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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5477559" data-attributes="member: 4937">I admit there is a certain amount of bias on my part on my part when reading the above related story about the possibly heroic troll, because trolls specifically in my game are much more than simplistic monsters with animal instincts.  There are troll bards and troll sages in my game world, for example.  While trolls are repulsive creatures that favor darkness, they are also morally ambigious much of the time.  They are far more strongly chaotic and fey than they are evil in my game.  So a troll as ally doesn't strike me as terribly improbable based on how I have concieved trolls in my head.  If a troll finds a baby in the woods, there is really no telling whether he'll see a snack or a baby.  A traveller finding a troll on the road may or may not get eaten, and it might come down to a) how recently the troll is eaten and b) whether or not the traveller acts frightened or impolitely.  A troll that gets treated like its civilized and respectable might in fact act civilized, merely to amuse itself.  They are really alien things, and the stupidity tends to manifest itself in apparantly illogical and unpredictable behavior not as a ravening animal predator.Now there are apparantly people who have concieved trolls very differently, and I don't blame them for that because I know that there are aspects of trollness that aren't part of canonical D&D.  If you bring that conception into my game, and the above situation begins to unfold you'll just be wrong and I'm going to be a bit baffled because as far as I will be able to tell, I've provided all the information you need to view this troll in a more complicated way.  I wouldn't blame a neutral character for simply viewing the troll as a complication to be disposed of, but I'd expect good aligned characters to be very conflicted at this point because they haven't been threatened and have no evidence that the troll is a threat to any but evil creatures (or at least, their enemies).Another source of bias on my part is that I consider the three strongest influences on my D&D game: HP Lovecraft, The Lord of the Rings, and Grimm's Fairy Tales.  If I were to pick a fourth it would be the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon (that did this plot twice).  If I were to introduce a monstrous looking creature who was mysteriously acting in a way that seemed heroic, there would be at least an 80% chance that it was a polymorphed prince or something of the sort.  In a world filled with magic, it would seem to me that judging something by its appearance is extremely foolish indeed.</blockquote>

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