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Message: <blockquote data-quote="John Morrow" data-source="post: 1924731" data-attributes="member: 27012">That is absolutley a fair point.Not at all, which is why they've only run into one situation where killing the women and children of an enemy was a real option.  I wouldn't want to run a whole game like that.  In fact, you'll notice that the Orcs in LotR spring from the ground and have no women and children and it simply doesn't come up in The Princess Bride at all.  This is being discussed in another threat about how monsters reproduce, by the way.  The BoED/BoVD interpretation of Good and Evil, by the way, says that they should spare the women and children.  That's a perfectly valid interpretation of Good, too, and this would certainly be a good reason for a GM to favor that approach.  If I have to do it again (or revise my setting), I may switch over to that approach.  I'll think it over when this campaign is done.Basically, Good isn't heartless by nature and asking them to kill relatively harmless women and children goblins is heartless.  It sounded good in theory but I role-played the goblins well enough that it was more disturbing than I thought it would be.  Perhaps if I hadn't humanized them so much, it would have been easier.  But in the big scheme of things, I think I'm happier that it troubled everyone than I would be if it didn't.  Well, they enjoyed it from a role-playing sense (I have a lot of in-character players who play for that sort of role-playing) but not from a "happy-happy-joy-joy" back-slapping and high-fiving sense.  FYI, they probably could have walked away if they really wanted to but the goblins did push the point by feebly attacking them.  Even then, they could have let them go but it wasn't really a desirable option, since there were so many of them and they grow up quickly.It happened once and it would certainly get old if I repeated it every session.  The other women and children goblinoids that they've killed since were actively manacing them and threatening so it was a bit different in many ways.  Part of what made the goblins so surprising to them was that I played them as thoroughly Evil and without redeeming features.  Once the party had killed all the combatant males, the females were hold up in their living quarters with the children.  The females pushed their own children into the PCs in hopes of softening them up a bit (they didn't).  After all the children were dead, the largest females shoved the smallest females through and so on until they found the last two hiding in a restroom area and dispatched them as they attacked.  I suppose you could argue that since the goblins attacked them, they were fighting in self defense but the goblin children and women were never really that much of a threat to the party.By the way, yes, I can explain exactly how goblins survive despite being that cruel to their own children.  Basically female goblins have children as a way to create minions to help them and their children stick to their mothers because no other mother will trust them or want them.  As soon as they grow up enough to survive on their own, they do.  The male goblins simply impregnate the females and, in turn, use the children as part of their minions once they grow up enough to fight.  They don't have a loving family life and giving them one won't change them.  They're nasty that way by nature.</blockquote>

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