It was just my first session with a wholly new group on Thursday night. The party is going through the Caverns of Chaos (Keep on the Borderlands). My Lawful Neutral Fighter/M-U tells the other characters that killing the younglings after the death & destruction of their parents is a mercy. The good characters object, but they turn away to begin looting the dead I declare that I'm about to start doing it when the DM tells the good PCs that they are in violation of their alignments if they allow this. So I got stopped, politely, and told not to do it. I agree & we instead captured the little snots.

Is there a consensus even now?

 I acted as much to test my fellow players as anything else.

I think the killing of goblins is the killing of vermin & is ethically neutral.

Anyone want to rehash this? I feel like it's 1984 all over again.

Quote from: Kyussopeth;913942It was just my first session with a wholly new group on Thursday night. The party is going through the Caverns of Chaos (Keep on the Borderlands). My Lawful Neutral Fighter/M-U tells the other characters that killing the younglings after the death & destruction of their parents is a mercy. The good characters object, but they turn away to begin looting the dead I declare that I'm about to start doing it when the DM tells the good PCs that they are in violation of their alignments if they allow this. So I got stopped, politely, and told not to do it. I agree & we instead captured the little snots.

Is there a consensus even now?

 I acted as much to test my fellow players as anything else.

I think the killing of goblins is the killing of vermin & is ethically neutral.

Anyone want to rehash this? I feel like it's 1984 all over again.

Depends on the setting.
Are goblinoids Mongols, Vikings, Klingons with fangs and green skin, then slaughtering their young is evil.  Although giving them a clean death may be preferable to turning them over to the local populace.

If they are corruption incarnate or, here we go again...irredeemably evil...then killing them is preventing future evil.

In any case, players who refuse to kill them are responsible for them, one way or another.

Quote from: Kyussopeth;913942Is there a consensus even now?

I hope not. The point, to me, isn't to come to some universal consensus on morality and alignment, but to see how each player and their character deal wtih morality and alignment.

Goblins are obviously stand-ins for oppressed peoples in the real world and killing them is supporting white supremacy.  Now that line of BS is out of the way.

Quote from: CRKrueger;913946Depends on the setting.
Are goblinoids Mongols, Vikings, Klingons with fangs and green skin, then slaughtering their young is evil.  Although giving them a clean death may be preferable to turning them over to the local populace.

If they are corruption incarnate or, here we go again...irredeemably evil...then killing them is preventing future evil.

In any case, players who refuse to kill them are responsible for them, one way or another.

No, they're the genericest of generic goblins. I agree they are the the PC's problem (including my character since I didn't exit the group over the issue).

Funny, I *JUST* added this issue to Keep on the Borderlands' TV tropes page.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TabletopGame/KeepOnTheBorderlands

My take on the subject is that killing goblin children is evil as is killing noncombatants of all types. However, this kind of act happens in the D&D world because when you attack a goblin camp, they're likely to take up arms to defend the place just like child-soldiers get used in plenty of real-life conflicts. Also, I rule that the racism of your average D&D world means that most people won't see it as a crime.

It is an evil act karmically even if Lawful Good characters may do it.

In my LotFP/Magic World game goblins sprout from dead un-baptised children (including aborted fetuses) and so kinda look like malformed kiddies... they don't reproduce though, so no babies to kill

Eberron had it best.

Have orcs actually capable of being reasoned with and elves unreasonable.

Totally depends on the presentation. Are goblins little kill crazed vermin? Or are they just not very bright aliens?

In BX EVERYTHING could be friendly. So we treated every encounter based on how the creatures reacted. If they attacked us. So be it. If the damn kids attack us then theres nothing for it. If they left us alone. GREAT! If they want to negotiate or trade then even better. If they were raiding and killing families then all bets were off. But we still didnt like running into monster families at all.

In AD&D it was a much the same and we were back to trying to puzzle out who was who. One thing we ended up realizing was that several of these races had explosive population rates and if adventurers and armies didnt keep weeding them out then eventually they over-run and totally devastate an area. Its even worse in the Forgotten Realms where orcs have repeatedly swept out and devastated civilization. What the hell do you do when the other side is dedicated to wiping you out?

So in the end it really depends on the presentation of the race and just how much the PCs backs are or are not against the wall.

What alternative options do the PC´s have?

And for notes: are there the basic ressources to do the job, starting from shelter, food to probably some wet nurses.
Are they neglecting any other duties or miss avoiding other harm when they drop out of adventuring to take care of them?

Even if they have money or other abstracted wealth it is still unsure that the local ressources (near wildness pseudo mediaval settlements are not that overflowing with output usually) will be enough to feed them all.

An alignment decission I would hook on the right or not to attack (or defend from) the goblin tribe at the start:

If the killing of the parents was OK, it was their fault to put the children in this position to start with.
Any real effort beyond basics necessary to help them I would consider being outstanding GOOD, but not necessary to stay GOOD and any risk put on any unrelated other people I would count against being GOOD.
If the killing of the parents was not OK in the other hand, then the alignment violation and drop from GOOD was already present here.

We had a coyote snooping around our place years ago. Killed my wife's pup and spooked horses etc. A buddy told me he saw it hanging around a bridge down the road. I tracked it and baited it, it died. Then I found its litter. They are coyotes, can't be made pets. If the grow up the become predators and a nuisance if not a danger. I killed them. I'm not evil.

Quote from: rgrove0172;913974We had a coyote snooping around our place years ago. Killed my wife's pup and spooked horses etc. A buddy told me he saw it hanging around a bridge down the road. I tracked it and baited it, it died. Then I found its litter. They are coyotes, can't be made pets. If the grow up the become predators and a nuisance if not a danger. I killed them. I'm not evil.

Which is exactly how we goblins feel about elves.

Quote from: Kyussopeth;913942Is there a consensus even now?

 I acted as much to test my fellow players as anything else.

I think the killing of goblins is the killing of vermin & is ethically neutral.

Anyone want to rehash this? I feel like it's 1984 all over again.

The correct answer is

QuoteIt depends on the setting of the campaign.

Being a leisure activity most referees go with the default depiction. For D&D 5th edition it is this.

QuoteGoblins are small, black-hearted, selfish humanoids that lair in caves, abandoned mines, despoiled dungeons, and other dismal settings. Individually weak, goblins gather in large- sometimes overwhelming- numbers. They crave power and regularly abuse whatever authority they obtain.
Goblinoids. Goblins belong to a family of creatures called goblinoids. Their larger cousins, hobgoblins and bugbears, like to bully goblins into submission. Goblins are lazy and undisciplined, making them poor servants,
laborers, and guards.

Their alignment in 5e is listed as neutral evil.

In Pathfinder we get this

QuoteGoblins are a race of childlike creatures with a destructive and voracious nature that makes them almost universally despised. Weak and cowardly, goblins are frequently manipulated or enslaved by stronger creatures that need destructive, disposable foot soldiers. Those goblins that rely on their own wits to survive live on the fringes of society and feed on refuse and the weaker members of more civilized races. Most other races view them as virulent parasites that have proved impossible to exterminate.

Goblins can eat nearly anything, but prefer a diet of meat and consider the flesh of humans and gnomes a rare and difficult-to-obtain delicacy. While they fear the bigger races, goblins' short memories and bottomless appetites mean they frequently go to war or execute raids against other races to sate their pernicious urges and fill their vast larders.

They are listed as being generally Neutral Evil.

From AD&D we get

QuoteGoblins have a tribal society, the strongest ruling the rest, allowing fealty to the goblin king. It is possible that goblins are distantly related to kobolds. Like the latter, goblins enjoy dwelling in dismal surroundings, although they tend to inhabit caves and similar underground places in preference to any habitation above ground. They too hate full daylight and attack at a -1 when in sunlight. Goblins have normal infravision (60’ range).

IN the above the alignment of Goblin is given as Lawful Evil

From the granddaddy of them all OD&D we get

QuoteThese small monsters are as described in CHAINMAIL. They see well in darkness or dim light, but when they are subjected to full daylight they subtract –1 from their attack and morale dice. They attack dwarves on sight. Their hit dice must always equal at least one pip.

Chainmail basically state the above. They are also listed as Chaotic.

It is my opinion that while all the descriptions above make out goblins as an evil race that are the enemy of humankind, there is not enough information to determine whether it is ethical to be killing goblin children. It makes a difference when ruling on this whether they are evil because of circumstances and culture or it is something magical or intrinsic to their race. Because all the editions are silent on this the answer still is "Depends on the setting." by default.

Now if you go beyond the books to the origins of the goblins (and orcs and the other humanoid races). Goblin are deformed creatures of folklore akin to brownies, leprechauns, and fairy tale dwarves.

Orc in constant were developed by Tolkien, and we know from his mythology that they are a corrupted race perverted by Morgoth. The other humanoids are variants of the basic goblin.

So if we were playing in the late 70s and early 80s, the default is likely to be that these were a magically bad race of humanoid and they are all should be treated like vermin.  There were some exceptions for example how Gloranthan Trolls were depicted in Runequest. There the Troll or Trollkin were depicted as a race with a unpleasant culture relative to the human norm.


But today, in 2016,  the standard D&D tropes have greatly influence how fantasy is present. And people have built on that to present compelling alternatives. One example are the honorable warlike orcs of Warhammer and World of Warcraft. They may be ugly and their dominant culture brutish, but orc, goblins and the lot are still people. In which case it would be unethical to slaughter their children.

Which is a convoluted way to going back to my original point that the correct answer is "It depends on the setting."

Quote from: rgrove0172;913974If the grow up the become predators and a nuisance if not a danger. I killed them. I'm not evil.

There is a ethical issue here but it revolves around the sanctity of life. The issue with killing goblin children is that it involve a sentient race, a very different issue than dealing with animals who are largely governed by instinct. Of course to some it doesn't matter whether it involves something that is sentient or not.

Another problem is that humanity has little experience in dealing with in between cases. Considering that the nearest relatives in intellect all died off 100,000 years ago the closest we have to deal with are the great apes. Those are located in limited geographical areas relative to the places on Earth that humanity expanded into. The best current example are the ethics in dealing with people with mental challenges.

On a side note, in one of his late essays on Orcs, Tolkien said that if they were rational beings, they had to be treated within the bounds of the rules of war--no torture, surrender had to be honored (although in practice, Morgoth and Sauron had so propagandized the Orcs that they never would surrender), etc.