Goblins and the evolution of Gaming Morality

[PontificatusRex]

I've been thinking about this for a while. It seems to me that the portrayal of the Goblin Dilemma (and that of monsters in general) in Order of the Stick is an allegory for the evolution of role-playing games and the morality within those games. And so here's a lot of words about this:

To me, the Gods seem a whole lot like Game Designers. They create worlds to play their games in and if they cooperate and work together the game goes well for a while, but when they each try to do their own thing it falls apart quickly. And the story of The Dark One as told in Start of Darkness is absolutely, literally true in regards to the design of Dungeons and Dragons - goblins and similar weak monsters were put in the game to be easy enough for low-level adventures to kill before they got high enough level to fight more interesting monsters.

And from an ethics standpoint, that was fine. The game was a straight up pastiche of pulp-era Sword and Sorcery stories mixed with Tolkienian high fantasy. The goblins, etc could just be straight-up evil, they were the servants and troops of the Big Villains and you didn't need to try to justify it because the point of the story was not to create realistic societies. Tolkien's Orcs were not supposed to be regarded as a fully-rounded alien race but as a reflection of all the worst he saw in humanity, especially in his experiences in WW1. And D&D and it's early imitators took that and ran with it. Monsters were obstacles and threats, not sentient beings whose life was inherently equal in value to the characters.

And yet this moral framework was almost immediately subverted in the game. One of the first published adventure modules was Keep on the Borderlands, which I'm sure many folks remember. A party of adventurers makes a series of raids on a cave complex filled with different groups of evil humanoids and some other monsters, in the context of defending civilization against enroaching Evil. Should be no problem, except in those caves are not just enemy warriors, but non-combatant females (yes, sexist) and children. And it's strongly implied the adventurers are supposed to kill them. We're told their hit points and combat abilities, and they come from straight up Evil races so if they aren't killed they'll grow up to be deadly threats later...It's really messed up. I don't think Gygax was trying to throw a massive moral dilemma at the players (especially since it was an Introductory adventure), I assume he was trying to be "realistic" by putting those tribal groups in there instead of just combatants, but it clearly didn't occur to him that said realism completely subverted the Fantasy morality that made it ethically permissible for D&D Adventurers to exist. It's kind of odd that he failed to notice that we never saw baby orcs in Tolkien (except a mention of Gollum killing and eating young goblins, not a great role model), nor did Conan, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Harold Shea, or any other of the protagonists of the stories that inspired Gygax ever have to decide whether or not to murder the children of their enemies.

The action of Keep on the Borderlands can actually be described as the destruction of Redcloak's village, from the human's point of view. There's never even any episodes of the humanoids attacking anyone else, it's completely framed as "Those guys over there are bad, go wipe them out."

On the other hand, in another very early module, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, you've got orcs as potential allies. While you're attacking a bunch of giants (and their non-combatant females, and their children...), there is a hideout of orcs who were slaves to the giants and escaped, and are potential allies to the adventurers. But they're still "Evil". Theoretically if any escaped the giants they would be as much a threat to civilization and should therefore be wiped out, but I doubt many real-life people ended up playing it that way when they ran the adventure.

So almost from the get go you've got monsters with families and children, monsters who are not just enemies but possible allies (a scenario I can't imagine with, say, Tolkien's orcs. I think at best Tolkien's orcs in a similar situation would have pretended to be friendly but betrayed the humans as soon as possible). Runequest, one of my favorite old RPG's, appeared soon after D&D and completely rejected it's ethical system, instead creating a world with the major races being neither good or evil and Elves and Dwarves being just as likely to be enemies of Humans as the Trolls, depending on the circumstances.

And there began a slow evolution to the current view, with 3.5 making humanoids races "Usually" Evil instead of straight up default, though that just complicated the moral issues of being a murderhobo. Orcs have gone from being armies of homicidal thugs to tribes of hardy barbarians (who breed with humans a lot), much like Star Trek Klingons. And Order of the Stick pushes very hard on the view that you just can't relegate any sentient species as "Evil" without keeping the narrative in very, very narrow parameters. Once the enemies have families they care about, the moral framework stops being Fantasy and starts being real-world. Goblins are not there to be enemies of the Player Races any more, they are equal in their inherent worth if not in material circumstances. And what kind of sociopath would wear the skin of their dead enemy as armor, anyway?

So, that was a lot of words. I hope some folks found them interesting.

[KorvinStarmast]

The action of Keep on the Borderlands can actually be described as the destruction of Redcloak's village not if you play that module smartly. Smart adventurers figured out that some of those groups of humanoids were at odds with the others, and tried the old divide and conquer strategy. It made the module far more interesting than an attempt at a kill 'em all dungeon crawl. And there is a backstab at the keep itself that can still get you ...

The premise, of 'borderlands' is that there is a zone of land that isn't under the control of humans, nor humanoids, and thus is contested. Kind of like the neutral zone in Star Trek, but actually more like a no man's land between battle lines on the Western Front. The adventurers are trying to tip the scales.

In the first group that I was in that played that, a whole lot of PCs died (and players had to roll up another one) during the course of that adventure.

[ebarde]

Yeah, I feel that's kinda of my problem with evil races. I'm mostly fine if they're clearly an entity that only exists for a single goal and don't do much outside of that, but the moment you try to flesh them out as a functioning society capable of a wide array of clearly human experiences, as at this point they are no longer really just an abstraction of a particular type of human behavior.

[PontificatusRex]

not if you play that module smartly. Smart adventurers figured out that some of those groups of humanoids were at odds with the others, and tried the old divide and conquer strategy. It made the module far more interesting than an attempt at a kill 'em all dungeon crawl.

Well, sure, that makes for fun gameplay but I don't think it's more ethical to manipulate different groups of neighbors into wiping out each other's families than to just march in and do it yourself.

[Vemynal]

https://twitter.com/rhdaly/status/1254504793747468288/photo/1

Gygax was all for straight up baby murder cause they would have grown up into murderers.

On the flip, the Giant has spent most of his time writing this comic attempting to subvert and give evidence against this ideology.

Is it cool to have horrible irredeemable monsters? Absolutely! Strahd is a personal fav of mine. But I like how gaming has gone the direction of "Strahd is an irredeemable monster" and not "Vampires are irredeemable monsters".

Redcloak is fairly irredeemable at this point I'd say; but I have tons of hope for Jirax, Redcloak's niece, etc. Its more fun imo when adversaries have layers.


edit: i havent posted in so long i forget my avatar was a vampire when i wrote this lmao

[KorvinStarmast]

Is it cool to have horrible irredeemable monsters? Absolutely! Strahd is a personal fav of mine. But I like how gaming has gone the direction of "Strahd is an irredeemable monster" and not "Vampires are irredeemable monsters".
I don't care for vampire revisionism. It's a shame that Blade meets Twilight, the movie, never got made. :smallcool:

Also, there's this for those of you wrapped around the axel about goblins. You are victims of lazy DMs. The original game had a d12 table for level 1 monsters, here's what BECMI (rule compendium) has for the Monster Level 1 Table.

Monster
1d6 Bandit
1d6 Beetle, Fire
1d6 Cave Locust
1d6 Centipede, Giant
1d2 Ghoul
1d6 Goblin
1d3 Human
2d6 Kobold
1d2cLizard, Gecko
1 NPC Party
1d6 Orc
1d10 Skeleton
1d2 Snake, Racer
1d2 Spider, Crab
1d8 Stirge
1d3 Troglodyte
1d3 Zombie

Lots more than goblins, and two separate entries for human: bandit and human. (though the bandits can be of any sort, depends on the imagination the DM applies).

[Doug Lampert]

Keep on the Borderlands was printed in December 1979.

Original D&D was copyright 1973. There were adventures and multiple settings published in the first 6 years, Keep was not the first by a long shot.

[KorvinStarmast]

Keep on the Borderlands was printed in December 1979.

Original D&D was copyright 1973. There were adventures and multiple settings published in the first 6 years, Keep was not the first by a long shot.

not to mention the fine stuff by Judge's Guild, like City State of the Invinicible Overlord and Tegel manor ... :smallsmile:

[arimareiji]

This is not unlikely my clear-to-the-bone-marrow jaded cynicism talking, but in a fantasy world where I get to decide alignments... Chaotic and Lawful can stay as they are. Good and Evil would have sub-categories "towards in-group" and "towards out-group", with ALL sentients being various shades of "Usually Good" to the former and "Usually Evil" to the latter. (^_^)°

The biggest difference would be the third axis: Humans would tilt far toward the Idealist (tendency to rationalize) pole, versus the "owning it" pole (brain is sleep-fuzzy; couldn't think of a good term).

[hroþila]

I think Tolkien's orcs are more nuanced than typically given credit for. For all their monstrosity, we still see the dwarves parlaying with them in The Hobbit in a way that suggests being given quarter was not out of the question, we're told that elves and men considered it ethical to treat orc prisoners humanely (even if they didn't always do it), we're pretty much told that the dwarves committed atrocities against them (which of course was reciprocal), a kind of judgment that requires acknowledgment that orcs aren't merely a pest to be destroyed. For all their destructive impulses, we mostly see fighting between orcs from different groups, not infighting as such. They're certainly evil, but we see them mostly at points in their history when they were most under the control of a dark lord that controlled them supernaturally to a certain degree.

[Sapphire Guard]

Once we move away from evil races, i find that the label just moves to some other group the PCs don't need to worry about killing.

Adventuring parties rarely murder villages just because they feel like it, it's a side effect of some other goal. It's usually more 'we're travelling through this forest to go somewhere or retrieve something, we fight back if attacked' than 'we are going out of our way to exterminate this species.'

[TRH]

Once we move away from evil races, i find that the label just moves to some other group the PCs don't need to worry about killing.


I assume that's why slavers are so common in RPGs. After killing a few dozen or a few hundred bandits, a player might stop and think about whether these guys are just trying to make ends meet and had to turn to crime, but slavers are indefensible, more or less.

[arimareiji]

I assume that's why slavers are so common in RPGs. After killing a few dozen or a few hundred bandits, a player might stop and think about whether these guys are just trying to make ends meet and had to turn to crime, but slavers are indefensible, more or less.

Not to mention that if you think it through, human traffickers at least enable a horrific act starting with R on a massive scale.

Which seems to have become unfortunately common in Hollywood fare as a shortcut for "This person is evil", i.e. reason #674 I generally avoid Hollywood fare like the plague. I think it's the result of a steady progression of reason #83 (Turn It Up To 11), in tandem with the unusual-for-Hollywood-realization that everything has to have a limit and not everyone can be Space H**ler.

[Clistenes]

I assume that's why slavers are so common in RPGs. After killing a few dozen or a few hundred bandits, a player might stop and think about whether these guys are just trying to make ends meet and had to turn to crime, but slavers are indefensible, more or less.

I dunno, if you are living in a village surrounded by wilderness, unprotected by state, king or lord, and these bandits are killing and raping people, what are you going to do? let them be? You usually don't even have the option of sending them to jail, because there isn't a jail, or any kind of judicial or penal system... it's either killing them, or letting them go and keep murdering and raping...

Same for "evil" species... if something or somebody is killing and eating humans, I would want them very dead, regardless of alignment or morality... I mean, yeah, eating humans may be a very important part of their culture, or maybe they are hungry and humans taste delicious... so what? **** them, they kill humans, they are dead!.

Which brings the uncomfortable issue of what to do with their children and non-combatants... An Ancient Age/Medieval person wouldn't have doubted what to do: They need to be eliminated so humans can live in peace in the future... but our modern mindset demands that there is a better solution... except there isn't one, because, a society that has to rely on roaming murderhobos for its protection can't possibly have the means to deal with a captured population of enemies who hates their guts, unless they break them and turn them into a slave underclass... which would have been considered humane by a Roman guy from I B.C., but is unacceptable to the modern sensibility of players...

You could claim that, having lost their hunters and looters and having to escape deep into the wilderness, most children will starve to dead of be killed by their mothers to save food, and that the women will look for a new tribe to join... but I don't think most players want to think about those grisly details...

[t209]

not if you play that module smartly. Smart adventurers figured out that some of those groups of humanoids were at odds with the others, and tried the old divide and conquer strategy. It made the module far more interesting than an attempt at a kill 'em all dungeon crawl. And there is a backstab at the keep itself that can still get you ...

The premise, of 'borderlands' is that there is a zone of land that isn't under the control of humans, nor humanoids, and thus is contested. Kind of like the neutral zone in Star Trek, but actually more like a no man's land between battle lines on the Western Front. The adventurers are trying to tip the scales.

In the first group that I was in that played that, a whole lot of PCs died (and players had to roll up another one) during the course of that adventure.

Yeah, kinda saw it on the video about it.
Not sure if Gygax thought about Foederatii (Late Roman's policy of making Barbarian "friends" to keep other Barbarians off their back, which backfired when Alaric survived Friggidus after Goths were used as meatshield on Arbogaust's army) for divide and conquer idea in dealing with the tribes.
Edit: Also Goblin Slayer might be reverse or another take on goblins, which the anime showed what happened if Fenris' plan succeeded since we did see goblin attacks being a common problem yet not addressed by higher-level heroes despite the large attrition rate on militias and level1 1 adventurers.
In fact, had it not been for Goblin Slayer, the demon would have ravaged the world since the chosen one's village was almost attacked by Goblin horde that the titular hero stopped.

[Finagle]

The premise, of 'borderlands' is that there is a zone of land that isn't under the control of humans, nor humanoids, and thus is contested. Kind of like the neutral zone in Star Trek, but actually more like a no man's land between battle lines on the Western Front. The adventurers are trying to tip the scales.
It's really a copy of the *eastern* front. It more similarly resembles the medieval Teutons going east to build civilization in a wilderness. Many of these oldschool D&D players were students of medieval history (bill-guisarme, anybody?) The Keep is the last outpost to keep the monsters out, and the players are there to make the area safe for more civilization. The module is only for levels 1-3, but a creative DM could have the players go all they way up to name level and build keeps of their own in the area and start an open borders immigration policy to fill the land with taxable farmers.

KOTB didn't even have "evil" aligned monsters. They were just Chaotic. The forces of civilization were the players - Law - and the forces opposing them were Chaos. The adventure zone was even called the Caves of Chaos, just in case anyone forgot.


In the first group that I was in that played that, a whole lot of PCs died (and players had to roll up another one) during the course of that adventure.
Yeah, the monsters have a lot of room for intelligent reaction to the PCs, setting ambushes, moving things around, etc. One of the reasons the module is a classic.

[The Pilgrim]

Ah, the issue of "fantasy racism"...

Well, back then when Tolkien made the orcs, it was a device not different than when we make zombies or alien-bug-infestion stuff today. You can, and must, flesh out the Evil Overlord, but the Evil Overlord needs minions, and you can't flesh out every individual minion to explain to the reader why it needs killing. So you end up creating a generic non-humanized enemy as legitimate target for your heroes to kill. When I was a child, I remember how the TMNT cartoon made all Foot Clan soldiers robots so there would be no moral problem in the protagonist killing them (while in the comic, they were living people). Star Wars ended up stablishing all Stormtroopers were clones with no personality in order to justify their mass slaughtering (and I suppose their poor marksmanship, too).

Problem is when your enemy-by-default begins to get development too, as an species whith their society, biological cycle, women and children. Then they begin to look too much like people and you start to feel you can't just slaughter them at sight. And you can't really go with labelling them as "utterly evil" when they are mating and reproducing like any other living species.

When you reach that point, it's when it becomes "fantasy racism". Because that's the point were, if you want to keep justifying killing them at sight, you have to resort to the same kind of rationalizations that humans in the past have used to justify ethnical cleansing.

My point is, it's not racist to do what Tolkien did. That is, to invent a non-humanized guilty-by-default enemy. But it is to pretend to keep with it as the "evil species" get, eventually, "humanized".

Nowadays, the role of Orcs&Goblins as "legitimate targets" in RPGs has been largely overtaken by Undead and Fiends. And, in general fiction, by Zombies and Alien Bugs. Though the Alien Bugs end up being problematic, too. See Starcraft.

[KorvinStarmast]

It's really a copy of the *eastern* front. It more similarly resembles the medieval Teutons going east to build civilization in a wilderness. Many of these oldschool D&D players were students of medieval history (bill-guisarme, anybody?) The Keep is the last outpost to keep the monsters out, and the players are there to make the area safe for more civilization. The module is only for levels 1-3, but a creative DM could have the players go all they way up to name level and build keeps of their own in the area and start an open borders immigration policy to fill the land with taxable farmers.

KOTB didn't even have "evil" aligned monsters. They were just Chaotic. The forces of civilization were the players - Law - and the forces opposing them were Chaos. The adventure zone was even called the Caves of Chaos, just in case anyone forgot. Nice summary. :smallcool: Yep. I had one AD&D 1e DM who ran it in AD&D 1e, (it took very little to adapt it) which made it quite a different adventure from running it in Basic. I also had a halfling/hobbit die by being eaten by one of the NPC's pet cats/feral cat.


Yeah, the monsters have a lot of room for intelligent reaction to the PCs, setting ambushes, moving things around, etc. One of the reasons the module is a classic. yeah.

You can, and must, flesh out the Evil Overlord, but the Evil Overlord needs minions, and you can't flesh out every individual minion to explain to the reader why it needs killing. So you end up creating a generic non-humanized enemy as legitimate target for your heroes to kill. Which is what the Goblins in Strip 0001 are. Minions of an evil overlord named Xykon.

Also: I've never had a problem with slaughtering zergs. It was the anti-protoss missions that got under my skin more (during the campaign: can't we talk? But there's a strain of 'religious zealot' built into the protoss that lends itself to them being the 'minions of an extremist ideology' ... Entaro Adun!)

[The Pilgrim]

Which is what the Goblins in Strip 0001 are. Minions of an evil overlord named Xykon.

Yep, they were free to kill until the strip actually got a storyline and became serious, then the author had to add flavor to them.


Also: I've never had a problem with slaughtering zergs. It was the anti-protoss missions that got under my skin more (during the campaign: can't we talk? But there's a strain of 'religious zealot' built into the protoss that lends itself to them being the 'minions of an extremist ideology' ... Entaro Adun!)

And by the final installment of the game, Zergs were humanized and got vindicated as a survival-of-the-fittest proud species with individual free will, who have been corrupted and enslaved by the Big Bad Guy and had to be freed by the human-born Queen of Blades.

The Protoss, I never got the hang of them. They were too expensive and fragile, to fix them you needed a Dark Archon to turn an SCV and set up a basic Terran camp to produce SCVs and Medics for repairing and healing. But by that point, I'd rather pull a Million Men Marine March and be done with the mission.

[t209]

Also: I've never had a problem with slaughtering zergs. It was the anti-protoss missions that got under my skin more (during the campaign: can't we talk? But there's a strain of 'religious zealot' built into the protoss that lends itself to them being the 'minions of an extremist ideology' ... Entaro Adun!)
Starcraft 1 justfied that Terrans being as Metzen puts it "an unfortunate people who got stuck in an intergalactic war but too busy fighting amongst themselves" with Protoss unwilling to talk with human due to being an outlier and prone to being infested (except Tassadar).
Starcraft 2 is iffy since Tel'darim is a malevolent cult (until Legacy of the Void, but only toning it down as a truce) not part of major Protoss civilization but you are technically looting sacred sites. Let's not mention "let's piss off our major ally by attacking a fleet that will burn down a colony. But we have Telltale story system where they would be shown as overzealous on what is essentially a minor containment yet taking side with Protoss will have it shown as out of control."

[Morty]

People have been pointing out why conveniently evil humanoids are several shades of terrible for years. Decades, really. Start of Darkness came out a long time ago as well. They haven't somehow become more terrible since then and other authors, games and works have managed to move on from it. It just took D&D a long while to catch up. The criticism became widespread enough that WotC finally deigned to talk about maybe doing something about it (the results being unimpressive so far).

[KorvinStarmast]

Let's not mention "let's piss off our major ally by attacking a fleet that will burn down a colony. But we have Telltale story system where they would be shown as overzealous on what is essentially a minor containment yet taking side with Protoss will have it shown as out of control." Heh, I just did that one, have not been playing SC 2 for a couple of years so I am starting all over again. My first try at that mission was a case of "need to build faster to keep more of the colonies from getting scorched" since I took the side that the good doctor advocated for.

[Ionathus]

Well, back then when Tolkien made the orcs, it was a device not different than when we make zombies or alien-bug-infestion stuff today. You can, and must, flesh out the Evil Overlord, but the Evil Overlord needs minions, and you can't flesh out every individual minion to explain to the reader why it needs killing. So you end up creating a generic non-humanized enemy as legitimate target for your heroes to kill. When I was a child, I remember how the TMNT cartoon made all Foot Clan soldiers robots so there would be no moral problem in the protagonist killing them (while in the comic, they were living people). Star Wars ended up stablishing all Stormtroopers were clones with no personality in order to justify their mass slaughtering (and I suppose their poor marksmanship, too).

Problem is when your enemy-by-default begins to get development too, as an species whith their society, biological cycle, women and children. Then they begin to look too much like people and you start to feel you can't just slaughter them at sight. And you can't really go with labelling them as "utterly evil" when they are mating and reproducing like any other living species.

When you reach that point, it's when it becomes "fantasy racism". Because that's the point were, if you want to keep justifying killing them at sight, you have to resort to the same kind of rationalizations that humans in the past have used to justify ethnical cleansing.

My point is, it's not racist to do what Tolkien did. That is, to invent a non-humanized guilty-by-default enemy. But it is to pretend to keep withit as the "evil species" get, eventually, "humanized".

Nowadays, the role of Orcs&Goblins as "legitimate targets" in RPGs has been largely overtaken by Undead and Fiends. And, in general fiction, by Zombies and Alien Bugs. Though the Alien Bugs end up being problematic, too. See Starcraft.

This is a really great breakdown, and I agree completely.


People have been pointing out why conveniently evil humanoids are several shades of terrible for years. Decades, really. Start of Darkness came out a long time ago as well. They haven't somehow become more terrible since then and other authors, games and works have managed to move on from it. It just took D&D a long while to catch up. The criticism became widespread enough that WotC finally deigned to talk about maybe doing something about it (the results being unimpressive so far).

I think there's something special about how D&D plays out, because it's a combat-focused game with lots of rules about how to Kill Stuff Good, but it also leaves the door open for improv and character decisions in lots of ways. Of course, other Tabletop RPGs have that dynamic, but they aren't saddled with 40+ years of existing lore and baggage, and their systems are often a lot more open and less focused on "hit it until it dies" mechanics.

So what you get with D&D is a property and playerbase with loads of existing lore and expectations, trying to reconcile its old-school roots as "kill monsters and take their stuff" while giving new players the freedom to tell more narrative stories and treat monsters as something more than mindless Evil Minions who are just there to be fought & killed. Basically, I appreciate WotC trying to create a game that's open enough to tell (almost) any kind of story, but there's only so much you can change D&D's mechanics and base assumptions before it doesn't look like D&D anymore.

Of course some players have been treating the orcs as mortal/moral/redeemable since the '70s, but the playerbase's mentality has definitely evolved

[danielxcutter]

Hasn't 5e been trying to move away from this? There are far more playable races now and many of them would have been called "monstrous races" only an edition or two ago, for example.

[hamishspence]

3e tried to move away from it - having gnolls as a player race in books like Races of the Wild and Unapproachable East. 5e reversed all the work 3e had done, by making gnolls demonic and irredeemable.

[danielxcutter]

.....Yeesh.

[hamishspence]

4e wasn't much better, but at least it had a splatbook with a section that went into some detail on how to play goblins as PCs (Into The Underdark: The Dungeon Survival Handbook).

5e's Volo's Guide, by contrast, is very much about goblins, and others, as antagonists, rather than as protagonists.

[Gurgeh]

The shift mid-4e to using Forgotten Realms as the "default" campaign setting over Greyhawk probably didn't help, either.

[hamishspence]

4E Realms at least has drow as a "full player race" in the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide. Dungeon Survival Handbook was one of the last 4E books - so I don't see how 4e moved away from "monsters as playable" over time.

If anything it's the reverse - goblins and kobolds are painted in a much less "playable" light early in 4e (MM), but late in 4e they got nuance.

[danielxcutter]

Hmm.

I think "monstrous" races as PCs are still more common? And it does seem the community as a whole's moved further away from the... things, even if the devs haven't.

[hamishspence]

Hmm.

I think "monstrous" races as PCs are still more common? And it does seem the community as a whole's moved further away from the... things, even if the devs haven't.

Races that are a bit less "human-shaped" have been moving into the rulebooks over time. Tieflings in particular, which have horns and tails, have been in the core PHB of both 4e and 5e.

Eberron gave us a playable construct (the Warforged) and a playable shapeshifter (the Changeling) in 3e and those have stayed in (albeit in campaign setting books rather than core PHB) ever since.

[Morty]

Hasn't 5e been trying to move away from this? There are far more playable races now and many of them would have been called "monstrous races" only an edition or two ago, for example.


3e tried to move away from it - having gnolls as a player race in books like Races of the Wild and Unapproachable East. 5e reversed all the work 3e had done, by making gnolls demonic and irredeemable.

3E paid some lip service to the idea that not all members of "monster races" are evil, 4E removed all of that and 5E flat-out rejected them as anything other than monsters during development. Like I said: the reason WotC has been making some small step towards maybe doing something about it in the past year is because they can't afford to keep ignoring the issue.

[danielxcutter]

I see. Does anyone know why?

[brian 333]

I've never viewed it as a problem, but as an opportunity.

If you have peaceful or non-combatant sapient beings and you kill them and take their stuff you have committed evil acts, even if the victims were themselves evil. 'Because they are Evil' is not a justification.

However, if you have raiders who sow not, nor do they reap, who survive by pillage and plunder and by robbing otherwise peaceful settlements, then it is not an evil act to end their predation, even if they are elves.

The issue is, are these beings acting evil? The stat block alignment and race description says that most goblins survive through pillage and plunder, but this has never excused the wholesale slaughter of a village of peaceful nocturnal hunter/gatherers.

[danielxcutter]

I doubt many people bother to think that far if the sourcebooks don't suggest otherwise.

[Dion]

I recently started reading Fafhrd.

Fafhrd does murder children. He abandons pregnant girlfriends. He lies and schemes, and his friends are brutally and hideously murdered by his enemies.

And he feels bad about all of it.

It’s not an amoral character like Conan.

Perhaps Gygax imagined more Fafhrd in his role playing. I don’t know.

[Fyraltari]

It’s not an amoral character like Conan.

I'm not sure I'd call Conan amoral. He's got a sense of right and wrong, it's just thay when he was young he didn't really bother himself with doing right and not doing wrong. As king of Aquilonia he's matured a lot and is a firm do-gooder.

[dps]

People have been pointing out why conveniently evil humanoids are several shades of terrible for years.

Heck, Tolkien himself was concerned about the problems with having Orcs be always evil.

Though, IMO, while it's a problem in stories, it's only a problem at the game table if you want it to be.

[Dion]

I'm not sure I'd call Conan amoral. He's got a sense of right and wrong, it's just thay when he was young he didn't really bother himself with doing right and not doing wrong. As king of Aquilonia he's matured a lot and is a firm do-gooder.

I agree; Conan has morals. But the author never seems interested in testing them. Conan is always besting some evil foe, or bedding some willing princess (usually with a lot of casual racism, or a naive BDSM sensibility that would make even 50 shades readers roll their eyes.)

But he’s never, as far as I can tell, actually tested on his morality. Conan mostly experiences a life without moral consequence.

But my underlying thesis is this: even by the 70’s, I believe the sword and sorcery source material that influenced the game had evolved to include these moral problems.

[Fyraltari]

I agree; Conan has morals. But the author never seems interested in testing them. Conan is always besting some evil foe, or bedding some willing princess (usually with a lot of casual racism, or a naive BDSM sensibility that would make even 50 shades readers roll their eyes.)

But he’s never, as far as I can tell, actually tested on his morality. Conan mostly experiences a life without moral consequence.

But my underlying thesis is this: even by the 70’s, I believe the sword and sorcery source material that influenced the game had evolved to include these moral problems.

There's the bit in, Scarlet Citadel I think?, where he's captured by the ennemy kings and their sorcerer who offer him plenty of gold if he agrees to just **** off and let them conquer his kingdom and he tells them to shove it.

Likewise in the big novel of recycled plots, I dimly recall him being given a chance to carve out another kigdom but he decides to do the hard thing and free Aquilonia from the invading tyrants or something.

Aside from that, yeah his problems are more of the "big monster" kind than of the "moral dilemma" kind.

I can't adress your underlying thesis since I know jack on the subject.

[Jason]

How can you be peaceful and evil at the same time? Or how can you be evil without engaging in evil actions?

If the goblins in your setting are living in peace with their neighbors and each other that's a good argument that they are not in fact evil.

[danielxcutter]

Oh boy this again?

[Morty]

Oh boy this again?

This is the discussion the concept of "evil races" inevitably leads to. All the more reason to hope it's done away with sooner rather than later.

[Cazero]

How can you be peaceful and evil at the same time? Or how can you be evil without engaging in evil actions?
By not being stupid.

Cooperation is disproportionaly beneficial to all contributors. A small group can trivialy outcompete a massively larger collection of isolated agents.
Refusing to reciprocate will get you ousted of the group, denying you the benefits. No matter how selfish or greedy you are, it is very obviously in your best interest to behave to some extent.
Peacefulness is not an achievement of virtue, it is the strict minimum bar to pass to enable cooperation, or as profiteers would say, "milk'em dry".

[Skull the Troll]

I've never viewed it as a problem, but as an opportunity.

If you have peaceful or non-combatant sapient beings and you kill them and take their stuff you have committed evil acts, even if the victims were themselves evil. 'Because they are Evil' is not a justification.

However, if you have raiders who sow not, nor do they reap, who survive by pillage and plunder and by robbing otherwise peaceful settlements, then it is not an evil act to end their predation, even if they are elves.

The issue is, are these beings acting evil? The stat block alignment and race description says that most goblins survive through pillage and plunder, but this has never excused the wholesale slaughter of a village of peaceful nocturnal hunter/gatherers.

This is exactly right. I'd like to know what happened in the week before the Azurites arrived at Redcloak's village. would we have found them peacefully tending their crops, or fitting collars on their newest human slaves? Even from what we know however there is *some* justification for the Azurite raid. they were there to kill the bearer of the Crimson Mantle which was someone who was trying to literally end the world. Where the Azurites went evil was in slaughtering the rest of the village. Heck killing the kids would be wrong under any circumstance IMO.

[hroþila]

This is exactly right. I'd like to know what happened in the week before the Azurites arrived at Redcloak's village. would we have found them peacefully tending their crops, or fitting collars on their newest human slaves? Even from what we know however there is *some* justification for the Azurite raid. they were there to kill the bearer of the Crimson Mantle which was someone who was trying to literally end the world. Where the Azurites went evil was in slaughtering the rest of the village. Heck killing the kids would be wrong under any circumstance IMO.
But the very fact that what we saw makes you wonder whether the goblins did anything to earn that level of hostility betrays your bias, I think. There's zero indication any of those goblins ever did any evil, and if the situation was reversed we wouldn't start digging for retroactive justification. Even the culpability of the bearer of the Crimson Mantle can be questioned. Having a theoretical plan is not the same as actively trying to carry it out, and even if he was actually trying to carry it out at the time, he was so far from being a threat to any gates that it could hardly justify such an operation even if the paladins had done their best to avoid non-combatant deaths.

[Jason]

By not being stupid.

Cooperation is disproportionaly beneficial to all contributors. A small group can trivialy outcompete a massively larger collection of isolated agents.
Refusing to reciprocate will get you ousted of the group, denying you the benefits. No matter how selfish or greedy you are, it is very obviously in your best interest to behave to some extent.
Peacefulness is not an achievement of virtue, it is the strict minimum bar to pass to enable cooperation, or as profiteers would say, "milk'em dry".
Being greedy, selfish, etc. but only acting within limits that allow you to cooperate within your community and allow your community to live peacefully with other communities sounds like neutral behavior to me, not evil.
Maybe if your community horribly tortures and kills the noncomformists in their own community they could still be described as evil. If everybody is getting along without active enforcement, however, because they all understand that they personally will benefit from a cooperative peaceful community that doesn't sound evil to me.

[danielxcutter]

Redcloak's sister was the equivalent to an IRL first-grader according to Rich. They killed her as well for the XP and orders. And the rest didn't exactly exhibit evil either, essentially.

[Jason]

Redcloak's sister was the equivalent to an IRL first-grader according to Rich. They killed her as well for the XP and orders. And the rest didn't exactly exhibit evil either, essentially.
Which again raises the question "how could anyone murder a first-grader and remain a paladin?"

That's the problem with the scene - that none of the paladins are shown to have fallen for their actions, and in fact we know that at least some of the paladins who participated in that massacre remained paladins afterward with their hostility against goblins fully intact (i.e. they apparently did not have to repent or atone in order to retain paladin status - see HtPGHS).

I see two alternatives: 1) The Southern Gods were cheating by allowing their paladins to engage in evil acts and remain paladins, either because of their animosity towards goblins or fear of the Snarl being let lose or for some other reason.
Or 2) wiping out the whole goblin village was insufficiently evil to cause a loss of paladin status - in other words despite appearances the goblins must have collectively engaged in enough evil acts that wiping them all out was not a strongly evil act (although not neccesarily a good act either).

Alternative 1 seems more likely to me.

[Fyraltari]

Which again raises the question "how could anyone murder a first-grader and remain a paladin?"

That's the problem with the scene - that none of the paladins are shown to have fallen for their actions, and in fact we know that at least some of the paladins who participated in that massacre remained paladins afterward with their hostility against goblins fully intact (i.e. they apparently did not have to repent or atone in order to retain paladin status - see HtPGHS).
I would rather say that's the problem with having a universe where the enforcers of a particular authority are guaranteed to be upstanding. It limits one's ability to make some particular criticisms.


I see two alternatives: 1) The Southern Gods were cheating by allowing their paladins to engage in evil acts and remain paladins, either because of their animosity towards goblins or fear of the Snarl being let lose or for some other reason.
Or 2) wiping out the whole goblin village was insufficiently evil to cause a loss of paladin status - in other words despite appearances the goblins must have collectively engaged in enough evil acts that wiping them all out was not a strongly evil act (although not neccesarily a good act either).

Alternative 1 seems more likely to me.

My own guess is that only the "worst offenders", as in the ones with actual child's blood on their swords, fell, while merely being complicit in the slaughter of children isn't egregious enough to warrant a fall. In which case, bleeeargh.

[Taevyr]

I would rather say that's the problem with having a universe where the enforcers of a particular authority are guaranteed to be upstanding. It limits one's ability to make some particular criticisms.



My own guess is that only the "worst offenders", as in the ones with actual child's blood on their swords, fell, while merely being complicit in the slaughter of children isn't egregious enough to warrant a fall. In which case, bleeeargh.

Yeah, while I understand Rich's point that, from the narrative point of view, showing some paladins falling would take away from Redcloak's grievance, the seeming lack of repercussions for the paladins in that scene is really not helping any attempt to discuss it.

I can, to a certain degree, agree that not all paladins who took part in the raid fell or should have fallen. I cannot agree that any paladins who felt the slaughter of children was justified, or who were shown enjoying the rampant slaughter, did not, even if they didn't directly take part in any of the "evil" stuff. If that's the case, as the scene seems to indicate without taking Rich's commentary on the subject in account, there's something deeply wrong with the basis of divine morality and we might as well stop worshipping the whole Southern bunch.


As for my opinion of the general morality of "always-evil" races/species: in games, it's fine so long as they're clearly "evil enemy race" that you're supposed to fight because they threaten you/your world/existence/whatever and never gain much further development beyond that. Things like DOOM and such. In stories, it's more murky, and even a very simple black-and-white world will usually get some fleshing out of the "evil race" if you want to actually make it interesting beyond "protagonists fight evil".

[PontificatusRex]

Though, IMO, while it's a problem in stories, it's only a problem at the game table if you want it to be.

So, this is really the crux of it for me. There was no reason why Keep On the Borderlands had to include non-combatants and children of humanoid races. Folks responding have been praising the module and I agree it has lots of good points, but none of those good things hang on the whole "slaughter orc toddlers" element. I find it kind of horrible-yet-fascinating that Gygax chose to create that moral dilemma when it was so unnecessary, and I think gamers are still untangling the ramifications of those choices 40 years later.

[brian 333]

I guess I'm an odd gamer in that in my first D&D experiences our DM tossed moral breadcrumbs to us from the start, and morality and its consequences were for me always a part of the game.

When I began to DM alignment was very much a part of the game, and it wasn't always a case of DM dispensing justice; as often as not the players drove the discussions and, as DM, I was forced to reconsider and adapt.

[hamishspence]

3E paid some lip service to the idea that not all members of "monster races" are evil, 4E removed all of that and 5E flat-out rejected them as anything other than monsters during development.

I'd rate 5e as worse than 4e on that subject, what with kobolds and goblins at least getting a full "playable" treatment in one 4e book.

[danielxcutter]

Aren't goblins and kobolds playable in 5e?

[woweedd]

Which again raises the question "how could anyone murder a first-grader and remain a paladin?"

That's the problem with the scene - that none of the paladins are shown to have fallen for their actions, and in fact we know that at least some of the paladins who participated in that massacre remained paladins afterward with their hostility against goblins fully intact (i.e. they apparently did not have to repent or atone in order to retain paladin status - see HtPGHS).

I see two alternatives: 1) The Southern Gods were cheating by allowing their paladins to engage in evil acts and remain paladins, either because of their animosity towards goblins or fear of the Snarl being let lose or for some other reason.
Or 2) wiping out the whole goblin village was insufficiently evil to cause a loss of paladin status - in other words despite appearances the goblins must have collectively engaged in enough evil acts that wiping them all out was not a strongly evil act (although not neccesarily a good act either).

Alternative 1 seems more likely to me.

They didn't. The Southern Gods don't do the full display for EVERY fallen Paladin. Those guys just found themselves unable to summon their powers next time they tried. Quite a few of the Paladins remained, i'm assuming because they didn't do anything evil themselves, even if their comrades did. It wasn't shown on screen, because that was a flashback by Redcloak, who doesn't know, or, I imagine, care (:redcloak:"Oh, the person who murdered my family can't summon his magic horsey anymore? Truly, justice has been served.")


I would rather say that's the problem with having a universe where the enforcers of a particular authority are guaranteed to be upstanding. It limits one's ability to make some particular criticisms.



My own guess is that only the "worst offenders", as in the ones with actual child's blood on their swords, fell, while merely being complicit in the slaughter of children isn't egregious enough to warrant a fall. In which case, bleeeargh.
I don't like it, but it is kinda consistent with how Rich has framed Good and Evil before. Think how Roy is still good, in spite of all the people Belkar's murdered, or how Durkon's still good despite standing by as his comrades tortured a prisoner. In fact, one of his major criticisms of the Paladin class (as stated by Roy in-comic at one point) is that it forces the player to be responsible for other people's conduct as well as their own. I imagine this may be colored a bit by the background of role-playing games: In a game, trying to dictate another player's behavior is kinda a jerk move, and lots of Paladins took it to extremes by trying to constantly police other player's in game morals (admitley, that's often because of DMs being jerks and trying to gotcha Fall them, but still).

[Fyraltari]

They didn't. The Southern Gods don't do the full display for EVERY fallen Paladin. Those guys just found themselves unable to summon their powers next time they tried. Quite a few of the Paladins remained, i'm assuming because they didn't do anything evil themselves, even if their comrades did. It wasn't shown on screen, because that was a flashback by Redcloak, who doesn't know, or, I imagine, care (:redcloak:"Oh, the person who murdered my family can't summon his magic horsey anymore? Truly, justice has been served.")


I don't like it, but it is kinda consistent with how Rich has framed Good and Evil before. Think how Roy is still good, in spite of all the people Belkar's murdered, or how Durkon's still good despite standing by as his comrades tortured a prisoner. In fact, one of his major criticisms of the Paladin class (as stated by Roy in-comic at one point) is that it forces the player to be responsible for other people's conduct as well as their own. I imagine this may be colored a bit by the background of role-playing games: In a game, trying to dictate another player's behavior is kinda a jerk move, and lots of Paladins took it to extremes by trying to constantly police other player's in game morals (admitley, that's often because of DMs being jerks and trying to gotcha Fall them, but still).

I was told that a paladin falls if they commit a single act of evil, while a good character may act evilly from time to time without that changing their alignment. Also Roy is trying to restrict Belkar's murders.

[Linneris]

Aren't goblins and kobolds playable in 5e?

They are. They're included as playable races in Volo's Guide to Monsters.

However, the fluff of Volo's describes goblinoids, orcs, gnolls, etc. as inhuman Other, focusing a lot on how their societies are systemically evil and how gnolls and orcs in particular are inherently evil because they were created by evil gods.

[danielxcutter]

Okay, who came up with that idea?

[dps]

Which again raises the question "how could anyone murder a first-grader and remain a paladin?


I remember first grade. I can buy "all first graders are evil" more easily than "all members of races A, B, and C are evil".

[arimareiji]

I remember first grade. I can buy "all first graders are evil" more easily than "all members of races A, B, and C are evil".
If my neighbors get mad at me for bursting into loud laughter at 2 in the morning, I'm blaming you. (^_~)

[Clistenes]

3E paid some lip service to the idea that not all members of "monster races" are evil, 4E removed all of that and 5E flat-out rejected them as anything other than monsters during development. Like I said: the reason WotC has been making some small step towards maybe doing something about it in the past year is because they can't afford to keep ignoring the issue.

4e's phylosophy was: "if it isn't a monster you are going to fight and kill, then it doesn't exist...".

So it makes sense that "good" member of traditionaly "evil" species didn't exist...


I've never viewed it as a problem, but as an opportunity.

If you have peaceful or non-combatant sapient beings and you kill them and take their stuff you have committed evil acts, even if the victims were themselves evil. 'Because they are Evil' is not a justification.

However, if you have raiders who sow not, nor do they reap, who survive by pillage and plunder and by robbing otherwise peaceful settlements, then it is not an evil act to end their predation, even if they are elves.

The issue is, are these beings acting evil? The stat block alignment and race description says that most goblins survive through pillage and plunder, but this has never excused the wholesale slaughter of a village of peaceful nocturnal hunter/gatherers.

I have always assumed that good adventurers attack "evil" species only because they prey on "good" ones, and would leave them alone otherwise...

I mean, if a tribe of goblins is living deep into a forest without bothering anybody, why would good people seek and hunt them...?

[elros]

Remember that the origin of D&D was miniature war games, which means that the rules deal with combat, often between two human factions. What made D&D different was that it added something other than combat.
As for fantasy races being evil, that is just another example of a common TV trope (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BlackAndWhiteMorality).
Not only has gaming evolved beyond that, but so have comic books, fantasy novels, sci-fi, and other forms of fiction. Binary thinking is lazy and boring.

[brian 333]

Binary thinking can contrast two opposed concepts without being distracted by the many exceptions. Let us presume a vast galactic empire which enforces a uniform social order by threat and by force which is opposed by a plucky band of individualists.

In this case having the minions of the empire being each a unique character with drives and attitudes which lead them to choose conformity over individualism detracts from the thesis. Sure, one or two henchmen motivated by evil purpose is okay, but the vast majority of the empire's minions need to remain annonymously evil. It doesn't help the audience to know that Hurricane Soldier 75247735432810 fights for the empire because he needs the employer-financed insurance because his developmentally challenged daughter requires expensive medical maintenance.

[Ionathus]

They are. They're included as playable races in Volo's Guide to Monsters.

However, the fluff of Volo's describes goblinoids, orcs, gnolls, etc. as inhuman Other, focusing a lot on how their societies are systemically evil and how gnolls and orcs in particular are inherently evil because they were created by evil gods.

I actually really liked the Goblinoids section in Volo's: it talks a lot about how the races are subjugated by the god Maglubiyet, who basically staged a god-coup on all the other goblinoid gods and either straight-up god-murdered them, or weakened them and made them play along. Very easy to interpret and adapt it as "goblinoids serve an evil god through fear/brainwashing", and in fact I based a campaign around goblinoids that were trying to break free from that subjugation and needed the players' help!

IIRC, orc societies are also depicted as inherently warlike rather than inherently evil, though whether or not that makes an actual difference is a matter of debate.

Gnolls really got the short end of the lore stick. I ran them as actual fiends spawned by Yeenoghu in my game, because the lore is so terrible if you view them as sentient mortals. Even still, I never really enjoyed doing it and probably won't include gnolls again.


I remember first grade. I can buy "all first graders are evil" more easily than "all members of races A, B, and C are evil".

Kids are sociopaths, man.


Binary thinking can contrast two opposed concepts without being distracted by the many exceptions. Let us presume a vast galactic empire which enforces a uniform social order by threat and by force which is opposed by a plucky band of individualists.

In this case having the minions of the empire being each a unique character with drives and attitudes which lead them to choose conformity over individualism detracts from the thesis. Sure, one or two henchmen motivated by evil purpose is okay, but the vast majority of the empire's minions need to remain annonymously evil. It doesn't help the audience to know that Hurricane Soldier 75247735432810 fights for the empire because he needs the employer-financed insurance because his developmentally challenged daughter requires expensive medical maintenance.

It's not necessary to dig into every henchperson's backstory (https://xkcd.com/873/), but I reject the idea that you can't portray henchpeople/mooks as mortals with actual motivations and a developed sense of fight-or-flight, even in an evil galactic empire story. Three of them drop, and the other two surrender. A solid intimidation check prevents a combat. They need something from you, and are willing to trade for safe passage or "looking the other way".

[Jason]

They didn't. The Southern Gods don't do the full display for EVERY fallen Paladin. Those guys just found themselves unable to summon their powers next time they tried. Quite a few of the Paladins remained, i'm assuming because they didn't do anything evil themselves, even if their comrades did. It wasn't shown on screen, because that was a flashback by Redcloak, who doesn't know, or, I imagine, care (:redcloak:"Oh, the person who murdered my family can't summon his magic horsey anymore? Truly, justice has been served.")
But How the Paladin Got His Scar makes it look like none of the paladins fell. The Sapphire Guard there are obviously carrying on just as they had before the massacre. There is no mention of "after that action the gods withdrew their favor from many of us and we re-thought our approach towards goblins in order to get back in their graces." The "I was following orders" excuse doesn't really ever work, especially not for a class that derives its powers from its righteousness.


I don't like it, but it is kinda consistent with how Rich has framed Good and Evil before. Think how Roy is still good, in spite of all the people Belkar's murdered, or how Durkon's still good despite standing by as his comrades tortured a prisoner. In fact, one of his major criticisms of the Paladin class (as stated by Roy in-comic at one point) is that it forces the player to be responsible for other people's conduct as well as their own.
It may be consistent, but I think it's wrong. Paladins can be used as adversaries, but not in a way in which they are no longer acting like paladins.
Any player character who is good-aligned should be concerned about their comrades routinely carrying out evil acts. That is in fact what is happening in the comic - Roy has acted as best he can to restrain Belkar's evil, and he almost was denied access to the LG afterlife because he hadn't done enough. Yes a paladin player can take it too far, and be a jerk about it, but its not excusable for a LG fighter to always turn his back when the evil members of a party want to torture a prisoner or rob someone. It can work short-term, but eventually someone's got to give ground.

[Morty]

This is why I think the paladin code is nonsense and subsequent editions were right to drop it. It makes it impossible for paladins to do anything wrong without the GM/author having to drop the hammer immediately. It removes nuance and complexity for no purpose.

[danielxcutter]

I suppose it's a fair criticism of OotS that Rich didn't convey his message well enough with context - Haley deciding to shoot Crystal dead could be seen as a similar instance, because the reason was only in the book version and it changes the situation a lot.

Doesn't change the message that he's trying to send, though.

[Jason]

So, this is really the crux of it for me. There was no reason why Keep On the Borderlands had to include non-combatants and children of humanoid races. Folks responding have been praising the module and I agree it has lots of good points, but none of those good things hang on the whole "slaughter orc toddlers" element. I find it kind of horrible-yet-fascinating that Gygax chose to create that moral dilemma when it was so unnecessary, and I think gamers are still untangling the ramifications of those choices 40 years later.

There were two excellent reasons to include the non-combatants:
1) Verisimilitude. The module is trying to show a tribe of humanoids trying to survive. Remove the non-combatants and it becomes just a bunch of monsters waiting in empty rooms for the players to come and slaughter them all.
2) To provide a moral dilemma to the players. Yes, 40-odd years ago at the very beginning of RPGs game designers were building moral dilemmas into their adventures. It has always been a part of the game.

You seem to be assuming that most groups in the '70s and early '80s who played the module just slaughtered all the non-combatants. Maybe some groups did. That wasn't my experience. We enjoyed grappling with the issue and doing some role-playing about it, and nearly every time I've played or run a similar situation the players have let the non-combatants go.

[danielxcutter]

I do wonder if murderhoboing is much less common these days than it was in Rich's. I can't say I've had much experience in playing, like at all, but none of them were really as bad as the paladins in SoD.

There was this one fetch quest where we had to go find an artifact from a hobgoblin/giant territory area where we mostly just killed them, but we left as soon as we got it and oh, each of us were literally chosen by a god for the quest because the artifacts were used to seal gods.

Slightly more justification, much less douchery in the execution. So yeah.

I'm in a RHoD campaign now actually, but we haven't progressed through the plot yet for the morality to be a huge issue as of yet anyways.

[Jason]

This is why I think the paladin code is nonsense and subsequent editions were right to drop it. It makes it impossible for paladins to do anything wrong without the GM/author having to drop the hammer immediately. It removes nuance and complexity for no purpose.
In earlier editions the DM could drop the hammer on anyone who wasn't playing their alignment - changing alignment meant loss of a level. Paladins and clerics just got hit a little harder by losing their class abilities too.

Playing a paladin in the early days was a chance to play the knight in shining armor archetype in a world inhabited by the likes of Conan and Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser, and dealing with the moral dilemmas was part of the point of playing a paladin.
Paladins were rare anyway. Rolling the attribute requirements was not easy.

[Ionathus]

Think how Roy is still good, in spite of all the people Belkar's murdered, or how Durkon's still good despite standing by as his comrades tortured a prisoner.

Point of order: how many people has Belkar murdered under Roy's command? He refuses to accept the goblins' surrender in the Dungeon of Dorukan, he tries to kill Elan for XP, he kills three barbarians in the random town, he suggests slitting the bandit leader's throats. Once he's no longer under Roy's control in the Azure City prison, he murders a single guard and then escapes, and then the Mark of Justice prevents him from murdering until Solt Lorkyung & the Oracle -- both of which happened while he was under Haley's command, not Roy's. While Belkar's impulses were certainly still super evil, and he has always been a clearly evil person, Roy's influence did indeed restrain Belkar quite a lot.


But How the Paladin Got His Scar makes it look like none of the paladins fell. The Sapphire Guard there are obviously carrying on just as they had before the massacre. There is no mention of "after that action the gods withdrew their favor from many of us and we re-thought our approach towards goblins in order to get back in their graces." The "I was following orders" excuse doesn't really ever work, especially not for a class that derives its powers from its righteousness.

Counterpoint: "Gosh, I can't believe Kwang-Sun crossed the line like that in the battle. Killing a child, even a goblin one? What a bloodthirsty maniac. I'm glad that the Twelve Gods have blessed me with the wisdom to only kill adult goblins, even those who are deceitfully pretending to not be fighters so they can strike while my back is turned. Had we merely slaughtered the whole adult population, perhaps the orphans would have learned to reject the ways of wickedness. Alas, due to Kwang-Sun and the other Fallen Paladins, that chance at redemption has been spoiled."

Obviously that's an internalized thought, not one that's actually articulated with any amount of self-awareness. But I wouldn't question it for a second if the remaining un-fallen paladins immediately pulled a No True Scotsman-Paladin to tell themselves that the problem was with those specific paladins, not the entire organization being rotten to various degrees.

[danielxcutter]

Point of order: how many people has Belkar murdered under Roy's command? He refuses to accept the goblins' surrender in the Dungeon of Dorukan, he tries to kill Elan for XP, he kills three barbarians in the random town, he suggests slitting the bandit leader's throats. Once he's no longer under Roy's control in the Azure City prison, he murders a single guard and then escapes, and then the Mark of Justice prevents him from murdering until Solt Lorkyung & the Oracle -- both of which happened while he was under Haley's command, not Roy's. While Belkar's impulses were certainly still super evil, and he has always been a clearly evil person, Roy's influence did indeed restrain Belkar quite a lot.

Didn't the Deva outright state that when evaluating Roy?


Counterpoint: "Gosh, I can't believe Kwang-Sun crossed the line like that in the battle. Killing a child, even a goblin one? What a bloodthirsty maniac. I'm glad that the Twelve Gods have blessed me with the wisdom to only kill adult goblins, even those who are deceitfully pretending to not be fighters so they can strike while my back is turned. Had we merely slaughtered the whole adult population, perhaps the orphans would have learned to reject the ways of wickedness. Alas, due to Kwang-Sun and the other Fallen Paladins, that chance at redemption has been spoiled."

Obviously that's an internalized thought, not one that's actually articulated with any amount of self-awareness. But I wouldn't question it for a second if the remaining un-fallen paladins immediately pulled a No True Scotsman-Paladin to tell themselves that the problem was with those specific paladins, not the entire organization being rotten to various degrees.

I think that they can't all have been rotten eggs considering the present-day Guard seemed to be at least decent, even with O-Chul joining for internal reforms, but otherwise... yeah.

Also where did you come up with that name, just the first one that you thought of? Sounds Korean-ish.

[Ionathus]

Didn't the Deva outright state that when evaluating Roy?

Yep, I was just curious if anyone had any other examples I was forgetting. No argument that Belkar was a horrible little miscreant from his first appearance, but I'd always seen him as pretty effectively reined-in.


I think that they can't all have been rotten eggs considering the present-day Guard seemed to be at least decent, even with O-Chul joining for internal reforms, but otherwise... yeah.

Agreed, but that's often a big point of discussion when you're talking about a corrupt organization or system: even the "good" members will have dirt on them by association or by refusing to stop their comrades' corrupt behavior. I didn't mean to say that every single paladin/cleric was corrupt: more so that the organization as an entity was culpable in the goblin civilians' deaths, rather than just individual paladins.

But if you were part of that corrupt system, it would accommodate your cognitive dissonance to instead tell yourself "well, the problem was just Kwang-Sun. I'm a good paladin. I don't need to re-evaluate my actions." And perhaps the act of Falling doesn't come with much in the way of a "Disciplinary Notes" section, so the Sapphire Guard had no way of parsing out the gods' intentions about who fell for what reason. Left to your own devices, you'll find an explanation that fits your assumptions.

Or heck, maybe the Twelve Gods were overdoing it too in their zeal to destroy the Crimson Mantle. We've seen in this latest comic that the gods certainly aren't infallible, even the Good ones.


Also where did you come up with that name, just the first one that you thought of? Sounds Korean-ish.

Yeah, I just Googled Korean names.

[danielxcutter]

Yep, I was just curious if anyone had any other examples I was forgetting. No argument that Belkar was a horrible little miscreant from his first appearance, but I'd always seen him as pretty effectively reined-in.

And he's been with the Order long enough that the reining-in is actually starting to make him a better person. If there was only the latest 300 strips or so most people would probably just label him CN.


Agreed, but that's often a big point of discussion when you're talking about a corrupt organization or system: even the "good" members will have dirt on them by association or by refusing to stop their comrades' corrupt behavior. I didn't mean to say that every single paladin/cleric was corrupt: more so that the organization as an entity was culpable in the goblin civilians' deaths, rather than just individual paladins.

But if you were part of that corrupt system, it would accommodate your cognitive dissonance to instead tell yourself "well, the problem was just Kwang-Sun. I'm a good paladin. I don't need to re-evaluate my actions." And perhaps the act of Falling doesn't come with much in the way of a "Disciplinary Notes" section, so the Sapphire Guard had no way of parsing out the gods' intentions about who fell for what reason. Left to your own devices, you'll find an explanation that fits your assumptions.

Or heck, maybe the Twelve Gods were overdoing it too in their zeal to destroy the Crimson Mantle. We've seen in this latest comic that the gods certainly aren't infallible, even the Good ones.

Sounds fair. And not all the gods are Good, after all, not even the Twelve; I wouldn't be shocked if a few of the non-Good gods didn't bother to elaborate because killing goblins with extreme prejudice(literally and figuratively) still prevented them from doing the Plan.


Yeah, I just Googled Korean names.

Ah, so it wasn't just me. Got it.

[Metastachydium]

Sounds fair. And not all the gods are Good, after all, not even the Twelve; I wouldn't be shocked if a few of the non-Good gods didn't bother to elaborate because killing goblins with extreme prejudice(literally and figuratively) still prevented them from doing the Plan.

That got me thinking.
1. Yes, the Twelve are worshipped as a pantheon and therefore Southern paladins are paladins of the Twelve – a collection of deities who are guaranteed not to all be Lawful Good;
2. and they appear to decide on which paladins are to fall as a pantheon rather than delegating that task to a LG member (case in point: Miko).
Is it possible that Southern paladins are just not always and necessarily held up to the same quality standards as non-Southern paladins (because non-LG members of the Twelve can block motions to make paladins fall) and the other pantheons just don't interfere with this to avoid interpantheonic conflict?

[Ionathus]

That got me thinking.
1. Yes, the Twelve are worshipped as a pantheon and therefore Southern paladins are paladins of the Twelve – a collection of deities who are guaranteed not to all be Lawful Good;
2. and they appear to decide on which paladins are to fall as a pantheon rather than delegating that task to a LG member (case in point: Miko).
Is it possible that Southern paladins are just not always and necessarily held up to the same quality standards as non-Southern paladins (because non-LG members of the Twelve can block motions to make paladins fall) and the other pantheons just don't interfere with this to avoid interpantheonic conflict?

It's also possible that The Twelve are incredibly cooperative, much more so than the other pantheons, and only one or two members are in charge of establishing Lawful Good Paladin Behavior, but the other Eleven will say "Alright, well Miko killed her liege and Dog says that's a no-go for paladins. Smitin' time."

Basically The Twelve might operate on the principles of a smaller-scale, self-contained, less bureaucratic Godsmoot.

[elros]

I suppose it's a fair criticism of OotS that Rich didn't convey his message well enough with context - Haley deciding to shoot Crystal dead could be seen as a similar instance, because the reason was only in the book version and it changes the situation a lot.

Doesn't change the message that he's trying to send, though.
I didn't get the book, so I was surprised by how Haley killed Crystal the way she did.

[arimareiji]

I suppose it's a fair criticism of OotS that Rich didn't convey his message well enough with context - Haley deciding to shoot Crystal dead could be seen as a similar instance, because the reason was only in the book version and it changes the situation a lot.

Doesn't change the message that he's trying to send, though.

I didn't get the book, so I was surprised by how Haley killed Crystal the way she did.

If I needed another reason to buy more books, I just got one. (^_~)

I'm guessing it's the same one where it happened in-comic?

[danielxcutter]

If I needed another reason to buy more books, I just got one. (^_~)

I'm guessing it's the same one where it happened in-comic?

Yeah, it makes more sense that Haley decided to assassinate Crystal like that with the print material - and to be honest, Haley probably expected Bozzok to rez Crystal anyways.

[woweedd]

Yeah, it makes more sense that Haley decided to assassinate Crystal like that with the print material - and to be honest, Haley probably expected Bozzok to rez Crystal anyways.
Also, more to the point, Crystal's an unrepentant murderer who shows no signs of stopping: Murdering her in the shower is only different from murdering her in an honorable and agreed-upon duel in the law/chaos end of the chart, not the good/evil part. I fully belive that, if Roy had proposed the "silting his throat in his sleep" plan for Belkar to a Chaotic Good outsider, that outsider probably would have been like "if that's the best way to ensure he doesn't slit any further throats himself, yeah, go for it".

[arimareiji]

Yeah, it makes more sense that Haley decided to assassinate Crystal like that with the print material - and to be honest, Haley probably expected Bozzok to rez Crystal anyways.
It wanders a little into "Greedo shoots first" territory, so I'm glad we didn't get the whole original story to begin with. And to me, there's another reason it had to come out: Without it Celia only comes across as a self-righteous twit who makes Haley pay the price of Celia's convictions. With it she comes across as the kind of person you say "Told you so" to as you're bleeding out, and she insists that it's not her fault.

(kidding) That, the party not believing her about the Linear Guild, et al is enough to make me wonder why Haley isn't more inclined to stab things in the face like Belkar over the protests of her allies. (^_~) (/kidding)

[Metastachydium]

Basically The Twelve might operate on the principles of a smaller-scale, self-contained, less bureaucratic Godsmoot.

That's basically my point, though. Even if supervising paladins is generally the job of a few LG Blues, if they need a nod from the rest to do something about misbehaving ones, the others might on occasion decide to respectfully disagree and block the verdict of the LG one(s). In Miko's case it (presumably) wasn't against the interests of any member of the Twelve to make her pay for her crimes but the raid on Redcloak's village might have been a different matter altogether if a sufficient number of Blues were sufficiently afraid of the Plan.

[Kornaki]

My mental model is the 12 gods just don't require their paladins to be LG. Why would they, most of them aren't good? They just require them to do works for the good of the religion/region/whatever and the paladins have interpreted that as being LG.

[Jason]

My mental model is the 12 gods just don't require their paladins to be LG. Why would they, most of them aren't good? They just require them to do works for the good of the religion/region/whatever and the paladins have interpreted that as being LG.
At which point they're no longer really paladins, in my book.

[brian 333]

Or maybe the god in charge of administering paladins on a day to day basis is a self righteous jerk with a stick planted up his back who doesn't see anything wrong with killing stuff with an Evil alignment because it's evil, and when Miko slashes a big hole in creation it gets the attention of the whole pantheon.

[Jason]

I remember first grade. I can buy "all first graders are evil" more easily than "all members of races A, B, and C are evil".
1st graders are immature, not evil.

An race that is insufficiently intelligent can't really be called evil either.

[danielxcutter]

It's called a joke, Jason.

[Ionathus]

That's basically my point, though. Even if supervising paladins is generally the job of a few LG Blues, if they need a nod from the rest to do something about misbehaving ones, the others might on occasion decide to respectfully disagree and block the verdict of the LG one(s). In Miko's case it (presumably) wasn't against the interests of any member of the Twelve to make her pay for her crimes but the raid on Redcloak's village might have been a different matter altogether if a sufficient number of Blues were sufficiently afraid of the Plan.

Not quite -- my train of thought wasn't so much "all Twelve vote on each action item," it's more like "we agreed Dog was in charge of paladin stuff, and Dog says we're gonna make this Miko person fall, so here we go. Now, Dog, I need your help giving this Evil Cleric her spells for the day, as you agreed..."

Kind of like a theological carpool. When it's your turn to drive, everybody follows your lead and (in a just world) listens to the music you want to listen to. But then tomorrow it'll be someone else's turn to drive. And you split the divine gas 12 ways.

[danielxcutter]

I think Miko's Fall being that spectacular could also due to it being a horrible thing from a practical point as well even in the short term.

Slaughtering goblins at least has the advantage of preventing them from doing the Plan. Killing your liege when an entire hobgoblin army is right on your ass because of a glorified hunch has absolutely no upsides.

[Jason]

It's called a joke, Jason.
Yeah, but sometimes it's hard to tell how serious someone really is being behind their joke.

[Worldsong]

I think Miko's Fall being that spectacular could also due to it being a horrible thing from a practical point as well even in the short term.

Slaughtering goblins at least has the advantage of preventing them from doing the Plan. Killing your liege when an entire hobgoblin army is right on your ass because of a glorified hunch has absolutely no upsides.

"You ****ed up so badly that we decided it deserved a parade."

[M1982]

3E paid some lip service to the idea that not all members of "monster races" are evil, 4E removed all of that and 5E flat-out rejected them as anything other than monsters during development. Like I said: the reason WotC has been making some small step towards maybe doing something about it in the past year is because they can't afford to keep ignoring the issue.

It wasn't 4e (yeah 4e made the gnolls demonic, but even then had then as PC race), but 5e that really reversed all the previous developments to make Orcs and Goblins more than mere monsters.

That's why the latest 5e turn to change this once again feels so hollow.

5e, starting with the sundering RSE leading up to 5e, did it's best to make the monstrous demihumans back into mere monsters. Cattie Brie was reincarnated with a divine verdict from Mielikki (of all deities) that all goblins are evil and should be put to the sword. Including their babies (yes, slaying baby goblins was specifically mentioned in the Sundering novels). She even made Drizzt questioning the good goblin he once meet and befriended.

Also the wiped the kingdom of many arrows from the map at the start of 5e, so no more huge source of civilized orcs trading with the other powers of the north as equals.

Then they released Volo's and portrayed the orcs as religious fanatics living to please their dark pantheon.

5e made them this way specifically. So all the more recent talk about how Gruumsh is bad as a racial deity and orc culture should be more diverse and not defined by him and his gang, etc. is in stark contrast to their deliberate change to make orcs this way in the first place.

Yes, all those orc deities existed since 2e (or even earlier), but they never had much more than their entries in monster mythology and some name dropping here and there. Other then Gruumsh none of them ever played a large role in D&D to the point that many players probably didn't even know there even was an orc pantheon beyond Gruumsh.

Then 5e designers thought it a good idea to bring those deities front and center and have all of orc culture in 5e rotate around them.

And then suddenly they jump on the "always evil orcs is wrong. Always Gruumsh dominated orcs is wrong" bandwagon.

So sorry if I can not believe this to be a change of heart but a straight up marketing ploy.

shortly before 5e: market research indicates our customers don't like how we civilized orcs and goblins. Make them evil kill on sight sacks of XP again, it will boost sales
during 5e: market research indicates our customers don't like the "fantasy racisim" in the always evil races. Let's quickly distance ourselves from it. It will bo

[woweedd]

"You ****ed up so badly that we decided it deserved a parade."
According to Rich, that is more or less why. I think his statement was "It's equivalent to the CEO of your multinational corporation coming to your cubical to fire you personally, because you screwed up THAT badly".

[sotanaht]

So almost from the get go you've got monsters with families and children
Not necessarily. The most obvious situation is like that of the 40k Orks, who grow from fungal spores without any real concept of "parents". More realistic is a race modeled after any real-world animal that does not directly care for its young, a common trait of many animal classes including most reptiles, fish, and insects. Warhammer Skaven might be a good example of how that might play out. Even if they do raise their own children, allowing them to be "good" means assigning human morality to things that are NOT human. That may be appropriate for some species, but just because they have "families" doesn't imply anything.

It can be somewhat difficult to justify the concept of civilization for a species that lacks any concept of family, but it can be similarly difficult to imagine how a proper civilization could form for any species not almost identical to humans in form and function, so that's something that can often be ignored in a narrative if only for the sake of allowing variety.

[danielxcutter]

"You ****ed up so badly that we decided it deserved a parade."

Hah! Is this a reference?


It wasn't 4e (yeah 4e made the gnolls demonic, but even then had then as PC race), but 5e that really reversed all the previous developments to make Orcs and Goblins more than mere monsters.

That's why the latest 5e turn to change this once again feels so hollow.

5e, starting with the sundering RSE leading up to 5e, did it's best to make the monstrous demihumans back into mere monsters. Cattie Brie was reincarnated with a divine verdict from Mielikki (of all deities) that all goblins are evil and should be put to the sword. Including their babies (yes, slaying baby goblins was specifically mentioned in the Sundering novels). She even made Drizzt questioning the good goblin he once meet and befriended.

Also the wiped the kingdom of many arrows from the map at the start of 5e, so no more huge source of civilized orcs trading with the other powers of the north as equals.

Then they released Volo's and portrayed the orcs as religious fanatics living to please their dark pantheon.

5e made them this way specifically. So all the more recent talk about how Gruumsh is bad as a racial deity and orc culture should be more diverse and not defined by him and his gang, etc. is in stark contrast to their deliberate change to make orcs this way in the first place.

Yes, all those orc deities existed since 2e (or even earlier), but they never had much more than their entries in monster mythology and some name dropping here and there. Other then Gruumsh none of them ever played a large role in D&D to the point that many players probably didn't even know there even was an orc pantheon beyond Gruumsh.

Then 5e designers thought it a good idea to bring those deities front and center and have all of orc culture in 5e rotate around them.

And then suddenly they jump on the "always evil orcs is wrong. Always Gruumsh dominated orcs is wrong" bandwagon.

So sorry if I can not believe this to be a change of heart but a straight up marketing ploy.

shortly before 5e: market research indicates our customers don't like how we civilized orcs and goblins. Make them evil kill on sight sacks of XP again, it will boost sales
during 5e: market research indicates our customers don't like the "fantasy racisim" in the always evil races. Let's quickly distance ourselves from it. It will bo

Or possibly they didn’t actually look at much at the market at first. I wonder how much was executive meddling and how much was personal bias on part of the devs.


According to Rich, that is more or less why. I think his statement was "It's equivalent to the CEO of your multinational corporation coming to your cubical to fire you personally, because you screwed up THAT badly".

That’s what he said, yes.


Not necessarily. The most obvious situation is like that of the 40k Orks, who grow from fungal spores without any real concept of "parents". More realistic is a race modeled after any real-world animal that does not directly care for its young, a common trait of many animal classes including most reptiles, fish, and insects. Warhammer Skaven might be a good example of how that might play out. Even if they do raise their own children, allowing them to be "good" means assigning human morality to things that are NOT human. That may be appropriate for some species, but just because they have "families" doesn't imply anything.

It can be somewhat difficult to justify the concept of civilization for a species that lacks any concept of family, but it can be similarly difficult to imagine how a proper civilization could form for any species not almost identical to humans in form and function, so that's something that can often be ignored in a narrative if only for the sake of allowing variety.

I suppose. But most “monstrous races” basically do act like humans with different colors and stuff in D&D.

[Crusher]

Eh. The tough part about generalizing about D&D in general is that there are lots of different settings with wildly different expectations. Forgotten Realms is kind of the default, and iirc Greyhawk is mostly similar, but Dark Sun is all grimdark, and Eberron embraced the "everyone's a person" ethos from day one. And even within those settings different DMs choose to focus on different things and different groups of players have fun with different kinds of experiences.

*Someone* has to be the antagonist and they have to have minions of some sort. When I was younger, I was happy to have groups hack through masses of clearly distinguished enemies and orcs are perfectly good for that. As I've gotten older I've found I appreciate nuance more. I like putting the characters in morally ambiguous situations and see what they decide to do. NPCs that would normally seem like antagonists, but for various reasons happen to have aligned goals and the party has to make hard decisions about whether the help is worth it.

Obviously I don't do that *all* the time, they aren't Jesuit monks obsessed with parsing moral dilemmas to the tenth decimal point, that gets old too (and pretty quickly. Its best used in small doses at key dramatic moments, especially if you've been gradually dropping hints leading towards it). It just adds some spice. Eberron has been great for that.

[hamishspence]

I suppose. But most “monstrous races” basically do act like humans with different colors and stuff in D&D.

As The Giant put it:


Because all authors are human, it is exceedingly difficult for anyone to imagine a fully realized non-human intelligence. It has been done maybe a dozen times in the history of speculative fiction, and I would venture not at all in the annals of fantasy roleplaying games. (Certainly, goblins, dwarves, and elves don't qualify, being basically green short humans, bearded greedy humans, and pointy-eared magical humans.) Therefore, it's a moot distinction and one not worth making. Statistically speaking, ALL depictions of non-human intelligence—ever—are functionally human with cosmetic differences. Which is as it should be, because only by creating reflections of ourselves will we learn anything. There's precious little insight into the human condition to gain from a completely alien thought process.

[danielxcutter]

That’s what I was thinking about, yes.

[Worldsong]

Hah! Is this a reference?

Surprisingly, no. It's just what popped into my head.

Of course it could be a reference and I just forgot where it came from.

[Dragonus45]

I see. Does anyone know why?

Because they caught a lot of flack for how complicated 3.5 was and the big clustercluck that was the OGL and decided to simply things as much as possible in both mechanics and flavor while trying to capture the feeling of older editions and wound up wildly overcorrecting in a bunch of ways.

[danielxcutter]

Because they caught a lot of flack for how complicated 3.5 was and the big clustercluck that was the OGL and decided to simply things as much as possible in both mechanics and flavor while trying to capture the feeling of older editions and wound up wildly overcorrecting in a bunch of ways.

Yeah, while 5e is infinitely more newbie-friendly than 3.xe ever was, I'd say it's a bit too watered-down for my tastes. And the part about the fluff makes sense too.

[Shadowknight12]

I read the opening post and I feel a bit confused, because it feels like there's an overarching point to it, but all it really says is "things used to be like this and now they are like that", which is more of an observation than anything else.

[JonahFalcon]

I may remind people that for all the discussion of morality, D&D is still just a game, and there are rules so that the fights are entertaining, but unrealistic -- like the fact that die rolls affect people's fates ("Wait a minute, I rolled a 22!")

It runs on "we're fighting them, they bad, let's kill them for XP."

[Shadowknight12]

It runs on "we're fighting them, they bad, let's kill them for XP."

A lot of people find that it doesn't suit their tastes, and it's not even something restricted to the game itself, but to the fantasy/science fiction genre as a whole.

[Ionathus]

I may remind people that for all the discussion of morality, D&D is still just a game, and there are rules so that the fights are entertaining, but unrealistic -- like the fact that die rolls affect people's fates ("Wait a minute, I rolled a 22!")

It runs on "we're fighting them, they bad, let's kill them for XP."

It literally only runs on that if you decide it runs on that. You don't personally define the parameters of something that's as broadly played and adapted as D&D is: a significant portion of the playerbase – as well as the game's current designers – would disagree with your definition.

[arimareiji]

It literally only runs on that if you decide it runs on that. You don't personally define the parameters of something that's as broadly played and adapted as D&D is: a significant portion of the playerbase – as well as the game's current designers – would disagree with your definition.
Not to mention the author, but it seems like we accidentally left him behind at the last rest stop.

Three states ago.

What a long, strange trip it's been. (^_~)


Vaarsvuvius then repeats and amplifies this misconception when he/she casts the custom-made familicide spell in #639, essentially speaking for all players who say, “All monsters are evil and exist only for us to kill.” But hopefully when the reader sees the scale on which Vaarsuvius carries out the devastation, the error of this thinking is more obvious. If it is wrong to kill a thousand dragons simply because they are dragons, then it is wrong to kill a single dragon for the same reasons.

[brian 333]

What we have intentionally glossed over in this topic is the simple question:

What if, in a particular setting, goblins really are irredeemable, rapacious monsters?

We have approached this topic fr6m the assumption that goblins are just like us, except for circumstance. This is also the author's theme in the comic. But assume that if you take a goblin child, raise it in kindness and wealth, give it an education and gainful employment, and it still becomes a murderous monster?

What are the moral implications of allowing such a goblin colony to thrive?

[Worldsong]

What we have intentionally glossed over in this topic is the simple question:

What if, in a particular setting, goblins really are irredeemable, rapacious monsters?

We have approached this topic fr6m the assumption that goblins are just like us, except for circumstance. This is also the author's theme in the comic. But assume that if you take a goblin child, raise it in kindness and wealth, give it an education and gainful employment, and it still becomes a murderous monster?

What are the moral implications of allowing such a goblin colony to thrive?

I believe that's called Goblin Slayer.

[danielxcutter]

I believe that's called Goblin Slayer.

The problem is that OotSverse goblins are not much the same as those goblins, yet people advocate for treating them as if they were.

[hroþila]

What we have intentionally glossed over in this topic is the simple question:

What if, in a particular setting, goblins really are irredeemable, rapacious monsters?

We have approached this topic fr6m the assumption that goblins are just like us, except for circumstance. This is also the author's theme in the comic. But assume that if you take a goblin child, raise it in kindness and wealth, give it an education and gainful employment, and it still becomes a murderous monster?

What are the moral implications of allowing such a goblin colony to thrive?
We have also glossed over the simple question of what language five babies would spontaneously begin speaking if they were raised with no linguistic input and basically no interaction. Foster-mothers and nurses would suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for we would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. What are the moral implications of conducting such an experiment?

I dunno but it's like about as relevant to OotS as your scenario.

[danielxcutter]

We have also glossed over the simple question of what language five babies would spontaneously begin speaking if they were raised with no linguistic input and basically no interaction. Foster-mothers and nurses would suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for we would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. What are the moral implications of conducting such an experiment?

I dunno but it's like about as relevant to OotS as your scenario.

For what it's worth, I don't think brian was saying that was specifically about OotS.

[hroþila]

For what it's worth, I don't think brian was saying that was specifically about OotS.
No, but what relevance does it have to anything? What kind of thought experiment is that? Why would we trying to come up with convoluted scenarios where murdering children would be morally justified?

[Taevyr]

What we have intentionally glossed over in this topic is the simple question:

What if, in a particular setting, goblins really are irredeemable, rapacious monsters?

We have approached this topic fr6m the assumption that goblins are just like us, except for circumstance. This is also the author's theme in the comic. But assume that if you take a goblin child, raise it in kindness and wealth, give it an education and gainful employment, and it still becomes a murderous monster?

What are the moral implications of allowing such a goblin colony to thrive?

If that's the case in a particular setting (e.g. goblin slayer), we can clearly conclude that those goblins have a rather simplified inherent morality and are thus hardly comparable to the goblins in OOTS besides their name and (presumably) certain physical characteristics, and thus not relevant to this thread. Any further discussing of that theoretical setting/those theoretical goblins could happen in a different thread that isn't about the OOTS goblins specifically.

Essentially, this "what if" is about as relevant as the question "what if all goblins had angelic wings, pooped rainbows and automatically became lawful good half-celestials upon reaching adulthood, even if raised by Xykon out of sheer boredom? What would the moral implications of destroying such a goblin colony be?"

[Ionathus]

What we have intentionally glossed over in this topic is the simple question:

What if, in a particular setting, goblins really are irredeemable, rapacious monsters?

We have approached this topic fr6m the assumption that goblins are just like us, except for circumstance. This is also the author's theme in the comic. But assume that if you take a goblin child, raise it in kindness and wealth, give it an education and gainful employment, and it still becomes a murderous monster?

What are the moral implications of allowing such a goblin colony to thrive?

This is, as others have said, a pointless hypothetical.

[Jason]

We have also glossed over the simple question of what language five babies would spontaneously begin speaking if they were raised with no linguistic input and basically no interaction. Foster-mothers and nurses would suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for we would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. What are the moral implications of conducting such an experiment?

I dunno but it's like about as relevant to OotS as your scenario.

It has also been essentially tried in real life in some orphanages, to the severe detriment of the experimental subjects. Humans babies who aren't regularly talked to suffer severe developmental and health issues.

[Metastachydium]

It has also been essentially tried in real life in some orphanages, to the severe detriment of the experimental subjects. Humans babies who aren't regularly talked to suffer severe developmental and health issues.

Yeah, who would have thought that would happen? Those filthy humans can be criminally dumb.

[danielxcutter]

It has also been essentially tried in real life in some orphanages, to the severe detriment of the experimental subjects. Humans babies who aren't regularly talked to suffer severe developmental and health issues.

You do know that was sarcasm, right?

[Jason]

You do know that was sarcasm, right?
Sure. But as I said, it has really happened. Go take a read if you would like to be horrified.

[Worldsong]

Sure. But as I said, it has really happened. Go take a read if you would like to be horrified.

I think I'll take your word for it.

[danielxcutter]

I've heard about it, yes.

[hroþila]

Yeah I was consciously referencing Frederick II's experiment there. I was quoting a medieval chronicle about it.

[Jason]

Something very similar has happened in understaffed modern orphanages in failed states where the kids have been fed but not much else.

[Worldsong]

The part of me that I'd call the mad scientist considers it an interesting experiment, but the rest of me considers it completely abhorrent.

[Fyraltari]

The part of me that I'd call the mad scientist considers it an interesting experiment, but the rest of me considers it completely abhorrent.

Mood.67890

[arimareiji]

We have also glossed over the simple question of what language five babies would spontaneously begin speaking if they were raised with no linguistic input and basically no interaction. Foster-mothers and nurses would suckle and bathe and wash the children, but in no ways to prattle or speak with them; for we would have learnt whether they would speak the Hebrew language (which had been the first), or Greek, or Latin, or Arabic, or perchance the tongue of their parents of whom they had been born. What are the moral implications of conducting such an experiment?

I dunno but it's like about as relevant to OotS as your scenario.

I feel like I just watched Haley skip an arrow off a wall, which made Oona duck, only for it to hit its real target of Xykon's phylactery in Redcloak's back pocket.

[Taevyr]

Yeah I was consciously referencing Frederick II's experiment there. I was quoting a medieval chronicle about it.

There's also supposedly such an attempt in the Ancient Near East that was passed on to modern knowledge, by some mesopotamian king. The kids ended up "speaking goat", imitating the sounds of the animals which were kept nearby as it was all they heard. The king in question fancifully interpreted their "words" as bekos, which meant bread in some ancient language, and considered it proof.

[Kish]

What we have intentionally glossed over in this topic is the simple question:

What if, in a particular setting, goblins really are irredeemable, rapacious monsters?
Then the author of that setting isn't very good.

[Worldsong]

Then the author of that setting isn't very good.

I do kind of like Goblin Slayer, although mostly because of the way the story explores the main character.

[brian 333]

The point, and the relevance of my post, was that in their original incarnation the goblins were indeed as I described them. Yet we make assumptions about behavior of players of the past using our present sensibilities. My question was not intended to generate angst, but to provoke thought. Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

Oh, and from your lofty perch, may I ask how many times you asked your opponent to surrender in Call of Duty?

[Shadowknight12]

Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

That is a lot of defensiveness. If the story upsets you so, you can always walk away from it. No need to build such resentment.


Oh, and from your lofty perch, may I ask how many times you asked your opponent to surrender in Call of Duty?

Firstly, I don't do military shooters.

Secondly, I do not think you can compare an entire game genre where both sides are being controlled by an equal amount of players, starting from an equal position, and with a dedicated Balance team constantly updating the game to attempt to reach as close as possible to a balanced state for everyone, to a game where one side is controlled by players and another by a DM, where oftentimes the rules for creating PCs and NPCs are not the same, and where balance is viewed from a completely different perspective.

[Emberlily]

Honestly if call of duty did have a way to demand and offer surrender I'd be way into that.

Edit: Like I'm not joking! Haven't you ever been in a match where one side was clearly not going to win and you want to move on but you don't want to just ragequit if you're on the losing team and you kinda feel bad when you're winning?

[Kish]

The point, and the relevance of my post, was that in their original incarnation the goblins were indeed as I described them. Yet we make assumptions about behavior of players of the past using our present sensibilities. My question was not intended to generate angst, but to provoke thought. Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

Oh, and from your lofty perch, may I ask how many times you asked your opponent to surrender in Call of Duty?
D&D is a roleplaying game.

"But it had its roots in miniatures combat"--does not lead to "is essentially a war game forever." If you're truly not interested in talking about roleplaying games, then there's no reason for you to get defensive; no one has suggested that white chesspieces and black chesspieces are obligated to negotiate. If you're taking offense at the implications of the story then it follows that only games that have story are relevant.

I have asked my opponent to surrender 0 times in Call of Duty. Coincidentally, that's the number of times I've ever played Call of Duty. Thanks for the anti-recommendation. Might I suggest trying more (genuine, not rhetorical-point-scoring) questions and fewer assumptions?

[Worldsong]

Firstly, I don't do military shooters.

Secondly, I do not think you can compare an entire game genre where both sides are being controlled by an equal amount of players, starting from an equal position, and with a dedicated Balance team constantly updating the game to attempt to reach as close as possible to a balanced state for everyone, to a game where one side is controlled by players and another by a DM, where oftentimes the rules for creating PCs and NPCs are not the same, and where balance is viewed from a completely different perspective.

Also, a game where if someone gets killed they immediately respawn with no penalties other than losing the killstreak bonuses, where the characters are nothing more than puppets for the players to control with no pretense of them having personalities or lives or anything else that would cause the fighting to be a source of suffering, and which could best be described as digital laser tag or paintball.

With RPGs, whether they be tabletop or digital, people try to treat the world in the game as being real, with real people and real conflicts and all that jazz. Of course, not everyone does that, but for those who do, how they treat characters in the RPG matters because they try to make it matter the same way it would if it were real. Or, if not on the same level as reality, at least somewhat quasi-real.

Stories arguably have this even more so because generally speaking one of the best qualities of a story is considered to be how engaging and immersive it is. The more you can sympathize with the characters and visualize the setting (ergo, the more real it is from your perspective), the better the story. Which means that what happens in the story can actually matter to you.

Call of Duty, meanwhile, is just people poking each other from a distance and trying to get the best scores, which are calculated from factors such as how many times you poked someone, how many times you got poked yourself, and how many times you helped someone else poke somebody.

EDIT:
And even then, as Emberlily pointed out, a surrender button would be nice.

[danielxcutter]

Also, a game where if someone gets killed they immediately respawn with no penalties other than losing the killstreak bonuses, where the characters are nothing more than puppets for the players to control with no pretense of them having personalities or lives or anything else that would cause the fighting to be a source of suffering, and which could best be described as digital laser tag or paintball.

With RPGs, whether they be tabletop or digital, people try to treat the world in the game as being real, with real people and real conflicts and all that jazz. Of course, not everyone does that, but for those who do, how they treat characters in the RPG matters because they try to make it matter the same way it would if it were real. Or, if not on the same level as reality, at least somewhat quasi-real.

Stories arguably have this even more so because generally speaking one of the best qualities of a story is considered to be how engaging and immersive it is. The more you can sympathize with the characters and visualize the setting (ergo, the more real it is from your perspective), the better the story. Which means that what happens in the story can actually matter to you.

Call of Duty, meanwhile, is just people poking each other from a distance and trying to get the best scores, which are calculated from factors such as how many times you poked someone, how many times you got poked yourself, and how many times you helped someone else poke somebody.

EDIT:
And even then, as Emberlily pointed out, a surrender button would be nice.

It does probably depend on what kind of "RPG" we're talking about.

MMORPGs and such probably lend themselves closer to "kill them all for phat lutz" mentality, but others certainly foster more emotional attachment than that.

Undertale is a good example of that, and other games like Fallout do that too.

[brian 333]

That is a lot of defensiveness. If the story upsets you so, you can always walk away from it. No need to build such resentment.



Firstly, I don't do military shooters.

Secondly, I do not think you can compare an entire game genre where both sides are being controlled by an equal amount of players, starting from an equal position, and with a dedicated Balance team constantly updating the game to attempt to reach as close as possible to a balanced state for everyone, to a game where one side is controlled by players and another by a DM, where oftentimes the rules for creating PCs and NPCs are not the same, and where balance is viewed from a completely different perspective.

What you label defensiveness was actually an attempt to be clear after having subtlety fail catestrophically.

The point about shooters was that the game design precludes mercy. The early incarnations of D&D grew out of wargaming. Is it at all surprising that enemies were created which, as part of the intent of the game, were supposed to be defeated?

Back at the beginning of this fifty-year, million-author march to where we are now we gave little thought to the issues that seem so important today, not because we were bigots, but because we were playing the game as it was designed to be played.

I came to D&D from simulation gaming. I won and lost the Battle of Ghettysburg playing both Union and Confederate sides. What were the moral implications of killing and ordering to their deaths tens of thousands of imaginary troops? How was this significantly different from our treatment of imaginary goblins?

Well, the difference was, when we started playing AD&D, the first time my character killed a non-combatant my DM shifted his alignment away from good. Even at its beginning, we were struggling with questions no previous game had asked.

Fifty years later it is easy to label what we were doing then, but you forget that the very people you label were struggling to create what you now take for granted.

[Shadowknight12]

What you label defensiveness was actually an attempt to be clear after having subtlety fail catestrophically.

The point about shooters was that the game design precludes mercy. The early incarnations of D&D grew out of wargaming. Is it at all surprising that enemies were created which, as part of the intent of the game, were supposed to be defeated?

Back at the beginning of this fifty-year, million-author march to where we are now we gave little thought to the issues that seem so important today, not because we were bigots, but because we were playing the game as it was designed to be played.

I came to D&D from simulation gaming. I won and lost the Battle of Ghettysburg playing both Union and Confederate sides. What were the moral implications of killing and ordering to their deaths tens of thousands of imaginary troops? How was this significantly different from our treatment of imaginary goblins?

Well, the difference was, when we started playing AD&D, the first time my character killed a non-combatant my DM shifted his alignment away from good. Even at its beginning, we were struggling with questions no previous game had asked.

Fifty years later it is easy to label what we were doing then, but you forget that the very people you label were struggling to create what you now take for granted.

Someone having Things To Say about a playstyle is not necessarily an attack or a condemnation of those who play it.

[arimareiji]

What you label defensiveness was actually an attempt to be clear after having subtlety fail catestrophically.

The point about shooters was that the game design precludes mercy. The early incarnations of D&D grew out of wargaming. Is it at all surprising that enemies were created which, as part of the intent of the game, were supposed to be defeated?

Back at the beginning of this fifty-year, million-author march to where we are now we gave little thought to the issues that seem so important today, not because we were bigots, but because we were playing the game as it was designed to be played.

I came to D&D from simulation gaming. I won and lost the Battle of Ghettysburg playing both Union and Confederate sides. What were the moral implications of killing and ordering to their deaths tens of thousands of imaginary troops? How was this significantly different from our treatment of imaginary goblins?

Well, the difference was, when we started playing AD&D, the first time my character killed a non-combatant my DM shifted his alignment away from good. Even at its beginning, we were struggling with questions no previous game had asked.

Fifty years later it is easy to label what we were doing then, but you forget that the very people you label were struggling to create what you now take for granted.

I'm curious: Between the two, which would you prefer?

It's not fair to criticize a brutal playstyle now because that's how D&D started and nothing has changed.
It's not fair to criticize the origins of D&D as brutal because that was a different time.

[Fyraltari]

Honestly if call of duty did have a way to demand and offer surrender I'd be way into that.

Edit: Like I'm not joking! Haven't you ever been in a match where one side was clearly not going to win and you want to move on but you don't want to just ragequit if you're on the losing team and you kinda feel bad when you're winning?

And I'm still pissed about the ennemies in Skyrim that can fake surrender but never surrender.

[Morty]

Someone having Things To Say about a playstyle is not necessarily an attack or a condemnation of those who play it.

Moreover, attempts to frame criticisms of XP fodder species as attacks on people who have used them is a very transparent deflection. I've seen it so often it's worn out at this point. Nobody said that those who have played this way were bad people, so brian 333's ardent defence of them against non-existent attacks is just a means to distract from the actual argument being made.

[hroþila]

Also, there has been commentary on military shooters and the like. Spec Ops: The Line is a classic for a reason.

Boy would you have hated Spec Ops: The Line.

[brian 333]

I am not trying to excuse or justify the past. My point, that I appear to be failing to make, is that the attitudes you express today grew out of our efforts and our mistakes. D&D was the first game to ask the question, so it is unsurprising we didn't always get it right. But back then no other game ever considered the morality of in-game actions. Even today games are designed with a 'kill them all' philosophy.

With the introduction of Alignments and non-combatants, D&D introduced something completely new, and we were forced to evolve. The moral high ground you hold today was gained by our efforts and our failures back then.

Were goblins treated badly back then? Well, no worse than General Pickett's cavalry. But unlike any other wargame, D&D asked us about the morality of our game decisions. And we evolved.

[Shadowknight12]

I am not trying to excuse or justify the past. My point, that I appear to be failing to make, is that the attitudes you express today grew out of our efforts and our mistakes. D&D was the first game to ask the question, so it is unsurprising we didn't always get it right. But back then no other game ever considered the morality of in-game actions. Even today games are designed with a 'kill them all' philosophy.

With the introduction of Alignments and non-combatants, D&D introduced something completely new, and we were forced to evolve. The moral high ground you hold today was gained by our efforts and our failures back then.

Were goblins treated badly back then? Well, no worse than General Pickett's cavalry. But unlike any other wargame, D&D asked us about the morality of our game decisions. And we evolved.

Firstly, this rationale only holds weight with people who have respect towards what came before simply because they came before, which is not true of everyone.

Secondly, D&D wasn't even the first game to do this very thing you claim. AD&D 2e, the edition that saw D&D rise to prominence in the public consciousness, was published in 1989, and Vampire: The Masquerade was published in 1991, merely 2 years later. At the same time as D&D was doing all these things you're claiming, Vampire: The Masquerade was doing those very same things in a different way.

If it hadn't been D&D, it would've been another game.

[Morty]

I am not trying to excuse or justify the past. My point, that I appear to be failing to make, is that the attitudes you express today grew out of our efforts and our mistakes. D&D was the first game to ask the question, so it is unsurprising we didn't always get it right. But back then no other game ever considered the morality of in-game actions. Even today games are designed with a 'kill them all' philosophy.

With the introduction of Alignments and non-combatants, D&D introduced something completely new, and we were forced to evolve. The moral high ground you hold today was gained by our efforts and our failures back then.

Were goblins treated badly back then? Well, no worse than General Pickett's cavalry. But unlike any other wargame, D&D asked us about the morality of our game decisions. And we evolved.

What does it matter what people thought back then, when they made and played those games? That was then, this is now. I don't see anybody accusing those people in the past of anything or indeed caring much about it. The point at hand is that, right now, people are saying that things need to change.

[Ionathus]

The point, and the relevance of my post, was that in their original incarnation the goblins were indeed as I described them. Yet we make assumptions about behavior of players of the past using our present sensibilities. My question was not intended to generate angst, but to provoke thought. Do we have the moral high ground to assert that people of the past, playing what was essentially a war game, were morally inferior because they made decisions based on the way the game was played then?

That "morally inferior" accusation, which you feel is pointed at you, seems to be coming from nobody but you. I certainly don't consider people morally inferior for running goblins like standard minions – either 40 years ago or today.

Recognizing that a specific pattern of behavior is troubling, and asking questions about what that pattern might come from or lead to, does not always pass individual and complete moral judgment on everyone who has participated in that pattern of behavior.

This is something I have been trying to communicate with the Bechdel Test in other threads: just because a single movie "fails" the test doesn't mean it's a misogynistic movie. But if enough movies "fail", you start to notice a pattern and recognize a possibly wider problem.

[Jason]

Secondly, D&D wasn't even the first game to do this very thing you claim. AD&D 2e, the edition that saw D&D rise to prominence in the public consciousness, was published in 1989, and Vampire: The Masquerade was published in 1991, merely 2 years later. At the same time as D&D was doing all these things you're claiming, Vampire: The Masquerade was doing those very same things in a different way.

If it hadn't been D&D, it would've been another game.

Uh, no. D&D rose to prominence in the late '70s/early '80s. If anything, 2nd edition was on the tail end of TSR's dominance of the hobby. They were strong in the '90s, but not what they had been in the '80s.
As has been pointed out, D&D's module designers were presenting players with moral dilemmas like "what do paladins do when confronted with goblin women and children" in the '70s. D&D did in fact do it first.

[Shadowknight12]

Uh, no. D&D rose to prominence in the late '70s/early '80s. If anything, 2nd edition was on the tail end of TSR's dominance of the hobby. They were strong in the '90s, but not what they had been in the '80s.
As has been pointed out, D&D's module designers were presenting players with moral dilemmas like "what do paladins do when confronted with goblin women and children" in the '70s. D&D did in fact do it first.

D&D was officially published in the 70s (1974 for 1e and then 1977 for 2e to be exact), but it was not an instant mass success. You could potentially argue it "rose to prominence" during the 80s, a decade before we had Vampire: The Masquerade, and that it already had those moral dilemmas there, but not in the 70s.

Even then, we had Traveller and Chivalry & Sorcery in 1977, RuneQuest and GammaWorld, both in 1978, and Empire of the Petal Throne (with its own campaign setting) in 1974/75 (and all of these games are still being published and receiving new editions into the 2000s/2010s, just like D&D). Empire of the Petal Throne was even an influence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Petal_Throne#1975_TSR_edition) on Gygax and Arneson themselves.

And the idea that none of these games raised moral quandaries despite being made in the same era, influencing each other, published by the same company and showing up in the same gaming cons, but D&D was some sort of special unicorn that did is frankly laughable.

D&D did not do it first.

[Jason]

I was around during most of the '70s, but a little on the young side to play D&D when it first came out. I did play it throughout the '80s (and '90s, and '00s, and '10s), and in my experience the early '80s were when it was the most popular and most in the public eye.


The original Traveller was occasionally criticized (or lampooned) because many of the early adventures required or encouraged the characters to engage in some form of illegal activity (smuggling, breaking and entering, piracy, etc.) or acts of questionable morality (mercenary actions, espionage, state-sanctioned assassination). There were several reasons for this, but the main one was that these were the kinds of adventures people seemed most interested in. They were the type most often submitted, and were the most commonly encountered at conventions...Traveller was not alone in encouraging rule-bending heroes, but perhaps we went a little overboard in the early days. As gamers became more sophisticated, they began to see the entertainment value in activities other than the criminal ones, and later versions of Traveller became more sophisticated.
Thanks for mentioning Traveller. I always like breaking out the Traveller quotes.

[Dion]

Someone smart has to explain to me what Vampire: The Masquerade is.

I spent a lot of time hanging out in game shops in the 80’s and 90’s, and this is literally the first time I’ve even heard of it.

Was it influential, or popular in certain circles, or just another one of the literally hundreds of RPGs that the invention of low cost digital typesetting made possible in the 90s?

[Fyraltari]

Someone smart has to explain to me what Vampire: The Masquerade is.

I spent a lot of time hanging out in game shops in the 90’s, and this is literally the first time I’ve even heard of it.

Was it influential, or popular in certain circles, or just another one of the literally hundreds of RPGs that the invention of low cost digital typesetting made possible in the 90s?
I mean, I've never played it but it's a pretty big thing. It's an urban fantasy vampire thing where the main risk isn't your character dying but turning even more into a monster.

[Dion]

I mean, I've never played it but it's a pretty big thing. It's an urban fantasy vampire thing where the main risk isn't your character dying but turning even more into a monster.

Oh neat! Sort of like Call of Cthulhu from a decade earlier, but instead of saying sane you stay non-evil?

That does sound like a cool mechanic.

It seems unlikely to have invented “RPGs scenario with a moral quandary”, though. That really doesn’t sound right to me.

Even the absolutely crazy RuneQuest knockoff book I once bought in a Kmart in 1984 had some sort of weird “hooker assassins PC” class.

There’s really no way to play a morally unambiguous hooker assassin.

[Morty]

Vampire: the Masquerade is possibly the only RPG to have ever got close to D&D's status in the hobby. It was very influential, even if it has waned in recent years. I am nonetheless reasonably certain people played games in which they didn't murder acceptably evil targets on sight before it came out.

[Kish]

Honestly? When playing Master of Orion II, a computer game where it's pretty unambiguous that the way to win fastest/get the highest score is to be a complete monster and your computer will never suggest that anything you've done to achieve victory is other than laudable, that's not the way I play, and I know, from previous discussions, that I'm a long way from alone. Contrary to brian 333's weird not-defensive "wargame" claims, I'm pretty sure "actually thinking about the morality of the situation presented in this game" goes all the way back to whatever misty point a Cro-Magnon first displayed enough imagination to come up with an imagination-based game.

[hroþila]

I've never seen a game embrace genocide more openly, keenly and gleefully than Master of Orion II.

[Jasdoif]

Honestly? When playing Master of Orion II, a computer game where it's pretty unambiguous that the way to win fastest/get the highest score is to be a complete monster and your computer will never suggest that anything you've done to achieve victory is other than laudable, that's not the way I play, and I know, from previous discussions, that I'm a long way from alone.Indeed; managing to be elected ruler of the galaxy by the express support of (the representatives of) over two-thirds of the galaxy's population is more fun, and even has a large score bonus if you're into that.

[Lord Raziere]

The problem is that OotSverse goblins are not much the same as those goblins, yet people advocate for treating them as if they were.

Yeah, not every instance of a trope is completely the same. we've seen OOTS goblins. they're an unusual take on this: Rich subverts the always chaotic evil trope for sure, but he doesn't go the obvious route of making them good protagonists. Instead they're people truly raised in a culture that teaches not to question their superiors, to keep their head down, obey and go to war when ordered to, to hate others and so on, as the O-chul's story tells us.

Like a vast majority of the hobgoblins we see are probably living similar lives to the ones that helped O-Chul, and thus are basically slaves to the few who love war and see it as a means of getting power.

but even in this culture, there are variations, differing opinions and the hate itself is described "a hazy lazy hatred" or something long those lines. the hatred is mostly there to keep the warlord in power by providing a scapegoat, not to urge everyone to kill humans as quickly as possible. and there are hobgoblins who don't desire war at all. are they good? eeeeeeeh, maybe, maybe not. I don't think alignment matters in that case.

what matters is they support a good cause no matter their reasons for doing so. the two hobgoblins that help O-chul are probably just neutral and the second supreme leader may still be some version of lawful evil for getting his position by poisoning and usurpation for the greater good and framing the humans for it. but in the end, peace is achieved, more lives are saved than lost, and O-chul departs not having killed the second leader for it.

could it have turned out better? personally I doubt it. Gin-jun was dead set on his goals, the first leader was set on his, when it comes to politics of this nature realistically it means they need to die or a war is happening. O-chul is lucky that his outdated honor duel plan actually worked, and even then Miko killed Gin-jun for him when he snapped. considering she did it before ever becoming a paladin killing him didn't impact her lawful good alignment apparently. and the first hobgoblin leader....yeah that was either ending in war or a change in leadership, and if it was a more selfish hobgoblin leader,? it would've ended in war anyways because assassinating someone's leader sounds like an excellent reason to go to war to many people.

the goodest goblin we know of is Right-Eye, and....well he was in on the plan for a few years before doing something different. and even then his village had human stylings to it if the Julio scoundrel action figure was any indication, as if he wasn't making something with goblin culture, but looking at human culture and adopting its ideas so that people don't attack him. and it can be argued even then that is neutral more than good, as he only took action when most of his family was dead, needing a personal reason to oppose Xykon's evil.

this is a more nuanced depiction of how the goblins would work in a DnD world than just throwing good goblins in defiance of alignment, but as we see it leaves it open to a lot of people who don't grasp it to think they're all irredeemable anyways.

could have comic benefitted from a goblin being more outright heroic to drive the message in better? maybe. but the problem there is it'd be subject to the Drizz't problem, and since we already Zzr'dti with the accompanying joke, its hard to say how the Giant would done such a character seriously, since the entire comic seems to go out of its way to avoid the trope, in fact Belkar is all about the inverse being a "good race" ranger who dual wields daggers but is completely evil. I wonder if the comic would be the same if it didn't have the jokey beginning it did, would Belkar even be made?

but then again, a lot of this comic's relationships between seemingly incompatible alignments depend on people being remarkably tolerant or overlooking this or that:
-in most adventuring parties, Belkar would probably get kicked out or killed in record time
-how Redcloak and Xykon treat the MitD is played for laughs but if played seriously, Xykon would probably do a lot of abusive stuff to make MitD more evil faster.
-Redcloak if he any more impulsive and willing to change plans, would've crushed Xykon's phylactery right after Dorukan's dungeon in revenge for what happened to Right-Eye and his family and attempted to become leader of the hobgoblins without his help to just get revenge on Azure city without needing to involve the Gates (well technically the gates would be involved, but if he fooled the Sapphire guard into guarding it over other places in the city one could take over the rest and leave the Sapphire guard guarding a throne that Redcloak could simply decide not to care about, blockade off and let them starve within it) but all that is assuming Redcloak lives past a hypnotized MitD attacking him from a posthumous xykon's final revenge spell. like that was Xykon's weakest point, you can't tell me that Redcloak wasn't at least bit tempted at that point to do it.
-that whole "Lawful Good kobold" revenge guy seemed a bit too focused on revenge to care about the fact that Nale murdered people to just lure another good person to be framed. seems like the kobold should've cared more about that.
-heck Haley's greed and hoarding treasure would put most adventuring parties against her, most of them deal the gold out equally and such, so her greed would put her at odds with those who want the loot shared more reasonably.

y'know things like that. the Linear Guild being a constantly destroyed and rebuilt group of incompetents is actually relatively realistic given how they operate.

Overall, I like the nuance of the comics depiction of all this, but I feel its being a little too subtle at times, and some relationships only work because of the comedy keeping the situation from leading to their logical conclusions.

[CountDVB]

Yeah, not every instance of a trope is completely the same. we've seen OOTS goblins. they're an unusual take on this: Rich subverts the always chaotic evil trope for sure, but he doesn't go the obvious route of making them good protagonists. Instead they're people truly raised in a culture that teaches not to question their superiors, to keep their head down, obey and go to war when ordered to, to hate others and so on, as the O-chul's story tells us.

Like a vast majority of the hobgoblins we see are probably living similar lives to the ones that helped O-Chul, and thus are basically slaves to the few who love war and see it as a means of getting power.

but even in this culture, there are variations, differing opinions and the hate itself is described "a hazy lazy hatred" or something long those lines. the hatred is mostly there to keep the warlord in power by providing a scapegoat, not to urge everyone to kill humans as quickly as possible. and there are hobgoblins who don't desire war at all. are they good? eeeeeeeh, maybe, maybe not. I don't think alignment matters in that case.

what matters is they support a good cause no matter their reasons for doing so. the two hobgoblins that help O-chul are probably just neutral and the second supreme leader may still be some version of lawful evil for getting his position by poisoning and usurpation for the greater good and framing the humans for it. but in the end, peace is achieved, more lives are saved than lost, and O-chul departs not having killed the second leader for it.

could it have turned out better? personally I doubt it. Gin-jun was dead set on his goals, the first leader was set on his, when it comes to politics of this nature realistically it means they need to die or a war is happening. O-chul is lucky that his outdated honor duel plan actually worked, and even then Miko killed Gin-jun for him when he snapped. considering she did it before ever becoming a paladin killing him didn't impact her lawful good alignment apparently. and the first hobgoblin leader....yeah that was either ending in war or a change in leadership, and if it was a more selfish hobgoblin leader,? it would've ended in war anyways because assassinating someone's leader sounds like an excellent reason to go to war to many people.

the goodest goblin we know of is Right-Eye, and....well he was in on the plan for a few years before doing something different. and even then his village had human stylings to it if the Julio scoundrel action figure was any indication, as if he wasn't making something with goblin culture, but looking at human culture and adopting its ideas so that people don't attack him. and it can be argued even then that is neutral more than good, as he only took action when most of his family was dead, needing a personal reason to oppose Xykon's evil.

this is a more nuanced depiction of how the goblins would work in a DnD world than just throwing good goblins in defiance of alignment, but as we see it leaves it open to a lot of people who don't grasp it to think they're all irredeemable anyways.

could have comic benefitted from a goblin being more outright heroic to drive the message in better? maybe. but the problem there is it'd be subject to the Drizz't problem, and since we already Zzr'dti with the accompanying joke, its hard to say how the Giant would done such a character seriously, since the entire comic seems to go out of its way to avoid the trope, in fact Belkar is all about the inverse being a "good race" ranger who dual wields daggers but is completely evil. I wonder if the comic would be the same if it didn't have the jokey beginning it did, would Belkar even be made?

but then again, a lot of this comic's relationships between seemingly incompatible alignments depend on people being remarkably tolerant or overlooking this or that:
-in most adventuring parties, Belkar would probably get kicked out or killed in record time
-how Redcloak and Xykon treat the MitD is played for laughs but if played seriously, Xykon would probably do a lot of abusive stuff to make MitD more evil faster.
-Redcloak if he any more impulsive and willing to change plans, would've crushed Xykon's phylactery right after Dorukan's dungeon in revenge for what happened to Right-Eye and his family and attempted to become leader of the hobgoblins without his help to just get revenge on Azure city without needing to involve the Gates (well technically the gates would be involved, but if he fooled the Sapphire guard into guarding it over other places in the city one could take over the rest and leave the Sapphire guard guarding a throne that Redcloak could simply decide not to care about, blockade off and let them starve within it) but all that is assuming Redcloak lives past a hypnotized MitD attacking him from a posthumous xykon's final revenge spell. like that was Xykon's weakest point, you can't tell me that Redcloak wasn't at least bit tempted at that point to do it.
-that whole "Lawful Good kobold" revenge guy seemed a bit too focused on revenge to care about the fact that Nale murdered people to just lure another good person to be framed. seems like the kobold should've cared more about that.
-heck Haley's greed and hoarding treasure would put most adventuring parties against her, most of them deal the gold out equally and such, so her greed would put her at odds with those who want the loot shared more reasonably.

y'know things like that. the Linear Guild being a constantly destroyed and rebuilt group of incompetents is actually relatively realistic given how they operate.

Overall, I like the nuance of the comics depiction of all this, but I feel its being a little too subtle at times, and some relationships only work because of the comedy keeping the situation from leading to their logical conclusions.


Seconded and we also need to take into account the Dark One’s influence. He saw diplomacy as a failure so he influences his people into conflict to get better opportunities and he’s followed because to most goblinoids, he’s their folk hero turned god. Almost like Romulus I guess.

They follow him because he’s the first one to care about them overall, and thus don’t really question him. And given how they were abandoned by Fenris and designated a hostile like universes beforehand, things went as “normal” before he care along and tried to reach for something better. He proceeded to get assassinated (whether or not that was done truly by the one of the three monarchs or something unexpected like a traitorous goblin or even a fiend we will hopefully find out)

They’re devoted to him because he was the first one to care and that’s what the others need to figure out how to deal with.

[hroþila]

Seconded and we also need to take into account the Dark One’s influence. He saw diplomacy as a failure so he influences his people into conflict to get better opportunities and he’s followed because to most goblinoids, he’s their folk hero turned god. Almost like Romulus I guess.
He did tell Jirix to focus on diplomacy though.

[CountDVB]

He did tell Jirix to focus on diplomacy though.

True, though this is how he frames it: “Your time to join this army is not yet, Jirix. I have many battles for you yet in the world of mortals. They will be battles of trade and logistics, diplomacy and intrigue, but they will be battles nonetheless.”

He describes it as battles and the whole afterlife is a standing army of the goblins. So there is a militant angle to it and the notions of conquest if you will. Everything is a battle or war that they must win and willing to resort to aggressive if not gain what they want.

Look at bugbear debating even. Granted, violence is a part of life and all mortalkind, though I wonder if the Dark One has a view outside of war and conflict.

[Squire Doodad]

True, though this is how he frames it: “Your time to join this army is not yet, Jirix. I have many battles for you yet in the world of mortals. They will be battles of trade and logistics, diplomacy and intrigue, but they will be battles nonetheless.”

He describes it as battles and the whole afterlife is a standing army of the goblins. So there is a militant angle to it and the notions of conquest if you will. Everything is a battle or war that they must win and willing to resort to aggressive if not gain what they want.

Look at bugbear debating even. Granted, violence is a part of life and all mortalkind, though I wonder if the Dark One has a view outside of war and conflict.

I mean, TDO is ostensibly an Evil god, and given both DnD rules and some of the lines from the IFCC, it's pretty clear that the Evil afterlife involves quite a bit of hellish combat. Blood war or something, I'm not entirely sure. TDO's afterlife being centered around combat and whatnot is probably indicative of his status as an evil god and not goblin culture.

Bugbear debating is a good point, but then that could also be some complicated cultural thing, a bit like real-world debate rules. "You have 5 minutes to speak; afterwards, both sides will be allotted 3 minutes of clashing" or something.

[CountDVB]

I mean, TDO is ostensibly an Evil god, and given both DnD rules and some of the lines from the IFCC, it's pretty clear that the Evil afterlife involves quite a bit of hellish combat. Blood war or something, I'm not entirely sure. TDO's afterlife being centered around combat and whatnot is probably indicative of his status as an evil god and not goblin culture.

Bugbear debating is a good point, but then that could also be some complicated cultural thing, a bit like real-world debate rules. "You have 5 minutes to speak; afterwards, both sides will be allotted 3 minutes of clashing" or something.

Yeah, though given he’s also their only god, the Dark One maintaining his aggressive route, maybe justified or not, is causing problems more overall in the long run.

It’s an echo chamber effect it seems.

This does make me wonder if the other gods are prevented from trying to get the goblins as worshippers as part of their complex system of arrangements and deals with one another.

[Spartan360]

Also, aside from the Bugbears who don't put much care either into the TDO worship (with his use mainly as a partly ceremonial name drop) or battling against other races, I don't think they affect the TDO much if even at all.

Meanwhile The former green goblins (we don't know how many still live if any aside from Redcloak (Could be wrong on that though)) and the Hobgoblins believe that the TDO was happy with the massacre they did to make him a god and that his goals as a divine is that of a wrathful conqueror against the other gods for Goblins. Meaning that their believe also adds to his war-driven desires and outlook.

It's good to remember that he's not a fully formed divine being that existed before the world (With rules and ideas for their followers), He's basically a violent, wrathful massacre that had decent semblance of the original goblin before his followers belief and expectations of his goal changed him for the worse (According to Right-eye) since before he would have focused on keeping his people alive over vengeance or plans but now he finds it acceptable to have Redcloak and Xykon kill countless of their own army (and the TDO's own followers) just to deal some damage to his foes, and at the same time with his goalpost evermoving, he won't be satisfied until he gets something that isn't supposed to be actually possible to get while at the same time, burning down every bridge he sees as they aren't goblins.

[Worldsong]

Yeah, though given he’s also their only god, the Dark One maintaining his aggressive route, maybe justified or not, is causing problems more overall in the long run.

It’s an echo chamber effect it seems.

This does make me wonder if the other gods are prevented from trying to get the goblins as worshippers as part of their complex system of arrangements and deals with one another.

The idea is that mortals go to the plane befitting their alignment unless they've devoted their life to a specific deity, in which case said deity gets priority. The dwarven souls go to Hel because of a special agreement with Thor which, admittedly, makes me wonder how they got the other deities to agree... unless Thor created the dwarves and thus was allowed to make such a decision by himself (although he probably would have gotten vetoed if he tried to keep all the dwarven souls to himself).

In the case of the Dark One I'd imagine that he just forcefully takes all the goblinoid souls and all the other deities have decided to let him because 1) those goblinoid souls would have been sorted by alignment anyway since goblinoids don't appear to worship any deity other than the Dark One, and 2) fighting with the Dark One could result in a Snarl forming.

[Lemarc]

D&D was officially published in the 70s (1974 for 1e and then 1977 for 2e to be exact), but it was not an instant mass success. You could potentially argue it "rose to prominence" during the 80s, a decade before we had Vampire: The Masquerade, and that it already had those moral dilemmas there, but not in the 70s.

Even then, we had Traveller and Chivalry & Sorcery in 1977, RuneQuest and GammaWorld, both in 1978, and Empire of the Petal Throne (with its own campaign setting) in 1974/75 (and all of these games are still being published and receiving new editions into the 2000s/2010s, just like D&D). Empire of the Petal Throne was even an influence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empire_of_the_Petal_Throne#1975_TSR_edition) on Gygax and Arneson themselves.

And the idea that none of these games raised moral quandaries despite being made in the same era, influencing each other, published by the same company and showing up in the same gaming cons, but D&D was some sort of special unicorn that did is frankly laughable.

D&D did not do it first.

It rose to prominence in the late 70s. 2E was first published in 1989, 1E in 1977 with the Monster Manual, you're mixed up. And it is fairly ridiculous to argue that D&D was not the trendsetter. Roleplaying games are literally an outgrowth of D&D. Call it primitive or badly designed or whatever, if you like, say we've moved past it, we don't need to pay attention to this old dinosaur, but it's still the primordial ooze this all came from and yes, it "did it first" for most values of "it".

[Shadowknight12]

It rose to prominence in the late 70s. 2E was first published in 1989, 1E in 1977 with the Monster Manual, you're mixed up. And it is fairly ridiculous to argue that D&D was not the trendsetter. Roleplaying games are literally an outgrowth of D&D. Call it primitive or badly designed or whatever, if you like, say we've moved past it, we don't need to pay attention to this old dinosaur, but it's still the primordial ooze this all came from and yes, it "did it first" for most values of "it".

Being the trendsetter or the most popular does not mean they get to claim to have done it first when they had contemporaries doing the same at the same time. If you read the rest of the post you quoted, you will see all my examples are from the 70s, including one that influenced D&D in turn.

[Lemarc]

Being the trendsetter or the most popular does not mean they get to claim to have done it first when they had contemporaries doing the same at the same time. If you read the rest of the post you quoted, you will see all my examples are from the 70s, including one that influenced D&D in turn.

It didn't have contemporaries in the sense of things which came out independently at the same time. Without exception, other RPGs of the period are the result of people playing D&D or a derivative thereof and deciding, in the manner of hobbyists, "this is fun but what if we changed X and Y and did Z?", and then taking the additional step beyond their fellow players of publishing those changes - very extensive changes sometimes, but changes cooked up by D&D players. EPT is notable in that it's the product of long-envisioned fictional world-building predating D&D, but as a game it's still just D&D-with-modifications. Look, I have no interest in defending D&D's honour or pedigree, but it's flatly inaccurate to say as you do that D&D was not the first game to do these things.

[Shadowknight12]

Look, I have no interest in defending D&D's honour or pedigree, but it's flatly inaccurate to say as you do that D&D was not the first game to do these things.

The point is that if it hadn't been D&D the one that took off, it would've been any of its contemporaries, and they would've presented any of the same moral quandaries as D&D.

The fact that Empire of the Petal Throne predated and influenced D&D proves that the only unique thing D&D brought to the table was its mechanics, and those aren't part of the moral quandary conversation.

[CountDVB]

The idea is that mortals go to the plane befitting their alignment unless they've devoted their life to a specific deity, in which case said deity gets priority. The dwarven souls go to Hel because of a special agreement with Thor which, admittedly, makes me wonder how they got the other deities to agree... unless Thor created the dwarves and thus was allowed to make such a decision by himself (although he probably would have gotten vetoed if he tried to keep all the dwarven souls to himself).

In the case of the Dark One I'd imagine that he just forcefully takes all the goblinoid souls and all the other deities have decided to let him because 1) those goblinoid souls would have been sorted by alignment anyway since goblinoids don't appear to worship any deity other than the Dark One, and 2) fighting with the Dark One could result in a Snarl forming.

True, though this is clearly not their first fantasy run and Thor has mentioned this world being formed from scraping the bottom of the idea barrel for it. As such, I was also speaking prior to the ascension of the Dark One.

The Dark One getting claim of goblinoid souls would mean that they were likely for the grabs. Then again, they never worshipped anyone before him and he ascended because of their faith, so that’s probably why he got claim in the first place and no one went against it because they had no reason to.

[Lemarc]

The point is that if it hadn't been D&D the one that took off, it would've been any of its contemporaries, and they would've presented any of the same moral quandaries as D&D.

The fact that Empire of the Petal Throne predated and influenced D&D proves that the only unique thing D&D brought to the table was its mechanics, and those aren't part of the moral quandary conversation.

No, if D&D hadn't taken off its contemporaries wouldn't exist. That's what I think you're misunderstanding. It's possible, perhaps probable, that "D&D" or the same thing by another name would have come about later - you can see the roots of it in old-school wargaming, the way grognards negotiate rulings on the fly with their opponents to make battles more realistic because such-and-such a class of cannon couldn't be pulled up an incline of that degree with this level of groundwater, etc. But roleplaying games did not evolve as a bunch of independently-envisioned concepts. D&D came into existence, from whatever concatenation of circumstances, and every other RPG is a derivative thereof. Tekumel predates D&D as a fictional universe, but EPT was created by MAR Barker based on D&D.

[Jason]

Even original Traveller, which has very little in common with D&D from a mechanics standpoint (they both have 6 attributes, but that's about it) still followed D&D's lead in it's format: three booklets with one focusing on characters, one on worlds and adventures, and one on starships (the sci-fi equivalent of the monster manual, in many ways).
It's the same size and format as original D&D, but with a black box instead of a white one.

[Mariele]

Honestly, I feel like every time people have Thoughts on D&D, the issue comes back to the alignment system. People have different definitions of good and bad and what is a good action in one instance is a bad action in a different one, and the game encourages creating a fairly rigid definition of good and bad, even if all the people playing at the table (much less playing the game period, or partaking in related media) have different ideas of good and bad.

Every time these issues get brought up, they always feel so alien to me because I grew up with World of Warcraft, where there's no alignment system and you can play as a variety of monster races, each with their own culture and sets of values. It just completely avoids of the issue of "evil races". You're (almost) always killing something because it's an MMORPG, but it could be bandits, cultists, soldiers, scouts, lumberjacks, farmers, whatever, from nearly every single race. The taurens (minotaurs) and elves (who both have cultures with strong ties to taking care of nature) will want you to go massacre the members of the Venture Mining Co. (normally humans, goblins, and dwarves, who all have cultures that focus more on exploiting resources) because they're destroying the environment (or providing too much competition in the case of a few goblins asking you to go commit slaughter). Neither side is objectively portrayed as being in the wrong with an alignment label, they're just opposing sides to a conflict. Everyone has their own agenda. It boils down to conflict and a violent solution in a violence-based game (although you can get to maximum level picking flowers.)

D&D is much heavier on the RP than WoW for everyday play, but I still feel like the alignment system tends to just muck that up, rather than enhance it. Idk, I'm heavily biased, but I just prefer the culture-based RP of WoW over what seems to be the alignment-based RP of D&D. Because even when D&D brings up culture, it always tends to skew to the view of "this is an Evil culture" or "this is a Good culture" and letting that serve as the basis of your interaction, rather than just making up a fantasy culture and letting the player determine how their own morality will let them interact with it.

I'm not dying on this hill lmao, this is just my $0.02 on this topic since I keep thinking about it every single time D&D and racism and morality and all of that pops up on this forum (which is like every two seconds)

[Lord Raziere]

Honestly, I feel like every time people have Thoughts on D&D, the issue comes back to the alignment system. People have different definitions of good and bad and what is a good action in one instance is a bad action in a different one, and the game encourages creating a fairly rigid definition of good and bad, even if all the people playing at the table (much less playing the game period, or partaking in related media) have different ideas of good and bad.

Every time these issues get brought up, they always feel so alien to me because I grew up with World of Warcraft, where there's no alignment system and you can play as a variety of monster races, each with their own culture and sets of values. It just completely avoids of the issue of "evil races". You're (almost) always killing something because it's an MMORPG, but it could be bandits, cultists, soldiers, scouts, lumberjacks, farmers, whatever, from nearly every single race. The taurens (minotaurs) and elves (who both have cultures with strong ties to taking care of nature) will want you to go massacre the members of the Venture Mining Co. (normally humans, goblins, and dwarves, who all have cultures that focus more on exploiting resources) because they're destroying the environment (or providing too much competition in the case of a few goblins asking you to go commit slaughter). Neither side is objectively portrayed as being in the wrong with an alignment label, they're just opposing sides to a conflict. Everyone has their own agenda. It boils down to conflict and a violent solution in a violence-based game (although you can get to maximum level picking flowers.)

D&D is much heavier on the RP than WoW for everyday play, but I still feel like the alignment system tends to just muck that up, rather than enhance it. Idk, I'm heavily biased, but I just prefer the culture-based RP of WoW over what seems to be the alignment-based RP of D&D. Because even when D&D brings up culture, it always tends to skew to the view of "this is an Evil culture" or "this is a Good culture" and letting that serve as the basis of your interaction, rather than just making up a fantasy culture and letting the player determine how their own morality will let them interact with it.

I'm not dying on this hill lmao, this is just my $0.02 on this topic since I keep thinking about it every single time D&D and racism and morality and all of that pops up on this forum (which is like every two seconds)

Agreed, I grew up with WoW myself, it doesn't have this alignment problem. It just lets you decide what your morality is, whatever that may be. Elder Scrolls has a similar set up in that all the living cosmic beings are jerks and your morality is largely determined by your culture as well, and both would be ruined by enforcing alignment. and then there is all the Final Fantasies which while having heroes, and being DnD inspired, don't really put things into rigid definitions like DnD does and just lets the heroic morality be more natural in how it plays out. Dragon age intentionally discarded any objective morality for its darker and edgier thing but still retains heroism and doing good things.

My two cents? I think its pretty telling that every single successor to or universe inspired by DnD I can think of looked at the alignment system and went: "....nah, we don't need that, thats kind of nonsense, get rid of it". and still work as the medieval fantasy that DnD was meant to be without forcing it.

[hroþila]

I think that has more to do with the limitations of video games than with any intrinsic flaw of the alignment system. Even then, many video games have implemented some sort of "karma" system, it's just that by necessity it's much, much simpler than what's possible in a tabletop roleplaying game.

[Lord Raziere]

I think that has more to do with the limitations of video games than with any intrinsic flaw of the alignment system. Even then, many video games have implemented some sort of "karma" system, it's just that by necessity it's much, much simpler than what's possible in a tabletop roleplaying game.

which we have moved away from. those karma systems were all 2000's era, maybe earl 2010's era and made mostly by Bioware, no one bothers to make those anymore, because they're fundamentally meaningless. its more worth it to make multiple endings that come as a result of your actions with actual effects and results from them.

[Taevyr]

Good and Evil (and Law and Chaos) as inflexible, set-in-stone alignments only really work in a setting where those are fundamental elements of reality with clear connotations, with fiends and celestials being inherently a certain combination or they'd cease to be, but not so much in modern D&D unless you actually go planehopping. It's the same reason it works in Star Wars games: the Force is the main.... force actively influencing the galaxy, so it only makes sense for your character's relation to it to be important. Though less so if you're not a force-sensitive, I suppose.

But the lack of alignment as a straightjacket is one of the things I like about 5e: they still have "protection from good & evil" spells and the like, but it explicitly protects you against beings that are from outside the material plane, beings that actually are inherently made up from "lawful good" or "chaotic evil" or such. The material plane generally doesn't consist of a specific morality, so you can't just summarize any being from the material plane as "he/she's X X alignment". And it offers a way to create conflict with all planes: they're all filled with alien beings with a dogmatic viewpoint, whether benevolent or not; at some point, if any gain an interest, there'll be trouble. It's not hard to imagine a babylon-5-esque situation with chaotic good and lawful evil forces duking it out over some material setting and the inhabitants trying to get rid of both.

[danielxcutter]

Good and Evil (and Law and Chaos) as inflexible, set-in-stone alignments only really work in a setting where those are fundamental elements of reality with clear connotations, with fiends and celestials being inherently a certain combination or they'd cease to be, but not so much in modern D&D unless you actually go planehopping. It's the same reason it works in Star Wars games: the Force is the main.... force actively influencing the galaxy, so it only makes sense for your character's relation to it to be important. Though less so if you're not a force-sensitive, I suppose.

But the lack of alignment as a straightjacket is one of the things I like about 5e: they still have "protection from good & evil" spells and the like, but it explicitly protects you against beings that are from outside the material plane, beings that actually are inherently made up from "lawful good" or "chaotic evil" or such. The material plane generally doesn't consist of a specific morality, so you can't just summarize any being from the material plane as "he/she's X X alignment". And it offers a way to create conflict with all planes: they're all filled with alien beings with a dogmatic viewpoint, whether benevolent or not; at some point, if any gain an interest, there'll be trouble. It's not hard to imagine a babylon-5-esque situation with chaotic good and lawful evil forces duking it out over some material setting and the inhabitants trying to get rid of both.

I believe there was something like this in the Tales of Wyre campaign journal. The druid, Nym, was rather unhappy that outsiders kept intruding into the Green(=nature).

There were a lot of philosophies across the factions and I really liked that.

[M1982]

Indeed; managing to be elected ruler of the galaxy by the express support of (the representatives of) over two-thirds of the galaxy's population is more fun, and even has a large score bonus if you're into that.

And best way to do that is to be a brutal warmonger and just elect yourself after ruling 2/3 of the galaxy's population.

[brian 333]

We can argue alignment all week and never agree.

And that's the point.

No one who plays Monopoly complains that you are an evil slumlord when they land on Baltic Ave. right after you put a hotel on it, or complains that your four-house development on Pacific Ave. has a negative environmental impact.

Gygax and Arneson came from a time when fantasy novels were largely concerned with good and evil, conformity and individuality. (Two top-rated TV shows of the day, Gunsmoke and Bonanza, illustrate this, and were contemporaries of Star Trek: The Original Series.) Within a decade of the publication of D&D such morality tales were considered too contrived or trite to be taken seriously and they were replaced with stories of dark heros who were morally indistinguishable from their foes.

So I disagree with the premise that if D&D hadn't done it someone else would have. The era of good guys versus bad guys was already over.

But D&D got a whole generation of gamers who might otherwise never have been exposed to it to think about what good and evil really mean. That's a good thing. Especially when we disagree, because it's our disagreements that make us think and, perhaps occasionnally, realize that we were wrong.

And maybe we're evolving a little along the way.

[goodpeople25]

No one who plays Monopoly complains that you are an evil slumlord when they land on Baltic Ave. right after you put a hotel on it, or complains that your four-house development on Pacific Ave. has a negative environmental impact.
Uh yeah those complaints would be daft, most people who play Monopoly aren't and don't play with slumlords or those responsible for the majority of negative enviromental impact and if so they are likely at a power imbalance or they own their own freaking hotel.

People absolutely do (and arguably should) question the ethics and point of the actions monopoly simulates.

[danielxcutter]

Wasn't Monopoly originally designed to prove a point?

[Morty]

We can argue alignment all week and never agree.

And that's the point.

No one who plays Monopoly complains that you are an evil slumlord when they land on Baltic Ave. right after you put a hotel on it, or complains that your four-house development on Pacific Ave. has a negative environmental impact.

Gygax and Arneson came from a time when fantasy novels were largely concerned with good and evil, conformity and individuality. (Two top-rated TV shows of the day, Gunsmoke and Bonanza, illustrate this, and were contemporaries of Star Trek: The Original Series.) Within a decade of the publication of D&D such morality tales were considered too contrived or trite to be taken seriously and they were replaced with stories of dark heros who were morally indistinguishable from their foes.

So I disagree with the premise that if D&D hadn't done it someone else would have. The era of good guys versus bad guys was already over.

But D&D got a whole generation of gamers who might otherwise never have been exposed to it to think about what good and evil really mean. That's a good thing. Especially when we disagree, because it's our disagreements that make us think and, perhaps occasionnally, realize that we were wrong.

And maybe we're evolving a little along the way.

You're still arguing against accusations no one seems to have actually made.

[Jason]

We can argue alignment all week and never agree.

And that's the point.

No one who plays Monopoly complains that you are an evil slumlord when they land on Baltic Ave. right after you put a hotel on it, or complains that your four-house development on Pacific Ave. has a negative environmental impact.

Gygax and Arneson came from a time when fantasy novels were largely concerned with good and evil, conformity and individuality. (Two top-rated TV shows of the day, Gunsmoke and Bonanza, illustrate this, and were contemporaries of Star Trek: The Original Series.) Within a decade of the publication of D&D such morality tales were considered too contrived or trite to be taken seriously and they were replaced with stories of dark heros who were morally indistinguishable from their foes.

So I disagree with the premise that if D&D hadn't done it someone else would have. The era of good guys versus bad guys was already over.

But D&D got a whole generation of gamers who might otherwise never have been exposed to it to think about what good and evil really mean. That's a good thing. Especially when we disagree, because it's our disagreements that make us think and, perhaps occasionnally, realize that we were wrong.

And maybe we're evolving a little along the way.
I agree with you on many points. If D&D hadn't created role-playing games in the time place it did there is no certainty that someone else would have stepped forward and done it.

I'm not sure I agree on the "all fiction now features anti-heroes" point. Marvel and Star Wars are both very popular right now, and both feature a lot of pretty clearly black and white villains. The polarization in politics in the US looks to me to also be a search for villains and heroes by the public. So our culture has not decided to give up on good guys vs. bad guys.

[Vahnavoi]

Good versus evil didn't go anywhere, it was relegated to children's entertainment - as was D&D itself for a while. Don't confuse temporary whims of fashion for permanent change, progress or evolution.

[brian 333]

I agree with you on many points. If D&D hadn't created role-playing games in the time place it did there is no certainty that someone else would have stepped forward and done it.

I'm not sure I agree on the "all fiction now features anti-heroes" point. Marvel and Star Wars are both very popular right now, and both feature a lot of pretty clearly black and white villains. The polarization in politics in the US looks to me to also be a search for villains and heroes by the public. So our culture has not decided to give up on good guys vs. bad guys.

Good point, though the stories we see in the comic movies are mostly from the 60s or earlier. But even in the movies we see Spiderman and Wolverine, to illustrate a point.

Spiderman, from the 60s, is arguably the first complex comic character, but he's clearly Good. Wolverine, from the 70s, is 'bad' but he's doing bad for a good cause.

This is not to say there was a hard date with unambiguously good heros on one side and unambiguously evil heros on the other, but it's definitely a trend. Marvel makes money by bucking the trend.

[Morty]

There's a considerable difference between having unambiguous heroes and villains and creating entire species of sapient beings whose purpose is to be nothing but low-tier minions for the latter. This strikes me as yet another deflection.

[Worldsong]

Wasn't Monopoly originally designed to prove a point?

I think the biggest point Monopoly has proven is that it's not a very good game.

[Ranadiel]

Wasn't Monopoly originally designed to prove a point?

Yup. 1.0 of Monopoly was called the Landlord's Game and was meant as a teaching tool about the evils of monopolies and the virtues of "Georgism." In the original game you played two rounds, the first with a proto-version of the modern rules and the second with rules based around the concept of a "single land value tax." People began making home brew variants fairly quickly and the second round getting jettisoned became popular within a decade of the original version.

In view of all of that, the original creator probably would have actually supported complaining "that you are an evil slumlord when they land on Baltic Ave. right after you put a hotel on it," since that seems consistent with the point they were trying to make.

[Spartan360]

Morality, alignment, ethical and pragmatic decisions in both real life and fiction aren't always as clean as some people push. You can be merciless, unempathetic and extreme while still wishing and working for a better outcome even though you won't always be looked on as a hero for it.

Another thing would be how good aligned decisions aren't always for the better and "evil" ones aren't always self-driven or worse. An example from Star Wars Tor is whether you should steal medicine for the war-Orphans that have suffered from completely callous war criminals or you can return it back to the true owners, the army who needs it for the wounded soldiers that need it to either live or to get back into the fight as soon as possible. In the game, Stealing it and giving it to the orphans is seen as the light/good option but anyone who thinks it through would likely notice the actual conflicting points, such as the fact that you are not only stealing from them but also potentially dooming soldier's who have been fighting to keep everyone there safe. Sure, you might have saved a bunch of kids but at the same time, not only have you allowed soldiers/defenders of those same people and more die but your allies now have less resources and manpower.

So I think what often causes such problems in RL and fictional is that people have difficulties scaling their morality or alignment depending on the varying situations. Especially when even when complaining about someone's action, the complainer eventually does or would do the same when faced with a similar event.

[danielxcutter]

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't massacre goblin children considering in OotS they're basically funny-looking humans.

[Spartan360]

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't massacre goblin children considering in OotS they're basically funny-looking humans.

Doubt that most people would under normal situations.

[Jason]

I think the biggest point Monopoly has proven is that it's not a very good game.
And yet it continues to sell, and there are thousands of branded variants.

[Worldsong]

And yet it continues to sell, and there are thousands of branded variants.

Yeah, turns out that being good and being profitable are not as closely linked as one might think.

[Spartan360]

Monopoly is somewhat like real life, you can spend the entire game being equal to your competition, you manage to take the nearest train to the rich life or you get your legs smashed by a baseball bat and never recover.

Personally in my actual opinion though, Monopoly is something that depends on personal taste, Most people that I have met love playing the game but I have also met people that detest the game. So basically, it's pretty much same thing as with pretty much everything in the world that people want to or refuse to experience.

[Vahnavoi]

I'm pretty sure I wouldn't massacre goblin children considering in OotS they're basically funny-looking humans.


Doubt that most people would under normal situations.

There's a Nietschze quote I could throw at you, but since I'm lazy, I'll just paraphrase and get to the meaning:

If you've never been in a situation where you even could massacre children, patting yourselves on your backs over how you totally wouldn't do it isn't of interest to anyone. Don't mistake lack of opportunity and ability for morality.

[Spartan360]

There's a Nietschze quote I could throw at you, but since I'm lazy, I'll just paraphrase and get to the meaning:

If you've never been in a situation where you even could massacre children, patting yourselves on your backs over how you totally wouldn't do it isn't of interest to anyone. Don't mistake lack of opportunity and ability for morality.

I know about Nietschze but again under normal situation as in I was simply sent to attack a mostly defense goblin village (aka Redcloak's origin) and the fact this isn't goblin slayer, There would be no reason for most people to kill the children, the elderly and the wounded. This is more like a situation that the Huns practiced rather than a vengeance or extremism driven one by something similar to the world and history that's in the LOTR.

[Ionathus]

Monopoly is somewhat like real life, you can spend the entire game being equal to your competition, you manage to take the nearest train to the rich life or you get your legs smashed by a baseball bat and never recover.

Personally in my actual opinion though, Monopoly is something that depends on personal taste, Most people that I have met love playing the game but I have also met people that detest the game. So basically, it's pretty much same thing as with pretty much everything in the world that people want to or refuse to experience.

I feel like the game-playing people in my life are just as polarized on it: they either really enjoy Monopoly or absolutely hate it.

Put me in the hate camp, though. Any game that's so dependent on luck, and has no real avenue for getting back in the game once you're even slightly down, is a poorly-made game in my book. Which, as others have said, was apparently the original point of the game.

And that ties nicely into the goblin discussion for me. It'd be one thing if all the races were playing Catan, for instance: you box each other out of resources, and you put the robber on each other, but at the end of the day it's a pretty individual, peaceful game with some trading. People can take resources from you, but they can't actively destroy your actual progress (VPs).

Compare that to a game like Monopoly or Risk, where in order to win, you have to crush others...and the ones who are crushed have laughably small odds of becoming a major player again. It's hard not to see the parallels in how entire races lose and then keep losing as a result.

[danielxcutter]

I feel like the game-playing people in my life are just as polarized on it: they either really enjoy Monopoly or absolutely hate it.

Put me in the hate camp, though. Any game that's so dependent on luck, and has no real avenue for getting back in the game once you're even slightly down, is a poorly-made game in my book. Which, as others have said, was apparently the original point of the game.

And that ties nicely into the goblin discussion for me. It'd be one thing if all the races were playing Catan, for instance: you box each other out of resources, and you put the robber on each other, but at the end of the day it's a pretty individual, peaceful game with some trading. People can take resources from you, but they can't actively destroy your actual progress (VPs).

Compare that to a game like Monopoly or Risk, where in order to win, you have to crush others...and the ones who are crushed have laughably small odds of becoming a major player again. It's hard not to see the parallels in how entire races lose and then keep losing as a result.

The goblins are basically trying to flip the board at this point because of that, especially since someone made a mistake earlier and gave them less money to start with.

[Ionathus]

The goblins are basically trying to flip the board at this point because of that, especially since someone made a mistake earlier and gave them less money to start with.

I'd argue that other goblins, when Redcloak isn't involved, seem to mostly cling to life and try to play the hand they're dealt, hoping to grind their way back into the game (I'm mixing all the metaphors today, huh).

Redcloak seems to be the only one obsessed with flipping the board, and while it's gotten him some results, it's pretty clearly not sustainable on the long term.

[danielxcutter]

I'd argue that other goblins, when Redcloak isn't involved, seem to mostly cling to life and try to play the hand they're dealt, hoping to grind their way back into the game (I'm mixing all the metaphors today, huh).

Redcloak seems to be the only one obsessed with flipping the board, and while it's gotten him some results, it's pretty clearly not sustainable on the long term.
Hmm, yes that’s true.

Honestly I think it’d be reasonable to understand why he wants to flip the board even if most people still want to keep playing.

[CountDVB]

Hmm, yes that’s true.

Honestly I think it’d be reasonable to understand why he wants to flip the board even if most people still want to keep playing.

Well, his reasons are a mix of selfish and selfless, the former tainting the latter since he doesn't wanna consider the fact he was in the wrong. It will all come down to what happens in the end, but as the way he is now, I suspect that he will still be selfish.

But in terms of flipping the board, it's not just because they started out with "less money", but the fact they are considered inherently evil just because of what they are/because they were made by Fenris and thus, considered just for the purpose of cutting them down.

[Spartan360]

All games that use dice and even other games depend on luck, some just more than others.

[Gurgeh]

Gygax and Arneson came from a time when fantasy novels were largely concerned with good and evil, conformity and individuality. (Two top-rated TV shows of the day, Gunsmoke and Bonanza, illustrate this, and were contemporaries of Star Trek: The Original Series.) Within a decade of the publication of D&D such morality tales were considered too contrived or trite to be taken seriously and they were replaced with stories of dark heros who were morally indistinguishable from their foes.
Eh, I don't think this assertion holds up. Speculative fiction had gone through a bunch of changes in the 60s and 70s and while there was plenty of black-and-white stuff out there (when has there not been?) there was also a huge amount of influential and successful fiction that took more complex (or cynical) views on morality. The original Law/Chaos alignment system from Basic is taken almost directly from Michael Moorcock's stories, after all.

The creators of D&D may have been unimaginative and arch-conservative in their views on morality and ethics - honestly, I wouldn't know - but the stories and authors that influenced them were most definitely not.

As far as Monopoly goes, its biggest sin is the fact that it's a player elimination game that takes way too long to eliminate its players. It's not uncommon for someone to achieve an unbeatable position fairly early in the game, but converting this unassailable lead into an actual victory, with every other player eliminated, may take three or four times longer - during which time the trailing players aren't really going to have much fun.

[Ionathus]

All games that use dice and even other games depend on luck, some just more than others.

Of course, but you can't deny there are tiers of luck-based games where skill or strategy or player choice barely even factors into it.

Even comparing d20 systems to something like PbtA: rolling a 20-sided die, with equal chances for 1 or 20 or anything in between, inherently makes the proficiencies and modifiers you choose less important. It makes the game more swingy and more dependent on the roll of a die. Compare that to PbtA, where you roll 2d6: when the average roll is weighted towards the middle, it means that your modifiers have a much stronger chance of actually affecting the roll.

That's not a slight against D&D: I really enjoy rolling d20s! But the game definitely swings harder because it's weighted more towards luck than consistency.

Monopoly has elements of strategy, sure, but it really all still comes down to a roll of the dice, and there are very few things you can do to change the course of the game.

Basically, the only games anyone should ever play are Tic-Tac-Toe, Go, and Chess. Luck in any form is a sin against gaming itself.

[Metastachydium]

Basically, the only games anyone should ever play are Tic-Tac-Toe, Go, and Chess. Luck in any form is a sin against gaming itself.

(Some forms of the game that we know as chess do, in fact, have dice (e.g. chaturaji).)

[Ionathus]

(Some forms of the game that we know as chess do, in fact, have dice (e.g. chaturaji).)

Boy, I would absolutely love a version of chess that wasn't 100% dependent on my own competency. Give me a bad roll to scapegoat and I'll take that any day.

[arimareiji]

Monopoly has elements of strategy, sure, but it really all still comes down to a roll of the dice, and there are very few things you can do to change the course of the game.

Basically, the only games anyone should ever play are Tic-Tac-Toe, Go, and Chess. Luck in any form is a sin against gaming itself.

Monopoly is Tic-Tac-Toe with dice, just as it was meant to be. (^_~)

The point of the game was to be utterly imbalanced in favor of whoever is the luckiest near the start (and follows the relatively-obvious strategies), which may or may not have been meant to parallel "good fortune as a function of birth".

[dps]

If you've never been in a situation where you even could massacre children, patting yourselves on your backs over how you totally wouldn't do it isn't of interest to anyone. Don't mistake lack of opportunity and ability for morality.

IMO, if put into a situation in which they were allowed to massacre children with no negative consequences, the biggest factor that would keep a lot of people from participating would be plain laziness, not morality.

[danielxcutter]

I wouldn't want to do that even if I could get away with it!

[dps]

I wouldn't want to do that even if I could get away with it!

So you're putting yourself in the Lazy alignment, then. 😁

[Fyraltari]

I wouldn't want to do that even if I could get away with it!

On saura jamais ce qu'on a vraiment dans nos ventres,
Caché derrière nos apparences.
L'âme d'un brave ou d'un complice ou d'un bourreau ?
Ou le pire, ou le plus beau ?
Serions-nous de ceux qui résistent, ou bien les moutons d'un troupeau,
S'il fallait plus que des mots ?
[...]
Et qu'on nous épargne à toi et moi,
Si possible, très longtemps
D'avoir à choisir un camp.

"We will never know what we really have in our guts. The soul of a brave, of an accomplice, of an executioner? The worst or the most beautiful? Would we be of those who resist or sheep in the herd, if it took more than words? [...] May we, you and I, be spared, if possible for a very long time, having to pick a side."
From Born in 17, in Leidenstadt by Jean-Jacques Goldman, Michael Jones and Carole Fredericks.

It's easy to say we would (not) have done this or that but the truth is, most of us don't know, and I hope we never find out.

[Silent Wrangler]

On saura jamais ce qu'on a vraiment dans nos ventres,
Caché derrière nos apparences.
L'âme d'un brave ou d'un complice ou d'un bourreau ?
Ou le pire, ou le plus beau ?
Serions-nous de ceux qui résistent, ou bien les moutons d'un troupeau,
S'il fallait plus que des mots ?
[...]
Et qu'on nous épargne à toi et moi,
Si possible, très longtemps
D'avoir à choisir un camp.

"We will never know what we really have in our guts. The soul of a brave, of an accomplice, of an executioner? The worst or the most beautiful? Would we be of those who resist or sheep in the herd, if it took more than words? [...] May we, you and I, be spared, if possible for a very long time, having to pick a side."
From Born in 17, in Leidenstadt by Jean-Jacques Goldman, Michael Jones and Carole Fredericks.

It's easy to say we would (not) have done this or that but the truth is, most of us don't know, and I hope we never find out.

I am of the opinion that if one was given a chance to say "ewww, no way" to slaughtering goblin noncombatants while pretending to be Minmax The Warrior, they will have better chances of saying "eww, no way" to killing human noncombatants while being John Smith The Soldier. Human mind likes to rely on past experience, even imaginary one.

[Metastachydium]

IMO, if put into a situation in which they were allowed to massacre children with no negative consequences, the biggest factor that would keep a lot of people from participating would be plain laziness, not morality.

I'm pretty sure there are such people, I'm pretty sure there isn't a lot of them and I'm absolutely certain that they should seek psychiatric help.

[Vahnavoi]

That's a specific pedagogical issue. Briefly, from knowledge and experience: training someone to be an ethical soldier requires significant time and drills made to resemble the real ethical situation as closely as possible.

Bluntly, fictional moral choices encountered as part of entertainment? They do not qualify. Expecting them to have much of an effect is just the inverse of "video games causes violence!". The proposed effect is the opposite, but the internal logic and the degree of proof for it is identical.

[danielxcutter]

I find "anyone would murder children if they thought they could get away with it" is a mindset I do not like.

[brian 333]

When D&D came out goblins were intended to be the enemy. They were characterized as implacable and irredeemable monsters. This was, and remains, normal in games where the player has (imaginary) living enemies to defeat.

This is not racisim!

Some modern portrayals of goblins show them to be human in all but appearance. They were most likely written that way precisely to make a point about racism.

Conflating the two is the problem here. The first is a game mechanic and the second is social commentary. When I mentioned Pickett's Charge and Monopoly the point was clear to me: in real life these things were horrible, but in a game they are just game mechanics. Nobody gets hurt in the game. There are no dead to bury, no wounded to tend, no bankrupt millionaires to house and feed.

It seems to me that we as a culture are losing the ability to differentiate the real from the imaginary, and that frightens me. How long will it be before I am accused of genocide for wiping out all of the red checkers?

[Morty]

When D&D came out goblins were intended to be the enemy. They were characterized as implacable and irredeemable monsters. This was, and remains, normal in games where the player has (imaginary) living enemies to defeat.

This is not racisim!

Some modern portrayals of goblins show them to be human in all but appearance. They were most likely written that way precisely to make a point about racism.

Conflating the two is the problem here. The first is a game mechanic and the second is social commentary. When I mentioned Pickett's Charge and Monopoly the point was clear to me: in real life these things were horrible, but in a game they are just game mechanics. Nobody gets hurt in the game. There are no dead to bury, no wounded to tend, no bankrupt millionaires to house and feed.

It seems to me that we as a culture are losing the ability to differentiate the real from the imaginary, and that frightens me. How long will it be before I am accused of genocide for wiping out all of the red checkers?

Nobody has accused anyone of being racist because they're killing imaginary goblins. Certainly not you, specifically. You've claimed to be accused of such several times, it's been debunked as false each time and you've ignored it. Now you've come up with some strawman about being accused of genocide for playing checkers. Why do you keep trying to make it a personal attack on yourself when nobody has made one? The argument has only ever been against trends of portrayal in fiction.

If doesn't frighten you that we as a society are "losing the ability to differentiate the real from the imaginary", because it's not happening and you know it. People are simply critically analysing things you've been taking for granted. If you're not comfortable with that, no one is forcing you to read the comic or threads like this one.

[Fyraltari]

When D&D came out goblins were intended to be the enemy. They were characterized as implacable and irredeemable monsters. This was, and remains, normal in games where the player has (imaginary) living enemies to defeat.

This is not racisim!
Brian, nobody is saying you are racist for having played those games. Nobody is saying that Gygax, Anderson and the others were racist for designing those games. What we are saying is that fiction does not exist in a vacuum. Fiction reflects a culture's perception of reality and a culture's perception of reality is shaped by the fiction it consumes. Snake biting its tail and all that.

As such, the portrayal of entire groups as "implacable and irredeemable monsters" isn't entirely harmless. It is, wittingly or not, reinforcing racist, xenophobic, prejudiced narratives and therefore plays a part in racist, xenophobic, prejudiced attitudes.

Is it a big part? No. Is anyone going to become racist simply by engaging with these stories? No. Does anyone need to be racist to engage with these stories? No.

But the thing about biases is that they are, by nature, hard to detect. Part of being a mature adult, a very important part, is the ability to reflect upon oneself and the reasons behind one's actions and taste. Asking "why do I enjoy this?" "Is there anything wrong or problematic within this work that I should be pay attention to?" Being critical of what we engage with so that we can take in the good while rejecting the bad is healthy.

To reiterate, no-one is saying that enjoying or creating a work of fiction with problematic elements makes you a bad person. Because no work of fiction is ever going to be ideologically pure. But it is important that we recognize the faults within ourselves and within our cultural framework, else we will never overcome them.


Some modern portrayals of goblins show them to be human in all but appearance. They were most likely written that way precisely to make a point about racism.

Yes, and the point is generally, at least partially that portraying entire people as naturally evil is feeding racist rhetoric and taking inspiration from it.

Taken generally, fantasy writers and consumers have looked/are looking at the past and saw an issue, namely "evil races" and are deciding not to repeat this issue, to correct that flaw. That is good. That is progress.



Conflating the two is the problem here. The first is a game mechanic and the second is social commentary. When I mentioned Pickett's Charge and Monopoly the point was clear to me: in real life these things were horrible, but in a game they are just game mechanics. Nobody gets hurt in the game. There are no dead to bury, no wounded to tend, no bankrupt millionaires to house and feed.
Everybody knows that game characters are not real. With the possible exception of people with severe mental issues. That's not the point.

The point is that Dungeon and Dragons, and in fact, all roleplaying games are precisely that: roleplaying games. The players are acting roles within a narrative. Unlike Monopoly, there is a context to the actions of the players, a story to ground them. And as such, that story is as valid to criticize as any art form. Remember, art does not exist in a vacuum. Every novel, every movie, every painting, every fairy tale and every game played tells two stories: the one it is trying to tell and the one of a specific moment in time of the culture that produced it.


It seems to me that we as a culture are losing the ability to differentiate the real from the imaginary, and that frightens me. How long will it be before I am accused of genocide for wiping out all of the red checkers?
Do not confuse scrutinizing the relationship between the real and the imaginary with losing track of which is which. Nobody actually cares about what the goblins feel. People care about what the author is trying to say.
Thinking that people criticizing the first editions of D&D will lead to people decrying checkers is a slippery slope fallacy: these games are fundamentally different. Checkers is an adversial game where two players face one another in a contest of strategic thinking devoud of context; the checkers representing nothing, are mere extensions of the other player's will. But D&D is a co-operarive game where the players and the Game Master come together to tell the story of heroic (or at least, interesting) characters where the Non-Player Characters represent, well, characters in that story, that the player characters can interact with in a myriad of way.

[Worldsong]

So on one hand we've got people claiming that most people would be fine with the idea of massacring children if they could get away with it and would only be stayed by their own laziness.

On the other, Brian continues to try and turn himself into a martyr for reasons unknown.

This thread has gone to strange places indeed.

[Morty]

So on one hand we've got people claiming that most people would be fine with the idea of massacring children if they could get away with it and would only be stayed by their own laziness.

On the other, Brian continues to try and turn himself into a martyr for reasons unknown.

This thread has gone to strange places indeed.

Really, I'd consider both of those entirely within the expected trajectory for a thread about this subject.

[Worldsong]

Really, I'd consider both of those entirely within the expected trajectory for a thread about this subject.

...You know what, fair enough. This forum has already gone in such strange directions in previous threads that the strange has become the new normal.

[Ionathus]

<snip>

Incredibly well said. Do you write essays? I would read them.

[Fyraltari]

Incredibly well said. Do you write essays? I would read them.

Aww. :smallredface:
No, I'm too lazy to seriously write something.

Also, permission to sig?

[Ionathus]

Aww. :smallredface:
No, I'm too lazy to seriously write something.

Also, permission to sig?

Granted! 10 character limit

[Shadowknight12]

When D&D came out goblins were intended to be the enemy. They were characterized as implacable and irredeemable monsters. This was, and remains, normal in games where the player has (imaginary) living enemies to defeat.

Some modern portrayals of goblins show them to be human in all but appearance.

Your word choices are quite telling. You see your own playstyle as the norm, and what's more, you want it to continue being the norm. You reduce those who do not share it to "some" in order to feel like they are only a newfangled minority.

This isn't really about the in-game morality, it's about feeling threatened ("Am I going to be accused of genocide?") and the fear of no longer being the norm.

[Spartan360]

Yeahhhh, I'm going to have to disagree with the theory that laziness would stop people from killing children if they were allowed to. An average person would likely have far too much empathy and decency to find a child-slaughter to be a pretty messed up act. Most of the western world for example, when seeing a small animal walking on it's own, don't think about killing it unless starved or financially troubled. Also I'm not completely sure about it but I believe most species have a somewhat innate sense towards defending newborns/children.

Also, I don't use real-life social stuff when thinking about in-fiction stories, far too much difference in history and also there are very conflicting mindsets in real life so unless you want to start a discussion/argument about on a different site, I mostly keep my mouth/fingers away from that mess.

[Kish]

Conflating the two is the problem here. The first is a game mechanic and the second is social commentary. When I mentioned Pickett's Charge and Monopoly the point was clear to me: in real life these things were horrible, but in a game they are just game mechanics. Nobody gets hurt in the game. There are no dead to bury, no wounded to tend, no bankrupt millionaires to house and feed.

It seems to me that we as a culture are losing the ability to differentiate the real from the imaginary, and that frightens me. How long will it be before I am accused of genocide for wiping out all of the red checkers?
Considering you're the only one here who seemingly doesn't understand that a roleplaying game involves imagination, I would say...you already have been so accused, but only by yourself.

I get that flatly asserting that D&D is a wargame and it's wrong to impute morality to it didn't get the reaction you wanted, but rubbing out the line between it and entirely other types of games won't get you that reaction either. Whatever you can say about the alignment rules, their entire existence puts D&D on a different plane than checkers or the other games you keep insisting it's exactly the same as.

[danielxcutter]

Considering you're the only one here who seemingly doesn't understand that a roleplaying game involves imagination, I would say...you already have been so accused, but only by yourself.

I get that flatly asserting that D&D is a wargame and it's wrong to impute morality to it didn't get the reaction you wanted, but rubbing out the line between it and entirely other types of games won't get you that reaction either. Whatever you can say about the alignment rules, their entire existence puts D&D on a different plane than checkers or the other games you keep insisting it's exactly the same as.

Well I'm pretty sure that D&D settings are canonically on a different Material Plane than Earth.

[Jasdoif]

Thinking that people criticizing the first editions of D&D will lead to people decrying checkers is a slippery slope fallacy: these games are fundamentally different. Checkers is an adversial game where two players face one another in a contest of strategic thinking devoud of context; the checkers representing nothing, are mere extensions of the other player's will. But D&D is a co-operarive game where the players and the Game Master come together to tell the story of heroic (or at least, interesting) characters where the Non-Player Characters represent, well, characters in that story, that the player characters can interact with in a myriad of way.Indeed. Everything is base once it's torn down to its basics, and everything is amoral once morality has been stripped from it; in much the same way that after a chocolate-covered vanilla ice cream cone is deprived of its chocolate covering and cone, it's overwhelmingly vanilla.

If everything that differentiates D&D from a wargame is ignored, D&D looks a heck of a lot like a wargame (not exactly a groundbreaking discovery). And conversely, if everything that stems from D&D's wargame heritage is ignored, D&D looks like nowhere near as much of a wargame (not quite as tautological).

Thus the Prime Directive of AnalysisTM: If you break something down into its components to understand it better, you have to put it back together before you can really understand it. This entire forum could be broken down into a legion of boolean logic operations taking place across a myriad of electronic devices; that doesn't mean memorizing a few tables of boolean logic operations is sufficient to understand this forum. (At all.) Similarly, and as you say, there's no moral aspect to the "roll dice, do math, compare numbers" component of D&D; it's the addition of storytelling on top of that, with all the usage and implications and expectations and everything else associated with storytelling, that allows the game to possess a moral dimension.

[dps]

So on one hand we've got people claiming that [Bmost people would be fine with the idea of massacring children if they could get away with it and would only be stayed by their own laziness.[/b]

On the other, Brian continues to try and turn himself into a martyr for reasons unknown.

This thread has gone to strange places indeed.

To be fair, I said a lot of people, not most people.

[Dion]

To be fair, I said a lot of people, not most people.

If you industrialized it, and spread the blame around a little so that everyone could say “I just paid taxes for those bombs but I didn’t build them” or “I just built the bombs but I didn’t drop them” or “I just dropped them but I didn’t target them” or “I just targeted them but I didn’t set strategy” or “I just set strategy but I didn’t set policy”, etc...

Yeah, I think most people would drop bombs on children.

[Jason]

If you industrialized it, and spread the blame around a little so that everyone could say “I just paid taxes for those bombs but I didn’t build them” or “I just built the bombs but I didn’t drop them” or “I just dropped them but I didn’t target them” or “I just targeted them but I didn’t set strategy” or “I just set strategy but I didn’t set policy”, etc...

Yeah, I think most people would drop bombs on children.
But paying taxes is not optional. If you don't pay taxes you go to jail. Are you responsible for all the ways the government spent your money after they forced you to give it to them at the threat of imprisonment?

Building bombs is not the same thing as choosing when and where to drop them either.

It's only when we get to the people actually dropping the bombs that we can start to really call it "bombing" anything.

[Shadowknight12]

But paying taxes is not optional. If you don't pay taxes you go to jail. Are you responsible for all the ways the government spent your money after they forced you to give it to them at the threat of imprisonment?

Building bombs is not the same thing as choosing when and where to drop them either.

It's only when we get to the people actually dropping the bombs that we can start to really call it "bombing" anything.

It's possible this isn't a black and white issue where taxpayers are 100% just as guilty as the person ordering the bombings (or the person dropping them), but also aren't 100% separated from the event. It's possible that being coerced to participate in a system that bombs innocents by the threat of harm/incarceration puts you in a gray area where you are neither complicit to nor separated from the event.

[Dion]

It's only when we get to the people actually dropping the bombs that we can start to really call it "bombing" anything.

That’s the beauty of industrialization. Everyone does everything, and nobody does anything.

“No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

[dps]

If you industrialized it, and spread the blame around a little so that everyone could say “I just paid taxes for those bombs but I didn’t build them” or “I just built the bombs but I didn’t drop them” or “I just dropped them but I didn’t target them” or “I just targeted them but I didn’t set strategy” or “I just set strategy but I didn’t set policy”, etc...

Yeah, I think most people would drop bombs on children.

Yeah, but OTOH, I think there's a pretty big distinction between dropping a bomb on a city from 30,000 feet up and sticking a sword into someone right in front of you, on a whole lot of different levels.

[pearl jam]

Yes, the distinction is that one is able to avoid seeing the consequence of their action right in front of them.

[dps]

Yes, the distinction is that one is able to avoid seeing the consequence of their action right in front of them.

Yes, that's one distinction, but not the only one.

[Worldsong]

Yes, the distinction is that one is able to avoid seeing the consequence of their action right in front of them.

The bomb also is a lot more effective.

[pearl jam]

Not necessarily.

[arimareiji]

That’s the beauty of industrialization. Everyone does everything, and nobody does anything.

“No, you’re wrong there—quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.”

That, and/or the Official Blessing of Authority (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment).


Yes, that's one distinction, but not the only one.

Indeed. "Bomb" (perhaps because it's at a distance) also generates the utterly-imaginary distinction that the consequences are instantaneous and merciful.

Except in very extreme circumstances, a bomb doesn't somehow instantly reduce people to their component elements. Bomb victims don't "poof" and vanish like monsters in a video game.

Injuries and death are generally caused by shrapnel, or roofs and walls falling. Sometimes fires, especially those started by incendiary bombs. But regardless, very likely to be the stuff of nightmares.

Edit: Because at this hour, more than vague allusions to what I think of as nightmare fuel are a Very Bad Idea.

[Worldsong]

Not necessarily.

Look, if you can't manage to be more effective with a bomb dropped on a city than a single sword that seems like a you problem, not a bomb problem.

[danielxcutter]

Look, if you can't manage to be more effective with a bomb dropped on a city than a single sword that seems like a you problem, not a bomb problem.

Depends on the rulesets we’re using. Apparently nukes have surprisingly low damage. Think they’re in d20 Modern.

[Cazero]

Depends on the rulesets we’re using. Apparently nukes have surprisingly low damage. Think they’re in d20 Modern.
More importantly, a sword doesn't break after the first hit. You'll kill more people with it eventualy.

[Doug Lampert]

Bombs also can be directed at killing an open and violent enemy, and yet still kill innocents as a side effect. If I bomb a village that contains a deadly enemy and where bombs are the most effective/safest way to get him, and innocent children die, then I can reasonably claim that I was trying to kill the deadly enemy.

If I use a sword to kill the deadly enemy, and then go through the rest of the village killing children, that claim has a lot less credibility.

Use of human shields is more of a crime by the side using them than by the side dropping bombs on them. But it's much, much harder to use innocents as a human shield against a sword. Hence the presumption with a sword is that the person using the sword intended to kill the innocent, while that presumption is weaker with a bomb from 30,000 feet. [I'm pretty sure I've seen fiction where someone did use a human shield against a sword, and that it is consistently treated as a dastardly deed by the guy using the human shield, not by the guy using the sword.]

The profoundly anti-war TV show MASH once had an episode where someone put an ammo dump next to the hospital, and all of the good characters made the point that if the enemy tried to bomb the ammo dump and hit the hospital, that wasn't THEIR (the enemy's) fault, it was the fault of the people who put an ammo dump next to a hospital. And that if the army put anti-aircraft guns in to protect the dump, then that just made the area around the hospital an even more legitimate target for high altitude bombing or artillery. And just to make the point 100% clear, the character who chose to put the dump there claimed to have gotten the idea from something the Nazi's did in WWII.

[Edited to add] In theory it is still possible to declare a city "open", which means "We promise not to defend or fight in that city or to use it to directly support military operations, and we expect you not to bomb that city." Basically, you can metaphorically put a giant Red Cross flag over the entire city to make it not a legitimate target for bombs.

[Squire Doodad]

Basically, you can metaphorically put a giant Red Cross flag over the entire city to make it not a legitimate target for bombs.

I'm tempted to use this in a game now

[Doug Lampert]

I'm tempted to use this in a game now

Wikipedia has a page on Open Cities, they are in the Geneva Conventions, but there were similar rules much earlier than the Geneva Convention.

Early modern warfare had a rule where if a city's wall had a "practical breech" (basically, a hole big enough to send troops through without them being easily slaughtered) then the defenders could request the "honors of war", and if granted, then the garrison was allowed to march out with their weapons, and go somewhere else, and the city surrendered without a fight allowing the civilians to live (which most of them would not if the city was sacked by storming troops in through that breech).

Similarly, IIRC, defenders in some medieval wars had the right to make the best terms they could and simply surrender the fortress or city they were garrisoning if they were not relieved within a particular time period (usually 90 days IIRC) without it being considered dishonorable or a betrayal of their own side. Basically, a city wasn't required to starve itself to death on behalf of a king who couldn't defend it.

There should be some way in most settings to say, "We're not fighting over this city, if you can take the surrounding countryside, we'll give you the city without a fight". The attacker has little or no reason to ever say NO to such an offer if it's made prior to conducting an expensive siege and if he trusts the offer.

[pearl jam]

Please kindly gather all your military targets into clumps, preferably in open unforrested terrain away from civilian areas, so that we can feel morally unimpeachable as we drop bombs on them from airplanes.

We'll still drop the bombs either way, but then it will be your fault if you haven't moved. Unintended consequences.

[arimareiji]

Please kindly gather all your military targets into clumps, preferably in open unforrested terrain away from civilian areas, so that we can feel morally unimpeachable as we drop bombs on them from airplanes.

We'll still drop the bombs either way, but then it will be your fault if you haven't moved. Unintended consequences.

All right, Durkula (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots1009.html) (panel 1*). (^_~)

* - But the rest is worth a read anyway, since the last panel may be Roy's single greatest crowning Moment of Awesome. Either that, or panel 7 of the next strip.

[Worldsong]

Please kindly gather all your military targets into clumps, preferably in open unforrested terrain away from civilian areas, so that we can feel morally unimpeachable as we drop bombs on them from airplanes.

We'll still drop the bombs either way, but then it will be your fault if you haven't moved. Unintended consequences.

If the alternative is every settlement and hospital turning into a warzone because military units keep trying to use these places as shields against attacks I'll take the idea that the defensive side has some responsibility in where they set up their barricades. It may seem unfair, but fairness appears to not have the power to turn those smoking ruins back into buildings and living people.

[Mariele]

IMO, if put into a situation in which they were allowed to massacre children with no negative consequences, the biggest factor that would keep a lot of people from participating would be plain laziness, not morality.

That's the most horrific point of view I've come across in a long time, and I'm completely serious.

No. No. No. Very, very few, extremely disturbed, people would kill or hurt children if given the option without consequences. Even people who "don't like" kids don't want them harm, they just don't want to be around them. If I could do it without consequences, yes, I would massacre a number of criminals. I wouldn't massacre random adults. And I certainly wouldn't harm children, much less massacre them. The fact that you think that "a lot" of people would do it is nothing short of terrifying.

And don't give me that "but you've never been in that situation so how could you knooooow" BS. I've done a lot of crap in my life, not all of it legal or moral, and I can tell you right now that I know I wouldn't hurt a kid any more than I would drop a bomb on a city if given the opportunity. If I can't know that much about myself, then I have no identity, period.

[pearl jam]

If the alternative is every settlement and hospital turning into a warzone because military units keep trying to use these places as shields against attacks I'll take the idea that the defensive side has some responsibility in where they set up their barricades. It may seem unfair, but fairness appears to not have the power to turn those smoking ruins back into buildings and living people.

Not killing people and not destroying buildings is pretty effective at preventing that situation.

Each side in a conflict is responsible for its own means and methods.

Attempts to free one side from responsibility for the consequences of its actions by using the actions of the other side as an excuse are rationalizations.