When do baby goblins become evil?

[Sigurd]

Its a little known fact that Goblins are on the brink of perfect morality & universal peace.

Rare Goblin artifacts proclaim that one ceremony enabled by humans would cleans the world of all evil goblins, create vast unused areas of farmlands and create untold wealth. The ceremony begins with the ritual sacrifice of all the good player character races. It can be done in any way affective really. The remaining goblins will recast the morality of the prime material and they will be 'good'. If you were alive you could ask them.

Any takers


S

 

[ThirdWizard]

Because D&D uses monolithic cultures for all races. Goblins are like X, elves are like Y, and dragons are like Z. Eberron mixes things up a bit, but that's not core D&D.

That's true from a design standpoint.

But, not an in character assessment of said knowlege.

 

[Savage Wombat]

If you kill all the baby goblins, there'll be no goblins left for the next generation of adventurers. Where are they supposed to get their first EXP from?

 

[Schmoe]

How many parents are on this thread?

The answers are fairly obvious to a parent.

All infants are good (until they keep you up at night then they are vile creatures of the night).

Actually infants are good until around the terrible twos then they switch to neutral and when they hit their teens they are fully evil.

My son is 14 and one of us may not make it till his 15th birthday.

I'm a parent of a 19-month old. He's a real treasure, and I can't imagine life without him. But I still think that goblin babies are face-chewing monsters. It's a lot more fun for me to play in a fantasy world with some clear distinctions between good and evil. Leave the moral ambiguity for the PC races, there's plenty of that to go around. At the end of the day, the PC's still need foes that they can feel good about vanquishing.

 

[Hurtfultater]

Read Keith Richburg's Out of America, particularly the sections about Somalia and other parts of Africa where there are lots of children running around with AK-47s. Think Lord of the Flies with guns. You can find the same thing in other parts of the world and in other periods of history, so I'm not just picking on Africa or Africans here. Yes, it's possible to crush the empathy and altruism out of people and really mess them up if you get to them as children and give them no hope for a better future.

I was referring to empathy and altruism in a pretty narrow and basic sense. I probably didn't make that clear. I can't comment on Out of America, having not read it, but I wouldn't hold up areas with child soldiers are janjaweed as functional societies.

And given the amount of supression of empathy required to enjoy a great deal of entertainment, be it watching armies of goons getting mowed down by the hero of a movie or playing first-person shooters or games like Grand Theft Auto, I really don't find this all that difficult to imagine.

Those forms of entertainment take a great deal of empathy, as you have to associate the images with people and then project emotional states onto the emotional appeal. Sure, we have to dial down your empathy to avoid being upset, but there's still quite a lot there.

The goblins in my game lack real empathy, even between mothers and children. Why do goblins have children? Because the male goblins don't give the females much of a choice. How do goblin children survive? Oh, their mothers do take care of them. Not because they love them but becuase it gives them a little group of extra hands that they can control because they are bigger and, well, no other goblin is going to care for them. But if it comes down to mother or child, the goblin mothers will toss their children into a meat grinder to save their own necks. Ugly? Absolutely. But I want my goblins to be nasty, brutish, and short lived. I don't want them to be misunderstood products of a bad upbringing who would be just like any other person if only they were raised right. My goblins are Evil by nature.

Look outside of primates. Cats for social structures but have no real empathy or real altruism. Read an article on training cats. And, yes, they do have a social order that operates on non-empathetic terms. Heck, look outside of mammals at bees and ants. Very complex social structures. No empathy. No conscious altruism.

Cats do have altruistic instincts. Haven't you ever seen a cat bring a dead mouse or snake as a present? Grooming behaviors are also altruistic. Cats (especially lions) can react to different emotional states in members of their social groups, and they vocalize and posture to signal these emotional states. There's empathy right their. House cats aren't extremely social creatures, anyway. I was trying to stay away from social insects as they're so much simpler in behavior that how they function wouldn't be pertinent unless you had goblins with extremely powerful social instincts and very little agency.

Yes. But it's not necessary. Like I said, it's important to having a "good" society but I don't think it's necessary for an intelligent creature or society. And if you don't believe that intelligent creatures can exist without empathy, you should take a look at the latest research on autism. And, yes, people who are autistic can be fully functional members of society.

I'm not sure you could have a society entirely composed of autistic people, and certainly not without high functioning autistics and people with Asperger's. Perhaps a more apt comparison would be a society of sociopaths, and I'm betting we can agree that that one wouldn't work.

Is the goal a successful goblin population that can build a rocket to put a goblin on the moon or to have menacing hoards of intelligent monsters that the players can kill without worrying too much about the moral implications? No, goblins that lack empathy and altruism are never going to run soup kitchens for the poor or nursing homes for old goblins, but is that really a problem?

The goal is to have a goblin population that can care for goblin babies (presumably as helpless as other hominid babies), can form recognizable societies, can make tools, can do things that require cooperation and have no immediate reward, and can regularly perform complex tasks. No soup kitchens are needed.

 

[fusangite]

This is a lovely problem. Leaving aside the evidence this provides for the raw absurdity of the current D&D alignment system, I'll try to sort this out.

The first question we have to address is where the nature of a people or race comes from. Obviously, the nature-nurture debate can't be easily mapped back onto the D&D world. Genetics and psychology don't exist as fields in D&D worlds and even if they did, we know that in the case of genetics at least, it would be a wrong theory.

So, what are some viable theories that might be true in a D&D world?

1. Environment: By this I don't mean social environment, I mean the theories of cultural difference that Greek and Roman philosophers and geographers subscribed to. The idea was that the physical locale a group lived in determined what kind of people they were -- in particular, humidity and heat were preponderant factors but there were other concerns as well. Not only did environmental conditions shape how societies worked and their values but individuals and group of a particular nature were thought to be attracted to an environment that suited them.
2. Nobility: By this, I don't mean a strict theory of bloodline but rather a Tolkienesque idea -- a whole people is enobled if its leader does something great or courageous or if a group distinguishes itself in battle. Thus, a people may become more or less noble based on their leader's conduct or their collective conduct.
3. Divine Inheritance: The fate of a people may be tied to the conduct and nature of their god -- when their god is good, they are good; when their god is powerful, they are powerful, etc. This may include both a lineal descent from the god and the ongoing relationship between the race and the god.

So, how do these things reflect on the question of how evil inheres in goblins?

First of all, there are game mechanical factors:

1. Usually: Goblins have a "usually" alignment. According to the rules,

The majority (more than 50%) of these creatures have the given alignment. This may be due to strong cultural influences, or it may be a legacy of the creatures' origin. For example, most elves inherited their chaotic good alignment from their creator, the deity Corellon Larethian.

2. Detectability: Unlike most worlds, in the D&D world, it is very hard for either large groups or powerful individuals to be unaware of their goodness or evilness. Detection spells, aligned weapons and spells, etc. make it very difficult not to know one's own alignment.

There are also some sizeable game mechanical holes. In particular, D&D rules do not list the characteristics of creatures who are less than adult, except for dragons. So, it's difficult to discern how and if the creatures' mental attributes and alignment tend to change over time.

Anyway, I've rambled on for a bit and I actually need a break to think through how this information could bear on this issue. So, I'll post again shortly.

 

[Ogrork the Mighty]

...when do the goblins learn their evil ways.

Right before my sword cuts them in half

 

[fusangite]

So, here is a possible framework:

We know that Intelligence is the attribute that permits non-neutral alignments to be adopted. Creatures with Int scores of 0-2 can only be neutral; most creatures with Int scores from 3-5 are also neutral.

Now, if one sees Int as an attribute that simply expresses latent intellectual potential, an individual's Int doesn't change over time -- a newborn will have an identical Int to an adult. On the other hand, if one sees Int as I do, as an operationalized expression of intellect, then one can imagine that a newborn has an Int of 1 and that as the child grows up, their Int increases until they become an adolescent.

Based on this, I would set up the following framework for creatures that do not have alignment in their subtype or the always descriptor, assuming an average Int of 10:
Infant
Int Range: 1-3
Alignment: Always neutral

Child
Int Range: 4-7
Alignment: Often neutral

Adolescent
Int Range: 8-9
Alignment: Often neutral evil

Adult
Int Range: 10+
Alignment: Usually neutral evil

Now, what factors could determine whether an individual goblin or group of goblins was evil? I would suggest that any of the following would bear on this:
1. How has this goblin's tribe, clan or extended family conducted themselves in the past?
2. Does this goblin or group thereof live under similar physical conditions to other goblins?
3. Does this goblin or group thereof worship a god other than Maglubiyet?
4. Is this goblin or group thereof of mixed blood?

Anyway, I hope this is useful to someone.

 

[Lasher Dragon]

As I am choking the last little shred of life outta them, sometimes they get an evil-looking gleam in their eyes. I postulate that they are always evil - you just have to choke it outta them when they are that young.

 

[caudor]

Based on this, I would set up the following framework for creatures that do not have alignment in their subtype or the always descriptor, assuming an average Int of 10: ... Anyway, I hope this is useful to someone.

Very well presented, fusangite. Yes, the framework is useful; I hope you won't mind if I use it for my campaign.