OOTS #918 - The Discussion Thread

[jere7my]

No, we don't. The entire POINT of the black dragon slaying was to challenge the presumption that things are just evil. We DON'T KNOW within the universe of OotS how many dragons are good or evil.

This isn't D&D. In order to make the claim that most of them are evil you must provide evidence that they are, and there is no such evidence within OotS.

OotS is based, pretty closely, on D&D. Barring evidence to the contrary, our assumption should be that things behave more or less as they do in D&D. If the Order were to meet a gold dragon, while Rich is of course free to do whatever he wants, it'll probably be good unless he has a particular reason for it to be otherwise. It's part of the toolset he's using. They probably won't encounter any chaotic modrons, unless it's for a joke. D&D black dragons are, for the most part, sadistic, evil killers, and the majority of OotS black dragons are probably sadistic, evil killers. Certainly the two we've met have been.

Is it possible that the OotS world is full of black dragon paladins, or black dragon vegetarians? Sure, and in that sense you're right that we can't know. But we have no evidence that they're any different than their D&D counterparts, and without that evidence the most likely assumption is that they're "always evil" (which means, in D&D terms, "almost always evil").

The point of Familicide was not that black dragons aren't bad news; the point was that you can't go around killing things just because their stat block says they're (most likely) bad news. You have to have evidence of individual wrongdoing—but that doesn't mean that such evidence wouldn't be forthcoming if we went looking for it.

Even then, even if they're evil, you need some infalliable way to prove that more lives will be lost by returning the dragons, another thing you can't prove. And keep in mind not just dragons died, but a lot of humans as well.

From a practical standpoint, apart from the Draketeeth there's not a lot of difference between undoing Familicide and summoning a few thousand black dragons and scattering them around the countryside. The moral implications of that are by no means clear.