Have you ever been in a game where genocide was the ethical option?

Have you ever been in a game where genocide was the ethical option?

>Be me.
>Old-ass male true neutral elven diviner. Level 2.
>Party consists of male neutral good halfling alchemist, a first-time female neutral good human druid, a female neutral good kitsune oracle, and a male chaotic neutral half-elf ranger. All level 2.
>Be broke.
>Go to local trading company as mercenaries for hire.
>Wants us to clear out an area for a new building.
>ImALumberjackAndImOkay.exe
>Gives us a device to signal him once we get there for further instructions.
>Get there eventually. It's already a clearing by a hill.
>Press device.
>There was a cave nearby, goblin inside says they're peaceful mushroom farmers. Don't like the idea of dumb, evil goblins.
>Ask them to leave.
>Says it's their ancestral home, and there are 400 gob-gobs down there.
>Probably too many to kill at our level.
>Employer gets there. Knew about the goblins, and wants us to blow up the hill with some dynamite or something. Gives us three days.
>Druid hippies out and tells him not to be racist to goblins, and it's their home.
>Pays us less because we're wasting his time working for gob-gobs, and leaves.
>Goblins won't leave.
>Says their graves are their only form of history, since they can't/won't write.
>Demands wherever they go, the graves get moved there.
>Fucking 1,000+ gobbo graves.
>Calculate that shit. Would be millions of freedom units of weight, and would have to be intact too.
>Genocide, anyone?

Cont.

>Come up with some options:
>Flood them out: No bodies of water near enough.
>Flood them out with magic: Device would either be too slow, or too expensive.
>Blow them up: They would stop us.
>Blow them up while throwing them a hard party: Too "cruel."
>Take hours.
>End up with four options.
>1: Fuck it. Genocide.
>2: Summon a wish-granting demon to move the settlement.
>3: Enchant king gobbo so he settles for a monument instead of graves.
>4: Lure them out of the cave and blow it up. Blame trading company.
>Roll it out on a d4, because we're tired of this shit.
>Option 3 it is.
>Need three spells: Sow Thought so gobbo agrees with us. Enchant Person so gobbo is friendlier. And Comprehend Languages, so the oracle can use bluff and diplomacy.
>Learn they could speak common the whole time, and heard everything.
>"We expect Genocide."
>MFW
>Don't need Comprehend Languages then. Diplomacy takes care of Enchant Person, and Sow Thought can go die.
>King gobbo wants life-sized statues of all the dead, in their likeness.
>Doesn't even remember what they look like.
>With an army of stonecrafters, it would take weeks. We have days.
>Fuckthat.jpeg
>I go over the party's collective heads and elect option 2.
>Ask ranger for assistance on Knowledge (Planes). Get a +2 bonus.
>Have a book, another +2 bonus.
>Cast Heightened Awareness on myself, another +2 bonus.
>Have a +9 in the first place, so total of +15.
>Be a diviner, so I can roll a d20 in advance and decide if I want to keep the result or roll again.
>NAT. FUCKING. TWENTY!
>Make a Knowledge (Planes) check of 35 on summoning a Glabrezu (pic related) demon at level 2.
>Teach the gob-gobs how to summon that shit.
>Tell them it will grant them a wish.
>"We can wish for ANYTHING?"
>Oshit.jpeg

Cont x2.

>Roll bluff. Get 18.
>"No... this specific ritual will let it grant you a wish only regarding the location of your civilization."
>They believe me.
>"We want to live here forever!"
>It's out of my hands now. We tell the goblins we're going to set up camp outside, and back away.
>Book it like hell once we exit the cave, and watch from a safe distrance.
>Demon appears, and they just talk.
>Demon leaves.
>Nothing happens. Goblins don't move, and neither do we.
>WTF happened? Approach cautiously.
>Start to hear them.
>SCREAMING.
>They can't move below their necks. All of them.
>Not just the men, but the women, and the children.
>Can feel bugs crawling up their legs.
>Try to move one, maybe we can still evacuate them and get paid.
>Try, and lose 8 HP, nearly killing me because old elven wizard.
>Dungeon Master says they're alive, starving, immortal, unkillable, and unmovable.
>They will persist in place, even if there's no ground below them.
>Ohgodwhy.webm
>Ranger wants to blow it up so we can get paid.
>I say it's not worth the 2,000 gp anymore.
>Ranger is in denial of everything.
>Druid is now and forevermore racist to elves.
>Alchemist isn't talking to us (he is mute).
>Oracle says we should tell the company.
>Go to the company and tell employer to survey the land.
>Says drinks are on him.
>Everyone but me tries to drink themselves dead before he comes back.
>He's overjoyed, and proud of us.
>"Their the perfect test subjects, and the ultimate building foundation!"
>Detect his alignment. Pure evil + science.
>Too afraid to detect my own alignment.
>He just opens the gold vault. We each get double the original payment.
>Bought a sweet wizard hat.

>Have you ever been in a game where genocide was the ethical option
Dude the ethical option here was walking away

A standard 10ft pole isnt long enough to touch this situation. As says, noping the fuck out of there would have been the best choice.

The ethical option here was to NOT kill 400 peaceful sentients because someone was paying you to.

Why, yes, we played in Dragonlance once, you know the setting with Kender.

I don't know why people hate kender so much. All of Dragonlance is bad, not just them.

>Have you ever been in a game where genocide was the ethical option?

No, and neither have you.

first response best response

depends on your ethics

It's part meme and part realization they are essentially gypsies.

Wjy didnt you just build the building somewhere else?

You were given many opportunities to not murder civilians for money, and even had multiple clear paths to peaceable resolution.

fpbp

>Human paladin
>Investigating rumors of drow slavers stealing surface dwelling folk in the middle of the night.
>Find tunnel leading to under dark.
>Get found by drow warband, get captured
>Get put in gladiatorial combat, turns out kidnapped people were being used as entertainment for a neutral zone for Drow and Duergar negotiations.
>live through several matches.
>Manage escape but have to leave injured and sick behind.
>Bumble way to treasure room during our shitty escape attempt.
>sorcerer finds extremely magical ring, identifies it as ring of greater wish
>OOC think DM is fucking retarded but keep it to myself.
>Party bickers over who gets to wish.
>Eventually agree to let me, the paladin decide.
>Have been shining beacon of morality and goodness up until this point.
>Think of sick and dying innocents still in dungeon
>Think of debauched orgy of evil all around him.
> run smite.exe
> "I wish every last drow and Duergar in this entire arena was dead"
> No more kidnappings, power vacuum in underdark lessened all surface excursions of any kind of any under dark race
>Even managed to save suck and injured from before.
>mfw

>Going through that much trouble for gobs
Genocide is ALWAYS the ethical choice when you're talking about goblins, user.

If it's not human, then there's no true ethical problem.
Genociding a bunch of goblins or any other race for any reason is acceptable, even for aesthetic reasons

it's not that farfetched for a QM to make goblins that aren't 100% evil

like, in one of my games, a few goblins ended up as vassals/allies of a dwarven cities as the orcs were enslaving more and more goblins around.
the goblin artificiers ended up giving the secret of black powder to the dwarves and designing portative (and arm) cannons for them (as trials on goblins ended up in broken limbs and hazardous rocket jumps)
but the players completely missed that

That seems like a good way to get both the Duergar and Drow to join forces and do retaliatory excursions at surface dwellers.

What duergar and drow?

...

Drow and Duergar are not the kind to seek vengence for vengence's sake. Plus, I killed the Drow Matriarch and the Duergar High Priest, as well as several levels of leadership for the two. I think the DM thought I would wish us and the hundreds of people out of there since there was several epic level enemies around. But he gave us the Greater Wish. He tried to argue I would fall for that but the rest of the party thankfully came to my defense.

>"I wish every last drow and duergar in this entire arena to release their captives and forever serve the cause of goodness"
FTFY

Too easy to fuck up. Drow have different morality than normal people do.

Another story of my paladin performing genocide.
>Tasked by local baron to "relocate" giant nest of hundreds of kobolds infesting this mountain
>Theres gold in them hills
>Mining guild hired an entire regiment of hobgoblins, ~2,500
>Arrive a week into hobgoblin siege
>Try to mediate between the two forces, kobolds are stubborn, hobgoblins are impatient.
>I want to assist the siege, female kobolt party member wants to rehome the kobolds.
>I'm gettin too chivalrous for this shit.
>Hobgoblins break armistice, attack main gate.
>Turns out the kobolds have a dragon, kills most of hobgoblin vanguard before they retreat.
>Black dragon, talks about the will of Taimat, pings very evil.
>Female kobold relents.
>Pray to bahamut
>Collapse certain tunnels, start fires at others, suck out all the oxygen in the tunnels.
>Kill random kobolds who stagger to the surface.
>Dragon died in its sleep.

I was given land by the Baron after the guild and nearby town vouched for my efforts.

>Drow have different morality than normal people do.
I figured he was using a game where the standard objective dnd alignments were in effect. Not that I condone using alignments, however.

Besides, if the GM wants to fuck you over with tortured wish-logic or unexplained limits, you kind of already lost the moment you even used the thing. Might as well just break or disenchant it then, for all the good it'll do you.

Or killing your employer.

>>I'm gettin too chivalrous for this shit.
>>Hobgoblins break armistice, attack main gate.
Dude, if you were being chivalrous you would fuck up the hobgoblins for breaking the armistice

>it's not that farfetched for a QM to make goblins that aren't 100% evil

Are there any (fantasy) races that deserve to be universally despised, or are they just memes created by /pol/ that oversimplify shit? I would think that having an all-evil race would be a very short-lived one since being evil for the sake of evil gets the hate of everyone, especially other evil people, so everyone is going to gang up on that race and erase them like a long math error.

Don't know if this counts but this story came to mind.

jesus h christ

Humans

gypsies written as if they were an asset to society no less, but literally without any trace of justification whatsoever.

Drow are virtually all evil and seem to thrive in their niche. But their society makes absolutely no sense and should by all right collapse on itself so maybe that's not the best example.

I'm actually setting this up in my current game.

There's a race of intelligent amphibian forest dwellers who care about preserving the balance of nature . Am aberrant plague has hit the entire land hard it's origin being a very pissed off aboleth, the elders of the tribe have seen this before and are effectively developing their own anti-plague which will kill all the hosts and carriers thus ending the plague but genociding most of the race as well.

I admit I should have said the "more" ethical option, if only compared to the result, though you are right.

>Besides, if the GM wants to fuck you over with tortured wish-logic or unexplained limits, you kind of already lost the moment you even used the thing. Might as well just break or disenchant it then, for all the good it'll do you.

I have considered casting Mage's Disjunction on them to break the curse, as soon as it's feasibly possible. If only as a mercy kill, since they're rightly ticked, and have some demon-summoning knowhow.

That sounds like a nice adventure hook. If I may add: In the event that the party is clearly going to kill the aboleth, the aboleth will offer to provide a cure, but only if the party fixes whatever was pissing off the aboleth by doing something that risks something even worse happening. The key is in the risk.

You could have just chosen to reject the quest, as already said. That was the true ethical option. What you did was cartoonishly evil.

>>Alchemist isn't talking to us (he is mute).
If this means the player chose to make a mute character, I'd suggest that finding a way to shift the effects of the wish onto that player would be the best option.

Yeah I thought about that a bit.

The aboleth has basically escaped to this isolated island which until now didn't have any gods , it has a seething hatred of the gods and blames them for why it and it's race were struck down from their old heights. It's currently licking it's wounds as it's last plot failed due to the efforts of my last group.

The party arrives on the island as well as a bunch of settlers and they've brought with them their belief in gods. I run the world like American gods in that if an area has people with an active belief a in gods then those gods manifest in that area. The aboleth has essentially triggered it's defence mechanism to wipe out all the worshippers before they take root which has also affected the natives.

One of the players is a worshipper of this god, Amaunteer, who himself along with his followers is trying to stamp out this plague and it's source.

If the worshippers simply leave the island then the plague will stop but they're fanatics who burn people at the stake at a hint of deformity.

My paladin was pissed, but he figured they suffered enough natural consequence when they lost 300 people when the kobolds lost less than 50. It was a pretty solid route for the kobolds against the vanguard.

Pretty much any race in the Underdark. They're all evil and are only kept together as a group because everything is trying to get them so forming a society is serving their self interest because they would die quickly otherwise. They're all also slave races so none live in poverty.