Thoughts on the OOTS goblin predicament

[pendell]

It probably should convince him to let the negotiators go free, though.

Why? Diplomacy isn't mind control or Dominate Person. Even those abilities give a saving throw for acting against nature. If the negotiators are high-level PCs who pose the single greatest threat to the army's success, an evil commander would most likely kill them regardless of a d20 success. That's exactly what Redcloak tried and, if you believe SOD, what the original human kings did to the Dark One back when he was mortal.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[Fyraltari]

Why? Diplomacy isn't mind control or Dominate Person. Even those abilities give a saving throw for acting against nature. If the negotiators are high-level PCs who pose the single greatest threat to the army's success, an evil commander would most likely kill them regardless of a d20 success. That's exactly what Redcloak tried and, if you believe SOD, what the original human kings did to the Dark One back when he was mortal.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Well 1) because attacking messengers is a poor long-term move and 2) the negotiators being the single greatest threat to his success (and it being apparent to the general) is an assumption you've made.

[Lemarc]

Without knowing the adventure path I don't think it is unreasonable.

DM (Narrating): The nation has been invaded by a monsterous horde of hobgoblins (or anyone else) who are pillaging all they find and are making their way to the capital.
DM (King): You must help us adventurers - go and assassinate their leaders, or secure our allies to our defence, or kill all of them with a pointy stick, or something ...
Bard Player: I have maxxed charisma and diplomacy - I am going to talk to them, I will have my own hobgoblin army (or any other army) in an hour or two tops.
DM: ...
DM (Narrating): Three hours later you wake in a cell in the hobgoblin camp ( (or other camp), the smell of urine ripe in your nose and your clothes stained in the filth of the cells former occupier.
Bard Player: But ... I didn't ... this is railroading!
DM: One good diplomacy roll is not going to convince the hobgoblin general (or any general) to abandon the plans he has spent decades developing, just no.

I think arimareiji means insulted by the DM bailing the party out by setting up a contrived escape. I know I would be.

[georgie_leech]

I think arimareiji means insulted by the DM bailing the party out by setting up a contrived escape. I know I would be.

Mm. Tracking down your equipment is one thing; an Oblivion-style convenient Regain Items Here to Escape is another.

[arimareiji]

Without knowing the adventure path I don't think it is unreasonable.

DM (Narrating): The nation has been invaded by a monsterous horde of hobgoblins (or anyone else) who are pillaging all they find and are making their way to the capital.
DM (King): You must help us adventurers - go and assassinate their leaders, or secure our allies to our defence, or kill all of them with a pointy stick, or something ...
Bard Player: I have maxxed charisma and diplomacy - I am going to talk to them, I will have my own hobgoblin army (or any other army) in an hour or two tops.
DM: ...
DM (Narrating): Three hours later you wake in a cell in the hobgoblin camp ( (or other camp), the smell of urine ripe in your nose and your clothes stained in the filth of the cells former occupier.
Bard Player: But ... I didn't ... this is railroading!
DM: One good diplomacy roll is not going to convince the hobgoblin general (or any general) to abandon the plans he has spent decades developing, just no.

Sorry, it looks like I gave the wrong impression: I wouldn't find it insulting that they didn't succeed, I would find it insulting that the party was only taken prisoner (and left in circumstances that allow escape with gear nearby).

It defies imagination if the general is supposed to be <unrepentantly Evil and wow are you dumb for thinking you could negotiate with him like he's a person or something>. It'd be more realistic to wake up in the afterlife, or on a slaver's cart (with your possessions having been sold, equipped, or given to loyal lieutenants).

You'd wake up in shackles if he thinks you have some value as hostage, but he's not going to let you easily escape unless he's extremely stupid (in which case why is he a general?) or has some reason for pulling a Xykon gambit.

_{Edit: Adding reply, because I take way too long to compose posts and didn't check via preview first... (^_^)°}

I think arimareiji means insulted by the DM bailing the party out by setting up a contrived escape. I know I would be.

Thank you, that was what I was trying to get at but didn't make clear. (^_^)b

[hungrycrow]

Sorry, it looks like I gave the wrong impression: I wouldn't find it insulting that they didn't succeed, I would find it insulting that the party was only taken prisoner (and left in circumstances that allow escape with gear nearby).

It defies imagination if the general is supposed to be <unrepentantly Evil and wow are you dumb for thinking you could negotiate with him like he's a person or something>. It'd be more realistic to wake up in the afterlife, or on a slaver's cart (with your possessions having been sold, equipped, or given to loyal lieutenants).

You'd wake up in shackles if he thinks you have some value as hostage, but he's not going to let you easily escape unless he's extremely stupid (in which case why is he a general?) or has some reason for pulling a Xykon gambit.

The bad guys in this case I think are noted as taking slaves. And it isn't too easy to escape; there are a bunch of guards you have to deal with while unarmed. No excuse for not bringing all the valuable equipment somewhere else though. They're at war, obviously they should be giving that out to their soldiers.

[Doug Lampert]

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

Every source I can find says they used ramps. Got a source for the claim of trebuchets?

Edited to add, the sources on the web also indicate that part of the reason for the surrender is that the people of Bagdad could not take the walls BACK after they were taken using ramps, AKA, they'd taken the walls more or less intact, not knocked breaches in them. I'm quite willing to believe that they used trebuchets to knock out the topworks and make the walls easier to take, but nothing I can find even uses the word breach to describe the action.

[arimareiji]

The bad guys in this case I think are noted as taking slaves. And it isn't too easy to escape; there are a bunch of guards you have to deal with while unarmed. No excuse for not bringing all the valuable equipment somewhere else though. They're at war, obviously they should be giving that out to their soldiers.

Thank you for the followup info. (^_^)b

Do you happen to remember (even a number impression is fine) where the level of restraint might've been on a scale from 0 ("Now you just sit there in the open and be good, while we go eat dinner in our tent") to 10 (stripped, gagged and blindfolded, hands and feet in mithral DC40 manacles chained to the walls in an antimagic cell while being watched by guards who can sound an alarm)?

[hungrycrow]

Thank you for the followup info. (^_^)b

Do you happen to remember (even a number impression is fine) where the level of restraint might've been on a scale from 0 ("Now you just sit there in the open and be good, while we go eat dinner in our tent") to 10 (stripped, gagged and blindfolded, hands and feet in mithral DC40 manacles chained to the walls in an antimagic cell while being watched by guards who can sound an alarm)?

Reread the adventure: they're shackled, manacled, and placed in a cell under watch by guards. The spellcasters are gagged. Eventually they're loaded onto wagons, which their manacles are chained to. However, the guards are supposed to be distracted at one point, so the PCs have a chance to break the wood they're chained to and look for the keys. And of course their stuff is nearby the whole time for some reason.

[Worldsong]

Reread the adventure: they're shackled, manacled, and placed in a cell under watch by guards. The spellcasters are gagged. Eventually they're loaded onto wagons, which their manacles are chained to. However, the guards are supposed to be distracted at one point, so the PCs have a chance to break the wood they're chained to and look for the keys. And of course their stuff is nearby the whole time for some reason.

Maybe the idea is to interrogate the adventurers at a later point in time about the exact working of all their magic items so the general has a better idea what to do with them.

[Shadowknight12]

Your comparisons are also pretty flawed. We don't go "just live with it" when a forest fire breaks out. We try to put it out. We put rules in place to try to avoid them. We build institutions around preventing, controlling, and extinguishing fires.

Not so. In many places, it is actually understood that small natural wildfires are a natural way for the underbrush to be consumed regularly and that preventing wildfires is actually harmful in the long term because it causes underbrush accumulation that leads to massive, catastrophic fires when they eventually ignite. Not every human approach to fire is to prevent, control and extinguish.

Wolves were eradicated from many areas, and we only kept "the good ones", the subservient ones, the docile ones that obey our orders and don't have an agenda or agency of their own.

And this was seen as a mistake that, when corrected, massively improved the local ecosystem when wolves were reintroduced to places they had originally been extinct in.

Is this your ethical solution?

No, I'm saying that the approach should be to try to understand and work out some sort of mutually agreeable solution through creativity and ingenuity.

A lot of this is just projecting. You can see a person tending a fire in their home and say "ah yes the human has conquered and dominated the wild element of fire!" but that is just your projection, it's equally easy to say "ah yes the human has established a mutually beneficial relationship with the wild element of fire!" because at the end of the day what the human is doing is just tending a fire.

The same goes for offering positive incentives to enemies to become allies, like trade, technology and diplomacy. You can paint that in a bad way if you want, certainly, like you can do with anything.

Peace is not always feasible. There are situations where the opposing party is dead set on conflict.

There is a difference between self-defence on an individual scale ("this person is actively trying to kill me right now so I need to defend myself or die") versus using "self-defence" as a justification for large-scale aggression against an entire group.

But level 1 adventurers are not diplomats. If the nation is to send emissaries to the raiding orcs to ask them to stop, it probably won't be the PCs. And whether the nation has tried or not to actually seek out a peaceful solution, the PCs just aren't in any position to seek this out for themselves. They don't have the skills, and they don't have the authority.

Either this means the game doesn't give the tools the PCs need to achieve this, which means we ought to question why that is, or the game does (like simply rolling incredibly high Diplomacy checks on enemies to instantly turn them from Hostile to Friendly), and your statement is inaccurate.

[dancrilis]

Sorry, it looks like I gave the wrong impression: I wouldn't find it insulting that they didn't succeed, I would find it insulting that the party was only taken prisoner (and left in circumstances that allow escape with gear nearby).

My bad for assuming one given reading over another one.

I think capturing people is often preferable to execution for a number of reasons from from the prespective of world building and from the prespective of playing a game - from world building the hobgoblins might want to kill them in a ritual to their gods, or get whatever information they have out of them, or maybe the hobgoblins think they are actually the good guys (maybe they are) and they want to deprogram the indoctrinated enemy instead of killing them etc, from playing the 'your all dead now' because the players made a single bad call is a bit rough.

For gear nearby their are a number of ways to justify this, easiest is likely to think of the equipment has yet to be assigned and catelogued and so has to be stored somewhere and complex storage process for captured enemy equipment prior to identification would be odder then 'just put it into that box there we will have a wizard review it later to see if anything is worth anything'.

[arimareiji]

Reread the adventure: they're shackled, manacled, and placed in a cell under watch by guards. The spellcasters are gagged. Eventually they're loaded onto wagons, which their manacles are chained to. However, the guards are supposed to be distracted at one point, so the PCs have a chance to break the wood they're chained to and look for the keys. And of course their stuff is nearby the whole time for some reason.

Thank you for taking the time, much appreciated. (^_^)b

---

My bad for assuming one given reading over another one.

I think capturing people is often preferable to execution for a number of reasons from from the prespective of world building and from the prespective of playing a game - from world building the hobgoblins might want to kill them in a ritual to their gods, or get whatever information they have out of them, or maybe the hobgoblins think they are actually the good guys (maybe they are) and they want to deprogram the indoctrinated enemy instead of killing them etc, from playing the 'your all dead now' because the players made a single bad call is a bit rough.

For gear nearby their are a number of ways to justify this, easiest is likely to think of the equipment has yet to be assigned and catelogued and so has to be stored somewhere and complex storage process for captured enemy equipment prior to identification would be odder then 'just put it into that box there we will have a wizard review it later to see if anything is worth anything'.

Not at all, and you raise valid points. Plus, my bad for assuming as a given that the adventure must have been written with the perspective of "Orange (or Green) Is The Mark Of Irredeemable Evil".

Like all humans, I'm sadly likely to assume that my negative past experiences can be safely extrapolated into "knowing" the unknown. (^_^)°

[hungrycrow]

The gear thing is less about making the escape easy, and more about the convenience for the whole adventure. 3.5 doesn't really gel well with rogue-like live with the consequences gameplay. The party is expected to have a certain amount of item bonuses to keep up with enemies, and certain characters won't function at all if they don't have specific equipment. Can't imagine being captured as a wizard, and then having to spend the next few months as a commoner.

[Ruck]

But the whole point is that they are non-human. Animals like us, but still not human, despite resembling us superficially. Somewhere, a line has to be drawn on when something is "close enough" to be human, and some people put that line pretty generously and would grant a whole lot of animals a whole lot of rights, and many others hold humanity (Homo sapiens) as distinct. There's no universal and unquestionable rule to separate what is human enough to count and what isn't.

They're sapient and capable of human thoughts and feelings. That's the line people are talking about.

Let us not forget that the goblinoids were made by an evil god, made by design to breed fast and spread destruction, and have since adopted the worship of a different evil god, and routinely do evil in the name of Evil itself. They aren't "just like us". No human society has ever embraced "evil" as some kind of virtue, and committed it for its own sake. Even those practising otherwise reprehensible acts such as human sacrifice. Human society just can't work like that, it needs to consider itself good to function properly, even if that requires a lot of mental gymnastics.

You sound like Gin-Jun.

Source? I don't remember them building a society around an evil god (quite a leap from an evil queen), or justifying their acts by saying "hey, we are the Evil ones". They certainly do wanton evil, but aside from Malak's secret agenda, the nation as a whole doesn't put evil on a pedestal as some kind of thing to strive for.

"The mass-scale Evil the Empire of Blood does is different because they're human" is just racism.

[Lemarc]

Every source I can find says they used ramps. Got a source for the claim of trebuchets?

Edited to add, the sources on the web also indicate that part of the reason for the surrender is that the people of Bagdad could not take the walls BACK after they were taken using ramps, AKA, they'd taken the walls more or less intact, not knocked breaches in them. I'm quite willing to believe that they used trebuchets to knock out the topworks and make the walls easier to take, but nothing I can find even uses the word breach to describe the action.

A paperback in my hot little hands titled "Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan" by Linda Komaroff, who I don't know from Eve, but which jibes with my general understanding of how trebuchets were used. The Mongols are reported to have swamped the Caliph's field army by breaking dams, then broke down the walls and towers of the city with catapults, which in this case would be counterweight trebuchets (since the design was famously copied at Xiangyang, which I didn't use as an example because they used explosive shells). The Mongols are described as having relied on their catapults and manpower in siege operations.

It is not remotely a detailed description of a trebuchet siege. I dug it off my shelf because it was to hand and because the target was Baghdad, an extremely fortified city and the most extreme example that came to mind. Baghdad (according separate source) had concentric walls, extremely thick and high with an incline of not much more than 60 degrees. I suspect we might have different definitions of "breach". No amount of catapult fire can displace a kiloton of bricks, nor can ramming or sapping, but it can convert a section of manned wall into an unmanned scalable mound, and that to me is a breach. At least it's a navigable gap in the defences that you can put your men through, accomplished through catapults. Certainly sustained trebuchet fire can shatter the towers of a castle; against a city rampart some amount of ramp-building might be necessary to get up to the gap you've made, but that doesn't mean the trebuchet compares unfavourably with other siege equipment and methods, which I think is the point under discussion.

[danielxcutter]

To be fair, in D&D magic beats everything. Especially 3.Xe.

[brian 333]

You can only negotiate with an enemy who wants to negotiate. History is filled with examples of negotiations like this:

Attacker: We are going to kill your soldiers, enslave everyone else, and loot your city.

Defender: We wish to avoid bloodshed. We will lay down our arms and open our gates if you promise not to kill and enslave us.

Attacker: Deal.

Later that day...

Attacker to his troops: Kill the soldiers, enslave everyone else, and loot the city.

Diplomacy is not about avoiding or ending wars. It's about winning them without fighting them. If the aggressor can't get what he wants through negotiation but can get it through force why would he want to compromise?

In this case the hobgoblins wanted battle and they wanted revenge for wrongs committed by people now mostly dead. What could Azure City offered in negotiations that would have mattered to the hobgoblins?

[danielxcutter]

You can only negotiate with an enemy who wants to negotiate. History is filled with examples of negotiations like this:

Attacker: We are going to kill your soldiers, enslave everyone else, and loot your city.

Defender: We wish to avoid bloodshed. We will lay down our arms and open our gates if you promise not to kill and enslave us.

Attacker: Deal.

Later that day...

Attacker to his troops: Kill the soldiers, enslave everyone else, and loot the city.

Diplomacy is not about avoiding or ending wars. It's about winning them without fighting them. If the aggressor can't get what he wants through negotiation but can get it through force why would he want to compromise?

In this case the hobgoblins wanted battle and they wanted revenge for wrongs committed by people now mostly dead. What could Azure City offered in negotiations that would have mattered to the hobgoblins?

Well, to be fair that was mostly Redcloak being the Supreme Leader. I don’t really think they’d have attacked like that otherwise.

Also how do we know the old SG members are “long dead”? O-Chul, Miko, and Hinjo hadn’t kicked the bucket by that time and half of them quit because of O-Chul so it’s not likely there was much of a turnover rate either.

[Morty]

"The mass-scale Evil the Empire of Blood does is different because they're human" is just racism.

I do wonder if Tarquin was supposed to be an intentional commentary on the subject. He's a horrible man running an oppressive state and doing horrible things for the pettiest reasons, but he's human and superficially reasonable, so many people gave him a pass until he finally cracked. Compare and contrast to goblins, who are guilty until proven innocent (and even then they're on thin ice).

[Ionathus]

You can only negotiate with an enemy who wants to negotiate. History is filled with examples of negotiations like this:

Attacker: We are going to kill your soldiers, enslave everyone else, and loot your city.

Defender: We wish to avoid bloodshed. We will lay down our arms and open our gates if you promise not to kill and enslave us.

Attacker: Deal.

Later that day...

Attacker to his troops: Kill the soldiers, enslave everyone else, and loot the city.

Diplomacy is not about avoiding or ending wars. It's about winning them without fighting them. If the aggressor can't get what he wants through negotiation but can get it through force why would he want to compromise?

In this case the hobgoblins wanted battle and they wanted revenge for wrongs committed by people now mostly dead. What could Azure City offered in negotiations that would have mattered to the hobgoblins?

Are you familiar with the concept of a Pyrrhic Victory?

You seem to be implying military strength is always an absolute binary: "either the attacker is strong enough to win the battle/war, or they aren't." But even a defender who's completely outmatched can put up a nasty, nasty fight that inflicts debilitating casualties on their conquerors even if they ultimately lose.

As others have said, the deaths of 25% of your military-age population would be a catastrophic blow to any civilization. We're talking Black Death levels here. Any commander who wasn't fanatically dead-set on revenge and a magical MacGuffin (and actually cared even one whit for the lives of their troops) would avoid the tactics that Redcloak used.

Barring that sort of fanaticism, a mundane commander might make a show of force or even besiege the city, but be more than willing to discuss treaties or territory, even if technically they would win in a straight fight.

As anyone who's played Risk can tell you, it's not always about winning the biggest battle...it's about still being standing to win the rest of them with your opportunistic neighbors, too.

I do wonder if Tarquin was supposed to be an intentional commentary on the subject. He's a horrible man running an oppressive state and doing horrible things for the pettiest reasons, but he's human and superficially reasonable, so many people gave him a pass until he finally cracked. Compare and contrast to goblins, who are guilty until proven innocent (and even then they're on thin ice).

While I do like to make comparisons to Tarquin and how readers tolerated his behavior more than Redcloak's, I don't really think the narrative was set up to make that point.

Tarquin was intentionally written to be affable, eloquent, and cooperative with the heroes...to a point. The point of his character arc is that you can't be Evil as a day job and still be a good, stable, emotionally healthy person in your personal life. It will seep through.

[dancrilis]

What could Azure City offered in negotiations that would have mattered to the hobgoblins?

They didn't need to offer the hobgoblins anything they could have offered Xykon the gate room for a few weeks to do what he wanted which might have been the deal if Hinjo had sent a diplomatic envoy as was suggested, such a course of action has also been suggested by others.

Had they done this much needless suffering could have been avoided on both sides and the planet would be more secure.

[danielxcutter]

They didn't need to offer the hobgoblins anything they could have offered Xykon the gate room for a few weeks to do what he wanted which might have been the deal if Hinjo had sent a diplomatic envoy as was suggested, such a course of action has also been suggested by others.

Had they done this much needless suffering could have been avoided on both sides and the planet would be more secure.

Are you being sarcastic with that last line or not? Genuinely can't tell.

[hungrycrow]

They didn't need to offer the hobgoblins anything they could have offered Xykon the gate room for a few weeks to do what he wanted which might have been the deal if Hinjo had sent a diplomatic envoy as was suggested, such a course of action has also been suggested by others.

Had they done this much needless suffering could have been avoided on both sides and the planet would be more secure.

Xykon and Redcloak were planning on taking over the world, they would never seriously agree to let Azure City stay in Hinjo's hands. Either they would refuse just for the fun of fighting it out, or they would use an agreement just to betray it as soon as they were past the city's defenses.

Also, I don't buy Redcloak or Xykon winning would avoid needless suffering. Needless suffering is part of what they want. Serini is delusional.

[danielxcutter]

Xykon and Redcloak were planning on taking over the world, they would never seriously agree to let Azure City stay in Hinjo's hands. Either they would refuse just for the fun of fighting it out, or they would use an agreement just to betray it as soon as they were past the city's defenses.

Also, I don't buy Redcloak or Xykon winning would avoid needless suffering. Needless suffering is part of what they want. Serini is delusional.

Redcloak's specific goal isn't inherently "needless suffering", it's more a nice bonus when it happens to Azurites.

Also, someone in another thread mentioned she seems to be taking the "run and fight another day" rogue mentality to its logical conclusion or something? I'm not sure if that's quite it - or quite what I feel her mentality is - but it seems close enough.

[hungrycrow]

Redcloak's specific goal isn't inherently "needless suffering", it's more a nice bonus when it happens to Azurites.

Also, someone in another thread mentioned she seems to be taking the "run and fight another day" rogue mentality to its logical conclusion or something? I'm not sure if that's quite it - or quite what I feel her mentality is - but it seems close enough.

Superficially Redcloak just wants equality between the races, but as Durkon points out there's a lot of ways to go about that. I'm pretty sure him running a worldwide regime would involve a healthy amount of payback for all the goblin suffering over the years, plus interest.

And of course Xykon is unabashedly in it for sadism.

[Fyraltari]

Redcloak's not even trying to establish a world-wide regime, though?

[Hurkyl]

Redcloak's not even trying to establish a world-wide regime, though?

Worldwide is thinking too small; The Plan is to use the snarl to subjugate the entire multiverse.

[Fyraltari]

Worldwide is thinking too small; The Plan is to use the snarl to subjugate the entire multiverse.

No, it's not the Plan is to use the threat of the Snarl to get the gods to do stuff for the Dark One. But it's a one-shot gun and they know it. It's not going to get the Dark One crowned Supreme Ruler of Everything.

[danielxcutter]

Superficially Redcloak just wants equality between the races, but as Durkon points out there's a lot of ways to go about that. I'm pretty sure him running a worldwide regime would involve a healthy amount of payback for all the goblin suffering over the years, plus interest.

And of course Xykon is unabashedly in it for sadism.

Worldwide is thinking too small; The Plan is to use the snarl to subjugate the entire multiverse.

...No? Rich said that TDO's plan is literally:

1. Use the Ritual to take control of the Snarl
2. Use the Snarl to blackmail the gods
3. Get concessions that benefit the goblins and explictily isn't on the lines of "and all of you are my slaves forever".
4. ???
5. Profit!

I agree that it'll probably cause needless suffering though, yeah.

Xykon probably wants "needless suffering" by default, unless part of his demands are "let me taste coffee again" potentially, but one way or another I don't see him taking over the world specifically through the Snarl.