The great D&D moral quandary

The party come across a textbook case of pic related upon first entering the dungeon.

What is the right course of action for them to follow?

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Slay

Turn around and walk quickly in the opposite direction.

>what the fuck is a yellow dragon.jpg

Raise them as your own.

Whatever they want to do.

This is the only correct answer

>D&D
>""""MORAL QUANDARY"""
lmao.
No.
D&D uses OBJECTIVE morality. As such killing a racially EVIL child is fine as it will always, with no exception (in non-stupid editions ofc) be ethically, morally and lawfully good correct.

Adopt them since gold dragons are always good in d&d.

What this user said, except the exact opposite since these are gold dragons and therefore lawful good.

They look gold. Leave em.

Well, who said we're not an evil party?

Begin training my future steeds.

noice. but I think those are gold dragons.

>. As such killing a racially EVIL child is fine as it will always
Good thing inherently evil creatures don't tend to have children then.

Even 1E had exceptions with different alignments, yes, even at least one true neutral chromatic dragon.

The morality only seems objective because you're a moron.

>What are orcs, mindflayers, colored dragons, gnolls, kobolds, etc...

"BUT MUH DOOS VOOLT PURGING FANTASY! I WANT MUH LG GENOCIDE CAMPS!"

Pretty much this. Isn't there also an example of a Silver Dragon managing to raise white dragon wymlings to be neutral?

The MM also says elves are chaotic good, which is obviously untrue in a lot of situations.

The MM isn't a holy book.

Not inherently evil creatures in any edition. Even older editions had Good/Neutral Orcs who sought asylum from their kin or got sick of serving some chromatic that treated them as canon fodder.

I don't think gnolls have kids. Are they magicked into existence by demons?

FREE DRAGON FAMILIARS FOR EVERYONE

Dragons can't be familiars.

Can a lvl1 party even kill them?

Those are Golds, they're good people and probably smarter than us.

...

>hatches from egg
>looks at fighter

"You should reroll into a wizard. You are holding back your team."

They are born with their own type based instincts and morality.

The wyrmling will already have questions and preferences at birth. A green will simply not have the same kind of strong moral satisfactions you’d feel from organizing a charity event.

Dragons are sentient creatures after all, so approaching it’s racial personality as something to be tamed or ‘cured’ implies abject cruelty that would quickly veer you the moral event horizon.

>Reek sounds like a good name for such a scummy being as yourself doesn’t it?

Honestly I feel the best way to veer a dragon away from it’s base morals would be up and honest about the how it’s thoughts are conditioned by cosmic alighnments and that the party is ready to help it break past those bindings.

Short term though I feel the best option would be to donate the poor things to a dragon of an opposing type and beg-ask them not to commit baby murder.

>Have there even boon any decent fanfics that deal with this subject of cosmically alighned nature vs nurture?

I want to see the comic where the baby green dragon hatches and immediately starts to bully the kobolds.

>Not one mention of the potential price on the open market
Fucking plebians.

...

> open market
>selling gold dragons on the open market

You are a fucking retard. Do you know nothing of the lore?

Only 5e, but that edition is shit lore wise. Gnolls have been usually CE, but that leaves plenty of them being Neutral or even Good

Pissing off scalie s is always the correct option.

Progress through the dungeon as normal, having left the little ankebiters a portion of dried game and a bowl of water for their first feast. We prepare ourselves to schmooze with what will no doubt be a very tenacious and paranoid adult dragon on the way out.

Alternative exit routes will be sought after.

>be ethically, morally and lawfully good correct.
According to whom? Where does it state killing evil is inherently a lawful or in fact good act? Please provide source and page numbers so that I may reference your assertions.....Oh that's right you can't and instead was trying pass of your opinion as fact.

Do everything in my power to avoid the little fuckers, if I dont need to be in the dungeon fucking leave

Just leave it a note saying 'yes we provided your children with a meal because we are kind benevolent souls, we will probably be returning this way in due course there is no cause for alarm'.

Oh wow. What an idiot. He doesnt realise that dragons would have fragile bones due the inverse square law. The only way dragons would work is thank to magic. And if you have magic, hou also have magic weapons.

>collect them
>then sell them
>speed money on frivolous nonsense

alternately
>eat it and gain it's powers

wow, what a tool

>mind flayers
Ceremorphosis isn't really having kids, though.

...

Not with that attitude.

Locate a potential exit and look for signs of passage from the parent.

Prepare a hasty retreat.

>mindflayers
I wonder who could be behind this post

There actually is a source for that or something very close to that. I'm not all too familiar with 1e or 2e and can't point it out for you, but it does in fact exist. There was a time when D&D had objective morality. When they abandoned it, things that had to do with alignments that were consistent before suddenly became ambiguous and, as a result, we have this thread or one of it's variants every now and then.

That is the most butthurt scalie I've ever seen in my life.

Dragons are not animals. They are intelligent creatures with their own cultures. They cannot be tamed as your mount. the word you're looking for is "enslave"

Feeblemind might be a viable strategy. Hope it survives the 4d6 damage, do it from long-range while it's trying to escape the egg so it doesn't recognize it was you, then try to get it to imprint. Even if the Feeblemind gets resisted after the first month, it had no memories prior to being Feebleminded. It'll probably suffer an existential crisis, fall into paranoia, and possibly seek help.
If you've got a good surgeon, you might be able to lobotomize a dragon hatchling down to animal-grade intellect. Or at least animal-grade loyalty. This obviously can affect other aspects of the dragon.
Psychological conditioning may also be effective if you can keep punishing it 24/7.

And now you are veering dangerously close to an enslavment fetish territory.

.

Well, introduce ourselves I guess, and try to locate their mother. Little guys are probably all disoriented and they need to be fed soon. Granted, they're smart as fuck, and dangerous to boot but that doesn't make them any less in need of assistance.

Run.

There's a mama dragon nearby.

More than likely, die horribly in Madagascar, since were playing Shadowrun.

What the fuck?

Why is he so mad? It's just fantasy.

He tries to speak as if he's any authority on the subject, but he's clearly an idiot who has no idea what he is talking about.

See, this is why you earn the dragon's respect and friendship by aiding and abetting its goals, which comes with the perk of it willingly allowing you to ride it later.

Metallic dragons aren't the type to do evil in D&D settings. If parent dragons are alive and around, leave them, if not, adopt them.

Found him here
furaffinity.net/user/sirrush/

This is usually the best response to ANYTHING dragon related

Very expensive omelettes

It's a desert dwelling dragon you uncultured swine. lomion.de/cmm/dragyell.php

It's in the 2nd Edition D&D monster manual, you fucking troglodyte.
The storytime where the guy asks "What the fuck is a yellow dragon?" is about a 3.P game where he clearly didn't play any previous edition.

>the lore
>depends on the setting
What I know is what's listed on Page 13 of Book Two - 'Monsters and Treasure' - of a game that is clearly called 'Dungeons and Dragons'.
'Value of Subdued Dragons'.
According to this, each of those critters is worth 500-1000 gold pieces for each hit point it has.
A pretty good haul, considering all you had to do was not get into a shitty 'muh alignment, muh deus vult' argument.

Doesn't matter what their allignment is. When a kobold dies, it goes to Avernus to live in Krutklumak's lair. When a gnoll dies, it goes to the Abyss and lives in the realm of Yeenoghu. In either case, the petitioner kobold/gnoll eventually is reabsorbed by the plane and becomes an outsider, which will one day be a powerful force for Evil.

But, if you kill them as child, their souls is automatically claimed by Zaphkiel, since he has dominion over the souls of all mortal children. There, they will be reabsorbed by the plain and eventually becoem a powerful force for Good.

Therefore, genocide them as children before they become mature and go to one of the shitty afterlives when they die.

>What is the right course of action for them to follow?

>*SQUEEE* Soo kawaiii!
>*Raises and trains them*

Leading directly to . Instant superpower. Let's see rival kingdoms try and step to us now, eh?

But if you murder children intentionally, doesn't that make it an act of Evil and thus forfeit as a sacrifice to an Evil God, intentional or otherwise?

Yes, if you murder good children. You're not murdering good children, though, you're murdering evil children.
Since your action literally reduces how much stuff pings Evil on a Detect [Alignment] spell, your brutal act of genocide is a 100% Good act.

This is why DnD's allignment system is so fucked. It describes what side you're on in the great celestial proxy war between the celestials and the fiends, but people also think that it's somehow also used to describe ethics and morality.
If ever you use the allignment system, do not fall into this pitfall; have asshole Lawful-Good inquisitors ruling through fear with an iron fist, and honorable Chaotic Evil blakguard samurai who refuse to fight dirty and spare the lives of those they find worthy. Or, just ignore the system completely.

>gm can I keep one as a pet?
What do you do?

You could, but as your friend I would like to ask you not to do that and just agree that it's not something your character would do.
Keeping one as a pet would make my job a hell of a lot harder, and it would probably cause a fight between us later down the line; spoiler, raising a potentially intelligent dragon as a pet has a bunch more repercussions than just adopting a stray cat.

banana dragon

Oh sick some gold dragons, those things are hella chivalrous and noble. Guess we better try to keep them safe so they can grow up to be protectors of society. Good thing those weren't chromatic dragon babies, otherwise we might've had a moral quandary on our hands.

>Gold dragon wyrmlings

I bid them a good day in draconic, offer them each a handful of gold coins as a gift, and ask if their mother is home and willing to receive guests.

How the heck are they supposed to know if their mother is around? They just hatched!

Return them to their mother I believe there was something written about a reward on the flyer

IIRC, dragons teach their young while they're still in the egg. That, or they reach child-level inteligence only a few hours after hatching.

They're also likely more intelligent than the majority of the party. Plus who knows, maybe they heard something before they hatched?

Yeah this is true mostly because D&D is now dominated by neck-beards rather than by true nerds

.... is this idiot really saying Yaweh/Allah's a dragon? Despite the fact that dragons until recent literature have nearly always symbolized the various evils of the world, if not Satan himself? Heck, he brings up Saint George without understanding that God gave him the strength to slay the beast? On top of that, the dragon was portrayed as pathetic and weak so to show how wretched a creature the Devil is, but humans couldn't take him down without the help of God?

>tfw you will never be a stupid scalie who autistically argues about dragons all day and shit talks Tolkien

>party is a band of nitwit goblins

... if we kill and eat them, we gain their strength!

>.... is this idiot really saying Yaweh/Allah's a dragon?
Yeah. The "dragon god" stuff is by far the funniest part of his bizarre views.

Holy fuck, this guy's retarded.

>tsun-tsun dragon hatchling with meta knowledge.
Truly the mark of an evil GM.

...

Then where do they come from smartass.

Retard. Gold Dragons chill with humans in people towns. Steal their baby and they will hunt your ass down. Fuck, they get word of one on the market and you are in for some shit.

You're like a hood rat getting excited that you stole gold from Fort Knox.

Oh holy shit,this.

My kobold character doesn't worship Krutklumak.

if you had specified that it was a 360 degrees turn, i could have seconded this and called it a /thread.

Dragons have malleable alignment, not fixed, so take and rear them, obviously.

Make sure they've been abandoned, if so raise them yourself. Otherwise leave some gold and hope whatever dragon owns them doesn't decide to kill you for getting too close to their eggs.

Depends on the color. When faced with this exact problem with black dragon eggs merely 3 weeks ago, my group's solution was to slaughter 40+ kobolds (women and children too), steal all the eggs, eat two, sell a third of the remainder to a "reputable" wizard, make another third into gingerbread (50lbs), magically seal gravy inside the shells of those we made into festive treats, sell said gravy eggs to aforementioned wizard, keep 2 just in case and one character has secretly decided to raise the last one as his son when it hatches.

Jesus Christ that momma dragon was PISSED. She tried to kill us but only managed to destroy the captain of our ship, our ship, and 20lbs of the gingerbread. Joke's on her we were gonna donate that gingerbread to the captain she killed anyway.

I don't know if that's a masterfully crafted troll of the classic school, or if he has his head so far up his ass he resembles a Klein bottle. I want to believe it's the former.

>turn around
>and walk quickly in opposite direction

Why would you want to walk towards it?

What was the party's alignment?

Let them go.
Cursory knowledge checks would let you know dragons, ALL dragons, are born as intelligent as humans if not moreso, with a wealth of built in survival knowledge, on top of the fact that dragons neither nurse nor raise their young, but DO STAY NEARBY TO ENSURE THEIR SURVIVAL WHICH MEANS RUN THE FUCK AWAY BECAUSE MOMMA DRAGON IS CURRENTLY WATCHING YOU.

Place them in hands of responsible, kind and good hearted parents

>>.... is this idiot really saying Yaweh/Allah's a dragon?
He actually is. He doesn't like that being brought up in the story much because physical forms are one of those things they knew were usable against Gods, but Yahweh shares traits with a few gods in the semitic pantheon, El and another god, Yam. Who, coincidentally, is described as El's son, the god "Yahweh" later overthrew.

Why do you think angels are actually burning serpents? Because they're incredibly close to Yahweh in terms of power and appearance, just not quite as good.

What would a gold dragon girl waifu be like?

Dragons are born self-aware and completely aware of their place in the world. As such they are treated the same way I treat every adult being that is a threat.

>I was in the U.S. Army
Another crazy guy in the Army. It's almost never the Air Force, Navy, or Marines on such consistent levels. The lower bar to entry seems to attract nutjobs.

Clobber with a sap, throw in a bag and sell to purveyor of exotic beasts or raise it as a flying mount. Or eat it, whatever.