Thoughts on the OOTS goblin predicament

[Hurkyl]

It's probably worth noting there's a complementary bias: Just Like Us. This one gets overplayed in modern works, in my (limited) experience, to the point where there is a presumption all conflict is simply because the people involved haven't figured out how they're all secretly the same.

[Ionathus]

The argument that certain topics in fiction make us more prone to certain behaviors in real life sounds like some sort of strawman or slippery slope fallacy to me. We've been warned all of our lives about how video games will turn us all into violent psychopaths.[snip] Just to name a few examples of how exposure to certain media, or models, or lack of moral oversight, will somehow irredeemably corrupt the average poor impressionable soul. People can and do separate real life from fiction.

And while you might not have, many people have made the claim that orcs are coding for a specific ethnicity.

I'm not sure how well a story about a sentient worm would sell. People tend to crave some level of relatability. It's not to say nothing of the sort has never been tried, I know there's "Empire of the Ants". But the idea kind of passes off as silly. This also reminds me of being forced to read The Character of Rain, where the author passes herself for something she is not, and that was quite a painful read. While presumably not an impossible task, making a story about a parasitic worm would be an awfully hard challenge, trying to find some sort of balance between the alien and the familiar. If it's too familiar, it'll pass as just reskinned humans. If it's too alien, it'll be hard to get hooked to and interested.

Evil humanoids are common not because most authors are closet racists, but because they are a very easy narrative tool. Too easy, one could argue, but there's quite a difference between lazy writing and malicious coding. And that's also the reason why you very rarely see stories from their perspectives. Most stories are about the heroes, the good guys. Evil races are by design antagonists. They are there to oppose the good guys, without the author needing to spend time and/or effort explaining or showing why they are bad. They are also typically depicted in a medieval-esque setting, a time period where the capital punishment was pretty much the default for any transgression, and where whole cities being razed by invading armies was not completely unheard of. People who resisted and then failed against the Golden Horde fared pretty poorly. As for prisoners of war, that's a pretty modern concept. Medieval armies might have kept valuable individuals for ransom, but they certainly did not keep whole armies detained, that was just not financially viable. The productivity to sustain modern levels of incarceration were just out of reach back then. So "capture the enemy combatants instead of killing them" doesn't really fit the era the settings are mostly based on, since there's be nowhere to send them to. Unless, you know... slave labor, which in fantasy only evil societies do. Good(TM) just kills them all (paladin-approved).

That said, it's not true that no stories depict their side, or that "100%" of tolkien rip-offs just have them be "evil humans" with no further thought. Often, authors have ideas about their settings that they just don't include in their works, because it just wouldn't fit without being detrimental to the rest. Sometimes, that lack of details on The Other (TM) is by design, precisely because if you know too much about them, they cease to be The Other (TM).

I also don't think the scenarios where this would matter are actually very common. In LotR, you don't have the Fellowship stumble into a goblin village, and then go "kill all the goblins, because evil goblin mothers give birth to evil goblin babies that will become evil goblin soldiers". It just doesn't happen. And I've seen it argued that Tolkien could have included scenes where the orcs were not overtly hostile combatants, why should he have? The Fellowship is on a quest to go destroy the One Ring and save Middle Earth. They aren't taking a leisure trek through a scenic island nation renown for its sheep and mountains. There isn't really any point in bloating the book with scenes where they start discussing the ethics of baby orcs. That's just not what the story is about. And the same applies for most ripoffs, as with traditional D&D settings. The issue of orc babies rarely comes up. As for orc adults, stories and games rarely have the protagonists just waltz into a town and then start a genocide, for no particular reason. If anything, the common trope is to have the protagonists go to great lengths to display virtue. Often with the very cliché scene where an enemy surrenders, is granted mercy, and then he tries to backstab them and dies (because having an actual prisoner would be too inconvenient, but not giving him a chance to surrender would not do "good guy" enough). In the archetypical D&D quest, an attack on goblins or orcs is not pre-emptive, but a retaliatory solution against attacks done by their raiders. The heroes don't go to an inn to ask "alright, who can we genocide next?" They go in looking for problems that need fixing, and then learn that orcs or such are attacking the countryside, stealing livestock and taking slaves. The resolution is then typically to disperse the camp, and typically that's done by defeating the leader.

Even in the lazy works, it's not about "difference is bad and it's okay to genocide everyone that's different". It's about standing up to Evil.

Please explain to me where, exactly, you have seen me voice any of the bolded opinions that you just placed in my mouth.

I have been working very hard to present my case in a nuanced and conversational way, and it is very frustrating to have those arguments painted in such exaggerated strokes. I have no interest in talking ourselves in circles around the points you think I'm making, because they are not the ones I actually am.

IRL, catapults do not just break walls. In this comic, they did. One guy argued that this was thanks to Redcloak and his titanium elemental. I don't buy this. The density thing might account for range, but the catapult still has a weight limit, which will be highly influential for its ability to break the walls. Of course, so does density, but if the catapults were able to do this level of damage per shot with the titanium elementals, I'd expect them to be able to do sufficient damage with lower-level ammunition, even if it may take them more time or more shots.

The militia captain had a point, when he burst the PC's bubble. You are putting a ton of faith in relatively few relatively high level characters, as if they would have made a significant difference. At the scale we saw, and even moreso at the greater scale that a furthere delayed conflict would have had, even a very powerful character has a miserable quantity of resources. Spell slots, HP, etc. That wizard didn't seem very good to begin with, how many hobgoblins do you think he could have taken out? Even if he tried to be smart about his targets? Same with the rest of the high level characters. When you've got an army of soldiers willing to march in to their deaths so as to essentially build a bridge with their corpses... and you've got a whole lot more than the enemy, a terrible K:D ratio is meaningless. They still would have prevailed.

You're putting too much stock in rank-and-file troops vs. epic-level spellcasters. Especially when the creator of this setting is on record stating the reverse:

Any or all of those could be true, but you're making a huge assumption that nations are the factions with true power in a D&D world. They're not; adventurers have power, and kings rule at the sufferance of adventurers. Most adventuring parties owe no loyalty to any crown, and will happily overthrow any government that looks at them funny. Governments who target adventurers are governments that get meteor swarmed.

ninja edit:

It's probably worth noting there's a complementary bias: Just Like Us. This one gets overplayed in modern works, in my (limited) experience, to the point where there is a presumption all conflict is simply because the people involved haven't figured out how they're all secretly the same.

Heck, I don't care how cliche it is, if its use simply gets us to start seeing the other side of every conflict as real, thinking people, that's a win in my book.

[hungrycrow]

It was O'chul that lectured Haley about the dangers of fighting an army instead of level-appropriate encounters. And you know what, he was totally wrong. Both Haley and Belkar end up get surrounded by hobgoblins and just slaughter them.

O'chul scoffs at the idea that the hobgoblins would arrange themselves in managable encounters, but that's exactly what walls do to armies.

Archer fight? Attackers can eventually outnumber the defenders, but they have to get their troops in place. Meanwhile they're taking potshots from defenders who get massive bonuses from being on top of the walls and behind cover.

Storming a breach? No matter how many soldiers the hobgoblins send, it turns into a 1:1 ratio because of the chokepoint. At least until the defenders run out of troops.

Climbing the walls with ladders? The attackers are actually outnumbered because they have to climb one at a time.

Really, 3 kills per defender is an underestimation, even for level 1 npc warriors.

[Peelee]

It was O'chul that lectured Haley about the dangers of fighting an army instead of level-appropriate encounters. And you know what, he was totally wrong. Both Haley and Belkar end up get surrounded by hobgoblins and just slaughter them.

Yes, the Azurite victory and negligible amount of dead Azurite soldiers really hammered home how wrong O-Chul was.

[hungrycrow]

Yes, the Azurite victory and negligible amount of dead Azurite soldiers really hammered home how wrong O-Chul was.

Yeah "totally wrong" was overselling it a bit. He was definitely right that the azurites were going to take casualties either way. But his argument that on paper the PCs couldn't take 200 or 2000 soldiers assumed that the hobgoblins could actually create engagements where they outnumber the azurites. The only reason they could do that was because Redcloak was able to disrupt so many of the azurites defenses. And of course the only casualty the Order took was Roy getting killed by Xykon.

[Dion]

Wait.. in the story, did 90% of all adult hobgoblin in the whole world attack azure city?

[hungrycrow]

Wait.. in the story, did 90% of all adult hobgoblin in the whole world attack azure city?

Just the ones in the vicinity of Azure City i believe.

[Dion]

Just the ones in the vicinity of Azure City i believe.

Didn’t like 25% of them die? That’s an absolutely insane percentage of the total hobgoblin population dying in just one battle.

[Mike Havran]

Didn’t like 25% of them die? That’s an absolutely insane percentage of the total hobgoblin population dying in just one battle.

What are you talking about? Redcloak only recruited the clan in the Azure city borderlands. Seriously, if the dwarven population is about 10 millions, odds are the fast breeding hobgoblins are not 40 000 in total.

[Worldsong]

Also Azure City on its own has like 500,000 inhabitants so if an army of 30,000 was 90% of the global adult hobgoblin population hobgoblins would be minuscule compared to not only the dwarves but pretty much all PC races.

[Doug Lampert]

People don't realize that attacking walls with mundane equipment is very, very difficult. Even catapults would take a while to bring down a good stone wall, taking return fire the whole time as you said. Climbing the walls, or storming a breach, would be suicidal for everyone involved no matter how much they outnumber the defenders. You essentially need high-level dnd shenanigans to make a dramatic assault like this possible. Without that, an army would probably try to starve the defenders out or bribe their way past the defenses, neither of which seems like an option for a hobgoblin army.

You don't go far enough when you call it very very difficult. The correct term is effectively impossible. AFAIK, NO ONE EVER breached a stone wall with trebuchets or catapults. Rams and undermining could, and ramps could make a wall largely irrelevant, but nothing shot from a distance could take one down, that stuff was all to hit the top works.

If anyone has a counter-example, feel free to present it. I know the Romans had plenty of siege engines, yet when they wanted an actual hole in a wall they undermined, or used a ram on a gate, or just decided they couldn't make a hole and built a giant ramp despite the fact that the guys building the ramp were under fire the entire time and the guys using a ram had stuff dropping on them the entire time.

Note that during the Republic, those soldiers getting killed by closing with a wall were CITIZENS with the VOTE. Their commanders were wiling to take some casualties, but they also wanted to win as cheaply as possible, and Roman siege engines were pretty good, they had specialized engineering units and put a lot of effort into this stuff. Yet, they didn't go around knocking holes in walls.

The middle ages were even worse at siege warfare, and the walls were better, effectively it was almost entirely blockade or bombard to weaken the topworks and then go in with ladders till people got cannon.

The walls weren't breached because heavy stuff hit them, they were breached because literal monsters punched them so hard that they broke. That was all Redcloak.
A hobgoblin leader that wasn't Redcloak wouldn't have gambled the survival of their tribe on a single battle by mobilizing their whole military might.
Blueriver Fort was taken approximately one week before the attack on Azure City. And don't forget that its garrison would also have got an advance warning if it weren't for Redcloak and Xykon, so the Azurites near the border could have fallen back. There'd have been significant reinforcements in Azure City itself if that's where the Azurites decided to make their stand.

Xykon and Redcloak went to a lot of trouble to take out the warning beacons and towers. Apparently THEY thought that the reinforcements and warning would make a substantial difference.

[Dion]

Also Azure City on its own has like 500,000 inhabitants so if an army of 30,000 was 90% of the global adult hobgoblin population hobgoblins would be minuscule compared to not only the dwarves but pretty much all PC races.

Hmm... so we really don’t have any way of knowing how many hobgoblins there are in the world?

The only thing we know with absolute certainty is that an epic level lich was able to conscript an army of 30,000 hobgoblins from a relatively small population and attack one nearby human city with at least 10 times the local hobgoblin population?

And we know that attack was basically suicidal for the local hobgoblins, killing a heavy percentage of them?

But that one battle doesn’t tell anything about the relative total population of hobgoblins vs humans or dwarves or elves or kobolds or lizard folk or hobbits or whatever in the rest of the world?

[Manga Shoggoth]

Yeah "totally wrong" was overselling it a bit. He was definitely right that the azurites were going to take casualties either way. But his argument that on paper the PCs couldn't take 200 or 2000 soldiers assumed that the hobgoblins could actually create engagements where they outnumber the azurites. The only reason they could do that was because Redcloak was able to disrupt so many of the azurites defenses. And of course the only casualty the Order took was Roy getting killed by Xykon.

The strip is Here.

That's not the point of that strip. Haley has just been delivering supplies and making rather flippant comments to the troops. The thrust of O-Chul's comments is that Haley needs to take the upcoming battle more seriously because it is not the same as a dungeon encounter.

(having just detailed the various situations based on Haley's level) "...Most of our soldiers are not that experienced. Even if we hold the city tomorrow it may be the last night alive for many of these girls you just told to 'chill out'.

It might even be the last night for you or one of your friends.

This isn't a dungeon. In a war, people on the winning side still die.

You might want to consider taking it somewhat seriously."

[Kish]

Also, Belkar and Haley walked away because of plot armor, which neither they nor O-Chul was allowed to know about at the time or is ever allowed to know the extent of--not because his "the weakest hobgoblin alive still has a 1/20 chance of hitting you, and if there are 20 attacking you that means you're getting hit an average of once a round" analysis was actually wrong for either a D&D campaign or a world that ran on the letter of D&D rules.

[Fyraltari]

Didn’t like 25% of them die? That’s an absolutely insane percentage of the total hobgoblin population dying in just one battle.

I'm starting to think that Team Evil might not be nice people.

[Jasdoif]

Also, Belkar and Haley walked away because of plot armor, which neither they nor O-Chul was allowed to know about at the time or is ever allowed to know the extent of--not because his "the weakest hobgoblin alive still has a 1/20 chance of hitting you, and if there are 20 attacking you that means you're getting hit an average of once a round" analysis was actually wrong for either a D&D campaign or a world that ran on the letter of D&D rules.

Weirdly enough, the commentary says the point of that strip was to imply that there was no guarantee of plot armor.

Spoiler: War and XPs commentary

Show

Speaking of O-Chul's speech to Haley, that strip was essentially my warning that anyone--yes, anyone--could die in the upcoming battle. I didn't want readers to assume that because the minor characters were dying left and right, that the primary characters were going to escape unscathed. People often refer to "character shields" protecting fictional characters who simply cannot be killed without endangering the story franchise. I wanted to make sure no one read through the battle thinking anyone was immune--especially since I was planning on killing off the guy who's arguably the main character of OOTS! I almost named the strip, "Shields Down, Captain!" but thought that was a bit too meta for my tastes.

[Lemarc]

If anyone has a counter-example, feel free to present it.

The Mongols used trebuchets to break down the walls of Baghdad in 1258.

[Dion]

I'm starting to think that Team Evil might not be nice people.

I don’t see why Redcloak doesn’t just spend a few generations inviting ranger-farmers and farmer-druids to improve the goblin agricultural practices.


They could have state fairs and corn dogs and cheese curds and llama judging competitions.

Thrilling stuff. Rich missed a big opportunity for hobgoblin farmers, I think.

[Hurkyl]

Heck, I don't care how cliche it is, if its use simply gets us to start seeing the other side of every conflict as real, thinking people, that's a win in my book.

It's not about being cliche; the point is that results are poor when you presume people are what you wish them to be rather than what they actually are. In fact, it can be rather oppressive when you wind up pushing your values and cultural norms on others because you fail to acknowledge the differences.

If I'm being cynical, I think I would even argue that a lot of "Othering" is the end result of trying to "Just Like Us" the other group -- that misguided attempts to relate to the other group failing repeatedly leads to the conclusion the other group is unrelatable.

[Shadowknight12]

It's not about being cliche; the point is that results are poor when you presume people are what you wish them to be rather than what they actually are. In fact, it can be rather oppressive when you wind up pushing your values and cultural norms on others because you fail to acknowledge the differences.

If I'm being cynical, I think I would even argue that a lot of "Othering" is the end result of trying to "Just Like Us" the other group -- that misguided attempts to relate to the other group failing repeatedly leads to the conclusion the other group is unrelatable.

I think this is conflating two approaches.

The first one is "I want to understand you" as a primary goal, with "so that you can be granted personhood" as a secondary goal.

The second one is "I want to grant you personhood" as a primary goal, with "and understanding you would be nice" as a secondary goal.

Your criticism only really applies to the first approach. A lot of people (myself included) oppose casting blanket judgments on non-human creatures not because we want to understand them, but because regardless of whether we can understand them or not, they deserve to be treated with the same respect and afforded the same rights and protections we grant to our fellow humans. That doesn't mean we expect them to be like humans, or that we don't want to accommodate their unique needs or priorities, it means that no matter how different they might be from us, they shouldn't be treated as less than humans.

And it seems that people confuse "we should treat them like we'd treat our fellow humans" as though it was a literal aspiration, when in reality it's about approaching non-humans from a respectful place.

[Jasdoif]

It's probably worth noting there's a complementary bias: Just Like Us. This one gets overplayed in modern works, in my (limited) experience, to the point where there is a presumption all conflict is simply because the people involved haven't figured out how they're all secretly the same.

It's not about being cliche; the point is that results are poor when you presume people are what you wish them to be rather than what they actually are. In fact, it can be rather oppressive when you wind up pushing your values and cultural norms on others because you fail to acknowledge the differences.

If I'm being cynical, I think I would even argue that a lot of "Othering" is the end result of trying to "Just Like Us" the other group -- that misguided attempts to relate to the other group failing repeatedly leads to the conclusion the other group is unrelatable.

The key difference, as you've noted, is that the "Just Like Us" route does result in a lot of realization that other people are not exactly what we expect from them. The "Othering" route tends towards ignoring/disregarding/shunning/killing, which inhibits the information needed for the same realizations to form.

[Last_Riot]

Please explain to me where, exactly, you have seen me voice any of the bolded opinions that you just placed in my mouth.

I have been working very hard to present my case in a nuanced and conversational way, and it is very frustrating to have those arguments painted in such exaggerated strokes. I have no interest in talking ourselves in circles around the points you think I'm making, because they are not the ones I actually am.





You're putting too much stock in rank-and-file troops vs. epic-level spellcasters. Especially when the creator of this setting is on record stating the reverse:



ninja edit:


Heck, I don't care how cliche it is, if its use simply gets us to start seeing the other side of every conflict as real, thinking people, that's a win in my book.

Some of the arguments may not have come from you, but they have been made by others, here, defending the same thesis. That said, some of it is paraphrasing your own arguments.

For example, you say you don't think it works as mind control, but then argue "every time we reinforce the concept of The Other in our fiction, those concepts are at risk of bleeding through into our own interactions with Out-Groups in the real world. Even if that alone doesn't turn people into racists, it can still affect our subconscious assumptions". This just sounds like sugarcoating to me. "It's not turning them into racists... but it's altering their subconscious assumptions in a way that makes them more racist" is basically how I'm reading that argument. It's like when you hear "I'm not a racist, but...", what follows is almost always racist. Or "with all due respect...", what follows is usually all but respectful. Yes, you stated you didn't mean to imply that it was some form of mind control. But then, you also stated that it influenced peoples' subconscious. To me, that's effectively arguing that it's effecting some levels of mind control. Maybe you meant to nuance the statement by saying that the effect is small, but I disagree with the effect altogether, at least to any meaningful scale.

I also don't see the idea of "the other" as being inherently wrong, it just needs to be kept in check. Assuming everyone else thinks like you and shares your values is a pretty dangerous and naive viewpoint that exposes you to all sorts of harm. We should never forget our similarities, but we should also never forget that we are not all one and the same. Humanity is not a monolith. And some places on this planet are still very, very harsh. And some people, all over, are psychopaths, and very willing to cause you harm for personal gain. And some groups strongly adhere to a form of tribalism, and just because you don't judge them as a group, doesn't mean many in that group won't see you as a lesser person for not belonging to it yourself.

You also said "you would have already put more thought into the ethics of an alien intelligence than 100% of the people who simply chuck "default" orcs & goblins & kobolds into their D&D worlds, run them like Always Evil humans, and expect their PCs to just kill and not ask any questions." So really, again, mostly just a reference to that.

As for "Just Like Us", the problem is often not so much that it's a cliché, but that it takes several really lazy shortcuts and completely ignores what set apart the two groups to begin with. Are there good people on both sides of any given major conflict? For sure. Are all combatants evil mindless drones? Of course not. Does that mean that every conflict could be avoided/resolved just by being exposed to the other? Most absolutely not. Movies that spin off this idea usually cheat their way into a win-win solution, if they don't sidestep the underlying conflicts entirely. The conflict is usually limited to some form of prejudice, and then they get stuck together, and then learn to respect each other. Or some force of nature forces them to work together for survival. But while scenarios like that can happen, they aren't really the driving force behind major conflicts. I'd love to see a depiction of it from the perspective of an Aquileian family in the year 452. Sure, the Huns too had family back home, that didn't stop them from razing the city. I'd have a hard time imagining a survivor go "Yea, you murdered my kids and raped my wife, but now that I've spent some time with you, you are a pretty swell guy." Or really just take any other genocidal groups, from way back like the Mongols under Genghis Khan, or as recent to your liking. Sure, the invader's population wasn't 100% composed of blood hungry psychopaths. But there was still a good share among them that viewed others as inferiors that could be slain without remorse. Just because you are open and willing to empathize with members of "the other" group, there is no guarantee that this sentiment will be reciprocated. And movies that try to push that the agenda of "just like us" really do themselves a disservice when they just keep going for easy implausible scenarios where the stakes are low and impersonal, or if the solution is an unlikely divine blessing that shouldn't have happened and that certainly none of the characters should have planned for. And by no means do I mean all of them, some do legitimately offer interesting and valuable insight. But it's still all pretty easy to hold an all-loving posture when nothing that one holds dear is actually put up for stakes.

To backtrack a little and return to the parasitic worm idea, though, now that I think of it, that's pretty close to vampires. Sadly, all fictions I'm aware of that try to nuance the morality of vampires offer them an easy way out, usually in the form of feeding upon animals. Which, unless you are a vegan, wouldn't typically pass as evil. I think a good premise for a story could be with vampires, but whose dietary requirements include something distinctly human, some proteins or vitamins or blood type issues or what not. Star the story in the modern day, when big Pharma has basically allowed them to satisfy this need with multivitamin pills or whatever, and pass a certain part of the story developing a certain vampire character, his struggles with his addition, and his righteous path. In the second part, throw him out of society. Maybe sent back in time before Big Pharma. Maybe have him get dumped far from civilization. Maybe have a pandemic or war destroy supply lines for the much needed pills. And then explore the moral implications where the protagonist is faced in a situation where he must legitimately choose between survival or abstaining from causing harm, without offering him any easy way out as such works tend to do. Not as extreme and interesting of a thought experiment as a sentient parasitic worm that deforms babies, but probably more relatable and interesting to read for any significant amount of time. The worm idea might work for a short, but I'd have a hard time imagining 300 pages of it.

It was O'chul that lectured Haley about the dangers of fighting an army instead of level-appropriate encounters. And you know what, he was totally wrong. Both Haley and Belkar end up get surrounded by hobgoblins and just slaughter them.

O'chul scoffs at the idea that the hobgoblins would arrange themselves in managable encounters, but that's exactly what walls do to armies.

Archer fight? Attackers can eventually outnumber the defenders, but they have to get their troops in place. Meanwhile they're taking potshots from defenders who get massive bonuses from being on top of the walls and behind cover.

Storming a breach? No matter how many soldiers the hobgoblins send, it turns into a 1:1 ratio because of the chokepoint. At least until the defenders run out of troops.

Climbing the walls with ladders? The attackers are actually outnumbered because they have to climb one at a time.

Really, 3 kills per defender is an underestimation, even for level 1 npc warriors.

Talking about RL, sure, but this isn't it. The walls were destroyed by punching. The bonuses for the high ground are minor and don't apply to every case (only melee attacks, I believe). There's no reason a lvl 1 human warrior would kill 3 lvl 1 hobgoblin warriors in melee. Hobgoblins even have better stats. Buffed up "best soldiers around" might kill a bunch of lvl 1 hobgoblin warriors, though, and archers may have a favorable K:D ratio, but you can only line so many archers on the walls, and you've probably only got so many arrows stashed up on the ready. For the tiniest gap, 3 defenders will be able to block 1 attacker. The wider the gap, the closer this comes to being 1:1. And despite all the advantages of the buffed breach guards, their ratio per attacking hobgoblin was worse than 1:1.

Azure City's fortifications and defenses were canonically bad.

I think this is conflating two approaches.

The first one is "I want to understand you" as a primary goal, with "so that you can be granted personhood" as a secondary goal.

The second one is "I want to grant you personhood" as a primary goal, with "and understanding you would be nice" as a secondary goal.

Your criticism only really applies to the first approach. A lot of people (myself included) oppose casting blanket judgments on non-human creatures not because we want to understand them, but because regardless of whether we can understand them or not, they deserve to be treated with the same respect and afforded the same rights and protections we grant to our fellow humans. That doesn't mean we expect them to be like humans, or that we don't want to accommodate their unique needs or priorities, it means that no matter how different they might be from us, they shouldn't be treated as less than humans.

And it seems that people confuse "we should treat them like we'd treat our fellow humans" as though it was a literal aspiration, when in reality it's about approaching non-humans from a respectful place.

Perhaps you are a vegan, but I am not. I can respect other forms of life and grant them care and empathy, without granting them the same rights as I would a person, and going so far as to ethically terminate their life is the situation warrants it. Some settings may have other sentient races be canonically of equal moral value to humans, and I'm fine with that. Sci-fi typically goes down this route, and I tend to love the genre. Some setting can have them as canonically distinct from humanity in moral value, as is often done in fantasy, and I'm equally fine with that. LotR orcs are innately and fundamentally evil, and killing them as humanely as possible is perfectly justifiable morally. Vulcans are basically humans with a different outlook on emotions and with pointy ears, killing them for being different would not be moral (reminder that the orcs are never really killed just because they look different, but because the orcs constantly cause strife). One is canonically "always evil", the other has no such innate morality.

I think the kind of people who are likely to accept an argument of "that other group is tainted by evil and worth less than ours" and the kind of people likely to read tolkienesque ripoff fantasy stories has zero overlap.

[Shadowknight12]

Perhaps you are a vegan, but I am not. I can respect other forms of life and grant them care and empathy, without granting them the same rights as I would a person, and going so far as to ethically terminate their life is the situation warrants it. Some settings may have other sentient races be canonically of equal moral value to humans, and I'm fine with that. Sci-fi typically goes down this route, and I tend to love the genre. Some setting can have them as canonically distinct from humanity in moral value, as is often done in fantasy, and I'm equally fine with that. LotR orcs are innately and fundamentally evil, and killing them as humanely as possible is perfectly justifiable morally. Vulcans are basically humans with a different outlook on emotions and with pointy ears, killing them for being different would not be moral (reminder that the orcs are never really killed just because they look different, but because the orcs constantly cause strife). One is canonically "always evil", the other has no such innate morality.

I think the kind of people who are likely to accept an argument of "that other group is tainted by evil and worth less than ours" and the kind of people likely to read tolkienesque ripoff fantasy stories has zero overlap.

I am not a vegan and my argument did not extend to animal forms. It was specifically about whether it's okay to treat fellow intelligent beings as less than human or not, and "they are evil and cause strife" is not adequate justification when such things are extremely subjective and furthermore, could be altered or accommodated so that they aren't harmful anymore.

Fire and electricity are both aspects of reality that are extremely harmful for humans (and most living things) to interact with, but we as humans took them into our lives and learned how to live with them and have been instrumental in our development as a species. A lot of foods we eat are poisonous, hurtful or evolved to be repulsive and bad tasting, both dogs and cats are domesticated descendants of dangerous predators, and in all these cases, we have welcomed them into our cultures.

Just because something is harmful and dangerous doesn't mean it should be killed, or that we can't coexist peacefully with it.

[arimareiji]

The key difference, as you've noted, is that the "Just Like Us" route does result in a lot of realization that other people are not exactly what we expect from them. The "Othering" route tends towards ignoring/disregarding/shunning/killing, which inhibits the information needed for the same realizations to form.

From a different angle, I'd say "Us-ing" and "Other-ing" do both stem from the same attitude of "these people are what I want them to be". Both impose what the actor wants to believe, and ignore/disregard evidence to the contrary.

But they take very different directions after that, because humans gonna human. In-group bias leans toward seeing Us in the the most positive light, and out-group bias leans toward seeing Others in the most negative light.

And what we want to believe tends to be heavily tainted toward self-serving bias -- i.e. "Us are an ally to help defend against Others", or "Us get to kill Others and take their stuff". Which is why it's pretty rare for people to actually rationalize "Hooray, our antagonists are Us!". It's more likely to be projected onto them as a straw man for purposes of Othering.

[hungrycrow]

Talking about RL, sure, but this isn't it. The walls were destroyed by punching. The bonuses for the high ground are minor and don't apply to every case (only melee attacks, I believe). There's no reason a lvl 1 human warrior would kill 3 lvl 1 hobgoblin warriors in melee. Hobgoblins even have better stats. Buffed up "best soldiers around" might kill a bunch of lvl 1 hobgoblin warriors, though, and archers may have a favorable K:D ratio, but you can only line so many archers on the walls, and you've probably only got so many arrows stashed up on the ready. For the tiniest gap, 3 defenders will be able to block 1 attacker. The wider the gap, the closer this comes to being 1:1. And despite all the advantages of the buffed breach guards, their ratio per attacking hobgoblin was worse than 1:1.

Azure City's fortifications and defenses were canonically bad.

Archers on the walls should get cover bonuses from the crenulations. And they can duck in and out of total cover as much as 3.5 action economy allows. Melee guys on the walls can use readied actions and aoos on hobgoblins that climb the ladders. Melee guys on the ground defending the breach don't really get any bonuses other than not having to worry about being flanked.

The downside i've been ignoring is that the hobgoblins have unrealistically high morale. Real soldiers would eventually run away rather than continually throw away their lives in a battle of attrition. The hobgoblins were willing to build a ramp out of their own corpses, so'd they'd definitely stick it out. I just don't know if a 6:1 numerical advantage is actually enough to exhaust the defenders.

As to the strength of the walls, idk. Either the titanium elementals have some special anti-wall ability like ignoring hardness, or Azure City walls are secretly made of paper mache.

[danielxcutter]

Don’t elementals that size have really good Str and attack bonuses? Especially since Titanium Elementals are probably closer to Earth Elementals than anything else(perhaps they have a higher Dexterity). Plus, they were launched through catapults, so that’s probably a good bonus to damage one way or another as well.

Let’s say that they had the offensive stats of a Huge Water Elemental, for conveniences’ sake. They have two slams with a +17 bonus that do 2d10+7 damage and Power Attack. With full Power Attack, they have a +5 bonus(irrelevant as empty spaces only have AC 5 anyways) and each slam does 2d10+19 points of damage. That’s 60 points of damage before hardness is applied, for EACH of them, and that’s not including the catapult bonus or if they had better physical stats(which they very well may have).

So yeah, it’s safe to say that most castles were not designed against tanking high-end summons.

[GeoffWatson]

Don’t elementals that size have really good Str and attack bonuses? Especially since Titanium Elementals are probably closer to Earth Elementals than anything else(perhaps they have a higher Dexterity). Plus, they were launched through catapults, so that’s probably a good bonus to damage one way or another as well.

Let’s say that they had the offensive stats of a Huge Water Elemental, for conveniences’ sake. They have two slams with a +17 bonus that do 2d10+7 damage and Power Attack. With full Power Attack, they have a +5 bonus(irrelevant as empty spaces only have AC 5 anyways) and each slam does 2d10+19 points of damage. That’s 60 points of damage before hardness is applied, for EACH of them, and that’s not including the catapult bonus or if they had better physical stats(which they very well may have).

So yeah, it’s safe to say that most castles were not designed against tanking high-end summons.

3.5D&D gives walls lots of hit points. The basic masonry wall has 90 hp per foot of thickness (and hardness 8), and other wall types have more hp, so it would take them a long time to bash down the walls if the rules were followed, not instant breaches.

[danielxcutter]

3.5D&D gives walls lots of hit points. The basic masonry wall has 90 hp per foot of thickness (and hardness 8), and other wall types have more hp, so it would take them a long time to bash down the walls if the rules were followed, not instant breaches.

Well, there were five of them. Not to mention the aforementioned catapult. But that does sound more like Rich fudged the rules rather than anything else.

And to be fair, when you launch a Huge sized creature with Str in mid-20s at minimum like that with a catapult like that, you’d expect that it’d punch a hole through the wall as well if you didn’t look at the rules.

[hungrycrow]

Well, there were five of them. Not to mention the aforementioned catapult. But that does sound more like Rich fudged the rules rather than anything else.

And to be fair, when you launch a Huge sized creature with Str in mid-20s at minimum like that with a catapult like that, you’d expect that it’d punch a hole through the wall as well if you didn’t look at the rules.

To be more fair, having the elementals bounce off the walls and then punch holes in it 5 rounds later would have been a lot less dramatic.

[danielxcutter]

To be more fair, having the elementals bounce off the walls and then punch holes in it 5 rounds later would have been a lot less dramatic.

Yeah, that checks out.