D&D General I really LOVE Stomping Goblins

[MGibster]

Last time I checked, this was an online discussion forum. Sharing an opinion in such a forum is de facto inviting people to express dissenting opinions.

That's debatable...

Ok, that’s great. I also wanted to share my opinion, which is that I feel that works fine, unless you also try to make those enemies morally nuanced.

I like that you share your opinions. In one of my playthroughs of Knights of the Old Republic I went all Dark Side! There's a point in the game where you can get the wookie companion of a little twi'lek girl to murder her because he's got a life debt towards you and you're the boss. I. Couldn't. Do. It. It was just so mean and pointless that even though I was a vile villain I just couldn't bring myself to have that little twi'lek girl ganked by her best friend.

So even though I know it's just a game, there are still some things I don't want to play out for whatever reason. I'm fine having my barbarian character split a dude's head in half with an axe, but I'm not going to have him burn down some random villagers hovel just for a few extra gold.

I'd have said this years ago too. If my games are not like philosophy 101 club, I dont have any fun anymore.

I'm partially there with you. I just don't go to D&D for games that require a whole lot of thinking or nuance. D&D is like a Saturday matinee to me.

 

[Scribe]

Ok, that’s great. I also wanted to share my opinion, which is that I feel that works fine, unless you also try to make those enemies morally nuanced.

I don’t know, ask @Reynard

Yeah OK.

 

[aco175]

Yeah. You eat the fairies to gain their magical powers. And fairy meat is delicious.

Is that white meat or red meat?

 

[MGibster]

Is that white meat or red meat?

Glitter meat.

 

[Oofta]

Right, and my point is that both of those things are fine, but it doesn’t work well to try and have both at once.

It's worked well enough for a lot of people going on half a century now. Doesn't mean that it works for everyone of course.

I understand your stance but there has been study after study. Violence in games has little to no correlation to violence or morals in real life. Telling a person that they're immoral because they don't mind violence in games is uncalled for.

 

[Reynard]

I don’t know, ask @Reynard

Don't ask ME. I was just saying killing the little &^$@#%$ers is a special kind of fun. You brought up the idea that somehow personality was related to free will or whatever.

 

[Reynard]

I find peoples attachment to killing goblins or orcs by the score for no reason somewhat weird, not from any great love of goblins or concern for sentient creatures, but for the insistence that it must always forever be goblins, orc and kobolds. After a couple decades at this, seems like you’d be bored of them and their rather well understood habits and be very accepting of their surrender and integration into the general populace, ready to move on to new, heretofore undiscovered, cave and dungeon dwellers.

You might think that but here we are. Game designers in various media have done an absolutely wonderful job of creating a race that is just extra fun to fight in swathes. Goblins are, in most modern iterations, full of chaotic energy, psychotic personalities and highly entertaining tactics and gadgets to compensate for their small stature. They make hilarious, fun enemies.

This NOT to say that in a particular campaign or game goblins can't be "people." Of course they can. They are fictional creatures. they can be anything we want. This thread was not started as to debate the ethics or morality of goblincide. It was just a little celebration of something in D&D I find really fun. What I was hoping for was a chorus of not just agreement, but tales of goblin slaughter, or how one's favorite stock enemies are drow or kua-toa or whatever. But, alas.

Anyway -- cheers to maniacal little green skinned monstrosities with an overdeveloped pyrotechnic industry and an underdeveloped sense of self preservation!

 

[J-H]

There's a lot of benefit in having some "mental complexity not required" enemies to fight in a game that's supposed to be fun. Not everyone wants to negotiate a complex diplomatic algorithm or think "Are we the baddies?"

Unfortunately the current social trends are all "there is no inherent evil" so the publishers aren't going that way. Orcs, drow, goblins, and now hobgoblins have all gone from "Designated evil" to "complex" to "They're just people like everyone else, so you should feel bad about killing them or stereotyping their culture as evil."

 

[Hexmage-EN]

For whatever reason in my first 5E campaign I settled on jackalweres as the default bad guys for a while. Just packs of them running down streets attacking people and such.

 

[Mad_Jack]

Trolls...
Ever since one of my AD&D thief characters one-shotted a troll by jumping off a ledge and brain-stabbing it with a flametongue bastard sword, they've pretty much been my go-to axe-to-the-face-catchers. You get to pound on them for a while before they fall over.

Yeah. You eat the fairies to gain their magical powers. And fairy meat is delicious.

This was actually the backstory of one of my 4E feylocks - he was a wandering Eladrin madman who, while in a black rage, grabbed a really cheerful and annoying Tinkerbell-style fairy out of the air, stuffed her in his mouth, and ate her.
His powers were a result of having digested an immortal fey whose magic caused her to physically reform into a sort of second central nervous system throughout his body - they were now a symbiotic organism, and her (now completely bug-bleep insane) consciousness lived on inside his head. Every so often, he/she would argue with themselves in two different voices at the same time, and sometimes they'd fall to the ground twitching and flailing as they fought for control over his body.