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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bagpuss" data-source="post: 7619202" data-attributes="member: 3987">Okay looking at your question in a bit more detail.My question to you would be why? Why did you feel the need to rework it and in what way did you rework it? If you remove the women and children hobgoblins then in my opinion you have done a disservice to your players.For me the encounter stands up as well today as it did when first published.It is there to present a moral dilemma to the players. They have been cutting their way through hobgoblins perhaps justifiably so, as they have been raiding the nearby human settlements. But then they face hobgoblin women who are ferociously defending their little hobgoblin children.I remember playing it my teens and it had an impact then, and presented many questions among the group as to do we kill them or not. Even when we decided to and tried to justify it with terms like "intrinsically evil, we can't look after them and it would be more cruel leave them to starve. They will only grow up to kill more humans." it made us question how heroic we really were. We looked back at the male hobgoblins we had been killing and realised they were just raiding to support their families. And all this was decades before people were analysing D&D for social justice issues in their blogs.I'm sure I'm part of the only bunch of kids that had a sort of wake up call with encounters like that one.So if you removed the women and children, you are just encouraging a murderhobo mentality, as for some reason society accepts killing males as fine. The male hobogoblins are then just killing for selfish reasons, and that justifies killing them.[h=1]So Why are we okay with violence in RPGs?[/h]Who says we are? We all have some fun with a bit of wanton destruction and violence in RPGs every now and again, and certainly violence is often a simple direct solution to problems in RPGs. As I said before it isn't real so there aren't and real world consequences form killing someone or something else(1). RPGs are a safe space in that respect to let out some of your darker traits. But I would say a lot of the time (and certainly in well written scenarios and games outside D&D) violence can have some dramatic in game consequences, and that's when RPGs are at there best, IMHO.That's why I am concerned to felt a need to alter the encounter in that scenario, even when playing with kids.---------------------------------------------------------------Warning: Below is a danger of going off into tangent on adult themes only just stopped myself.1) Saying that there can be real world consequences if you go and kill another PC. I've played in lots of games with plenty of PvP deaths, and it is never nice to be on the receiving end. But it makes for a memorable moment, and personally I think a little bit of negative emotion at the time is well worth it, and friends end up laughing about it and retelling tales down the line. Other groups have broken up over stuff like that, I don't understand that myself. It is only a game, admittedly one you can get heavily emotionally involved in, but still a game.</blockquote>

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