Quote from: Manzanaro;914454There's a reason Tolkien doesn't include orc children in LotR.

May not be that be just that reason though. Goblins (and Orcs) originated as a corruption of elves by Morgoth in the First Age. We don't see any elf children either. Under certain circumstances goblin kids may be pretty rare. Note that in the Hobbit, the Goblins recognized Orcrist and Glamdring calling them Beater and Biter. Those two swords were named before the fall of Gondolin in the First Age and were lost a long time ago (can't recall when, but probably before the fall of the Witch King of Angmar so 1000+ years.)

Quote from: Maarzan;914467With don´t treat others in a way you don´t want to be treated yourselve there ist probably a base for universal moral - as long as this works both ways.

Maybe one of the bible scholars can clarify, but I don't think the word "other" has the same meaning as it usually does in English today, i.e. all people fall into the category of "other people."  In many cultures strangers from another culture weren't necessarily considered to be "other people." For lots of cultures you had these categories: (1) family; (2) in-group (village, clan, tribe, polis, cultural grouping and later nation state); (3) out-group (people from another clan, tribe, village, polis, or cultural group). You were expected to show preference for people in your family, but rules against murder applied to everyone in the wider in-group. Guest obligation typically applied to people from your in-group, but often did not apply to people from the out-group. One thing we repeatedly see with the rise of larger and larger groups of people is the extension membership in the in-group. Until you get to what we have today where it is common to see the in-group as at least my country/culture and often as all humanity. In the 20th century we even see some people making extensions of the in-group to all sentient life, all primates, all cute and fuzzy animals, etc.

Quote from: Manzanaro;914468Why would we have to be careful about judging things like human sacrifice and slavery?

Being an unpaid devil’s advocate…seriously that bastard is cheap. Let me take a stab at a counter.

In appears that in some times and places the sacrifices may have been volunteers. We praise martyrs to a cause we believe in our people who give their life to save another person’s life. How is either different than a person who voluntary sacrifices their life as part of a cultural ritual thought to ensure that the sun rises, the rain falls, and the crops grow? Also in a number of cultures suicide is considered an acceptable action under certain circumstances. Isn’t that too a form of voluntary human sacrifice or martyrdom?

Slavery isn’t the same in all times and places. In some times and places, slavery was a status that one could enter or leave. In Rome for example, slaves could earn money, make investments, and many (but nowhere near most) slaves purchased their freedom. And in the ancient world slavery was not based on being from some place, culture, or race but was originally the outcome of capture in warfare or of selling oneself or family to pay for debt. Anyone could become a slave. All that was required was defeat in a military conflict or severe economic reversals. So slavery was an equal opportunity legal status. And if we look at combat, what is the alternative to enslaving one’s enemies? Slavery was sometimes the lesser of two evils. Kill them or capture and enslave them were two traditional alternatives. (A third alternative was maiming so they couldn’t take up arms again, see the supposed origin of the British V-for-Victory. Frequently this condemned the victim to a retched life of begging and poverty or placed them as a dependent and a burden on their family. And if resources were scared, forced the victim and family to a cruel choice of who to feed.) Nobody in the ancient world really saw being a slave as a good thing (often defeat in war and enslavement was deeply and profoundly humiliating, see also Roman views when one might fall on one’s sword.)

And if there are any really dim readers out there, I am not arguing for human sacrifice or slavery. I'm only putting forth arguments against a universal morality that makes human sacrifice and slavery universally and unutterably evil.

I think it merits mentioning, if only to dump a few gallons of gasoline on the fire, that in AD&D Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kobolds, Trolls, Ogres, (evil) Giants, and just about each and every other evil intelligent being that anyone wants to drag into this Vietnam War quagmire of a thread, are all the creation of demons and devils.  Grummsh, Vaprak, Kurtulmak, Yeegnohu, Maglubiyet, etc.  Gary himself once stated that his intent was not to have individual gods for each humanoid race but rather appropriate evil demons and devils (I think in the same discussion he said Hextor was the creator of orcs, IIRC).

The point is: assuming you need an in-game rationale...they are all the creation of devils and demons.  OF COURSE YOU FUCKING KILL ALL OF THEM!

Quote from: thedungeondelver;914485I think it merits mentioning, if only to dump a few gallons of gasoline on the fire, that in AD&D Orcs, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kobolds, Trolls, Ogres, (evil) Giants, and just about each and every other evil intelligent being that anyone wants to drag into this Vietnam War quagmire of a thread, are all the creation of demons and devils.

I don't remember that. Was it in the original Monster Manual for AD&D or did it come later, like in AD&D2?

Yep as Bren just mentioned, culture and even just time has a huge impact on what's considered moral, up to and including human sacrifice... although the human sacrifice part seems to be mainly different because most Christians and modern Westerners have no cultural context to understand what human sacrifice, or even death, mean and don't mean to an Aztec or even a pre-Christian Northern European. Christianity is peculiar amongst human religious cosmologies in that it thinks of death and armageddon as dead ends, and time as linear, and has the whole heaven/hell judgmental afterlife with eternal damnation a common end point. Aztecs and most others saw time or at least life and death and rebirth as eternal cycles and a natural thing. The firey afterlife that the Christians plagiarized and twisted into a sometimes perpetual torment, was in the previous religions a purifying process - burning off the crap that accumulated during life.

Back to the goblin children, it's interesting to me that people tend to shortcut the choices down to either killing them all, or finding happy safe homes for all of them. Huh? What about ignoring them? Or telling them the way to freedom and foster parents is forward and down, and following behind to see if they set off any traps (LOL)?

Quote from: Bren;914492I don't remember that. Was it in the original Monster Manual for AD&D or did it come later, like in AD&D2?

Roger Moore and Ed Greenwood wrote about various nonhuman deities, some were codified in Deities & Demigods and others were beings from Unearthed Arcana, but all are canonical.

Quote from: Skarg;914493Back to the goblin children, it's interesting to me that people tend to shortcut the choices down to either killing them all, or finding happy safe homes for all of them. Huh? What about ignoring them? Or telling them the way to freedom and foster parents is forward and down, and following behind to see if they set off any traps (LOL)?

Yes, the thread has been populated by LG/LN folks, it's about time we heard from the Chaotic Neutral camp!  I like the cut of your jib, son.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;914494Roger Moore and Ed Greenwood wrote about various nonhuman deities, some were codified in Deities & Demigods and others were beings from Unearthed Arcana, but all are canonical.

Thanks for the information. While I have Gods, Demi-gods & Heroes for the original D&D ruleset and I used to own the original AD&D DM book and Monster Manual, I never bought or used Deities & Demigods. I don't recall any DM ever using it when I was a player.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;914495Yes, the thread has been populated by LG/LN folks, it's about time we heard from the Chaotic Neutral camp!  I like the cut of your jib, son.

My LG character would have provided a very stern and hopefully inspiring sermon before letting the children go. I don't think he'd have considered following them to find another nest. Pretty clever that.

Whenever this type of situation becomes a problem, it's on the GM.  There may be general agreement in a thread like this about whether killing goblin kids is evil or necessary, but none of that really matters when it comes to the individual campaign.  In some settings orcs aren't evil, they're just a different-looking race, with a benevolent creator-god looking down disappointed every time a human being discriminates against them.  In other campaigns orcs are evil with a small e, prone to aggression, and generally malicious.  Sometimes, like in Tolkien, they are evil with a large E, created by evil for evil with no middle ground.  None of these variations is necessarily wrong or superior, they're just different.  The problem comes when the players don't know where the moral orientation is, or worse still when the GM doesn't know.  If the morality of the setting is black and white, then a GM who obscures the truth in an attempt to recreate the moral ambiguity of modern human conflicts is creating an unnecessary and unrealistic problem, and many times is only doing so to be difficult or to manufacture drama.  Whether or not killing orc villages is supposed to have the same moral implications as the slaughter of human refugee camps is sort of an important thing for the PCs to know, and barring some strange set of circumstances they certainly should know it.  Clerics would certainly know whether divine power is lost when orc villages are killed, or whether blue-bolts tend to fly as a result, because such a thing has almost certainly happened in the setting before. In our world it's only been 150 years since the massacres of native Americans on the plains and only 50 or so since countless such incidents in Korea and Vietnam. If it's that common in our world, it would certainly take quite a convoluted setting to explain clerics not knowing with certainty what their gods think of similar massacres of orcs and other types of beings.  I have my own preference just like any GM does. The fact that we don't agree in our preferences is not a problem. The problem arises when your player characters are suffering because you can't pick or because you are being intentionally opaque about the issue.

Quote from: Ghost;914512The fact that we don't agree in our preferences is not a problem. The problem arises when your player characters are suffering because you can't pick or because you are being intentionally opaque about the issue.
.

Agree with all of it well said especially this last part.

Two othe points that came up.  If you are playing with the alignment system you aren't playing a campagin that deals with moral quandries.  Sure play your alignment if you want but it's not a quandary if you can find the answer to what you should do written in two words at the top of your charcter sheet.   Also don't play with the alignment system, D&D is a fun game and doesn't need that steaming pile of severed horse genatilia, tacked on.


Second.  Slavery was always wrong.  And Jeferson owning slaves makes him a bad person (especially if he's the one that said he would free them I his will and then didn't) bad people can still do good things, great things, but the good doesn't wash out the bad.  The northern slaves the Azetecs captured to sacrifice, hated being sacrificed.  The warrior that takes them, and the priest who cuts their heart out maybe able to say 'I was just following orders' but that only passed the evil along (if that.).

 It may not be evil to sacrifice your self so others may live, but it is evil to convince someone else that they have to die so others may live.

Quote from: daniel_ream;914360No.

I'm being horrifically facetious here; the conceit of Dream Park was that you weren't playing actual inhabitants of a fantasy realm, but rather modern-day punters playing characters of their own in a massive holographic VR simulation of a fantasy realm.

In much the same way that people arguing this point seem to be playing themselves - with their modern mores and ethics - inserted into a fantasy realm, rather than actual inhabitants of such a realm whose views on such things would be rather different, I'd wager.

I think half of the reason this debate keeps happening is because of this. The actual societies in question would already have handled this question and the characters would know the answer. It would almost certainly be a brutal answer. ("Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.") The appropriate approach is for the DM to decide what the answer is in his setting, inform the PCs of that fact, and move on. Then...
If the PCs and GM all want contemporary morality, they'll all be happy.
If the PCs and GM all want classical or medieval values, they'll all be happy.
But...
If the PCs want contemporary morality and the GM has created a setting with classical or medieval values, it won't be fun.
If the PCs want classical or medieval values and the GM has created a setting with contemporary morality, it won't be fun.
And they should sort that out.

I think the other reason this debate keeps happening is because goblins look like us. I've never once heard a similar question arise as to whether Ripley was morally correct to kill the xenomorph eggs and facehuggers in ALIENS. Yet it's certain they were sentient, and plausibly sapient. Personally, in my own setting, baby goblins are treated pretty much the way xenomorph eggs and facehuggers are treated in Aliens. Heroes kill them on sight. Amoral or evil individuals might keep them alive to use them as bioweapons. There are no good goblins anymore than there are good xenomorphs. The end.

Its like the divide between players who kill merchants and citizens in a game. And those who dont. Some see the NPCs and everything else for that matter as just statistics. EXP for the next level up. Some treating the game as a board game rather than an RPG. Others see the NPCs as people and Im pretty sure a few of us here know, or are, a player whos gotten very attatched to an NPC.

No matter what the answer is, the players should definitely know how this would be viewed in their culture or sub-culture.
Also, no matter what they believe is the will of their god, they may not know the truth.  It depends on the god, or even a particular church of a god.

The PCs probably won't know what other cultures think.  Elves might be horrified and not allow the PCs to pass through their land after, knowing they killed the Goblin children, Dwarves might do the same if they let them live.

The way you handle this is really the way you handle everything else...
Start with the truth of the setting based on its Cosmology.
Determine what the PCs would know of that truth based on their background and the details of the setting itself.
Provide them with meaningful choice and deliver meaningful consequence, whether medal, jailtime, bounty or bluebolt.

I think that religious beliefs may act to obscure the morality of an action but don't really change it. Many Christians believe that good and innocent people go to heaven, yet this doesn't mean that killing good and innocent people is thus moral because you're sending them to a better place. Similary, you can believe, or claim to believe, in Nirvana or the wheel of time or whatever, but you still have the hardwired knowledge of pain and suffering as part of your fundamental structure.

That being said, I acknowledge that morality is a luxury that not all cultures could afford, especially when it came to extending your morality to how you treated potential enemies.

Nevertheless, I would still highly question the inclusion of goblin children and etc. in a typical RPG of violent escapism in which the concept of violence as heroism is largely accepted without examination.

Not many people would enjoy roleplaying child murder (even of demon children), and I would find those that do questionable.

Quote from: Manzanaro;914548Not many people would enjoy roleplaying child murder (even of demon children), and I would find those that do questionable.

What does this have to do with anything.

Quote from: Ghost;914582What does this have to do with anything.

It explains why I don't generally want to deal with this kind of thing in an RPG. It's not fun.