to be played this way—and 99.999% of the time, there is no analysis, no deep exploration of the theme of alien intelligence, just a baby dragon, a battle mat, and some dice.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 10:36 AM

Why introduce an infant/juvenile of a sentient species as a threat, if you're not doing it to explore the moral questions that come with it?

Or, to put it another way: Since most players are not willing to explore the moral questions, why does an infant/juvenile of a sentient species need to be introduced?

Kish

2013-10-04, 10:38 AM

Well, I don't know what the right thing to do is on this topic. Even after reading arguments from both sides. Does that mean it is ambigious, according your rules (which I don't agree with, but I don't want to get into an argument about semantics, so let's just agree to disagree.)?
You don't know whether it's morally acceptable to kill black dragon babies?

Then yes. You could have just said, "I find it morally ambiguous, give me a nickel."

snikrept

2013-10-04, 10:41 AM

Maybe I should have made clear - 'could converse with me' is part of what makes the created creature have human values and therefore makes inventing a situation to kill it's babies wrong. I also intended it to be an ability, clearly stated, to converse at some point in it's life cycle. I haven't spoken to an awful lot of people but I have the ability to (with a translator if needed).
While I think I get what you're saying, this wording is still pinging my discomfort meter.

Correct me if wrong, but I think what you are saying is the Xenomorphs in Aliens aren't demonstrated by the creators of those films to be sapient at all?

This is a fair point; maybe they aren't. But if they are sapient, IMO their ability or inability to speak human languages at any stage of lifecycle is not relevant to the decision by the soldiers to destroy them. Meanwhile their slavering hunger for human flesh, IMO, is.

Theoboldi

2013-10-04, 10:44 AM

You don't know whether it's morally acceptable to kill black dragon babies?

Then yes. You could have just said, "I find it morally ambiguous, give me a nickel."

You did not need to make this thinly veiled insult. Yes, I believe that it is morally neutral, if only because they can be an actual threat to the average, low-level adventurer. This is not what even the Giant argued. The questions was whether it is okay for these creatures to be okay to kill. However, you have answered my question, and that's all I wanted. I'll not discuss this any further with you.

Tryfan

2013-10-04, 10:45 AM

Why not? Again, is the DM required to ensure that PCs only encounter fully mature creatures? I should think a world where you only encounter full adult specimens with treasure hoards would be less plausible than a world where dragons have a full life cycle. A life cycle in which they represent a *potential* threat to adventurers at all stages. It does not follow that , just because the creature presents a threat, the adventurers must therefore engage it in combat. Perhaps it is better to avoid it. Or perhaps it is better to bargain with it.

If you're fine with that then ok, but if you want that level of 'realism' then would you want your DM to say 'you meet the evil guy's 8 year old daughter' when you're sneaking around his house? As she's able to scream and raise the alarm she's a threat. Do you want to be told about the elven children in the house you just fireballed because a violent criminal gang meets there?

Or even, as the giant has said in the past, killing every member of a goblin tribe because they might be a threat in the future. Only say that it's ok to have very young dragons about with the potential for killing them if you're happy with your DM doing the above to you as well, but I would sacrifice realism every time. Not because I dislike morally ambiguous situations but because that is not the game I want to play.

Snikrept

Correct me if wrong, but I think what you are saying is the Xenomorphs in Aliens aren't demonstrated by the creators of those films to be sapient at all?

This is a fair point; maybe they aren't. But if they are sapient, IMO their ability or inability to speak human languages at any stage of lifecycle is not relevant to the decision by the soldiers to destroy them. Meanwhile their slavering hunger for human flesh, IMO, is.

Not quite, I'm saying the ability to speak is part of them that shows they were created with human values in mind, being able to converse is an important part of being able to relate to a creature, along with showing greed (very human) and all the other positive/negative traits that are involved with having an alignment.

My main point was we don't project human values on d&d dragons, they are created with some of those values built in which is why killing their children feels wrong. In contrast the Xenomorphs aren't and are deliberately created so no human, good or evil, can interact with them beyond shooting them.

fishguy

2013-10-04, 10:45 AM

Thanks for your perspective on this Rich. It has actually been helpful for me in the design of a possible upcoming encounter in a campaign I am DMing.

I try to create a story with a fair degree of versimilitude (in the framework of a fantasy world! not always an easy task) so I try to have unintended consequences of actions, timeline contingent occurences and missed opportunities, feasible food webs and ecosystems supporting populations of monsters, resource scarcity and the nominal need to make sure that basic necessities are available.

I have a tribe of orcs (a handful of which have levels) which make their living by banditry and mining (with some goblin slaves) and I was stuck on what to do about the younglings and non-combatants. While I like to give my players tough dilemmas with no clear correct choices something wasn't sitting well when I was gaming out in my head what would happen if the party came upon the creche and had to deal with the orc young.

Your perspective... how realism can (and should) take a back seat to creating a positive, enjoyable and morally safe story for my players seems so simple in retrospect. Not sure why I didn't see it myself. Now I will just not have the "whole" tribe in the mines... there is no need for it for the story.

Thanks!

Edit: *realism instead of reality

FlawedParadigm

2013-10-04, 10:45 AM

What I saw was a teenager trying to defend himself against and then being murdered by armed home invaders.

So basically the "reality ensues" version of the Home Alone films?

Kish

2013-10-04, 10:52 AM

You did not need to make this thinly veiled insult.
No insult was actually intended. You're just the first person I've ever encountered who does find it ambiguous (although see below), which, for the record, I find far preferable to finding it unambiguous in the direction of "yes it's okay."

Yes, I believe that it is morally neutral, if only because they can be an actual threat to the average, low-level adventurer.

...Neutral is not the same as ambiguous and I explicitly said that "you shouldn't doing it for practical reasons" wasn't what I was asking about.

So, your position is actually not that it's ambiguous, but that it's morally okay but may be impractical?

I'll not discuss this any further with you.
Have fun.

Amphiox

2013-10-04, 10:55 AM

You don't even need those, there's only a chance of running into a hatchling dragon if the DM says there is a chance of running into one - and what kind of DM puts a baby human in the tavern you've just burnt down? or puts random elven children into the area you're fighting in and rolls for collaterol damage?

At the end of the day this is a made up world and there is no need to make up situations that require child murder. The only place for kids is in situations like being rescued from the BBEG (who for some reason doesn't kill them) or in scenes where there is no chance of fighting and if fighting does break out they instantly get teleported away by their nanny or something.

I think it would be interesting for DMs to put innocent bystanders into situations where it is within reason and likelihood that innocent bystanders could be present. Handwaving away the possibility of collateral damage on innocents when one engages in combat recklessly to me is just as problematic as giving implying that sentient infants are legitimate targets.

It is more than possible that children or babies be found in taverns. Perhaps players should be reminded of such possibilities before they carelessly unleash the fireballs in a populated area.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 10:55 AM

Agreed, which is why they should not exist in our fantasies. Because the taboo is so critically important that we cannot permit any opening to form. That we are even sitting here having a discussion about when it is or is not OK to kill babies is kind of disgusting. That this hobby led to this conversation is a problem. And that we hand a game that is capable of leading to a conversation that says, "Sometimes, it's OK to kill a baby," to a twelve-year-old is just not acceptable to me.

Basically, your freedom to imagine whatever you want about dragons doesn't matter to me at all. It's not something I am going to spend even one moment defending. Because you'll always be able to make up whatever stuff you want at your gaming table, just like right now you can depict rape or incest or cannibalism at your gaming table and I can't stop you. I'm worried about the hobby as a whole and the general population playing it. I would rather force you to have to invent your own stats if you want to go kill dragon hatchlings than have a 7th-grader open up the encounter table, roll dice, and say, "Oh, looks like you're fighting a dragon hatchling, roll initiative," without ever questioning why they would fight a newborn or whether or not it's OK.

While your passion is admirable (especially since it is a passion for something as sacrosanct as the taboo not to hurt children), I still feel you are missing the point. And just because you implicitly associated me with rape and cannibal-play, I feel the need to try to explain my position one more time. You don't have to reply to it if you don't want to of course, as you have made your point clearly and eloquently.

There are two basic strategies of trying to make sense of the world, lumping and splitting. On the topic of recently hatched dragons you lump, I split. You notice the similarity between a dragon hatchling and a baby of being "of very young age" (despite the fact that dragons (might) spend a lot of mentally advanced time within their egg, learning and scheming) and thus lump them together in the baby category. You reduce the definition of "baby" to its age, thus missing the cause of the taboo, and with it the duty of protecting it at all costs. You further state that anyone who "splits", claiming that a dragon hatchling is completely unlike a human child in every pertinent way, is approaching (or has reached) morally reprehensible territory as he is furthering "child murder play".
I split. I am willing to imagine an intelligent creature without a childhood. And I am willing to respect other gamers enough to assume that they can too. That they get the essential difference between a baby and a dragon hatchling.

Rape is always bad. Infanticide is always bad. Both in fact are so horrifying that I would not be able to play a make-belief game where fellow players engage in them. But slaying dragon hatchlings is not child murder, nor does it necessarily carry the associations of it.

You lump, and since you do you passionately and righteously dislike dragon hatchling killing. That is understandable. But your epistemological lumping is not a strength, and branding those who view it differently as almost morally bankrupt is not fair.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 10:58 AM

Amphiox

2013-10-04, 11:03 AM

When it comes down to it, all sapient/sentient creatures in fantasy are modelled after humans. Because humans are the only real life beings definitively known to be sapient/sentient.

These sapient aliens in fiction are *proxies* for human beings. That is why killing their babies is problematic, and that is why trying to come up with justifications like "they're born with adult minds" or what not is problematic. It is only a small step from that to going "those people in the other valley over there, even their babies are born evil and dangerous, so we can kill them without remorse".

And I will also point out that the problem with killing human babies has nothing to do with their physical dependency and helplessness, but rather their innocence and inexperience.

An infant by definition does not have life experience, no matter how physically imposing it might be or how intellectually capable it might be at the moment of birth.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 11:04 AM

While your passion is admirable (especially since it is a passion for something as sacrosanct as the taboo not to hurt children), I still feel you are missing the point. And just because you implicitly associated me with rape and cannibal-play, I feel the need to try to explain my position one more time.

It was not in any way my intention to say that you were morally bankrupt for holding those views about dragon hatchlings, nor to imply that I thought you personally depicted rape or cannibalism in your games. I apologize if I lead you or anyone to believe that I thought that of you.

NerdyKris

2013-10-04, 11:09 AM

malloyd

2013-10-04, 11:17 AM

Or, to put it another way: Since most players are not willing to explore the moral questions, why does an infant/juvenile of a sentient species need to be introduced?

But letting them kill adult sentient things without considering the morality of it isn't a problem?

This is particularly ambiguous in the case of "young adult" since, well, it's probably an appropriate label for, say, most enemy soldiers. Deciding if or when killing is tolerable should *always* be a hard ethical question in reality, condemning entertainment for not treating it as one in some situations but not others strikes me as illogical. Not that most people's reactions to killing babies isn't based in deep emotional programming rather than logic.

snikrept

2013-10-04, 11:21 AM

The Giant

2013-10-04, 11:21 AM

But letting them kill adult sentient things without considering the morality of it isn't a problem?

This is particularly ambiguous in the case of "young adult" since, well, it's probably an appropriate label for, say, most enemy soldiers. Deciding if or when killing is tolerable should *always* be a hard ethical question in reality, condemning entertainment for not treating it as one in some situations but not others strikes me as illogical. Not that most people's reactions to killing babies isn't based in deep emotional programming rather than logic.

Who said I don't have issues with that, too? One fight at a time.

pendell

2013-10-04, 11:26 AM

I would rather force you to have to invent your own stats if you want to go kill dragon hatchlings than have a 7th-grader open up the encounter table, roll dice, and say, "Oh, looks like you're fighting a dragon hatchling, roll initiative," without ever questioning why they would fight a newborn or whether or not it's OK.

That's a bit of information I didn't have. I can imagine putting all stages of a dragon in the monster manual but why is it in the encounter table? For that matter, a dragon shouldn't even be IN the random encounter table, I should think.

By default in a wargame, your hostile encounters should be hostile military or animals. Putting a baby dragon in the encounter table makes about as much sense as putting in a baby goblin. Why is it necessary?

If you're fine with that then ok, but if you want that level of 'realism' then would you want your DM to say 'you meet the evil guy's 8 year old daughter' when you're sneaking around his house? As she's able to scream and raise the alarm she's a threat. Do you want to be told about the elven children in the house you just fireballed because a violent criminal gang meets there?

Or even, as the giant has said in the past, killing every member of a goblin tribe because they might be a threat in the future. Only say that it's ok to have very young dragons about with the potential for killing them if you're happy with your DM doing the above to you as well, but I would sacrifice realism every time. Not because I dislike morally ambiguous situations but because that is not the game I want to play.

Honestly? I would. That IS the game I want to play, because those are the kinds of decisions you have to make in military encounters in the real world, especially in counterinsurgency environments.

Isn't there a quote floating around here to the effect that fantasy only has value if it reflects the real world, anything else is petty escapism?

You mention the 8-year-old elven child. The real-world equivalent occurred in Iraq (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bravo_Two_Zero). This SAS patrol was discovered by a shepherd boy. They chose to flee rather than silence the child. This meant the entire patrol was killed or captured save for one survivor, and of course their mission was a failure.

You mention the people in the house that was fireballed. One real world equivalent is the SF Hydro (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Hydro). During WWII, the Germans moved a shipment of heavy water via a ferry. Rather than risk letting the Nazis have atomic weapons, the ferry was sunk in the middle of the lake. There were 52 people , civilians, women and children (I think)on that ferry, but the commandoes didn't have the option of warning or evacuating them without also tipping off the Nazis.

So the cold-blooded decision was made to sacrifice those lives in order to inhibit the Nazi atomic weapons program. A sacrifice which, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight and postwar review, may have been completely unnecessary.

We know that now. We didn't know that then.

D&D is a wargame. And if you're going to make a wargame for 7th-graders, kids who may very well be signing up for the army themselves in a few years, then it is imperative that it give them a view of the wars they may be fighting as they really are. NOT a nice clean environment where all the bad guys where clearly identifiable uniforms. NOT an environment where all the bad guys helpfully have little red icons floating above them. NOT a world where you respawn or roll up a new character.

It's an environment where evil enemies will gladly use your own decency against you.

It's an environment where doing the good thing, and the moral thing in peace time, is going to get you and your friends killed.

It's an environment where you're going to be miserable much of the time, do only a few things you're really proud of, and are likely to do a fair number of things you're ashamed of.

Which is why most vets of my grandfather's age don't like to talk about their war experiences. At ALL.

Any person who is either considering joining the military, may join it in a few years, or (heaven forbid) is voting on whether his nation is going to go to war needs to be painfully aware of this reality. And if we shield them from that reality, allow them to live in Elan world, where combat is glorious and people fall over the second they are shot with guns, we do them no favors.

I think it is better to be thinking about it and wrestling with these issues BEFORE they're off in Afghanistan or some place with a rifle. So yes. I think 7th graders should be confronted with moral dilemmas to which there is no easy answer, so that when they confront those issues in real life they are in a better position to deal with them.

If a 7th grader encountering an elven child in a campaign makes the adult just a tiny bit more prepared to deal with the situation when they encounter a real human child in a real houseclearing operation, I consider that well spent. Certainly they are in a better position than if all their upbringing to this point has carefully protected them from even considering the possibility.

This is particularly ambiguous in the case of "young adult" since, well, it's probably an appropriate label for, say, most enemy soldiers.

In the real world, the enlistment age is 17. Most human soldiers ARE young adults. They aren't old enough to drink or to vote or to finish college, but they're old enough to kill. And in places like Africa or Southeast Asia, children are conscripted at very young ages. Just because you don't think kids should be shooting at you doesn't mean they can't shoot at you, and you're just as dead from an AK fired by a 13 year old as by a 30 year old.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Amphiox

2013-10-04, 11:27 AM

Now consider this hypothetical hatchling born with a fully adult mind. Indistinguishable mentally from an adult.

What narrative purpose is there to call such a thing a hatchling? What difference is there in gameplay between this infant and an adult of relatively low power? What then is the point of including this character in the game/story specifically as a hatchling?

The Giant

2013-10-04, 11:27 AM

Hm. I think the weight and strength of this position isn't the bit about pretending to fight Recently Created dragons. I think it is the calling into question of the decision, with the prominent placement of combat statblocks, by the writers of the rulebooks to emphasize deadly force against sapients as the typical and accepted solution to one's characters' problems. Handing to a preteen a game that says "usually, it's OK to kill" is the issue, perhaps. As you say, the game can depict all sorts of foul murders on the battlemat. Maybe there shouldn't be statblocks for any sapient creature.

On the other hand, if one is OK with a game that encourages preteens to pretend to kill sapients freely, I respectfully don't agree that the size or age of the sapient being pretend-killed is the line in the sand before outrage happens.

Look, this is the argument that came up today, so I'm making it. Do I also feel like D&D is heading in the wrong direction with regards to using violence to solve all conflicts? Yes. Is that a bigger, more difficult, and less likely to succeed argument? Also yes. Do I also have less ground to stand on with that topic before being a hypocrite because I make my living depicting violent D&D-type action? Oh, hell yes.

Fish

2013-10-04, 11:27 AM

Sympathy to the young is an important part of our attitude toward all higher life on the planet. When we see a nature program depict a pod of orcas separating a whale calf from its mother so they can eviscerate it and eat its tongue (leaving the remainder of the dead whale to rot, uneaten, on the sea floor) we are sympathetic. It's what humans do. We see the whale mother plaintively nudging the carcass in an oily, bloody patch of ocean, and we feel sorry — even sick. Or the wolves relentlessly pursuing the baby bison, or the weasel that eats the eggs of a nesting bird. Sometimes higher life forms even form attachments to other baby animals; just check YouTube for a daily dose of bulldogs who have adopted a squirrel, a monkey with a pet puppy, cats playing with a family hedgehog, and so on. I am alive today because the family Newfoundland dog pulled me out of the ocean.

So I agree it is inappropriate to encourage one to think, "Wicked! Check out this infanticide!" Especially when the player is then rewarded with gold, magic treasure, or XP. The designers did do that, and I have to ask, "What the hell is wrong with them!? You can't expect players to explore moral quandaries you yourself did not examine!" Such a place does not look anything like the world we know.

The real world and the fantasy world differ greatly, for no good reason. In the real world, we can take any baby apex predator and train it, befriend it, nourish it, study it, and even appreciate it. Some can be domesticated; some can only be tamed. In the fantasy world, such beings might be Evil for no other reason than The Designers Said So, regardless what humans might do to influence it.

It would have been so easy for the designers to say, "This is the stat block for a little bitty adult dragon, and this is the stat block for a great big honkin' menace." They didn't. Instead, they named the extreme ends "hatchling" and "ancient wyrm." What they should have created was a system whereby Evil was learned and cultural, rather than a biologically mandated convenience. They didn't do that either.

Me, I play GURPS. There's no XP for murder in that system.

Tryfan

2013-10-04, 11:28 AM

To chuck something else in this reminds me of a scene in the latest Robin Hood movie (the one with Russell Crowe) where Robin is attacked by a band of children. They were clearly a threat to him as they managed to knock him out and he couldn't have known they didn't intend to kill him - they also knew exactly what they were doing.

However the film producers didn't have a long fight scene with them or killing/ injuring any of them because a) it would have put him into to the evil bin forever in the minds of the audience and b) it would be a deeply unpleasent scene. Note that this is in a setting where he can shoot as many French or Sheriff's men as he likes and will be applauded for it.

The fact they are a threat etc. is irrelevent in this case, no DM would create a scene like that because the players going 'kill them all' would be unaaceptable. Why then is it acceptable to do the same with dragons?

Storm_Of_Snow

2013-10-04, 11:34 AM

Sir_Leorik

2013-10-04, 11:46 AM

While the 3.5 MM didn't publish a full statblock for them- it did provide rules for "downsizing" a giant's statblock all the way down to very young and 2 sizes smaller than an adult.

Did it really? Ugh. That's just awful. Who thought that was a good idea?

I think it dates all the way back to G1: Steadding of the Hill Giant Chieftain. There's an encounter where the PCs invading the Steadding encounter a group of juvenile Hill Giants. In the encounter text, EGG suggests that if the PCs kill the juveniles, they might be able to use their clothing and some heavy padding to disguise themselves as Juvenile Hill Giants, in order to sneak around the Steadding. There are also unarmed female Hill Giants in various locations in the Steadding, who generally cower or run away.

In hindsight, the G series of modules is pretty morally questionable. While the Giants are raiding human settlements, the only solution the module offers to the problem is genocide.

Sir_Leorik

2013-10-04, 11:53 AM

There are stats even for gods, if this means something.

I'm glad the Lady of Pain isn't statted. :smallcool:

The Lady of Pain and the Dark Powers of Ravenloft have lucked out, by never having been given stats since their first appearances in 2E. The Sorcerer-Kings of Dark Sun, most of the Darklords in Ravenloft, most of the D&D gods, the Demon Princes, the Archdevils, Angels and lots of powerful Elementals have not been so lucky. "If it has stats we can kill it!" is a motto of a lot of players. Some never think to ask "Just because it has stats, does that mean we should be trying to kill it?"

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 11:55 AM

Aside from dragons, I can only think of one creature that's been statted out in a large number of ages, from basically newborn, to ancient: the Faerun monster called the Phaerimm (3.5 version, at least).

http://www.wizards.com/dnd/images/mof_gallery/MonFaePG70.jpg

They're a lot like slaad or super-intelligent spellcasting Xenomorphs, in their habit of laying eggs in people.

UnicornBandit

2013-10-04, 12:02 PM

To be clear: This is not some conversation about what anyone thinks should be done should we, the real humans in the real world, encounter real alien sapients. This is a conversation about what we think should be done when we, the real humans in the real world, sit down to our dining room table with our dice and our books and tell each other stories about our pretend humans meeting pretend dragons. We're not saying don't kill them if they're a threat to you; we're saying stop pretending to be in situations where a baby is a threat to you.

I appreciate this point, and I feel this is the right way to think about works of fantasy. (Also, love the strip btw.) I'll try to respond in the framework of why we imagine things.

Killable baby dragons are a side effect of trying to imagine a truly terrifying monster. In OoTS, dragons care for their young. I can enjoy that version of dragons. In my own D&D games, dragons are giant, intelligent reptiles. Reptiles lay eggs and forget about them.

Much of what makes us human and able to be friends with non-human things comes from being mammals. I can be friends with my cat because we've both had mothers. He likes sitting on my lap and I like petting him because we both like physical contact. I don't think reptiles have any of that.

A creature that does not love its young, and is without any of the social instincts we have, becomes more terrifying rather than more sympathetic by being intelligent. Imagining terrifying things is something many people enjoy doing. When playing D&D, many people enjoy imagining terrifying things, and then imagining killing them.

If pushed I don't know that I could defend the practice any better than I defend playing GTA V though. :) It's not morally edifying, but I have to admit I like it.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 12:03 PM

The Giant

2013-10-04, 12:04 PM

Isn't there a quote floating around here to the effect that fantasy only has value if it reflects the real world, anything else is petty escapism?

Much like how I engage with D&D itself, I am much more interested in talking about how the world should be than how it is.

Fish

2013-10-04, 12:08 PM

There are two basic strategies of trying to make sense of the world, lumping and splitting. ... I am willing to imagine an intelligent creature without a childhood.

...You lump, and since you do you passionately and righteously dislike dragon hatchling killing. That is understandable. But your epistemological lumping is not a strength...
I am also willing to posit an intelligent alien form of life without a childhood, if the author asks me to. If the author also says, "And the name for this not-child is 'young dragon,'" that's when I start to balk. "If it is not a child," I ask, "why does the author emphasize its youth with words like 'young' and 'baby' and 'hatchling?' What is the author trying to say? Why the linguistic contortions? Where are we going with this? Ah, the author is trying to make infanticide palatable, that's why." You see, I can entertain the idea, but I never stop analyzing the author.

Suppose you read a story about a female who looked and acted like a full-grown woman, but was only 10 years old. Would you not start wondering, "Where is the author going with this? Is he trying to justify a sex scene with this character, who in Earth-human terms is clearly underage and off-limits?" You would be right to wonder why the author has invented a fantasy of that kind. And if that author did that in every book you would start to wonder if he was damaged somehow.

Personally, I do not consider "splitting," as you call it, a strength either. It is the first step on the path to They Are Other By Definition, and giving yourself the semantic cover to will away your moral convictions.

snikrept

2013-10-04, 12:08 PM

Look, this is the argument that came up today, so I'm making it. Do I also feel like D&D is heading in the wrong direction with regards to using violence to solve all conflicts? Yes. Is that a bigger, more difficult, and less likely to succeed argument? Also yes. Do I also have less ground to stand on with that topic before being a hypocrite because I make my living depicting violent D&D-type action? Oh, hell yes.
Well said.

I guess the satiric argument I was attempting and failing was this: Objecting to the pretend-killing young creatures and drawing that line merely because they are young appears, even though it might not be, to be implicit acceptance of pretend-killing all the old ones.

Object to pretend-killing helpless creatures, or noncombatant creatures, or creatures who have no agency, and you have my agreement. Object based on age alone and it seems awfully strange to me. The latter thing is easy to put in the statblock; the former things are all roleplaying items and no fault of the rules-writers (given, unless they specifically write "this creature has no agency and doesn't fight back" in the statblock!).

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 12:09 PM

Much of what makes us human and able to be friends with non-human things comes from being mammals. I can be friends with my cat because we've both had mothers. He likes sitting on my lap and I like petting him because we both like physical contact. I don't think reptiles have any of that.

Some reptiles reputedly like physical contact. I suspect a lot of snake or iguana owners would say that, at least.

And crocodile females make nests, and look after their young for at least a short time after hatching.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 12:18 PM

Isn't there a quote floating around here to the effect that fantasy only has value if it reflects the real world, anything else is petty escapism?
.

Yes, but in this case there is not really anything being taught to us.

How often in real life are you going to encounter a newborn that is massively stronger than an adult? What is the life lesson? Because the current lesson to having uber-powerful newborns is "sometimes it's ok to kill babys."

And that is something that teaches us nothing about real life.

In contrast, the quote you're mentioning has to do with a separate issue, in that there are "always evil" sapient creatures in DnD, which makes no sense because that doesn't exist in real life and teaches us that "things different than you can sometimes be auto-ok to kill", which is wrong teaching in terms of what fantasy should be teaching us.

If you ignore the lesson of "things can be always evil" and just kill things for fun and don't think about it.... well then it's just escapism, which is what The Giant said.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 12:21 PM

I am also willing to posit an intelligent alien form of life without a childhood, if the author asks me to. If the author also says, "And the name for this not-child is 'young dragon,'" that's when I start to balk. "If it is not a child," I ask, "why does the author emphasize its youth with words like 'young' and 'baby' and 'hatchling?'
Does a monster manual actually call the statted-out hatchlings babies? I don't play D&D, so I don't know. If it does, then I admit that this is an unfortunate choice of words.

There are otherwise no "linguistic contortions". "Young" is just a word describing relative age. It is very technical and there is nothing wrong with using it for the hatchling. Neither is hatchling misused, as it just says that the dragon recently hatched.

Personally, I do not consider "splitting," as you call it, a strength either. It is the first step on the path to They Are Other By Definition And Can Be Killed.
Splitting is the origin of all science, and lumping informed by splitting is its intermediate goal. The point is to notice relevant and essential differences and similarities instead of focusing on irrelevant and accidental ones. As far the child-killing taboo is concerned, the relevant causes are utter dependence, powerlessness, lack of reason and maturity and especially innocence. Not age. That was my point.

The narrative point of hatchling monsters could be the utterly alien concept of an intelligent creature without a childhood. It can be interesting to communicate with (or even simply think about) a creature that hatches from its egg with a mature sense of good and evil and a developed identity. You can believe that it is not, that is fine. But it is unfair to imply that a writer introducing such a creature has to have hidden desires to depict child-killing (as you did with your odd "10-year-old in an adult body to sanitize pedophilia" comparison).

Paseo H

2013-10-04, 12:28 PM

D&D is a wargame. And if you're going to make a wargame for 7th-graders, kids who may very well be signing up for the army themselves in a few years, then it is imperative that it give them a view of the wars they may be fighting as they really are. NOT a nice clean environment where all the bad guys where clearly identifiable uniforms. NOT an environment where all the bad guys helpfully have little red icons floating above them. NOT a world where you respawn or roll up a new character.

It's an environment where evil enemies will gladly use your own decency against you.

It's an environment where doing the good thing, and the moral thing in peace time, is going to get you and your friends killed.

It's an environment where you're going to be miserable much of the time, do only a few things you're really proud of, and are likely to do a fair number of things you're ashamed of.

Which is why most vets of my grandfather's age don't like to talk about their war experiences. At ALL.

Agreed. This is one reason D&D should just do away with alignments altogether...there's no guarantee you'll ever get to maintain a good alignment.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 12:31 PM

But it is unfair to imply that a writer introducing such a creature has to have hidden desires to depict child-killing

No one is saying that the authors of D&D have a hidden desire to depict child-killing. What we are saying is that they ARE depicting child-killing, whether or not they intended it, and that they shouldn't be and don't need to be.

And since those same authors already took these things out of the current rulebooks because they agree and I mentioned that on Page 1, this is a more pointless argument than usual.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 12:33 PM

No one is saying that the authors of D&D have a hidden desire to depict child-killing. What we are saying is that they ARE depicting child-killing, whether or not they intended it, and that they shouldn't be and don't need to be.

And since those same authors already took these things out of the current rulebooks because they agree and I mentioned that on Page 1, this is a more pointless argument than usual.
Fish made that point. I was responding to Fish.

I am aware that your position is different.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 12:36 PM

~cut~.

DnD is a RP game, not a war game, and regardless of what happens in real life, the children killed in war do not fight back and certainly aren't equivalent to baby dragons. Even in war, no matter the circumstance, no one says "its was good that child died."

In contrast, killing a CR3 Black wyrmling dragon makes you say "good thing we killed it, lets loot its nest"

See the difference? In DnD, with baby dragons as a stat block with a defined alignment you are saying "its ok and good we killed baby dragons" in your real life example you say "it sucks that it happened."

If baby dragons are presented as a stat block then so should every other baby creature, but that sounds horrible doesnt it?

Paseo H

2013-10-04, 12:37 PM

As an aside, I must say I'm really enjoying this topic.

Nothing should ever be safe from deconstruction, and everything should be held up to pointed, constant scrutiny. It's the sign of a thinking reader.

Fish

2013-10-04, 12:38 PM

There are otherwise no "linguistic contortions". "Young" is just a word describing relative age.
I'm afraid you're mistaken. "Young" is tied not only to age but to development, ripening, exposure, experience. A young mountain range is unaffected by erosion; a young coconut has not mature flesh; a young wine has not developed its full flavor. This is because although your hypothetical creature is otherworldly, and is mature from the nanosecond of its creation, we are describing it with a word that was invented in a place where that is not possible. The only creatures who are instantly mature are bacteria and fungi.

Splitting is the origin of all science, and lumping informed by splitting is its intermediate goal. The point is to notice relevant and essential differences and similarities instead of focusing on irrelevant and accidental ones.
Exactly. If the only essential differences between a young and old dragon are size and power, then there is no need to distinguish by age. The designers chose age, unfortunately.

The narrative point of hatchling monsters could be the utterly alien concept of an intelligent creature without a childhood. It can be interesting to communicate with (or even simply think about) a creature that hatches from its egg with a mature sense of good and evil and a developed identity. You can believe that it is not, that is fine. But it is unfair to imply that a writer introducing such a creature has to have hidden desires to depict child-killing (as you did with your odd "10-year-old in an adult body to sanitize pedophilia" comparison).
A noble thought, but I insist I am right: the authors of D&D did NOT pose the questions you suggest. Nowhere in any D&D manual or module are you likely to find the ethical questions you ask — and I admit they are interesting. I would be fonder of D&D if it had such investigations. However, my "odd example" must stand: the D&D creators only, to the exclusion of any other possibility, only describe the hatchlings with one purpose; they only left instructions for dispatching the hatchlings and rewarding the players for having done so. Not conversation, not parlay, not communication, not philosophy, not alien viewpoint. Only killing — not that dragons are alone in being targeted for murder. Thus, I wonder "why must this be so?"

crayzz

2013-10-04, 12:39 PM

How often in real life are you going to encounter a newborn that is massively stronger than an adult?

Newborn? Not likely.

A large at risk teenager acting violent towards his or her small caretaker? It happens, and more often than you think.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 12:46 PM

I'm afraid you're mistaken. "Young" is tied not only to age but to development, ripening, exposure, experience. A young mountain range is unaffected by erosion; a young coconut has not mature flesh; a young wine has not developed its full flavor. This is because although your hypothetical creature is otherworldly, and is mature from the nanosecond of its creation, we are describing it with a word that was invented in a place where that is not possible. The only creatures who are instantly mature are bacteria and fungi.
I am not saying that a young dragon and an old dragon are the same. I am saying that youth in a dragon and youth in a human do not imply the same traits. The things that come along with youth in humans (I listed them before) rightfully bring forth the sacrosanct taboo against child-killing. Those same things are however not necessarily included in the descriptor "young". I eat young asparagus without killing babies, I can mine a young mountain range without killing babies, I can drink young wine without killing babies.
If a young dragon is in fact a baby univocally in the sense of human childhood, then killing dragon hatchlings is atrocious. That assumption however is not necessary.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 12:52 PM

A noble thought, but I insist I am right: the author did NOT pose the questions you suggest. Nowhere in any D&D manual or module are you likely to find the ethical questions you ask — and I admit they are interesting. I would be fonder of D&D if it had such investigations. However, my "odd example" must stand: the D&D creators only, to the exclusion of any other possibility, only describe the hatchlings with one purpose; they only left instructions for dispatching the hatchlings and rewarding the players for having done so. Not conversation, not parlay, not communication. Only killing.

To wit, the sum total of the content in the Monster Manual regarding the mental faculties of a newborn red dragon is that they have Intelligence 10, Wisdom 11, and Charisma 10. We have no idea what these things mean for the creature's mental state. What do they know? Do they need to be taught? Do they have magical ancestor knowledge? We don't know what they know or don't know when they come out of that egg. However, I could tell you in much greater detail how tough they are to kill.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 12:55 PM

Newborn? Not likely.

A large at risk teenager acting violent towards his or her small caretaker? It happens, and more often than you think.

But no one said "young adult" is wrong to have a stat block for...

we're specifically talking about murdering children.

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 12:55 PM

To wit, the sum total of the content in the Monster Manual regarding the mental faculties of a newborn red dragon is that they have Intelligence 10, Wisdom 11, and Charisma 10. We have no idea what these things mean for the creature's mental state. What do they know? Do they need to be taught? Do they have magical ancestor knowledge? We don't know what they know or don't know when they come out of that egg.

4e Draconomicon (book 1) is one of the few sources that do discuss this sort of thing- ancestor knowledge being a part of it, at least.

Though it may have copied some of it from the 3e and 2e Draconomicon books.

pendell

2013-10-04, 12:56 PM

A world where nobody ever has to pee at an inopportune time is far less plausible than either one, yet we all seem to have no trouble imagining it every session. There are lots of little ways in which we suspend our disbelief; why is the idea that there never happen to be hatchlings in the dragon's lair where they draw the line?

I didn't see this earlier, but it deserves an answer.

The need to be pee is not of great tactical or moral significance, and so it can be usefully abstracted out. It is a trifle.

The presence of young in a being's house/lair/dwelling is only a trifle if we're willing to rule out hostage situations, or civilians, or third parties. And their tactical contribution can only be ignored if they don't have the capability to harm the party in any way.

A baby dragon doesn't *have* to be a hostile encounter. Who says the only possible encounter with a dragon has to be an adult like Smaug?

In one of the early Endless Quest books -- revenge of the rainbow dragons -- you are presented with the opportunity to encounter a newly hatched baby dragon. Befriending that baby dragon allows you to befriend the mother, then later to enlist her and her relatives to overthrow the evil wizards who are the true enemies of the campaign.

If you encounter mom before encountering the baby, it's instant TPK. The rainbow dragons distrust humans, can't imagine why.

But if you play your cards right, the baby can be a mediator and bring peace where before there was only war.

Isn't that a more satisfying ending than a world where dragon hatchlings are absent? Where the only possible confrontation is between adult humans and adult dragons, with all the history behind them?

That's the great risk of a game. A game is not a morality tale with a predetermined ending. Instead, the players are allowed agency -- the ability to determine whether they are going to befriend the newly-born prince of the rainbow dragons, take the time to stop long enough to learn that's what they're dealing with, or whether they're going to simply treat it as a combat encounter.

And once they've made that decision, to take the consequences of that. Even if it means the campaign is now unwinnable and they are now facing a no-win confrontation with an enemy many times their power level.

And that's why baby dragons are useful. There's no moral dilemma, no question involved, when confronting a baby infant. And there's no real dilemma, no real question, when confronting a full grown adult dragon. But a baby dragon is not really one thing or the other, it doesn't fit into an easily categorized box, and therefore seems optimally made to make adventurers stop and think about what they're doing and why they're doing it.

Splitting is the origin of all science, and lumping informed by splitting is its intermediate goal. The point is to notice relevant and essential differences and similarities instead of focusing on irrelevant and accidental ones. As far the child-killing taboo is concerned, the relevant causes are utter dependence, powerlessness, lack of reason and maturity and especially innocence. Not age. That was my point.

Agreed. The taboo against killing baby humans in our world does not apply to baby mice or to newly-split bacteria or viruses. The taboo exists for a reason. This taboo doesn't apply at all to other creatures because the reason the taboo exists don't apply.

A baby dragon is a special case, because it doesn't exist in our world. To what extent does the taboo apply? To what extent is this creature helpless? To what extent does it know good from evil? To what extent is it responsible for it's actions? The game rulebooks give us general guidelines, but they don't tell us anything about the GM's particular world.

I don't know about the rest of you, but that sounds to me like an ideal case for adventurers to stop, take a deep breath, and think. Not just simply pick up the dice and roll for initiative. And any adventurer who does that, kill first and ask questions later, is going to be punished for it. That is, if we're going to model this anything like the real world at all.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 12:57 PM

To wit, the sum total of the content in the Monster Manual regarding the mental faculties of a newborn red dragon is that they have Intelligence 10, Wisdom 11, and Charisma 10. We have no idea what these things mean for the creature's mental state. What do they know? Do they need to be taught? Do they have magical ancestor knowledge? We don't know what they know or don't know when they come out of that egg. However, I could tell you in much greater detail how tough they are to kill.

This I can wholeheartedly agree with. I have never played D&D, so maybe I am just not realizing what a monster manual is and how little it goes into the unique "what-ness" of each particular creature.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 01:04 PM

This I can wholeheartedly agree with. I have never played D&D, so maybe I am just not realizing what a monster manual is and how little it goes into the unique "what-ness" of each particular creature.

The answer is, "As little as possible." Usually two sentences at the start of the page, then half a page of combat stats, a picture, and a sample of tactics and it's on to the next one.

It is perhaps because I don't ever expect them to take the time to fully flesh out these creatures in a three-dimensional way that allows equal weight to noncombat encounters that I am willing to settle for just removing the problem. They're not going to do it right, so I would rather they not did it at all.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 01:04 PM

I didn't see this earlier, but it deserves an answer.

The need to be pee is not of great tactical or moral significance, and so it can be usefully abstracted out. It is a trifle.

The presence of young in a being's house/lair/dwelling is only a trifle if we're willing to rule out hostage situations, or civilians, or third parties. And their tactical contribution can only be ignored if they don't have the capability to harm the party in any way.

A baby dragon doesn't *have* to be a hostile encounter. Who says the only possible encounter with a dragon has to be an adult like Smaug?

But then, if we need a stat block for dragons because you might encounter them as babys or they can be good for hostage situations.... why don't we make stat blocks for human newborns?

The reason is because stat blocks are specifically constructed to be fought. You can easily have a baby dragon hostage without needing a statblock the same way any time a newborn enters a DnD campaign it usually doesn't have a statblock.

Edit: and we're only saying "they contribute in a meaningful way" because we said so. It doesnt change the fact that it's still baby killing and we're intentionally making it a-ok to kill babies. The correct solution is to not include them as a stat block, and if the the DM wants to make baby dragons kill people, well then he just makes them...

Fish

2013-10-04, 01:11 PM

Grim Portent

2013-10-04, 01:12 PM

This I can wholeheartedly agree with. I have never played D&D, so maybe I am just not realizing what a monster manual is and how little it goes into the unique "what-ness" of each particular creature.

Other than discussing where something lives and how it fights and organises it's military plus a small amount of ecological information it ignores the mindset of creatures for the most part. Generally it's left to assume that young members of a race have the same outlook as the older ones, so Orcs are implied to be evil from birth/young childhood for example. In the case of dragons this indicates that a black dragon fresh from the egg is inherently cruel and sadistic with a desire to torment and kill other species even though it's never even seen a single living thing.

Which seems a bit of a flawed way to portray a race that wasn't literally designed to be a living weapon.

crayzz

2013-10-04, 01:12 PM

But no one said "young adult" is wrong to have a stat block for

I don't consider a 13 year old to be a young adult. I don't consider teenagers at all young adults; if I or most societies did, they'd have the responsibilities of adults.

Further, many of these children are burdened by mental illness, reducing their actual level of mental development.

And actually, from what I remember, the young black dragon is question was a teenager; the mother seemed to imply that he was dating at least, and considered him to be old enough to be left alone for days at a time. Considering the parallels the Giant drew, teenager looks like the most accurate description to me.

Aside: there was some complaint over the term "young" in and of itself, although the existence of the phrase "young adult" neatly undercuts the argument made.

It doesnt change the fact that it's still baby killing and we're intentionally making it a-ok to kill babies.

The way that was done was by making the imaginary babies in question completely different from actual babies; the only similarity is their age. The actual reasons we find child killing repulsive isn't present, aside from the instinctive bit of squick.

"Baby" at this point only denotes an age; the normal implications of mental and physical competence don't apply.

The Giant

2013-10-04, 01:15 PM

This taboo doesn't apply at all to other creatures because the reason the taboo exists don't apply.

As a general rule, you should not assume that other people feel the same way as you about killing animals, baby or otherwise.

pendell

2013-10-04, 01:16 PM

But then, if we need a stat block for dragons because you might encounter them as babys or they can be good for hostage situations.... why don't we make stat blocks for human newborns?

The reason is because stat blocks are specifically constructed to be fought. You can easily have a baby dragon hostage without needing a statblock the same way any time a newborn enters a DnD campaign it usually doesn't have a statblock.

Yes. I've just been reading through the SRD.

Dragon (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/dragonTrue.htm)

and for comparison the entry for
goblin (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/goblin.htm).

The two things I learn from this are that dragons do not age the same way goblins do. A dragon is considered a young adult at 50 years of age (most goblins are dead by then, yes?) and may live to more than a thousands years old.

A newly hatched dragon has an INT of 8 and matures to an intelligence of 20 when it reaches 'Great Wyrm' stage.

A goblin, by contrast, has intelligence at 10 at all times.

I must think on this. Why does a dragon receive so much attention, including length , diameter of cone, and full stats at every age, when a goblin does not?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

crayzz

2013-10-04, 01:18 PM

As a general rule, you should not assume that other people feel the same way as you about killing animals, baby or otherwise.

Such an assumption was not made, from what I can tell.

The point is that the taboo is being applied arbitrarily, not that you or others feel the same way. Indeed, the point made depends on the fact that you don't.

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 01:19 PM

Why does a dragon receive so much attention, including length , diameter of cone, and full stats at every age, when a goblin does not? May be a legacy thing- when the designers decided to call the game "Dungeons and Dragons" dragons were earmarked to be covered in the most detail, and every edition since has taken the same approach.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 01:19 PM

I don't consider a 13 year old to be a young adult. I don't consider teenagers at all young adults; if I or most societies did, they'd have the responsibilities of adults.

Further, many of these children are burdened by mental illness, reducing their actual level of mental development.

And actually, from what I remember, the young black dragon is question was a teenager; the mother seemed to imply that he was dating at least, and considered him to be old enough to be left alone for days at a time. Considering the parallels the Giant drew, teenager looks like the most accurate description to me.

Aside: there was some complaint over the term "young" in and of itself, although the existence of the phrase "young adult" neatly undercuts the argument made.

The way that was done was by making the imaginary babies in question completely different from actual babies; the only similarity is their age. The actual reasons we find child killing repulsive isn't present, aside from the instinctive bit of squick.

"Baby" at this point only denotes an age; the normal implications of mental and physical competence don't apply.

A few things:
You don't consider a child a young adult, but thats a more modern perspective and its basically your opinion. Keep in mind there was a time when people got married as early as 14.

Second, the age of the young black dragon doesnt change the fact that having a stat block for young ages is pretty messed up. How come there are no stat changes for human teenagers? They have physical differences to adults obviously, and on top of that some PC's actually play them! In my current campaign there are two teenaged PC's.

The reason why there isn't a stat block is because killing younger people is taboo, and the only reason we make stat blocks for younger dragons is to justify killing young dragons. This is the same thing as deeming sentient races "always evil", its just a justification for in game racism and infanticide.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 01:25 PM

I must think on this. Why does a dragon receive so much attention, including length , diameter of cone, and full stats at every age, when a goblin does not?

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Brain P, I love that you add "respectfully" to the end of all your posts. It makes me think of you as this uber polite guy, even when we disagree.

Anyway. I think essentially what happened was, that since dragons are the big thing in DnD WotC thought it important to spend a lot of time detailing dragons (and this makes sense and is fine) and so they stated the younger dragon versions without thinking of the moral implications of making stats for children dragons.

Obviously they corrected this somewhat in 4E.

IMO, I think its awesome that they want to devote a lot of attention to detailing out dragons, it fleshes out the game and makes it exciting. Just that detailing shouldn't be "lets stat young versions" and instead should be "lets make more famous dragons, maybe a dragon society, detail interactions between dragons."

If you cant tell I like RP a bit more thn combat :D

Tingel

2013-10-04, 01:27 PM

Brain P, I love that you add "respectfully" to the end of all your posts. It makes me think of you as this uber polite guy, even when we disagree.
This aligns well with his avatar.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 01:28 PM

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 01:28 PM

This aligns well with his avatar.

Whats his avatar mean? Its two letters?

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 01:31 PM

Anyway. I think essentially what happened was, that since dragons are the big thing in DnD WotC thought it important to spend a lot of time detailing dragons (and this makes sense and is fine) and so they stated the younger dragon versions without thinking of the moral implications of making stats for children dragons.

Obviously they corrected this somewhat in 4E.

Yup- relegated hatchlings to the 4E Draconomicon books- which themselves went into much more detail about dragon psychology than even the 3E Draconomicon did.

It also had a lot more in the way of social challenges with respect to dragons- not just combat challenges.

And so forth.

snikrept

2013-10-04, 01:32 PM

The d20 (D&D open source) page on dragons:
http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/dragonTrue.htm

Note that it is wholly a tactical appraisal that reads like anti-dragon propaganda. All dragons are covetous, like sleeping on hoards of treasure, and here is how they fight. Great detail is given to the tactics of each species; almost none is given to the viewpoint or philosophy or culture of any.

Now I am envisioning a stat page for "humans" written from a dragon propagandist's point of view, with typical tactics and methods of dispatching them detailed.

What's important about humans? Well, they like to lump rocks together into castles and carry metal pointy sticks.

crayzz

2013-10-04, 01:33 PM

I tend to respond in this manner, but it has recently caused a lot of offense. If the same is true for you, please let me know.

You don't consider a child a young adult, but thats a more modern perspective and its basically your opinion.[1] Keep in mind there was a time when people got married as early as 14.[2]

Second, the age of the young black dragon doesnt change the fact that having a stat block for young ages is pretty messed up. How come there are no stat changes for human teenagers?[3] They have physical differences to adults obviously, and on top of that some PC's actually play them! In my current campaign there are two teenaged PC's.

The reason why there isn't a stat block is because killing younger people is taboo, and the only reason we make stat blocks for younger dragons is to justify killing young dragons. This is the same thing as deeming sentient races "always evil", its just a justification for in game racism and infanticide.[4]

1) If we're going to arbitrarily assign responsibilities and burdens by age rather than mental competence and experience, I'm just going to assert that killing two year olds is OK under the same circumstances that killing and adult is OK.

But then, I don't do that. I take into account the capabilities of the being in question.

2) Younger, actually. Sometimes as young as 6. This is actually an argument against just going by societal standards.

3) This seems to just be an argument for the status quo on the basis that it's the status quo. I have no problem with stating out teenagers. Or kids, for that matter. Babies seems pointless, since they're just little bundles of nerves and flesh.

4) No, those are two separate issues. "Always evil" gives us a justification to kill; stats don't. By that argument, the stats given to commoners are just justifications to kill them.

Tingel

2013-10-04, 01:36 PM

Whats his avatar mean? Its two letters?
It is one Chinese and Japanese character and means something along the lines of "courtesy" or "etiquette".

OblivionBlade

2013-10-04, 01:42 PM

IMO i'm an intense believer that if you get to a young creature early enough, you can change it's alignment 1-2 step in any direction. (Nurture over nature).

Incoherent speel:

For instance, after playing too much DDO (A dnd based mmo) i always wanted to have a character that could have a thraak hound (http://ddowiki.com/page/Thaarak_Hound) puppy as a familliar. (The fact I really like the idea of an aberant mage really sorta seals the envelope)

anyhow, if i were to come across a dragon egg clutch, i'd much more likely try and get them and raise them to be less evil, (Closer to TN) and maybe pay someone to cast permancy disguise self so they appear as a metallic dragon.

'Course, all my ramble means is that i think that there's never any reason to kill a child of any race, as you can always try and raise it to be less evil/chaotic/good/lawful.

(Edit) i have an idea for a campagn that involves a city full of high level lawful neutral civilized kobolds (Mostly sorcerer) and their metallic dragon guardian. You can sorta tell I don't give a damn about preset alignments for anything.

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 01:44 PM

IMO i'm an intense believer that if you get to a young creature early enough, you can change it's alignment 1-2 step in any direction. (Nurture over nature).
...

anyhow, if i were to come across a dragon egg clutch, i'd much more likely try and get them and raise them to be less evil, (Closer to TN) and maybe pay someone to cast permancy disguise self so they appear as a metallic dragon.

According to MM2, Crystal dragons feel that this is doable with white dragons- and white dragons that have been raised by crystal dragons tend to be less evil. How much less, is unclear though.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 01:44 PM

I tend to respond in this manner, but it has recently caused a lot of offense. If the same is true for you, please let me know.

1) If we're going to arbitrarily assign responsibilities and burdens by age rather than mental competence and experience, I'm just going to assert that killing two year olds is OK under the same circumstances that killing and adult is OK.

But then, I don't do that. I take into account the capabilities of the being in question.

2) Younger, actually. Sometimes as young as 6. This is actually an argument against just going by societal standards.

3) This seems to just be an argument for the status quo on the basis that it's the status quo. I have no problem with stating out teenagers. Or kids, for that matter. Babies seems pointless, since they're just little bundles of nerves and flesh.

4) No, those are two separate issues. "Always evil" gives us a justification to kill; stats don't. By that argument, the stats given to commoners are just justifications to kill them.

1) Ok, by mental competence we don't make stat blocks for less competent humans because of mental development. Happy?

4) I agree that their separate issues, but they are similar in the sense that having something there encourages it to be used. Having Always Evil on a goblin encourages it to be always evil, and having combat stats for other children encourages them to be present in combat. I bet you we'd see a lot more teenagers and children at less experience gaming tables if we stated out teenagers and children.

pendell

2013-10-04, 01:45 PM

Brain P, I love that you add "respectfully" to the end of all your posts. It makes me think of you as this uber polite guy, even when we disagree.

Quite. I value courtesy and respect to the point I get very angry if people don't give it to me, so I endeavor to give it to others first. Do unto the other fellow what you would want done to you and do it first, or something like that :).

In point of fact, the signature is typed by hand and, if I believe the post belies the signature, I revise it until either A) it fits or B) I have to give up and sign it "Tongue-in-cheek" or "In despair" or some such.

Anyway. I think essentially what happened was, that since dragons are the big thing in DnD WotC thought it important to spend a lot of time detailing dragons (and this makes sense and is fine) and so they stated the younger dragon versions without thinking of the moral implications of making stats for children dragons.

Obviously they corrected this somewhat in 4E.

I think you're right. I don't think 'If you stat it they will kill it' was in the minds of the original designers, or they wouldn't have spent so much time lovingly statting out Baalzebub, Asmodeus, Dispater , and all the other lords of the nine hells in the early editions. You shouldn't EVER be encountering these creatures, let alone winning a battle against them , but they put them in the early monster manuals anyway, presumably out of a love of detail.

Which got them into ALL kinds of troubles with the parents of that era, I can tell you.

If you cant tell I like RP a bit more thn combat :D

As do I. I much prefer dialog and other options to combat, which may be why I don't see things Rich's way -- I'm not the audience he's thinking of. The idea of attacking a hatchling dragon without warning or provocation is simply alien to me. But I guess I'm not your typical seventh grade roleplayer, whose primary interest is in killing things. Or so the stereotype we've seen in this thread seems to say. I wonder if it's true?

It is one Chinese and Japanese character and means something along the lines of "courtesy" or "etiquette".

It is a kanji which is supposed to translate as 'respect'. I drew it myself, but my drawing ability is .... untrained, shall we say.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 01:46 PM

I tend to respond in this manner, but it has recently caused a lot of offense. If the same is true for you, please let me know.

Haha, nah. TBH I prefer things easily lined/labeled because it's easier to address and stuff. I used to do it but only stopped because of the same reason.

Oko and Qailee

2013-10-04, 01:53 PM

As do I. I much prefer dialog and other options to combat, which may be why I don't see things Rich's way -- I'm not the audience he's thinking of.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

It's understandable then, IMO, that this disagreement pops up. Because from your perspective it makes sense, it would probably make sense (for you) if even younger human examples were stated up (Just guessing ofc).

But the problem is specifically the DMs/P's that are playing for combat and the implications of mindlessly throwing young dragons at the PC's just because its CR3, because it's essentially allowing a lot of people to just kill young dragons without thinking "hey this is kinda messed up."

I believe Rich mentioned a few posts back that it's not the players hes upset at, but the writers.

Edit: Im gone for a bit, have to work. Was a pleasure chatting.

crayzz

2013-10-04, 01:55 PM

Ok, by mental competence we don't make stat blocks for less competent humans because of mental development. Happy?

No*, because it produces a contradiction in your position; young dragons are mentally and physically competent, matching the capabilities of an average adult. Any argument against stats for young dragons necessarily attacks the fact that we make stats for adult humans.

I agree that their separate issues, but they are similar in the sense that having something there encourages it to be used.[1] Having Always Evil on a goblin encourages it to be always evil, and having combat stats for other children encourages them to be present in combat. I bet you we'd see a lot more teenagers and children at less experience gaming tables if we stated out teenagers and children.[2]

1) I agree with this; your original phrasing looked like false equivocation to me.

2) Good; children exist. We have child soldiers in our world now. I'd rather have a game that acknowledges there existence than one that acts as though they can't exist.

TBH I prefer things easily lined/labeled because it's easier to address and stuff. I used to do it but only stopped because of the same reason.

I know! It's a useful little formatting thing. Another person got the totally wrong message, though, so I wanted to check. Thank you.

*I'm actually happy right now; I just figured you meant "are we in agreement?".

SavageWombat

2013-10-04, 02:20 PM

The YBD was not a young adult. It was the first time he had been left at home alone for a few days. Probably roughly equivalent to early or mid teens ("child" imo), not late teens or early twenties ("young adult" imo).

Well, technically, that would make his CR lower than 9, and he'd be pretty much a curb-stomp encounter for a group of 6 11th level PCs. Even if one was a lizard.

But I digress.

hamishspence

2013-10-04, 02:26 PM

The YBD was not a young adult. It was the first time he had been left at home alone for a few days. Probably roughly equivalent to early or mid teens ("child" imo), not late teens or early twenties ("young adult" imo).

I think the term "Young Adult" has been used for books aimed at early-teens.

Maybe the same principle applies in D&D.

This was the strip in which Vaarsuvius deduces that the dragon was young adult, and gives reasons:

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0188.html

FlawedParadigm

2013-10-04, 02:39 PM

In contrast, the quote you're mentioning has to do with a separate issue, in that there are "always evil" sapient creatures in DnD, which makes no sense because that doesn't exist in real life

I guess that depends whether you consider two-year-olds to be sapient or not... :p

Fish

2013-10-04, 02:39 PM

2) Good; children exist. We have child soldiers in our world now. I'd rather have a game that acknowledges there existence than one that acts as though they can't exist.
I would only want a game where child soldiers can exist, when the game addresses the moral difficulties therein; and when it doesn't, not.

Children used to play Cops and Robbers, bang bang, I got you, and so on. It's play-learning about the world, developing fear instincts and internalizing the concept of the battlefield. It's shorn of complexity (the Robbers are killed, rather than facing trial; and the Robbers are always assumed guilty). Fine. D&D is essentially Cops & Robbers of the imagination.

But "kill the enemies' babies in the cradle" is too adult, too morally entangled a lesson for 12-year-old gamers to digest. It does not belong here.

Would I like to see a morally gray, adult RPG that handles concepts like sex, death, maturity, and civic duty in complex ways? Yes. I don't think this is it.

Doug Lampert

2013-10-04, 03:11 PM

Other than discussing where something lives and how it fights and organises it's military plus a small amount of ecological information it ignores the mindset of creatures for the most part. Generally it's left to assume that young members of a race have the same outlook as the older ones, so Orcs are implied to be evil from birth/young childhood for example.

Nope, Orcs are an OFTEN race in terms of alignment, this is specifically noted in the rules that often races usually have the alignment as the result of cultural factors and that it is not inborn. So, in fact, we know that orc children aren't neccessarily CE and aren't born CE. JUST AS WE KNOW that over half of all orc adults aren't Chaotic Evil.

Dragons on the other hand are ALWAYS races in terms of alignment, this is specifically noted as meaning it's inborn but that rare individuals can have a different allignment because they choose to act differently.

There isn't much information on "why is race X evil" in the game system, but there's some.

The Cat Goddess

2013-10-04, 04:14 PM

Personally, at my table, I tend to avoid children existing in my games at all. Rather, it's not that they don't exist, but that I as the DM just never mention them in scenes. That means if a child ever comes up in play, it's one that a player has specifically sought out, and it's never a combatant. So if a character kills a child of any race, I don't feel bad asking that player to leave the table, or at the very least 'remove' that character from play. As far as dragon specifics, I always treat any dragon encountered in my games as a mature creature. Even if I use the stats for a much younger dragon, I state that (for the purposes of my worlds) statted dragons begin at maturity.

The only time I've ever really dealt with this issue was in a game where I was playing and not running. We were all playing a group of goblins sent to raid a nearby town. We came upon an outlying farm and killed the farmer and farmhands (which was the actual combat encounter). Afterwards, it was discovered that the farmer's wife and several children were in the house. Several of the party voted for just leaving them there and continuing to the town. It was pointed out by other players (and the DM, no less) that this was out of character for chaotic evil goblins. In the end, one of the party torched the farmhouse while the rest of us (players, not characters) argued. One of the players (her first, and last gaming experience) left the table in tears and the game pretty much dissolved after that. There was no reason for there to be kids in the farmhouse other than "realism". And sometimes, realism just needs to take a back seat to player comfort and stability. Note:I'm not making a statement on morality (such would be against the forum rules anyway), but just on good DMing as a whole. Just because the book IMPLIES something doesn't mean you should let your players use it, or use it in the way the book states. The BoVD has rules for drugs and addiction, but I'll NEVER let a player use those rules. And any player that takes issue with that (or any player who argues with me about never finding baby dragons) is free to not play at my table.

Given your example... your group was clearly not ready to play "ravening evil" characters and your GM should've picked up on that, rather than pushing the issue. Especially when you've got a first-timer at the table.

My own group has done "evil" campaigns... I tend towards the "evil mastermind" or the "nearly emotionless experimenter" type myself in those games. But we do have a guy who, given the opportunity, likes to play the "ravening evil" type... and that's okay, because we're used to it. We've been gaming together for more than 12 years. Sometimes it's okay to use the rules for drugs and addiction when everyone is comfortable with it.

Of course, I want stats for hatchling dragons... because I want the opportunity for my character to raise a dragon to be her sidekick/friend. I am used to games that last 50-100 game sessions.

As for children existing in the game... of course they do! It gives the heroes extra motivation to fight, after all.

Would your group have been as upset if, instead of playing the goblins who raided the farm and burned down the house, they were the heroes who learned about the goblins doing those things? No. They would've had their characters be outraged and swore bloody vengeance upon the goblins... but I seriously doubt any would've thought that the GM was "going too far" by saying that there were children in the farmhouse.

Now, describing the scene in gory detail... that would've been going too far...

Here are the stats you actually need for a hatchling dragon:

Movement: Gets away if you let it.
Saving Throws: Miraculously survives all accidents.
Armor Class: You hit.
Hit Points: Congratulations, Baby-Killer.
Special Qualities: I hope you can live with yourself.

Coincidentally, these are the same exact stats for every other species of baby.

Extremely good point... and pretty-much how my group treats that kind of thing. It's sort of a "fine, you kill the thing which was no threat to you... everyone else looks disgusted" type thing.

Then again, some people don't see much difference between wiping out a nest of vipers or wiping out a nest of black dragons. Especially if it's very close to where people live.

You don't even need those, there's only a chance of running into a hatchling dragon if the DM says there is a chance of running into one - and what kind of DM puts a baby human in the tavern you've just burnt down? or puts random elven children into the area you're fighting in and rolls for collateral damage?

At the end of the day this is a made up world and there is no need to make up situations that require child murder. The only place for kids is in situations like being rescued from the BBEG (who for some reason doesn't kill them) or in scenes where there is no chance of fighting and if fighting does break out they instantly get teleported away by their nanny or something.

That's going too far in the opposite direction, IMHO. I think having a situation where the PCs have to be aware of their surroundings makes it more challenging. "We need to take the fight outside!", "Stop them before they get to the Church!", "Do you stop me, or do you rescue the children?" are all staples of heroic fiction. Give the heroes moral quandaries. Make things tough. The bad guy gets away by running into a crowd because the hero cop won't shoot into a crowd to stop him. The DreadKnight escapes because the Sorcerer won't risk the fireball hitting the orphanage. The heroes stop fighting the orcs because someone realizes that the orc families are starving and only raided the farms because they were driven out of their homelands.

I have. In Kerberos's 'Sword of the Stars' 4X space strategy game, the Zuul. The Zuul are both extremely evil, and extremely dangerous. They were created to be both, deliberately, by their in-game creators, the Suul'ka.

What I have learnt from this is that to create an intelligent race that is incapable of anything but creating and enduring suffering is probably the greatest crime imaginable, and that an 'always evil' race, more than anything else, is a victim of its creator.

Both these points have profoundly changed the way I think about Artificial Intelligence, and are not unimportant.

Slightly more on topic, with the right players (i.e. players capable of responding to a challenge with something other than fire and the sword), I think a giant infant/infant giant rampaging in the countryside could be fun. I mean, how would you control something like that without hurting it? How do you find, and warm, that much milk? How do you change it's nappy?!

Why introduce an infant/juvenile of a sentient species as a threat, if you're not doing it to explore the moral questions that come with it? There's plenty of level-appropriate threats without baby-killing for fun. Dragons are famous for their low birth rate - not having any infants in the chamber is very plausible.

Exactly. Especially your point abut the Zuul and "always evil" races.

Like the Giant, my group long ago threw out the "alignment system"... even before we started playing GURPS much more often than AD&D.

Oh... and as far as having stats for Devas, Planetars & Gold Dragons goes? Personally, I like to think they're included so that the DM can use them as allies for the heroes at times.

Or, to put it another way: Since most players are not willing to explore the moral questions, why does an infant/juvenile of a sentient species need to be introduced?

Here, I'll have to disagree with you.

I agree that there are things that "go too far" for many people... I'll even say most people. I'll also agree that it's expected for the GM to say "hey, Eric's bringing his nephew to the game next week, so we're going to tone things down a bit".

But if I want to run a game that explores the moral quandaries of "are all orcs really evil?" and "is it really okay to kill the children of the ravening dragon, just because they're dragons?", the system itself shouldn't arbitrarily limit me from doing so.

I do agree with your assertion that "newborn dragons have stat-blocks that make them a credible threat" was a poor decision by the game designers. Newborn dragons shouldn't be any more a threat than newborn bears or newborn tigers..

But what about saying that a Dragon matures at "an incredible rate" and is "mature after three years of growth"? Would that make it acceptable?

If you're fine with that then ok, but if you want that level of 'realism' then would you want your DM to say 'you meet the evil guy's 8 year old daughter' when you're sneaking around his house? As she's able to scream and raise the alarm she's a threat. Do you want to be told about the elven children in the house you just fireballed because a violent criminal gang meets there? <snip>

To be honest, the first scenario is fine. To me, it reads as "the GM doesn't want us to be able to sneak up on the bad guy", "now I have to find a non-lethal way to keep this kid from screaming because I'm a hero" or "time to go!"

The second scenario... well, if I didn't do my research to find out there were kids there, it's on me. My character should feel terrible about what happened and work harder to make sure she never makes that kind of mistake again. Hey, role-playing opportunity! If the GM deliberately hid the information, or made it impossible for my character to know until it's too late... I'm going to be upset with the GM.

Coddling the PCs so they never have to make a tough call or face consequences leads to results like "we kill the hatchlings". Because, if all they've ever faced are clear-cut decisions, why should they think that one was any different?

P.S. Want to keep your PCs from killing hatchling dragons? Say "you see the hatchlings kind of rough-housing with each other, play-biting, etc... it kinda looks like this", then show a video of baby cheetahs playing together.

Also... be sure to provide non-lethal methods for the PCs. With it's lack of rules about knock-out and the often over-looked subdual damage rules, AD&D is very lacking in ways to take down targets non-lethally.

To chuck something else in this reminds me of a scene in the latest Robin Hood movie (the one with Russell Crowe) where Robin is attacked by a band of children. They were clearly a threat to him as they managed to knock him out and he couldn't have known they didn't intend to kill him - they also knew exactly what they were doing.

However the film producers didn't have a long fight scene with them or killing/ injuring any of them because a) it would have put him into to the evil bin forever in the minds of the audience and b) it would be a deeply unpleasent scene. Note that this is in a setting where he can shoot as many French or Sheriff's men as he likes and will be applauded for it.

The fact they are a threat etc. is irrelevent in this case, no DM would create a scene like that because the players going 'kill them all' would be unaaceptable. Why then is it acceptable to do the same with dragons?

Because, if the players are roleplaying heroes, then they won't say "kill them all". Sometimes there are "no win" situations where the players have to say "well, I guess we're stuck".

I am also willing to posit an intelligent alien form of life without a childhood, if the author asks me to. If the author also says, "And the name for this not-child is 'young dragon,'" that's when I start to balk. "If it is not a child," I ask, "why does the author emphasize its youth with words like 'young' and 'baby' and 'hatchling?' What is the author trying to say? Why the linguistic contortions? Where are we going with this? Ah, the author is trying to make infanticide palatable, that's why." You see, I can entertain the idea, but I never stop analyzing the author.

Suppose you read a story about a female who looked and acted like a full-grown woman, but was only 10 years old. Would you not start wondering, "Where is the author going with this? Is he trying to justify a sex scene with this character, who in Earth-human terms is clearly underage and off-limits?" You would be right to wonder why the author has invented a fantasy of that kind. And if that author did that in every book you would start to wonder if he was damaged somehow.

Personally, I do not consider "splitting," as you call it, a strength either. It is the first step on the path to They Are Other By Definition, and giving yourself the semantic cover to will away your moral convictions.

And this is a key point. The argument isn't about "itty-bitty dragons have stats", it's about "itty-bitty dragons are called children, yet they're not supposed to be treated as children."

What would you say to my point above... if Dragons were listed as "maturing at a fantastic rate" and "being fully mature at 3 years old", would you find that acceptable?

DnD is a RP game, not a war game, and regardless of what happens in real life, the children killed in war do not fight back and certainly aren't equivalent to baby dragons. Even in war, no matter the circumstance, no one says "its was good that child died."

In contrast, killing a CR3 Black wyrmling dragon makes you say "good thing we killed it, lets loot its nest"

See the difference? In DnD, with baby dragons as a stat block with a defined alignment you are saying "its ok and good we killed baby dragons" in your real life example you say "it sucks that it happened."

If baby dragons are presented as a stat block then so should every other baby creature, but that sounds horrible doesnt it?

But that's the thing... if you portray the CR3 black dragon acting as a child and clearly not mature enough to understand right from wrong, then the players should (and probably will) feel bad if they kill it... and a good group will try to find some way to avoid killing it.

If you portray the CR3 black dragon as a mindless, ravening beast, then the players should not feel bad if they kill it... any more than they should feel bad about killing a CR3 tiger that's preying upon villagers.

If you portray the CR3 black dragon as a being that is fully mature, fully aware of it's actions and deliberately doing "evil", then again, the players should not feel bad if they kill it. Unless, of course, they're level 10+... then they should just slap it down and say "bad dragon, stop it!"

But then, if we need a stat block for dragons because you might encounter them as babys or they can be good for hostage situations.... why don't we make stat blocks for human newborns?

The reason is because stat blocks are specifically constructed to be fought. You can easily have a baby dragon hostage without needing a statblock the same way any time a newborn enters a DnD campaign it usually doesn't have a statblock.

Edit: and we're only saying "they contribute in a meaningful way" because we said so. It doesnt change the fact that it's still baby killing and we're intentionally making it a-ok to kill babies. The correct solution is to not include them as a stat block, and if the the DM wants to make baby dragons kill people, well then he just makes them...

GURPS provides rules and stats for children. Does this mean that GURPS encourages combat with children? No, of course not. It means that sometimes the GM will need to know "what happens if the 12 year old picks up his father's sword and swings it at the barbarian?"

While I will agree that there are groups whose whole RPing can be boiled down to "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" or "if it has Stats, we can Kill it"... why should my game be limited because of their existence?

Personally, I agree with the Giant in that working to raise the maturity level of the players is important... but that's no different than why training wheels exist for bicycles. First-time riders need training wheels... experienced riders don't.

Nope, Orcs are an OFTEN race in terms of alignment, this is specifically noted in the rules that often races usually have the alignment as the result of cultural factors and that it is not inborn. So, in fact, we know that orc children aren't neccessarily CE and aren't born CE. JUST AS WE KNOW that over half of all orc adults aren't Chaotic Evil.

Dragons on the other hand are ALWAYS races in terms of alignment, this is specifically noted as meaning it's inborn but that rare individuals can have a different allignment because they choose to act differently.

There isn't much information on "why is race X evil" in the game system, but there's some.

The only way I can see Chromatic Dragons as "always evil" goes back to Tiamat. If we accept Tiamat as being the original birth-source of all chromatic dragons and we accept that Tiamat is Evil because her very essence is Evil... then all Chromatic Dragons are Evil for the same reason all Horned Devils & Ice Devils are Evil. Because that "evil essence" actually prevents them from thinking "good".

Then again, there's the famous example of the Succubus Paladin, Fallen Angels and any number of other "always (blank)" individuals going against type.

Which is why I have pretty-much always disagreed with the existence of the Alignment System in AD&D... but that's a different argument.

Scow2

2013-10-04, 04:21 PM

Agreed, which is why they should not exist in our fantasies. Because the taboo is so critically important that we cannot permit any opening to form. That we are even sitting here having a discussion about when it is or is not OK to kill babies is kind of disgusting. That this hobby led to this conversation is a problem. And that we hand a game that is capable of leading to a conversation that says, "Sometimes, it's OK to kill a baby," to a twelve-year-old is just not acceptable to me.

Basically, your freedom to imagine whatever you want about dragons doesn't matter to me at all. It's not something I am going to spend even one moment defending. Because you'll always be able to make up whatever stuff you want at your gaming table, just like right now you can depict rape or incest or cannibalism at your gaming table and I can't stop you. I'm worried about the hobby as a whole and the general population playing it. I would rather force you to have to invent your own stats if you want to go kill dragon hatchlings than have a 7th-grader open up the encounter table, roll dice, and say, "Oh, looks like you're fighting a dragon hatchling, roll initiative," without ever questioning why they would fight a newborn or whether or not it's OK.

What's in the manuals influences the way the game is played, and it doesn't NEED to be played this way—and 99.999% of the time, there is no analysis, no deep exploration of the theme of alien intelligence, just a baby dragon, a battle mat, and some dice.And this is where I have to fundamentally disagree with your opinion, namely by mis-blaming fantasy gaming for something that has been with us far longer, and in media that is entirely unrelated (Again: See the Aliens series).

Frankly, when it comes to non-humans, I see nothing wrong with killing what you mislabel as 'babies' just because they're recently born. In fact, your own life and health depends on those who've made the decision to kill young 'monsters' - Dragons have more in common with Rats, English House Sparrows, Grackles, Japanese Carpet Beetles, Mosquitoes, Lice, and other vermin than humans, despite their intelligence and communicative ability.

What I find most abhorrent about the whole argument here is the idea that the life of an Adult, regardless of any extenuating factors, is worth less than the life of anyone else. Why is it less abhorrent to thoughtlessly kill a college student or farmhand or Icecream Truck Driver or Bank Teller or Rent-A-Cop or grandmother than a toddler?

pendell

2013-10-04, 05:07 PM

Having thought about this, I find myself coming around to the idea that there is no place for a stat block for juvenile sentients , lest people simply throw them on the battle board as a random encounter. Juveniles are not appropriate targets in a wargame except under very, very special circumstances and therefore removing the stat block makes sense.

However, this is a bit more to say.

Because, if the players are roleplaying heroes, then they won't say "kill them all". Sometimes there are "no win" situations where the players have to say "well, I guess we're stuck".

I have an issue with this.

One of the problems with having scruples is that your enemies know you have them and aren't ashamed to use them against you. For instance, suppose you have a group that has a horror of killing children.

So what will you do when your enemy starts using dominate person to send the contents of the local preschool to carry out his will?

Do you stand aside and let the evil villain win because he's evil and unscrupulous? How long does evil get to win before you step up and say "no more"?

Or are your villains not really villains but mustache-twirling Snide Whiplashes from a cartoon? Someone who prances around in a black cloak but never actually does anything really evil?

Because I promise you there are people in the real world (http://www.nbcnews.com/id/22945797/ns/world_news-mideast_n_africa/t/handicapped-bombers-kill-dozens-iraq/#.Uk83WSSTxg0) who really are that evil.

That's a part of the problem in any war of good vs. evil, which is that evil will abuse the rules. Say that you won't bomb places of worship, the enemy sets up strongpoints (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1124831/posts) in those very places. Say that you won't harm civilians, those civilians will be used as human shields.

Against a really evil enemy, saying you will never harm children will mean , when you kick in the final dungeon door, that there will be 10 or 12 children chained to the Macguffin such that, if you destroy it, you'll kill them too.

So what do you do now? Call it a "no-win situation"? Does that mean the enemy gets his way? Or are you going to sit back and let the DM write you a deus ex machina solution so you don't really have to do anything bad? Or hope the DM will write in a villain to do the dirty work so you don't have to and can cling to your nice shiny clean conscience?

I suppose you can play that way. But please, if you do, stay out of the armed forces or anything even remotely real. Because the real world doesn't work like that.

In the real world, paradoxically the only way to minimize the barbarism of war is to wage it as ruthlessly as possible. To shoot right through the human shields as if they weren't there. To bomb hell out of the places of worship just as if they were warehouses. The only way evil enemies will not take advantage of such scruples is if they gain no advantage from doing so, and the only way to do that is by demonstrating you won't be deterred. To ensure your enemy fails at what he's trying to achieve regardless of the cost. Because if your enemy can always win by being more ruthless and evil than you, he's going to use the exact same strategy again. And every other would-be tyrant and evildoer will take note and follow suit.

Good doesn't win wars by being nice and squeaky clean. Good wins wars by being ruthless and terrible, as any review of real-world wars will show.

That's the real nature of good vs. evil. Evil puts good in the position of having to step off its pedestal and do terrible things, and there are plenty of people out there who are too good, too pure, to consent to it. Which is one reason evil wins again and again. "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing" -- and sometimes the reason good men do nothing is because doing the thing that will work will mean they can no longer call themselves good, can no longer look themselves in the mirror.

I made the decision a long time ago that if I have to weigh my own self-image against the lives of innocents, the lives of innocents will win every time.

And if a game or a story doesn't grapple with that, doesn't show the true challenge of what it means when good and evil clash, doesn't show that fighting evil can cost not only one's life but one's very soul, then it is a children's game, unworthy of serious moral attention.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

ETA: The "you" in the above is not aimed at any individual poster. It just seemed a word more able to convey strong emotion than it, they, or anything else I could use, because this is a subject I feel strongly about. No insult or attack is meant to any reader, living or dead. I intend rather to point out the inherent contradiction here , which is that in a world where heroes are too scrupulous, evil can always win by being unscrupulous. And there are very few definitions of 'hero' that include 'allowed the villains to conquer the world'. -- BDP.

Fish

2013-10-04, 06:14 PM

But what about saying that a Dragon matures at "an incredible rate" and is "mature after three years of growth"? Would you find that acceptable?
I would find it better, yes. Not ideal, but better. Humans are the only parallel we have with which to compare intelligent life; a dragon that matured as quickly as a housecat but had 50x the intellect and 200x the lifespan would be a stretch, but I could live with it. After all, animals reach adulthood quickly (including many of the ones we eat).

Not including "baby dragon" stat blocks at all would be best. The game doesn't attempt the complexity that you or I can perceive as adults; it should be left on the level of its young teen audience.

Gwenovier

2013-10-04, 06:45 PM

As for children existing in the game... of course they do! It gives the heroes extra motivation to fight, after all.

Would your group have been as upset if, instead of playing the goblins who raided the farm and burned down the house, they were the heroes who learned about the goblins doing those things? No. They would've had their characters be outraged and swore bloody vengeance upon the goblins... but I seriously doubt any would've thought that the GM was "going too far" by saying that there were children in the farmhouse.

Now, describing the scene in gory detail... that would've been going too far...

I don't use child death (or trying to prevent it) as a SPECIFIC motivator. If a group of goblins is raiding a town, of course there are children there. But unless a player specifically asks, its not going to come up. If the players chose to act as though the town is nothing but adults they'll find no evidence contradicting that. If a plague is sweeping a nation, it's logical that it's killing the children as well as the adults, but I'm not going to mention that. I don't feel it NEEDS to be said. If a fighter is perfectly willing to let a village get burned to the ground until he specifically hears that there are children in some of the houses, then he's not a "hero". I'm only talking about me, specifically. I'm not saying other DMs are wrong for including children in their stories. I just don't. I find ways to fulfill my plot needs using adults.

Kish

2013-10-04, 06:49 PM

And if a game or a story doesn't grapple with that, doesn't show the true challenge of what it means when good and evil clash, doesn't show that fighting evil can cost not only one's life but one's very soul, then it is a children's game, unworthy of serious moral attention.
I wonder what "good" and "evil" even mean to you here. Your concept of "good" is perfectly willing to slaughter innocents in the name of victory. It appears that your distinction is certainly not "how far they're willing to go to win." Is there any distinction at all, or is it "us vs. them"?

Math_Mage

2013-10-04, 07:09 PM

I wonder what "good" and "evil" even mean to you here. Your concept of "good" is perfectly willing to slaughter innocents in the name of victory. It appears that your distinction is certainly not "how far they're willing to go to win." Is there any distinction at all, or is it "us vs. them"?
I'll hazard a guess that the consequences of victory for good look just a bit different from the consequences of victory for evil. There are real-life examples, I won't go into them. But a clash between two parties gets as evil as the most evil party is willing to make it, unless the evil party never had any actual power to influence events in the first place. (This includes situations where the good party declares a "no-win" scenario and leaves the field to the evil party.)

Amphiox

2013-10-04, 07:45 PM

One of the problems with those rules is of course that the dragons were *singled out* for having infants with stats.

The argument has been amply made that all the sentient creatures in the game should be treated equally and none should have infants with stats.

Now consider the other end of the spectrum here - we treat all sentient creatures equally but give ALL the infants stats, including humans.

Now, assuming the game is not marketed solely for the consumption of psychopaths, the result of having human babies with stats should end falling somewhere on the spectrum between "this is a gritty fantasy world and even all the infants are vulnerable, and DMs and players will have to factor that consideration in when playing" and "campaigns will not necessarily be designed using stats only or primarily as a way of what gets killed and how hard it is to be killed, stats will also be employed in other ways, since babies have stats and *obviously* you're not going to be wantonly killing babies".

Setting the dragons apart and making their young having stats unique, however, creates the implication that it is ok to slaughter the infants of *some* creatures, while not others, because *some* creatures are X, with X being any variety of "dangerous", "evil", "alien", "powerful" or whatever.

And that dichotomy is what is really the most problematic of all.

DaggerPen

2013-10-04, 07:54 PM

Here are the stats you actually need for a hatchling dragon:

Movement: Gets away if you let it.
Saving Throws: Miraculously survives all accidents.
Armor Class: You hit.
Hit Points: Congratulations, Baby-Killer.
Special Qualities: I hope you can live with yourself.

Coincidentally, these are the same exact stats for every other species of baby.

If I had room in my signature I'd sig this. Heck, I might be able to if I use a spoiler break - I'll have to look into the line limit.

You missed one.

Alignment: TBD.

Perfect.

What I saw was a teenager trying to defend himself against and then being murdered by armed home invaders.

In some fairness, said home invaders clearly didn't realize that they were invading a home. If you're living in a cave with no "here there be dragons" markings or anything else to indicate that it's occupied and a group of adventurers stumble in, take one look at you, and run away, then it's fair to assume that they have made a grave mistake and are about to hightail it out of there. V had absolutely no need to kill the YBD, though, as V could easily have had the YBD pick a direction and keep flying, as stated above, or remove him from the situation nonlethally some other way. V just didn't care to do so.

I have an issue with this.

One of the problems with having scruples is that your enemies know you have them and aren't ashamed to use them against you. For instance, suppose you have a group that has a horror of killing children.

So what will you do when your enemy starts using dominate person to send the contents of the local preschool to carry out his will?

Forcecage.

That's a part of the problem in any war of good vs. evil, which is that evil will abuse the rules. Say that you won't bomb places of worship, the enemy sets up strongpoints (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1124831/posts) in those very places. Say that you won't harm civilians, those civilians will be used as human shields.

Really, that's the source you're going with? But regardless-

This is a D&D world. You can teleport in, grab the civilians, and teleport out. You can put the entire group to sleep and drag out and bind the combatants. If there's an anti-magic field, soften the field with a tanglefoot bag and move in. Use a smokestick and send in the rogue to disarm the hostage-takers. And so on, and so forth. And if you try your best and things still go wrong, well, all that diamond dust is going to be a pain to procure, but if your group is really Good, they'll get over it. Good is willing to make any personal sacrifice necessary to protect the innocent.

Against a really evil enemy, saying you will never harm children will mean , when you kick in the final dungeon door, that there will be 10 or 12 children chained to the Macguffin such that, if you destroy it, you'll kill them too.

So what do you do now? Call it a "no-win situation"? Does that mean the enemy gets his way? Or are you going to sit back and let the DM write you a deus ex machina solution so you don't really have to do anything bad? Or hope the DM will write in a villain to do the dirty work so you don't have to and can cling to your nice shiny clean conscience?

Can they be teleported/planeshifted/dimension doored out? Can their chains be cut? Can the rogue disarm any traps? There are a million other solutions to try first in a D&D setting.

Situations like the ones you've listed virtually always have a third option, no matter the cleverness of the DM involved. It's the ability to come up with those options that really define heroes.

And if you want to discuss a non-D&D world, well, you're in the wrong forum, aren't you?

I suppose you can play that way. But please, if you do, stay out of the armed forces or anything even remotely real. Because the real world doesn't work like that.

In the real world, paradoxically the only way to minimize the barbarism of war is to wage it as ruthlessly as possible. To shoot right through the human shields as if they weren't there. To bomb hell out of the places of worship just as if they were warehouses. The only way evil enemies will not take advantage of such scruples is if they gain no advantage from doing so, and the only way to do that is by demonstrating you won't be deterred. To ensure your enemy fails at what he's trying to achieve regardless of the cost. Because if your enemy can always win by being more ruthless and evil than you, he's going to use the exact same strategy again. And every other would-be tyrant and evildoer will take note and follow suit.

Good doesn't win wars by being nice and squeaky clean. Good wins wars by being ruthless and terrible, as any review of real-world wars will show.

Then it's a good thing we're discussing D&D settings, isn't it?

Baby dragons should not be combat encounters. Children should not be combat encounters. Period. If you want to argue that a dragon completely mentally matures right out of its egg and gets ancestral knowledge that gives it the life experience necessary to make decisions, and heck, for all you Always Evil proponents out there, say that ancestral knowledge even gives that fresh out of the egg dragon an evil mindset? Fine. Play it that way in your setting. But the source books don't make that the case. Young dragons have lower mental stats. They learn to fly as they age. They learn spells. They are clearly born immature and learn as they grow. They are children, teenagers, etc. Please don't tell us how to kill them without at least making it clear that no, slaughtering children and teenagers instead of trying to figure out a nonlethal way to deal with the young, selfish dragon who's still learning how to get along with others and figuring out complex questions is not a heroic act.

(Mind you, I can see the argument for having some stats for baby dragons just to help make those nonlethal solutions more viable - e.g., if you use Suggestion on a baby dragon to have the little guy toddle off somewhere safe and out of the crossfire while dealing with the parent who's been terrorizing local villagers, having mental stats would be useful. But as it is, it's basically a datasheet saying "Here are baby dragons. Here's how to kill them. Here's the parties for which it would be a level appropriate encounter. Have fun." Which is... concerning, for several reasons. As Rich said, if the book's not going to handle it properly, I'd rather they not do it at all, and make any DM who wants to introduce more complexity guesstimate some appropriate stats.)

Scow2

2013-10-04, 07:58 PM

But no one said "young adult" is wrong to have a stat block for...

we're specifically talking about murdering children.No, we're not. We're talking about killing Wyrmlings, which are more like tigers than children.

Forcecage.That requires a Level 9 prepared spellcaster or Level 10 spont caster that knows the spell, and 5,000 GP in material component in addition to the spell slot... and the spell's not big enough to get them all anyway. Also, you're level 3 or 6, and have maybe 2000 GP. Just because a power theoretically exists in the world (And is far, far beyond the capabilities of anyone you're likely to know) doesn't mean it's available. It's like saying the solution to school shootings is spontaneously equipping every student in the building with Dragonskin armor and thermal imaging to find and evade the shooter. The same goes for every single one of your other arguments. Just because level 10 is in the middle of the level scale doesn't mean it's the average level of people in the world.

Baby dragons should not be combat encounters. Children should not be combat encounters. Period. If you want to argue that a dragon completely mentally matures right out of its egg and gets ancestral knowledge that gives it the life experience necessary to make decisions, and heck, for all you Always Evil proponents out there, say that ancestral knowledge even gives that fresh out of the egg dragon an evil mindset? Fine. Play it that way in your setting. But the source books don't make that the case. Young dragons have lower mental stats. They learn to fly as they age. They learn spells. They are clearly born immature and learn as they grow. They are children, teenagers, etc. Please don't tell us how to kill them without at least making it clear that no, slaughtering children and teenagers instead of trying to figure out a nonlethal way to deal with the young, selfish dragon who's still learning how to get along with others and figuring out complex questions is not a heroic act. They mature, but they start with all the lethality and self-survival ability of a fire-breathing tiger with the cunning of an amnesiac adult human - and they only go up from there.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 08:16 PM

No, we're not. We're talking about killing Wyrmlings, which are more like tigers than children.

Tiger cubs, though.

Scow2

2013-10-04, 08:23 PM

Tiger cubs, though.No, not cubs. A wyrmling is usually more than a year old. They're explicitly born with survival instincts surpassing any fully-adult animal (Enough to more than merely fend for themselves, but also thrive from the moment they're born). They have physical capabilities far greater than any real-world adult apex predator. The only thing that makes them "immature" is their balls won't drop for another couple dozen years or so.

A black dragon Wyrmling is born with the mental and physical capability to wipe out a Thorpe consisting of 50 of the cheesiest, most optimized commoners possible in D&D (Using acceptable racial demographics)

Kish

2013-10-04, 08:27 PM

Tiger cubs, though.
Sapient tiger cubs. Or...

Actually, I see no good reason to accept a move away from "children." If one does not consider their intelligence more relevant than their claws there is something fundamentally wrong with one's definition.

Scow2

2013-10-04, 08:37 PM

Sapient tiger cubs. Or...

Actually, I see no good reason to accept a move away from "children." If one does not consider their intelligence more relevant than their claws there is something fundamentally wrong with one's definition.Since we're speaking of a fictional race, I can cite a case of a Very Young dragon deliberately destroying an entire Gnorcish army and its sorcererous leader in revenge for every adult dragon being petrified by said sorcerer. The whelp's wings weren't even developed enough to let it actually fly. He was young, but still cunning and deliberately destructive.

cobaltstarfire

2013-10-04, 08:38 PM

No*, because it produces a contradiction in your position; young dragons are mentally and physically competent, matching the capabilities of an average adult. Any argument against stats for young dragons necessarily attacks the fact that we make stats for adult humans.

Not necessarily, look at the int of the chromatic dragons newly hatched. (3.5)

Black: 8
Blue: 10
Green: 10
Red: 10
White: 6

(The metallic dragons have higher stats overall, (none have a stat bellow 10)

They're all (the "evil" ones anyway) average or worse, and some of the wyrmling dragons are often described as being more animal-like in their behavior until they are older and more experienced (particularly the white's ). Ability to learn and reason isn't necessarily an adult state of being.

On the physical end wyrmlings are described as "physically awkward", not exactly a description that comes to mind for average adults.

I suppose the point I'm trying (and probably failing) to make is that just because something that is a baby has a decent set of stats doesn't mean it is as capable as an adult (by the human metric).

Something about this thread is making me think of the strangeness involved in elvin maturation...

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 08:46 PM

No, not cubs. A wyrmling is usually more than a year old.

A year old out of hundreds of years, that is a small fraction of a dragon's lifespan.

A juvenile tiger could totally mess you up, they are not helpless after a few weeks or months, which I think is roughly equivalent to the wyrmling's developmental stage. Is an adult tiger way more scary? Totally. Is a tiger "child" a threat too? Yep. Those are not useful questions, though, for deciding whether it's okay to fantasize about fighting them.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-04, 08:54 PM

A year old out of hundreds of years, that is a small fraction of a dragon's lifespan.

A juvenile tiger could totally mess you up, they are not helpless after a few weeks or months, which I think is roughly equivalent to the wyrmling's developmental stage. Is an adult tiger way more scary? Totally. Is a tiger "child" a threat too? Yep. Those are not useful questions, though, for deciding whether it's okay to fantasize about fighting them.

Well, as I noted much earlier, it's done so that dragons can be used in the game at all. Not as some profound philosophical statement.

If the earlier stages of dragon are to be removed for morality reasons, then the adults need to be way, way, way toned down so that they're maybe CR 7 or 8 and actually see use. Most campaigns don't last long enough for the powerful, mature dragons to ever appear other than in rumor. I've seldom seen a campaign last long enough for CR 21 or so creatures to come into play. Heck, in my experience, it's rare for campaigns to last long enough for CR 14 or 15 creatures to put in an appearance.

You also have to make the dragons a lot more short-lived, no more ancient lurkers on treasure. Because otherwise, you sort of have to pretend they don't exist for the first few hundred years of their lives. Because "child" and therefore "off limits."

"Excuse me, Mr. Dragon-Ravaging-My-Town, can you please show me your ID so that I can figure out if you're old enough for me to fight you?" :smallbiggrin:

DaggerPen

2013-10-04, 09:01 PM

Well, as I noted much earlier, it's done so that dragons can be used in the game at all. Not as some profound philosophical statement.

If the earlier stages of dragon are to be removed for morality reasons, then the adults need to be way, way, way toned down so that they're maybe CR 7 or 8 and actually see use. Most campaigns don't last long enough for the powerful, mature dragons to ever appear other than in rumor. I've seldom seen a campaign last long enough for CR 21 or so creatures to come into play. Heck, in my experience, it's rare for campaigns to last long enough for CR 14 or 15 creatures to put in an appearance.

You also have to make the dragons a lot more short-lived, no more ancient lurkers on treasure. Because otherwise, you sort of have to pretend they don't exist for the first few hundred years of their lives. Because "child" and therefore "off limits."

My preferred way to deal with this is to establish that dragons reach maturity while still comparatively small, but never stop growing at any point in their lives. So the moment they leave the nest, they are mature, and have the mental faculties of your general college-age equivalent - they may lack in some life experience, but they're still totally mature. That way, any dragon you encounter on their own can be assumed to be an adult. However, dragons never stop growing, and as they grow older they pick up various tips and tricks, learn spells, learn combat strategies, etc., and thus get more dangerous, especially if they're evil and have survived this long by pillaging and killing and generally terrorizing villages without getting taken out by a single group of adventurers. Meanwhile, nesting dragons - which, due to the species' long lifespans and low fertility rate, is only a small fraction of dragons - prepare a guarded designated nursery area in their lairs, wherein the dragon will live until they reach maturity and go out on their own. These dragons will generally flee from adventurers unless very close to being able to strike out on their own, and if they do attack, unless nearly mature, will pose no more challenge than a small animal at worst. You baby-killing monster.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 09:02 PM

Well, as I noted much earlier, it's done so that dragons can be used in the game at all. Not as some profound philosophical statement.

As a counter-example I cite every other entry in the Monster Manual, which do not have a statblock for children. You can invent stats yourself for young bulletes or whatever, if you need them. This "then you'd need to..." stuff is hogwash, false dilemma. There are often creatures with a "weaker version" and a "stronger version" (e.g. ghouls and ghasts), or even many different versions (e.g. elementals... a level 5 party and a level 15 party could each have a challenging encounter against one fire elemental).

If the rationale for having "weak dragons" is indeed so that dragons can be used in the game at all, then they could have exactly the same stats for different "levels" of dragon, but not call them children. Perfect solution? No. Workable solution? Sure. Start at "young adult" instead of "hatchling". The problem is with the flavor text, not with the mechanics.

I am not saying the authors are intentionally making a profound philosophical statement, I am saying they are accidentally making one. There should not be stats for baby dragons in the canon, it encourages killing them.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-04, 09:03 PM

My preferred way to deal with this is to establish that dragons reach maturity while still comparatively small, but never stop growing at any point in their lives. So the moment they leave the nest, they are mature, and have the mental faculties of your general college-age equivalent - they may lack in some life experience, but they're still totally mature. That way, any dragon you encounter on their own can be assumed to be an adult. However, dragons never stop growing, and as they grow older they pick up various tips and tricks, learn spells, learn combat strategies, etc., and thus get more dangerous, especially if they're evil and have survived this long by pillaging and killing and generally terrorizing villages without getting taken out by a single group of adventurers. Meanwhile, nesting dragons - which, due to the species' long lifespans and low fertility rate, is only a small fraction of dragons - prepare a guarded designated nursery area in their lairs, wherein the dragon will live until they reach maturity and go out on their own. These dragons will generally flee from adventurers unless very close to being able to strike out on their own, and if they do attack, unless nearly mature, will pose no more challenge than a small animal at worst. You baby-killing monster.

Seems like an excellent way to handle it. And makes them refreshingly different from humans, too. Your solution is worth 1 Internet, in my opinion. :smallcool:

Cerussite

2013-10-04, 09:05 PM

It's not that killing children is by itself wrong: killing a helpless sapient creature is a despicable act. Bacteria aren't sapient, so we don't mind killing recently-split bacteria by the thousands. Most people don't see insects as sapient either, so they have no problem smashing a spider's exoskeleton with a newspaper if they find one on their bed. The fact is just that most mammals indeed are helpless and sapient in their youth.

Human children aren't statted for one simple reason: if the average adventurer wants to kill one in one blow, he can. Statting human/elven/et al children is superfluous.

Wyrmlings, however, are anything but helpless. The average black wyrmling is almost as intelligent and self-aware as your average human, and he can one-shot-kill an average commoner by breathing on him. The moral implications of killing a child are greatly changed if the child is pointing an AK-47 at you.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-04, 09:07 PM

It's not that killing children is by itself wrong: killing a helpless sapient creature is a despicable act. Bacteria aren't sapient, so we don't mind killing recently-split bacteria by the thousands. Most people don't see insects as sapient either, so they have no problem smashing a spider's exoskeleton with a newspaper if they find one on their bed. Human children aren't statted for one simple reason: if the average adventurer wants to kill one in one blow, he can. Statting human/elven/et al children is superfluous.

Wyrmlings, however, are anything but helpless. The average black wyrmling is almost as intelligent and self-aware as your average human, and he can one-shot-kill an average commoner by breathing on him. The moral implications of killing a child are greatly changed if the child is pointing an AK-47 at you.

This too. If it can kill you, and has the aggression to want to do so, then it can't really claim noncombatant status.

Which was kind of my point also, earlier, but you put it much better than I did.

Cerlis

2013-10-04, 09:09 PM

The reason for the age categories, of course, is so that dragons can be used as monsters/bosses at various levels. Adult dragons are so powerful they would seldom appear in games. The younger age categories enable actual game use of the creatures, while maintaining the idea that dragons are some of the most powerful beings in the game.

Justified in that even at the size of a kitten Most (looking at you whitey) dragons are as intelligent as adult humans and just as crafty. And by the time a dragon gets anywhere near to an "Adult' he as probably already lived longer than an adult elf.

So yes , even a creature a mother dragon would consider a "toddler" is several times more dangerous, cunning, and intelligent than your average human

Scow2

2013-10-04, 09:14 PM

A year old out of hundreds of years, that is a small fraction of a dragon's lifespan.All that says is that Dragons end up exceeding human mental prowess in all ways. A Very Young dragon is still as mentally mature in all ways except reproduction as an average human. Just because it gets even bigger

Those are not useful questions, though, for deciding whether it's okay to fantasize about fighting them.You make Jack Thompson and Patricia Pulling proud. If you start judging people by what they toss into speculative fiction and strip it of all context (Such as taking "YOU'RE FINE KILLING BABIES!" from "We're dealing with a beast that is an intelligent, cunning, and capable predator and monster from the moment it hatches!"), then you undermine and hold back the purpose of speculative fiction for the sole purpose of discrediting people by taking their words and twisting them just to say "You're a Psychopath/Pervert!"

This makes me go back and look at something even earlier in the thread:
Suppose you read a story about a female who looked and acted like a full-grown woman, but was only 10 years old. Would you not start wondering, "Where is the author going with this? Is he trying to justify a sex scene with this character, who in Earth-human terms is clearly underage and off-limits?" You would be right to wonder why the author has invented a fantasy of that kind. And if that author did that in every book you would start to wonder if he was damaged somehow.Not at all. The ones that make me wonder are those who create characters that look and act like 10-year-old girls, but are really hundreds of thousands of years old or somesuch. Authors that make characters that have different life cycles (Such as Stargate's people that live only 100 days, or the new Thundercats "Song of the Petallers" episode, with small plant-based humanoids that grow and live in only a single day) are usually used to explore the experience of the passage of time and contrast the disparity of the meaning of time in the scope of life.

Cerlis

2013-10-04, 09:32 PM

The creature on Aliens was a baby.

Not a single one here that wouldnt have killed it with fire AFTER understanding it.

The fact is that there is a big gap in comparing Draconic non-adults to humans (since, humans are after all, in the real world the only "people" regarded such by law).

Yes, he may be immature and prone to stupid actions like lashing out (with fire), But most human toddlers arent capable of learning who you are, tracking you down, murdering your whole family, and burning your town to the grown, because you killed its mother.

this is why there exists something known as "trying(sp?) as an adult". if the exact biological nature of a sentient being mattered as much as their ability and intent to do something, than people wouldnt be considered "adults" till they are 23 years old (or so).

There is another story that did something similar. I forget what the series was called but it was a world where magic came and went. and when it came it could be gathered up in special stones that usually had a specific power. The main character, she got the main stone far stronger than the others. As a side effect of her interraction with magic, as well as her daughters, her grandson was born with precognition.
the young boy (i think about 6 years old), didnt want to hurt anybody, but he could see every outcome available and surrounded by outcomes in which he would (guaranteed) die the scared little boy went down whatever path in which he did not. Long story short, the kindnapped boy orchestrated the murderers of captor after captor until he ended up the leader of a Bad-Guy army. And since it was the only option left to the boy he ended up going head to head with the other characters in the story. He ended up dying tragically with no possible future outcome that could have saved him.

The reason i bring this up is despite being innocent he was still a mass murderer that was intent on murdering more to save himself. Innocence or age didnt matter so much as what the thing/person did/does. And a dragon a few weeks old is capable of more destruction that this poor boy caused.

for instance that scenario the Giant laid out on the first page didnt include the fact that sometimes children try to help their parents. So what happens when those 8 dog sized dragon babies try to kill the people who killed their mother and in their minds, will probably kill and eat them next.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 09:40 PM

Nobody says there is never a situation where killing a baby isn't the right thing to do. The claim is that there shouldn't be stats for babies in the D&D canon. The GM can custom-craft some if they're necessary for some reason, making up a plausible set of stats isn't that hard (there are lots and lots of analogies in the MM to build from), and making up a limited ability set (e.g. breath weapon, spell-like abilities...) isn't much harder.

Whether the baby is a dragon or a xenomorph or a human isn't really the point.

Cerussite

2013-10-04, 09:45 PM

Nobody says there is never a situation where killing a baby isn't the right thing to do. The claim is that there shouldn't be stats for babies in the D&D canon. The GM can custom-craft some if they're necessary for some reason.

Whether the baby is a dragon or a xenomorph or a human isn't really the point.

I fail to understand why, in a game where the whole economy runs on killing stuff for profit, killing potentially threatening recently-hatched dragons is any worse than killing potentially threatening adult dragons. If it's strong enough to pose a threat, there's no reason not to stat it. As I said, the only reason human children needn't be statted is that even when armed they're so easily killed it's not worth statting them.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 09:49 PM

That is not the point. Baby storm giants are potentially threatening to adult humans, for sure. Are there official stats for them? Nope. If you needed baby storm giant stats for your game, could you make them? Yep.

Having official stats for dragons at every stage of growth implies it is perfectly acceptable to murder dragon children.

Cerussite

2013-10-04, 09:54 PM

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 09:58 PM

It does imply that.

Scow2

2013-10-04, 10:01 PM

It does imply that.
I don't see why baby dragons, which are as intellignent and cunning as an adult of any other species, should have special protection. Especially when Chromatic dragons are usually capable of fending for themselves immediately after hatching, 'family values' be damned.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 10:02 PM

I don't see why baby dragons, which are as intellignent and cunning as an adult of any other species, should have special protection.

Uh, not saying they should have special protection, saying they should not have special threats. Few or no other entries in the MM have stats for babies.

Cerussite

2013-10-04, 10:05 PM

It does imply that.

We either play vastly different games or have completely different notions of what 'perfectly acceptable' means then, I guess.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 10:10 PM

ti'esar

2013-10-04, 10:19 PM

You make Jack Thompson and Patricia Pulling proud. If you start judging people by what they toss into speculative fiction and strip it of all context (Such as taking "YOU'RE FINE KILLING BABIES!" from "We're dealing with a beast that is an intelligent, cunning, and capable predator and monster from the moment it hatches!"), then you undermine and hold back the purpose of speculative fiction for the sole purpose of discrediting people by taking their words and twisting them just to say "You're a Psychopath/Pervert!"

...And the line between "well-intentioned if occasionally susceptible to unfortunate wording" and "ignore button time" has just been crossed.

Jack Thompson? Give me a break.

Cerussite

2013-10-04, 10:20 PM

I was quoting the ABD, who was exaggerating a bit. I think "valid target" is a more accurate description of the implication. Having stats for human adults does in fact imply human adults are valid targets. There are no stats for human children.

Are there situations where a human child might be a valid target? Sure. But a blanket statement to that effect would be creepy at best.

Well, I'd argue saying all adult humans are valid targets for killing (and fantasizing about killing people) is creepy, as anyone who's held a gun knows. Children are usually less valid targets than adults EXACTLY because the odds a child is threatening you enough that killing it is a morally valid action from the standpoint of self-defense are much smaller than those for an adult, or a storm giant or a wyrmling.

Things don't need stat blocks to be valid targets, as anyone who's ever attempted to kill a rampaging gazebo has experienced firsthand.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-04, 10:35 PM

Something doesn't need a stat block to be a valid target...

Really sick of the goalposts being moved. And that guy who said something needs a stat block to be a valid target is such a jerk. Oh, nobody said that!

There are lots of things in the MM that are immediately threatening when they hatch (etc), but only dragons have official stats for them. Even the wyvern entry doesn't have stats for baby wyverns, and they are less intelligent/sapient/conscious/whatever than dragons are.

I agree with Bulldog Psion's earlier conjecture that (paraphrasing) there are probably "weaker dragons" so they can oppose weaker parties, but calling them babies wasn't the only solution to that problem, and it carries unfortunate implications.

DaggerPen

2013-10-04, 10:45 PM

There are lots of things in the MM that are immediately threatening when they hatch (etc), but only dragons have official stats for them. Even the wyvern entry doesn't have stats for baby wyverns, and they are less intelligent/sapient/conscious/whatever than dragons are.

I agree with Bulldog Psion's earlier conjecture that (paraphrasing) there are probably "weaker dragons" so they can oppose weaker parties, but calling them babies wasn't the only solution to that problem, and it carries unfortunate implications.

Very, very much agreed. Having weaker and stronger dragons is not a problem. Having the weaker dragons be younger isn't even a problem. But characterizing the weaker dragons as immature dragons, and making them a valid target, is gross. The early ages should not be "Wyrmling 3; very young 4; young 5; juvenile 7; young adult 9" before even getting to adult. They should all be adults, just of differing power levels - broken down, perhaps, by size, or some other ranking. And they also should never be "always" any alignment, but that's a different topic.

Ghost Nappa

2013-10-04, 10:56 PM

I think that by and large the following CAN be agreed upon:

1) Dragons are given age categories by the game developers for the purposes of making them available as combat encounters at different levels of play.

2) The use and implications of having dragons currently involves the killing of the infants of a sentient species.

3) There are individuals who find this murder unacceptable.

Proposed Solution: Rather than tie a dragon's power to its age, tie it to its size:
Yes. I am going to propose the solution to a moral issue by exploiting the logic behind a joke. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0719.html)

Make Dragons marginally more intelligent, and wise, and such based on their age if you wish: a contributing factor, but not a main player. Make them more powerful based on their size. Tie their size to their diets.

A Dragon that is capable of securing more food for itself undergoes growth spurts leading it to become bigger, better, faster, stronger. By eliminating power and age as a direct casuality, you push the construction of scenarios away from the murder of hatchlings, while still maintaing dragons as fightable enemies at whatever level.

Next, this is a big cultural thing: you NEED to push the focus of D&D away from combat and the sociopathy the system implies. I do NOT have a problem with a system that has different stats for creatures at different ages, I DO have a problem with implying by Alignment notes and the lack of cultural fluff that this race/class/creature/object is a designated punching bag. And while this may not be explicitly discussed, the issue is really "Here's an X. You're supposed to kill this." Especially when YOU are the aggressor.

I think if there was a sub-system in place that encouraged both capturing and ARRESTING hostile forces instead of executing or killing them, a lot more players would flock towards those non-lethal methods of handling encounters and social interaction, in general.

Guy Incognito

2013-10-04, 10:57 PM

On the one hand, the dragon in question was a Young Adult, not a hatchling. He would have been at least fifty at the time of his death.

On the other hand, while looking up dragon ages, I found the necessary rules for a dragon hatchling (can't fly, -2 Dexterity and attack rolls). And right above that, the image of a group of cute little baby silver dragons popping their way out of their eggs, their eyes still shut.

So yeah. Besides, sentience or no, it's hard to feel good about killing something the size of a puppy.

Everyl

2013-10-04, 11:09 PM

This thread is going to fast for me to feel like I can post a coherent reply before half a dozen other people post and the conversation moves on. I guess I'll try anyway.

Has anyone else here read the Council of Wyrms setting from 2e AD&D? It was a setting in which the PCs were dragons, and the default antagonists were humans. "First-level" players were hatchlings, and the provided opening adventure involved the PCs hatching in the middle of a (IIRC) human raid on a community hatchery, then fighting for their lives and the lives of their unhatched fellows. So, at least in that setting of that edition of D&D, hatchlings are indeed capable of defending themselves against roving bands of appropriate-level baby-murderers.

The setting is an interesting look at how humanoid-dragon relations seem from the scaley side.

DaggerPen

2013-10-04, 11:23 PM

Proposed Solution: Rather than tie a dragon's power to its age, tie it to its size:
Yes. I am going to propose the solution to a moral issue by exploiting the logic behind a joke. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0719.html)

Make Dragons marginally more intelligent, and wise, and such based on their age if you wish: a contributing factor, but not a main player. Make them more powerful based on their size. Tie their size to their diets.

A Dragon that is capable of securing more food for itself undergoes growth spurts leading it to become bigger, better, faster, stronger. By eliminating power and age as a direct casuality, you push the construction of scenarios away from the murder of hatchlings, while still maintaing dragons as fightable enemies at whatever level.

Oh, I like this! My thought was just that dragons don't stop growing once they hit adulthood, but the idea of a more powerful dragon being able to get a larger size - and in the process learn spells, etc. - is a really good one.

Next, this is a big cultural thing: you NEED to push the focus of D&D away from combat and the sociopathy the system implies. I do NOT have a problem with a system that has different stats for creatures at different ages, I DO have a problem with implying by Alignment notes and the lack of cultural fluff that this race/class/creature/object is a designated punching bag. And while this may not be explicitly discussed, the issue is really "Here's an X. You're supposed to kill this." Especially when YOU are the aggressor.

I think if there was a sub-system in place that encouraged both capturing and ARRESTING hostile forces instead of executing or killing them, a lot more players would flock towards those non-lethal methods of handling encounters and social interaction, in general.

Yeah, agreed.

On the one hand, the dragon in question was a Young Adult, not a hatchling. He would have been at least fifty at the time of his death.

On the other hand, while looking up dragon ages, I found the necessary rules for a dragon hatchling (can't fly, -2 Dexterity and attack rolls). And right above that, the image of a group of cute little baby silver dragons popping their way out of their eggs, their eyes still shut.

So yeah. Besides, sentience or no, it's hard to feel good about killing something the size of a puppy.

Well, in fairness, V's children are as old as some of the party members yet were equivalent to human 5-year-olds, so longer-lived species in OOTS are clearly children for a more proportional period of their lifespan, barring odd growth cycles. But yes. If you are putting your PCs against a newly-hatched dragon the size of a housepet, either your campaign is a dark, complex one or something has gone horribly wrong and you should take a step back and rethink some things.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-04, 11:30 PM

I think if there was a sub-system in place that encouraged both capturing and ARRESTING hostile forces instead of executing or killing them, a lot more players would flock towards those non-lethal methods of handling encounters and social interaction, in general.

I don't know, the idea of Beowulf going in to arrest the firedrake, or Bard, future king of Esgaroth, slapping a citation on Smaug, just doesn't really cut it for the heroic, life-or-death struggle feel of the original tales. In fact, they seem more cartoony and ludicrous than anything else. Fine for an explicitly cartoonish game, but the idea of CSI: Ogres isn't going to go over too well with those looking for action and high peril, IMO.

Forikroder

2013-10-04, 11:34 PM

Make Dragons marginally more intelligent, and wise, and such based on their age if you wish: a contributing factor, but not a main player. Make them more powerful based on their size. Tie their size to their diets.

then it makes no sense for there to be weak dragons becuase all they gotta do is find a mcdonalds and they can become epic in an afternoon

if all a dragon has to do is eat to become strong then what limits them from becoming strong?

I don't know, the idea of Beowulf going in to arrest the firedrake, or Bard, future king of Esgaroth, slapping a citation on Smaug, just doesn't really cut it for the heroic, life-or-death struggle feel of the original tales. In fact, they seem more cartoony and ludicrous than anything else. Fine for an explicitly cartoonish game, but the idea of CSI: Ogres isn't going to go over too well with those looking for action and high peril, IMO.

Frodo delivering a "cease and desist" to Sauron

Harry handing Voldemort a restraining order

DaggerPen

2013-10-04, 11:38 PM

I don't know, the idea of Beowulf going in to arrest the firedrake, or Bard, future king of Esgaroth, slapping a citation on Smaug, just doesn't really cut it for the heroic, life-or-death struggle feel of the original tales. In fact, they seem more cartoony and ludicrous than anything else. Fine for an explicitly cartoonish game, but the idea of CSI: Ogres isn't going to go over too well with those looking for action and high peril, IMO.

See, now that just reminds me of this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O6kTZJSThIc).

Anyway, I'm fine with the players not arresting dragons, but it would still be nice to see more non-lethal solutions to dragon-related plotlines. Negotiating an agreement with a dragon who's been raiding nearby livestock, or to get access to a rare treasure they have, or to get help against an invading army that's technically invading the dragon's territory too, etc. Stats could be necessary in these situations (especially if your diplomats are a bit liberal with Suggestion magic) without winding up with PCs just killing dragons.

Forikroder

2013-10-04, 11:51 PM

See, now that just reminds me of this video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=O6kTZJSThIc).

Anyway, I'm fine with the players not arresting dragons, but it would still be nice to see more non-lethal solutions to dragon-related plotlines. Negotiating an agreement with a dragon who's been raiding nearby livestock, or to get access to a rare treasure they have, or to get help against an invading army that's technically invading the dragon's territory too, etc. Stats could be necessary in these situations (especially if your diplomats are a bit liberal with Suggestion magic) without winding up with PCs just killing dragons.

im sure that sort of thing happens often enough in campaigns taht contain players who like that sort of thing

course those players arent the type being debated about

Boogastreehouse

2013-10-04, 11:53 PM

Scow2

2013-10-05, 12:19 AM

The thing that continues to bother me is the notion that a life is considered innocent regardless of what it's capable of doing and does do until it's balls drop.
He's saying that such situations are inappropriate to sit around a table simulating.And I'm going to continue to disagree with the notion that simulating the justified/unjustified killing of creatures that are dangerous from day 1 is inappropriate for fantasy gaming. In fact, there's a formerly-popular series (That semirecently got a popular reboot) about a nearly-infant dragon destroying an entire army and its leader on a quest for vengeance. And even the Council of Wyrms, as noted, has Wyrmlings just as smart, keen, and cunning as a band of adventurers.

There are lots of things in the MM that are immediately threatening when they hatch (etc), but only dragons have official stats for them. Even the wyvern entry doesn't have stats for baby wyverns, and they are less intelligent/sapient/conscious/whatever than dragons are. That's because the wyvern isn't born as intelligent and developed as a dragon is. A freshly-hatched wyvern is about as dangerous as a tiger cub or baby Red-Tailed Hawk, and the statblock in the monster manual describes a Juvenile wyvern. Dragons, on the other hand, are born intelligent, mentally-developed, and in almost full control of their physical capabilities. I guess they kind of are childish... but if human 2-to-4-year-olds were as capable as a dragon is, the world would be a VERY scary place (In my experience raising and watching children develop, the only thing keeping them from almost all being classified as "Chaotic Evil" is an inability to actually act on their impulses in a meaningful way. Give them a body as strong and flexible as a dragon's, and "Kill it with fire" becomes the only way to survive.)

DaggerPen

2013-10-05, 12:32 AM

The thing that continues to bother me is the notion that a life is considered innocent regardless of what it's capable of doing and does do until it's balls drop.

Why do you keep using this line? Are the females of species considered perpetually innocent, then?

And I'm going to continue to disagree with the notion that simulating the justified/unjustified killing of creatures that are dangerous from day 1 is inappropriate for fantasy gaming. In fact, there's a formerly-popular series (That semirecently got a popular reboot) about a nearly-infant dragon destroying an entire army and its leader on a quest for vengeance. And even the Council of Wyrms, as noted, has Wyrmlings just as smart, keen, and cunning as a band of adventurers.

That's because the wyvern isn't born as intelligent and developed as a dragon is. A freshly-hatched wyvern is about as dangerous as a tiger cub or baby Red-Tailed Hawk, and the statblock in the monster manual describes a Juvenile wyvern. Dragons, on the other hand, are born intelligent, mentally-developed, and in almost full control of their physical capabilities. I guess they kind of are childish... but if human 2-to-4-year-olds were as capable as a dragon is, the world would be a VERY scary place (In my experience raising and watching children develop, the only thing keeping them from almost all being classified as "Chaotic Evil" is an inability to actually act on their impulses in a meaningful way. Give them a body as strong and flexible as a dragon's, and "Kill it with fire" becomes the only way to survive.)

If the dragon is mature out of the egg, then the rules should refer to them as adults, not juveniles, young dragons, wyrmlings, etc. If the dragon is not mature right out of the egg, then they should be treated like children, albeit children who are holding a gun and are lashing out - E.G., they should be handled with caution, but every effort should be made to take the child down nonlethally and address the underlying cause of their violent behavior. And frankly, unless you'd be comfortable fighting children of any species, it should stay out of your campaign entirely and the younglings should hide in the back and flee from adventurers, if present at all.

Forikroder

2013-10-05, 12:35 AM

Why do you keep using this line? Are the females of species considered perpetually innocent, then?

If the dragon is mature out of the egg, then the rules should refer to them as adults, not juveniles, young dragons, wyrmlings, etc. If the dragon is not mature right out of the egg, then they should be treated like children, albeit children who are holding a gun and are lashing out - E.G., they should be handled with caution, but every effort should be made to take the child down nonlethally and address the underlying cause of their violent behavior. And frankly, unless you'd be comfortable fighting children of any species, it should stay out of your campaign entirely and the younglings should hide in the back and flee from adventurers, if present at all.

unless that while they possess the mind of an adult right out of the egg they dont possess the body of one so while there adult mentally there still a juvenile physically

Porthos

2013-10-05, 12:41 AM

Dragons, on the other hand, are born intelligent, mentally-developed, and in almost full control of their physical capabilities.

Because the game designed them that way. As you note, since they haven't with other creatures they didn't have to here.

FlawedParadigm

2013-10-05, 12:43 AM

I really don't see this thread going anywhere good in either the near or distant future.

Forikroder

2013-10-05, 01:00 AM

Because the game designed them that way. As you note, since they haven't with other creatures they didn't have to here.

no they didnt have to, but dragons are super cool so why limit them to only the highest level of adventurers?

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-05, 01:10 AM

Because the game designed them that way. As you note, since they haven't with other creatures they didn't have to here.

Dungeons & Dragons.

I think they wanted the iconic beasts to be potential foes (or allies) at all levels, because they're supposed to be one of the defining features of the game.

If it was Grottoes & Giants, I'm sure giants would be statted out for all levels. :smallsmile:

DaggerPen

2013-10-05, 01:16 AM

The problem is not with making dragons viable opponents at all levels; it's with making dragons that are a far cry from being an adult acceptable targets. Having adult dragons who are just of varying power levels for whatever reason works just fine for getting rid of this issue.

The Giant

2013-10-05, 01:20 AM

This is really going in circles, with you guys putting forth the exact same arguments I was having on page 2, but I wanted to jump in and say that I think there is a huge difference between such depictions in a work of authorial fiction like a novel or movie, and their inclusion in a Monster Manual. In the former, the author is capable of making it explicit that the baby dragon is a threat, or perhaps that it's unfortunate but the protagonist's life is in danger. In the Monster Manual, they're stripped of all extenuating circumstances and put alongside 400 other monsters whose sole purpose is to be killed for their treasure. That's the real problem.

If you spent an entire book dealing with the lifecycles of dragons and explicitly detailing what their mental capacities at various ages were like, with examples and appropriate (not necessarily lethal) encounter scenarios, that would be a lot more acceptable. People could still take those books and run DragonBabyKill3000, but it would be clear that wasn't the intent in their inclusion. I still personally think it would be even better to leave them out altogether because it's not needed and any DM that wants it can just make it up themselves, but it would be a lot less problematic from a publisher's point of view. My understanding based on earlier comments is that this is exactly what 4e did, so good for them.

Also, my Mod Senses are tingling, so I'll be looking back in this thread for line-crossing.

Poppatomus

2013-10-05, 01:21 AM

I really don't see this thread going anywhere good in either the near or distant future.

Well, you have to wait until the thread reaches a certain size before you can kill it.

:smallbiggrin:

The Giant

2013-10-05, 01:22 AM

Dungeons & Dragons.

I think they wanted the iconic beasts to be potential foes (or allies) at all levels, because they're supposed to be one of the defining features of the game.

If it was Grottoes & Giants, I'm sure giants would be statted out for all levels. :smallsmile:

If you can explain why they can't invent Orange Dragons who are adults at Small Size and level 3 and Yellow Dragons who are adults at Medium size and level 6, then maybe this would be a valid argument.

EDIT: Fun fact, I submitted a Medium-sized true dragon for Monster Manual 3 when I worked on it. It was rejected. But Topiary Guardians got in.

TheOtherErnie

2013-10-05, 01:31 AM

The thing that continues to bother me is the notion that a life is considered innocent regardless of what it's capable of doing and does do until it's balls drop.
Of course a life would be considered innocent until it does something non-innocent. This is The OotS universe. Rich constantly depicts beings and creatures who COULD cause damage as being friendly. Look at The Monster In The Darkness.

And I'm going to continue to disagree with the notion that simulating the justified/unjustified killing of creatures that are dangerous from day 1 is inappropriate for fantasy gaming.
This is something that I do not understand. Unless one of your characters is playing as a dragon then the DM is the one who made all the decisions as to what is dangerous and how dangerous and whether that creature is even encountering the players.

Rich has writen OotS such that Belkar is a valuable part of the good-aligned team trying to save the world. And Belkar is sympathetic enough to have his own fan club here.

Isn't the plot of OotS about how some creatures were created to be fodder and Redcloak's attempts to redress that?

And by the same token, if there is ever a situation where the players have to choose between their death or killing just hatched dragons it is because the DM put that situation there. And that DM is the one who decides whether killing them is good or evil or neutral or whatever in his game.

And it is the players' decision on whether to continue to play with that DM.

Amphiox

2013-10-05, 01:46 AM

I don't see why baby dragons, which are as intellignent and cunning as an adult of any other species, should have special protection. Especially when Chromatic dragons are usually capable of fending for themselves immediately after hatching, 'family values' be damned.

How do we know that baby dragons are as intelligent and cunning as adults of any other species?

Because their stats make them so.

How do we know that baby dragons possess weapons and abilities that let them one-shot human commoners?

Because their stats make them so.

How do we know that baby dragons are capable of fending for themselves immediately after hatching?

Because their stats make them so.

WHY did someone *decide* to make it so that baby dragons would have such abilities and such characteristics? And give them stats to convert these abilities and characteristics into gameplay mechanics?

What reason except to make it justifiable for them to be killed?

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-05, 01:59 AM

LadyEowyn

2013-10-05, 02:22 AM

If you can explain why they can't invent Orange Dragons who are adults at Small Size and level 3 and Yellow Dragons who are adults at Medium size and level 6, then maybe this would be a valid argument.

EDIT: Fun fact, I submitted a Medium-sized true dragon for Monster Manual 3 when I worked on it. It was rejected. But Topiary Guardians got in.
That's a great way of resolving the problem.

The debate in this thread over attacking things versus resolving situations in other ways reminds me of something I just saw in video gaming. My brother was playing Skyrim and had a quest to get rid of some mercenaries who were occupying a town's mine. His character went up to them and said, "You should leave, the whole town wants you gone," and they said "All right, we're not prepared to go up against the whole town" and left, because his character had strong persuasion skills. Quest accomplished, bloodshed: 0, experience gained (in the area of persuading people). All the other role-playing games I'd seen (e.g., Diablo) were just about killing the enemy, so I was really impressed with Skyrim for enabling resolutions other than violence.

And it's more interesting than just "find things and kill them". I expect that goes for D&D too.

ti'esar

2013-10-05, 02:38 AM

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-05, 03:27 AM

I think they wanted the iconic beasts to be potential foes (or allies) at all levels, because they're supposed to be one of the defining features of the game.

Yes, totally, but there are lots of other ways to make different "power level" versions of the same creature... there are ghouls and ghasts, four different kinds of hydra, six versions of each type of "classic" elemental, and lots of other examples, none of which use age as a metric. Or even stick with age, just don't start below young adult, or use exactly the same stats as right now except they're called different things. You can make stats for a juvenile dragon if you need to, just talking about what is printed in the book.

OMGoblins

2013-10-05, 03:32 AM

This thread is total hell. Honestly.

Domino Quartz

2013-10-05, 03:44 AM

This thread is total hell. Honestly.

Trust me, it's nowhere near as bad as some of the other threads that have been started in the OotS forum.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-05, 03:50 AM

Yes, totally, but there are lots of other ways to make different "power level" versions of the same creature... there are ghouls and ghasts, four different kinds of hydra, six versions of each type of "classic" elemental, and lots of other examples, none of which use age as a metric. Or even stick with age, just don't start below young adult, or use exactly the same stats as right now except they're called different things. You can make stats for a juvenile dragon if you need to, just talking about what is printed in the book.

I agree that's a perfectly viable way to handle it. I'm not particularly enamored of the current system as it is. It's just that in my case at least, I'm also not particularly upset about how they chose to handle it, either, and to me at least, it doesn't seem like an especially big deal either way. More of a molehill than a mountain on my horizon at least, though YMMV, of course, and my opinion is just my opinion, and not worth very much to anyone but me.

However, I also need to ask, if it bothers you having a "juvenile" dragon as a menace, is it that big of problem changing it in your home game? It's pretty much just a label, since the "juveniles" are powerful and dangerous predators, and can easily be reskinned as adults. They pretty much are miniature adults already, after all, kind of like monitor lizards or something.

The Giant

2013-10-05, 04:42 AM

I agree that's a perfectly viable way to handle it. I'm not particularly enamored of the current system as it is. It's just that in my case at least, I'm also not particularly upset about how they chose to handle it, either, and to me at least, it doesn't seem like an especially big deal either way. More of a molehill than a mountain on my horizon at least, though YMMV, of course, and my opinion is just my opinion, and not worth very much to anyone but me.

I'm just going to point out that you, personally, are the one who dragged me, by name, into this argument by mischaracterizing positions I have taken before on other related subjects:

D&D clearly assumes the latter. It's fine if Mr. Burlew doesn't in his world, but to portray RAW D&D as encouraging PCs to kill "dragon children" in the sense of "cute harmwess wittle dwagons who wouldn't hurt a fwy" is completely off the mark, IMO.

Again, I'm not arguing against Mr. Burlew's ideas. I'm simply pointing out that the age category concept of dragons in D&D doesn't change their basic ferocity and peril. And that a juvenile elf is a good deal more harmless and helpless than a juvenile dragon, by RAW.

So I could either let stand the idea that I go around saying that the baby dragons in RAW D&D are harmless, which is not something I ever claimed, or correct it.

Yes, this is a trivial subject. It's not even at the top of my list of Unfortunate Implications I Would Like to See Gone from D&D, much less my list of Things I Would Like to See Changed in the World. But you started this debate, so we're having this debate. If you don't think a topic is worth debating, don't start debating it.

However, I also need to ask, if it bothers you having a "juvenile" dragon as a menace, is it that big of problem changing it in your home game? It's pretty much just a label, since the "juveniles" are powerful and dangerous predators, and can easily be reskinned as adults. They pretty much are miniature adults already, after all, kind of like monitor lizards or something.

Of course it's not a big deal to reskin monsters. That's why it isn't a big deal to make people who want baby dragons to have to reskin them from smaller adults. If you have two options where the first way will upset some people and add some really weird implications to your product, and the second way will upset no people and no one will even have a conversation about it, why are we even considering the first way? Especially since this is already what they've done with the 4e Monster Manual, and I don't remember anyone being upset that the baby dragons were missing from the book.

Yes, "young" is pretty much just a label on a set of mechanics for a Small-sized reptilian monster, but since it's the label itself that's really the problem, it should be what gets tossed.

Cerlis

2013-10-05, 04:55 AM

I think it looks nicer with a little space

Seriously, you guys.

Rich isn't saying that if a hatchling dragon came up to you and was about to breath real fire at you, that it wouldn't be realistic to try to defend yourself. He's saying that such situations are inappropriate to sit around a table simulating.

He's saying that, yes, it can be a realistic situation, but not all realistic situations need to be acted out. It's just as creepy as acting out a rape scene. Sure, that is a thing that happens in the world, but why would you need to roleplay it?

If it's something that comes up during play, it's always better for the DM to say that some event occurs that eliminates the need to go any further.

If it's something that a villain is guilty of doing to show what a villainous-villainy-villain she or he is (whether it be rape, baby-killing, bunny-punching or whatever), it should still probably be kept out of the spotlight, so it doesn't become some lurid spectacle that the players are right in the middle of. Even if their goal is to try and stop the villain from performing the heinous act, if it's being portrayed right in their presence, they will be made to feel they are in some way participating because they are participating in the scene.

Tarquin didn't burn those slaves alive right up close where we could get a good look at their horrible final moments, because Rich knew that it would be inappropriate to include us in that ghastly act. Put that sensibility into gaming terms. Some things are better left referred to abstractly, rather than explored in gratuitous detail. Some things are better off simply implied. Some things are better left out all together.

I think it looks nicer with a little space

there is nothing creepy about killing a fire gecko. Talking about murdering a fire gecko might be a little. but whats it matter if he's 100yrs old or 500? The fact is that Fire Gecko babies are not on the same level as human babies. If you want to talk about creepy i'd recommend saying its ok to have your players murdering people but only if they are "legal". "Hold on!? Are any of yall under 18? Ok You two go.NO! Not you, him. ". Not to mention how much of a 4th wall break that is.

And yes he was basically saying that. "The only stats" they should have means no attacks, weapons and Hp = "congratulations baby killer". Yea i killed a baby. If the baby wanted to live he shouldnt have eaten my sister. Wasnt old enough to realize that Humans are pack animals and dont like their sisters getting eaten? To bad. shouldnt have tried to eat me either.

Many stories have fighting evil. Many stories are fighting evil monsters. But plenty of stories are about Fighting non-evil Monsters. And if there is an entire room of them non hatched who's entire purpose is to give my friends a face full of alien wing wang and turn us into a bloody test tube baby maker...
Then yea i might just set fire to the lot of them and piss off their mother and get into an awesome fight sequence with her using a yellow mecha.

And aint nothing creepy bout that.

In fact i'm pretty sure every single person who watched that part of that movie cheered when she did that.
-----------------------------------------

Unfortunate Implications I Would Like to See Gone from D&D
I wonder if anyone has ever made a (well made) version of this. it might be a good read (if done right). via the main reason i enjoy tv tropes. in that its a quick way of finding consistencies, non-consistencies and themes as well as other stuff you might have missed while interacting with the entirety of the game (for instance, watching 7 seasons of something you may not notice this consistent background event. But it might be pointed out in tv tropes, thus you learn about the thought that was put into it. Joy abounds).
But yea, basically something concerning major thinks like those unfortunate Implications that abound in the game/genre that one might easily overlook if they arent looking for it or interact with it directly.

-----------------------------

Of course it's not a big deal to reskin monsters. That's why it isn't a big deal to make people who want baby dragons to have to reskin them from smaller adults. If you have two options where the first way will upset some people and add some really weird implications to your product, and the second way will upset no people and no one will even have a conversation about it, why are we even considering the first way? Especially since this is already what they've done with the 4e Monster Manual, and I don't remember anyone being upset that the baby dragons were missing from the book.

One "problem" i see is the notion of a very evil dragon who makes psycho evil babies ...or something similar is basically a classic and often interesting "boss fight". Hell Onyxia in Warcraft is a great example. Every black dragon has been outwardly corrupted by dark god evil insanity magic. And in her boss fight you fight her and periodically her eggs hatch creating swarms of monsters.

one "solution" is that its perfectly easy to make a fight LIKE that without involving baby-killing. I think it would be more interesting in a campaign i'm working on if there where Corruption creatures milling around and the dragon is seen as their "queen" (since she is corrupted by the stuff they are made of). So they see her as "one of them". So you get your swarms of monsters and they are literally made out of psycho-bable. So killage ensues.

the "problem" is that someone is eventually going to want some guidelines on how to involve non-combatants (imagine all the DMS and players who play by RAW). You could have a "mini" statblock involving all the "non-combatant" stats (i'm not sure but didnt i see one of these in a 3.5 or 4.0 book somewhere?), such as run speed and "murdered" HP. And of course is someone is going to use these guidelines ...that means they are going to purposefully put non-combatants in and there is going to end up, always, a scenario in which you need more stats than that. Such as their Str or their alignment or whatnot. Thus, the notion of "why wont they just stat that out."

you see support for this even here. Every now and then you see someone talking about stats for pregnant person, or the notion of downscaling stats for young members of a race. and it does seem "wrong" or "Creepy" * because RPGs are suppose to be real-life simulators, sometimes under the notion that real-life has fantastic elements (or is ruled by such elements). and its just "statted out rules"

Point being there are players who always want more detailed information. I myself would probably make some stuff up on the fly, like "the kids you just rescued help pull you up , giving you a +4 bonus on that climb check". But the reasoning can't be Creepy* because its basically just the player trying to figure out what number to add to his dice-roll. its not someone actually thinking "ok well this is loosely based on the real world....So...ok guys help me brainstorm when its ok to kill children so we can figure out when its an Evil act"

*The fact is Creepyness or anything similar is a hard thing to gauge anything by. There are players freaked out but just the notion of undead. I have a friend who is completely wigged out by the idea of openly talking about sex and sexuality. Completely normal and rational stuff can creep and freak people out. And usually the problem is with that person, IMO.

------------------------

This is really going in circles, with you guys putting forth the exact same arguments I was having on page 2, but I wanted to jump in and say that I think there is a huge difference between such depictions in a work of authorial fiction like a novel or movie, and their inclusion in a Monster Manual. In the former, the author is capable of making it explicit that the baby dragon is a threat, or perhaps that it's unfortunate but the protagonist's life is in danger. In the Monster Manual, they're stripped of all extenuating circumstances and put alongside 400 other monsters whose sole purpose is to be killed for their treasure. That's the real problem.

maybe.

But the general impression i get is that. its dungeons and dragons. There are monsters. Some of these are dragons. Sometimes there are big dragons sometimes smaller ones.

Why are the dragons different sizes? Well probably because some are older.

Bamf many dragon sizes statted out.

Now one MIGHT look at that and think its not PC to have little months old dragons statted out. And they COULD change it to dragons are "adults" at Small size and get bigger in proportion to their power (or just age beyond adulthood).

But that is basically altering your story cus you realized that all your character (or most) are X demographic, so you change one to Y demographic and another to Z just so you dont look prejudiced or w/e.

I mean it could not affect the story at all.

So i guess the question is if one thinks that you should alter your work JUST to be P.C.

I mean there IS a better way to do it without those implications. But I highly doubt that the notion of different sized dragons wasnt answered "The small ones are hatchlings and the big ones are adults" cus that seems the most likely notion they would have had when coming up with it.

FlawedParadigm

2013-10-05, 06:31 AM

I'm going to bow out of this thread before it goes somewhere bad worse, but before I do I just want to say that the "dragons are dangerous right out of the egg" argument would sit better with me if there were in fact actual real life dragons and this was a known fact about them.

"It is known." - if you know the source material for that, that's a world wherein hatchling dragons (a few months old) are perfectly capable of destroying adult humans. Ask Kraznys mo Nakloz, if you like. Don't expect an answer, though.

Trust me, it's nowhere near as bad as some of the other threads that have been started in the OotS forum.

Oh no, not even close to being on the top ten, really. Is there such a thing as internet-old? 'Cause I feel it now.

hamishspence

2013-10-05, 06:35 AM

The previously mentioned Giant stats at least stop at Juvenile (2 sizes smaller than an adult) with an infant Giant having "no combat capability".

If a player is squicked by the thought of fighting a Giant toddler- because of the moral implications- what's wrong with applying some of that attitude to the children of other, less humanlike intelligent species?

Kish

2013-10-05, 06:43 AM

"It is known." - if you know the source material for that, that's a world wherein hatchling dragons (a few months old) are perfectly capable of destroying adult humans. Ask Kraznys mo Nakloz, if you like. Don't expect an answer, though.
I am certain that invoking George R. R. Martin will convince someone somewhere of something.

deworde

2013-10-05, 06:49 AM

Seems like there's a few arguments here.

1) Denying the ability to fight infant monsters prevents you from telling the story you want to tell.
* Sure, but that story shouldn't be promoted by the game guide. Child-killing should be something you build out of the supplied parts, not something the guide encourages you to throw in as a generic boss fight.

2) Dragon babies are monsters and we need to defend ourselves against them
* This is a misunderstanding of how "Don't write X that way works". You can't make statements about dragons as if fact, when that is readily changeable. If the setting made killing dragon babies fine, then that's the problem, arguing that it's just the way of things is daft. Especially as dragons are written every six ways from Sunday.

3) Look, my gaming group carved its way through a swarm of dragon babies and we don't want to be judged, alright! We're still Lawful Good! We're. Still. Lawful. Good.
* Sure, you're still lawful good. Stop worrying about it, it's just a game. Why so defensive? Baby-Killer. :-P
But seriously, the guide encouraged it, so you did it, and there was no reason to question it, so you didn't. If this discussion is making that now uncomfortable, good.

4) It's all fiction and doesn't matter.
* Well, yes, but then why argue. For me, sitting down to play the baby-slaughtering game makes me uncomfortable, once it's drawn to my attention. So that's good, because I avoid doing it in future.

FlawedParadigm

2013-10-05, 07:00 AM

I am certain that invoking George R. R. Martin will convince someone somewhere of something.

It was an example of a world wherein infantile dragons posed a credible threat to adult humans, nothing more. Sort of like how many species of snakes and scorpions in the real world are.

Bulldog Psion

2013-10-05, 07:04 AM

So I could either let stand the idea that I go around saying that the baby dragons in RAW D&D are harmless, which is not something I ever claimed, or correct it.

Which I never stated.

Really, I never stated it.

The OP basically asked "does D&D encourage baby killing."

I said, or intended to say, "Baby dragons according to D&D are not like baby humans. They may be in Mr. Burlew's works. But in RAW, they are not harmless little baby dragons who wouldn't hurt a fly."

That's it. I never stated, nor intended to state, that you go around saying this. In fact, I put in what you quoted as a disclaimer to make sure that it was clear I was not criticizing your take on dragons and that I was not referring in any way, shape or form to your take on dragons.

Apparently, what I said came across as the exact opposite. Which is ironic, considering that I put in specifically to avoid the debate position you're apparently ascribing to me.

It's a good thing that the Internet isn't used as the medium for international negotiation, because clearly, the result would be continual war.

I'm bowing out now, amid a chorus of :headdesks: and :facepalms:, because I've got enough frustration in my life without getting frustrated about being called out for something that I was specifically trying to avoid getting called out for in a discussion I could care less about.

Ugh.

Dodom

2013-10-05, 08:30 AM

I'd handle it more like wild animals, given that they're not physically comparable to human babies. Think about a bear:
It's intelligent, not in the same way as a human, but it learns and understands in its own way. Still can't be expected to do as enlightened and far sighted moral decisions though. It can kill a human one on one, and if it wanted to go on a rampage it would most certainly be able to do a lot of damage before being stopped. But do we go out and kill bears on sight? No.
We learn to be noisy when going out in the woods. We learn not to get close to their young, we learn not to leave food at their reach. Essentially, we learn enough about how bears work to avoid confrontation.
If a bear is clearly intent on killing you and you have a gun, of course you should save your life and kill it. But if you have a gun and a can of pepper spray, the latter is the recommended method.
If a given bear goes crazy and threatens humans in general, that one bear is put down, not just any random bear in the area.

halfeye

2013-10-05, 08:45 AM

If a given bear goes crazy and threatens humans in general, that one bear is put down, not just any random bear in the area.
Tell that to the sharks.

hamishspence

2013-10-05, 09:44 AM

"What Measure Is A Non-Cute" indeed.

TheOtherErnie

2013-10-05, 10:58 AM

4) It's all fiction and doesn't matter.
* Well, yes, but then why argue. For me, sitting down to play the baby-slaughtering game makes me uncomfortable, once it's drawn to my attention. So that's good, because I avoid doing it in future.
I agree with you. It is the DM who decides on the majority of the fiction in the campaign.

For experienced DM's it should be easy to calculate what a baby dragon is capable of in that DM's campaign. And, more importantly, how the characters interact with baby dragons. From never seeing one to never being closer than 10 miles to one to being dropped into a nest of them.

For inexperienced DM's it would be better (IMO) to not have stats for any babies. That way the inexperienced DM cannot include them without intentionally developing them and, therefore, intentionally developing the situation where the characters have to interact with the baby-whatevers.

There are two key concepts here that I see:
1.The characters will NOT encounter ANY creature that the DM does not allow them to encounter.

2. The characters' options in each of those encounters will be whatever the DM decides are the options available to the characters.

Kaerou

2013-10-05, 11:29 AM

Basically, I've never argued that the baby dragons in RAW D&D are "harmwess widdle dwagons." I've argued that there should not be baby dragons in RAW D&D at all. There shouldn't be published newborn stats on anything that is sapient, period. It's creepy and weird and actually encourages exactly this sort of debate when I think we'd all be better off not spending our time debating under what circumstances it is or is not cool to murder alien babies.

I feel so much more respect for you Giant. I feel this exact way and whenever I see artwork with adventurers killing / having killed a baby dragon (theres a famous pic out there of some guy posing by one hung by its tail that I feel very uncomfortable seeing). I feel nothing but disgust and discomfort. When I hear people telling D&D stories of fighting baby dragons I feel incredibly uncomfortable like 'why are you telling me this like its a good thing?'. if ever a DM I was playing with put one in as an encounter I would sit it out IC and OOC. Its just that disturbing to me.

I mean, its like having an encounter of six human/elf children with shields that grant cover due to their size and deadly poison crossbow pistols. Sure its a dangerous threat that can kill you but should it really be a thing in the game? I really don't think so.

Fish

2013-10-05, 11:43 AM

I'm going to continue to disagree with the notion that simulating the justified/unjustified killing of creatures that are dangerous from day 1 is inappropriate for fantasy gaming.
Who decided that dragons were dangerous from Day 1? The designers. Was that a necessary decision? No. A D&D dragon is not a discovered or revealed creature that the designers found in the forest one day and drew sketches of in the wild. It is an invention, an interpretation, of a collective (Western) myth.

The designers could easily have said, "Dragons come in different sizes." They could have left age off the table. They could have said, "From age 0-40, a baby dragon lives on its mother's back until it can fend for itself." No. They decided that dragons, alone of all creatures, were lethal the instant they hatched, and were therefore small level-appropriate bags of XP.

The only reason dragon children are statted out at all is because of branding. The designers wanted a) dragon-slaying as part of their gamers' routine and b) dragons also to be the pinnacle of the creature index. You could say "dragon juveniles have stats so players could feel heroic murdering them at any level, without having to wait." The problem stems partly from the whole XP-for-death exchange rate that is built into the core game, but mostly as an ill-chosen means of distinguishing between high-level and low-level targets.

Mightymosy

2013-10-05, 12:09 PM

[...]The problem stems partly from the whole XP-for-death exchange rate that is built into the core game, but mostly as an ill-chosen means of distinguishing between high-level and low-level targets.

I beliebe this is probably the biggest flaw or one of the biggest in all those Rp games.

We used to play a lot in a homemade RP that basically was a rip-off from Shadowrun that basically let out most of the rules and simplified and kinda reinvented the flavour background of that game. And the players that were the most successful (read: best stats) were the ones that had killed the most people. Because killing people = exp = better stats.
The guy who "invented" the game later included penalties for hurting various kinds of innocent people (still rather arbitrarily) and thought of other stuff you could get XP points for, but the damage was done and it still is remembered basically as a splatter game with some adventure elements.
So, the age we were playing that was at an age when we were young and aggressive and watched bloody action movies all the time, and computer games promoted this violence as well, so the game might have turned the same way without the XP for kills rule anyway. But i believe it is a major flaw when a game acitvely promotes killing as a good thing.

I'm still very much on the fence whether this applies to computer first person shooter games where the actual gameplay objective is to shoot other players.

But in roleplay games about imagining adventures, it is the single most stupid rule of all.

It doesn't even make sense! How can anyone get better scores in some random talents that are not even fighting related? I'm ok when a character gets boxing +1 after he's had a tough fight in a bar or whatever, but why should they get some arbitrary amount of "points" which they can later spend to increase their ability to, for example, craft magic items?
Doesn't make sense, and doesn't promote the kind of adventure game I'd like to play.
Especially when you feel kinda silly when everyone is killing people left and right and as a result his character is getting better than your own when you try to find peaceful solutions?:smalltongue:

It's sort of the last tie to the table wargame history that needs to be cut...

Reddish Mage

2013-10-05, 12:39 PM

The Giant is making an assumption on D&D and the monster manual that appearing in the monster manual is an invitation to be a target for rampaging adventurers. D&D is about adventurers killing their way through the world, only question is, will they kill baby dragons because they are automatically evil dragons, or will they kill adult minded dragons who made choices about what sort of dragon they will be and made the choice that after trying out a job as protector and finding its boss was a ****, that it would rather eat virgins and hoarde gold.

Paseo H

2013-10-05, 01:09 PM

Who decided that dragons were dangerous from Day 1? The designers. Was that a necessary decision? No.

Agreed. Makes you wonder what else they messed up on, and should be rewritten or done away with. Perhaps a whole lot of stuff. :smallamused:

Cerussite

2013-10-05, 02:19 PM

In the Monster Manual, they're stripped of all extenuating circumstances and put alongside 400 other monsters whose sole purpose is to be killed for their treasure. That's the real problem.

To you, maybe. I always saw the MM's vagueness in many 'fluff' aspects to be intended not to straitjacket the DM into putting those monsters as-is in the game, but to encourage creativity in inserting those creatures in the narrative in ways that are believable to the players (I actually think the biggest problem with the MMs is actually the inclusion of stuff like 'always CE' in alignments, given how they induce the DM to play each creature as written). In a game, the DM can very well, like you stated in the same post, "[make] it explicit that the baby dragon is a threat, or perhaps that it's unfortunate but the protagonist's life is in danger".

A poor DM may just roll dice on an encounter table to see what monster he's putting in the path of the party to 'kill for their treasure' and go with that, but others know the story they want to tell their players and put the monsters there in accordance with that, with the necessary context to not turn, say, a raid into a dragon's nest for a stolen heirloom into an arbitrary slaughter. A monster manual is not, indeed, a novel: it's just a book of ideas a DM can use to create a story. The final objective is the story, not the book.

ChristianSt

2013-10-05, 02:43 PM

To you, maybe. I always saw the MM's vagueness in many 'fluff' aspects to be intended not to straitjacket the DM into putting those monsters as-is in the game, but to encourage creativity in inserting those creatures in the narrative in ways that are believable to the players (I actually think the biggest problem with the MMs is actually the inclusion of stuff like 'always CE' in alignments, given how they induce the DM to play each creature as written). In a game, the DM can very well, like you stated in the same post, "[make] it explicit that the baby dragon is a threat, or perhaps that it's unfortunate but the protagonist's life is in danger".

A poor DM may just roll dice on an encounter table to see what monster he's putting in the path of the party to 'kill for their treasure' and go with that, but others know the story they want to tell their players and put the monsters there in accordance with that, with the necessary context to not turn, say, a raid into a dragon's nest for a stolen heirloom into an arbitrary slaughter. A monster manual is not, indeed, a novel: it's just a book of ideas a DM can use to create a story. The final objective is the story, not the book.

But the argument is: Why give the "poor DM" the option to make such a shorthand leading down a questionable road if it isn't necessary in the first place? Would D&D (or any RPG with equivalent stuff) be a worse game if there where no baby dragons in there? I think not.

Someone creating a story should have the awareness that most creatures are not just plop into existence - so even if there where non baby dragon in the MM, a DM could just make one up if he thinks he need one for his story.

Also I don't see much difference with the alignment example you provide, since it is as easily possible to ignore that value as ignoring the baby dragon. (I'm not saying that "Always XY" is a good thing, but I don't think it is that much different from providing values for baby dragons - getting rid of both seems good)

Reddish Mage

2013-10-05, 02:43 PM

To you, maybe. I always saw the MM's vagueness in many 'fluff' aspects to be intended not to straitjacket the DM into putting those monsters as-is in the game, but to encourage creativity in inserting those creatures in the narrative in ways that are believable to the players (I actually think the biggest problem with the MMs is actually the inclusion of stuff like 'always CE' in alignments, given how they induce the DM to play each creature as written). In a game, the DM can very well, like you stated in the same post, "[make] it explicit that the baby dragon is a threat, or perhaps that it's unfortunate but the protagonist's life is in danger".

A poor DM may just roll dice on an encounter table to see what monster he's putting in the path of the party to 'kill for their treasure' and go with that, but others know the story they want to tell their players and put the monsters there in accordance with that, with the necessary context to not turn, say, a raid into a dragon's nest for a stolen heirloom into an arbitrary slaughter. A monster manual is not, indeed, a novel: it's just a book of ideas a DM can use to create a story. The final objective is the story, not the book.

The Giant's point is that D&D is a game with broad appear, that most people starting to play it are young teens, and a lot of people play with nothing more in mind than to hunt down monsters and treasure. Many of the published adventurers explicitly encourage this behavior, and hatchling chromatic dragons are obviously there for low level adventurers to get the thrill of fighting dragons. There was even one in one of those beginner's boxes I picked up to start.

hamishspence

2013-10-05, 02:47 PM

I remember back in late 2e, the yellow beginner box had several adventures (ogre fortress, with minions digging for the Orb of Dragonkind, a haunted house adventure, and a more standard dungeon crawl)- and the last monster in the last adventure was a hatchling red dragon.

Reddish Mage

2013-10-05, 03:01 PM

Mine was the black box, escape from Zanzer Tem's dungeon. The white dragon hatchling appears in the follow-up partially completed dungeon after you escape.

I note that there's a slave in Zanzer's dungeon you can let escape that looks a bit feral and has yellow eyes. If you let him escape he'll come back the next round as a werewolf and try to kill you.

Cerussite

2013-10-05, 03:07 PM

The Giant's point is that D&D is a game with broad appeal, that most people starting to play it are young teens, and a lot of people play with nothing more in mind than to hunt down monsters and treasure. Many of the published adventurers explicitly encourage this behavior, and hatchling chromatic dragons are obviously there for low level adventurers to get the thrill of fighting dragons. There was even one in one of those beginner's boxes I picked up to start.

Then the problem is that the behaviour of killing stuff for treasure with no regards to consequences is encouraged all over D&D, not that there is a statblock for a creature that some people would find morally wrong to kill somewhere in the MM.

But the argument is: Why give the "poor DM" the option to make such a shorthand leading down a questionable road if it isn't necessary in the first place? Would D&D (or any RPG with equivalent stuff) be a worse game if there where no baby dragons in there? I think not.

Someone creating a story should have the awareness that most creatures are not just plop into existence - so even if there where non baby dragon in the MM, a DM could just make one up if he thinks he need one for his story.

In that case, why even have a MM at all? Might as well just have the DM homebrew everything. D&D wouldn't suffer without one. The MM, as I see it, just provides a bunch of statblocks that can be molded by the DM into a creature with a personality, motives, et al.

Also I don't see much difference with the alignment example you provide, since it is as easily possible to ignore that value as ignoring the baby dragon. (I'm not saying that "Always XY" is a good thing, but I don't think it is that much different from providing values for baby dragons - getting rid of both seems good)
I'm of the belief that, on matters concerning fluff, less is more. Publishing that black dragons are 'Always CE' pretty much ensures that most players that have read the book will instinctively jump straight to the pointy-stick solution when confronted with a black dragon, regardless whether the DM intended for the dragon to be CE, TN, NG, or whatever, specifically because they'll have that section in mind. Putting creatures in the book has no similar effect.

Paseo H

2013-10-05, 03:21 PM

I feel so much more respect for you Giant. I feel this exact way and whenever I see artwork with adventurers killing / having killed a baby dragon (theres a famous pic out there of some guy posing by one hung by its tail that I feel very uncomfortable seeing).

If it's the one I'm thinking of, in the original 2nd edition PHB, yeah...I didn't really think the dragon was a hatchling but it was the other stuff that bothered me. The sternly smug/overauthoritative hammer wielding guy, and the rest of the group looking like a bunch of carbon copy fantasy character stand ins.

TheOtherErnie

2013-10-05, 03:26 PM

In that case, why even have a MM at all? Might as well just have the DM homebrew everything. D&D wouldn't suffer without one.
Because different people play in different campaigns and it makes it easier for them to start new games and to join different games. They can be presented with a page of "house rules" and not need to ask whether goblins can breathe fire or if dwarves are the same as trolls.

Reddish Mage

2013-10-05, 03:31 PM

Cerussite if the only thing you are saying that if dragons were in the monster manual with the alignment removed and perhaps a richer personality than "greedy beyond belief and likes to eat people" there wouldn't be an assumption that its proper to kill them on the surprise round...I'd still note they are sandwiched between two other monsters that are basically there for putting in front of the PC death squad. If you are saying that no one is actually drawing the implications from the monster manual, you just need to read more to see your wrong.

If you are saying that people who read the monster manual this way are beneath your concern, and that real DMs don't need Monster Manuals anyway, then you aren't interested in the Giant's agenda or his point about making the world a better place in one small way.

And yes, I realize the Monster Manual is richer in its depiction of dragons. It mentions that the clever ones try to trick people into bringing them more treasure before they eat them.

Dr.Gunsforhands

2013-10-05, 03:44 PM

Fun fact, I submitted a Medium-sized true dragon for Monster Manual 3 when I worked on it. It was rejected. But Topiary Guardians got in.
^ Funniest thing I've read all day.

I've noticed a lot of people trying to argue about what constitutes a baby, but I imagine that its original inclusion had more to do with people's conception of what constitutes a dragon, which has changed over time culturally.

Long before D&D existed, things like goblins and dragons were the sole province of myth and parable, and stood less as characters and more as representations of the darker and more bestial parts of the human psyche; more like the game's demons and devils than the living creatures dealt with typically. Like Plato's Republic, the kingdoms they pestered were not reflective of any society real or imagined, but of a single person's multifaceted mental structure.

...but people don't look at stories that way so much anymore. In D&D, this is even more so; we're playing a character-driven game that can't be subject to that kind of interpretation. Intelligent dragons, however insane, are still generally seen as characters with their own problems and motivations, and they are sometimes allowed to have vulnerable children who don't really know what's going on. If it gets analyzed at all, it's more likely to effect some Star Trek-style social commentary than a cautionary tale about self-examination.

Anyway, the problem here has less to do with the stats existing in the manual (stats or no stats, a DM can set up any story desired) as the idea that, in a simple dungeon crawl, children are showing up on the same random encounter table as hired guards and infernal spiders with the same printed alignment and no special consideration. Yeah, players and DMs alike can notice this and improvise in those situations or make up some explanation as to how even a baby dragon is mentally capable of making the bad judgement call to start mauling you, but they might not, and either way it's still kind of dumb. The idea of showing a degree of respect for sapient beings in general resonates with me, and I'm fine with changing it in favor of the rad baby template from earlier.

Kish

2013-10-05, 03:47 PM

^ Funniest thing I've read all day.

I've noticed a lot of people trying to argue about what constitutes a baby, but I imagine that its original inclusion had more to do with people's conception of what constitutes a dragon, which has changed over time culturally.

Long before D&D existed, things like goblins and dragons were the sole province of myth and parable, and stood less as characters and more as representations of the darker and more bestial parts of the human psyche; more like the game's demons and devils than the living creatures dealt with typically.
If the original inclusion of dragons in D&D manuals was "less as characters and more as representations of the darker and more bestial parts of the human psyche," I wouldn't think there would have been good dragons included.

Dr.Gunsforhands

2013-10-05, 03:57 PM

If the original inclusion of dragons in D&D manuals was "less as characters and more as representations of the darker and more bestial parts of the human psyche," I wouldn't think there would have been good dragons included.

They're the kingdom's superego, duh. :smalltongue:

Yeah, I'm not sure how far they really thought it through; I mean, they probably didn't do it on purpose so much as make the assumption implicitly.

Math_Mage

2013-10-05, 04:07 PM

If the original inclusion of dragons in D&D manuals was "less as characters and more as representations of the darker and more bestial parts of the human psyche," I wouldn't think there would have been good dragons included.

Of course, by the same token, if the original inclusion of baby dragons in D&D manuals was as targets, why stat out good dragons? Or good dragon hatchlings?

I'm aware the implication is still there in the present day, but if we're talking about intent, the point should be made.

Reddish Mage

2013-10-05, 04:14 PM

Of course, by the same token, if the original inclusion of baby dragons in D&D manuals was as targets, why stat out good dragons? Or good dragon hatchlings?

I'm aware the implication is still there in the present day, but if we're talking about intent, the point should be made.

Honestly, I wouldn't make out too much out of the stating of good creatures. For dragons, it may be for symmetry, though young dragons are also useful for mounts and "animal" companions for the PCs. Other good creatures are similarly stated as either for allies or mounts.

Paseo H

2013-10-05, 04:30 PM

Of course, by the same token, if the original inclusion of baby dragons in D&D manuals was as targets, why stat out good dragons? Or good dragon hatchlings?

I'm aware the implication is still there in the present day, but if we're talking about intent, the point should be made.

Well obviously bad guys have no qualms about being evil baby killing metallic-dragon-targeters.

I think the issue here is more that people think it's all well and good to kill baby chromatic dragons.

Nachoman_Randy

2013-10-05, 04:50 PM

I think the same could apply to the chromatic/metallic dragons aligement.

Yeah, I can see the Giant's point.

But the hatchling statics of dragons are usefull if you have one, for example a PC with a dragon hatchling familiar/companion or just taking care of it.

Rogar Demonblud

2013-10-05, 05:26 PM

If it's the one I'm thinking of, in the original 2nd edition PHB, yeah...I didn't really think the dragon was a hatchling but it was the other stuff that bothered me. The sternly smug/overauthoritative hammer wielding guy, and the rest of the group looking like a bunch of carbon copy fantasy character stand ins.

Well, it was kind of a 'team picture' of what a group of adventurers would look like. And they were also kind of chewed on (one of the women in particular).

Honestly, if you want to start reforming your players, forget about alignment or whether something's in the Monster Manual. Those are excuses, not causes. You want to fix the problem, get rid of the motivations and the enablers. No random loot drops for killing stuff. And no XP for killing stuff.

One of the games I played when I was younger was Alternity, which in retrospect was kind of a halfway point between AD&D 2e and D&D 3e. One of the few things I loved about it was that you got no XP for anything except completing the scenario, and maybe a bonus for good RP. Gods of Gaming, that was a relief from the late 90s hackfest.

Of course, I also turned my dragons into TN ultra-apex predators that are created rather than born, so a lot of my gaming doesn't exactly apply to this thread.:smallredface:

Fish

2013-10-05, 05:27 PM

Then the problem is that the behaviour of killing stuff for treasure with no regards to consequences is encouraged all over D&D, not that there is a statblock for a creature that some people would find morally wrong to kill somewhere in the MM.
Why must only one of these be problematic?

3Power

2013-10-05, 05:37 PM

If you spent an entire book dealing with the lifecycles of dragons and explicitly detailing what their mental capacities at various ages were like, with examples and appropriate (not necessarily lethal) encounter scenarios, that would be a lot more acceptable.It's called the Draconomicon, and it has been a part of 3rd edition since 2003. It has an entire section on the dragon life cycle and gives a sample dragon for each base variety/life stage combination, with a short description of each dragon and what daily life is like for them.

A wyrmling dragon is capable of reason at 1 hour old, which it does at the same level as an average adult human (except for black dragons, who do it at the same level as an adult orc, and white dragons, who are dumber than orcs). It also magically inherits knowledge from it's ancestors. By the young adult stage (the same as black dragon junior) the average dragon has severed all ties from their family. Most have done so much earlier, and black dragons are specifically mentioned as "advising their children to leave before they decide to eat them," after a certain point.

Anyway, if we define children as "innocent, defenseless, helpless creatures who can't be held accountable for their own actions," then the point is moot because then there are no such things as draconic "children." They're born fully capable of surviving on their own, and are capable of performing both malevolent and benevolent deeds with full understanding of what they're doing. Now, are there children as in "offspring?" Yes. "Pre-mating age?" yes. "In the first X% of their lifespan?" Sure. But "defenseless and ignorant?" No. Not in canon D&D.

Elves are another interesting race to examine. Like dragons, they're long-lived but they're complete opposites maturity wise. Elves reach physical maturity at around 20 years old, but the vast majority don't feel comfortable leaving the home they've grown up in until they're 100 years old at the earliest. So what is more unacceptable? Killing an elf that's lived in his mom's basement for 50 years, or killing a black dragon wyrmling that's been living alone in the wilderness, stealing from travelers for the five years it's been alive?

Thus, rather than "having stats for every stage of growth encourages the killing of dragon children," it's "The fact that dragon children aren't makes them just as susceptible to being killed as anything else in the game, for the same potential reasons and justifications."

Kish

2013-10-05, 05:47 PM

3Power

2013-10-05, 05:57 PM

Kish

2013-10-05, 05:58 PM

An excellent example of wordplay, on par with, "Turning left at that corner is not turning right, and as it is not right it is obviously wrong." You may chalk up victory to yourself in whatever contest you consider yourself to be having.

rodneyAnonymous

2013-10-05, 05:58 PM

Might want to read that again.

titan_monarch

2013-10-05, 06:12 PM

Remember Bug's Life (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SFUiz3oI6Ek)? From our perspective, a baby bird is cute. From the perspective of a bug, a baby bird is an invincible machine of death.
<snip'd stuff about human toddlers vs. ants and other baby apex predators>

This got me thinking about a possible strategy for dealing with baby creatures in D&D. I side with the "just leave out the babies" or "stats: a/c infinite, HP infinite, alignment TBD" camps. But if one must make a D&D world where there are things that prey on humans or other PC species and are dangerous enough to be a really serious threat at any stage of life (the baby bird or human toddler to the PCs' ants), I propose:

if one finds oneself up against an infant of such a species, the infant should not be immune, but should have a penalty associated with killing it, an XP loss or alignment penalty or suchlike (don't play D&D much myself, so I'm not sure what would be applicable, but hopefully the idea is clear).

Then your player gets a bit of a dilemma: it's a threat, so the easy way out and standard D&D response is "kill it with fire"; but it's a child, so doing that gets you penalised. The player then has to weigh up the "infant" versus "still dangerous" factors and decide what kind of person their character is: do you kill it anyway and remove the threat in the easiest way possible, as per other monsters, since it's dangerous, but then get penalised (and get killing a baby on your [character's] conscience); or do you find some other way of dealing with it, and avoid the penalty both stats-wise and morally, but very possibly get killed?

There are probably holes in this method, and I don't know if I expressed it very well. Also, skipped half this thread, sorry. Anyway just my 2gp.

Reddish Mage

2013-10-05, 06:36 PM

It is rather fascinating to observe, no matter how many times Rich repeats "I am aware that the Monster Manual writers chose to make killing dragon babies A-OK, that is the problem, not somehow a solution to the problem," people will still show up, nine pages into the thread (and certainly fifty pages into the thread, should it go on long enough) with, "But, see, look at their Monster Manual writeup, there's no reason for killing them to be a moral issue."

You can make the argument that dragons are something so different, that their "young" aren't equivalent at all to our young. The Giant has already anticipated this argument and headed it off several times with references to alien babies, and basically said that its the adjectives "young" and "juvenile" he has a problem with. If the Monster Manual instead decided to call the dragons "small adult stages 1 ,2 and 3" and stressed their full mental capacity and maturity instead of calling them children, there wouldn't be the same problem. As he mentioned but a two pages ago in the wee hours of the morning. I'm sure Once Upon a Time Dwarves (who come into the world fully formed adults with clothes from an egg) are not child labor either.

Yes, "young" is pretty much just a label on a set of mechanics for a Small-sized reptilian monster, but since it's the label itself that's really the problem, it should be what gets tossed.

Math_Mage

2013-10-05, 06:38 PM

It occurs to me that if dragons are adult from the egg and only mature physically thereafter, they could simply be described that way in the MM and not given any baby labels at all. However, I'm guessing that someone will accuse me of playing semantics with babies if I actually advocate that position instead of sticking to the line that no nonhuman is allowed to be mentally cognizant from birth, so...*shrug*

EDIT: Or, I might be ninja'd. *double shrug*

Cerussite

2013-10-05, 06:38 PM

Why must only one of these be problematic?

Why should having a statblock for a creature be wrong? There's a lot of things statted out in DnD that are morally reprehensible to kill. There are stats for ponies (http://www.d20srd.org/srd/monsters/pony.htm) in the game, for gosh's sake, and they specifically say they'll run scared for their lives if attacked. On the other hand, there's a bunch of non-killy reasons why I would want having an infant dragon statted out. I might want one as a companion, for one.

That people see the MM as a hitlist is the only problem here.

King of Nowhere

2013-10-05, 07:15 PM

I think you're all overanalyzing things.

We all know D&D manual are poorly written in many ways. the monster's descriptions totally lack any attempt at imagination, in particular 90% of creatures are evil and are described according to 3 or 4 horribly clichèd templates. the description on morals are a mix of stuff that should be self-evident and of stuff that contradicts each other. It is just too obvious in the description of everything that the purpose of anything in the game is to provide fight to the players. From the settings, to the creatures, to the spell selections (how many spells have a civilian use?), to the encounter tables. Everything is inconsistent when analyzed in depth.

So this thing about killing babies is just another of those very many ways D&D manuals are just a filmsy setup for a kick-the-door playing group. We don't need to discuss it in depths, because it's absolutely irrelevant to anything. All this discussion proves is that the manuals are poorly conceived for anything not related to direct fighting between a party of adventurers and a group of monsters, and we already know that. If we want to use it as a start to discuss real life moral points, we'd rather use better material to start with. If we want to criticize the manuals, there's no further point in doing so, cause it's like shooting on the red cross.

In the end, the actually good thing the manuals provide is a bunch of pieces that a clever DM can wield into an adventure. All the creatures in the monster manual are balanced and playtested and you can have an idea what you can throw at your party without accidentally killing them all, and that's the thing that was actually taken care by the writers.
Then, depending on the DM and the group, he may use those elemeents to create complex stories with groups of people with different ideas and complex interactions and let the players sort the morality, or he can play a black-and-white world where monsters are just there to be killed. A good DM can take what's good in the manuals and use it for his own purpose. A bad DM will misuse everything, even if the books were actually good. And yes, the manuals could be written much better than that, but I doubt a few quick fixes like removing growing stats for dragons are going to make any difference. they would have to be completely rewritted with ample worldbuilding in mind. But they aren't made with that in mind. I bet 90% of players just like them the way they are and don't want to be saddled with complex riddles like what to do with a small dragon that is attacking them because he may or may not be grown enough to not realize he can actually hurt them.
We who like to play complex stories are just a minority, and the rules aren't made for us. It's up to us to houserule the bits needed to make a more consistent world.
Then, I would see nothing wrong with a DM deciding that a dragon is human-like sapient from the day it comes out of the egg, and as such perfectly capable of making decisions that can lead it to become an acceptable target. or that a baby dragon is just like human babies, but with incredible destructive potential, and may accidentally burn down a whole village without reallly realizing it's hurting anyone, and thus forcing the humans to defend themselves. Rich said he find a bad thing that players would want to play a campaign like that, but some people likes that kind of gritty realism, and I see no harm in that. It's all up to what the party is about.

By the way, I once threw a baby golden dragon at my group, but it was part of a joke. First the baby dragon attacked the group, then the dragon's mother came and scolded the baby for being mean to strangers, she apologized to the party and she offered to carry them away from the mountains.

EDIT: first I tell you you're overanalyzing, then I make one of the longest posts in the thread. I am a bit like vaarsuvius on that.