Are the "Dark One" and his allies really evil?

[paladinofshojo]

I mean all he wants is his sentient race to be free of the persecution and genocides they have to face because their sole creation is nothing more than experience points for a bunch of arrogant jerkasses who worship the divine jerkasses who created them for that purpose. I mean it would be easy to see how some of the gods can be sympathetic to this plight, since the "evil" Loki has more common sense than the "good" Thor.

[Oracle_Hunter]

He's also willing to unleash the Snarl and destroy the world, all the people on it, and possibly several gods in the process.

Yes, he's Evil. Even well-intentioned Evil is Evil.

[paladinofshojo]

He's also willing to unleash the Snarl and destroy the world, all the people on it, and possibly several gods in the process.

Yes, he's Evil. Even well-intentioned Evil is Evil.



But he tried peaceful solutions in the begginning but that didn't work, so it's logical to come up with the solution that "if you can't reason with them with words and well 'reason', reason with them with a theoretical bullet in the face"

[Warren Dew]

I mean all he wants is his sentient race to

... be allocated land that has never belonged to them, making numerous people from other races homeless.

Yes, they are evil. Read Start of Darkness for what a group of good goblins would actually do. Hint: part of it is abandoning worship of the Dark One.

[Enlong]

Clerics of the Dark One Rebuke Undead.

Therefore, he's Evil.

[MReav]

Yes, they are evil. Read Start of Darkness for what a group of good goblins would actually do. Hint: part of it is abandoning worship of the Dark One.

Well,

I'm not so sure they necessarily abandoned worshipping The Dark One. Sure they don't have any aspirations of trying to smash down other people or want to engage in deific blackmail, but the only indication of your statement is Right-Eye's bitterness toward having had to sacrifice everyone and everything for a cause he no longer believed in.

[Enlong]

Wait, I have more definitive proof: SoD quote from Redcloak.

REally?? Oh, man, that is SO wicked!

:redcloak:: Well, he's technically an Evil god, so yeah, pretty much.
So yeah, definatly Evil.

[Lord_Butters_I]

Adolf Hitler did what he did for the good of the fatherland. I'm just saying.

[Crinos]

Adolf Hitler did what he did for the good of the fatherland. I'm just saying.

Godwins law aside, you're absolutely right:

Look at Azure City under Redcloak's rule (I say Redcloak's rule because Xykon isn't really interested in running things so much as he is subjecting O-Chuul to elaborate deathtraps and making magical items, but I digress). Sure, the Hobgoblins are well taken care of, but it sucks for everything else. If Redcloak gains control of the snarl like he and Xykon plan, then basically the whole world will end up like Azure city: With the Goblins running things and the other races reduced to slaves.

Oddly enough, I find The dark ones situation similar to that of the white terror from the webcomic "Goblins"; a great leader of the goblin people who tried the peaceful path with other races, got screwed over just for being a member of the "evil" race, and subsequently deciding to go the "do whats best for the Goblins and rot on everyone else" route.

In a way, Redcloak is kinda like Magneto, only for Goblins.

[Mauve Shirt]

But he tried peaceful solutions in the beginning but that didn't work, so it's logical to come up with the solution that "if you can't reason with them with words and well 'reason', reason with them with a theoretical bullet in the face"

He raised an enormous army and basically tried to blackmail the humans. Not really a peaceful solution.

[MReav]

I mean all he wants is his sentient race to be free of the persecution and genocides they have to face because their sole creation is nothing more than experience points for a bunch of arrogant jerkasses who worship the divine jerkasses who created them for that purpose. I mean it would be easy to see how some of the gods can be sympathetic to this plight, since the "evil" Loki has more common sense than the "good" Thor.

I should point out that based on Loki's complaints in SoD, he was likely a participant in the creation of XP fodder races.

[Warren Dew]

Well,

I'm not so sure they necessarily abandoned worshipping The Dark One. Sure they don't have any aspirations of trying to smash down other people or want to engage in deific blackmail, but the only indication of your statement is Right-Eye's bitterness toward having had to sacrifice everyone and everything for a cause he no longer believed in.

Valid point. I take Right Eye's later statement to Redcloak of "you don't know what it's like not to serve ... a petty spiteful god" as meaning that Right Eye didn't worship the Dark One any more, but we don't know for sure that he quit before he founded the village.

[MReav]

Valid point. I take Right Eye's later statement to Redcloak of "you don't know what it's like not to serve ... a petty spiteful god" as meaning that Right Eye didn't worship the Dark One any more, but we don't know for sure that he quit before he founded the village.

More Spoilerific responses.

My point was that while Right-Eye seemed to have abandoned the worship of the Dark One by that point, but the blind date he tried to set Redcloak up with seemed well-versed in His scriptures.

[Teron]

Presumably, many of the villagers still had a casual sort of worship going on. Giving the Dark One due credit for being their race's patron deity, looking out for them and what not, even if they're not willing to wage war in his name. Sort of like how most Christians aren't inclined to venture into the Amazon and try to convert the natives. :smalleek:

[kpenguin]

But he tried peaceful solutions in the begginning but that didn't work, so it's logical to come up with the solution that "if you can't reason with them with words and well 'reason', reason with them with a theoretical bullet in the face"

Peaceful solutions? He didn't exactly write a petition for a separate goblin nation and send it to the human rulers. He gathered up a huge army and basically tried to intimidate the humans into giving up some of their land.

[paladinofshojo]

Peaceful solutions? He didn't exactly write a petition for a separate goblin nation and send it to the human rulers. He gathered up a huge army and basically tried to intimidate the humans into giving up some of their land.



Was this before or after the goblins where getting slaughtered for experience points? Anyway, he didn't necessarilly go through with it did he? He just wanted his people to be safe, and as we all know, fantasy humans are bastards, they recognize no authority other then their own, the only way to reason with them is meaningless bloodshed and violence.



Asides from that, if you where a goblin would you rather have a huge army protecting you or live in a quant village that PCs visit regularly?

[Arcadius798]

my thought is that the dark one has been pulling on redcloaks chain, instead actually wanting to become the ultimate power using the snarl

[Warren Dew]

More Spoilerific responses.

My point was that while Right-Eye seemed to have abandoned the worship of the Dark One by that point, but the blind date he tried to set Redcloak up with seemed well-versed in His scriptures.

She was from the next valley over, though, not from Right Eye's village. Granted she seemed part of the same general community.

[paladinofshojo]

Godwins law aside, you're absolutely right:

Look at Azure City under Redcloak's rule (I say Redcloak's rule because Xykon isn't really interested in running things so much as he is subjecting O-Chuul to elaborate deathtraps and making magical items, but I digress). Sure, the Hobgoblins are well taken care of, but it sucks for everything else. If Redcloak gains control of the snarl like he and Xykon plan, then basically the whole world will end up like Azure city: With the Goblins running things and the other races reduced to slaves.

Oddly enough, I find The dark ones situation similar to that of the white terror from the webcomic "Goblins"; a great leader of the goblin people who tried the peaceful path with other races, got screwed over just for being a member of the "evil" race, and subsequently deciding to go the "do whats best for the Goblins and rot on everyone else" route.

In a way, Redcloak is kinda like Magneto, only for Goblins.




But yet the human species as a whole hasn't suffered being persecuted just for being a human right? Redcloak and his Master know better then to kill humans in cold blood, seeing as that would make them no better than humans themselves. However, slavery for humans is just a byproduct of the war rather than any "hatred" for humans.

[Lamech]

And gathering a huge army is wrong why exactly? Escpecially when "adventures" are always attacking? And as a goblin he was likely to be killed on sight unless their was a reason not to? And asking for a more equitable distrubution of land is wrong how again? Those human leaders assassinated him when he had done nothing wrong; if he had say give us land or I'll attack that would be blackmail. Convictions are not based on someone will do something.
P.S. I don't have SoD with me msitakes about details may be made.

[Warren Dew]

Was this before or after the goblins where getting slaughtered for experience points? Anyway, he didn't necessarilly go through with it did he?

While he didn't get a chance to follow through immediately, it seems that he did after he became a god.


He just wanted his people to be safe, and as we all know, fantasy humans are bastards, they recognize no authority other then their own, the only way to reason with them is meaningless bloodshed and violence.

To the contrary.

Also,
The fact that Right Eye's village, which conducts "no raids on humans", has "no paladins" coming after them, suggests otherwise.

[paladinofshojo]

While he didn't get a chance to follow through immediately, it seems that he did after he became a god.



To the contrary.

Also,
The fact that Right Eye's village, which conducts "no raids on humans", has "no paladins" coming after them, suggests otherwise.



Well being killed, and shot down by the highest order in the universe tends to do that to you.

And what about Redcloak's first village?

[Warren Dew]

And what about Redcloak's first village?

It harbored the Dark One's high priest.

Very likely it was the center for coordinating all goblin raids on humans.

[Teron]

Well being killed, and shot down by the highest order in the universe tends to do that to you.

And what about Redcloak's first village?
Given that the previous bearer of the Crimson Mantle knew the paladins were only there for him, one might take a poor view of him for entering settlements in the first place. It's not like he couldn't do the holy hermit thing and have would-be initiates come to him instead of the other way around. Not that that entirely justifies the paladins' actions on its own, but I think it bears mentioning. I always think, reading that scene, that the future Redcloak should be mightily pissed off at him for admitting that in the midst of his family's slaughter.

[B. Dandelion]

... be allocated land that has never belonged to them, making numerous people from other races homeless.

To be allocated fertile land that "never belonged to them" because the gods didn't consider them on the same level as the other sentient races when they were doing the allocating. Nobody ever said anything about displacing others from their "rightful" land.

Very likely it was the center for coordinating all goblin raids on humans.
There is absolutely no evidence to indicate this at all -- it's just a flimsy attempt at a justification for the massacre that took place there.


While he didn't get a chance to follow through immediately, it seems that he did after he became a god.
You mean after he was butchered under a pretext of a parley, then ascended to godhood to find out the real reasons for his race's existence? What he did afterward doesn't speak to what his intentions were beforehand -- we don't know what they were, and the only evidence we do have was that his motives were simply to give his people something of a fair share of land.

[Jenx]

"The road to hell is paved with good intentions."

There's a reason why this saying is still used. He's evil.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Really, the question isn't if he's evil(there's a lot of evidence he is), but whether Odin, Dragon, and the others are good. The Dark One's plans involve threatening to unleash a god-eating horror in order to get his way, but creating living, sentient beings to be brutally slaughtered for your own gain isn't better, by any stretch of the imagination.

[David Argall]

To be allocated fertile land that "never belonged to them" because the gods didn't consider them on the same level as the other sentient races when they were doing the allocating. Nobody ever said anything about displacing others from their "rightful" land.

Of course not. One does not admit that one's glorious plan of more for us involves stealing it from them.
But the initial complaint in effect says there is no available fertile land. All is, in one manner or another, in use.
Of course our initial complaint is a lie, told for the convenience of the liar. We merely don't know in what detail.
We may also add that in any real world situation, the alleged oppression simply does not work. The goblins are not poor because they are oppressed.


There is absolutely no evidence to indicate this at all -- it's just a flimsy attempt at a justification for the massacre that took place there.
The rules say that paladin who do evil fall, period. No exceptions for godly missions or anything.
The paladins who raided the village did not fall.
Therefore they did not do evil there.
We are not trying to justify the masacre. We are trying to understand it.
You may want to suggest alternate ideas, but they amount to saying a gross direct violation of D&D rules was just passed over without comment.


You mean after he was butchered under a pretext of a parley, then ascended to godhood to find out the real reasons for his race's existence? What he did afterward doesn't speak to what his intentions were beforehand -- we don't know what they were, and the only evidence we do have was that his motives were simply to give his people something of a fair share of land.
Again, we are taking the propaganda of his agent as correct here, an obviously dangerous idea.
And the fair share of somebody else's land is zero.

[Tempest Fennac]

Couldn't the gods have created more fertile land if they wanted to? I'd personally say that the Dark One is evil due to what we know about him, but the other gods honestly aren't any better (assuming that the crayon part is accurate, I can see why he wants revenge).

[B. Dandelion]

Of course not. One does not admit that one's glorious plan of more for us involves stealing it from them.
How does it constitute "stealing," David? It could just as easily be turned around and said the land was "stolen" from the NPC races because they didn't get any. We're talking about a notion of "deserving" -- and the gods dictated that. But the gods didn't take "fairness" into account when they divvied things up.

But the initial complaint in effect says there is no available fertile land.
Or possibly too close to human lands, who wouldn't be comfortable with goblins sharing their pastures.

All is, in one manner or another, in use.
"In one manner or another" covers any number of potential scenarios in which it is quite ridiculous to assume there's absolutely nothing more to go around.

Of course our initial complaint is a lie, told for the convenience of the liar. We merely don't know in what detail.
You mean the OP (and indeed, the DO is evil) or are you claiming the Dark One's story is a lie because... you assume it is a lie, even though we've been given not one shred of evidence to dispute it?


We may also add that in any real world situation, the alleged oppression simply does not work. The goblins are not poor because they are oppressed.
That's your theory. What we're told in the creation story is that they are poor because they were given the scrublands to toil in and this was done deliberately to encourage them to become raiders, thus justifying humans killing them for XP.


The rules say that paladin who do evil fall, period. No exceptions for godly missions or anything.
Do you have the relevant section of Mr. Burlew's bible that you'd like to cite, here? Because we don't have evidence that what you say is true. Maybe it's true in D&D, but not all the rules in D&D apply in OOTS.


The paladins who raided the village did not fall.
Therefore they did not do evil there.

No, the fictional Dungeon Master running the game (who is the ultimate arbiter of good and evil)* apparently declared that it was not evil. Therefore it is not, in his universe. In our universe, just about any sane and rational person would say it was evil.

It's akin to the "just following orders" excuse. It ain't evil 'cause the guy in charge says it ain't, but that's not how it works.

*the gods, in this case, since there is no literal DM


We are not trying to justify the masacre. We are trying to understand it.

David, when you say "it wasn't evil because..." you're justifying it. That's what the word means.


You may want to suggest alternate ideas, but they amount to saying a gross direct violation of D&D rules was just passed over without comment.
And gosh knows that never happens in OOTS! BY golly!


Again, we are taking the propaganda of his agent as correct here, an obviously dangerous idea.
It could be propaganda, but it's the only story we HAVE so far, and we've had nothing to contradict it. That means we should take it with a huge grain of salt, not dismiss it out of hand.


And the fair share of somebody else's land is zero.
It was never the "humans" land. It was the GOD'S lands, divvied up as they saw fit.

[Prowl]

The Dark One may be 'evil' in D&D terms, however I question whether much of what is attributed to him is really evil in character.

SoD related questions and argument:


Is it evil to want a reasonable chance to prosper?

Is it evil to want an end to your people being slaughtered as cannon fodder?

Is it evil to negotiate for peace while being prepared for war? (Arguably it is simply foolish not to do so.)


When I think of 'evil' I think of those minded for destruction for destruction's sake, power for power's sake, wealth for wealth's sake. Things like 'upholding the dignity of a sentient race' seem to me to fall into a different category than 'evil'.

I guess the question to be answered is that if the Dark One were 'good', what would he have done differently, given the circumstances from which he arose? Petition endlessly for human treatment from races with no inclination or incentive to give it? Immolate himself in futile protest?

While being evil often implies that any means to an end is acceptable, I don't see that either the initial goal of the Dark One (fair treatment for goblinoids) nor the means by which he pursued that goal while he was mortal, were done in a fashion any different from what many 'good' races would do. If merely raising an army to defend the interests of his people was 'evil', how then can one consider paladins who do the same thing (and slay innocents on the basis of a prophecy) not to also be 'evil'?

[pjackson]

According to te beginning of The Order of the Stick: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools the rules of D&D do govern the world of the OotS. Those rules do allow the DM to override them so there can be exceptions, but we do have an example of a Paladin falling for commiting a single evil act so it appears that rule does apply.

Therefore it seems that what the Paladins did at the beginning of Start of Darkness was not evil, despite appearances.
It is possible it is an inconsstancy, but it is also true that there are explanations that explain what was shown without palains commiting acts that they should have fallen for.
Note that it was not an attack on a village - there are no huts or any other buildings shown. Redcloak's family were there to support him as he was ordained as a priest of an evil god. Everyone else there was probably also either a priest or a worshipper of the Dark One.
The paladins must have used divination to find the place. They were searching for threats to Soon's gate, which Redcloak was. If they used that divination to check if there were any non-evil goblins present that would probably be enough to cover them.
Especially if they were given a prophecy that if a single goblin survived the gate would be destroyed. Though such a prophecy would not have been enough to protect them from falling for killing innocents, or risking doing so.

[Tempest Fennac]

The idea that the Paladins used Detect Evil first was discussed in the old SoD thread. I think the concensus was that, unless the Goblins all had awful Spot checks and the Paladins and their mounts did brilliantly with their Hide checks, they couldn't have possibly scanned the Goblins before they charged in without being seen. Admittedly, the lack of Smite Evils being used on the old High Priest was a controversial point due to us lacking data on his level (you'd expect the Paladins to Smite him due to how many of them he was able to kill, if he was evil).

[King of Nowhere]

There's evil and evil. While the Dark One is now evil, because he went too far in his goals, part of them are perfectly legitimate. He's not extremely evil, and he could be brought to neutrality or even goodness if he was treated fairly.

I believe he wasn't evil when he was a mortal, and he turned evil because of his rage when he discovered everything after he died. Even now, for what we know from SoD, his plan just want to make goblins a PC race, and that's not bad. Probably he would do more than this, so that's why he needs to be stopped.
Still, talking to him and giving the goblins a fair share would be the best thing to do. It seems most of the evil races are evil, but not because they're bad people per se, but because they are mistreated and hated. Treating them well would be enough to redeem many.
Anyway, what the gods did when creating the goblins is much worse than anything the Dark One ever did. It's like if you have children and want them to be champions at boxe, so you give birth to other children that your favorite children can punch around for training. And for fear that they can eventually defend themselves and hurt your favorites, you give them less food, so they grow weaker and sicker, and can't really hurt the others.
It wasn't even needed for the XP, since it is certain that you can gain XP just from study, only at a slower rate than adventuring.
The gods deserve everything bad that would happen to them.

[B. Dandelion]

According to te beginning of The Order of the Stick: Dungeon Crawlin' Fools the rules of D&D do govern the world of the OotS. Those rules do allow the DM to override them so there can be exceptions, but we do have an example of a Paladin falling for commiting a single evil act so it appears that rule does apply.
Did she fall for an evil act, or for violating the Paladin Code? If the latter, this proves nothing. If the former, all it determines is that she committed an act the Gods considered evil -- leaving us back at square one, I'm afraid.


Therefore it seems that what the Paladins did at the beginning of Start of Darkness was not evil, despite appearances.
It is possible it is an inconsstancy, but it is also true that there are explanations that explain what was shown without palains commiting acts that they should have fallen for.
Explanations people have had to scramble to invent, as opposed to accepting the evidence as was presented, and not presented in such a way as to suggest we were seeing things through an "unreliable narrator."


Note that it was not an attack on a village - there are no huts or any other buildings shown.

Right-Eye teases Redcloak about having a crush on the girl in "the hut next door." Also if it wasn't a village, why were there women, children, and old men?


Redcloak's family were there to support him as he was ordained as a priest of an evil god. Everyone else there was probably also either a priest or a worshipper of the Dark One.

"Worshiper" in the sense that the Dark One is the God of all goblins. Right-Eye, in the end, didn't have a very high opinion of him, but until then he still swears by him.


The paladins must have used divination to find the place. They were searching for threats to Soon's gate, which Redcloak was. If they used that divination to check if there were any non-evil goblins present that would probably be enough to cover them.
Especially if they were given a prophecy that if a single goblin survived the gate would be destroyed. Though such a prophecy would not have been enough to protect them from falling for killing innocents, or risking doing so.

When Redcloak speaks to the other goblins during the attempted raid on the Paladin fort, it's clear Azure City has been waging war on all goblin villages -- not just the one specific to the Redcloak. Because not a one among them hadn't lost friends and family members to the raids.

[Tempest Fennac]

One solution I had for levelling Clerics was for temples to have "training rooms" where anyone entering would fight a CR-appropriate amount of Celestial creatures with only non-lethal damage being possible in the room so that the Clerics could use spells for healing other people. In regards to Miko, I think it was possibly evil due to Shojo being defenceless (admittedly, I would have personally classed her action as good if Shojo had been conspiring due to the possibility of another rigged trial).

[Kish]

This subject's come up a lot. Let me see if I can find what I've posted in it before...



Evil doesn't mean "one-dimensional Snidely Whiplash caricature." I believe the Dark One, as a living goblin, was, if not quite as saintly as Redcloak thinks, not as monstrous as [the person who started the last thread like this was] suggesting either. (There is, for that matter, no indication that he was an evil mortal, only that, after being sacrificed and empowered by mass slaughter, he rose as an evil god.)

So why is he evil (now)? Well, first, he's willing to let everyone--goblinoids, the occasional adventurer like Roy who rejects the idea of genocide, the worshipers of his allies Tiamat, Rat, and Loki--be destroyed, down to their souls, and treat it as a win because the group that comprises his precious worshipers could be a PC race in the next world. "No humanoid race will get the shaft," Redcloak said; what about intelligent nonhumanoids? XP fodder for the new goblin adventurers, apparently.

Second, his Plan apparently takes no issue with the mass slaughter of his people by Xykon. Redcloak's Crimson Mantle has given him information before, including the whole plan; if the Dark One cared about the individual lives of goblins beyond the power they give him as his worshipers, then by now, it would have given Redcloak the message, "SMASH THE PHYLACTERY."

[Dacia Brabant]

Did she fall for an evil act, or for violating the Paladin Code? If the latter, this proves nothing. If the former, all it determines is that she committed an act the Gods considered evil -- leaving us back at square one, I'm afraid.

Wait a minute, are you saying you don't think murder of an unarmed and defenseless old man is necessarily evil? That it's only either a violation of a class' code of behavior or an act only considered evil bythe higher authorities--who you've already made clear you don't trust? And weren't you just saying to David that his calling the paladins' raid "not evil because of the rules" was a justification of their (by real-world definition) evil acts?

You might want to rethink your argument here.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Wait a minute, are you saying you don't think murder of an unarmed and defenseless old man is necessarily evil? That it's only either a violation of a class' code of behavior or an act only considered evil bythe higher authorities--who you've already made clear you don't trust? And weren't you just saying to David that his calling the paladins' raid "not evil because of the rules" was a justification of their (by real-world definition) evil acts?

You might want to rethink your argument here.The problem is, without a convoluted justification that relies on fairly unlikely circumstances, the Paladins' acts in SoD are also evil, and they didn't fall.

[Dacia Brabant]

The problem is, without a convoluted justification that relies on fairly unlikely circumstances, the Paladins' acts in SoD are also evil, and they didn't fall.

So what people have a problem with is that the paladins' evil acts went unpunished by their authority figures while they did punish Miko for hers. Okay that makes sense, but the trouble with that is it's confusing internal moral codes that are relative to a particular system, such as the Twelve Gods, for a universal standard of measurement for morality.

The fact that there were no reprecussions for the paladins means that their/the gods' relative morality, one that says it's okay to butcher defenseless sentients because of their race, is not in line with objective morality--i.e. that cold-blooded murder is evil. This does not mean that, when another paladin violates the objective morality in a way that also happens to be offensive to their relative standards, it's any better or worse for being recognized by the Powers That Be for the evil that it was while the other was not.

Simply put, societies and their authorities don't always define and judge good and evil for themselves by the same standard, let alone by natural rights that apply to everyone. When they engage in double standards and hypocrisies, it's their failing, but I won't fault them when they get it right--as they did with Miko.

[Sstoopidtallkid]

Cropped for length
So what people have a problem with is that the paladins' evil acts went unpunished by their authority figures while they did punish Miko for hers. Okay that makes sense, but the trouble with that is it's confusing internal moral codes that are relative to a particular system, such as the Twelve Gods, for a universal standard of measurement for morality.

The fact that there were no reprecussions for the paladins means that their/the gods' relative morality, one that says it's okay to butcher defenseless sentients because of their race, is not in line with objective morality--i.e. that cold-blooded murder is evil. This does not mean that, when another paladin violates the objective morality in a way that also happens to be offensive to their relative standards, it's any better or worse for being recognized by the Powers That Be for the evil that it was while the other was not.

Simply put, societies and their authorities don't always define and judge good and evil for themselves by the same standard, let alone by natural rights that apply to everyone. When they engage in double standards and hypocrisies, it's their failing, but I won't fault them when they get it right--as they did with Miko.The issue was that someone used the fact that Miko fell for committing an evil act but the paladin's did not fall for the assault on Redcloak's village as proof that the massacre wasn't evil.

[Dacia Brabant]

Cropped for lengthThe issue was that someone used the fact that Miko fell for committing an evil act but the paladin's did not fall for the assault on Redcloak's village as proof that the massacre wasn't evil.

Yes I realize that, and I know it makes me look just as hypocritical for calling one of them out but not the other--and indeed I was biased in who I chose to respond to, but not because of where my sympathies lie between humans and goblins. Suffice to say I think Remirach is better than what she wrote there. :smallsmile:

[Crinos]

But yet the human species as a whole hasn't suffered being persecuted just for being a human right? Redcloak and his Master know better then to kill humans in cold blood, seeing as that would make them no better than humans themselves. However, slavery for humans is just a byproduct of the war rather than any "hatred" for humans.

Except that the Hobgoblins were joking about how "whipping them is the best part of the job." And Redcloak was more than ready to throw innocent people into the snarl in order to get O Chuul to tell him about the other gates.

[Warren Dew]

It was never the "humans" land. It was the GOD'S lands, divvied up as they saw fit.

In Start of Darkness, it's made very clear that the humans were living on their land before the goblins were ever created. That's what made it the humans' land. Even if redistribution by the gods were seen as legitimate, the gods did not do that; they explicitly said that the humans got to keep those lands. Either way, it's the humans' lands.

The goblins coming and trying to take it away from the humans, by whatever means, does not constitute "fair distribution"; it constitutes aggression.


The Dark One may be 'evil' in D&D terms, however I question whether much of what is attributed to him is really evil in character.

SoD related questions and argument:

Specific quotes from spoiler within the following (Start of Darkness) spoiler:


Is it evil to want a reasonable chance to prosper?

That depends on the methods. Right Eye's method, establishing a village on supposedly worthless goblin lands, and making that village prosperous through his own peaceful work - incidentally proving that those lands are not worthless, after all - is not evil, and it is telling that the paladins do not raid his village. Ignoring that method, eschewing the land and assets that you already have in favor of taking more from others - that is evil, and that is what the Dark One does.


Is it evil to want an end to your people being slaughtered as cannon fodder?

Wanting it is not evil. Achieving it through peaceful means, as Right Eye does, is not evil. Destroying Right Eye's work, and resuming the Dark One's plan, sending your own people to be slaughtered as cannon fodder - that is what is evil.


Is it evil to negotiate for peace while being prepared for war? (Arguably it is simply foolish not to do so.)

If you already have peace, why do you need to negotiate? While the dirty details are omitted, the only possible reasons for negotiation are that there is already an ongoing war, or that the Dark One is threatening to start one.

So, indeed, all of that attributed to the Dark One is truly evil in character.


When I think of 'evil' I think of those minded for destruction for destruction's sake, power for power's sake, wealth for wealth's sake. Things like 'upholding the dignity of a sentient race' seem to me to fall into a different category than 'evil'.

To me, evil consists of doing bad things to other people. That can include destruction for destruction's sake, but while Xykon is an example of that, that is rare. Far more common is destruction for the sake of selfish gain, which describes the Dark One's religion perfectly, even if he does sugar coat it in meaningless verbiage like 'dignity of a sentient race'.


I guess the question to be answered is that if the Dark One were 'good', what would he have done differently, given the circumstances from which he arose? Petition endlessly for human treatment from races with no inclination or incentive to give it? Immolate himself in futile protest?

Do as Right Eye did, and teach his people to use their own resources to prosper. You might see that as "wealth for wealth's sake", but it hurts no one, and that is why it is good rather than evil.

Indeed, Right Eye had the potential to become the true savior of the goblin race, and killing him may be the most evil act of the Dark One's present high priest, Redcloak. The Dark One is evil not only because he advocates needless aggression, but also because he is fundamentally a traitor to the interests of his own people.

Edit:


The problem is, without a convoluted justification that relies on fairly unlikely circumstances, the Paladins' acts in SoD are also evil, and they didn't fall.

It's not convoluted at all. All it requires is that one presume that people gathered peacefully around a high priest for a ceremony are his followers.

[King of Nowhere]

Except that the Hobgoblins were joking about how "whipping them is the best part of the job." And Redcloak was more than ready to throw innocent people into the snarl in order to get O-Chul to tell him about the other gates.
Redcloak was bluffing in throwing the slaves in the rift, otherwise he would have done that. Now, it's true that the hobbos were happy of abusing of humans, but think of the opposite: a human army conquered a hobbo village. How many of the humans wouldn't mind to throw hobbosin a rift? They won't enslave them because they'll kill them all on the spot.
So, everything the hobbos did to humans, the humans did the same to the hobbos. Why are the humans that are right, and the hobbos evil, and not vice versa?


Originally posted by Warren Dew
...

You consider Right Eye's way to be the right way, and I generally agree with you, but it would never have worked.
Sooner or later, a gang of adventurers would have come by happenstance and slaughter everybody before asking questions. It didn't happened for 17 years, maybe they could have lived many other years peacefully, but sooner or later it would have happened.
Also, Right Eye settled in a place far from humans. How many places are there like that? Consider a goblin village near a human village. Probably the human village would call adventurers to wipe out the goblins "before they start threatening them", and even if it don't happen, the first time winter is harsher than normal a goblin would steal a couple of hens from a human to feed his family, and the humans would take that for a raid and destroy the whole goblin village. Plus any goblin village in a (40+2d20) mile radius, "just to be sure".
No, I do not believe that Right Eye attemp was going to be succesful in the long run.

[SteveMB]

Redcloak was bluffing in throwing the slaves in the rift, otherwise he would have done that.

He decided not to throw them in when it became clear that it wouldn't do any good. That simply means that he is not a sadist who harms people for no reason other than personal amusement (a difference between him and Xykon). He was still willing to threaten it, and to all indications willing to do it, if he thought it would achieve his aims.

[Tempest Fennac]

In regards to where RE's village was, the fact that a pretty much perminant circus with human audiance members suggests that there was a human settlement nearby. Sadly, we don't know anything about the settlement, other then the fact that is was possibly richer then RE's village if RC had seen it while going to see RE.

[hamishspence]

the claim made in SoD is that the gods created the (new) world, gave their first creations wonderful land, then created new races for their followers to kill, and situated them in terrible land to ensure they would not get too powerful. Their second intelligent creations are, understandably miffed.

Arguments about property rights are all well and good, but do not obsure that the gods have done evil.

Either: the humanoid races have potential for good, in which case, being made fair game for everyone eklse to kill is unfair. Or:

The humanoid races, despite sometimes being affable or cautious about hostility, are evil to the core, in which case, is an abuse of the elves, goblins, dwarfs, to put such vicious beings so close, and create a situation where they will attack the good races.

Unless, the whole Gods Create Humanoids for XP story is a lie. So why are they stuck with all the worst lands?

[arkwei]

I want to refute two points.

1. The Dark One (TDO) has the good of his people in mind.

His plan is to unleash the Snarl. That would mean the destruction of the world. Including all of the goblin race, up to and including all their souls.

Consider this scenario: aliens invade the Earth. Humans are losing. Then there's this guy, claiming that he will save us for the "dignity" of human race. He demands a percentage of people be sacrificed to unleash some power.

If he demands 10% of all human race to be sacrificed, I think quite some people will volunteer, because that means their wife/husband, son/daughter, other family members, friends, and other loved ones will be safe. It's worth it.

What if he asks for 20%? 30%? 70%? 90%?

No, he asks for more than that. He wants all humans to be sacrificed, so that, in the next big bang, some other human race will rise and prosper, worshiping him as god.

But there's this little fact: all my loved ones, all your loved ones, and all his/her loved ones, will be dead. Why would I care about some other human race, when all members of my own race is dead?

I think you see the parallel here.


2. Right-Eye (RE) won't be able to keep the peace of his village.

As Tempest Fennac mentioned earlier, there is a human circus very nearby. They seems to be on good terms. Also, it suggest that many humans live close to RE's village. Presumably, the humans know the location of the goblin village. And RE has lived there for quite long time, and the humans haven't attacked.

[Tempest Fennac]

I know what you mean about the Snarl being drastic, but that's only the back-up plan for the Dark One. It is still worrying that he'd use it like that if the other gods can't be blackmailed, though.

[BRC]

I want to refute two points.

1. The Dark One (TDO) has the good of his people in mind.

His plan is to unleash the Snarl. That would mean the destruction of the world. Including all of the goblin race, up to and including all their souls.

Consider this scenario: aliens invade the Earth. Humans are losing. Then there's this guy, claiming that he will save us for the "dignity" of human race. He demands a percentage of people be sacrificed to unleash some power.

If he demands 10% of all human race to be sacrificed, I think quite some people will volunteer, because that means their wife/husband, son/daughter, other family members, friends, and other loved ones will be safe. It's worth it.

What if he asks for 20%? 30%? 70%? 90%?

No, he asks for more than that. He wants all humans to be sacrificed, so that, in the next big bang, some other human race will rise and prosper, worshiping him as god.

But there's this little fact: all my loved ones, all your loved ones, and all his/her loved ones, will be dead. Why would I care about some other human race, when all members of my own race is dead?

I think you see the parallel here.


2. Right-Eye (RE) won't be able to keep the peace of his village.

As Tempest Fennac mentioned earlier, there is a human circus very nearby. They seems to be on good terms. Also, it suggest that many humans live close to RE's village. Presumably, the humans know the location of the goblin village. And RE has lived there for quite long time, and the humans haven't attacked.

Releasing the Snarl isn't the plan. The Plan is to use the Snarl to force the other gods to cooperate in making things alittle more equal for the goblinoids. If the world is destroyed in the process, they have a backup plan, but that is far from their goal. His goal is to put Goblins on an equal footing with humans and other races.

[ericgrau]

Evil with justification is still evil. And frankly, I've never seen a single real world example of evil without justification.

[CasESenSITItiVE]

I think right eye's assessment of the Dark One was most accurate

I don't think he was evil when he amassed an army to take equal shares, and i don't think he was quite evil when he first concocted his gate plan (though many can argue this, and will have a point. at the very least he was headed down a slippery slope).

But at this point, i think the Dark One is starting to lose track of his original goal. i think the Dark One's goal has started to slip away from "help the goblin people" towards "get revenge". It's his spite that settles it for me

[Lissou]

arkwei> You know, that's not unusual to fight for rights to the death, even though you won't ever get these rights and a new "race" (well, the same race, but new individuals) will get them. It's happened a lot throughout history. A lot of the rights women have in the world, or black people in some regions, or pretty much any minority who had to fight for rights, had to go through sacrifices, and for decades or centuries, the situation didn't get better.

RC just wants to speed up the process, but in its essence, it's the same thing. Yes, people in real life are usually related to those who sacrificed themselves by blood, but only in the way that all human beings are related. Don't forget DNA tests can't be conclusive if peopel aren't directly related (parent to child). Even brothers and sisters can't always be proven without the missing link (the parent or parents in common).

So, I don't think it's anything unusual. It's extremist, it's evil, but some peopel will argue it's a necessary evil.

[arkwei]

arkwei> You know, that's not unusual to fight for rights to the death, even though you won't ever get these rights and a new "race" (well, the same race, but new individuals) will get them. It's happened a lot throughout history. A lot of the rights women have in the world, or black people in some regions, or pretty much any minority who had to fight for rights, had to go through sacrifices, and for decades or centuries, the situation didn't get better.

RC just wants to speed up the process, but in its essence, it's the same thing. Yes, people in real life are usually related to those who sacrificed themselves by blood, but only in the way that all human beings are related. Don't forget DNA tests can't be conclusive if peopel aren't directly related (parent to child). Even brothers and sisters can't always be proven without the missing link (the parent or parents in common).

So, I don't think it's anything unusual. It's extremist, it's evil, but some peopel will argue it's a necessary evil.


Please note that I acknowledged the "10% sacrifice" plan as viable in my original post. I never said such sacrifice was unworthy. I fully appreciate the sacrifice made by racial/religious minorities, and women.

However, we are not getting anything like that here. Please see the following progression:

Sacrificing self to save family;
Sacrificing self to save friends;
Sacrificing self to save some innocent person (infant, children);
Sacrificing self to save most of human population;
Sacrificing self to save some stranger;
Sacrificing self to save part of human population;
Sacrificing self to save a tiny bit of human population;
Sacrificing self to save someone I dislike/hate;
Sacrificing self to save someone evil and I hate;
Sacrificing myself and everyone I know and love to give somewhat of a better chance to some random race that doesn't exist yet and may or may not be another human race. While we still have a good chance of living peacefully/normally.

You see, there is no potential gain for the worshiper of this particular deity. People make sacrifices when they know some particular group of people will benefit from it, and they want them to benefit. In this case, the benefiting party is too faraway for any of those sacrificed to care.

A more real life example will be like this: (I'm not trying to offend, if you are, I'm very sorry)

The Dark One (TDO) demands all Americans to be sacrificed, so that Chinese people will have a better lot in life. He goes, "You are all humans! Surely you will happily sacrifice yourself for the betterment of your fellow brethren? Even though they are living pretty good lives, they can still benefit from it! And you Americans must give up your perfectly good lives and souls to do it!"

Maybe some people will be cool with it, but I'm fairly certain most people will have problems.

And this is not even the "next human race" yet! Americans generally don't want to sacrifice for Chinese people, why would TDO's worshiper care about the next goblin race?

And this is what I meant that TDO doesn't have the best of his worshiper in mind.

[Linkavitch]

Adolf Hitler did what he did for the good of the fatherland. I'm just saying.

Well, technically, he believed he was doing good. Most historians on the subject think he was mildly insane.

[arkwei]

Releasing the Snarl isn't the plan. The Plan is to use the Snarl to force the other gods to cooperate in making things alittle more equal for the goblinoids. If the world is destroyed in the process, they have a backup plan, but that is far from their goal. His goal is to put Goblins on an equal footing with humans and other races.

You see, no one knows for sure what will happen when the snarl is under control by Redcloak (RC). It might be tamed. Or, it might be destructive. Considering that RC and Xykon will be killed in the controlling ritual, according to SoD, I think it has a good chance of being destructive. Also, TDO might be lying to RC. He's an evil god, too, so that's not too far-fetched.

Also, it took three pantheons to seal Snarl in the world. Yet TDO says he can control it all by himself, and force more than twenty deities do his bidding.

[Kish]

RC and Xykon will be killed in the controlling ritual, according to SoD,
:smallconfused: SoD doesn't say that.

[Warren Dew]

Unless, the whole Gods Create Humanoids for XP story is a lie. So why are they stuck with all the worst lands?

That they are the "worst lands" could be a lie too.

Start of DarknessThe success of Right Eye's village suggests those lands aren't so bad after all.

[arkwei]

:smallconfused: SoD doesn't say that.

Huh. So my memory failed me, and my SoD is in another country so I can't check. But wasn't there a scribble picture of RC and Xykon being killed by the Snarl in there?

[B. Dandelion]

Wait a minute, are you saying you don't think murder of an unarmed and defenseless old man is necessarily evil?

Yes, yes, that's exactly what I was saying. In fact, I personally murder old defenseless people all the time. It's a great stress reliever. Really, you should try it sometime.


You might want to rethink your argument here.
You might want to try rereading my POST before you decide to get snarky with me, when what I said was:

Did she fall for an evil act, or for violating the Paladin Code?
I clearly labeled the act as evil. The sticking point here is that we've seen paladins do things that are also evil, and haven't fallen. So the Gods' barometer of good-versus-evil is skewed. So them labeling this particular act evil only proves to me that they don't always screw it up.

In Start of Darkness, it's made very clear that the humans were living on their land before the goblins were ever created. That's what made it the humans' land. Even if redistribution by the gods were seen as legitimate, the gods did not do that; they explicitly said that the humans got to keep those lands. Either way, it's the humans' lands.

The goblins coming and trying to take it away from the humans, by whatever means, does not constitute "fair distribution"; it constitutes aggression.
Okay, so your position on the matter is that the gods gave the humans the land, then created the goblins, but the land should be now and forever the sole territory of the humans no matter how the goblins feel about it, and they have no right whatsoever to any claim to it, nor should they be allowed in any way to take steps to get any part of that land.

And it's fair because the gods say it's fair.

Do I have that about right?

[Kish]

Huh. So my memory failed me, and my SoD is in another country so I can't check. But wasn't there a scribble picture of RC and Xykon being killed by the Snarl in there?
Yes, in the crayons for speculation, Redcloak mentions that if the Snarl is released as a result of the Plan they'll all be worse than dead. But that won't happen if the primary Plan goes according to, well, plan.

[Kranden]

Notice the sharp teeth? That's a big giveaway.

Goblins love killing things especially humans. I bet those Hobgoblins had the time of their life when they crushed that puny human city!

[Impikmin]

To even discuss this, you need to establish what we're going to think like here. To paladins, good is right, and evil is wrong. To Redcloak, good is the paladins, and evil are those who oppose them. Do you think evils and deeds are right and wrong or just flavors of icecream?

Anyway, if I'm in the goblins position, I would rather have the world destroyed and know the future would be better (btw if you know the snarl is going to kill everything kill yourself first so you'll be moderately safe in the afterlife) so I think the Dark One is good in moral terms. However from everyone elses position it's like wtf we don't want the world destoryed? Who's to say all the gods are killed and everything ceases to exist? In this setting where no one thinks they will really die when they die, REAL death is a scary thought.

I have to side with the goblins, but other people have a good point too.

[Lokasenna]

Anyway, if I'm in the goblins position, I would rather have the world destroyed and know the future would be better (btw if you know the snarl is going to kill everything kill yourself first so you'll be moderately safe in the afterlife) so I think the Dark One is good in moral terms.

Paraphrasing what Redcloak said to O-chul, if the Snarl destroys the world there will be no afterlife.

[Lord Seth]

I have to wonder something: Why is Xykon still going along with this? If the plan works as planned, giving the Dark One control of the Snarl, and this results in the Goblins getting a fair share, how does that let Xykon take over the world?

In fact, even if the Dark One uses it to give goblins complete control of the world, why would Xykon believe that he'd get any kind of special power?

I know he got lied to by Redcloak and Right-Eye can't remember the specifics, wasn't it that they'd be the ones to control the Snarl, not the Dark One?), but he later unraveled all the other lies he got told, so I don't know why he'd still be blindly following that lie.

[Warren Dew]

Okay, so your position on the matter is that the gods gave the humans the land, then created the goblins, but the land should be now and forever the sole territory of the humans no matter how the goblins feel about it, and they have no right whatsoever to any claim to it, nor should they be allowed in any way to take steps to get any part of that land.

And it's fair because the gods say it's fair.

Do I have that about right?

Not quite.

First, you are neglecting peaceable exchange. Ownership of the land can change through peaceable mutual agreement; for example, individual goblins could buy it from willing individual human sellers, and that can be legitimate if not tainted by threat of force. Rulership of the land can also change through peaceable means as well. For example, goblins might be able to marry into a ruling human family.

Second, I didn't say anything about the gods' being "fair". It's rarely possible to find a solution that is fair to everyone in any complex situation, as this one is.

[hanzo66]

I believe that The Dark One counts as an Evil God, but it seems that in the world of The Order of the Stick, Evil seems to at the least follow in "Whomever the Original Gods don't like". Although it's quite likely that Redcloak's backstory may not be the most accurate, it does seem that the Dark One officially became Lawful Evil upon realizing that to the Gods the "Evil" races (particularly the Goblins) were created merely as XP Fodder, which probably drove him to believe that all non-monster races are hypocrites who can commit the same atrocities to his race and still be "Heroes".


It does seem that Goblins are exempt from any sort of karma against the killer, no matter if they're youngsters ("to-be murderers") or elderly ("experienced killer who has spent his life raping the dog"). This seems to be partly an attempt at pointing out the Moral Dissonance and partly to show that even "Good" Gods aren't all that great.

[B. Dandelion]

I have to wonder something: Why is Xykon still going along with this? If the plan works as planned, giving the Dark One control of the Snarl, and this results in the Goblins getting a fair share, how does that let Xykon take over the world?

In fact, even if the Dark One uses it to give goblins complete control of the world, why would Xykon believe that he'd get any kind of special power?

I know he got lied to by Redcloak and Right-Eye can't remember the specifics, wasn't it that they'd be the ones to control the Snarl, not the Dark One?), but he later unraveled all the other lies he got told, so I don't know why he'd still be blindly following that lie.

When RC and RE were talking about the Snarl, and how the Gates could be controlled, Xykon immediately leapt to the conclusion that you could use the Gates to actually control the Snarl like a pet monster on a leash. So he figured he could blackmail nations into giving him whatever he wanted. And since his misconception made him more likely to go along with the plan, Redcloak never bothered to correct his mistake or tell him that the only one who'd really have any control would be the Dark One -- and that no one at all can actually control the Snarl, all they can do is open rifts.
Not quite.

First, you are neglecting peaceable exchange. Ownership of the land can change through peaceable mutual agreement; for example, individual goblins could buy it from willing individual human sellers, and that can be legitimate if not tainted by threat of force.

Buy with what money? What did the goblins have to offer? The only thing I can think of is possibly selling themselves into slavery or serfdom.


Rulership of the land can also change through peaceable means as well. For example, goblins might be able to marry into a ruling human family.
What possible benefit would the human family get out of this?


Second, I didn't say anything about the gods' being "fair". It's rarely possible to find a solution that is fair to everyone in any complex situation, as this one is.
To be sure, it's very difficult to always be exactly "fair." But the gods deliberately and intentionally went out of their way to make things as difficult as they possibly could for the goblins, because they didn't want them to prosper, they only wanted them to exist so they could be slaughtered. That's going beyond it being difficult to find an equitable solution, this is a situation where a fair solution was completely undesirable.

[Dacia Brabant]

Yes, yes, that's exactly what I was saying. In fact, I personally murder old defenseless people all the time. It's a great stress reliever. Really, you should try it sometime.


You might want to try rereading my POST before you decide to get snarky with me, when what I said was:

I clearly labeled the act as evil. The sticking point here is that we've seen paladins do things that are also evil, and haven't fallen. So the Gods' barometer of good-versus-evil is skewed. So them labeling this particular act evil only proves to me that they don't always screw it up.


It was the fact that you included this statement, "If the former, all it determines is that she committed an act the Gods considered evil -- leaving us back at square one, I'm afraid," that led me to ask the questions that I did.

Given your negative attitude toward the human gods in the OOTS universe, on display in this very post, it seemed like a legitimate question, but now I see your emphasis on that word "gods" there wasn't intended to be derogatory toward them and their skewed moral judgment, just to say that she was punished because they recognized she had done something evil.

Which, incidentally, I later said I agreed with.

[Warren Dew]

Buy with what money? What did the goblins have to offer? The only thing I can think of is possibly selling themselves into slavery or serfdom.

In his village, Right Eye is supporting a family with three children, can evidently afford to take them to the circus frequently, and is making enough money to think about setting up a college fund for them before "the plan" messes things up again for him. It looks like a hard working, peaceful goblin can do reasonably well. Some might decide to buy land for their kids rather than a college education.

Regarding marrying into a human ruling family,


What possible benefit would the human family get out of this?

Having their heir apparent or single family head get to marry the one he loves. Not all royal marriages are political alliances.

[B. Dandelion]

It was the fact that you included this statement, "If the former, all it determines is that she committed an act the Gods considered evil -- leaving us back at square one, I'm afraid," that led me to ask the questions that I did.

Given your negative attitude toward the human gods in the OOTS universe, on display in this very post, it seemed like a legitimate question, but now I see your emphasis on that word "gods" there wasn't intended to be derogatory toward them and their skewed moral judgment, just to say that she was punished because they recognized she had done something evil.

Which, incidentally, I later said I agreed with.
So no hard feelings then?

In his village, Right Eye is supporting a family with three children, can evidently afford to take them to the circus frequently, and is making enough money to think about setting up a college fund for them before "the plan" messes things up again for him. It looks like a hard working, peaceful goblin can do reasonably well. Some might decide to buy land for their kids rather than a college education.
Would a human sell land to a goblin?

They were getting by on levels humans would consider poverty. They weren't unhappy with this arrangement, but I don't know that it proves they could get along all that well. I'm reminded of the fellow in OtOotPCS who wanted to kill orcs simply because they were "listed as evil." Goblins were made specifically to be cannon fodder. If they mostly stayed away from humans and elves, saving the tolerant ones like the folks at the circus, they could perhaps get by on subsistence levels, but this talk about college may have just been a pipe dream. Remember, in the crayon story it's specifically noted that humans and elves hunt down goblins once they become too populated or settled in. Otherwise they might start to get "ideas."


Regarding marrying into a human ruling family,
Having their heir apparent or single family head get to marry the one he loves. Not all royal marriages are political alliances.
No but in this kind of setting many are, and there would be a lot of objections to this kind of thing. It might be against the law. It would probably cause an uproar among the nobility. This is Romeo and Juliet material, not a probable scenario under the current conditions.

[Elfey]

I think too many people forget the Gods seem to be short sighted and a bit Jerkish. They created Goblins as XP fodder and always chaotic evil. So you can always kill them and get away with it as the Gods define Good and Evil.

Now we're shown the village. Most Goblins were just trying to get by. The Gods defined them all as worry free kills to Clerics could fight them. This includes women and children. The pallies seem to be normal hack and slash players who view the village as good source of XP, like the Gods intended .

It strikes me as basically the Gods are presented as lazy authors/world creators who didn't think the whole thing through, especially creating always chaotic evil races, and make them, you know all evil to a fault. If I was a Goblin in this word, I'd be pissed too.

SoD mentions them seeking the Village for Red Cloak's wearer. They were far far from home and seemed to be using magic to find the wearer. Thus any village with Red Cloak in it would have only so long until Pallies would come. Otherwise you might be able to hide until the eventual adventures stumble on them.

Oh and a quick note, we've seen evidence of some pretty huge wars in the backstory that have killed millions. I think Right Eye's village wasn't in lands traditionally connected to goblins, but another humanoid which god a better hot when created.

Is the Dark One Evil? Yes. But the Good Gods are Jerks in how they created Goblins in the first place. This is going to drive any Goblin Deity to be pissed. This combined with the way the rules were set up when the world was written means he's always chaotic evil because the other Gods wrote him that way.

Now the bigger question is are they right? Not good, evil, but right?

I personally believe Goblins need a better shot. The Dark One was their big chance to do it in mortal hands and establish a kingdom. The Gods themselves set them up to be always on the edge of starving, chaotic evil whose entire purpose is to be cannon fodder. We've seen Goblins that clearly want to establish a nation, and many would be peaceful about it.

But as long as they are established as the way to get low level xp by the Gods, not much will change. Any village will fall, and the bigger and more powerful it is the bigger the target for low levels. Because good characters can always claim it's justified by the always chaotic evil the Gods gave them.

I think the ultimate ending of OotS will give them a better shot to succeed or fail on their own. But not anyway Red Cloak or the Dark One plans. Ultimately the Gods need change the rules for this to happen.

[Lissou]

arkwei,

having the world destroyed by the Snarl and re-constructed isn't the plan itself, though. It's the worst-case scenario, and Redcloak said he's willing to take the risk because he thinks even then, at least the next world will be better off than this one. But his plan is to get the Snarl as a weapon to blackmail the other Gods, letting the Dark One make his humanoids equals to the other races.
At first, it really was "get control of Lirian gate, blackmail Gods". Could be done within a few years. it nearly was, too. Redcloak and his family would have directly benefited from it, and had Xykon not be the arcane caster, not so many people would have died.

So we're in something else, there. It's more of a "I went too far, I can't stop now" mentality, and unfortunately it's a very common feeling in people. Instead of trying to limit their losses, they think if they keep at it, someday they'll get a reward, as thin as it is, and they'll be able to think they accomplished something, and there was a reason for everyone who died to die.

[David Argall]

Would a human sell land to a goblin?

Certainly. They might well demand extremely high prices, and try other swindles. But humans are assumed to vary widely, which means those willing to sell to goblins exist.


Remember, in the crayon story it's specifically noted that humans and elves hunt down goblins once they become too populated or settled in. Otherwise they might start to get "ideas."

The sentence about ideas doesn't seem to be present.

However, all of this is humanoid propaganda, just the sorts of myths one dreams up to blame somebody else for one's own faults.

The basic point to recall is that the strip consistently shows the goblins/etc as evil, acting so and declaring themselves so. A reading of SoD that tries to reverse that is wrong.

[BRC]

Are the Dark One and his clerics evil, probably. Are they justified, Probably. On one hand they have a right to be pissed, they were literally created and given sentient intelligence SIMPLY TO BE KILLED. You can't exactly blame them for wanting to change their lot in life. On the other hand, The Plan isn't exactly a good idea either. First of all because there is a chance that the Snarl will unmake creation, and secondly, do you really think that the Dark One will get an unstoppable god killing superweapon, bully the other gods into evening the scales a little, and then just ignore it completely. Even if the dark one doesn't use the Snarl, the other gods will be afraid of him, which will likely fail influence things. Imagine this, Goblins invade some northern humans. Invasions happen, this one isn't for any better or worse a reason than most of them. It's just some standard issue warfare of the type that might erupt between two human kingdoms just as easily as between some humans and some goblins. Except that during this conflict The Northern gods, afraid of pissing off the Dark One, withold power from their clerics, leading to the goblin victory. Eventually the goblins could conquer the world simply because the other gods would be afraid to oppose them.

Now, you can't completally blame the goblins. People will say "Why don't they negotiate with the other races rather than fighting them/trying to unleash the snarl". Well, they Tried that already. Back when he was alive, the Dark One attempted peaceful, non violent methods for helping the goblins. In response, the humans had him assassinated during the negotiations. So we can't really throw around the word "Evil" as much as we would like.

[B. Dandelion]

Certainly. They might well demand extremely high prices, and try other swindles. But humans are assumed to vary widely, which means those willing to sell to goblins exist.
"Yes, they would," is not an answer, it's your guess. Where are the humans who have sold land to goblins? Or have shown willingness to sell to goblins? Cite examples, please. To a degree I think it's probably true that there would be some folk somewhere who would hand land over, but what percentage? If it's infinitesimally small, that's just about as bad as no humans being willing whatsoever.

The sentence about ideas doesn't seem to be present.
I was paraphrasing. The exact line goes like this:
For their part, the humans, elves, and dwarves became even more brutal in their persecution of the goblins. The goblins' massacre of the humans entered history as a warning: Do not allow the humanoids to become too organized or settled.
Obvious Inference being: otherwise they'll start "getting ideas" again, e.g. armies, massacres, etc.

However, all of this is humanoid propaganda, just the sorts of myths one dreams up to blame somebody else for one's own faults.
It's your theory that the story is propaganda, and you have yet to provide textual support for it besides the constant refrain of "but they're evil!" Yeah, Redcloak is evil. It doesn't follow that his story is necessarily a lie.


The basic point to recall is that the strip consistently shows the goblins/etc as evil, acting so and declaring themselves so. A reading of SoD that tries to reverse that is wrong.

"Anyone who tries to interpret SoD in a way that conflicts with my personal opinions is doing it wrong!"

[SmartAlec]

"Yes, they would," is not an answer, it's your guess. Where are the humans who have sold land to goblins?

There are no humans that we've seen who've stated they'd be willing to sell land to Goblins, but we have seen a human apparently willing to live in happiness with an Orc. Namely, Therkla's father.

So the existence of humans quite willing to enjoy the company of the 'Always Chaotic Evil' races is a reality in the world of OOTS. From there, it's a short leap of educated guesswork to the existence of humans willing to engage in trade.

[B. Dandelion]

I don't think we need spoiler tags for this one.


There are no humans that we've seen who've stated they'd be willing to sell land to Goblins, but we have seen a human apparently willing to live in happiness with an Orc. Namely, Therkla's father.

So the existence of humans quite willing to enjoy the company of the 'Always Chaotic Evil' races is a reality in the world of OOTS. From there, it's a short leap of educated guesswork to the existence of humans willing to engage in trade.
Well, that is true, I had forgotten about that. Still, it fails to really convince me because the whole story of Therkla's parentage comes across as a joke playing on people's expectations of "where do half-orcs come from?" rather than a statement on the general level of acceptance most humans, elves, or dwarves have for the "evil" races.

The fact that Hinjo and the others were willing to set up trade negotiations with the Orc Island inhabitants is another one you might have brought up, but there's a problem with that one too: namely, he's desperate by this point and willing to work with almost anyone.

[Charles Phipps]

I have my own personal theory that I'd love for readers to evacuate that I will explain here.

The Order of the Stick World is itself Genre Savy

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreSavvy

The gods created the Goblins to be Always Chaotic Evil and that's what they're meant to be. They're meant to be a race of irredeemable monsters that people should feel good about wiping off the face of the planet because they're THAT bad. Thor killing Giants isn't something you're supposed to feel bad about because all giants are bad (well, except for the one he has kids with...ANYYWAY)

The problem is that as soon as the people in the OOTS world started to look around and recognize the genre conventions, they can exercise their free will and move beyond them. Hence, Right Eyes family NOT being Lawful Evil monsters is actually an abberation as the Divine Order goes. Yet, it happens just like Evil Elves (and not Dark Elves). Heck, one shot or not, the implications are that the Drow are no longer evil in the OOTS world. However, they are considered to be Evil because THEY WERE DESIGNED TO BE.

Thus, what was originally a fairly good idea has morphed into something horrible for both sides. The Dark One is a being railing against an utterly unjust and monstrous system for his people while suffering from the fact his race is still, for the most part, meant to be unjust and monstrous.

This would make no sense in a "normal" world but OOTS is a world of storytelling. It's like Jarret in Labyrinth (The Goblin King as played by David Bowie). He more or less clues in the protagionist towards the end, which she doesn't get, that the only reason he's kidnapped her child is because she demanded that he did and he's playing the role of the villain. She, however, follows the story to the letter.

FYI- My ultimate hope is Xykon will slay the Dark One.

[Warren Dew]

Would a human sell land to a goblin?

They sell them circus tickets. They sell them Julio Scoundrél action figures. I don't see why they wouldn't sell them land.

Heck, if they're selling their land, they're likely moving away anyway. Even for humans who normally wouldn't deal with goblins, this is one transaction where they don't have to deal with the buyers again. I'd think they'd take the highest bid, and worry about the color of the money rather than the color of the buyer.


They were getting by on levels humans would consider poverty. They weren't unhappy with this arrangement, but I don't know that it proves they could get along all that well.

Right Eye was paying 4 silver to get his family in to see the monster in the dark. I don't know what prices are like in 3.5th edition, but back before the "A" was prepended to "D&D", people in poverty didn't even have copper pieces to throw around on casual entertainment. I don't think Right Eye was rich, but he didn't strike me as notably poorer than the average human villager in his situation.


I'm reminded of the fellow in OtOotPCS who wanted to kill orcs simply because they were "listed as evil." Goblins were made specifically to be cannon fodder. If they mostly stayed away from humans and elves, saving the tolerant ones like the folks at the circus, they could perhaps get by on subsistence levels, but this talk about college may have just been a pipe dream. Remember, in the crayon story it's specifically noted that humans and elves hunt down goblins once they become too populated or settled in. Otherwise they might start to get "ideas."

I can't find this last quote. Are you perhaps referring to the part of Redcloak's narration where he says, "The goblins' massacre of the humans entered history as a warning: Do not allow the humanoids to become too organized or too settled. PCs spent centuries 'clearing them out' of various adventure scenarios."

That's likely a biased viewpoint; Redcloak's narration here is admitted to be less than the whole truth, designed primarily to get a human to join them as an ally. I'd suggest that while massacres of humans by the Dark One's former armies likely did result in centuries of backlash against the goblins, humans - especially the NPCs making up the bulk of the population, rather than the PC adventurers - likely were usually smart enough to focus on those that posed a threat.

I'd cite the circus folks as an example. They seem to be perfectly tolerant when Right Eye's family are acting like normal customers, but they are more than happy to marshal deadly force against Redcloak and his nephew when the latter steal the monster in the darkness from the circus. I'd suggest that while Redcloak might see their dogged pursuit as evidence of prejudice against goblins, it's more realistically seen as a simple objection to being stolen from. I'd also suggest that a similar view applies to the overall human goblin conflict as well.

I suspect that very few goblins have tried the peaceful approach. My bet is that most are beguiled by stories of the Dark One's original armies, "the greatest military force that the northern continent had ever seen". Even after Right Eye got fed up with the Dark One's "plan", it took unexpected advice from Eugene, a human, to give him the idea of settling down peacefully.

Regarding marrying into royal families:


No but in this kind of setting many are, and there would be a lot of objections to this kind of thing. It might be against the law. It would probably cause an uproar among the nobility. This is Romeo and Juliet material, not a probable scenario under the current conditions.

There are lots of kingdoms. There's lots of time. Sure, it might take a goblin Cinderella, but it's bound to happen eventually. It can't be worse than getting cleared out of adventure scenarios for centuries because of following the Dark One.

[arkwei]

arkwei,

having the world destroyed by the Snarl and re-constructed isn't the plan itself, though. It's the worst-case scenario, and Redcloak said he's willing to take the risk because he thinks even then, at least the next world will be better off than this one. But his plan is to get the Snarl as a weapon to blackmail the other Gods, letting the Dark One make his humanoids equals to the other races.
At first, it really was "get control of Lirian gate, blackmail Gods". Could be done within a few years. it nearly was, too. Redcloak and his family would have directly benefited from it, and had Xykon not be the arcane caster, not so many people would have died.

So we're in something else, there. It's more of a "I went too far, I can't stop now" mentality, and unfortunately it's a very common feeling in people. Instead of trying to limit their losses, they think if they keep at it, someday they'll get a reward, as thin as it is, and they'll be able to think they accomplished something, and there was a reason for everyone who died to die.

And exactly how is "I went too far, I can't stop now" bearing the good of the entire goblin race?

Sorry if that sounded harsh, but I think you missed my point a little. My point was and only was that TDO doesn't care much for his followers/goblins.

The thing is, no one knows what are the chances for the worst-case scenario.

Is it 10%? 40%? 90%?

And remember, TDO (the dark one) is only one of twenty something gods. He wants to blackmail all 20+ other gods to do his bidding. And he didn't know a lot of secrets of the creation of the world, and is still likely to be left out on certain details (evil gods don't tell you the whole truth, period).

Still, the original evil gods were not actively trying to use their clerics to do what TDO is doing. That implies danger, complicity, or both. Don't you think, when the odds are vastly against TDO, that worse case scenario becomes much more likely?

And yet he did not put a halt to the Plan.

[B. Dandelion]

Warren:
They sell them circus tickets. They sell them Julio Scoundrél action figures. I don't see why they wouldn't sell them land.
Because it's a finite resource of immense value. And as a general rule, people who have better weapons and better numbers don't either give or sell fertile land to peoples they consider inferior savages. And even when they do, they often renege on those agreements. They send the barbarians to the hinterlands, if they don't just wipe them off the map entirely.


Heck, if they're selling their land, they're likely moving away anyway. Even for humans who normally wouldn't deal with goblins, this is one transaction where they don't have to deal with the buyers again. I'd think they'd take the highest bid, and worry about the color of the money rather than the color of the buyer.
That would be the logical thing to do. But when racism... speciesism... whateverism... is rampant, logic gives way to prejudice. Even if the individual in the area was willing, they'd have a lot of pressure put on them by their peers. We don't want their kind in our backyard! Look at the uproar that happened over desegregation here in the states. And there are those who'll say they would never ever sell or buy a house from a Jewish person.


Right Eye was paying 4 silver to get his family in to see the monster in the dark. I don't know what prices are like in 3.5th edition, but back before the "A" was prepended to "D&D", people in poverty didn't even have copper pieces to throw around on casual entertainment. I don't think Right Eye was rich, but he didn't strike me as notably poorer than the average human villager in his situation.
I'll have to take your word on that. Redcloak said they had very little compared to the humans, and the huts looked very rudimentary.


I can't find this last quote. Are you perhaps referring to the part of Redcloak's narration where he says, "The goblins' massacre of the humans entered history as a warning: Do not allow the humanoids to become too organized or too settled. PCs spent centuries 'clearing them out' of various adventure scenarios."
Yeah, that was the one I was referring to (I had to point it out to David, too).


That's likely a biased viewpoint; Redcloak's narration here is admitted to be less than the whole truth, designed primarily to get a human to join them as an ally. I'd suggest that while massacres of humans by the Dark One's former armies likely did result in centuries of backlash against the goblins, humans - especially the NPCs making up the bulk of the population, rather than the PC adventurers - likely were usually smart enough to focus on those that posed a threat.
Except that in War and XPs the Giant says outright that Azure City had waged war on goblin settlements for decades. Not "war camps," settlements. And although we should indeed take Redcloak's narration with a grain of salt (I personally believe he is telling the truth as he knows it in the crayon section of SoD, but he might not know the whole truth), we've had nothing yet that contradicts this "biased viewpoint."



I'd cite the circus folks as an example. They seem to be perfectly tolerant when Right Eye's family are acting like normal customers, but they are more than happy to marshal deadly force against Redcloak and his nephew when the latter steal the monster in the darkness from the circus. I'd suggest that while Redcloak might see their dogged pursuit as evidence of prejudice against goblins, it's more realistically seen as a simple objection to being stolen from.
I sort of agree, although one does wonder if they would have been as quick to resort to deadly force if the thieves in question had been human. (Actually you could say Redcloak started the killing when he fricasseed the poodle swarm.) But tolerating them doesn't really mean accepting them. They risk nothing by having the goblins enter the circus and they make money. Giving them land might be a bit much even for the kind of people who'd let a happy goblin family into their circus.


I'd also suggest that a similar view applies to the overall human goblin conflict as well.
I'd have to disagree. There are too many centuries of blood between the races for the average human or goblin to have an open-minded approach to the situation. Although the geography of where the human or goblin was from might factor into it.


I suspect that very few goblins have tried the peaceful approach. My bet is that most are beguiled by stories of the Dark One's original armies, "the greatest military force that the northern continent had ever seen". Even after Right Eye got fed up with the Dark One's "plan", it took unexpected advice from Eugene, a human, to give him the idea of settling down peacefully.
I am actually in 100% agreement with this.The best way for goblins to get ahead in the world is to work hard and live peacefully. They will be on the bottom of the social latter for a long time, and it will not be easy. It's also not fair that it has to be that way, (the gods really did screw them over) and the unfairness of the situation is what rankles so many of them into wanting to just take what they feel should be their "fair share." Not to mention their own god advises them to stay away from humans and advocates seizing equality by force. Since what they want is an equality they feel they deserve, it's no surprise that a goblin like Right-Eye would be such a rarity.


Regarding marrying into royal families:

There are lots of kingdoms. There's lots of time. Sure, it might take a goblin Cinderella, but it's bound to happen eventually. It can't be worse than getting cleared out of adventure scenarios for centuries because of following the Dark One.
It could happen, maybe, but that's not the way to bet things will ever be solved.

[arkwei]

Warren:
1. Because it's a finite resource. Because it's a renewable resource. And as a general rule, people who have better weapons and better numbers don't either give or sell fertile land to peoples they consider inferior savages. And even when they do, they often renege on those agreements. They send the barbarians to the hinterlands, if they don't just wipe them off the map entirely.


1. So? People sell land in real life, back in the old days at wild west when a gun means everything as law. Also see below.



Warren:
2. That would be the logical thing to do. But when racism... speciesism... whateverism... is rampant, logic gives way to prejudice. Even if the individual in the area was willing, they'd have a lot of pressure put on them by their peers. We don't want their kind in our backyard! Look at the uproar that happened over desegregation here in the states. And there are those who'll say they would never ever sell or buy a house from a Jewish person.



2. Empire state building in NY was sold (majority stocks, anyways) to a Japanese group in 1991. After what happened in Pearl Harbor, you'd think those Americans owners would have qualms selling a landmark building to a Japanese group. Nope, capitalism doesn't work that way, pal.

Empire state building was just an example. There were more buildings sold to Japanese groups and rich people, but ESB was the most famous.

[B. Dandelion]

1. So? People sell land in real life, back in the old days at wild west when a gun means everything as law. Also see below.
Oh wow, land is sold in real life to other people? That totally negates everything I just said. Gosh, I'm such an idiot!

:smallannoyed:

This is totally irrelevant to the notion of selling land to a group of creatures most of humanity is hostile toward (and vice-versa), is quite literally considered to be evil (and they have the spells to prove it), and have been at war with one another for a millennium.


2. Empire state building in NY was sold (majority stocks, anyways) to a Japanese group in 1991. After what happened in Pearl Harbor, you'd think those Americans owners would have qualms selling a landmark building to a Japanese group. Nope, capitalism doesn't work that way, pal.
We haven't been at war with Japan since 1945. Selling lands to goblins would be closer in scope to leasing an apartment to Osama bin Laden.


Empire state building was just an example. There were more buildings sold to Japanese groups and rich people, but ESB was the most famous.
The Japanese are not analogous to the goblins. We aren't at war with them (actually, they're our allies). They're the same species as us. They aren't "usually neutral evil," because there's no such thing as alignment in real life.

[arkwei]

Oh wow, land is sold in real life to other people? That totally negates everything I just said. Gosh, I'm such an idiot!

:smallannoyed:

This is totally irrelevant to the notion of selling land to a group of creatures most of humanity is hostile toward (and vice-versa), is quite literally considered to be evil (and they have the spells to prove it), and have been at war with one another for a millennium.


We haven't been at war with Japan since 1945. Selling lands to goblins would be closer in scope to leasing an apartment to Osama bin Laden.


The Japanese are not analogous to the goblins. We aren't at war with them (actually, they're our allies). They're the same species as us. They aren't "usually neutral evil," because there's no such thing as alignment in real life.

You were using examples of real life people who won't sell to Jews, and I'm trying to counter that point.

1. You say those people won't sell to Jews because they have reasons;

2. I'm saying that people who have good reasons to not sell to Japanese still sold to them.

[B. Dandelion]

You were using examples of real life people who won't sell to Jews, and I'm trying to counter that point.

1. You say those people won't sell to Jews because they have reasons;

2. I'm saying that people who have good reasons to not sell to Japanese still sold to them.
Let me try to break this down for you:

Prejudice often leads people to act illogically and not take the best material offer when the person making it is someone they are biased against.

This happens, even now, to many other groups such as Jews, blacks, or gays. It does not always happen, but it does occur.

There was some resistance to selling to the Japanese. Quite a bit, actually. But in this case, they had been our allies for decades, and the bias had worn itself down enough so that the transactions still occurred. There are still a lot of people extremely unhappy about this. Try reading Michael Crichton's Rising Sun some time (they're going to buy out all the land from under us and they'll OWN us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

In the world of OOTS, this bias is magnified a thousandfold, and nothing has happened to diminish it. These people loathe each other and have been at war for hundreds of years.

It's a completely different situation.

[arkwei]

Let me try to break this down for you:

Prejudice leads people to act illogically and not take the best material offer when the person making it is someone they are biased against.

This happens, even now, to many other groups such as Jews, blacks, or gays. It does not always happen, but it does occur.

There was some resistance to selling to the Japanese. Quite a bit, actually. But in this case, they had been our allies for decades, and the bias had worn itself down enough so that the transactions still occurred. There are still a lot of people extremely unhappy about this. Try reading Michael Crichton's Rising Sun some time (they're going to buy out all the land from under us and they'll OWN us!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!).

In the world of OOTS, this bias is magnified a thousandfold, and nothing has happened to diminish it. These people loathe each other and have been at war for hundreds of years.

It's a completely different situation.

Please note that in Origin, goblins and humans are siting in the same circus to have the same fun in right eye's village.

This is not the "thousandfold" bias you are talking about.

If you want to make blatant assumptions about OOTS, fine, just don't do it when it contradicts Canon Material.

By your logic, right eye's village should be destroyed years ago.

[B. Dandelion]

Please note that in Origin, goblins and humans are siting in the same circus to have the same fun in right eye's village.

This is not the "thousandfold" bias you are talking about.
We were talking about selling land, not going to an event. And yes, they still hated humans. Even at the end of the story before Right-Eye dies, he curses Xykon because now his daughter might be raised by ::shudder:: humans.

You can loathe someone and not always be trying to kill them. Haven't you ever hated someone in real life? Are you constantly trying to stab them?


If you want to make blatant assumptions about OOTS, fine, just don't do it when it contradicts Canon Material.
How does it contradict it?


By your logic, right eye's village should be destroyed years ago.
Again, hate doesn't always mean kill smash rorag destroy. It was a sparsely populated area with nothing worth looting. The goblins weren't causing any trouble, and Right-Eye was a high enough level to discourage any who might try to ravage the place. If the place got too big, there might have been trouble, as was indicated in the crayon story, but it hadn't reached that point yet.

[Arcane_Secrets]

And gathering a huge army is wrong why exactly? Escpecially when "adventures" are always attacking? And as a goblin he was likely to be killed on sight unless their was a reason not to? And asking for a more equitable distrubution of land is wrong how again? Those human leaders assassinated him when he had done nothing wrong; if he had say give us land or I'll attack that would be blackmail. Convictions are not based on someone will do something.
P.S. I don't have SoD with me msitakes about details may be made.

No, you're right. He asked for a "fair distribution of land". The humans and other leaders didn't even bother saying "We'll see what we can do." They probably said to themselves "What level rogue can we get to flank him for a sneak attack" instead.

In fact, the more I think about it, while I do think that he's an evil god, I wonder if he would've been deified as an evil god if he hadn't been assassinated in the first place? I think he would've been deified anyways, but perhaps the belief that shaped him partially came from fury at his being slaughtered.

[B. Dandelion]

Sorry to post again, I feel I'm monopolizing the thread and I'd like to stop. But i wanted to clarify some things, because some when I shoot out a reply I just go with whatever argument immediately leaps to my head. So I left out -- or simply failed to emphasize -- certain relevant details So I'd just like to lay out what I think about the possibility of "people selling land to humanoids"

1. I do believe there are some humans that would sell land to goblins. However, there might be several factors in play, and for some humans their misgiving might cause them to refuse to sell no matter how generous the offer.

a) The goblin massacre after tDO's death was horrific. The threat of another army being raised would instill an enormous amount of paranoia in the PC races. And anyone thinking about selling their property to goblins would have to live with a horrible amount of guilt if history repeated it, because they helped to enable it.

b) Goblins are are "usually neutral evil." If you're a good-aligned person, (especially Lawful), you might just oppose dealing with goblins on that principle alone. There would be trust issues on both sides, and why reward evil behavior?

c) Humans were specifically warned not to let the humanoids become too settled (although I'm not sure how this jibes with Xykon's 2000+ man army that was just hanging out the hills).

d) Goblins aren't "people" to many of the PC races. Again I cite the Paladin of "Origin" who wanted to kill orcs... because they are orcs. The gods did this deliberately. Goblins were created for the express purpose of being green mobile chunks of XP. Ergo it might be considered a violation of the gods' wishes to give land to a expendable humanoids. If the goblins are prosperous, they have no reason to raid, and thus they are not a thread that needs to be eliminated. So how are the gods' clerics supposed to level up? The evil gods could have their followers kill innocent goblins, but what about the priests of good gods?*


2)The circus folk tolerated the goblins, that's true. But they're not giving the goblins any kind of material advantage, and they themselves are making money from their patronage.

Land is a more complicated issue.

Anyway I think some humans would sell. I actually said it before, but I guess I didn't make it clear enough.



To a degree I think it's probably true that there would be some folk somewhere who would hand land over, but what percentage? If it's infinitesimally small, that's just about as bad as no humans being willing whatsoever.

See? ^---
So what I'm saying is it that there would be a lot of obstacles to overcome in order for a goblin tribe to buy land legitimately.

* I just had totally weird idea. Remember how the evil gods sided for tDO's inclusion in the pantheon and Tiamat thought it might be nice to have the status quo changed? I always wondered why they did that. But now I see a possibility (although it's pretty out there) -- evil PCs can kill any kind of creature, good PCs can't. If he goblins settled down, the Evil clerics would have a small advantage over the Good ones, because Good-aligned characters would probably have much fewer monsters to slay without incurring alignment penalties. And Redcloak at one point in SoD (pg 46), said that he wanted a level playing field for ALL sentient races, which would make it even MORE difficult for those low-level good-aligned clerics to level up, because the wimpy monsters they used to be able to kill with impunity would now be off limits to them -- but not to the EVIL clerics. So Loki and Tiamat and Rat would benefit because THEIR clerics would have a much faster level progression than their good counterparts. So with greater and stronger numbers of clerics, the evil gods could exert a stronger influence on world affairs.

Anyway I hope this was coherent because I am really not doing so hot right now and I'm not sure my head's screwed on straight.

[Warren Dew]

Dandelion/Remirach
That would be the logical thing to do. But when racism... speciesism... whateverism... is rampant, logic gives way to prejudice. Even if the individual in the area was willing, they'd have a lot of pressure put on them by their peers.

In an agrarian economy, people don't like to sell land, whether it's to people "like themselves" or people that "are different". Selling your land means losing your family's farm and income. However, it does happen. When?

Traditionally, it's when the current landowner mismanages his estates and builds up debts. For example, the heir of a big landowner may spend his time gambling rather than tending to his farm. Then he starts getting pressure to pay his gambling debts. His peers may not like the idea of his selling to goblins, but they may like the idea of writing off what he owes them even less.


Except that in War and XPs the Giant says outright that Azure City had waged war on goblin settlements for decades. Not "war camps," settlements.

Sure. After the Dark One's original armies massacred vast swathes of humans, no doubt they founded settlements on the land they had thus cleared. The humans consider that still to be land rightfully owned by human heirs, so they consider the settlements illegal and wage war on them. This is what happens when transfer is violent rather than peaceful.

For that matter, if goblins use settlements in the original goblin lands to stage attacks, those might in turn be subject to attacks as well. The only way for the goblins to be safe from attacks is by being peaceful, as Right Eye was.


I am actually in 100% agreement with this.The best way for goblins to get ahead in the world is to work hard and live peacefully. They will be on the bottom of the social latter for a long time, and it will not be easy. It's also not fair that it has to be that way, (the gods really did screw them over) and the unfairness of the situation is what rankles so many of them into wanting to just take what they feel should be their "fair share."

This is why I don't think arguing about "fairness" is very productive. You can argue the gods made a mistake - in the crayon pictures, they seem surprised when they realize they made more nonhuman humanoids than humans - but why should that be taken out on the humans who were already there? Two wrongs don't make a right.

And if the mistake was creating too many goblins, what's the obvious fix to that? If I were a goblin in the Ootsiverse, I think I'd prefer having been created, even with a lesser share of land, than never having been created in the first place. I'd certainly prefer it to the gods' rectifying their mistake by simply wiping out enough goblins to restore equilibrium.


We haven't been at war with Japan since 1945. Selling lands to goblins would be closer in scope to leasing an apartment to Osama bin Laden.

1945 was less than a century ago. The wars between the goblins and the humans have been going on for far more than a century - for many centuries. The peaceful path may require a few decades and a lot of patience, but I think it's got a better chance in the long run than the Dark One's plan.

[B. Dandelion]

Warren:


In an agrarian economy, people don't like to sell land, whether it's to people "like themselves" or people that "are different". Selling your land means losing your family's farm and income. However, it does happen. When?

Traditionally, it's when the current landowner mismanages his estates and builds up debts. For example, the heir of a big landowner may spend his time gambling rather than tending to his farm. Then he starts getting pressure to pay his gambling debts. His peers may not like the idea of his selling to goblins, but they may like the idea of writing off what he owes them even less.
In that case, why not just give the farm up to the people they owe money to in the first place, and let them sell it? That'd be a pretty good way of weaseling out of some of the debt, actually: look, I can pay you back the full amount, but the only folk willing to shell out that much money for my farm are goblins, so would you rather I stationed them in your backyard or will you take the farm at a loss?


Sure. After the Dark One's original armies massacred vast swathes of humans, no doubt they founded settlements on the land they had thus cleared. The humans consider that still to be land rightfully owned by human heirs, so they consider the settlements illegal and wage war on them. This is what happens when transfer is violent rather than peaceful.

The massacre after the Dark One was killed happened centuries ago. If there were goblin settlements on formerly occupied land in the time period immediately thereafter, they were doubtless wiped out long ago. But the settlements I'm talking about are the ones that were still being attacked 36 years ago in lands that weren't even desirable -- "meager hills" and "dismal swamps" -- and were a thousand miles away from Azure City to boot. Those settlements hadn't been on the human's lands and the humans didn't want them. They just didn't want the goblins to get too settled in.


For that matter, if goblins use settlements in the original goblin lands to stage attacks, those might in turn be subject to attacks as well. The only way for the goblins to be safe from attacks is by being peaceful, as Right Eye was.
I don't know that they used "settlements" for staging raids on humans, but if they did, then yes they probably should expect retaliation. However Redcloak's village had done nothing to the Azurites, who lived 1000 miles away anyway. So it doesn't seem like the humans were specifically targeting raiders, they were targeting settled goblins indiscriminately. War camp, settlement -- what's the difference?


This is why I don't think arguing about "fairness" is very productive. You can argue the gods made a mistake - in the crayon pictures, they seem surprised when they realize they made more nonhuman humanoids than humans - but why should that be taken out on the humans who were already there? Two wrongs don't make a right.
Operating on the basis that the Dark One's story is true, I don't think the goblins originally wanted to punish the humans for their own lack of arable land. They tried the "speak softly and carry a big stick" approach to diplomacy and attempted to appeal to the humans' sense of fairness. They also thought they could share... well, we never quite found out what it was they were offering, but they were going to share something, so we were essentially talking about a trade here. The humans weren't even willing to listen -- and this is part of the reason I have such a hard time believing goblins would find many willing sellers of land. When tDO was murdered, THAT'S when it became about punishment and two wrongs making a right and getting "their fair share." Truth to be told, the humans certainly did not owe the goblins land -- it's not their fault the gods divvied things up as they did. But they DID owe the goblins a chance to make their case and treat them fairly, and they didn't, because they thought of goblins as nothing but XP.

IOW, it's not just the gods who were unfair.


And if the mistake was creating too many goblins, what's the obvious fix to that?

Well I was going to say "make the barren lands hospitable," but I see you're talking about the problem of wanting the goblins to be baddies but not ever becoming powerful enough to rate a serious threat.

Why can't the gods just make more PC races?


If I were a goblin in the Ootsiverse, I think I'd prefer having been created, even with a lesser share of land, than never having been created in the first place. I'd certainly prefer it to the gods' rectifying their mistake by simply wiping out enough goblins to restore equilibrium.
Well I'd prefer to lose a foot as opposed to an arm, but that's still not going to make me thank the person chopping my limbs off.



1945 was less than a century ago. The wars between the goblins and the humans have been going on for far more than a century - for many centuries. The peaceful path may require a few decades and a lot of patience, but I think it's got a better chance in the long run than the Dark One's plan.
We also had only been at war with Japan since 1941 (well, "we" as in the ever-tardy U.S.A.) and there wasn't centuries of bloodshed and hatred between the two cultures. I actually still agree with you about the peaceful path being the better one, I just find the Japan vs. US analogy to be very poor.

[SoC175]

What the "good" deities did to the goblins and similar races was clearly evil.

The OotS world doesn't seem to follow the classical D&D alignments as fundamental forces even beyond the deities but seems to follow "we the deities decide what is considered [Good] and that shall forever be considered as [Good]".

To even discuss this, you need to establish what we're going to think like here. To paladins, good is right, and evil is wrong. To Redcloak, good is the paladins, and evil are those who oppose them. Do you think evils and deeds are right and wrong or just flavors of icecream?
Obviously the OotS deities were able to consider them as just flavors of icecream to be determined according to their wishes. Goblins doing the same thing to humans as humans do to goblins is suddenly evil while perfectly good the other way round.

but it seems that in the world of The Order of the Stick, Evil seems to at the least follow in "Whomever the Original Gods don't like".
That's my point.

And that's not the standard D&D assumption, in D&D even greater deities can find themselves falling from grace as [Good] and [Evil] are true fundamental definitions and not even the deities can change them.

Dandelion/Remirach
Sure. After the Dark One's original armies massacred vast swathes of humans,
Which also only was after human massacred even vaster swathes of goblins out of boredom for sheer pleasure and sanctified by their mendacious pantheons

[David Argall]

that's not the standard D&D assumption, in D&D even greater deities can find themselves falling from grace as [Good] and [Evil] are true fundamental definitions and not even the deities can change them.


But having said this, why do you assume the opposite applies to the OOTS world? Recall here, SoD is told from the view of the evil goblin and thus is likely to contain lies and misrepresentations.
Contrast this with the actual strip where the evil humanoids are proud of being evil, and prove it routinely.

[Warren Dew]

Responding to Dandelion
In that case, why not just give the farm up to the people they owe money to in the first place, and let them sell it? That'd be a pretty good way of weaseling out of some of the debt, actually: look, I can pay you back the full amount, but the only folk willing to shell out that much money for my farm are goblins, so would you rather I stationed them in your backyard or will you take the farm at a loss?

Again, this is where being peaceful comes into play. If the only goblins they know are the ones who massacred their granduncle's village, they might take that deal. If the goblin in question is the one whose kids my kids go to the circus with, then maybe they're better neighbors than the deadbeat who thinks three aces showing is a bluff, and I'll insist on cash from the sale to the goblin.


I don't know that they used "settlements" for staging raids on humans, but if they did, then yes they probably should expect retaliation. However Redcloak's village had done nothing to the Azurites, who lived 1000 miles away anyway. So it doesn't seem like the humans were specifically targeting raiders, they were targeting settled goblins indiscriminately. War camp, settlement -- what's the difference?

I have to disagree with respect to the opening pages of Start of Darkness. In strip 277, Shojo - who, while not unimpeachable, is as reliable as Redcloak - says of the Sapphire Guard, "Soon sent his men and women on a crusade to wipe out all who would threaten the Azure City gate, no matter how far removed geographically." The high priest of the Dark One definitely qualifies as someone who threatens the gate, and "no matter how far removed" explains the 1000 miles. This is just Rich taking the opportunity to illustrate more concretely how Soon's crusades interacted with the Dark One's plan - and perhaps to drop a few hints about how skilled the Azure City diviners were.


Operating on the basis that the Dark One's story is true, I don't think the goblins originally wanted to punish the humans for their own lack of arable land. They tried the "speak softly and carry a big stick" approach to diplomacy and attempted to appeal to the humans' sense of fairness. They also thought they could share... well, we never quite found out what it was they were offering, but they were going to share something, so we were essentially talking about a trade here.

I don't read it that way at all. I'm pretty sure that sentence was going to be, "We wish to share this land of yours." That's how "speak softly and carry a big stick works" - the big stick is an implied threat in order to get concessions from others that might otherwise be impossible.

It might even have worked if the Dark One had been honest instead of pretending it was a "fairness" issue. If one really thinks one has a "fairness" issue, one doesn't show up with an army. The army he shows up with - even Redcloak says it was "the greatest military force that the northern continent had ever seen" - makes it clear that he's seeking concessions, not fairness. Note that Teddy Roosevelt didn't claim "fairness" when using the technique to gain land concessions in Panama and Cuba; he just said what he wanted, and let his military speak for itself.


The humans weren't even willing to listen -- and this is part of the reason I have such a hard time believing goblins would find many willing sellers of land.

Why listen to what are obviously lies? If the Dark One had shown up offering gold instead of brandishing an army, things would likely have gone quite differently. As it was, it was clear before he started speaking that the Dark One was there to make threats, not offers.


We also had only been at war with Japan since 1941 (well, "we" as in the ever-tardy U.S.A.) and there wasn't centuries of bloodshed and hatred between the two cultures. I actually still agree with you about the peaceful path being the better one, I just find the Japan vs. US analogy to be very poor.

It might not be a great analogy, but it's not as bad as all that. The U.S. showed up with battleships on Japan's doorstep a century earlier, in 1854, to end Japan's 300 year policy of seclusion and enforce an unequal trade treaty. Periodic conflicts between Japan and the west had been ongoing ever since.

[King of Nowhere]

David,
you claim that SoD should be a lie, or at least only what the goblins want to know. You base that on the fact that the goblins, while recognizing their evil alignment, fail to display the evil behaviour you woul expect.
By reading your posts, I understand that you have a very strong concept of "evil": to fit in your evil alignment, one must be a total and utter bastard, who hurts other people for no reason and find pleasure in it. You expect the goblins, due to their evil alignment, to be like that.
But the definitions of the alignment aren't universally accepted. Most people have a different concept of evil, a less strong one, that put in people who aren't totally bad.
In oots the alignments are decided by the Giant; unless we want to reject every fact told in SoD, we may suppose that Rich's concept of evil is blander than your, and that the goblins fail to display the evilness you expect from them not because they do it off screen, but because they aren't so bad after all.

[Elfey]

From SOD the God's defined Goblins as Always Chaotic Evil.

Not that they are or are not, but the are defined that way, and no matter how good one seems to be, the rules say they are Always Chaotic evil. That way they get to be XP fodder. What they actually are seems to vary between goodish (or at least neutral) and from law to chaotic. We've seen all sorts of acts, and seen even teenage goblins being Lawful good as a phase.

But fact is, they can't really change alignment cause the gods are jerks.

Is the Dark One's plan ultimately hurtful and extremely dangerous, oh yeah. Is it sympathetic? To me it is.

[David Argall]

David,
you claim that SoD should be a lie, or at least only what the goblins want to know. You base that on the fact that the goblins, while recognizing their evil alignment, fail to display the evil behaviour you woul expect.

On the contrary, I insist they are, by and large, showing that evil behavior. In particular they are in the strip itself. What is creating tension is a myth that is told by a biased source, and sounds rather like the lies any group might invent to blame their failures on others.

In the strip, we have the humanoids saying directly they are evil, and then proving it. They admit it. Why should we doubt it?



From SOD the God's defined Goblins as Always Chaotic Evil.
See strip 93. Goblins are usually Neutral evil. To the limited extent you can say SoD says CE, you are rejecting SoD.


But fact is, they can't really change alignment cause the gods are jerks.
Fact is this theory is not supported by either the strip or SoD.

[B. Dandelion]

Hi, Warren!

Warren, you provide logical reasons why it should be possible for goblins to purchase land from humans. But I can't help but think this is looking at the problem backwards.

You seem to be saying there has never been an insurmountable obstacle for the goblins to obtain fertile land by purchasing it fairly from humans. You assert that Right-Eye's financial status (which, to me, looked like poverty, but I don't play D&D and don't know most of the rules) indicates that it's possible goblins could work up enough cash to make a reasonable bid on land. You also assert that there must be some humans willing to sell.

But here's the thing. Goblins are "usually evil" (either intrinsically, or put into situations that would cause them to adopt that alignment -- SoD suggests the gods specifically wanted the goblins to have no recourse but to raid human lands, thus giving clerics a justification for killing them), but not ALWAYS evil. Good and neutral goblins also exist. The goblins were around long before their hero was deified (literally) and encouraged his worshipers to avoid contact with humans.

If what you say is true, every single condition necessary for a transaction to have taken place exists. But if the method of purchasing land has been possible in all this time, why has it never happened? It's not just that goblins are evil, because some aren't. There should have been neutral goblins willing to pay (because they wouldn't want the humans to retaliate by stealing land instead), and good goblins willing to pay because they would think of it as a legitimate and honest thing way to enrich the lives of their people.

So what went wrong?



Again, this is where being peaceful comes into play. If the only goblins they know are the ones who massacred their granduncle's village, they might take that deal. If the goblin in question is the one whose kids my kids go to the circus with, then maybe they're better neighbors than the deadbeat who thinks three aces showing is a bluff, and I'll insist on cash from the sale to the goblin.

I think you are rather over-optimistic about the presence of goblin-friendly humans. Goblins are "usually evil," and people know it. You would know that a good or neutral goblin was an anomaly, and that under normal circumstances, if you run into a goblin there's a better than 50% chance that they are evil. So I don't know that a personal encounter with a goblin that was friendly would make a human suddenly welcome all humanoids with open arms.

If the Dark One gave up on his thirst for revenge and just tried to help his people improve their station in life, or if Redcloak and Right-Eye had settled down in the peaceful goblin village and helped it to prosper, the percentage of evil goblins may well have gone down, and people would have become more willing to trust.



I have to disagree with respect to the opening pages of Start of Darkness. In strip 277, Shojo - who, while not unimpeachable, is as reliable as Redcloak - says of the Sapphire Guard, "Soon sent his men and women on a crusade to wipe out all who would threaten the Azure City gate, no matter how far removed geographically." The high priest of the Dark One definitely qualifies as someone who threatens the gate, and "no matter how far removed" explains the 1000 miles. This is just Rich taking the opportunity to illustrate more concretely how Soon's crusades interacted with the Dark One's plan - and perhaps to drop a few hints about how skilled the Azure City diviners were.
The redcloak was a threat. It was wise to target him. Killing the goblins who attacked the paladins in turn would also be acceptable. I do not, however, think that murdering goblin children helped to further the cause of peace. Moreover, they didn't stop at the Crimson Mantle or even the Mantle's one village -- when Redcloak gives his speech just before they plan to storm the paladin fortress, he mentions that all the assorted goblins he's speaking to had lost loved ones due to the "crusades" of the Paladins.

Soon, as I recall, referred to Redcloak's "wretched kind" (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0459.html), and may well have lumped every single goblin in the existence of ever as a threat, or a potential threat. It's also possible that Shojo, who was in charge of the Sapphire Guard when Redcloak's village was wiped out, ordered an escalation of affairs. Either way -- the Paladins might have been looking for the Crimson Mantle, but they also were looking to execute any goblin they could get their hands on.


I don't read it that way at all. I'm pretty sure that sentence was going to be, "We wish to share this land of yours."

Huh. You know, that interpretation didn't even occur to me, since Xykon immediately asked what it was the Dark One wanted to share. Makes sense, though.


That's how "speak softly and carry a big stick works" - the big stick is an implied threat in order to get concessions from others that might otherwise be impossible.
Um, yes, I understand that. The army was the stick, obviously.


It might even have worked if the Dark One had been honest instead of pretending it was a "fairness" issue. If one really thinks one has a "fairness" issue, one doesn't show up with an army.

Mmmn, I don't know about that. TDO DID think it was a fairness issue, and he's not wrong that the goblins WERE in an unfair position as opposed to the humans. Yet he didn't suggest the humans were greedy, he just said that they controlled all the livable land, while the goblins had nothing.


The army he shows up with - even Redcloak says it was "the greatest military force that the northern continent had ever seen" - makes it clear that he's seeking concessions, not fairness.

Which kind of amounts to the same thing when every square inch of land is already owned by people that aren't goblins.


Why listen to what are obviously lies?
His remarks might have been a bit self-serving, but I don't know that he was lying. His army was so huge they may very well have been able to conquer the humans if they wished, but he said he didn't want to. It fits with his history: he united the disparate goblins together by appealing to their common... uh... "goblinhood?" He says to the humans they're all the children of the gods, which sounds like an appeal to the things ALL sentient beings have in common. He might even have truly meant that, but being run through from behind while at a supposed parley might have changed his attitude on that front.

[Charles Phipps]

So what went wrong?

Did something go wrong? Is it necessarily that the Goblins and Humans are in a state of utter and perpetual conflict? Or is it more that it happens (just like in the real world) and otherwise, they're at peace or in an uneasy peace.

Just because REDCLOAK had his village massacred doesn't mean that all Goblins everywhere are in danger of genocide.

[B. Dandelion]

Charles:


Did something go wrong?

With due respect, I don't think you grasped what I was talking about The "wrong" I refer to is an incongruity. If we presume the goblins want fertile land, some goblins could afford to pay for it, and there exist humans who would sell it to them -- how is it possible that not one sale has been made to goblins in a thousand years? It strains credibility. Either one of those presumptions is incorrect or some other, unknown factor is in play, and I wanted to hear Warren's take on it.

(I just really hope he doesn't respond with something like "we should almost certainly presume that our author has intended to portray the evil goblins in a sympathetic light, and thus made many illogical writing choices so as to make the goblins seem "oppressed.")



Is it necessarily that the Goblins and Humans are in a state of utter and perpetual conflict? Or is it more that it happens (just like in the real world) and otherwise, they're at peace or in an uneasy peace.
When it comes to the Sapphire Guard and the Dark One's worshipers, it is perpetual conflict.


Just because REDCLOAK had his village massacred doesn't mean that all Goblins everywhere are in danger of genocide.
That assumption is flat-out contradicted in War and XPs. According to rich, Paladins spent decades exterminating entire villages of goblins and other humanoids. And those are his exact words, too.

[Warren Dew]

Dandelion:

Hi, Warren!

Hi!


Warren, you provide logical reasons why it should be possible for goblins to purchase land from humans. But I can't help but think this is looking at the problem backwards....

If what you say is true, every single condition necessary for a transaction to have taken place exists. But if the method of purchasing land has been possible in all this time, why has it never happened? It's not just that goblins are evil, because some aren't. There should have been neutral goblins willing to pay (because they wouldn't want the humans to retaliate by stealing land instead), and good goblins willing to pay because they would think of it as a legitimate and honest thing way to enrich the lives of their people.

I have a couple answers to that. Please bear with me, because my first answer is going to contain some math - only fair when discussing a race that uses Redcloak's titanium elementals!

I think that to succeed at the peaceful path, you need more than a single goblin. You need a whole community of goblins, like Right Eye establishes, with a number of good goblins and basically no evil goblins - because if you have any noticeable number of evil goblins, they'll spoil it for the rest of the community.

Right Eye's village has maybe 100 inhabitants. So say we need 100 nonevil goblins.

Now what are the chances of a group of 100 goblins all being nonevil? If goblins have a 10% chance of being good or neutral, it's 0.10 to the power of 100, or 10 to the minus 100 power (10E-100). That chance is vanishingly small; it's the kind of probability people talk about when they're discussing asteroid strikes that destroy the earth, or spontaneous origination of life in one's teacup. If those are the chances, it's quite likely that it has simply never happened.

Now, the math is likely not quite that bad. If goblins have a 50% chance of being good or neutral - the maximum - the probability is 0.5 to the power of 100, or roughly 10E-6 - a chance in a million. Alternatively, even if the chance is only 10%, the group of goblins might not be random - once the village gets established and becomes known, maybe neutral and good goblins will be preferentially attracted to it. Still, villages like Right Eye's are likely to be extremely rare - to the point that good aligned goblins who want to live in one are likely to have to build it, rather than find one already standing.

And even Right Eye's peaceful village isn't enough. It gets swept away after 17 years - by karmic irony, by the same evil Xykon that Right Eye originally recruited when he was violent rather than peaceful. Even if Xykon hadn't returned, though, it's quite likely that the stealing of the monster in the darkness would have put the village in danger, by putting it at odds with the humans. That illustrates how even one evil goblin can really mess things up for a community of peaceful goblins - and there are a lot of evil goblins to go around.

So that's my first answer. It's possible that the goblins have simply never been able to sustain a peaceful community large enough, and for long enough, to accumulate enough money to buy land - or for that matter even to expand enough to have the need to buy land.

My second answer is a lot shorter: who is to say it hasn't happened? I think it probably has. It may be rare, for the reasons discussed above, but it could have happend a number of times in history. It just hasn't happened enough for it to have come up in the comic yet.

In fact, why haven't the humans disturbed Right Eye's settlement, which seems to be doing okay on the land it has? My theory is that it's on those traditional goblin lands, and Redcloak exaggerated, or was just plain mistaken about, how bad the land was. However, it's also possible that the village is on good land that was originally human owned, but got bought by some rich goblin in ages past. I don't think that's likely, but it's an interesting possibility.


I think you are rather over-optimistic about the presence of goblin-friendly humans. Goblins are "usually evil," and people know it. You would know that a good or neutral goblin was an anomaly, and that under normal circumstances, if you run into a goblin there's a better than 50% chance that they are evil. So I don't know that a personal encounter with a goblin that was friendly would make a human suddenly welcome all humanoids with open arms.

I agree that it would take a lot more than one encounter. That's why I picked the "children go to the circus together" example, as Right Eye's kids seem to go frequently - they were going again tomorrow, so possibly every day - allowing for repeated contact. Nor do I think the humans have to welcome all humanoids with open arms - they could be suspicious of lizard folk or even other goblin strangers, but still think "that Right Eye and his village, they're okay."

It might take more than a generation, too. Maybe Right Eye or his equivalent doesn't get to buy land, but it's his daughter, who makes friends with humans in childhood visits to the circus, does.


If the Dark One gave up on his thirst for revenge and just tried to help his people improve their station in life, or if Redcloak and Right-Eye had settled down in the peaceful goblin village and helped it to prosper, the percentage of evil goblins may well have gone down, and people would have become more willing to trust.

Absolutely. That's basically what I'm saying, too, except that I'm not convinced the Dark One has it in him. The peaceful goblins need for someone like Right Eye to get elevated to godhood to inspire them.


The redcloak was a threat. It was wise to target him. Killing the goblins who attacked the paladins in turn would also be acceptable. I do not, however, think that murdering goblin children helped to further the cause of peace. Moreover, they didn't stop at the Crimson Mantle or even the Mantle's one village -- when Redcloak gives his speech just before they plan to storm the paladin fortress, he mentions that all the assorted goblins he's speaking to had lost loved ones due to the "crusades" of the Paladins.

Don't get me wrong - when I say I think the paladins only killed goblins who detected as evil, I'm not arguing that Soon's strategy was the wisest course of action. Sometimes it can be better not to kill people, even if they are evil.

In understanding the situation, though, I think it has to be kept in mind that the Sapphire Guard was not created to further the cause of peace. It was created to protect the Azure City gate. The mission of the Sapphire Guard gave it a particularly adversarial relationship with the Dark One and his followers, the goblins. Again, I'm not saying that's a good thing; I'm just saying that's how it happened.

It's to be noted that we don't hear about similar crusades from the northerners or the westerners; when we hear present day goblins complaining about the depredations of the humans, it's almost always Soon's paladins they're complaining about. I think Soon's "crusades" represent a far higher tempo of violence on the part of the humans than in the preceding centuries.

At any rate, the Sapphire Guard has been destroyed; they're not an issue any more.


Mmmn, I don't know about that. TDO DID think it was a fairness issue, and he's not wrong that the goblins WERE in an unfair position as opposed to the humans.

Inequality does not automatically mean unfairness. That depends on how the inequality came about. If it was because the goblins spent their time raising armies rather than engaging in more productive pursuits, then it's not unfair; they're just getting their just desserts. If Redcloak is right about the gods being to blame, it's still not the humans' fault. A better course might be to convert to worshipping the same pantheon the humans worship, and pray for them to simply create more land.


Which kind of amounts to the same thing when every square inch of land is already owned by people that aren't goblins.

It wasn't, though. The goblins, even according to Redcloak, had land. They had forests; the forests may have been "without fruit", but the goblins could have cut trees for lumber and traded it for food. They had plains; the plains might have been "without tillable soil", but such plains are good for a pastoral life herding cattle or sheep. The problem wasn't lack of land; it was lack of inclination to use the land productively, or conversely, the inclination to view things as a competition, leading to a preference for taking what others had over producing things oneself.


His remarks might have been a bit self-serving, but I don't know that he was lying. His army was so huge they may very well have been able to conquer the humans if they wished, but he said he didn't want to.

If he really came in peace, he had no reason to bring an army. Sure, he might have been the type who brings a huge army just to show off how their chic black armor matches his pretty shoulder pads, but I don't think it's reasonable to expect the humans he addresses to see it that way. To them, the words he said are necessarily going to look like obvious lies. Even if he actually believed what he was saying, to me, the fact that he brought his army just shows that he was deceiving himself.

Indeed, that's what makes him a poor negotiator: he doesn't understand where he himself is coming from. If he had come alone and begged for fairness, he might have gotten some scraps. If he took a page from Xykon, embraced being evil, and sent an emissary to deliver an ultimatum - "cede land or be destroyed" - he might well have extracted concessions. His failure was trying to do both at the same time.

Ultimately, though, I think something along Right Eye's path will be more successful.

[David Argall]

[QUOTE=Warren Dew;4997059]
to succeed at the peaceful path, you need more than a single goblin. You need a whole community of goblins, like Right Eye establishes, with a number of good goblins and basically no evil goblins - because if you have any noticeable number of evil goblins, they'll spoil it for the rest of the community.

Right Eye's village has maybe 100 inhabitants. So say we need 100 nonevil goblins.

Now what are the chances of a group of 100 goblins all being nonevil? If goblins have a 10% chance of being good or neutral, it's 0.10 to the power of 100, or 10 to the minus 100 power (10E-100).

Alternatively, even if the chance is only 10%, the group of goblins might not be random - once the village gets established and becomes known, maybe neutral and good goblins will be preferentially attracted to it.
This is just about certain. people tend to congregate with others of the same type. A casual example, about 2/3 of Amish live in just 3 states, and just about zero live in about half of the US.



So that's my first answer. It's possible that the goblins have simply never been able to sustain a peaceful community large enough, and for long enough, to accumulate enough money to buy land - or for that matter even to expand enough to have the need to buy land.
Now notice that this answer assumes that most goblins are in fact evil, and that evil makes it about impossible to maintain a self-sustaining village. That's an entirely valid position, but you need to be aware of this.



In fact, why haven't the humans disturbed Right Eye's settlement, which seems to be doing okay on the land it has? My theory is that it's on those traditional goblin lands,
A more likely theory is that the talk about race war/etc is largely just talk, and excuses for why goblins have not prospered.
Notice here that the goblins seem to within walking distance of the humans. This makes little sense if we assume humans are vigorously attacking them.

So a reasonable theory is that some goblins moved into the area [or may have been moved in as slave labor] and took [were given] the crapy jobs. Surviving as such, they attracted relatives who were also willing to not fight. [In almost all societies, slaves eventually buy their freedom. Technically this is buying themselves with their owners' money, but the slave gets the incentive to work hard and the result is that the owner is ahead to ignore this detail. So if the goblins started as slaves, they don't stay such.]
Some of the goblins were lucky or smart and saved up enough money to buy some of the poorer farms. Having done so, they of course attracted other goblins to that part of the farming community, with the eventual result a peaceful goblin farming village.



It's to be noted that we don't hear about similar crusades from the northerners or the westerners; when we hear present day goblins complaining about the depredations of the humans, it's almost always Soon's paladins they're complaining about.
This is largely talking from a lack of evidence. The West in particular is almost entirely unknown to us.

[Eric]

Sorry to post again, I feel I'm monopolizing the thread and I'd like to stop. But i wanted to clarify some things, because some when I shoot out a reply I just go with whatever argument immediately leaps to my head.

Very nearly all of us do that. I certainly do.

AS to selling land to Orcs/Goblins, what if it's the marginal land? Kind of the reverse of the Indian Reservation idea. A family in the badlands would like to move to a more settled and safer area where there are opportunities of their children not having the option of being a farmer like them in the same scrubby land being the only one.

But they live on the edge. Nobody wants to DOWNGRADE their land to the worst scrubby bits, so nobody to sell to.

Extept Goblins, who are in the lands even humans don't want.

As long as they are working under the law of the land for the human settlement, they will merely be the poorest and least worthy people. But not monsters.

And that starts the move to integration. Because the best and brightest Goblins may be able to get jobs with rich humans, then teach their children better than they were taught. Move to better places (now that Goblins are known now to be in two classes: the nice ones and the old unreformed monsters) and so on.

Could take centuries.

But no need to destroy the world.

[Warren Dew]

Response to David Argall:
Now notice that this answer assumes that most goblins are in fact evil, and that evil makes it about impossible to maintain a self-sustaining village. That's an entirely valid position, but you need to be aware of this.

I think both Dandelion and I accept that goblins are "usually evil", thus at least 50% are evil.

The argument regarding villages is slightly narrower than that. It's really that evil makes it impossible to maintain a self sustaining village that engages in trade with the humans. An evil village could for example be formed that survives on raiding others for food, but people from such a village are not the kind of people one would want to sell land to.


A more likely theory is that the talk about race war/etc is largely just talk, and excuses for why goblins have not prospered.
Notice here that the goblins seem to within walking distance of the humans. This makes little sense if we assume humans are vigorously attacking them.

I'm operating under the assumption, which I mentioned earlier in the thread, that Right Eye's village is not getting attacked because it does not threaten the humans. They've broken the cycle of violence, so to speak. That could be true whether or not the talk about warfare is "largely just talk".

My inclination is to believe that there's at least enough evidence for Redcloak's view for him to believe he's telling the truth, apart from the stuff he leaves out because he doesn't want to reveal the full plan to Xykon. Now, it's possible to believe things that are pretty far from the objective truth, especially in cases of cultural or linguistic separation. However, I don't think he's willfully lying through his teeth; he's just seeing and interpreting the world through avocado colored glasses, based on information obtained from the goblin point of view.


So a reasonable theory is that some goblins moved into the area [or may have been moved in as slave labor] and took [were given] the crapy jobs. Surviving as such, they attracted relatives who were also willing to not fight.

Are we talking about Right Eye's village here? Right Eye built most of the village's houses himself. I think it's pretty clear that he was a founder of the village. I expect he founded it in an area without currently active warfare, not too far from the border between traditional human lands and traditional goblin lands. The circus may have come later, locating to a border location where it could serve both humans and goblins. I don't think there's any need to posit slave labor.


[In almost all societies, slaves eventually buy their freedom. Technically this is buying themselves with their owners' money, but the slave gets the incentive to work hard and the result is that the owner is ahead to ignore this detail. So if the goblins started as slaves, they don't stay such.]

I don't see any evidence of humans using slaves - goblins or otherwise - in the strip. The hobgoblins do keep some human slaves in Azure City, but that's an unusual and likely temporary situation; they didn't seem to have any slaves in the original homeland Redcloak recruited them from.


Some of the goblins were lucky or smart and saved up enough money to buy some of the poorer farms. Having done so, they of course attracted other goblins to that part of the farming community, with the eventual result a peaceful goblin farming village.

This is a possible explanation for Kayannara's valley. I don't think it fits for Right Eye's village, though.

On most of the strife being with the southern paladins:


This is largely talking from a lack of evidence. The West in particular is almost entirely unknown to us.

Agreed that we have little information about the west. I do think we have evidence about the north. We know Roy is a northerner from where he appears in the afterlife. Dorukan's dungeon seems to be part of the north, not of the south, and it seems to be part of Redcloak's operating area.

[Eric]

Agreed that we have little information about the west. I do think we have evidence about the north. We know Roy is a northerner from where he appears in the afterlife. Dorukan's dungeon seems to be part of the north, not of the south, and it seems to be part of Redcloak's operating area.

AC paladins operate in the south. Using divine magic in the wrong area is frowned on. RC's mentor was killed by AC paladins in force.

This could be proof that RC was (for the purposes of training) from the south.

Dorukan's gate is in the north, but where's Giriel's?

They've been mooching about for decades looking for that gate and Xykon mooched about for years after Giriel's gate finding Dorukan's. So the location of Dorukan's gate is no proof of that.

PS why are all the messages spoilered?

[Warren Dew]

Dorukan's gate is in the north, but where's Giriel's?

Did you mean Lirian's gate? It's definitely not within the paladins' operating area, since Soon's paladins are supposed to stay away from the other gates. I got the impression it was on the same continent as Dorukan's gate, which would put it in the northern lands, but it might be on the western continent somewhere since it's in an elf forest.


PS why are all the messages spoilered?

Mostly because they contain Start of Darkness spoilers.

[Eric]

Did you mean Lirian's gate? It's definitely not within the paladins' operating area, since Soon's paladins are supposed to stay away from the other gates. I got the impression it was on the same continent as Dorukan's gate, which would put it in the northern lands, but it might be on the western continent somewhere since it's in an elf forest.

Aye, Lirian's I meant.

RC could have started anywhere. It was years travelling to get to the first one.

Which continent they started on is irrelevant. You can walk a long way in a year.

[Renegade Paladin]

Okay, I'm sick of this. For those whining about Right-Eye's village having very little compared to the humans, I can only quote Belkar: Well duh!

Right-Eye and his people had been settled for seventeen years. You don't essentially start a civilization from scratch and get filthy rich in less time than it takes the first generation of children to grow up. In fact, one would expect them to be doing worse if they were entirely on their own, which suggests active trade, because otherwise they wouldn't even have had what they did. It's been asked what the goblins have to trade, and there's an easy answer: Labor. The same basic service that any other intelligent being does. I don't have anything to trade to my boss for my wages except my work, so that's what I do. There's very little that can't be overcome with honest labor, presuming you're willing to keep at it. Whining about how the goblins should be given all of this for free is nonsense; you might as well whine about how it's not fair that people who've been around longer than you own land and you don't: That's the way it is, and if you want that level of success, you'd best be willing to earn it.

Right-Eye was doing extremely well for himself and his village given the timeframe and what he started with. It was the Dark One's plan that screwed it up. Not humans, not paladins, not adventurers. The Dark One and his Plan. The good of the goblin people indeed.

[paladinofshojo]

I find that many people are saying that the goblins are "wrong" for not using non-violant means to better their lot in life. I find this to be quite odd since they don't even have a stable nation other than those little villages who don't get attacked by self-righteous jerkasses trying to gather exp, so why exactly should the humans and the other "good" races care about the goblin's position, the humans and other PC races benefit out of goblin bloodshed, so why will they ever care for how many "decent" goblins they kill, especially when the divine standard of the universe's "good" and "evil" says that goblins are acceptable targets because they're created just for the sole purpose of dying. Aside from that, why is it so wrong that the Dark One raised an army? Every human nation has an army for self-defence and land security but that doesn't make them evil now does it, so what's with the double standard of using force to get what you feel you deserve? When humans do it, we get the American Revolution, when goblins do it, we get an "evil plot".

[Renegade Paladin]

I find that many people are saying that the goblins are "wrong" for not using non-violant means to better their lot in life. I find this to be quite odd since they don't even have a stable nation other than those little villages who don't get attacked by self-righteous jerkasses trying to gather exp, so why exactly should the humans and the other "good" races care about the goblin's position, the humans and other PC races benefit out of goblin bloodshed, so why will they ever care for how many "decent" goblins they kill, especially when the divine standard of the universe's "good" and "evil" says that goblins are acceptable targets because they're created just for the sole purpose of dying. Aside from that, why is it so wrong that the Dark One raised an army? Every human nation has an army for self-defence and land security but that doesn't make them evil now does it, so what's with the double standard of using force to get what you feel you deserve? When humans do it, we get the American Revolution, when goblins do it, we get an "evil plot".
You'd be right, except for one small detail: Paladins killed every goblin present at Redcloak's ordination except Redcloak and Right-Eye (and not for lack of trying) and did not fall. Since paladins fall when they do evil, full stop no exceptions, then every goblin they killed must have been truly deserving of it in some way. Further, since paladins did not raid Right-Eye's village, we know that it cannot be simply because it is considered "good" to kill all goblins, because then they would make no distinction for Right-Eye. You can not like it all you want, but it stands: Paladins fall when they do evil, the massacre of innocents is evil, therefore the goblins at the ordination ceremony were not innocent.

[Warren Dew]

I find this to be quite odd since they don't even have a stable nation other than those little villages who don't get attacked by self-righteous jerkasses trying to gather exp, so why exactly should the humans and the other "good" races care about the goblin's position, the humans and other PC races benefit out of goblin bloodshed, so why will they ever care for how many "decent" goblins they kill, especially when the divine standard of the universe's "good" and "evil" says that goblins are acceptable targets because they're created just for the sole purpose of dying.

Wow. One more word in that sentence and you would have hit 100!

Edit: I'd give you a more sensible reply, but I honestly couldn't figure out what you were saying there. I'd be interested in a clarification.

[paladinofshojo]

Wow. One more word in that sentence and you would have hit 100!

Edit: I'd give you a more sensible reply, but I honestly couldn't figure out what you were saying there. I'd be interested in a clarification.



I'm saying how hipocratic it is to expect goblins to try "completely peaceful" means to get their fair share, especially when society already brands them as "acceptable targets" as cannon fodder........

[paladinofshojo]

You'd be right, except for one small detail: Paladins killed every goblin present at Redcloak's ordination except Redcloak and Right-Eye (and not for lack of trying) and did not fall. Since paladins fall when they do evil, full stop no exceptions, then every goblin they killed must have been truly deserving of it in some way. Further, since paladins did not raid Right-Eye's village, we know that it cannot be simply because it is considered "good" to kill all goblins, because then they would make no distinction for Right-Eye. You can not like it all you want, but it stands: Paladins fall when they do evil, the massacre of innocents is evil, therefore the goblins at the ordination ceremony were not innocent.



I sincerely doubt that all those children, women, and elderly goblins where "evil" I believe that the reason the paladins could wipe them all out and still retain their "paladinhood" was that their religion was "evil" and ergo their "evil". So the paladins didn't lose their paladinhood because each and every civilian goblin had done something evil. But because they worshipped someone who could become a threat to their dieties, and ergo them. So the reason they probably didn't lose their paladinhood was because they where trying to root out threats to their order. Similar to why the Nazi's began to kill Jews because they saw them as a political threat to their rule.

[B. Dandelion]

Thanks for the reply, Warren.. Much of what you say either makes sense and can't be disproved or is something I agree with anyway. So I cut those parts out.
It wasn't, though. The goblins, even according to Redcloak, had land. They had forests; the forests may have been "without fruit", but the goblins could have cut trees for lumber and traded it for food. They had plains; the plains might have been "without tillable soil", but such plains are good for a pastoral life herding cattle or sheep. The problem wasn't lack of land; it was lack of inclination to use the land productively, or conversely, the inclination to view things as a competition, leading to a preference for taking what others had over producing things oneself.
Now, the crayon portion of SoD is the one part of the book I'd suspect of containing an "unreliable narrator" (unlike David who perpetually states as fact that the ENTIRE book has one), so Redcloak and/or TDO might be self-serving here. But if the humanoids were created just to be slaughtered, it makes sense that the gods put them in areas where they just could not scrape by on the land's meager resources. There was specifically not the kind of land that would allow the humanoids to unite into populations of any significant size. They didn't just want the goblins to be poor, they wanted to ensure that they would be forced to target other civilizations for resources they just could not get on their own.

So I wouldn't blame laziness. A competition, though... The Dark One I can definitely see taking that attitude, especially once he found out about the truth and considering that his whole plan revolves around maneuvering himself into a position to have power over the other gods (dollars to donuts says "Saved Game" (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0456.html) is his favorite strip ever), and Redcloak literally expresses that sentiment. RC, though, is really just an appendage of the Dark One -- as his brother says, he hasn't had a life of his own since the day he put on the cloak. So naturally he echoes the sentiments of his god. The only other baseline we have for an "average" goblin is Right-Eye, who didn't see things as a competition and didn't mind being poor. He just wanted to get by, and he said that was what the regular goblins did too -- that his brother was so much a slave to his two masters that he had no idea what the average goblin wanted.

Then again, Right-Eye himself may well have been someone extraordinary.

Anyway, long story short, to some degree (on which YMMV) the goblins brought the mess down on their own heads, and they have the Dark One to thank for that. But laziness and hatred wasn't the only thing that kept them behind and I refuse to say the gods can take no responsibility for centuries of humanoid suffering. I don't think they meant it to be consciously cruel, but they thought of the humans, elves, and other races as their children and never took into consideration the kind of life they were inflicting on their later creations. All they cared about was advancing their OWN power through their clerics.


Don't get me wrong - when I say I think the paladins only killed goblins who detected as evil, I'm not arguing that Soon's strategy was the wisest course of action. Sometimes it can be better not to kill people, even if they are evil.
I just think there's something seriously wrong with a system that will allow five-year-olds to detect as an evil alignment, or for Paladins to be allowed to cut them down even if they do. I think Rich is making the arbitrary and sometimes contradictory notions of alignment an actual plot point. It's slightly allegorical -- in a gaming session, opinions on a matter may vary wildly between the participants, but the only person who gets the final word in on what constitutes "good" or "evil" is the DM. Here, it's the gods who make that call. They're very flawed gods, best evidenced by their accidental creation of the snarl, and they make some really bad calls at times. When Rich called the goblin massacres "damning" and basically says that Azure City and the 12 gods got what was coming to them WRT Redcloak it really confirmed this for me. The fact that paladins could go on a genocidal rampage and NOT fall doesn't prove that the goblins were really evil or the Paladins were doing good -- it just proves the gods thought so. People keep trying to come up with a justification for the whole bloody affair but really the only justification needed is that the guys in charge of writing the rules said "it shall be so."


In understanding the situation, though, I think it has to be kept in mind that the Sapphire Guard was not created to further the cause of peace. It was created to protect the Azure City gate.
Good point. It takes the irony meter up to 11 though when one considers that Redcloak would never have been a threat to their Gate if they hadn't massacred his village -- neither he nor TDO even suspected there were gates besides Lirian's.


It's to be noted that we don't hear about similar crusades from the northerners or the westerners; when we hear present day goblins complaining about the depredations of the humans, it's almost always Soon's paladins they're complaining about. I think Soon's "crusades" represent a far higher tempo of violence on the part of the humans than in the preceding centuries.
Yeah. Soon actually struck me as a somewhat self-righteous person who'd hesitate at nothing -- no deed, no sacrifice -- to achieve his end. Not necessarily bad traits, in fact they might have been exactly what was needed. But Girard and Dorukan plainly thought Soon completely disregarded Kraagor's life in order to close the final seal, which was what caused the Scribble Order to fall apart. If Soon thought genocide would save the Gates, he strikes me as the type who would order it.


At any rate, the Sapphire Guard has been destroyed; they're not an issue any more.
True, although Hinjo might conceivably start it up again. But he obviously knew nothing about Redcloak other than that he was a high-level caster on Xykon's side -- which I find weird given that Miko knew him on sight. Between his ignorance of the Dark One's plans and Shojo's elaborate web of deception, it seems he was kept pretty sheltered from the realities of the office he was due to inherit. Poor man.


If Redcloak is right about the gods being to blame, it's still not the humans' fault. A better course might be to convert to worshipping the same pantheon the humans worship, and pray for them to simply create more land.
I sort of got the impression they already DID worship the same gods as the humans. The Dark One made an issue of humans and goblins all being children of the gods. The goblins just had no idea what their actual status was in the eyes of their deities. Possibly this was one of the reasons the big purple dude was so pissed when he found out the truth -- what a horrible thing to find out. A fundamental betrayal, which is the word Redcloak uses when he narrates the crayon section.


If he had come alone and begged for fairness, he might have gotten some scraps.
I have an extreme amount of skepticism concerning the honor and generosity possessed by a group of people that would murder a person under a flag of parley. I doubt this scenario very much.


If he took a page from Xykon, embraced being evil, and sent an emissary to deliver an ultimatum - "cede land or be destroyed" - he might well have extracted concessions.
Odds are better on this one.


His failure was trying to do both at the same time.
I guess he didn't think he was going to get what he wanted without showing how strong his forces were, but didn't want them to think of him as the bad guy.


Ultimately, though, I think something along Right Eye's path will be more successful.
Yeah, agreed.

Renegade Paladin:
Okay, I'm sick of this. For those whining about Right-Eye's village having very little compared to the humans, I can only quote Belkar: Well duh!
Who in the world do you believe you are addressing? They had less than the humans. They had to work harder because the gods deliberately rigged the game against them. They were content with their situation, to live and love and enjoy the things life WAS willing to let fall into their lives. That's what made them admirable.

Whining about how the goblins should be given all of this for free is nonsense; you might as well whine about how it's not fair that people who've been around longer than you own land and you don't: That's the way it is, and if you want that level of success, you'd best be willing to earn it.
Thank you, sir, I haven't had my daily required dose of tired platitudes yet. Would you like to tell me the touching story of how your grandfather built up his savings by starting off as a boot polisher? Thus far there has been no one suggesting that there should be some kind of government-funded goblin welfare system. What is being said is that what the gods did when they created the humanoids was cruel and unfair. Please keep in mind that the gods do not want the goblins to be successful, they want them to be slaughtered so the beloved PC races can gain XP. To that end, the humanoids were only given barren lands in which they could barely scrape by and would have little choice but to turn to banditry -- making them wonderful little walking targets for clerics looking to gain levels. They were not owed riches, but they should have been owed at least a CHANCE to prosper and it was largely denied to them because they were really only around to get killed for XP, not to have meaningful and productive lives.


Right-Eye was doing extremely well for himself and his village given the timeframe and what he started with. He was content in his situation, which he had started out in at a pronounced disadvantage. He wasn't complaining. Even Redcloak started to realize that it wasn't so bad to have been given less in life when you had the love of your family and friends.


It was the Dark One's plan that screwed it up.
Well, Xykon, really. TDO couldn't interfere in matters directly, and his high priest was wavering and coming around to the idea of trying a different plan.


Not humans, not paladins, not adventurers. The Dark One and his Plan. The good of the goblin people indeed.
No, you can't let the Paladins off the hook for their massacres, even if TDO was a threat. He shouldn't have come up with the idea of blackmailing the gods, but if the other gods didn't like what he was telling his followers, why did they make him god of the goblins when he ascended? (Seems to me the gobs got screwed over twiceways -- their creators made them to be cannon fodder, and their later god didn't give a crap how many of them died as a result of his ambition so long as there was one guy in a red cloak willing to keep the dream alive.)

Have you read the commentary in War and XPs? Rich doesn't consider this a problem with just one source, just one person at fault. A whole lot of things came together and set into motion a continuing cycle of revenge, hatred, and violence. The Dark One bears some culpability and he should grow the hell up already and start doing right by his people instead of his own pride. But he's not the single and only reason the goblins had suffered. They were suffering from the moment they were created, because that was what they were created for.

You'd be right, except for one small detail: Paladins killed every goblin present at Redcloak's ordination except Redcloak and Right-Eye (and not for lack of trying) and did not fall. Since paladins fall when they do evil, full stop no exceptions, then every goblin they killed must have been truly deserving of it in some way. Further, since paladins did not raid Right-Eye's village, we know that it cannot be simply because it is considered "good" to kill all goblins, because then they would make no distinction for Right-Eye. You can not like it all you want, but it stands: Paladins fall when they do evil, the massacre of innocents is evil, therefore the goblins at the ordination ceremony were not innocent.
Again, War and XPs commentary. The fact that the gods sanctioned genocide meant that the Paladins did not fall. It didn't mean they were serving the greater good. Rich refers to their actions as "damning" and says that the destruction of Azure City was karma coming back around. When the gods get to call the shots on who is "good" and who is "evil," you're only finding out what the GODS think is "good" or "evil." And the OOTS gods are very, very fallible. It's their fault the Snarl exists in the first place!

[Renegade Paladin]

Renegade Paladin:
Who in the world do you believe you are addressing? They had less than the humans. They had to work harder because the gods deliberately rigged the game against them. They were content with their situation, to live and love and enjoy the things life WAS willing to let fall into their lives. That's what made them admirable.
I was addressing the general sum of arguments in the thread, since I didn't feel like going back and sifting through it a second time in order to write a small book's worth of individual responses. They had less than the humans because they started with less, and were by all indications rapidly gaining ground. Who goes from nothing to seriously being able to consider college funds for multiple children in a span of seventeen years? The source of the initial disparity is irrelevant; they were rapidly working their way up and from what we see they weren't about to stop. Whining about how unfair the gods were a couple millennia ago accomplishes nothing, and in fact is actively harmful, as we also clearly see throughout the storyline.

Thank you, sir, I haven't had my daily required dose of tired platitudes yet. Would you like to tell me the touching story of how your grandfather built up his savings by starting off as a boot polisher? The argument you are protesting is not the one that is occurring here.
Actually, my grandfather was a cattle trader, but that's neither here nor there. I, on the other hand, am starting with nothing, and if I sat around whining about how unfair it is and plotting means of stealing my way to wealth rather than going to my job, I'd be in real trouble. And it is occurring here, whether you realize it or not. Or if it isn't, then you're not making much sense; do you or do you not believe that land and prosperity should be given to the goblins? If yes, then that's exactly the argument you're making, and if no, what on Earth are you talking about?

He was content in his situation, which he had started out in at a pronounced disadvantage. He wasn't complaining. Even Redcloak started to realize that it wasn't so bad to have been given less in life when you had the love of your family and friends.
And he was absolutely right, particularly when being content with that and buckling down to make the most of what they had was making them more prosperous than most human peasants. Seriously, who was doing better, Right-Eye or the dirt farmers? And what Redcloak and company are doing now is absolutely wrong.

Oh, and there's that pesky "given" again. Make up your mind; do you want the goblins to simply be given prosperity, or not?

Well, Xykon, really. TDO couldn't interfere in matters directly, and his high priest was wavering and coming around to the idea of trying a different plan.
A valid point, but the Dark One's Plan was what set Xykon on that path in the first place.

No, you can't let the Paladins off the hook for their massacres, even if TDO was a threat. He shouldn't have come up with the idea of blackmailing the gods, but if the other gods didn't like what he was telling his followers, why did they make him god of the goblins when he ascended? (Seems to me the gobs got screwed over twiceways -- their creators made them to be cannon fodder, and their later god didn't give a crap how many of them died as a result of his ambition so long as there was one guy in a red cloak willing to keep the dream alive.)
I wasn't; I was simply pointing out that no paladins attacked Right-Eye's village, because it wasn't a threat to the Gates. As for what we see, the paladins attacked a religious ceremony of the Dark One. There was no village in evidence, unless you contend that they have villages without buildings or even any visible campsites. All the rest we hear about it comes through the mouth of Redcloak trying to convince Xykon, and if you don't realize that he has an agenda in his telling, then I don't know what to say.

Have you read the commentary in War and XPs? Rich doesn't consider this a problem with just one source, just one person at fault. A whole lot of things came together and set into motion a continuing cycle of revenge, hatred, and violence. The Dark One bears some culpability and he should grow the hell up already and start doing right by his people instead of his own pride. But he's not the single and only reason the goblins had suffered. They were suffering from the moment they were created, because that was what they were created for.
Yes, I just re-read it last night, actually. Of course the problem has more than one source, but that's not the question, is it? Observe the title of the thread: "Are the Dark One and his allies really evil?" The answer is a resounding yes. Moving on.

Again, War and XPs commentary. The fact that the gods sanctioned genocide meant that the Paladins did not fall. It didn't mean they were serving the greater good. Rich refers to their actions as "damning" and says that the destruction of Azure City was karma coming back around. When the gods get to call the shots on who is "good" and who is "evil," you're only finding out what the GODS think is "good" or "evil." And the OOTS gods are very, very fallible. It's their fault the Snarl exists in the first place!
The gods don't get to call the shots on that, though, because if they did, none of the gods would be evil because they'd define what they want as good! In baseline D&D and in every setting I'm aware of, the alignment axes are independent of the deities' opinions (and paladins fall based on alignment regardless of whether their god wants them to or not), and gods fall where they do on it based on their ethos and behavior; their ethos and behaviors do not define the alignments. I see no reason to believe this is different in the OotSverse.

[B. Dandelion]

Renegade Paladin, again:

I was addressing the general sum of arguments in the thread, since I didn't feel like going back and sifting through it a second time in order to write a small book's worth of individual responses. They had less than the humans because they started with less, and were by all indications rapidly gaining ground. Who goes from nothing to seriously being able to consider college funds for multiple children in a span of seventeen years? The source of the initial disparity is irrelevant; they were rapidly working their way up and from what we see they weren't about to stop. Whining about how unfair the gods were a couple millennia ago accomplishes nothing, and in fact is actively harmful, as we also clearly see throughout the storyline.
I reserve the term "whining" for people here who like to complain about Rich being late with strips and writing plots they don't agree with -- not people discussing the story. And, uh. The gods were not just unfair when the humanoids were first created. It's not that the goblins just didn't get as much. It's that they were specifically not supposed to prosper. They were not put on the earth to have meaningful, productive lives, they were there to get cut down for XP. That Azure City's Paladins could have their disgusting campaigns condoned by the gods even 1000 years later shows that nothing had changed.


Actually, my grandfather was a cattle trader, but that's neither here nor there.
Yes, how delightful, my grandfather was an Irish Catholic WWII vet who beat, terrorized, and sexually assaulted his wife and children. He only died a few weeks ago, and the fact that he outlived his wife and several of his children strikes me as a gross miscarriage of justice. Aren't family histories fun?


I, on the other hand, am starting with nothing, and if I sat around whining about how unfair it is and plotting means of stealing my way to wealth rather than going to my job, I'd be in real trouble. And it is occurring here, whether you realize it or not. Or if it isn't, then you're not making much sense; do you or do you not believe that land and prosperity should be given to the goblins? If yes, then that's exactly the argument you're making, and if no, what on Earth are you talking about?
You are narrowly focused on the land issue and are missing the overall point. Land was what the Dark One wanted when he gathered his army, but the real problem -- as he discovered -- wasn't just that his people weren't granted automatic prosperity or even the same level playing field as the humans, it's that they weren't taken into consideration at all as sentient beings with goals, hopes, loves, and so on. The humanoids were specifically made to suffer and die for the benefit of the PC races, who were the only "people" of measure in the eyes of the gods, and later, in the eyes of one another. That is the injustice which continues to this day and we've seen multiple examples of. We especially see it with contrast to Roy, who'll go on record as saying he will never kill somebody just because it's slightly more convenient than talking to them. That puts him at odds with the Paladin in his group. The Paladin! The Paladin would have gotten into no trouble at all for slaughtering peaceful Orcs who harmed no one and paid for the goods they wanted, and was in fact pissed off at Roy for not letting him do exactly that.


And he was absolutely right, particularly when being content with that and buckling down to make the most of what they had was making them more prosperous than most human peasants. Seriously, who was doing better, Right-Eye or the dirt farmers? And what Redcloak and company are doing now is absolutely wrong.
Oh give me a break. You're going to use the one specific example of humans living in poverty, compare it to Right-Eye's relative success, and say that it negates the overwhelming amount of evidence showing that it's much more often the other way around? And what Redcloak is doing is wrong, but he's doing it for the right reasons. I say I sympathize with him, not condone his evil actions.


Oh, and there's that pesky "given" again. Make up your mind; do you want the goblins to simply be given prosperity, or not?
Quit being deliberately obtuse. He was given less in life by being a member of a race that existed only to be killed, and growing up in poverty and constant terror. I didn't say he should have wealth and prosperity rained upon his head, I said it's unfair that his people seldom have a chance to even work for prosperity because the gods specifically don't want them to succeed. They were afraid that if the humanoids became too self-reliant and successful, there was a chance they might conquer the other races, and they couldn't have that. So they give their PC worshipers carte blanche to wipe out the humanoids whenever they see fit. I have this radical notion that goblins should be "given" the right to exist as people and not somebody else's chance to use their great cleave feat. Redcloak, you may note, is actually pretty smart and while he has his faults, laziness isn't one of them. If he hadn't seen everyone he'd ever known and loved cut down before his eyes for reasons he didn't even understand, he would have just worked to promote his little community and maybe married the girl in the hut next door, had kids, grown up and died leaving his village a little bit better off than it had been before.

Instead he's a fanatic who hates humans with a passion, works feverishly on a plan that he knows full well might be the doom of them all, and has been turned into little more than the slave of an undead psychopath whose atrocities disgust even HIM.


A valid point, but the Dark One's Plan was what set Xykon on that path in the first place.
And the humans murdered the Dark One, who came up with the plan in retaliation. We can do this all day if you want.


I wasn't; I was simply pointing out that no paladins attacked Right-Eye's village, because it wasn't a threat to the Gates.
Considering how broadly they constituted the word "threat," it may well have been only a matter of time.


As for what we see, the paladins attacked a religious ceremony of the Dark One. There was no village in evidence, unless you contend that they have villages without buildings or even any visible campsites.
We didn't see them, but there were huts. When RC joins his family after being ordained and is embarrassed by his mother's PDA, she asks who he is afraid will see and Right-Eye, snickering, points over at a young goblin girl and says she's the girl in the hut next door that Redcloak has a crush on. Maybe Rich thought drawing in all the huts would have made the scene look cluttered, or maybe they were slightly off-site, but there definitely was a village.


All the rest we hear about it comes through the mouth of Redcloak trying to convince Xykon, and if you don't realize that he has an agenda in his telling, then I don't know what to say.
Redcloak has reason to lie to Xykon, but Xykon couldn't care less how many goblins the Paladins have slaughtered so there wouldn't have been any point. And it's not just Xykon he talks to -- he gives a speech to several assembled goblins who were about to hit the Paladin fort and says they've all lost family to the crusades. The commentary in War and XPs specifically says the Paladins wiped out villages. There's nothing about only targeting the Dark One's devotees, they were targeting goblins, period.


Yes, I just re-read it last night, actually. Of course the problem has more than one source, but that's not the question, is it? Observe the title of the thread: "Are the Dark One and his allies really evil?" The answer is a resounding yes. Moving on.
Good grief have you never had a conversation that expanded on to several closely related topics? We're on page three of this discussion thread on my settings, if the only thing that was being discussed was the title the thread would have been over with one post in three letters.


The gods don't get to call the shots on that, though, because if they did, none of the gods would be evil because they'd define what they want as good!
That doesn't necessarily follow. We see evil beings who think of themselves as good (like Redcloak and TDO), but we also see plenty of evil beings who are delighted to revel in their evil nature (like Xykon, Nale, and Sabine).


In baseline D&D and in every setting I'm aware of, the alignment axes are independent of the deities' opinions (and paladins fall based on alignment regardless of whether their god wants them to or not), and gods fall where they do on it based on their ethos and behavior; their ethos and behaviors do not define the alignments. I see no reason to believe this is different in the OotSverse.
This is what I find so irritating with some of you gamers: you insist that if it isn't in the Players Handbook it can't possibly be the case in OOTS, despite the fact that Rich tears up the rules to make confetti parades whenever he damn well feels like it. This isn't a game, it's a story that mostly follows the D&D template and then doesn't if it fits the plot better or is funnier. Chlorine Elementals? Symbol of Insanity on a bouncy ball?

But, no, you continually insist that the rules are always the same and you and the people who think like you are thus are endlessly justifying the Paladin's attacks by insisting that those five-year-old goblin children had richly earned a sword thrust through their bellies. What part of "damning" do you not understand to mean "evil?" I am really sick and tired of arguing with people who turn themselves into a god damn caricature (http://redwing.hutman.net/~mreed/warriorshtm/ferouscranus.htm) over this issue, so if the Word of God (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WordOfGod) telling you that "the Twelve Gods may have sanctioned the paladins' massacres, but even they can't stop Karma from kicking them in their divine asses once in a while" doesn't make it clear to you what is going on, then certainly nothing I can say will sway you.

[Warren Dew]

I sincerely doubt that all those children, women, and elderly goblins where "evil"

Evil people don't always become nonevil just by getting older. Look at Xykon if you want an example.

B. Dandelion:

Thanks for the reply, Warren..
Much of what you say either makes sense and can't be disproved or is something I agree with anyway. So I cut those parts out.

That's fair. I'm continuing mostly because it's an interesting discussion, not because of any significant disagreement.


Now, the crayon portion of SoD is the one part of the book I'd suspect of containing an "unreliable narrator" (unlike David who perpetually states as fact that the ENTIRE book has one), so Redcloak and/or TDO might be self-serving here. But if the humanoids were created just to be slaughtered, it makes sense that the gods put them in areas where they just could not scrape by on the land's meager resources. There was specifically not the kind of land that would allow the humanoids to unite into populations of any significant size. They didn't just want the goblins to be poor, they wanted to ensure that they would be forced to target other civilizations for resources they just could not get on their own.

I think you are giving the gods too much credit here. Thor definitely doesn't strike me as that thoughtful. Granted other gods might be different, but tiger and dog don't seem very sophisticated either. I think "we'll make them evil so they'll never even consider settling down peacefully" is more their speed.


So I wouldn't blame laziness.

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say they were lazy, and I'm sorry if I came across as doing so.

There are different ways of being hard working. I'm saying I don't think most of them are inclined to take the peaceful route - becoming woodcutters if their trees don't bear fruit, for example. I think when Redcloak says "forests without fruit", that's illustrative: it means that he doesn't think about the other peaceful uses that forests could be put to. I would agree that the goblins might work very hard at raiding or soldiering or working with dark powers, for example - certainly the hobgoblins are very good soldiers.


The only other baseline we have for an "average" goblin is Right-Eye, who didn't see things as a competition and didn't mind being poor. He just wanted to get by, and he said that was what the regular goblins did too -- that his brother was so much a slave to his two masters that he had no idea what the average goblin wanted.

Then again, Right-Eye himself may well have been someone extraordinary.

I think it's fairly clear that he was extraordinary, at least by that point. Even then, he didn't think of settling down and leading a peaceful life by himself. That only happened after he gave Eugene a chance to fulfill Eugene's blood oath, and Eugene said the oath was less important than raising a family - and suggested that Right Eye do the same. It still probably took Eugene's "When you're dead, you're never going to look back on your life and say, 'Darn, I didn't spend enough time on petty revenge'" to get Right Eye to take the advice.

We do have one other view of a goblin family (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0093.html) which may be more typical. Here we see the father making his teenager drink the blood of the innocent. I really think the gods just set it up so that "peaceful" would not be the kind of thing that came easily to the goblin mind.


Anyway, long story short, to some degree (on which YMMV) the goblins brought the mess down on their own heads, and they have the Dark One to thank for that. But laziness and hatred wasn't the only thing that kept them behind and I refuse to say the gods can take no responsibility for centuries of humanoid suffering.

I definitely agree that the gods are responsible for the situation. That's part of why I think it's unreasonable - "unfair", even, not that that's relevant - for the Dark One and his goblins to take it out on the humans.

I do think one has to be a little bit careful here. I don't think many people would blame a gamesmaster for populating "usually evil" goblins for the player characters to kill and putting them on substandard land. I think very few would blame Rich for having written this into his story. We have to keep in mind that the humans and humanoids in this story may bear the same relation to the gods, their creators, as the characters in a story bear to their author. Granted this gets complex with two levels of authorship.


I just think there's something seriously wrong with a system that will allow five-year-olds to detect as an evil alignment

Even if they're drinking blood of innocents like we drink orange juice?

More mundanely, as a child, and now again as a parent, I do think there's sometimes a big difference between good children and bad children, and I think that the worst children I've met are as close to "evil" as the worst adults I've met. That's certainly not close enough to justify killing them - either the adults or the children - but in a D&D style world where alignments are much more extreme? I wouldn't rule it out.

To give a more specific example, I think Haley would have been perfectly justified in using weapons against the goblin child in strip 100 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0100.html), even though it would likely have been lethal.


I think Rich is making the arbitrary and sometimes contradictory notions of alignment an actual plot point. It's slightly allegorical -- in a gaming session, opinions on a matter may vary wildly between the participants, but the only person who gets the final word in on what constitutes "good" or "evil" is the DM. Here, it's the gods who make that call.

I think it's actually the author that makes that call here.


When Rich called the goblin massacres "damning" and basically says that Azure City and the 12 gods got what was coming to them WRT Redcloak it really confirmed this for me.

I think you may be reading more into that passage than is actually there. I don't remember Rich characterizing the Sapphire Guard as genocidal; one can wipe out whole villages and still be far from genocide. In World War 2, FDR and the Allies' fire bombings of Dresden and Truman's decisions to wipe out Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be questionable, but they weren't genocide, and they were a lot more than Soon's or Shojo's paladins are doing.

I do agree wiping out villages, or cities, is heavy handed.


Yeah. Soon actually struck me as a somewhat self-righteous person who'd hesitate at nothing -- no deed, no sacrifice -- to achieve his end. Not necessarily bad traits, in fact they might have been exactly what was needed. But Girard and Dorukan plainly thought Soon completely disregarded Kraagor's life in order to close the final seal, which was what caused the Scribble Order to fall apart.

Well, Dorukan might have thought so - or he might just have been responding hotly to a perceived insult of the power of magic. He would have had to be pretty irrational to believe it fully, though, since it seems to have been Dorukan himself who cast the spell that killed Kraagor. Like Kraagor, Soon was standing close enough to the rift to be in danger, and unlike Kraagor, Dorukan and the others were not.


If Soon thought genocide would save the Gates, he strikes me as the type who would order it.

Possible. However, recall that the attack that killed Redcloak's parents happened more than a generation after Soon turned the Sapphire Guard over to Shojo's father - more than a decade into Shojo's own reign, if I remember correctly.

Given that Shojo was willing to ignore the paladins' oath against investigating the other gates, I think it's likely that Shojo was also more willing to expand the use of the paladins beyond just what was necessary to protect the gates - for example by starting a pogrom against the Dark One's goblins.

Soon probably had the military expertise to protect the gate with the minimum amount of force necessary, while Shojo did not. Shojo probably was likely also willing to expend more of the paladins' lives on such attacks than Soon would have, given Shojo's cavalier attitude toward the paladins. If you're looking for a human to blame here, I think Shojo is probably your man.


True, although Hinjo might conceivably start it up again. But he obviously knew nothing about Redcloak other than that he was a high-level caster on Xykon's side -- which I find weird given that Miko knew him on sight.

I'm not disagreeing, but what leads you to believe this?


I sort of got the impression they already DID worship the same gods as the humans.

Good point. Presumably most of them, being evil, worshipped the evil ones, which would explain why the evil ones were more receptive to the Dark One after he became a god.

[B. Dandelion]

Warren:
That's fair. I'm continuing mostly because it's an interesting discussion, not because of any significant disagreement.
I'm glad you think so. I've been trying to think of a non-cheesy way to say I've really been enjoying your responses -- I don't agree with every thing you say, but you come to your conclusions logically, and you're very level-headed. I hadn't even thought of some of the things you've been bringing up -- the Dark One's appeal to the human leaders reads a whole lot different to me now that you pointed out that the "sharing" he's talking about was almost certainly the sharing he expected the humans to dish out and not some kind of mutual exchange or trade. It makes much more sense that a guy like THAT would turn into a "petty and spiteful" god.


I think you are giving the gods too much credit here. Thor definitely doesn't strike me as that thoughtful. Granted other gods might be different, but tiger and dog don't seem very sophisticated either. I think "we'll make them evil so they'll never even consider settling down peacefully" is more their speed.
I think that interpretation makes sense too. The reason I thought it might be otherwise is Redcloak's narration in the admittedly suspect crayon version of events. "They gave their new creations every geographic, economic, and even physical disadvantage they could think of to ensure that they would cling to the outskirts of other civilizations in their hovels and act as raiders and brigands" (Emphasis mine.) So were they made intrinsically evil or designed to be driven to evil? To be honest I can't really make heads or tails of it, because they both make sense to me. I think I like Redcloak's suggestion a little bit more, because it means the goblins who are evil are the ones that chose to go bad and not some arbitrary percentage number of folk who are just born that way, and it allows for the possibility of them choosing to go good once peaceful settlements started to come up. But if the gods are making, say, 75% of goblins just born evil, a solution would seem to be harder to find.


I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say they were lazy, and I'm sorry if I came across as doing so.
It's quite all right -- I know I often come across as a goblin due to my belligerent posting style, but I'm actually human and not offended at all. :smallamused:


There are different ways of being hard working. I'm saying I don't think most of them are inclined to take the peaceful route - becoming woodcutters if their trees don't bear fruit, for example. I think when Redcloak says "forests without fruit", that's illustrative: it means that he doesn't think about the other peaceful uses that forests could be put to. I would agree that the goblins might work very hard at raiding or soldiering or working with dark powers, for example - certainly the hobgoblins are very good soldiers.
Would you think it would perhaps be fair to phrase that as them not wanting to get their hands dirty with menial tasks, or that they thought such work was degrading?


I think it's fairly clear that he was extraordinary, at least by that point. Even then, he didn't think of settling down and leading a peaceful life by himself. That only happened after he gave Eugene a chance to fulfill Eugene's blood oath, and Eugene said the oath was less important than raising a family - and suggested that Right Eye do the same. It still probably took Eugene's "When you're dead, you're never going to look back on your life and say, 'Darn, I didn't spend enough time on petty revenge'" to get Right Eye to take the advice.
That's got to be one of the best lines in the book. It's beautiful advice for Right-Eye but does it ever come back to haunt Eugene.


We do have one other view of a goblin family (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0093.html) which may be more typical. Here we see the father making his teenager drink the blood of the innocent. I really think the gods just set it up so that "peaceful" would not be the kind of thing that came easily to the goblin mind.
I hope you won't take this as a cop-out, but I consider much of the Dorukan's dungeon segment of the plot somewhat loose with continuity and don't take that scene seriously. (The big-time example is V's reaction to Unholy Blight.) For one thing, the kid says his dad is the priest of some big demon prince guy. The priest. We never hear of this deity again, but Redcloak is said to be high priest of his evil goblin deity some time after Elan pushes the self-destruct button. SoD declares the Dark One the god of all goblins "in a pantheon of one," so who the heck is this kid's dad the high priest of, and why is Redcloak letting some heathen run around spreading heresy?

Second, the blood drinking -- never mentioned in SoD, or for that matter ever again. The only thing that comes CLOSE is Xykon's attempt to make tMitD eat babies. The preferred goblin snack (or hobgoblin snack at any rate) seems to have been set as Gouda.

I write it off as a joke. The early goblins were generically evil in the most obvious way possible so as to have a joke about rebelling goblin teenagers ticking off their parents by adopting a "good" alignment, and then deciding it was just a phase.


I definitely agree that the gods are responsible for the situation. That's part of why I think it's unreasonable - "unfair", even, not that that's relevant - for the Dark One and his goblins to take it out on the humans.
Yeah. Like I've said, the humans don't OWE the goblins anything and they didn't write the rules. The assorted leaders were still total bastards for murdering the Dark One even though he was a total bastard too. I'm not quite sure how they should have reacted, just not the way they did. Actually, though, the Dark One doesn't seem to have much to say on the topic of humans except to advise his people to stay away because they're "treacherous."


I do think one has to be a little bit careful here. I don't think many people would blame a gamesmaster for populating "usually evil" goblins for the player characters to kill and putting them on substandard land. I think very few would blame Rich for having written this into his story. We have to keep in mind that the humans and humanoids in this story may bear the same relation to the gods, their creators, as the characters in a story bear to their author. Granted this gets complex with two levels of authorship.
No, few people would blame a person for writing a campaign or a novel that contained "usually evil" races. The whole OOTS story, the Snarl and the gods and the goblins... it's all something that is harmless on paper, but this story has actually come alive and certain actors are displeased with their roles. To some extent the gods were just naive. To another extent that isn't really a justification, because they weren't playing make-believe. It does raise the question: do you need "usually evil" races? How can you realistically imagine such a thing? Our heroes need villains to oppose and slay, but monsters that have some kind of intrinsic good or evil percentage... it's nonsensical, creatures don't evolve over time to fill some "good" or "evil" niche. Individuals do good or evil for their own personal reasons for which they have justification, that's where conflict happens in real life. Is the story really improved by having hordes of nameless mooks to slay before they can do their evil that is evil because they are evil?

Even if they're drinking blood of innocents like we drink orange juice?
a) if their mother sat it down in a glass for them with the rest of breakfast, then probably not
b) if they're doing it on their own they might just be crazy, or feral. Predatory instincts are not evil in and of themselves
c) having a hard time picturing a five-year-old having both the malice to do harm and the full cognizance of what it means. If they did, then either they need serious counseling or maybe they really are evil. But they would be the exception. Of course the existence of "usually evil" races throws a wrench into these gears, but even the average "usually evil" five-year-old may not do evil even while understanding it, they merely emulate those around them.


More mundanely, as a child, and now again as a parent, I do think there's sometimes a big difference between good children and bad children, and I think that the worst children I've met are as close to "evil" as the worst adults I've met. That's certainly not close enough to justify killing them - either the adults or the children - but in a D&D style world where alignments are much more extreme? I wouldn't rule it out.
Can you clarify this for me a bit? when you say "in a D&D style world where alignments are much more extreme," do you mean in a world where absolutely everyone has an alignment and it has to be in one of nine neat little boxes, or do you mean in a fantasy setting where the good guys are Big Damn Heroes and the bad guys are raging genocidal maniacs?

In case a, probably still wouldn't be happy with little kids winding up with an "evil" alignment. If there were more shades of gray, it would be helpful to have some kind of "bratty" alignment in between neutral and evil that we could use. (Some time back, I wrote this linear morality scale from 1-perfect good to 15-perfect evil and tried to fit my favorite fictional characters in. A bunch of personality traits kept popping up again and again in characters that were somewhat equivalently evil. I don't think most bratty kids would have progressed past nine on my list, which would actually make them evil... barely, just one number away from neutral. Not so far gone that they were a lost cause. A kid getting higher than that would be pretty scary.)

In case b, in the rare exception that their minds are developed enough to understand what it is they are doing and relish causing people misery, then I guess detect evil would be appropriate.


To give a more specific example, I think Haley would have been perfectly justified in using weapons against the goblin child in strip 100 (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0100.html), even though it would likely have been lethal.
You think she would have been justified in killing him after she'd escaped, or in order to escape? I think it would have been overkill to murder him after escaping, but killing him to get free... I wouldn't fault her on it. Besides, I was really talking about children, not teenagers so much. I'm not sure where I'd set the age barrier exactly -- probably differs from person to person, I guess I'd hazard around 14 -- but he demonstrated that he knew what he was doing, so he's morally culpable, so he's evil.


I think it's actually the author that makes that call here.
Yes, that is so. However. I believe Rich has one moral code and he is giving the gods another one, with which he sometimes disagrees. So the gods are making calls on good and evil which look plainly hypocritical from time to time.


I think you may be reading more into that passage than is actually there.
::shrugs::


I don't remember Rich characterizing the Sapphire Guard as genocidal; one can wipe out whole villages and still be far from genocide.
No, he did not use that precise word. He said there were "massacres" and paladins "exterminated entire villages."


In World War 2, FDR and the Allies' fire bombings of Dresden and Truman's decisions to wipe out Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be questionable, but they weren't genocide, and they were a lot more than Soon's or Shojo's paladins are doing.
We don't have to call it genocide if you object to the word, but the paladin campaign went on for decades. How much of a body count do you need before you start calling it unacceptable? In the paladins' case it was also an indiscriminate slaughter when they had to personally chase down and butcher each and every humanoid, and without flinching they cut off old women's heads and disemboweled little children. If we can't call it genocide, maybe we should call it closer to terrorism.


I do agree wiping out villages, or cities, is heavy handed.
I was going to go with EVIL, myself.


Well, Dorukan might have thought so - or he might just have been responding hotly to a perceived insult of the power of magic. He would have had to be pretty irrational to believe it fully, though, since it seems to have been Dorukan himself who cast the spell that killed Kraagor. Like Kraagor, Soon was standing close enough to the rift to be in danger, and unlike Kraagor, Dorukan and the others were not.
I'm not sure how all the spell-flinging went down, you're right that it was Soon and Kraagor by the rift (and I'm certain Soon would have found it a worthy cause to die himself sealing the rift, Kraagor probably the same way) with Dorukan and Lirian off to the side. It's the angry look Girard gives Soon as Serini weeps and Lirian says Kraagor's sacrifice won't be forgotten that makes me think something happened which wasn't exactly shown. Soon himself looks sort of shell-shocked. Later we have the argument which goes from Dorukan talking about magic, to Soon talking about honor, to Girard sneering at said honor, and then the accusations flying about not caring about anything except power or vengeance.


Possible. However, recall that the attack that killed Redcloak's parents happened more than a generation after Soon turned the Sapphire Guard over to Shojo's father - more than a decade into Shojo's own reign, if I remember correctly.

Given that Shojo was willing to ignore the paladins' oath against investigating the other gates, I think it's likely that Shojo was also more willing to expand the use of the paladins beyond just what was necessary to protect the gates - for example by starting a pogrom against the Dark One's goblins.

Soon probably had the military expertise to protect the gate with the minimum amount of force necessary, while Shojo did not. Shojo probably was likely also willing to expend more of the paladins' lives on such attacks than Soon would have, given Shojo's cavalier attitude toward the paladins. If you're looking for a human to blame here, I think Shojo is probably your man.
Yeah, actually that had occurred to me as well -- he was definitely an ends-justify-means type, but Soon recognized the Crimson Mantle for what it was the minute he saw Redcloak, and in the crayon story, Shojo tells of the "crusades" starting just after Soon founded the Sapphire Guard. The picture has some paladins killing off goblins, including a former Crimson Mantle, apparently. And during the attack on his village, Redcloak asks the current Crimson Mantle what is going on and he replies that they had come for him, just as they came for his master and the one before. Even 35 years ago, the purges had been going on for decades.


I'm not disagreeing, but what leads you to believe this?
On the boat, when they were waiting for Haley and Belkar to come back with Roy's corpse, Hinjo got it into his head to improve his chances of reclaiming the city by taking out some of Xykon's higher-level characters. So he declared his intention of going after the goblin cleric. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0479.html)

The lone goblin in a sea of hobgoblins. Who happens to be wearing a red cloak. And is obviously a high-level priest. He assigns no particular value to this at all, jumps off the ship to attack Redcloak "in the name of your crimes against my city" -- and of course nearly gets wiped out in one shot. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0480.html) I think he'd have been able to put two and two together if he'd known anything about the Crimson Mantle, but he only referred to him as a goblin, only took issue with his attack on Azure City, and badly underestimated just how high a level he was.


Good point. Presumably most of them, being evil, worshipped the evil ones, which would explain why the evil ones were more receptive to the Dark One after he became a god.
It does fit together. They also mention the elves raised their own gods and that they had been accepted, maybe they were mostly good and the evil side wanted a few more players to round out the roster.

[hamishspence]

I don't think this is necromancy, its only been a couple of weeks.

There is a way of seeing what the Dark one was trying to do whne he was alive, as wrong: the Objectivist way. Runs as follows:

No amount of "we need the extra land to survive and prosper" justifies demanding it as a gift. The only right way to get land is to pay for it- asking people to give it, with the implicit threat of a big army, is extortion, even if the threat is not voiced.

Which doesn't justify assassination, however, it does say, that by making the thinly veiled demand, the Dark one was in the wrong.

Now the right way, would have been to offer something as payment for the land. Whether it is the service of goblins as labourers or soldiers at very low price, or some other payment, doesn't matter, but morally, land must be paid for.

Now you may or may not agree with this perspective, but it does show, that it isn't all one-sided.

[Barachiel]

Not to belabor the obvious, but Redcloak got his information from a very biased deity. While I don't doubt some parts of his story are true, maybe even all of it, I've no doubt that its being told with a very large goblinoid slant. Like do you HONESTLY expect me to believe, the Dark One united the goblin peoples into an enormous army... to use it as a deterrent go make a peaceful bargain at the negotiating table? Umm, sorry, Im' not buying it. Humans may have assassinated him, but I'm betting the terms he laid down to them were nowhere NEAR as benevolent sounding as Redcloak's little flashback implied. At the end of the saga, I'm expecting RC to find out just what a vile bastard his god is and that he's wasted all this time and the lives of his family to serve a deity that doesn't give a rats ass about the goblin people, he just wants revenge.

[B. Dandelion]

Which doesn't justify assassination, however, it does say, that by making the thinly veiled demand, the Dark one was in the wrong.

Now the right way, would have been to offer something as payment for the land. Whether it is the service of goblins as labourers or soldiers at very low price, or some other payment, doesn't matter, but morally, land must be paid for.

Now you may or may not agree with this perspective, but it does show, that it isn't all one-sided.
I'm not exactly sure what you're going for with this talk of "Objectivism." The Dark One was in the wrong to attempt extortion. The humans were in the wrong to assassinate him. The goblins should not have retaliated the way they did, and the humans shouldn't have turned around and tried to drive off the humanoids whenever they got too settled. The Dark One is in the wrong to try and harness the rifts, but the humans were in the wrong to exterminate entire villages of humanoids. Nobody has been willing to call off the endless cycle of repaying violence with violence. I don't think the point is to find one group or the other more culpable.


Not to belabor the obvious, but Redcloak got his information from a very biased deity.
And the other deities are models of honesty and forthrightness? Even the openly evil ones?


While I don't doubt some parts of his story are true, maybe even all of it, I've no doubt that its being told with a very large goblinoid slant. Like do you HONESTLY expect me to believe, the Dark One united the goblin peoples into an enormous army... to use it as a deterrent go make a peaceful bargain at the negotiating table?
Yes, actually. It doesn't actually make the Dark One look all that great, it makes him look somewhat hypocritical, gathering an army and then wanting to discuss "peacefully" matters of "fairness." It's like a guy cornering you in an alleyway with a loaded gun and a cheerful smile, asking you if you really thought it was fair that you had a wallet full of money and he had not a dime to his name.


Umm, sorry, Im' not buying it. Humans may have assassinated him, but I'm betting the terms he laid down to them were nowhere NEAR as benevolent sounding as Redcloak's little flashback implied.
What terms were laid out in the flashback? He didn't even get that far.


At the end of the saga, I'm expecting RC to find out just what a vile bastard his god is and that he's wasted all this time and the lives of his family to serve a deity that doesn't give a rats ass about the goblin people, he just wants revenge.
I'd be down with that.

[Barachiel]

Actually yes he did. I don't have the book handy atm, but I just re-read them and the Dark One was portrayed as being verbose, well spoken, and almost genteel, as he politely asked them each to cede land to the goblinoid peoples.

MAYBE if he'd been angry or aggressive or ANYTHING at all like a warlod instead of nice old country gentleman asking his neighbors for a pitcher of iced tea, I might have bought it, but that panel made it clear to me, that RC was being fed a line of "oh look at us, we're so abused, i gave them the hand of friendship and they stabbed me in the back for it."

Sorry, not buying it, not till someone OTHER than the Dark One's Chosen tells the story. EVERYONE biases a tale to their side. The gods, the paladins, EVERYONE. I'm not going to assume the Dark One is the only totally honest one fo the bunch just because he has a better sob story. Truth is typically found by hearing all sides, figuring out the common elements, and seeing where each side is putting their own view of the world into events and finding the middle ground.

[duckie]

In a way, Redcloak is kinda like Magneto, only for Goblins.

That was the smartest thing anyone has said in the last few threads!
I propose a new thread to discuss Magneto/Redcloak similarities.

[B. Dandelion]

Actually yes he did. I don't have the book handy atm, but I just re-read them and the Dark One was portrayed as being verbose, well spoken, and almost genteel, as he politely asked them each to cede land to the goblinoid peoples.
How much land, and where? Would he have been willing to give up anything in return? That's what I mean by terms. "We'd like some land" is too unspecific to qualify.


MAYBE if he'd been angry or aggressive or ANYTHING at all like a warlod instead of nice old country gentleman asking his neighbors for a pitcher of iced tea, I might have bought it, but that panel made it clear to me, that RC was being fed a line of "oh look at us, we're so abused, i gave them the hand of friendship and they stabbed me in the back for it."
The thing about having "the greatest military force that the Northern continent had ever seen" at your back is that you don't have to take an angry or aggressive approach -- your army does that part of the talking for you. And even so, the Dark One wasn't exactly subtle. "Yes, we could kill you all, but we don't want to. We would like to discuss some issues of "fairness," however..."


Sorry, not buying it, not till someone OTHER than the Dark One's Chosen tells the story. EVERYONE biases a tale to their side. The gods, the paladins, EVERYONE. I'm not going to assume the Dark One is the only totally honest one fo the bunch just because he has a better sob story.
So you consider Shojo's version of the crayon story to be equally suspect? I didn't find that the crayon stories really contradicted one another, but as I said to Warren, the crayon section of SoD is the only part I'd suspect of containing the unreliable narrator. But nothing's contradicted it thus far, so I regard the information given as something that should be taken with a grain of salt, not something that should be considered a complete fabrication from start to finish.

[hamishspence]

Its a rather unusual philsophy that came up in the sixties, that places self-interest high, and altruism lower, and says most evil comes from forcing people to be altruistic.

While D&D morality, at least by Exalted Deeds, reverses this, there are similarities on certain issues. No compromise with evil being one: stealing being considered evil (in Vile Darkness) another. Some posters have quoted objectivist-type authors like Terry Goodkind as proof that mercy is not good, or that killing bad guys is never evil. It seems they haven't read book closely.

The point to be made is, when two diametrically different philosophies agree on certain points, those points are worth considering.

Exalted Deeds may expect players to be uber-good, and place a high value on altruism, but it does place altruism and selfishness in a certain context-

a selfish motive for a normally good deed makes it neutral, but not evil.
an altruistic motive "good motive" cannot turn an evil deed into a neutral one.

A lot of people keep saying: Yes it can. Thats not what book says in 3.5, and if you go back to 2nd and 1st ed D&D, again, the Good motive + Evil Deed = Neutral idea is contradicted.

[Felixaar]

In DnD terms, YES, he is evil.

In semantic terms it's debatable.

[hamishspence]

Some people keep going "altruistic motives justify theft, or extortion" Not consistant with most D&D sourcebooks.

Depends what version of Dark One we talk about: him just before being assassinated might be "evil, but very altruistic and benevolent towards his people" if you believe Redcloak.

[silvadel]

Ok -- we saw what happens if the dark one comes to the humans with an army at his back.

Do you really think the humans would have taken him seriously at all if he tried to come with say 3 bodyguards? He wouldnt have made it into the kingdom. That is the point. The humans have the humanoids living in squalor and by the 12 gods they are going to stay that way.

If the paladins got wind of a settlement of goblins (RE villiage) I have no doubt they would have gone in to wipe it out. The only reason why it survived was it had a very very small footprint -- isolationist.

---

TDO and the goblins in general are "evil" because "good" decided to make of them an adversary. That is pretty much the way it is and it weakens the goodness of the good guys necessitating mercenary groups like the order of the stick to actually solve the problems.

[Cleverdan22]

Yeah, the Dark One and his followers are evil. They are trying to summon a god killing abomination to destroy the gods.

The plan is to shift the gate to the upper planes, destroying the gods. This plan will also kill Redcloak and Xykon, which the latter does not know. What I find interesting is that the Dark One and Redcloak seem to think that once the Snarl is up there, the Dark One will be able to control it long enough to make an even playing field for the goblins, and that once that happens, that the Snarl won't just destroy the world! So not only are they evil, they are stupid evil.
BTW, Redcloak is one of my favorite (if not one of the most frustrating) characters for the above reasons among other things.

[MReav]

The plan is to shift the gate to the upper planes, destroying the gods. This plan will also kill Redcloak and Xykon, which the latter does not know. What I find interesting is that the Dark One and Redcloak seem to think that once the Snarl is up there, the Dark One will be able to control it long enough to make an even playing field for the goblins, and that once that happens, that the Snarl won't just destroy the world! So not only are they evil, they are stupid evil.

My comment:
The Dark One is willing to destroy the world and everyone on it for the chance to rebuild it with the goblinoid races in a better position.

What is ignored is that they might just chuck The Dark One to the Snarl once it is released.

[Cleverdan22]

My comment:
The Dark One is willing to destroy the world and everyone on it for the chance to rebuild it with the goblinoid races in a better position.

What is ignored is that they might just chuck The Dark One to the Snarl once it is released.

But what I'm saying is

The Snarl doesn't discriminate who it kills. It will kill all of the gods - including the Dark One - as soon as it is released, and then the world.

[hamishspence]

the plan, supposedly, is as follows:

A gate is opened. But, some gates still function, keeping the snarl in, but, it is able to reach a short distance though gate.

Message is sent to Gods: Pay up or else.

Assuming they do not, Spell is cast, gate moved to a divine realm, Snarl starts snatching at anything nearby.

Nervous gods, not daring to come near, promise to pay up if gate is moved back.

Gate is moved back.

This is roughly what SoD implied. However, if something goes wrong, world gets eaten, gods gather and rebind snarl, Dark one gets a say in the rebinding, and next world.

How does this sound? It is based on my reading of SoD

[MReav]

But what I'm saying is

The Snarl doesn't discriminate who it kills. It will kill all of the gods - including the Dark One - as soon as it is released, and then the world.

Well...

Not necessarily. The Elder Gods survived the destruction of the first world.

[B. Dandelion]

In DnD terms, YES, he is evil.

In semantic terms it's debatable.
Succinctly put.

Cleverdan, that isn't the Dark One's stated plan. If you want to say he's lying, that's another debate, but the ostensible plan is thus: A divine and arcane caster can warp a Gate so that tDO controls what dimension it appears in. Apparently all the gods have throne rooms in different dimensions, so with that kind of power, tDO can blackmail the other gods into giving him what he wants. The idea isn't just to kill them all off, it's to obtain the power to threaten them. Now the plan runs the high risk of accidentally loosing the Snarl upon the mortal plane again, which would result in the destruction of the earth and the souls of everyone in it. TDO is willing to accept this as a win-win scenario, because if the earth is destroyed, the gods will come together to make World 3.0 (as they did the last time the Earth was destroyed), and this time he will be involved in the creation process from the beginning. So he'll make sure none of his people are made to be mere cannon fodder.

So yeah, hamishspence, I think you get the gist of it.

[hamishspence]

which makes the evil of the Dark One Well Intentioned Extremist, altruistic evil.

He doesn't gain anything personally from it: unless making the goblins more successful will lead to population explosion, and his power is directly tied to population number. He's doing it "for the sake of his people"

[B. Dandelion]

which makes the evil of the Dark One Well Intentioned Extremist, altruistic evil.

He doesn't gain anything personally from it: unless making the goblins more successful will lead to population explosion, and his power is directly tied to population number. He's doing it "for the sake of his people"
Actually he does get something personally from it: revenge. I tend to agree with Right-Eye's characterization of tDO as "spiteful." He's still holding on to a grudge for what happened to him in life -- his fantasy of talking to the three pantheon heads while gloating about how he's got the secret assassin now is all very much about him and not very much at all about the people he's supposed to be guiding.

Redcloak deserves a better god, frankly...

[Threeshades]

Clerics of the Dark One Rebuke Undead.

Therefore, he's Evil.

not necessarily, he might be neutral. Clerics of neutral gods can choose wether to channel positive or negative energy. If the clerics themselves are evil though, they dont have that choice.

[hamishspence]

Assuming that cleric near the start of Dungeon Crawling Fools was of the Dark one- and he fits the colour coding, dark One must offer the Evil domain, since Unholy Blight can only be accessed via the Evil Domain. Disintegrate: the Destruction Domain. Hold Monster (SoD) The Law domain.

While one deity I know of exists whose domain does not match his alignment, this is a massive exception.

That Deity is the Goblin deity Maglubiyet: Destruction, Evil, Chaos, Trickery, NE alignment.

Dark One, so far, offers Destruction, Evil, Law.

That is, unless you assume the cloak grants bonus spells and a smite ability.

Hmm.

[MR.PIXIE]

There's really no sutch thing as ''evil ''
if you ask me.
Just my opinion.

[Deathcon300]

The dark one is totaly evil but his actions are for the best :biggrin:


oh and the crimson mantal is super magical so red cloak gets realy powerfull when he puts it on and assuming it dosent enhance ability scores the cloak gives :redcloak: more spells
I.E. his smite in SoD

[hamishspence]

There is a big jump between evil and totally evil.

[Deathcon300]

there is????

Huh this is what i get for not being a gamer:smallconfused:

[hamishspence]

Sure! there's Evil, but devoted to X and will do anything to protect them/keep their love/etc.

"Evil, but for a good cause" is a classic trope. How good the cause will be depends on the writer.

Shojo's second-last words fit perfectly into mounth of Redcloak:

"Everything that I did, I did for my people"

[Deathcon300]

sweet but i still think the dark ones evil

[hamishspence]

And I agree: Primarily from Exalted Deeds: "Good motives cannot make evil acts any less evil"

And ED portrays altruism as the classic Good motive.

[David Argall]

If the paladins got wind of a settlement of goblins (RE villiage) I have no doubt they would have gone in to wipe it out. The only reason why it survived was it had a very very small footprint -- isolationist.
SoD But the village was not isloationist. It was close enough to a substantial number of humans [large enough to support a circus staying on one location for at least a week] that a child could walk there and back in a day and have enough time to attend a show, and get back in time for dinner.
If we are talking about goblins being harvested for XP, this village makes no sense. It does make sense if the humans merely kill those who are actively evil, and that the talk about harvesting for XP is pretty much goblin propaganda.



TDO and the goblins in general are "evil" because "good" decided to make of them an adversary.
No, the goblins, etc, are evil because they are evil. Go thru the strip. Our evil types say they are evil and behave in an evil manner. SoD is the odd man out here.

[B. Dandelion]

There's really no sutch thing as ''evil ''
if you ask me.
Just my opinion.
Evil is a subjective human concept. In D&D it is made to be objective, defined by the rules and DM fiat. In the real world, you can be punished for breaking the rules and doing something society at large views as evil, but who's the final arbiter of morality? God? Even He's been challenged by his followers on occasion. Taking such a murky concept and trying to compartmentalize it into neat little boxes of "good," "evil," or "neutral" is an exercise in futility -- albeit a vastly entertaining and sometimes enlightening one. People are never going to see eye-to-eye on every aspect.

Here's the thing. A story that utilizes this "objective" system is set in a world completely alien to our own. People who are evil know that they are evil, but their understanding of what constitutes evil is not always the same as ours (although it is at times). In our world, almost no one actually thinks of themselves as evil. In the Giant's world, no small percentage of the population has that tag, which dilutes the strength of its meaning. (Seriously, people in the real world who regularly classify things as evil are usually either joking or they are considered overblown and melodramatic. It's an extremely strong word, usually reserved for folks like Hitler or the Nazis.) People like Xykon are unquestionably evil, but I rather seriously doubt that the Dark One or Redcloak would have embraced that label on their own. But in their "objective" universe, they know their classification. So that puts them on the same "side" as Xykon, in opposition to the "good" paladins that murder children.

In no other universe could I imagine... (SoD)Right-Eye immediately thinking Xykon would make a good ally because he slaughtered people that begged for mercy. "He's obviously totally evil, and evil wizards always need good villainous plotlines to pursue. And we're sitting on a doozy." That makes no rational sense in the real world. The fact that it makes total sense in a parody genre is funny, but it's not just a throwaway joke -- you can extrapolate quite a bit from it. The evil people do evil because they're expected to and they consider other evil people their allies. It's just a matter of sides, and Team Evil gets a cooler mascot and better health care benefits. Because the lines are drawn so starkly, people wind up being driven to greater acts of actual evil simply because they fall afoul of the sometimes arbitrary "objective" rules their world is governed by. But there's a pretty big difference between the mindsets of the people who camp underneath the all-inclusive tent of Evil. Redcloak and Right-Eye didn't fully understand that when they first met Xykon, any more than Jirix does when Redcloak warns him that Xykon cannot be trusted. Redcloak understands it now, but he learned the hard way and considers himself too far gone to turn back now. Xykon himself certainly understands it, as it is the topic of his final soul-crushing speech to Redcloak in SoD.

Not all evil is created equal.

Oh sheesh, that was a ramble. Forgive my blowhardiness. Getting back to Mr. Pixie's statement, you can say you don't believe in evil in the real world, but it's a very literal and unavoidable thing in the OOTS-verse, and it shapes the mindsets of everyone that lives there. The thing to keep in mind is that it isn't always our concept of evil, even though there is overlap. Xykon is objectively evil in his own universe, but he'd fit the subjective standards of just about anyone who tried to define the meaning of the word in our own. Redcloak is objectively evil by the rules of his universe and often does things that fit our definition (like torture a guy for information he already knows he doesn't have), but he wouldn't meet everyone's subjective criteria. The terrible irony of his character is that he has been driven into darker and darker acts of subjective evil as a direct result of being classified as objective evil in the first place.

[HamsterOfTheGod]

Evil is a subjective human concept. In D&D it is made to be objective, defined by the rules and DM fiat. In the real world, you can be punished for breaking the rules and doing something society at large views as evil, but who's the final arbiter of morality? God? Even He's been challenged by his followers on occasion. Taking such a murky concept and trying to compartmentalize it into neat little boxes of "good," "evil," or "neutral" is an exercise in futility -- albeit a vastly entertaining and sometimes enlightening one. People are never going to see eye-to-eye on every aspect.

Here's the thing. A story that utilizes this "objective" system is set in a world completely alien to our own. People who are evil know that they are evil, but their understanding of what constitutes evil is not always the same as ours (although it is at times). In our world, almost no one actually thinks of themselves as evil. In the Giant's world, no small percentage of the population has that tag, which dilutes the strength of its meaning. (Seriously, people in the real world who regularly classify things as evil are usually either joking or they are considered overblown and melodramatic. It's an extremely strong word, usually reserved for folks like Hitler or the Nazis.) People like Xykon are unquestionably evil, but I rather seriously doubt that the Dark One or Redcloak would have embraced that label on their own. But in their "objective" universe, they know their classification. So that puts them on the same "side" as Xykon, in opposition to the "good" paladins that murder children.

In no other universe could I imagine... (SoD)Right-Eye immediately thinking Xykon would make a good ally because he slaughtered people that begged for mercy. "He's obviously totally evil, and evil wizards always need good villainous plotlines to pursue. And we're sitting on a doozy." That makes no rational sense in the real world. The fact that it makes total sense in a parody genre is funny, but it's not just a throwaway joke -- you can extrapolate quite a bit from it. The evil people do evil because they're expected to and they consider other evil people their allies. It's just a matter of sides, and Team Evil gets a cooler mascot and better health care benefits. Because the lines are drawn so starkly, people wind up being driven to greater acts of actual evil simply because they fall afoul of the sometimes arbitrary "objective" rules their world is governed by. But there's a pretty big difference between the mindsets of the people who camp underneath the all-inclusive tent of Evil. Redcloak and Right-Eye didn't fully understand that when they first met Xykon, any more than Jirix does when Redcloak warns him that Xykon cannot be trusted. Redcloak understands it now, but he learned the hard way and considers himself too far gone to turn back now. Xykon himself certainly understands it, as it is the topic of his final soul-crushing speech to Redcloak in SoD.

Not all evil is created equal.

Oh sheesh, that was a ramble. Forgive my blowhardiness. Getting back to Mr. Pixie's statement, you can say you don't believe in evil in the real world, but it's a very literal and unavoidable thing in the OOTS-verse, and it shapes the mindsets of everyone that lives there. The thing to keep in mind is that it isn't always our concept of evil, even though there is overlap. Xykon is objectively evil in his own universe, but he'd fit the subjective standards of just about anyone who tried to define the meaning of the word in our own. Redcloak is objectively evil by the rules of his universe and often does things that fit our definition (like torture a guy for information he already knows he doesn't have), but he wouldn't meet everyone's subjective criteria. The terrible irony of his character is that he has been driven into darker and darker acts of subjective evil as a direct result of being classified as objective evil in the first place.

Excellent post.

I think the irony between objective and subjective evil is one of the points where this "parody genre" webcomic based on D&D achieves a high level of art. And I think its a shame to miss this point. The important thing is not whether Redcloak is evil in our terms, or in story terms. (He is evil in story terms...for now.) It's more important how the reader reacts to this question. (Not surpringsingly, there is a similar debate going on in the Erfworld forum).

On the one hand, that the goblins were created as an "XP race" and that the Dark One and his followers are fighting for a "fair" share of the world is a parody of the D&D genre, both mechanically and in its backstory.

But the story arc surpasses mere parody. Redcloak offers the hero's choice to O-Chul, who turns it down. But then we find that Redcloak was not really offering the hero's choice to O-Chul. Redcloak had an ulterior motive for staging the high profile confrontation, making a better city for the hobgoblins, which is in direct contrast to the traditional scene just played out with O-Chul. It is also in conflict with his previous stated goal as the Dark One's cleric. That is, why take the steps of securing Azure City when his ultimate plan is to use the gates to get what he wants? Xykon seems to be, in some ways, the saner one here. By becoming more "realistic", more "humane", in our terms, Redcloak becomes less realistic in his fictional world's terms.

Then, Kubota offers first to Therkla and then Elan, the same "hero's choice". Then he offers it Elan yet again with his "I surrender." And, ironically, he offers the choice yet once more to V. V opts to do the non-hero thing and presumably Quarr is going to offer V yet again another good vs evil choice...or perhaps it's now a neutral vs evil choice. All this ties in with other parts of the story like Belkar and his series of evil vs evil choices, Miko and her choices of duty vs good, the afterlife evaluation of Roy's lawful good vs non-lawful good choices, etc.

Perhaps the Giant's greatest achievement is taking the D&D alignment debate which is the one of the most pedantic, petty and trollish of arguments and turning it into something beautiful.

[Lord Seth]

Adolf Hitler did what he did for the good of the fatherland. I'm just saying.Germans weren't being killed off just to gain experience, though.


Not to belabor the obvious, but Redcloak got his information from a very biased deity. While I don't doubt some parts of his story are true, maybe even all of it, I've no doubt that its being told with a very large goblinoid slant. Like do you HONESTLY expect me to believe, the Dark One united the goblin peoples into an enormous army... to use it as a deterrent go make a peaceful bargain at the negotiating table? Umm, sorry, Im' not buying it. Humans may have assassinated him, but I'm betting the terms he laid down to them were nowhere NEAR as benevolent sounding as Redcloak's little flashback implied. At the end of the saga, I'm expecting RC to find out just what a vile bastard his god is and that he's wasted all this time and the lives of his family to serve a deity that doesn't give a rats ass about the goblin people, he just wants revenge.I doubt Redcloak got his information, or at least not most of it, from The Dark One. He states that no one knows what TDO was going to say before being killed. If The Dark One did tell him all that, I'd think he'd be privy to that piece of information.

[David Argall]

Evil is a subjective human concept.
There are a great many people out there who insist it is objective, not to mention a great many more who want to make it as objective as possible.



In our world, almost no one actually thinks of themselves as evil.
While few would formally call themselves evil, a great many know their behavior is deplored by the general society, and is harmful to it, and do not care about that harm. That classification will do for most of our purposes.



In no other universe could I imagine... (SoD)Right-Eye immediately thinking Xykon would make a good ally because he slaughtered people that begged for mercy. "He's obviously totally evil, and evil wizards always need good villainous plotlines to pursue. And we're sitting on a doozy." That makes no rational sense in the real world.

It makes a great deal of sense. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Perfectly sensible to see if a deal can be worked out. If I need an expert with explosives for my evil scheme, I look at the jailbirds, or those that back my evil ideas for somebody who has experience with explosives, not go thru the general list of people of people with experience with explosives looking for one that is evil.

[B. Dandelion]

There are a great many people out there who insist it is objective, not to mention a great many more who want to make it as objective as possible.
Ugh, this promises to get ugly fast. The only way evil (or for that matter, good) can be objective is if there is an official arbiter. Some force or some being gets the final call in determining what is classified as good or evil. In a gaming session, that is the DM. For most people in real life, it is God, or rather their own interpretation of God's wishes. There is plenty of disagreement on what precisely those wishes are, or whether such a being even exists. If there is no God, there is no such thing as good or evil save for the meaning we humans attach to such concepts. Everyone has their own interpretation. It's subjective. The "correct" objective definition -- if it exists -- is a cipher.


While few would formally call themselves evil, a great many know their behavior is deplored by the general society, and is harmful to it, and do not care about that harm. That classification will do for most of our purposes.
Respectfully disagree. It's an overblown term of absolutes and I don't care for it.


It makes a great deal of sense. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." Perfectly sensible to see if a deal can be worked out. If I need an expert with explosives for my evil scheme, I look at the jailbirds, or those that back my evil ideas for somebody who has experience with explosives, not go thru the general list of people of people with experience with explosives looking for one that is evil.
My point here is most people would not see a person that roasted an entire fort full of soldiers just because he enjoyed setting people on fire and think "ooo, we should go and make friends with the homicidal maniac!" But, you know, he's evil, and so are they, even though in the real world the goblin brothers would have regarded themselves as good and the paladins as evil butchers. They would have thought the humans got exactly what was coming to them, but anyone with an ounce of common sense would have to expect that a sadistic chaotic evil sorcerer is not going to make for an extremely reliable or trustworthy ally. But because they are, again, evil, they take him to the Evil Diner with the authentic evil food summoned from the Spice Rack of the Damned and the cute demonic waitress and it's all just terribly silly.

[ChowGuy]

Hmmm... let me see if I understand some of the concepts in this thread:

[Cue theme music]
This Land...is Mine,
God.gave.this.land...to me!

Act 1:
Scene 1:
Asking for fertile land:
Cortez: I declare these lands the property of Spain!
Montezuma: Hmm... well pale ones, you satisfy all the prophecies, so I guess that's OK. It's just that, well, I still have all these people to feed, so could we just keep a little of it?
Cortez: You dare defy your new god? Die, Evil One!

Scene 2:
Paladins detecting evil:
Cortez Chaplain: Wait! Before we smite this wretched savage, the Lord commands we test him!
[Displays crucifix]
Tell me, slave, what doth thou see?
Montezuma: Gah! A man nailed to a tree. What a horrible image.
Chaplain: Die Evil One, and all thy kin with thee!

Act 2:
Scene 1:
[The Successful Village]
Jackson: Right nice place you got here, Sequoia.
Sequoia: Yes, and look we even have our own written language just like you.
Jackson: Sure do. Why I betchya in a few years you could be real competitors. Thats why we gotta move you to Oklahoma. You know, just in case.

Scene 2:
Custer: Now look here, I know we told you you could have this worthless land, but that was before we knew there was gold her. And anyway you're off your reservation, so
Sitting Bull: Die Evil One!


How am I doing so far?

[HamsterOfTheGod]

Hmmm... let me see if I understand some of the concepts in this thread:

<snip>

How am I doing so far?

I would say you are running a risk of violating the rules of the forum. There is a rule against posting real world politics in the forum.

The above real world examples you cite are heavily argued and emotionally laden in and of themselves. How do they help resolve an issue in a fictional story?

The moral issues in the fictional story are created by an author who has his real world moral compass. But the moral issues in the fictional story are read and interepreted by readers, each with his own real world ethos. So the moral issues in a story are in a way a communication between author and readers.

Arguing one readers ethical view against another readers ethical view is not invalid in itself. But I don't think goes to what the discussion of the webcomic should be about.

[hamishspence]

there is another option: the idea based on these two principles: that morality is objective and, there is no arbitrator.

Some people say that issues over whether a paladin falls, are above and beyond the gods of D&D- going right to the top- "fundamental forces of Law and Good"

If a force is unintelligent, how is it an arbitrator?

I would agree that The Giant makes alignment issues work very well, however, not everyone interested in those sort of issues, is trollish. Some are genuinely interested in the concepts and how they work. Or, the evolution of the concept over the past 4 editions of AD&D.

[David Argall]

The only way evil (or for that matter, good) can be objective is if there is an official arbiter.
It would seem to be the reverse. If there is an official arbiter, the idea contains a subjective element.

Gravity contains no arbiter, official or not. It is objective.
The judge had an argument with his wife, and gives you the legal maximum. A subjective element.


Some force or some being gets the final call in determining what is classified as good or evil.
Which is a subjective element.


If there is no God, there is no such thing as good or evil save for the meaning we humans attach to such concepts. Everyone has their own interpretation. It's subjective.
Not necessarily. That each student in a math class has a different answer to a problem does not mean the result is at all subjective. Each of those answers can be subjective, but there still exists an objective answer.

On the other side, we can note that any subjective definition contains objective elements. "I want people to be happy." is subjective. What makes them happy, and how much, are objective facts [which may include that the goal is impossible to achieve since the definition of happy may be having more than the average.]
So any definition of "Good" we offer has objective elements, and can be objectively measured. This can be impossibly complex, but the result is not subjective.

If we define Good as beneficial to a society, it becomes merely an extremely complex problem to measure that benefit objectively.


My point here is most people would not see a person that roasted an entire fort full of soldiers just because he enjoyed setting people on fire and think "ooo, we should go and make friends with the homicidal maniac!"
And as already noted, that depends on what you thought of those soldiers. If you didn't like them, the idea of getting in good with their killer can sound pretty good.
It happens all the time. Sam may hate John, who returns the sentiment, but if they both hate Max more, a deal is possible. So Xykon is insanely dangerous and kills some of his friends? So we just arrange it so he kills more of our enemies. We can make a profit from the deal [or at least think we can.]

[paddyfool]

I haven't read SoD, but I'd like to discuss one of the many morally laden issues on this thread if I may:



The charge (apologies for paraphrasing rather than quoting): The gods were evil to create the goblins, a sapient race, and not give them decent land, so that their main role in the running of the world seems to be as XP-fodder.

My response: "Never ascribe to malice what can more easily be ascribed to incompetence." I very much doubt there was anything specifically malicious in it; the gods just vaguely thought there should be goblins, and never got down to the specifics of sorting out a decent homeland for them thanks, firstly, to arguments with their fellow deities, and secondly, to trying to get the Snarl wrapped up tight as a matter of the most urgent priority. Unjust, certainly, and not remedied at any point after the fact; but not really evil, just sloppy workmanship.

[Kish]

I haven't read SoD, but I'd like to discuss one of the many morally laden issues on this thread if I may:



The charge (apologies for paraphrasing rather than quoting): The gods were evil to create the goblins, a sapient race, and not give them decent land, so that their main role in the running of the world seems to be as XP-fodder.

My response: "Never ascribe to malice what can more easily be ascribed to incompetence." I very much doubt there was anything specifically malicious in it; the gods just vaguely thought there should be goblins, and never got down to the specifics of sorting out a decent homeland for them thanks, firstly, to arguments with their fellow deities, and secondly, to trying to get the Snarl wrapped up tight as a matter of the most urgent priority. Unjust, certainly, and not remedied at any point after the fact; but not really evil, just sloppy workmanship.


Unfortunately, no. SoD is not ambiguous about this.The gods did not simply create goblins and not give them decent land so that their main role seems to be XP fodder. The gods very specifically set out to create entire races as XP fodder so that their PC-race clerics and druids would one day be able to cast spells above first level. When they realized that they had carelessly created so many of their XP fodder races that the races that followed them were outnumbered, they went to a great deal of effort to make sure the monstrous humanoids would never be able to compete with PC races. "Isn't a +1 LA a little high for a hobgoblin?" "Eh, they're not for playing, they don't have to be balanced." "We can't even be dirt farmers, the PC races have all the good dirt!" (Paraphrased from SoD.)

[B. Dandelion]

If a force is unintelligent, how is it an arbitrator?

In something of the same sense that a measuring scale is.

It would seem to be the reverse. If there is an official arbiter, the idea contains a subjective element.

Gravity contains no arbiter, official or not. It is objective.
The judge had an argument with his wife, and gives you the legal maximum. A subjective element.
Gravity, yes, but that's a property of the physical realm and not the much more nebulous concept of "good" and "evil." The judge rules subjectively, but he doesn't actually get the final say of what is good or evil. He makes a stand on what society thinks is fair, incorporating his own understanding of morality.


Which is a subjective element.
Not necessarily. Part of the reason our opinions are all subjective is that they're imperfect, as is our understanding of the universe. God is generally assumed to be perfect.


Not necessarily. That each student in a math class has a different answer to a problem does not mean the result is at all subjective. Each of those answers can be subjective, but there still exists an objective answer.
2 + 2 = 4, objectively. However, 30 kids in English class all turn in 30 different essays on the book they were assigned to read. Some are better than others -- subjectively -- and the instructor grades them accordingly. But while 2+2=4 is a perfectly correct answer, there isn't really such a thing as a "perfect" objective essay even though some will earn full marks.


On the other side, we can note that any subjective definition contains objective elements. "I want people to be happy." is subjective. What makes them happy, and how much, are objective facts [which may include that the goal is impossible to achieve since the definition of happy may be having more than the average.]
So any definition of "Good" we offer has objective elements, and can be objectively measured. This can be impossibly complex, but the result is not subjective.

If we define Good as beneficial to a society, it becomes merely an extremely complex problem to measure that benefit objectively.
If we define the meaning of good then we're doing exactly what I wrote in the section you're responding to: If there is no God, there is no such thing as good or evil save for the meaning we humans attach to such concepts. So if we determine that what is beneficial to society is "good" we can find objective means to that end, yes. But it doesn't actually mean that it is an objective good. It's a subjective good.


And as already noted, that depends on what you thought of those soldiers. If you didn't like them, the idea of getting in good with their killer can sound pretty good.
It happens all the time. Sam may hate John, who returns the sentiment, but if they both hate Max more, a deal is possible. So Xykon is insanely dangerous and kills some of his friends? So we just arrange it so he kills more of our enemies. We can make a profit from the deal [or at least think we can.]
Well yeah they might have still thought they should talk to him just because he seemed to be opposed to the paladins, but the rationale that was given at the time was that he was obviously evil, so let's go ask him if he's interested in our evil plan. In the real world that would be total nonsense, his apparent sadism would have been far more likely to make them wary of approaching him rather than the reverse.

[dps]

It's quite clear that The Dark One is an Evil God; the question is whether he was evil before his murder and ascension to godhood. And I don't really see any firm evidence either way. (Note that I'm going off what I've read in the forums; I haven't actually read SoD yet, so I might be missing some information.)

[David Argall]

Unfortunately, no. SoD is not ambiguous about this.The gods did not simply create goblins and not give them decent land so that their main role seems to be XP fodder. The gods very specifically set out to create entire races as XP fodder so that their PC-race clerics and druids would one day be able to cast spells above first level. When they realized that they had carelessly created so many of their XP fodder races that the races that followed them were outnumbered, they went to a great deal of effort to make sure the monstrous humanoids would never be able to compete with PC races. "Isn't a +1 LA a little high for a hobgoblin?" "Eh, they're not for playing, they don't have to be balanced." "We can't even be dirt farmers, the PC races have all the good dirt!" (Paraphrased from SoD.)


SOD [spoiler] Now this is Redcloak's, or likely the Dark One's, version of the facts, and they are obviously suspect because they do draw such a clearly "I'm a victim" picture. It also clashes with the strip's "I'm evil and proud of it" picture. [spoiler]



Gravity, yes, but that's a property of the physical realm and not the much more nebulous concept of "good" and "evil."
A 500 factor equation can be distinctly nebulous. But it can also be a trivial part of the formula for gravity involving a substantial number of stars and planets. The mere fact of complexity does not make something subjective or objective.


The judge rules subjectively, but he doesn't actually get the final say of what is good or evil. He makes a stand on what society thinks is fair, incorporating his own understanding of morality.
In other words, he is subjective.


Part of the reason our opinions are all subjective is that they're imperfect, as is our understanding of the universe.
That is not the definition of subjective we are concerned with here. Under this definition, there is no such thing as objective. All points become subjective since our understanding of fact is also imperfect. Such a definition has its uses, but not where we are trying to make a distinction between objective and subjective.


2 + 2 = 4, objectively. However, 30 kids in English class all turn in 30 different essays on the book they were assigned to read. Some are better than others -- subjectively -- and the instructor grades them accordingly. But while 2+2=4 is a perfectly correct answer, there isn't really such a thing as a "perfect" objective essay even though some will earn full marks.
And some essays are better than others objectively. One spells better, another uses better language, the writer of the third actually read the book...



Well yeah they might have still thought they should talk to him just because he seemed to be opposed to the paladins, but the rationale that was given at the time was that he was obviously evil, so let's go ask him if he's interested in our evil plan. In the real world that would be total nonsense, his apparent sadism would have been far more likely to make them wary of approaching him rather than the reverse.
You are continuing to label what happens routinely in the real world as total nonsense. "He's a !@#$, but he's our !@#$."

[B. Dandelion]

A 500 factor equation can be distinctly nebulous. But it can also be a trivial part of the formula for gravity involving a substantial number of stars and planets. The mere fact of complexity does not make something subjective or objective.
It's not complexity per se that makes it nebulous. It's the distinctly human element which clouds the issue.

In other words, he is subjective.
Obviously. A human judge will make a subjective human judgment. I didn't say that any kind of arbiter for any kind of decision ever is going to be objective.

That is not the definition of subjective we are concerned with here. Under this definition, there is no such thing as objective.
It means we can never know what is objectively good or evil for so long as we remain imperfect, not that there is no such thing.

All points become subjective since our understanding of fact is also imperfect. Such a definition has its uses, but not where we are trying to make a distinction between objective and subjective.
We are talking about objective and subjective morality in a fantasy series that is deliberately running amok with those very concepts. The gods, like us, are clearly imperfect in OOTS, but they can permit their paladins to slaughter humanoids by the truckload and label the act lawful good. Given that War and XPs calls those actions "damning," refers to Redcloak as "a villain they themselves created," and says that Azure City's fall at his hands was rather karmic, I rather don't get the sense that we are supposed to think of those massacres as any definition of good. But good and evil are objective in D&D, and the DM gets to make the final call. In this story the gods are filling in the DM role, and they are condoning actions most everyone in the real world would consider subjectively evil. The people here who defend those actions argue that because the paladins did not fall, it should not be an act we the reader see as evil, clearly all the goblins had it coming for one reason or another. That argument hinges on the premise that there is such a thing as objective and perfect good and evil in OOTS, so that's the kind of objectivity I'm talking about when I dispute those claims.

And some essays are better than others objectively. One spells better, another uses better language, the writer of the third actually read the book...
Actually that doesn't mean that they are objectively "better" essays. It means some essays will fill more of the pre-determined criteria of what the teacher defines as better, which would almost certainly include all the things you mentioned.

You are continuing to label what happens routinely in the real world as total nonsense. "He's a !@#$, but he's our !@#$."
You're still missing my point. The scenario we are talking about was more of a "hey, look what a !@#$ this guy is, let's ask if he wants to join us!" They didn't want him despite his evil nature, they wanted him specifically because of his evil nature, and that's what makes it ridiculous. It's supposed to be, because it's funny. After they introduce themselves he asks where evil types go for coffee, and they take him to the evil diner, which is also ridiculous and hilarious. If Right-Eye had given any other rationale, such as the fact that he was obviously powerful and didn't care much for paladins, it would have been totally different. But instead it was, "look, he's evil, our plan is evil, let's recruit him."

[David Argall]

A human judge will make a subjective human judgment. I didn't say that any kind of arbiter for any kind of decision ever is going to be objective.
But your earlier statement was "The only way evil (or for that matter, good) can be objective is if there is an official arbiter."
Now you are saying that arbiter is subjective, which means your earlier statement is wrong [or possibly incomplete. One could argue that X is impossible without Y, and since Y is impossible, then X is too. But this does not seem to be the argument you are making.]


It means we can never know what is objectively good or evil for so long as we remain imperfect, not that there is no such thing.
But that is not the meaning of subjective at issue. Imperfect knowledge still allows for some attempts to measure, generally with increasing accuracy.



We are talking about objective and subjective morality in a fantasy series that is deliberately running amok with those very concepts. The gods, like us, are clearly imperfect in OOTS, but they can permit their paladins to slaughter humanoids by the truckload and label the act lawful good. Given that War and XPs calls those actions "damning," refers to Redcloak as "a villain they themselves created," and says that Azure City's fall at his hands was rather karmic, I rather don't get the sense that we are supposed to think of those massacres as any definition of good. But good and evil are objective in D&D, and the DM gets to make the final call. In this story the gods are filling in the DM role, and they are condoning actions most everyone in the real world would consider subjectively evil. The people here who defend those actions argue that because the paladins did not fall, it should not be an act we the reader see as evil, clearly all the goblins had it coming for one reason or another. That argument hinges on the premise that there is such a thing as objective and perfect good and evil in OOTS, so that's the kind of objectivity I'm talking about when I dispute those claims.
Now is your problem that you are confusing subjective and objective?

If the gods are deciding what is good and evil, the standard in the story is subjective. There is no grounds for objecting to the action by us. It is our opinion that good and evil are objective that allows us to object and say this action is or is not good. If we abandon objective morality, we abandon grounds for objecting.
So we are saying the situation must be based on objective morality because otherwise we have no standard to judge by. We can disagree, quite vigorously, about what this objective morality is and requires, but if we talk about subjective ethics, we abandon any ability to say X or Y is in the right or wrong.

Here we have a situation where something seems wrong. But a clear and definite measure says nothing is wrong. So how do we resolve this?
To say a D&D story has abandoned a D&D rule of very long standing and wide use, without bothering to explain at all, is quite a claim. It smacks of the writer cheating.
We see no evidence elsewhere of such a rule change. Origin shows us a paladin who is wary of his deeds. We see Miko fall for an evil act. All seems like a normal D&D game.
The alternative is that SoD is a biased and incomplete report. It seems things from the goblin view, not the view of morality. We are simply not seeing all the facts. [And we know we are not seeing all the facts. A minor example is that Right-eye -then double eyed- talks about the "next hut". But we see zero huts, despite wide views of several areas. So some facts are missing.]
When we compare with the strip, we find this bias shows up. The goblins, etc in the strip announce themselves as evil and do their best to prove it. They do it early in the strip and the most recent time we see them oppressing the slaves in Azure City. The SoD picture of them as mere victims is simply at odds with the facts.
It seems much more sensible to think SoD just presents a biased picture.


You're still missing my point. The scenario we are talking about was more of a "hey, look what a !@#$ this guy is, let's ask if he wants to join us!" They didn't want him despite his evil nature, they wanted him specifically because of his evil nature, and that's what makes it ridiculous.
And as I keep saying, this happens on a routine basis in the real world. It's not a fantasy. For any definition of evil we care to use in a real situation, we find that Evil guys X & Y, seeing Z act in an evil manner, may consider asking Z to join them. They may decide against it, say because that means splitting the loot too many times, but they can consider his evil as a reason to want to approach him.

[Lowkey]

I would say you are running a risk of violating the rules of the forum. There is a rule against posting real world politics in the forum. His most recent example happened about 130 years ago. There is no way any sensible person would claim that violates the politics rule, particularly when this thread also has people talking about Hitler and Nazi Germany, and his example is over twice as old as that.

[dps]

His most recent example happened about 130 years ago. There is no way any sensible person would claim that violates the politics rule, particularly when this thread also has people talking about Hitler and Nazi Germany, and his example is over twice as old as that.

I'd say that he was more in danger of violating the rule against discussing real-world religion, but that's up to the mods.

[paladinofshojo]

For some reason my little question about the objectiveness of evil in the OotS's realm had escaladed into a heated political debate over the vary basis of "evil" in general............Wow, I must use my powers for good:smallamused:

[HamsterOfTheGod]

His most recent example happened about 130 years ago. There is no way any sensible person would claim that violates the politics rule, particularly when this thread also has people talking about Hitler and Nazi Germany, and his example is over twice as old as that.

You feel that he was using historical examples which are do not carry any political or religious controversy in the current day. That's fine.

I thought different and was trying to give a friendly notice that the statements may be controversial to some.

I'm not a mod so ultimately my opinion doesn't matter. Apparently the mods didn't think there was anything wrong with the statements.

[B. Dandelion]

But your earlier statement was "The only way evil (or for that matter, good) can be objective is if there is an official arbiter."
Now you are saying that arbiter is subjective, which means your earlier statement is wrong [or possibly incomplete. One could argue that X is impossible without Y, and since Y is impossible, then X is too. But this does not seem to be the argument you are making.]
You're taking my statement to mean "any arbiter can make an objective ruling," which is not something I intended to imply when I said objective good and evil can only exist if there is an arbiter.


But that is not the meaning of subjective at issue. Imperfect knowledge still allows for some attempts to measure, generally with increasing accuracy.
We humans do not precisely "measure" good and evil, as in "Steve's latest crime scored an 8.6 on the kilonazi graph." We examine actions that have been performed, consider the motives involved, and from there we attempt to interpret good and evil. Our courts require the prosecution prove their case "beyond a reasonable doubt." The impossibility of total certainty is built right into the system.

Now is your problem that you are confusing subjective and objective?

If the gods are deciding what is good and evil, the standard in the story is subjective.
If the gods were perfect, their view of good and evil would also be perfectly objective. Obviously this is not the case in OOTS. The people who keep defending the paladins, however, say that if what they did was objectively evil, they should have fallen, period. For that to happen even when the gods condoned their actions, there would have to be some other, omnipresent "force" of objective good or evil that could have smote the paladins (or stripped away their powers) as punishment for their IMHO BLATANTLY evil actions. That didn't happen. We, the reader, can TRY to be as objective as possible as we analyze the story, but there does not appear to be any real objective force of good or evil in OOTS except, perhaps, for karma as Rich alludes to in War and XPs.


Here we have a situation where something seems wrong. But a clear and definite measure says nothing is wrong. So how do we resolve this?
To say a D&D story has abandoned a D&D rule of very long standing and wide use, without bothering to explain at all, is quite a claim. It smacks of the writer cheating.
It is being explained. Not all at once, but it's getting there. And I don't think it is "cheating" at all for a story that is taking place within a comic strip to not adhere to all of the properties of a story which is told from behind a dungeon master screen.


We see no evidence elsewhere of such a rule change. Origin shows us a paladin who is wary of his deeds.
DUDE! The paladin in Origin is one of the worst characters in the entire series for demonstrating what a "lawful good" person can get away with. The orcs Roy's party ran into just wanted to go to a concert, they didn't attack anyone except the adventurers who tried to attack them. The paladin and the other humans were pissed off that Roy helped them go to their concert instead of just killing them because "randomly killing things is what we do!" Which is not even to mention the fact that he was conspiring with his other teammates to have Durkon killed off because he was "annoying." You honestly think he was "objectively good?"


We see Miko fall for an evil act.
She killed her liege lord. Huge violation of her oath. Belkar seems to have thought it was the "evilness" of the deed that caused her to fall, he might be right, it's hard to be completely certain.


All seems like a normal D&D game.
The alternative is that SoD is a biased and incomplete report. It seems things from the goblin view, not the view of morality. We are simply not seeing all the facts. [And we know we are not seeing all the facts. A minor example is that Right-eye -then double eyed- talks about the "next hut". But we see zero huts, despite wide views of several areas. So some facts are missing.]
We don't see huts, so therefore, it was a lie? Instead of, oh I don't know, them being just offscreen or something because it would have been cluttered and awkward to show the mounted paladins attacking among a bunch of rude hovels? And also somehow that makes the total slaughter of their village okay, including killing the little sister?


When we compare with the strip, we find this bias shows up. The goblins, etc in the strip announce themselves as evil and do their best to prove it. They do it early in the strip and the most recent time we see them oppressing the slaves in Azure City. The SoD picture of them as mere victims is simply at odds with the facts.
It seems much more sensible to think SoD just presents a biased picture.
SoD is not contradictory to everything else we've been told. What I have been saying over and over again is that the goblins think of themselves as evil, and their concept of evil is nothing like ours because the rules of their universe are so radically different. Obviously there is some overlap between what we viewers might want to call evil and what the goblins in the strip would call evil, like slavery, but RC and RE are going to remember the "good" paladins as butchers and their older brother as an "evil" person who gave his life trying to protect them. Is it any shock at all that they wind up with an understanding of morality that is TOTALLY WARPED?

Thus we have RC who refers to "that whole "Good" thing" as a "pyramid scheme" or says that they're all "on the side of Evil, as defined by our opposition to those who choose to call themselves Good" and in the same breath refer to Xykon as an untrustworthy monster.

And as I keep saying, this happens on a routine basis in the real world. It's not a fantasy. For any definition of evil we care to use in a real situation, we find that Evil guys X & Y, seeing Z act in an evil manner, may consider asking Z to join them. They may decide against it, say because that means splitting the loot too many times, but they can consider his evil as a reason to want to approach him.
*sigh*

In the real world, why would Redcloak and Right-Eye think of themselves as evil at all? The humans were the ones who came to their village unprovoked and killed everything that moved, including women and children. They would think the paladins were the bad guys. They wouldn't think "oh look another evil person, let's recruit him" when they saw Xykon. It's possible they could have thought "oh look, that human seems to hate the paladins too, I wonder if he'd join us."

[Rettu Skcollob]

I've always held The Dark One and Redcloak in high regard. They are so dedicated to the cause of bettering the Goblin Race, that they will use any means necessary to elevate their cause. They fight against a hypocritical enemy that is just as ruthless, violent and manipulative as they are, if not more in some cases, that believes themselves able to slaughter Goblin men, women and children without a thought, and yet still believe themselves to be superior to them.

I believe that Redcloak is a great Anti-Hero, he has his cause and will do anything that he believes will result in the Greater Good for the Goblin Race, even killing his own brother to foster the long-term plans of the Dark One. Looking at Heroes of Horror, I believe this supports that:


"He or She may use Evil means towards an ultimately Good end."
-Heroes of Horror 3.5


Redcloak believes that he is doing a Good thing by elevating Goblin-kind to a position equal to that of other Races, but he recognizes that he could never achieve this by peaceful means, as the assassination of The (Pre-Divine) Dark One illustrates, so he takes more direct action. He has sacrificed everything for his cause. Love, [Blind-Date] Freedom [Willingly under Xykon's control] and even his remaining Family [Right-Eye's Death].

I'm not sure if there's any canon-evidence to support or deny this; but could Redcloak be Neutral? The way he acts strikes me as a TN character.

[Evil DM Mark3]

I believe that Redcloak is a great Anti-Hero, he has his cause and will do anything that he believes will result in the Greater Good for the Goblin Race, even killing his own brother to foster the long-term plans of the Dark One.

Wouldn't that make him better quailified as an Anti-Villain? (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiVillain)

[Kish]

I'm not sure if there's any canon-evidence to support or deny this; but could Redcloak be Neutral? The way he acts strikes me as a TN character.
I would certainly argue the interpretation of the way he acts, but there's no need; Soon Kim used Smite Evil on him and it worked, so he's Evil, in addition to all the times he's declared himself Evil.

[Yogi]

The fastest way to solve a fictional alignment debate is for a real life example.

Let's say there is a native of the Americian continent, and that he has been living in squalor because all the good lands have been taken by the United States of America. Let's say that the only reason the United States of America has this land is because they were HUGE jerks around a hundred years ago. So, he hatches a plan. He will steal Nuclear Weapons and threatens to blow up New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles unless his people get their fair share of land. Would he be Good, Neutral, or Evil?

[Evil DM Mark3]

1. Real life and DnD alignment do not mix
2. Real life politics (and this is exactly that) does not mix with this forum's code of conduct.
3. He is Evil, very Evil indeed.

[Rettu Skcollob]

Wouldn't that make him better quailified as an Anti-Villain? (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AntiVillain)

Yes, this sounds like a better definition, although I had not heard the term previously.

[hamishspence]

Heroes of horror section that suggests evil means used in good ends is called Heroes and Anti-heroes. While it makes suggestion that such a character could be a "flexible neutral" the later book Tyrants of the Nine Hells tells us that evil acts stick: "the good that mortals do in life is outweighed by the taint of sin"

Translation: whatver your alignment, expect strict afterlife judgement if you do evil deeds without atoning.

Its focussed more on Lawful than Chaotic characters. However, it has a sidebar suggesting that Chaotic characters can slip toward Law, in the same way that Good characters can slip toward evil be doing evil deeds.

The scales are weighted in favour of evil, Intentionally, I think, to prevent the absurdity of the character who does good acts after they do evil acts, and thinks they are OK by doing so.

This was exemplified in 2nd ed's True Neutral, where you had to do acts in both directions, to keep yourself at the Neutral point, to the extent of when friend are fighting monsters, helping the monsters when it looks like they are losing. See 2nd ed Player's Handbook.

[David Argall]

You're taking my statement to mean "any arbiter can make an objective ruling," which is not something I intended to imply when I said objective good and evil can only exist if there is an arbiter.
It would seem irrelevant whether I did or not. The point is that any arbiter will make a subjective ruling by the fact of being an individual.


We humans do not precisely "measure" good and evil, as in "Steve's latest crime scored an 8.6 on the kilonazi graph." We examine actions that have been performed, consider the motives involved, and from there we attempt to interpret good and evil.
Which in the end works out to saying Steve scored 8.6.


Our courts require the prosecution prove their case "beyond a reasonable doubt." The impossibility of total certainty is built right into the system.
Which is not the point at issue. Subjective is, for our purposes, not uncertainity over whether Steve scored 7 or 9. It is knowing that he scored 8, and then deciding Steve's a nice guy and is punished as a 7 [or didn't comb his hair and so gets hit with a 9].


The people who keep defending the paladins, however, say that if what they did was objectively evil, they should have fallen, period. For that to happen even when the gods condoned their actions, there would have to be some other, omnipresent "force" of objective good or evil that could have smote the paladins (or stripped away their powers) as punishment for their IMHO BLATANTLY evil actions.
And the D&D rules very clearly do assume such a "force" exists. The paladin does evil, he falls, period. Not after a trial or upon the decision of some god, just falls immediately and without exception.


That didn't happen. We, the reader, can TRY to be as objective as possible as we analyze the story, but there does not appear to be any real objective force of good or evil in OOTS except, perhaps, for karma as Rich alludes to in War and XPs.
Now the very idea of karma is a claim of such objective measure, so this of itself defeats the idea there is any such objective force.
Nor do we need to identify such a force. You fall out of a tree, you fall whether or not you or anybody else knows about the force of gravity. We don't need to know how it is that a paladin falls. He does.



It is being explained. Not all at once, but it's getting there.
Oh? How? And what is the outline of that explanation? On the face of it, this seems to be a plea to have faith. All will be revealed in the end.
We have a strip that is easily understood as good guys vs evil guys. Where do we have evidence that there is some sort of "deeper" meaning?


And I don't think it is "cheating" at all for a story that is taking place within a comic strip to not adhere to all of the properties of a story which is told from behind a dungeon master screen.
The properties of a story are largely the same whether we talk of comic strip, book or module. The rules, and their exceptions, extend over all the forms. The one at interest here is being fair to the reader. You do not lie to them. You tell them what is happening. Oh, the mystery killer may not be revealed to the last page and the horrible monster scratching at the door may never even come onstage, but the reader knows this from the start.
Here we have 600 strips, and more pages, and the bad guys are still going around doing evil things. No sign they are forced into it. Rather we see them happily going about their evil ways. The idea of them being some sort of innocent victims just does not fit the script.



The orcs Roy's party ran into just wanted to go to a concert, they didn't attack anyone except the adventurers who tried to attack them.
But they did attack them. And did not attack others only because the others were too scared to come close to them.
While Roy's party did intend to attack the orcs, the orcs did not know this when they attacked Durkon and Roy. They deemed them innocent fans. Legally and morally, the orcs were the aggressors here.


The paladin and the other humans were pissed off that Roy helped them go to their concert instead of just killing them because "randomly killing things is what we do!" Which is not even to mention the fact that he was conspiring with his other teammates to have Durkon killed off because he was "annoying." You honestly think he was "objectively good?"
Properly no. But that merely means I disagree about what the objectively good standards ought to be. Our paladin testifies to the existance of those standards, however much we may challenge them.
Of course, we also have the point that this is intended as a joke, deriding the attitudes of many players about alignment. That can mean the episode can have absolutely zero relevance to the rest of the story, and the finer the point we are discussing, the more likely this is.
The joke depends on the attempt to get around a standard that is well known to the reader, and so testifies that this standard is being used. But the "crime" they are trying to fiddle around needs to be one that the reader finds unacceptable. It does not need to be one that is or is not part of any actual code.

Now when we look at the village, we see there is no joke involved here. The situation is serious and the rule of funny does not protect the paladins.



She killed her liege lord. Huge violation of her oath. Belkar seems to have thought it was the "evilness" of the deed that caused her to fall, he might be right, it's hard to be completely certain.
Which is a way to concede the point without admitting it. "Hard to be completely certain" translates to "easy to see what way to bet."
We can look at the responses to the scene. All sorts of people denouncing Miko for killing this helpless innocent old man. Durn few grumbling about offing her superior officer. The deed was seen as evil, not unlawful. [It was both of course, but the vote is heavily that it was far more evil than unlawful.]



We don't see huts, so therefore, it was a lie?
No, so therefore the information is clearly incomplete. Which in turn means we may have incomplete information about paladin motivations and justifications.


And also somehow that makes the total slaughter of their village okay, including killing the little sister?
Something does. The paladins do not fall.



SoD is not contradictory to everything else we've been told. What I have been saying over and over again is that the goblins think of themselves as evil, and their concept of evil is nothing like ours
But their concept of evil seems very like ours. They identify as evil just the same deeds we do.


In the real world, why would Redcloak and Right-Eye think of themselves as evil at all?
Why would they not? Except in the willingness to lie to themselves and others, they are apt to agree their crimes are marks of evil.



The humans were the ones who came to their village unprovoked and killed everything that moved, including women and children.
And what would we expect criminals to think of the cops who raid the place and arrest everybody? We expect them to be quite indignant about being arrested for their crimes.



They wouldn't think "oh look another evil person, let's recruit him" when they saw Xykon.
Why not?

[Cleverdan22]

"An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind." Right-eye realized that, probably because he was half blind already. And by the end of SoD, Right-eye was right, and Redcloak was wrong. Right-eye got it straight at the end, that it wasn't about the Dark One anymore, it was about whose fault it was.

Plus, all the hobgoblins that Redcloak killed. Sure, he realized it after causing the deaths of hundreds, but how did he atone for it? Killing more humans. Right-eye had more wisdom than Redcloak could ever hope for, and Redcloak needs to realize that soon.

[B. Dandelion]

It would seem irrelevant whether I did or not. The point is that any arbiter will make a subjective ruling by the fact of being an individual.
No, not any arbiter. An imperfect human arbiter will make a subjective, imperfect ruling. That pretty much covers every person on earth. What about God?


Which in the end works out to saying Steve scored 8.6.
Uh, not exactly.


Which is not the point at issue. Subjective is, for our purposes, not uncertainity over whether Steve scored 7 or 9. It is knowing that he scored 8, and then deciding Steve's a nice guy and is punished as a 7 [or didn't comb his hair and so gets hit with a 9].
Cute. You're right that it isn't the point at issue, however, since I don't really want to get into this.


And the D&D rules very clearly do assume such a "force" exists. The paladin does evil, he falls, period. Not after a trial or upon the decision of some god, just falls immediately and without exception.
And that is where we fall afoul of "conception" versus "execution." The D&D rules may say exactly that. Who is in charge of enforcing those rules? The DM, who takes his subjective understanding of good versus evil and attributes it to the universe at large.

I don't even play the game and I've seen hundreds of debates over whether or not it should be acceptable for players to kill orc children, or a captured murderer, and so on and such forth. For each of those people running a game, the so-called "objective" force of morality is going to make different -- yes, subjective -- rulings. Obviously the very notion of objectivity in a gaming session is in fact illusory.


Now the very idea of karma is a claim of such objective measure, so this of itself defeats the idea there is any such objective force.
Oh yes, the claim of karma is indeed the claim of an objective force -- although really, in a story, if karma rules against a character it is in fact the author's subjective notion of morality portrayed as the objective. Karma, here, ruled against the gods who were pretty patently allegorical for gamers throwing ideas together in a mishmash of wildly contrasting themes. The OOTS gods are far from perfect. I don't think they meant to be cruel, but a cruel life was what they have given most of the humanoid races, and for them to sanction massacres...


Nor do we need to identify such a force. You fall out of a tree, you fall whether or not you or anybody else knows about the force of gravity. We don't need to know how it is that a paladin falls. He does.
I don't know why you'd make this claim, it seems to me pretty important to the plot that we do recognize where such a force comes from. Miko losing her powers was no small affair. It was very unambiguously a matter of the 12 gods "turning away" from her. Although I do recall at the time that you were pretty adamant that the gods were just there for a light show and in fact had nothing to do with it, it was that objective force of morality we keep getting back to that stripped her of her paladinhood. You don't believe that any more?


Oh? How? And what is the outline of that explanation? On the face of it, this seems to be a plea to have faith. All will be revealed in the end.
We have a strip that is easily understood as good guys vs evil guys. Where do we have evidence that there is some sort of "deeper" meaning? "Good guys vs evil guys?" For Roy vs Xykon that might be the case. That, for you, is "easily understood" as the meaning of the whole strip? Obviously it's ONE of the themes, you think it's the ONLY one?


The properties of a story are largely the same whether we talk of comic strip, book or module. The rules, and their exceptions, extend over all the forms. The one at interest here is being fair to the reader. You do not lie to them. You tell them what is happening. Oh, the mystery killer may not be revealed to the last page and the horrible monster scratching at the door may never even come onstage, but the reader knows this from the start.
Here we have 600 strips, and more pages, and the bad guys are still going around doing evil things. No sign they are forced into it. Rather we see them happily going about their evil ways. The idea of them being some sort of innocent victims just does not fit the script.
Xykon, sure. Redcloak? Oh yeah, "happily going about his evil ways?" Like at the end of SoD, that was happy? Or near the beginning when he was directly cribbing off MLK Jr, we the reader are supposed to think he is completely and irredeemably evil? Or the paladin that put out Right-Eye's eye -- little twerp had it coming?


But they did attack them. And did not attack others only because the others were too scared to come close to them.
While Roy's party did intend to attack the orcs, the orcs did not know this when they attacked Durkon and Roy. They deemed them innocent fans. Legally and morally, the orcs were the aggressors here.
When Durkon and Roy approached the camp, several other adventurers had already come and tried to attack the orcs, because when the orcs had come to town to try to BUY food, the humans assumed the worst and screamed and fled. So the orcs thought the adventurers were attacking them to get their seats for themselves. When they saw another group of ARMED adventurers, they assumed they were there to attack. You want to ding them for assuming Durkon and Roy were there to attack them when that WAS in fact exactly what they were planning to do? And all they did was knock Roy on his butt? Fine. The paladin in question was still a horrible waste of a human being who was pissed at Roy for not letting him kill the orcs once the misunderstanding had been straightened out.


Properly no. But that merely means I disagree about what the objectively good standards ought to be. Our paladin testifies to the existance of those standards, however much we may challenge them.
ROY also disagreed and I rather got the impression that the narrative sided with him. Roy and Durkon actually ARE lawful good. The paladin is a selfish jackass who thinks the rules are stupid and inconvenient.


Of course, we also have the point that this is intended as a joke, deriding the attitudes of many players about alignment. That can mean the episode can have absolutely zero relevance to the rest of the story, and the finer the point we are discussing, the more likely this is.
The joke depends on the attempt to get around a standard that is well known to the reader, and so testifies that this standard is being used. But the "crime" they are trying to fiddle around needs to be one that the reader finds unacceptable. It does not need to be one that is or is not part of any actual code.

Now when we look at the village, we see there is no joke involved here. The situation is serious and the rule of funny does not protect the paladins.

You were the one who brought it up as an example of a paladin who was "wary" of his deeds. Now you say it's a joke? Make up your mind.


Which is a way to concede the point without admitting it. "Hard to be completely certain" translates to "easy to see what way to bet."
::rolls eyes:: Yes, I'm terrified to concede a point to you. It frankly makes no difference to my overall argument whether she fell for violating her oath or for committing an "evil" deed, so I point out it is not actually labeled the one versus the other. Haley, when later (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0524.html) referring to it says they know a paladin can fall for "killing their defenseless liege lord" not "executing an innocent man."


We can look at the responses to the scene. All sorts of people denouncing Miko for killing this helpless innocent old man. Durn few grumbling about offing her superior officer. The deed was seen as evil, not unlawful. [It was both of course, but the vote is heavily that it was far more evil than unlawful.]
This is, again, totally irrelevant, but who are these people in which comics?


No, so therefore the information is clearly incomplete. Which in turn means we may have incomplete information about paladin motivations and justifications.
We don't see huts, although huts are referred to, meaning the information is incomplete? Or dare I say, misleading? Why in the world should a reader pick up SoD, say, "I didn't see any huts!" and therefore logically conclude there must be some information missing that would be almost certain to vindicate the paladins' actions? Including, again, killing old women and children?

Something does. The paladins do not fall.The paladins did not fall, so you continue to assert that this proves they should not have fallen, that nothing they did was evil, even killing old women and children, even though we have seen nothing within the strip to validate this assertion. I frankly don't see why your "they didn't fall ergo they didn't do anything worthy of a fall" tautology is more logical than the premise that when the IMPERFECT gods get to call the shots on what's good or evil, sometimes you're going to wind up with some blatantly hypocritical calls.


But their concept of evil seems very like ours. They identify as evil just the same deeds we do.
No not really. They label things many things evil that we, were we in their position, would rationalize as good. I don't see why this is so hard to accept. A bunch of armed men burn your village to the ground and kill everything that moves, years later you try and lead a resistance movement against them, directly quoting from Martin Luther King Jr., and you call yourself the bad guy?


Why would they not? Except in the willingness to lie to themselves and others, they are apt to agree their crimes are marks of evil.
WHAT crimes? They hadn't done anything. RC is baffled that the Azurites attack them for that exact reason.


And what would we expect criminals to think of the cops who raid the place and arrest everybody? We expect them to be quite indignant about being arrested for their crimes.
And how exactly does this help your point that they should THINK of themselves as evil? And they should have been so lucky as to be arrested instead of disemboweled or beheaded.


Why not?
Because it doesn't make rational sense in the real world that people in Redcloak and Right-Eye's position would have thought what they were doing was evil.

[Cleverdan22]

Look, the Giant made SoD to have the readers sympathize with the bad guys, but it ends there. The Giant will most often side with the protagonist group in the story, which is the Order, which is made up of Good (well, mostly) aligned characters. Therefore, the Evil aligned antagonists will always get the short end. That's pretty much how things go.

And I still stand by my statement that by the end of SoD, Right-Eye was right, and Redcloak was wrong. Redcloak sticks with Xykon because he doesn't want the countless number of goblin deaths to be his fault. Also, Right-Eye pretty much hit the nail on the head with the statement "petty and spiteful god."

[B. Dandelion]

Look, the Giant made SoD to have the readers sympathize with the bad guys, but it ends there. The Giant will most often side with the protagonist group in the story, which is the Order, which is made up of Good (well, mostly) aligned characters. Therefore, the Evil aligned antagonists will always get the short end. That's pretty much how things go.
It strikes me as curious that the leader of the OOTS is Roy, who is noted as an anomaly among the "lawful good" denizens of the world because of the fact that he "will never kill someone just because it's easier than talking to them" while Xykon's top lieutenant and arguably the mind behind his entire operation is a goblin whose whole life would have turned out differently had he encountered more humans like that. Or really ANY humans like that.


And I still stand by my statement that by the end of SoD, Right-Eye was right, and Redcloak was wrong. Redcloak sticks with Xykon because he doesn't want the countless number of goblin deaths to be his fault. Also, Right-Eye pretty much hit the nail on the head with the statement "petty and spiteful god."
Pretty much.

[Morty]

It strikes me as curious that the leader of the OOTS is Roy, who is noted as an anomaly among the "lawful good" denizens of the world because of the fact that he "will never kill someone just because it's easier than talking to them" while Xykon's top lieutenant and arguably the mind behind his entire operation is a goblin whose whole life would have turned out differently had he encountered more humans like that. Or really ANY humans like that.


I'll throw in that I find it hard to belive Giant -or any reasonable writer- would waste a whole book that people pay for, as opposed to the online strip they get for free, on a clever ruse hiding the fact that OoTS is, in fact, yet another cliched black-and-white fantasy story.

[David Argall]

No, not any arbiter. An imperfect human arbiter will make a subjective, imperfect ruling. That pretty much covers every person on earth. What about God?
God seems to have a whole lot of biases.


Uh, not exactly.
Close enough for our purposes.


I've seen hundreds of debates over whether or not it should be acceptable for players to kill orc children, or a captured murderer, and so on and such forth.
And if you investigate any objective fact, you will find that there were hundreds of debates over it as well. The source of the Nile is eventually found and the debates largely end, but they can last for lifetimes. Talking about moral issues of far greater complexity, not to mention bias of the speakers, we are hardly surprised that the debates last way longer.


The D&D rules may say exactly that. Who is in charge of enforcing those rules?
Who is in charge of enforcing the rules of gravity?



The DM, who takes his subjective understanding of good versus evil and attributes it to the universe at large.
And for the purposes of our discussion, that makes the subjective rules objective. There is nobody the PC [as opposed to the player] can turn to to ask for a break.


Obviously the very notion of objectivity in a gaming session is in fact illusory.
Right. And to make it a better illusion, they make books like BVD and BED. And wrong in the sense that this is important to the point. The whole game is an illusion. Objectivity is no more a problem here than flying dragons and other violations of the laws of science.



I don't know why you'd make this claim, it seems to me pretty important to the plot that we do recognize where such a force comes from.
It can be, or it can not be. There is a flood in our story. We can blame the dam breaking, the recent rain, or any of dozens of other causes. Most likely we don't care. We likely have a tale of the hero dealing with the flood, and the cause gets a line or so.



Miko losing her powers was no small affair. It was very unambiguously a matter of the 12 gods "turning away" from her. Although I do recall at the time that you were pretty adamant that the gods were just there for a light show and in fact had nothing to do with it, it was that objective force of morality we keep getting back to that stripped her of her paladinhood. You don't believe that any more?
By the D&D rules, and the logic so far shown in the story, that is what happened. The picture of the gods was great scenery, but Paladin and paladin falling is a world wide concept, not a Southern gods one, and we don't even know that any of the 12 gods are LG. The idea they all are is most unlikely. But if they are not all LG, you have a distinctly tainted jury. Quite simply these gods were either simply endorsing a decision they had no control over, or D&D rules were not being followed.


"Good guys vs evil guys?" For Roy vs Xykon that might be the case. That, for you, is "easily understood" as the meaning of the whole strip? Obviously it's ONE of the themes, you think it's the ONLY one?
You can suggest what other ones there are, if you like.
Here, you seem to be suggesting a theme of the evil races being mistreated and misunderstood. But where in the strip do we have actual evidence of that?


Like at the end of SoD...near the beginning when he was directly cribbing off MLK Jr, ... Or the paladin that put out Right-Eye's eye
You are trying to use SoD evidence to answer a question about the strip itself. The request was for strip evidence.


When Durkon and Roy approached the camp, several other adventurers had already come and tried to attack the orcs, So the orcs thought the adventurers were attacking them to get their seats for themselves. When they saw another group of ARMED adventurers, they assumed they were there to attack.
Flatly wrong. "Humans not get better seats than Gronk!"
Nor does law or ethics allow you to simply attack what might be attackers.



You want to ding them for assuming Durkon and Roy were there to attack them when that WAS in fact exactly what they were planning to do? And all they did was knock Roy on his butt?
That was not all they tried to do. It was merely all they apparently succeeded in doing. [Roy may have been seriously wounded. While the marks of a wound do not appear here, they also do not appear on the party after the kobold battle. And Roy does give a cry consistent with a wound.]


Fine. The paladin in question was still a horrible waste of a human being who was pissed at Roy for not letting him kill the orcs once the misunderstanding had been straightened out.
Which is unimportant for our purposes.



ROY also disagreed and I rather got the impression that the narrative sided with him. Roy and Durkon actually ARE lawful good. The paladin is a selfish jackass who thinks the rules are stupid and inconvenient.
Which, again, testifies to there being such rules.


You were the one who brought it up as an example of a paladin who was "wary" of his deeds. Now you say it's a joke? Make up your mind.
No inconsistency here. The joke exists at the more detailed level and does not interfere with the more general conclusion.
1-The reader/player is well aware of those who try to get around restrictions on paladins. So this reference says there are such restrictions in OOTS.
2-But for the joke to work, the paladin must be trying to do something entirely unacceptable. If he is just barely fiddling with the rules, we stop and ask if we would let him get away with it, instead of laughing at the very idea. So we can't conclude that his behavior is in any way acceptable for a paladin. Rather we largely conclude the reverse.



This is, again, totally irrelevant, but who are these people in which comics?
These people are those posting in the forum, who give us a view of how the scene is viewed, and thus its actual message.



We don't see huts, although huts are referred to, meaning the information is incomplete? Or dare I say, misleading? Why in the world should a reader pick up SoD, say, "I didn't see any huts!" and therefore logically conclude there must be some information missing that would be almost certain to vindicate the paladins' actions? Including, again, killing old women and children?
You are strawmaning. The lack of huts means our information is incomplete, and being incomplete, we lack the certainity needed to say the paladins were unjustified. We can look around and see evidence that some standard justifications are not valid here, but we can not reject the idea that off-camera justifications exist.


The paladins did not fall, so you continue to assert that this proves they should not have fallen, that nothing they did was evil, even killing old women and children, even though we have seen nothing within the strip to validate this assertion. I frankly don't see why your "they didn't fall ergo they didn't do anything worthy of a fall" tautology is more logical than the premise that when the IMPERFECT gods get to call the shots on what's good or evil, sometimes you're going to wind up with some blatantly hypocritical calls.
D&D rules, which the strip is based on, say the paladin falls automatically. The gods have no control over the situation. The strip gives no evidence this rule has been abandoned. [The Miko case has the same result either way and so is not evidence.] So the presumption is that the rule is being followed. There is no D&D rule that gives the gods such power.



No not really. They label things many things evil that we, were we in their position, would rationalize as good. I don't see why this is so hard to accept. A bunch of armed men burn your village to the ground and kill everything that moves, years later you try and lead a resistance movement against them, directly quoting from Martin Luther King Jr., and you call yourself the bad guy?
Well, since you are pushing a plan to endanger the entire world, a plan that started before you did, you might indeed.



WHAT crimes? They hadn't done anything. RC is baffled that the Azurites attack them for that exact reason.
Our RC is baffled by his own ignorance. The senior RC explains the paladins have valid reasons for being here.
In essence, our boy is a bandit in Mexico who doesn't understand why New York city cops are arresting him. He is in no sense innocent of crime. They just do not take up space on the page. He was already an agent of the Plan to grab the Gate and threaten the gods/destoy the world, a plan that has been put in place 20 years before. However much Redcloak might think so at the moment, this is not something that happened out of the blue.



And how exactly does this help your point that they should THINK of themselves as evil?
Because they are, and agree they are. You are just assuming they deem that is something bad. They call themselves team evil for a reason.
Calling oneself evil is a very common macho routine. It can be a brag.



Because it doesn't make rational sense in the real world that people in Redcloak and Right-Eye's position would have thought what they were doing was evil.
You seem to be assuming they would care. The very fact they are evil denies that.



I'll throw in that I find it hard to belive Giant would waste a whole book that people pay for, as opposed to the online strip they get for free, on a clever ruse hiding the fact that OoTS is, in fact, yet another cliched black-and-white fantasy story.
But he is not trying to hide that. The evidence, one way or another, is right in front of us.
SoD is to make Redcloak a tragic figure. As such he needs our sympathy, and so is given a sympathetic start. We are given as little justification for the paladin attack as possible because making their attack justified reduces sympathy for RC. That does not mean there is no justification. It merely means there is no story utility in explaining that justification.

Recall here that SoD is an expansion. It does not change the meaning of the strip. So when we see no sign the evils are other than evil in the strip, SoD must be read in that light, not the other way around.

[B. Dandelion]

David I tried to reply to you line by line, but got smacked with a power outage and I have no desire to subject myself to that again.


Who is in charge of enforcing the rules of gravity?
In a gaming session? The DM. Unless of course you're in the habit of letting your players hop off cliffs to their heart's delight.


It can be, or it can not be. There is a flood in our story. We can blame the dam breaking, the recent rain, or any of dozens of other causes. Most likely we don't care. We likely have a tale of the hero dealing with the flood, and the cause gets a line or so.
Which is an apples-and-oranges comparison that you make quite frequently throughout your post.


You can suggest what other ones there are, if you like.
Here, you seem to be suggesting a theme of the evil races being mistreated and misunderstood. But where in the strip do we have actual evidence of that?
"I just figured we'd wander around, kill some sentient creatures because they have green skin and fangs and we don't, and then take their stuff. What?"


You are trying to use SoD evidence to answer a question about the strip itself. The request was for strip evidence.
In the section I was replying to, you wrote "Here we have 600 strips, and more pages," so obviously "more pages" would cover the bonus material.


Flatly wrong. "Humans not get better seats than Gronk!"
Nor does law or ethics allow you to simply attack what might be attackers.
Wrong, wrong, wrong... and also arrogant.

"Bloodeye Tribe camp here, Gronk get munchies. Goes to town to get Duhritoes and Mountain Doom."
"And not yucky "Code Red" either."
"Storekeeper scream! Run away. Gronk left copper pieces on counter and returned to camp."
"Ever since, stupid adventurers try to keep Gronk and friends from seeing Iron Golems!"
A few pages prior, Paladin Assmunch informed his party that three other groups of adventurers had been hired before their group to take care of the orc problem, and they'd all been killed. The other adventurers attacked the orcs, who assumed they were trying to take their seats. When they saw Roy's group, they assumed (RIGHTLY) that they were there to attack them (for their seats, wrongly).


That was not all they tried to do. It was merely all they apparently succeeded in doing. [Roy may have been seriously wounded. While the marks of a wound do not appear here, they also do not appear on the party after the kobold battle. And Roy does give a cry consistent with a wound.]
They stopped attacking immediately after the PCs started talking to them instead of merely charging them with the intent of attacking them. God forbid they defend themselves. I like how you're siding with the paladin over ROY.


You are strawmaning. The lack of huts means our information is incomplete, and being incomplete, we lack the certainity needed to say the paladins were unjustified. We can look around and see evidence that some standard justifications are not valid here, but we can not reject the idea that off-camera justifications exist.
What you are saying is that the lack of huts indicates that there is some piece of information so relevant to the scene that it would completely change our perception of human paladins murdering women and children in cold blood from something unacceptable to something perfectly justified. I am calling that total BS. That would make the entire scene completely misleading. "The huts, the huts, where are the huts?!" What the hell difference could it possibly make? You are grasping at straws.


D&D rules, which the strip is based on, say the paladin falls automatically. The gods have no control over the situation. The strip gives no evidence this rule has been abandoned. [The Miko case has the same result either way and so is not evidence.] So the presumption is that the rule is being followed. There is no D&D rule that gives the gods such power.
Them not falling for what they did to RC's village could be pretty clear evidence that rule wasn't being followed. That we're told in the commentary that the gods can sanction massacres would be another clear hint. Hell the existence of the groups of gods, the Snarl, and the creation of humanoids... how the hell does that line up with traditional D&D rules? It's called artistic license.


Well, since you are pushing a plan to endanger the entire world, a plan that started before you did, you might indeed.
A plan that is seen as a win for your side and the cause of righteousness even if it does destroy the entire world. Which won't be a permanent end, either. (Although YOUR end will be.)


Our RC is baffled by his own ignorance. The senior RC explains the paladins have valid reasons for being here.
In essence, our boy is a bandit in Mexico who doesn't understand why New York city cops are arresting him. He is in no sense innocent of crime. They just do not take up space on the page. He was already an agent of the Plan to grab the Gate and threaten the gods/destoy the world, a plan that has been put in place 20 years before. However much Redcloak might think so at the moment, this is not something that happened out of the blue.
He didn't know about the plan until he put on the cloak. All he wanted to do was serve his community as a cleric.



SoD is to make Redcloak a tragic figure. As such he needs our sympathy, and so is given a sympathetic start. We are given as little justification for the paladin attack as possible because making their attack justified reduces sympathy for RC. That does not mean there is no justification. It merely means there is no story utility in explaining that justification.
So it's a lie, basically. We should only sympathize with him because we don't know the whole story.


Recall here that SoD is an expansion. It does not change the meaning of the strip. So when we see no sign the evils are other than evil in the strip, SoD must be read in that light, not the other way around.
We see plenty of evidence RC is not exactly evil incarnate to the level Xykon is -- his total horror at the concept of him turning INTO Xykon was pretty proof positive of that. SoD actually verifies RC's claim that the paladins murdered his whole village including his mother, which prior to that people were assuming had a better justification than SoD wound up delivering. (Back then, the assumption was that his mother himself must have been a priestess of the Dark One and in on the Plan. Not so, as it turned out.)

[David Argall]

I tried to reply to you line by line, but got smacked with a power outage and I have no desire to subject myself to that again.
Always painful. I have lost a few long posts over the years and it's not easy to recover and retype.


In a gaming session? The DM. Unless of course you're in the habit of letting your players hop off cliffs to their heart's delight.
And the DM is also all the laws of physics. But as far as the story is concerned, the DM does not exist.



Which is an apples-and-oranges comparison that you make quite frequently throughout your post.
You charge this, but do not show any evidence this is the case.

Your earlier clain is that
"it seems to me pretty important to the plot that we do recognize where such a force comes from."
But when we take a look at an actual force that might be in a story, such as a flood, we find little to no interest in the origin of such a force. We are interested in how the hero deals with such a force, but where it came from is, at best, a minor point.



"I just figured we'd wander around, kill some sentient creatures because they have green skin and fangs and we don't, and then take their stuff. What?"
Now this is the statement of Belkar, the identified evil, and is condemned by all of the party we can see. So this becomes a condemnation of such behavior, and a rejection of any SoD claims that such behavior was the norm..


In the section I was replying to, you wrote "Here we have 600 strips, and more pages," so obviously "more pages" would cover the bonus material.
Given the casual use of language around here, assuming something like this is obvious is rather obviously unwise. Our 600 strips is some distinctly higher number of pages before we count any bonus material. Dungeon Crawling Fools is 120 strips, and 160 pages [some of which don't count for our purposes, but we still have a notable difference between the two counts].

However the question was what in the strip, bonus pages included, supported SOD in suggesting abused evil types? For that question, SoD references are by definition invalid. Where does the strip, not SoD, deny that the enemy is evil and by and large deserves punishment.



When they saw Roy's group, they assumed (RIGHTLY) that they were there to attack them (for their seats, wrongly).
Which still makes them guilty of assault and battery. With a bad lawyer, they could go down for attempted murder. The law of self defense does not allow you to attack until all alternatives are ruled out. Since this scene ends peacefully, there were rather obviously peaceful alternatives still possible and the orcs can not plea self defense successfully.



They stopped attacking immediately after the PCs started talking to them instead of merely charging them with the intent of attacking them.
Durkon and Roy have not charged here. Roy was suggesting charging from 40', only to be told Durkon could only charge from 30'. So he was "innocently" considering other alternatives when the orc charged him.

Now in this scene, drama and plot overcome realism. We want Durkon to have a reason to stay with Roy. So Roy saves Durkon. And we want reasons for Roy [& Durkon] to quit the others, so once the orcs have threatened Durkon, they absurdly stop fighting for no good reason, are the first to talk, and allow Roy to show good sense and settle the matter peacefully.
So we can deduct very little about OOTS ethics from this incident. Any morals involved are being bent to the needs of the plot.


What you are saying is that the lack of huts indicates that there is some piece of information so relevant to the scene that it would completely change our perception
And as I said before, this is a strawman argument. There is no claim there is such a piece of information. The claim is that the lack of huts shows us merely that there can be such a piece of information.



Them not falling for what they did to RC's village could be pretty clear evidence that rule wasn't being followed.
Does not follow. This is flying saucer logic... "The craft violated several laws of science, so it must have been from outer space.", ignoring that it in fact violated none, because the observer was confused or a fraud.
In the story, we are that confused observer. We do not reason "It seems to violate the laws of D&D. Therefore the law is not being followed." Rather we reason "therefore there is something we don't see."



That we're told in the commentary that the gods can sanction massacres would be another clear hint.
Can you give a little closer source here?


Hell the existence of the groups of gods, the Snarl, and the creation of humanoids... how the hell does that line up with traditional D&D rules? It's called artistic license.
All of that is fairly routine D&D stuff.


A plan that is seen as a win for your side and the cause of righteousness even if it does destroy the entire world. Which won't be a permanent end, either. (Although YOUR end will be.)
Such a plan is routinely denounced as insanely evil in most stories.


He didn't know about the plan until he put on the cloak.
He didn't know the details of the plan before then. He could hardly avoid knowing there was a plan. All thru his life, expeditions of goblins had been marching off into elven lands for some important purpose. So he know of the plan. And it is hard to see how he would be ignorant of the broad outlines of the plan either. There is no obvious reason to keep any of the details secret. Note that the paladins seem to know some details of the plan and it would be rather strange if the average goblin knew less than the enemy did.


All he wanted to do was serve his community as a cleric.
His comment was a much more vague "serve the community in some small way".



So it's a lie, basically. We should only sympathize with him because we don't know the whole story.
That is a crude way of putting it, and not really accurate. We are wanting to trace the path of his fall, and we can't do that if we start out thinking he was already fallen. In essence, the justification of the paladins' attack doesn't matter for the story of RedCloak. Whether it was or was not justified, we want a Redcloak seeking revenge/whatever, and falling as a result.
A justified attack merely gets in our way in understanding Redcloak, and so we do not want the justifications.



We see plenty of evidence RC is not exactly evil incarnate to the level Xykon is -- his total horror at the concept of him turning INTO Xykon was pretty proof positive of that.
Which tells us little since Xykon is pretty much evil of the evil. Plenty of room for Redcloak to still be evil on his best days. Nowhere near the proof that he is anything but evil. Nor that evil and good are just the whims of the gods.


SoD actually verifies RC's claim that the paladins murdered his whole village including his mother, which prior to that people were assuming had a better justification than SoD wound up delivering.
You'll have to give me a closer reference here to check that. However it seems not to fit the evidence needed here. That goblins have been killed is well known. That other goblins think that unfair is rather obvious. That it was actually a crime of any sort is quite another matter.

[xelliea]

he is the god of goblins of corse he is evil

[King of Nowhere]

Let's say there is a native of the Americian continent, and that he has been living in squalor because all the good lands have been taken by the United States of America. Let's say that the only reason the United States of America has this land is because they were HUGE jerks around a hundred years ago. So, he hatches a plan. He will steal Nuclear Weapons and threatens to blow up New York City, Washington DC, and Los Angeles unless his people get their fair share of land. Would he be Good, Neutral, or Evil?

Well, native americans aren't regularly shooted at for aiming practice (the closest to "killed for XP" I can think in the real world). If they were, that guy could have a point.

[Kish]

Well, native americans aren't regularly shooted at for aiming practice (the closest to "killed for XP" I can think in the real world). If they were, that guy could have a point.
That's not a very good analogy. In the OotS universe, XP is extremely important and can in no way be acquired with any manner of target dummy or training exercise.

[Lamech]

Does not follow. This is flying saucer logic... "The craft violated several laws of science, so it must have been from outer space.", ignoring that it in fact violated none, because the observer was confused or a fraud.
In the story, we are that confused observer. We do not reason "It seems to violate the laws of D&D. Therefore the law is not being followed." Rather we reason "therefore there is something we don't see."
Umm... are you going to claim that the gods must have other worshippers not in the OotS prime? Because the whole survival without worshippers seems to violate the standard DnD rule of gods getting power from prayer.


Durkon and Roy have not charged here. Roy was suggesting charging from 40', only to be told Durkon could only charge from 30'. So he was "innocently" considering other alternatives when the orc charged him.
So Roy was suggesting that they kill the orcs from 40' away, and Durkon was said I can only kill them from 30'. When an armed person is suggesting attacking you and in range to do so, one has every right, to defend yourself in the most effective, method possible, until they are no longer a threat. One is not required to give any advantages to the armed person suggesting they are about to kill you.


He didn't know the details of the plan before then. He could hardly avoid knowing there was a plan. All thru his life, expeditions of goblins had been marching off into elven lands for some important purpose. So he know of the plan. And it is hard to see how he would be ignorant of the broad outlines of the plan either. There is no obvious reason to keep any of the details secret. Note that the paladins seem to know some details of the plan and it would be rather strange if the average goblin knew less than the enemy did.
And how and what exactly was he supposed to conclude from, the goblins marching off? And I think things like any possible destruction of the souls of the goblins would be kept secret. Probably Redcloak was told that the plan was to keep goblins from being randomly attacked and all being killed, even those that are not evil by adventures. Something any good person would support, from Redcloak's view. (Which the elves mostly are.)

[Jan Mattys]

/me points at David Argall and at Dandelion

I might be a total newcomer in this forum, but kudos to you two "veterans" for turning an interesting in-topic OOTS thread into a widely boring and off-OOTS thread.

Do you guys get candies if you finally "win" an arguement over the net?

geez...
:smallsigh:

[David Argall]

Umm... are you going to claim that the gods must have other worshippers not in the OotS prime? Because the whole survival without worshippers seems to violate the standard DnD rule of gods getting power from prayer.
There is no such standard D&D rule. Or perhaps more correctly, there are a whole bunch of such rules that wildly conflict. These are color rules that exist for mere background, addressing such questions as why giants are concerned about ants. They don't really affect actual play and are there to make the world seem more complete.

In our OOTS world, the gods are lightly involved with the world, their actual personal appearance being rather rare, but acting thru various agents, their clerics among others. They have agendas about the world, which are rather vague for the most part, unless we want to use them as a plot hook, as with the gates and the Dark One.
Standard enough D&D stuff.


When an armed person is suggesting attacking you and in range to do so, one has every right, to defend yourself in the most effective, method possible, until they are no longer a threat.
Not at all. You try that and you are going to jail for a long time.
Now D&D encourages resorting to violence sooner than a real society would, but we still have the same basics. You are to use the most efficient, not the most effective, methods of defense, and anything that ends up with a dead body is deemed highly inefficient, no matter who the body was.
If A is discussing attacking you, you are pretty much limited to discussing what you will do if they try. Recall the old saying "threatened men lead long lives." There is a big step between their talking about killing you and trying to do it. So you can morally ready your weapon and can issue warnings. You can't attack until their attack is unavoidable.



One is not required to give any advantages to the armed person suggesting they are about to kill you.
Depends on what you mean by advantage here. In many cases, you are supposed to run away. And routinely you have to yield the same "advantages" you give to the random individual. In particular, you have to let him "draw first".



And how and what exactly was he supposed to conclude from, the goblins marching off?
Let's see... This is something important to goblins, that it is allright to invade elven lands... We have the right to attack others to get what we want...
He had at least a vague idea where the gate was, and possibly an exact location.

And of course, this is only one of several sources of possible information.


And I think things like any possible destruction of the souls of the goblins would be kept secret.
Possibly, but recall here that Redcloak was apparently entirely open with Right-eye. He is his brother and all, but you don't tell anybody what you want to keep secret. What you tell your brother, he is likely to tell others, and they others. So the presumption would be that all of this information was available to any goblin who wanted to have it. And thus that what our young Redcloak didn't know about the gate was what he didn't want to bother learning.


Probably Redcloak was told that the plan was to keep goblins from being randomly attacked and all being killed, even those that are not evil by adventures.
No doubt, but there is no reason to assume that was all he was told.

[B. Dandelion]

/me points at David Argall and at Dandelion

I might be a total newcomer in this forum, but kudos to you two "veterans" for turning an interesting in-topic OOTS thread into a widely boring and off-OOTS thread.

Do you guys get candies if you finally "win" an arguement over the net?

geez...
:smallsigh:
I'd be interested in hearing what you considered the interesting aspects of this debate -- and slightly less interested in hearing who you'd like to finger-point as the culprits that "ruined" the thread for you. Seeing as the one course of action might resuscitate the debate while the other probably wouldn't lead to anywhere but... well, xkcd (http://xkcd.com/386/) seems to get the idea (and in fairness my "debate" with David had gone on for too long by this point, but a little tact wouldn't hurt either of us, or anyone here for that matter).

[King of Nowhere]

That's not a very good analogy. In the OotS universe, XP is extremely important and can in no way be acquired with any manner of target dummy or training exercise.

That's false: in Origin is clearly stated that many members of OOTS got some levels before starting adventuring, and one of them never adventured before joining the OOTS at level 9-10: V got all his levels from studying, Haley got 3-5 levels by stealing, and Roy likely was at level 2 or 3 when he left college.
It seems in the OOTSverse you can get XP from normal training, but at a much slower rate than by adventuring. You can spend a month doing exercices and fighting with wood-made training swords, or you can clear a village of goblins and be done in half an hour, and get approximately the same XP.
You can also get XP from roleplaying (even this is stated in Origin), but killing the monsters is easier and faster than talking to them.
And even if there were no other mean to get XP, slaughtering dozens of sentient beings to gain a level hardly seems fair.