Quote from: Omega;915835Paladin casts Detect Evil on the goblin kids. Problem solved!

"But Omega? There are no Paladins in BX?"

aww hell. Ok could you goblin kids like hold still while we call in a Cleric to see if you are evil or not?

"But Omega? Detect evil in BX only detects evil intentions. The Goblin kids read as "kid"?"

Ok. Screw it. We are retiring and opening the Geezer Gronan Goblin Day Care!

(note: goblins reach maturity in 1 month due to their brief life spans.)

"Well that was a short retirement..."

The Dragonstar setting had an answer for this. Detect Evil could not be used as justification for killing a sapient mortal being. It would be murder. OK, they detect as evil. But what have they *done*? It was evidence based law enforcement. Want to kill a goblin? Show that they have committed a crime worthy of the death penalty. Play in a game without the death penalty? Catch them in the act so a self-defense or defense of the innocent justification will stand up in court. Just like the real world. Killing a sapient mortal being based on a Detect Evil spell amounts to a thought pre-crime.

Quote from: Tetsubo;915843Asking an Asian person to play in a game based on a war with Asian countries seems to me to be rather tone deaf. I'm not surprised that he wasn't interested. Any more that I would be surprised if a black person wouldn't want to play a white cop during the Watts riots. Some times things are a role-playing challenge that some players find invigorating. And sometimes they are just in poor taste. The best we can do when tackling complex moral issues is float them past our players for review. Which you did. Kudos.

My last name is German, should I consider someone "tone deaf" if they ask me to play in a WWI or WWII game? Rincewind is Polish, should we abstain from inviting him to play Grey Ranks, or are those poor minorities not able to handle things the way we strong Europeans can? Asian Americans of all nationalities served in the military in the Pacific Theater of WWII, in Korea and in Vietnam.  Americans of Middle-Eastern descent, including Muslims, are serving in the military right now in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Asian is way too broad a brush to assume you have any idea what the player will think.  Why would a Korean player necessarily care?  Hell, if the player was Hmong, they might want to play even more.  Even if the player was Vietnamese, why would he automatically be against playing in the Vietnam War?  "Tone deaf" would be me not bringing it up because Whitey knows best.

The proposed Recon game reminds me of the plot of Apocalypse Now, which was of course the plot of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, mixed with a large helping of the Odyssey, the latter especially clear if you watch the Redux version. Not bad company to be in.

I'm a white boy and I'm not sure I would be into Viet Nam. Reskin the game somewhere/when else and I would be on it in a heartbeat.

We all have different "nope"s. For some goblin babies are not really babies, they're little monsters. I do think it's kind of a dick move to put them in an introductory module.

Quote from: DavetheLost;915849The proposed Recon game reminds me of the plot of Apocalypse Now, which was of course the plot of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, mixed with a large helping of the Odyssey, the latter especially clear if you watch the Redux version. Not bad company to be in.

I'm a white boy and I'm not sure I would be into Viet Nam. Reskin the game somewhere/when else and I would be on it in a heartbeat.

We all have different "nope"s. For some goblin babies are not really babies, they're little monsters. I do think it's kind of a dick move to put them in an introductory module.

Well it might be an indicator to the players what the tone of the campaign could be. This could be viewed as interesting or a warning.

Quote from: David Johansen;915823... Really I think ignoring them or refusing to engage with the realities of violence seems more grotesque than the alternative.

Yes, I quite agree.

I think computer games that have you "defeat" flocks of enemy humanoids with weapons such as swords or guns and shows them turn into gold stars, or even just have their bodies disappear into thin air, are worse than games that show blood and leave a pile of bodies where they fell after a battle.

I also think combat games with little or no way to die or lose or have your comrades die in combat also nerf and avoid a major part of what combat is.

Having certified pure evil humanoid races to exterminate feels a bit that way to me too, for the most part.

I have found in many games that if I don't keep some attention on the "details" of the realities of violence, especially outside of the heat of combat, and if I don't keep the NPCs being detailed personalities that really want to live, then players can slide their characters into being villains without really meaning to. I think part of it is that there is a natural tendency to cope with terrible things by laughing about it and not taking it seriously - I have that quite strongly myself, but I think there's an important line where it goes from laughing at the horror, to pretending the horror isn't horrible.

I.e. I think Monty Python and the Holy Grail is a good film for many young kids, but I am much less comfortable with them watching 1980's G.I. Joe cartoons or the A-Team, where modern gun violence almost never hurts anything but vehicles.


I agree that "baiting paladins" with gotcha code violations seems nonsense. I tend to do sort of the opposite, questioning when players try to have their PCs do things that would contradict their characters' values or nature.

(BTW it's funny to read some people invoking Christians and crusaders as examples of clear morality, considering how much of medieval Christian violence was directed at other Christians, including crusades such as the one that decided to sack Christian Constantinople on the way to holy land for loot, or the crusade against "heretic" Christians who were making the clergy look bad, or the inquisitions against other groups of heretic Christians over theological differences of opinion - the list goes on and on and on.)

The possible fate of the goblin children reminds me of what we did to the Village of Hommlet back in high school. As adolescent boys are wont to do we ransacked the place, leaving everyone dead, often butchered in creative ways. Thankfully our gaming has matured since then.  This was long before computer games. I was a new player to the group and wondered at the bloodbath. I thought maybe that was the way D&D was supposed to be.

I think RPG combat and D&D combat especially can often be too "clean". If all there is for consequences is lost Hit Points, which are easilly restored the impact of actual wounds is lost. Dead monsters seem almost to vanish like soap bubbles. I have been trying to develop ways of making combat more the last option than the first.

It is very heartening to me that people here are actually taking a deeper look at the goblin babies problem and not just seeing them as walking XP.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915840Is "babies" a more appropriate and less loaded term?

Are you a fucking retard? Jesus. /shake head at poor mental formation

Edit - I apologize; everyone should express an opinion regardless of mental deformity.

Quote from: Chainsaw;915880Are you a fucking retard? Jesus. /shake head at poor mental formation

Edit - I apologize; everyone should express an opinion regardless of mental deformity.

One of us may be. Me, when I'm trying to figure out who the fucking retard is, I put my money on the guy who says stuff like, "Are you a fucking retard??" without actually making any kind of point.

Still, I'll admit, the last one to know who the fucking retard is is often the fucking retard himself.

Quote from: Skarg;915866(BTW it's funny to read some people invoking Christians and crusaders as examples of clear morality, considering how much of medieval Christian violence was directed at other Christians, including crusades such as the one that decided to sack Christian Constantinople on the way to holy land for loot, or the crusade against "heretic" Christians who were making the clergy look bad, or the inquisitions against other groups of heretic Christians over theological differences of opinion - the list goes on and on and on.)

The point was it's exactly because of the Crusades and other real world atrocities, terrible things done falsely in the name of god, that many people can't or won't imagine the possibility of an Evil race and a Good that opposes it.  They were invoked as a false morality.

Quote from: Skarg;915866I also think combat games with little or no way to die or lose or have your comrades die in combat also nerf and avoid a major part of what combat is.

Yeah, totally agree with this. This reminds me of some years back, when I had a couple young nephews who were playing the video game Half Life. To me, young kids playing a game where you fight and kill monsters is not really a concerning issue; there's nothing bad going on there even if monsters aren't real.

But then my youngest nephew, who was having a hard time with the game, found the cheat for "god mode" where he couldn't be hurt, and he started just going around and killing monsters and soldiers and scientists and everything else. And that did rub me the wrong way. And after thinking about it a while, I realized that what had happened was that the game had changed from a combat simulation, to a murder simulation where you were killing stuff that had no defense against you.

This is pretty much the same way I feel about games that are rigged so that the "protagonists" can never die, and just go around killing other entities.

But some players just want to adventure and not delve into the aftermath of the adventure or any moral or ethical quandries. Others love that stuff. And of course others like both.

And you can get moral dilemmas without the DM even trying. "Is staking vampires and silvering weres the right thing to do if they are just normal people under a curse? A curse that can be cured?"

Much like how some players dont want to deal with the logistics of adventuring. Ammo counts, food stocks, who brought the ten foot pole, etc.

Quote from: Skarg;915866I think computer games that have you "defeat" flocks of enemy humanoids with weapons such as swords or guns and shows them turn into gold stars, or even just have their bodies disappear into thin air, are worse than games that show blood and leave a pile of bodies where they fell after a battle.

In all fairness, that's a performance issue.  Continuing to render all those bodies/blood splatters even though the player can't meaningfully interact with them takes up memory and processing power; these are extremely scarce resources in most high-pressure FPSes.

Granted, some games do have persistent bodies as a selling point, but it's rarely worth the tradeoff in development time.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the emergent impact on the players, but it's not intentional on the part of the designers.  They know blood sells.

I frequently collect and use casualty miniatures in miniatures wargaming. The presence of little lead bodies on the tabletop certainly gives a different feel to the game than defeated units vanishing back to the storage shelf.

Quote from: CRKrueger;915939The point was it's exactly because of the Crusades and other real world atrocities, terrible things done falsely in the name of god, that many people can't or won't imagine the possibility of an Evil race and a Good that opposes it.  They were invoked as a false morality.

Ok. I don't think everyone was posting that way, though. Never mind, it was pages and pages ago.

Quote from: Manzanaro;915952...
But then my youngest nephew, who was having a hard time with the game, found the cheat for "god mode" where he couldn't be hurt, and he started just going around and killing monsters and soldiers and scientists and everything else. And that did rub me the wrong way. And after thinking about it a while, I realized that what had happened was that the game had changed from a combat simulation, to a murder simulation where you were killing stuff that had no defense against you.

This is pretty much the same way I feel about games that are rigged so that the "protagonists" can never die, and just go around killing other entities.

Yep, I agree. I also think that the standard mode of most computer games (the "savescum" ones, where if you die you're expected to just restore a recent saved game and keep playing like it didn't happen, until you win - it typically doesn't even record how many times on your path to victory, and generally has no effect other than that it takes you more time, breaks immersion, and makes you re-try the same thing you just did) are only one level better than that.

Oh, at Archie MacPhee you can get tiny plastic babies by the handful, so you can do those orphanages your players want to massacre...