OOTS #1232 - The Discussion Thread

[danielxcutter]

I’m pretty sure Xykon alone was stronger than the rest of the entire hobgoblin army. Heck, maybe Redcloak was stronger than the entire hobgoblin army.

[Sapphire Guard]

If that was true, they wouldn't have needed an army to take the city in the first place.

[danielxcutter]

If that was true, they wouldn't have needed an army to take the city in the first place.

Hmm. Maybe. Still, most of the hobgoblin army'd literally be incapable of hurting Xykon(DR 15/magic and bludgeoning).

[Deepbluediver]

Redcloak I think is less important but even then his tactics split the party and effectively nullified a mid level wizard and opened up entry to for the hobgoblin forces - while his Heucuva occupied the leader of the azurite forces and a mid-level cleric - and in the aftermath moved to establish trade relations which of nothing else would likely act as protection from invasion by neighbouring forces.

Don't forget that it was Redcloak's elementals who punched a couple of huge holes in the city walls. From what I've read about sieges, breaching large stone fortifications like that is extremely difficult without gunpowder. If the attackers drastically outnumber the defenders, you can do it, but not without inflicting a lot of losses on your own troops, which in turn leads to either a pyrrhic victory or a mutiny. And in an era (historically) when generals and kings were expected to lead from the front, it's not exactly safer for the people in charge, either. "You 10,000 men go die for my glory" isn't an easy order to compel people to follow. It's why many sieges were a lot of sit-around-and-wait for the defenders to get hungry.

So when Redcloak's magic and tactics effectively nullified the biggest Azurite defensive advantage, it made getting the bulk of the army into the city much easier. Maybe the Azurites could have held out if they'd been able to rapidly deploy a thermopolye-type defense, but as has been pointed out, most of the high-level characters were occupied elsewhere. And so with moral low amongst the rank-and-file, and no leaders to encourage them, many soldiers ran for it and those who were left were too few to hold the line. I think it's telling that that is the point in the story when things REALLY start to go downhill for the main characters, and they switch from "defense" to "survival".

Hmm. Maybe. Still, most of the hobgoblin army'd literally be incapable of hurting Xykon(DR 15/magic and bludgeoning).

To throw my 2cp into this discussion, just because you have a couple of really powerful players on your side, like a rook or a queen, doesn't mean it's not useful to ALSO have a whole bunch of pawns. There's a difference between "conquering a city but with 99% of your forces (or you) dead", and "conquering a city with enough strength left over to hold it".

[Adeptus]

New comic is up.

Amazing work again Rich. The writing in OotS is absolutely top notch.

[Roselily2006]

So now we’re done with the debate forever and ever. The goblins were intentionally designed as XP fodder. They got the worse lands because literally none of the gods cared about them. The gods gave them a short brutal life intentionally. Word of god. Done.

Ha ha ha ha. No, just kidding. We should argue.

Narrator: And then they argued for the rest of the thread.

[Deepbluediver]

Narrator: And then they argued for the rest of the thread.

I went back to read some of the earlier comments and it seems like people are criticizing the "good" gods for letting the goblin-situation turn out the way it did (I saw the phrase "bystander syndrome" at least once), and even Thor admits that they kinda just let it happen.

But my question is how much obligation do they have to stop it, and what could they actually do about it?
Remember that scene with the monkey-god when he was like "I want ninjas" and everyone else was like "we're doing medieval swords-and-sorcery" and monkey was like "too bad, it's my turn and I want ninjas" and everyone else had to just be like "sigh ok we have ninjas now"? Any conflict can't become to overt, or it risks creating another snarl. And we've also seen that the Good (capital G) gods don't particularly outnumber or overpower the Evil and neutral gods either, particularly not in the long run.

So they can't stop Fenrir from creating goblin-like races, and they can't force him to take responsibility for his creations, AND they have their own peoples and philosophies they are trying to cultivate, because as Thor also said they NEED them for the lean in-between times....
Maybe there isn't any perfect solution.

Even if Fenrir acts in a predictable manner most of the time, would it even be possible for the Good gods to create some fertile land and keep it unoccupied for the Fenrites (whatever you call Fenrir's races), without someone else trying to move in and take over? If they exhibited to much of that, I could easily see the evil gods trying to use it as a tactic- create so many problem-races that the Good gods spread themselves too thin trying to care for everyone, and then the Evil's chosen few can sweep in and slaughter them all. Or something like that.

In a way I think it has real-world parallels in that even for the most well-intentioned person, there are often limits to what you can accomplish.


And also, just to conclude, there's no guarantee that the goblins would turn out that way. If there's one recurring theme in the comic, it's that your background doesn't determine who you are or what you do. We've seen examples of people who had every advantage and were still ****, and people who had tons of bad breaks but turned out alright.

[Sir_Leorik]

Wow. While the gods may not have been as malicious as Redcloak described in Start of Darkness, they definitely are responsible for the mess the world is in. Fenrir created the Goblinoids, didn't nurture them the way Humans, Elves, Dwarves and the other PC races were, and over a thousand years later Redcloak comes along. Durkon recognizes the inherent inequity of the Dwarves, say, versus the Goblins, but he doesn't yet see a just way to fix things. Which is too bad, because as the protagonists, the Order of the Stick are the ones who will have to find a way to deal with the Goblins' lack of resources, and other systemic woes. I see the Giant as having put a kibosh on any Deus ex Machina solution of the gods just reordering the world to make Goblin (and Orc, Xvart or any other non-PC humanoid race) lands more fertile.

As I was thinking about how to respond to this comic, my first thoughts turned to Right-Eye and Goblin Dan. They were both successful, despite the systemic problems Goblins face. Then I realized the fallacy of such a thought. Right-Eye and Goblin Dan are the exceptions. The average Goblin is born into poverty, and either dies of starvation, or decides to join a Goblin War Band and attack more affluent races. Because they lack the resources to compete militarily with those more affluent races, the average Goblin dies on the much better blade of an adventurer, and the adventurer gets XP for killing the Goblin. Something needs to be done to change the incentives for adventurers killing Goblins for XP. If the gods were interested in actually reshaping the world, I would recommend they try a Milestone advancement scheme, the way many 5E DMs (like myself) do, since adventurers would have less incentive to murder sapient beings for XP that way. Or they could take a page from Dave Arneson's original Blackmoor game (which just turned 50, by the way) and make acquisition of gold pieces worth XP. But that's not going to happen. The gods are either okay with this system or helpless to change it. Any meaningful change will come at the hands of the Order of the Stick.

[Skull the Troll]

Perhaps. Even so, from what I understand, it's got a fairly standard supervillian origin story for Redcloak. And the lich creation process.

Even if his village was wiped out, that doesn't even begin to excuse anything he did, and I don't think it was intended to excuse anything. I'm also fairly certain that the humans have their own side of the story. Lawful good characters don't just commit massacres. They can't do that and remain good. Lawful maybe, but not good.

You should read it. Everything you said above is wrong. It's odd that you have such strong opinions on something you admit you know nothing bout. OOTS is basically a 15 year long thesis on why the DND alignment system is stupid. In this world you can do patently evil things and still be lawful good. Maybe you you think you dont run your DND world that way but you do- unless your PC's gave everything they ever killed a fair trail before killing it.

[Fyraltari]

It's odd that you have such strong opinions on something you admit you know nothing bout.

Hello, welcome to the Internet.

[Sir_Leorik]

Good lord, it's a stick figure comic with an extremely slow post rate and long walls of text accompanying drawn-out plot lines. Get over yourself. This isn't Watchmen.

Order of the Stick is better than Watchmen.

[Skull the Troll]

Hello, welcome to the Internet.

+1 to you good sir. :)

[KorvinStarmast]

So really "monster" is any race except Humans.

Nope, a "monster" in D&D has always been "whomever isn't the PCs" although in later editions the term NPC is applied to a lot of humanoid non PCs rather than Monster. (My reference is Men and Magic as the basis...)

Why do I reach back that far.

Haley1's Dad is a 1e thief, which means that if you go back to before strip 1 older D&D stuff applies to the world as a whole. The first strip is a joke on "the edition changed again" (though Rich wisely stopped doing that when 4e came out and he was well into his plot by then).

If you look in the AD&D 1e MM, there is an entry for "Men" as there was for lots of kinds of "men" (humans) such as dervishes, nomads, berserkers, bandits, and so on from the original game. And then there's the old adage: "What is the most dangerous beast in the forest?"

Spoiler: it's an old literary reference

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The one that walks on two legs. (Mankind, which is now referred to 'human' in D&D)

[Schroeswald]

Good lord, it's a stick figure comic with an extremely slow post rate and long walls of text accompanying drawn-out plot lines. Get over yourself. This isn't Watchmen.

God I really tried not to respond like this but, I can’t resist (note that Watchmen is great).

Good lord, it’s a comic sold in a shop next to toys with a bunch of people in spandex costumes accompanied with inserts of fake newspaper articles and fake comics. Get over yourself. This isn’t Romeo and Juliet.

Watchmen is great, one of the greatest pieces of comic art and modern literature, but like, yeah it’s a superhero comic in a supernatural setting that’s big climactic moment is a giant squid made by artists exploding over New York and killing half the population. It’s most commonly sold in comic shops, which are always filled with toys to buy, don’t act snobby and pretend that you can dismiss any other comic because it isn’t watchmen and thus isn’t allowed to have any ideas or important artistic merit because it doesn’t meet your idea of what an important comic can be, is Watchmen better than Order of the stick? Yeah, I guess (I vastly prefer OOTS tho), but it comes from just as inauspicious backgrounds as order of the stick.

[Ionathus]

But what happened - the Goblins got bad land? Ok how could that have been solved and how could it be solved now?
Assume for a moment that the goblin population started as 1,000 and the Dwarf population started as a 1,000 and that they each got 1,000,000 units of X.
Assume that Dwarves double the population every 100 years and goblins do it every 10 years.
That means after 100 years the Dwarves have 2,000 people with an average 500 units of X, goblins have 1,024,000 with less then 1 unit of X each on average.

If Unit X is '1 pound of Iron' then dwarves end up heavily armoured and weaponed and goblins don't - and since goblins likely have to compete with each other for scarse resources they likely have a lot more infighting.

Now maybe the gods gave the Dwarves 1500 units of X and the Goblins 500 units of X to begin with but that doesn't really change anything after a bit of time passes, the goblins still have less then 1 Unit of X each.

Taking all the Dwarf X and redistributing it now will still have the same problem once a bit more time passes anyway - a potential solution might be goblin mass sterilisation/fertility suppression program but that is likely not the equality that Redcloak would accept.

While you make a good point about population differences, I think you're assuming a lot about the math here. Thor never says "when we create each humanoid race, we're allotted 450,000 km² to each, with an absolute perfectly equal distribution of all resources, and every race has to start with exactly the same." It would make sense for each race's resources to roughly balance out with the others, but that doesn't mean they all start with exactly 1,000,000 units of X.

Consider, for instance, that maybe Redcloak's argument has already accounted for the population difference -- that even though each goblin was always designed to have less X than each dwarf, at a 5:1 ratio, the goblins only outnumber the dwarves 2:1. Even with their numbers advantage, the resource gap is just too large to overcome. Durkon offered a hypothetical fight between 1 dwarf and 1 goblin, but I don't think that was meant to be taken literally. It was just an evocative image.

I'm getting flashbacks to the Godsmoot where people were saying "but Hel's math doesn't work out! 10 million dwarves isn't enough to cause a power imbalance!" Except everybody in the story was treating it like Hel's math does work out. It's the same situation here: Redcloak tells Durkon, who tells Thor, who says "yeah, the math is kinda against them, we did kind of neglect them by accident."

All the relevant characters in the comic are agreeing about it, and nobody in the comic has offered a rebuttal. Because the characters in the comic (including one of the gods that created the world) are going to know more about how their world's resources are allocated, we really ought to take their word for it rather than make incomplete assumptions about the math.

I'll read it or a summary. I have other things to spend my money on, and I know this is a paid story, so I might not bother. It's just a silly little comic.

I have never seen the "people are presenting actual rebuttals to my point, so now I don't actually care about this argument" defense work.

[Ganbatte]

Frankly this whole discussion from Durkon is kind of bogus: when the gods created the world I doubt they went and stated "but the dwarves get it better, the goblins get it worse!" from the beginning.
They all started equal on world creation, then through time it just happened that some rose up and some fell down due to a multitude of reasons... to complain now is just being a whiny loser.

And why didn't Thor say "no" clearly, anyway?
They weren't created to be fodder, they were created under the theory of "breeds fast, numbers over quality" which didn't pan out in the end.
I'm sure the goblins wouldn't bat an eyelid if it was them "farming" dwarves for xp in the present day, but they're only concerned about equity now because they're the ones losing, "test of time" speaking, so they want to flip the table over the winners.

All in all, equity stinks.

[Dragonus45]

Thank you, this is the exact point of all these pages of discussion. It doesn't matter whose fault it is, nearly as much as it matters that it happened and it needs fixing. Bad things happen by accident or carelessness all the damned time, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't help fix them just because it wasn't our fault.

Consider that your hypothetical is missing a few aspects, namely that the people you are saying should be obligated to fix it are literally incapable. None of it justifies Redcloak's actions regardless. You don't get to mug someone at gunpoint then call it reparation.

[Deepbluediver]

Which is too bad, because as the protagonists, the Order of the Stick are the ones who will have to find a way to deal with the Goblins' lack of resources, and other systemic woes.

Ok....why?
What makes it their responsibility to "save" a race that isn't their own and has never been anything but trouble for them? And has, to be honest, quite a few willing evil members.

I don't like the idea that responsibility can be forced upon someone- no individual should be punished or held account for failing to fix a problem that they had no hand in creating. IMO.

[Ionathus]

Frankly this whole discussion from Durkon is kind of bogus: when the gods created the world I doubt they went and stated "but the dwarves get it better, the goblins get it worse!" from the beginning.
They all started equal on world creation, then through time it just happened that some rose up and some fell down due to a multitude of reasons... to complain now is just being a whiny loser.

People can suffer from injustice even when there isn't some mustache-twirling villain orchestrating their oppression. If every other race was nurtured and guided by a god, but the goblinoids got abandoned shortly after their creation and no other gods stepped in to help nurture them, then they have suffered an unintentional disadvantage through no fault of their own.

I'm sure the goblins wouldn't bat an eyelid if it was them "farming" dwarves for xp in the present day, but they're only concerned about equity now because they're the ones losing

Yes. Exactly. You have directly stated the exact point: oppression only matters to the oppressed. Why would the people who profit from the system care about changing the system?

edit: ninja

Consider that your hypothetical is missing a few aspects, namely that the people you are saying should be obligated to fix it are literally incapable. None of it justifies Redcloak's actions regardless. You don't get to mug someone at gunpoint then call it reparation.

People keep putting words in my mouth about this. I'm not saying the gods have to step in and fix it now -- I did read yesterday's comic where Thor said "we literally can't step in and fix it". My entire point is that even though nobody intended for it to happen, the goblinoids have still suffered an injustice, and we (and the OotS civilizations) need to acknowledge that. Recognizing the injustice is the first step to moving forward, and beginning to fix it as a society, even if the gods aren't going to magically step in and fix everything.

Please also don't put words in my mouth about Redcloak. He is wrong. Completely wrong about how to fix this. He is making everything worse. Understanding his mentality and behavior is not the same as endorsing it.

[arimareiji]

I have never seen the "people are presenting actual rebuttals to my point, so now I don't actually care about this argument" defense work.

One funny thing about "winning" is that there are about a million possible ways to do it, depending on your priorities. (^_^)°

For some reason I'm reminded of a kid who lived in our neighborhood for a short while when I was growing up. He was famous for, whenever his team started losing, literally taking his ball and going home. Not to say that this is the equivalent of that, it just occurred to me that even he probably considered himself to have "won" in some fashion.

[Ganbatte]

OH. So every time they start a new world, Fenris tries to ZERG RUSH it!

Fenris is awesome.

And it's not even a bad idea, everyone knows Zerg rushes work.

[KorvinStarmast]

And I don't believe you, or anyone else, could live up to the standard you are demanding that the OOTS Gods should live up to.

The duty of care being assigned to the gods is probably related to them being the creators of the OoTS world (and millions of others) but it does have a snag: duty of care is a human construct (at least where I live) whereas the gods of OoTS are not human and not mortal; they make the rules (for this particular world of OoTS), and they get to choose which ones they follow or don't.

My personal opinion is that the Gods are tired. They've made billions of worlds and now they're doing another stick figure fantasy? They have effectively given up all hope of doing something and so why should it matter if the goblinoids succeed or not? The world will only last a few million years anyways. It wasn't until TDO showed up that the Gods actually started to have hope for the future, but now it's too late to fix their mistakes and they have to make the mortals do the work for them.

Something like this. When you've seen a few million of your own creations go up in flames, you might get a little "world building weary" eventually, but they have to keep doing it since without the souls the have no sustenance (eventually) (see the four food groups strip with Thor explaining).

Redcloak prefers unconditional surrender to negotiation. I'm not sure he realizes it but it's actually very hard for the gods to collectively negotiate, they might not agree to all of his demands even with his leverage.

He has no clue. Heck, almost nobody has a clue besides the readers, and Durkon and Minrah.

I should note that Redcloak came very close to accepting Durkon’s offer.

Not seeing it, in terms of "came very close to accepting" but here's where I give Reddie a tip of the cap: he did sit down to listen, at the table. He did engage in dialogue. He didn't have to do that. But he made that choice to do that. Given his entering position, I find his "if that's your best offer, no thanks" position rational (if unfortunate) since he has not got the omniscience level of the reader.

For what it's worth, I do my best not to step on them.

The ants don't care, they still want your picnic lunch. Their alignment is hungry.

I have other things to spend my money on,

That's a fair point, continuity wise. When there are "those who bought 'not published on line' material" and 'those who read the comic as published on line' material, we end up with two similar but different versions of 'canon' - with a lot of overlap but also much distinct unshared perspective.

This isn't Watchmen.

True. Watchmen is an exceptional graphic novel. (I've read others, and it still stands up quite well). I will point out that Rich didn't set out to write Watchmen - he's got his own story story to tell. Also, Rich both draws and writes and colors, etc. Moore didn't do it all, did he? Watchmen came from the team of a writer Alan Moore, an artist Dave Gibbons and the colorist John Higgins.

I don't like the idea that responsibility can be forced upon someone- no individual should be punished or held account for failing to fix a problem that they had no hand in creating.

But I try not to litter anyway. I don't want to add to the problem.

[Ionathus]

Ok....why?
What makes it their responsibility to "save" a race that isn't their own and has never been anything but trouble for them? And has, to be honest, quite a few willing evil members.

I don't like the idea that responsibility can be forced upon someone- no individual should be punished or held account for failing to fix a problem that they had no hand in creating. IMO.

I dunno, maybe because they're heroes and they care about making the world a better place? Some people have the absolutely radical belief that you should sometimes help fix problems you didn't create, if you have the power to do so.

If we all went around doing the accounting on whether or not a problem was "our" responsibility or not before helping, the world would be a dark place indeed. Society works because enough people help each other, in a billion tiny ways, regardless of whether or not it's their job to.

[KorvinStarmast]

Society works because enough people help each other, in a billion tiny ways, regardless of whether or not it's their job to.

And it also doesn't work, with the inverse of what you describe also going on at some level. (See my point on littering, above).

[Deepbluediver]

People keep putting words in my mouth about this. I'm not saying the gods have to step in and fix it now -- I did read yesterday's comic where Thor said "we literally can't step in and fix it". My entire point is that even though nobody intended for it to happen, the goblinoids have still suffered an injustice, and we (and the OotS civilizations) need to acknowledge that. Recognizing the injustice is the first step to moving forward, and beginning to fix it as a society, even if the gods aren't going to magically step in and fix everything.

Please also don't put words in my mouth about Redcloak. He is wrong. Completely wrong about how to fix this. He is making everything worse. Understanding his mentality and behavior is not the same as endorsing it.

OK, but what obligation do people have to ensure a perfectly equal outcome for everyone? Especially if the people who suffered an injustice are actively making it worse?

Imagine if both Thor and Fenrir takes their kids to the beach. Thor, being a good parent, chooses a shady spot to set up the blanket, makes sure the kids have easy access to the water, that the sand is safe, that they've got snacks and drinks and toys, etc. Fenrir, being a ****ty parent, dumps his kids on the first patch of rocky ground that he comes to, next to a sewage outflow pipe, and then wanders off to go hit on the lifeguard. After a while Fenrir's kids, who obviously aren't having a good time, run over to where Thor's kids are hanging out; they knock down the sandcastle, steal Thor's kid's juicebox, and say "this is mine now!"
And you expect Thor's offspring to respond with "you're right, our bad- let us help you fix things"?

In a purely theoretical world, maybe that is the best/Good outcome possible, but it is a HELL of standard to hold someone to, especially when you have no guarantee that your assistance and kindness will be returned in equal measure.

[Fyraltari]

It’s most commonly sold in comic shops, which are always filled with toys to buy

You don't buy your comic books in bookstores? Wild.

[Ganbatte]

People can suffer from injustice even when there isn't some mustache-twirling villain orchestrating their oppression. If every other race was nurtured and guided by a god, but the goblinoids got abandoned shortly after their creation and no other gods stepped in to help nurture them, then they have suffered an unintentional disadvantage through no fault of their own.

But we already know that once the world is created the Gods step back and stop interfering directly, so what's this "nurturing" consisting of, exactly?
Clerics?
And don't you need to "accept" a deity to become one anyway? It's not like they all do.

Bottom line is: we don't know how much the god's "nurturing" influenced the outcome.
Perhaps very little, meaning that the goblins actually deserve to be in this position due to their "zerg style" on world creation that didn't pan out.
It's not pleasant but it doesn't mean it's unjust. They had their shot at the game and ended up losing this time around.
It happens.

People keep putting words in my mouth about this. I'm not saying the gods have to step in and fix it now -- I did read yesterday's comic where Thor said "we literally can't step in and fix it". My entire point is that even though nobody intended for it to happen, the goblinoids have still suffered an injustice, and we (and the OotS civilizations) need to acknowledge that. Recognizing the injustice is the first step to moving forward, and beginning to fix it as a society, even if the gods aren't going to magically step in and fix everything.

Well, I don't acknowledge that.
Inequality is not synonymous with oppression.
Difference is not inherently bad or unjust.

Just as you say the goblins are suffering injustice due to their currently weakened "loser" status, I might as well call it injustice depriving the current "winners" of their hard-earned accomplishments through the test of time.

I don't like seeing a lion catching up and eating the gazelle, but I'd never dream to take the gazelle away and had the lion robbed of his meal and starved to death.

[ziproot]

I agree that Fenris and maybe Odin should be taken up on neglect. The other gods seem to have done their jobs well. At least, the good ones. Hard to tell what constitutes a "good job" for the evil gods. Keep in mind that many of the evil gods do far worse things to far more people than Fenris seems to have done with the goblins.

Other than Hel (and possibly Nergal), who would that be?

Well, pushing the goblins back from Azure Citywould at least bring things back to a point from which they can negotiate. Unless that new guy (Jirix?) has done a really good job reforming things, the place was basically a hellhole under Xykon and Redcloak. The sooner its occupation ends, the better.

That, like all solutions, must be resolved by the mortals. Still, I think this is not a good idea, as it would just further alienate the goblinoids and Azure City doesn't seem to care. A better idea would be to do what Durkon did, agree to recognize the legitimacy of Gobbotopia under certain conditions.

There's also the matter of rewarding bad behavior, something Durkon himself isn't fond of. Under normal circumstances, he probably wouldn't be suggesting that Azure City be kept by the goblins, but circumstances are dire. If giving up the city would help save all of existence, that's one thing. If giving up the city was done just because the goblins wanted it to make up for their being losers for a long time, that's another. Absent massive reforms, it is clear that the city is suffering terribly under their rule and they don't deserve to hold it for another second. This was made exceedingly clear when we saw what happened to it under the new regime.

For the "terrible rule" part, that also applies to about half the Western continent, and we don't know if Jirix improved conditions or not. As for the "deserving" part, they deserve it about as much as anybody else who controls a city they conquered.

Make no mistake: like Redcloak, the goblins and hobgoblins here are a force for evil. Perhaps they were mistreated in the past but that doesn't excuse, justify, or mitigate anything they do now. Maybe the entirety of their species aren't evil and they are not be mindless monsters who are evil incarnate, but if they are like Redcloak or take after him in any way, they are past all reason and have to be treated as such. Force is the only language most of them understand. Just look at what happened when Redcloak was approached for a simple parley. Durkon attempted to reason with him and he nearly died. The best they can hope for is a treaty after this is all over which sees them get more respect in exchange for concessions or failing that, a better role in the next world/a rebuilt version of the current world.

I think it is pretty clear that Redcloak is not your average goblin. Goblins understand the "goblin" language, and possibly common. There are other goblinoids out there, such as Jirix, Goblin Dan, someone in How the Paladin Got His Scar¹, or someone in Start of Darkness² who actually seem to be reasonable people and understand more than just force. I think the better idea is to hopefully approach with someone other than Redcloak who is more reasonable. Of course, for the "seal the gates" problem, you need Redcloak to agree, and I think warhammer diplomacy (suggested by Julia) is the right call for dealing with Redcloak specifically.

¹

Spoiler: How the Paladin Got His Scar

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The supreme leader of the hobgoblins.

²

Spoiler: Start of Darkness

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Right-eye.

EDIT: I would also like to point out how the fact that we are spending this much time arguing over the comic shows how much we care about it.

[Ionathus]

And it also doesn't work, with the inverse of what you describe also going on at some level. (See my point on littering, above).

An important corollary; well said.

OK, but what obligation do people have to ensure a perfectly equal outcome for everyone? Especially if the people who suffered an injustice are actively making it worse?

Imagine if both Thor and Fenrir takes their kids to the beach. Thor, being a good parent, chooses a shady spot to set up the blanket, makes sure the kids have easy access to the water, that the sand is safe, that they've got snacks and drinks and toys, etc. Fenrir, being a ****ty parent, dumps his kids on the first patch of rocky ground that he comes to, next to a sewage outflow pipe, and then wanders off to go hit on the lifeguard. After a while Fenrir's kids, who obviously aren't having a good time, run over to where Thor's kids are hanging out; they knock down the sandcastle, steal Thor's kid's juicebox, and say "this is mine now!"
And you expect Thor's offspring to respond with "you're right, our bad- let us help you fix things"?

In a purely theoretical world, maybe that is the best/Good outcome possible, but it is a HELL of standard to hold someone to, especially when you have no guarantee that your assistance and kindness will be returned in equal measure.

I mean, yeah. That would be the ideal move. Recognize these kids come from a bad situation and try to help them, instead of taking their meanness as an inherent and unsolvable problem and washing your hands of the situation.

I'm not saying Thor's kids are bad people if they don't do that. I don't expect everybody to just roll over and accept aggression. I'm saying it would be an excellent demonstration of compassion if they were able to look past that and help Freirns's kids out. There are like a billion after-school specials about this concept.

Justice is a high bar. Not everyone is capable of it, either physically or mentally/emotionally, and that's not an indictment of their character. That doesn't mean we shouldn't strive for it.

[Good Coyote]

I'm usually pretty good at keeping up with the twists of argumentation, but I must confess I did not spot the moment when "Redcloak's lack of moral justification" became relevant to events that occurred at the beginning of the world, and "continued lack of events to address it" in the time since. He's not the ur-goblin.