Is it a Lawful Good act to, swiftly and without undue pain, massacre goblin children?

Hey, I am called (literally) the paladin of my group of friends, and I have a mental disorder. Is it evil to kill me?

>using alignments and ALWAYS EVIL REPENTLESS NEVER GOOD races
>starting a blatant trolley paladin thread

Not at all. I'm just following through the logic. You have to have some actual standard (say, this child is 80% likely to murder innocents) but no matter where it falls it'll be arbitrary.

No.

You weaken the species.

I feel like it wouldn't be much of a stretch to assume you do as well, my edgy friend.

Since I have no intention to breed, I have no effect.

>confirming my suspicions

Jesus user, you should at least try to defend yourself. Now I'm sad.

In GS universe yes, because they're evil-by-nature vengeful rape machines.

Why lie about it?

>you should at least try to defend yourself.

Buy user, you are the normalfag on 4chins, you are the one who needs to defend his choices in life.

Everyone expects the grognard to act and live like a grognard, but what do you have to say for yourself and your white-knighting?

...

I believe you are confused. I also said I have a mental disability.

As for my supposed "white knighting", I do not white night. I simply try to be a good person. I will help people young and old, weak and strong, no matter what sex or creed you are. People only need to ask for help and I will provide it.

Call that white knighting if you will, but I feel that I am a better person for it.

I can't wait for this meme series to die.

No, no matter what Gygax tries to claim.

Yes. Goblins have never shown mercy, restraint, or empathy to other sapients (at least in the setting I'm currently playing in) which shows they are either evil naturally or non-sapient.

Not in germany.

It needs less rape and more pragmatic monster slaying

>but I feel that I am a better person for it.

Oh okay, so you are not trying to be a decent person for the sake of being a decent person but only so you can get your moral high-ground.

I sense your fedora even from here.

I cant wait for your mom to throw you out of her basement.

Wonderful retort user. Have a gold star for trying.

>massacre children
>EVER lawful

I am the defender of justice and friend to all children! You won't get away with this!

They're not from a culture that wants to kill all human men, rape all human women, and eat all human children. Goblins are.

Filthy greenskins

Helpful Comrade and plenty of other intolerable, spergy tripfags all thought of themselves as incredibly moral paladinish people too, so yeah. Execution for you!

Goblin children, no. Demon children, probably.

It's probably a lawful act in most places unless you have an obvious reason that you're not supposed to but it's almost certainly not good

Fuck off SJW, we're not taking gobbo refugees.

Uncle Adolph would be proud.

I'm a Gray Guard. I don't give a fuck.

Kind of irrelevant in the case of the individual goblin child.

Following the laws of man =/= Lawful act. The universe defines lawful, not mankind

Goblin-loving lieberal detected.

Is that a new chapter?

Who will grow up to kill human men, rape human women, and eat human children. Find your balls, get your mace, and do the RIGHT thing. Better you hurt a little inside now than a lot of people end up dead later.

Not in all cases.

Yes. always. The presence of alignment system means objective good and evil, and aligned races, exist in the setting. Goblins are evil. Killing them is both lawful and good act. End of statement.

>tfw goblin partymember
I can understand innate alignment when it comes to devils and angels and the such, but why would you want it on regular creatures? Seems kind of silly desu

Well, that leads back to If you're thinking about this in the context of future evil deeds, it doesn't actually matter that it's a goblin. Effectively goblin is shorthand for "is X likely to commit intolerable evil deeds". The same can apply to children from many other species and backgrounds, including many human children.

If you're a paladin, you ought to be just and apply a just standard fairly and without bias. You ought not to be a hypocrite.

Have Goblins ever been 'Always Evil' D&D? Your statement really only applies to the 'Always Evil' races.

Ah right, I forgot something that is propably even more critical to the question. Goblins are classified as -monsters- not people. The question of alignment on the act of killing them doesn't even enter the picture.

When has that ever been a distinction of anything more than propaganda?

Well, grabbing the Monster Manual closest to me, which is the 2E binder edition, Goblin entry says Alignment: Lawful Evil, and the fluff text doesn't imply thay can be anything else.

It is the single most important distinction in the entirety of D&D multivers. There are people, and there are monsters. The two groups operate on entirely separate considerations (and most of the time, game rules).

Well in the Complete Book of Humanoids:
>Alignment. The race's typical alignment is listed here. The range of PC options is usually more extensive.
That featured Goblins. So in 2e we have mutability of Goblin alignments, unless we accept that only PC Goblins can be non-Evil, which is kind of weird but potentially interesting.

>goblins are evil
>goblin kids are evil too
>by killing evil goblins you are doing something good
>paladins fight against evil
>paladins kill evil goblins
>paladins fight against evil by killing evil goblins
>evil goblin kids are evil goblins, no matter how you try to spin it
There, no fuck off with this shit.

Goblins are corruption of the one ring akin to ringwraiths and gollum. It is your sacred duty to murderhobo goblin children.

Its not like Goblins are people or anything, just little packets of XP.

Eh, it's irrelevant. It's actually just the "goblins are evil" argument with different coded language. The principle of still applies. It is the not the act of being a "monster" that necessitates killing someone, it is their deeds and/or thoughts. Or it's hypocrisy and you aren't actually following through on your claimed principles. "Monster" is just shorthand for "has or is likely to have or is likely to commit intolerable evil deeds" all over again, but even less effectively than goblin is because monster is vaguer, harder to classify, and even in the core text features good examples.

If your PCs go purely by what is considered a monster in public opinion they must be an ineffective and easily manipulated bunch. Every good party interested in retributive justice ought to have killed a few non-monsters too.

>wizard casts spell that turns all kids in the world evil, permanently
>paladins become obligated to kill all kids

Yes, and? That's actually so much more simple than the goblin question.

It's based in their culture and general behavior in the setting, but, in diferent settings those can change.

>another wizard casts spell that turns all paladins evil, permanently
>paladins become obligated to kill each other

Of course, the keyword there being "permanently". They're effectively dead the moment they turn evil and getting rid of them is objectively good aligned. Comparable situation would be people irreversibly turning into zombies -- of course it's okay to kill zombies.

I don't know what point you were trying to make aside from a ham-fisted attempt at calling him a child-killer.

3rd Edition has them listed as "Usually" Neutral Evil, which means more than 50% but still markedly less than all of them.

More to the point I bet if you looked up drow in the 2E binder, would also not imply the capacity for any other alignment, yet we have a multitude of canonical examples of just that.

>The presence of alignment system means objective good and evil, and aligned races

By that logic all high elves should be Chaotic Good, but I'll bet a tidy sum of money that it wouldn't be hard to find elves who are other than that.

If elves can be evil, why can't goblins be good?

I'm not sure you've thought through that example, user. Consider how step 1 affects step 2.

I really haven't. The paladins would probably fall in that situation, though no fault of their own.
I'm just having fun spitballing ways evil wizards can use slaydar paladins to make civilizations collapse.

Paladins no longer have an alignment restriction, and haven't for 2 editions now. A paladin obligated to kill Evil doesn't necessarily fall if they themselves become Evil through some curse rather than their own actions.

Yes. It is written.

You are misguided by only letting yourself consider IC views and ignoring OOC. People have, in the "Players Handbook," a "Race Entry" and they can take up one or more "Character Classes" and all that implies. Monsters on the other hand live and die by "Monster Manual" stat block, and most editions don't even give them something as fundamental to people-hood as attribute values.

People =/= Monsters.

So Gary has no idea about his own Alignment system then.

Makes sense really.

Gygax's word was written more than a decade after he stopped being the IP holder of D&D and a couple of editions later besides. He was just some guy speaking his own opinions on the matter, without being in any position of authority to do so besides his reputation.

Deus vult!

>You are misguided by only letting yourself consider IC views and ignoring OOC
Well, that is absolutely the correct way to think about it, so. You should ignore OOC for PC decisions in a blank slate question.

Your PCs must be working on a terrifyingly alien moral code, then.

Of course, they're adventurers.

>and most editions don't even give them something as fundamental to people-hood as attribute values.

What do you mean by this?

No, I'm not memeing, I mean, what do you actually mean by this? What is an "attribute value"? Do you mean the 6 ability scores and derrived base statistics? Because in fact most editions give them exactly that.

>massacre goblin children?
oh for the love of!

THIS AGAIN?!
Have you absolutely nothing better to do than beat this dead horse?
Just gonna block this.

Why do we have to keep having threads about this garbage?

Shit is fucking nothing.

Remember, "rape" didn't originally mean having sex with a woman without her consent, it meant having sex with a woman without her father's consent.

So if a young woman elopes with her lover, a Paladin is bound by the precepts of Law and Good to mutilate him and drag her back home.

Remember, Gary Gygax wrote that in the 21st century and was clearly referring to the common law definition of rape.

True Neutral detected

I would unironically play a setting that abided by a Burgundian legal code, sure.

>Lawful Good
>Massacre

Massacre implies they are helpless or otherwise no threat to you. otherwise you'd have asked if it's okay to battle goblin children.

If you are in no immediate danger, it is MURDER, plain and simple.

The LG solution would be to raise them into loyal servants of your god (because why would you be LG if you weren't dependent on a god) so they may serve a better purpose

No, he wasn't. He's specifically siting the Anglo-Saxon punishment for rape, e.g., what the Anglo-Saxons defined as rape.

This means that either,
a) He knows what "rape" used to mean and still considers such a punishment Lawful Good; or
b) he didn't know what "rape" used to mean and therefore did not do adequate research into the matter.

Regardless, like I said, Gygax's word is not law and had not been law for some time at the time that post was made. 17 years, in fact, since he left TSR in 1985. Two entire new editions of D&D had come out (2nd and 3rd), and two more have since followed it.

Treating Gygax's word as final on the matter would be quite a bit like a military man taking orders from Bill Clinton or George W. Bush today.

People are going to say that goblins will stay evil no matter how they are raised, solely because the Monster Manual says they are evil. Mark my words.

The counter-argument is that we have innumerable examples of non-evil kobolds, drow, orcs, mind flayers, even outright demons (lookin' at you, Falls-From-Grace). From 2nd Edition onwards at least, it has been accepted as fact that alignment is not a straightjacket.

plus iirc the 5e rulebook states that alignments stated are societal norms for that species' society, but it's entirely possible to defy societal norms

Ah great. Someone has brought up this pseudo-hentai series again.

I just wonder, is this rapist behavior exclusive to goblins or not?
If it is then why does the guild not warn female adventures that this is the monster that rapes people?
Or are we going to find out that there are bands of orcs that lay waste to entire cities and kidnap legions of women?

The people of Goblin Slayer are terminally moronic.

reminder that the only good goblin is a dead goblin

Depends on setting.

If you ask Gygax, yes.
Pretty much everyone else says no.

What's funny is that true neutral or neutral evil types should object to this more than good types because regardless of what alignment they grow up to be, a goblin child can be kept and raised as a slave who could in turn provide them with more money as a result of their forced labor than the bounty for killing all the goblins.

Aren't they literally produced as a form of radiation from a war between the gods?

Actually in Tolkein Canon they're the same thing as orcs who in turn are really a sub-type of elf.

So yeah, to murder goblin children is literally no different from murdering elven children a completely good and righteous act with no downside

I would call it quite a confession for a D&D player to call the rules of the books as "alien."

Source?

That's nice if you're sitting in a comfy church writing on morality instead of fighting. That child won't forget his dead parents or forgive you, ever. He will grow up hating you, and someday exact vengeance. Kill it now.

Ah this reminds me, I think we all agree that True Neutral does not have universal, blanket moral objections to slavery, only those of moment-to-moment convenience - that is, as they relate to their specific, immediate, personal situation.

You know it's easy to make new kids right? And the new ones aren't gonna be evil

I was about to say this, actually. Seems like it would be fun to follow the old laws.

I'd say a more fitting allegory would be a military man taking orders from Sun Tzu. He may be good at it, and know what he's doing, but he's fallen behind the times.

Not to mention, isn't part of the chain of command anymore either.