OOTS #1066 - The Discussion Thread

[Kish]

[...]

Your questions continue to dodge the point. "Given that this exists, how do you..." doesn't relate to what Rich said. There is no example of it that will make it relate to, "This shouldn't exist."

[Keltest]

Your questions continue to dodge the point. "Given that this exists, how do you..." doesn't relate to what Rich said. There is no example of it that will make it relate to, "This shouldn't exist."

Rich is entitled to his opinion, however without him being here to explain his rationale, no counterargument or justification is needed beyond "i disagree", so I don't know what youre expecting.

"This shouldn't exist" is not evidence to be refuted or examined, its just a claim.

[Unoriginal]

Your questions continue to dodge the point. "Given that this exists, how do you..." doesn't relate to what Rich said. There is no example of it that will make it relate to, "This shouldn't exist."

Your answers continue to dodge my point. WHY shouldn't it exist?

Should have the Xenomorph not been a few hours old, but instead be just another alien boarding a spaceship?

Should the Dryad of my exemple not exist?

Killing toddlers is horrible, yes, there is nothing to argue about that. But why is killing a being that's knowingly acting and thinking like any human bandit that the adventurers would kill more wrong because the being is younger than the bandit?

[Jasdoif]

Out of universe, they are decisions made by humans, yes. In-universe (as far as the Monster Manual and the other documents about dragons are concerned, meaning they could be modified depending of the setting), they're observed facts.

I'm fairly sure that the Giant's objection being about the out-of-universe decisions, rather than the in-universe details, is a large part of why you don't understand the objection on the basis of the in-universe details.

[Kish]

You expressed yourself as wanting to understand what Rich said. Are you changing that to "I want to redefine the terms of the debate entirely"? Because I'm not really interested in trying to convince you, if that's the case. If you want my opinion of "inherently evil" in writing, I already gave it and you complained about my not phrasing it more gently, so I know you saw it. If you want to understand what Rich said, you'll need to ditch the whole "how do people relate to these facts" and approach them on the level of "why do people decide these things"?

If the Alien movies are supposed to actually have anything to say, rather than being about "you like gore and action scenes," I've never heard it. Lots of people apparently like the gore and action scenes, but I'm real unclear on why they qualify them to be brought in as moral examples. Similarly, your D&D scenario has "contrived scenario to make the players fight a newborn creature" written all over it from inside as well as from outside, and the only justification you're offering for it is that you can imagine it.

[Unoriginal]

I'm fairly sure that the Giant's objection being about the out-of-universe decisions, rather than the in-universe details, is a large part of why you don't understand the objection on the basis of the in-universe details.

I understand he's objecting to the out-of-universe decision. I don't understand why he's objecting to the decision "we're stating dragon babies for players to kill" while what the actual decision the authors did was "we're stating dragons since a young age, because dragons are basically adult from day one."

Maybe I should just stop talking about it.

[KorvinStarmast]

If the Alien movies are supposed to actually have anything to say, rather than being about "you like gore and action scenes," I've never heard it. Lots of people apparently like the gore and action scenes, but I'm real unclear on why they qualify them to be brought in as moral examples.

Ripley's point about the aliens not screwing each other over for a percentage (Aliens, second movie) was perhaps lost on you. Roger Ebert gave it 3.5 of 4 stars, and he was no soft touch on movie reviews.

[Kish]

...that doesn't make any sense. They didn't look at a biology textbook and go, "Huh, dragons are adult from day one." They went, "We're going to have dragons who adventurers can fight, and we'll give them stats for just after they're born, because why not?" They didn't even decide "this is viable because dragons are Adult From Day One" then; they just wrote the stats down and came up with the ad hoc justification years later, after Gygax was too dead to be working on D&D anymore. (Gygax did not see the need, ever, for a justification for good characters killing dragon babies or orc babies. He said, publicly, "The old adage about nits making lice applies.")

[Unoriginal]

You expressed yourself as wanting to understand what Rich said.

I understood what he said. It's the reasoning that I don't get.

I already gave it and you complained about my not phrasing it more gently

When did I complain about that? I apologize if I sounded like a jerk.

In any case, I'll drop the subject, and am sincerely sorry if I was out of line.

[goodpeople25]

Honestly that quote always bugged me a bit. I agree on alot of the surrounding issues, but the core statement of "babies" (well I saw it as that) just seems human centric and didn't really add much to the argument (let alone relative the amount of focus. Yeah we're all presumably human and yeah that should be taken into account, but while leaving that perspective and doing it well is difficult I don't see it as impossible or something that shouldn't be done ever.

I don't know, I guess I'm just having trouble finding an angle where the baby/age is really the point besides the human preconceptions of babies.

Sorry if this is hard to follow, I've been thinking on this off and on for for quite a while now. (possibly a year or two now that I think about it, wow) Getting a bit anxious about posting this, defenitly out of my comfort zone here.

[Kish]

Don't worry about it, you weren't; I know my phrasing was...probably excessively blunt.

Honestly that quote always bugged me a bit. I agree on alot of the surrounding issues, but the core statement of "babies" (well I saw it as that) just seems human centric and didn't really add much to the argument (let alone relative the amount of focus. Yeah we're all presumably human and yeah that should be taken into account, but while leaving that perspective and doing it well is difficult I don't see it as impossible or something that shouldn't be done ever.

I don't know, I guess I'm just having trouble finding an angle where the baby/age is really the point besides the human preconceptions of babies.

Sorry if this is hard to follow, I've been thinking on this off and on for for quite a while now. (possibly a year or two now that I think about it, wow) Getting a bit anxious about posting this, defenitly out of my comfort zone here.

It's not just human-centric. There are no "as intelligent as an adult human after birth" species. It might be possible to write one and be interesting. But "it's as intelligent as an adult human and coincidentally, without needing to know anything about it but its species, you know it has the personality of a really vile adult human" does nothing but provide a flimsy justification for treating the species as a kind of nominally-sapient (nominally, because if you can predict that they'll all behave like bandits they aren't actually sapient in any meaningful way) virus.

[KorvinStarmast]

adventurers can fight, and we'll give them stats for just after they're born, because why not?" They didn't even decide "this is viable because dragons are Adult From Day One" then; they just wrote the stats down and came up with the ad hoc justification years later, after Gygax was too dead to be working on D&D anymore. (Gygax did not see the need, ever, for a justification for good characters killing dragon babies or orc babies. He said, publicly, "The old adage about nits making lice applies.")

1. Gygax was pretty blatant about D&D being a human-centric world. I will point out that in the original editions of the game, before AD&D 2e, you could SUBDUE dragons rather than kill them. It was a thing. You could also raise dragons as mounts, but that was left (in terms of detail) to the DMs and their campaigns.
2. Chivington made that line infamous. Sand Creek.

[Kish]

OD&D didn't have dragon age categories at all. It had dragons. One set of stats for each color. Then later boxed sets came out and, to have new dragons for the higher-level adventurers to fight, declared that the Basic Set's "these are dragons" were "Small" dragons, giving new stats for "Large" and "Huge" dragons of each color.

Also, subdued dragons had to be sold. "A subdued dragon must be sold." Why that "must," who would descend to smite adventurers who didn't sell their subdued dragons, and even who they would sell them to for what purpose were things the book didn't go into. It was very much more like a these-are-the-rules-so-they're-the-rules wargame than a roleplaying game--and definitely had nothing to do with what later editions would do with dragon hatchlings.

[GrayGriffin]

Also in 4e they've rewritten things so the only stats for fightable dragons are in the adult range anyways, so I don't get why so many people want to die on this "baby dragons must be fightable" hill in the first place.

[8BitNinja]

Also in 4e they've rewritten things so the only stats for fightable dragons are in the adult range anyways, so I don't get why so many people want to die on this "baby dragons must be fightable" hill in the first place.

Did you hear that, evil? Killing babies is impossible effective immediately

[KorvinStarmast]

OD&D didn't have dragon age categories at all. It had dragons. One set of stats for each color.

Unlike me, you apparently never played OD&D. It was certainly a wide open game. But you are quite simply wrong.

I suggest that you go back and look at Monsters and Treasures, page 11, age, 1-6 from young to Very old. (Roll on a 1d6 ...)

Subdued dragons may be sold NOT must be (page 13). (However, to be honest, one was usually better off selling one so I'll give you a point for good sense on tha one).
Why?
A subdued dragon was a tricky thing, as they'd usually want to try to escape. (RIP, Galthior, Fighting man and aspiring dragon rider...should have had the rest of the party around while you were working on flying lessons. 8^( )

You see, in OD&D, we actually role played. Players and DM's came up with all kinds of things that required imagination. Building a strong hold and all that ... it could be a labor of love (if you survived that long...)

If you subdued a young dragon, you could try and train/tame it, and develop a relationship with it, and even ride it. But that required the player and the GM to use, well, their imaginations and ingenuity. And you could fail, unlike some of these new age snowflake RPGs where people get all emo when a character dies.

A lot of fun, though a very raw and often a lethal game. OD&D. It's not coming back.

[Kish]

I was probably thinking of Basic.

Still, for my part, I'm glad it's not coming back. (And I would be amazed if it made any efforts to justify dragons being "effectively adults when they're born," considering Gygax's general views on the subject of killing evil races.)

[KorvinStarmast]

I was probably thinking of Basic.

I think you were. What you cited looked like it had that stamp on it. (Basic was a much better intro to the game, in that it cleaned up a lot of the loose ends of OD&D. )

Still, for my part, I'm glad it's not coming back. (And I would be amazed if it made any efforts to justify dragons being "effectively adults when they're born," considering Gygax's general views on the subject of killing evil races.)

Yes, the past 30+ years of evolution has been, all said and done, beneficial. I like 5e, it's a nice mix of old, middle, and new.

[Jasdoif]

I don't understand why he's objecting to the decision "we're stating dragon babies for players to kill" while what the actual decision the authors did was "we're stating dragons since a young age, because dragons are basically adult from day one."

Well....Can dragons be "basically adult from day one"? Adulthood is greatly defined by the freedom to make one's own choices and mistakes, opportunities which a newborn simply hasn't had; a newborn dragon having human-adult-level mental faculties may help them more readily learn from the first time they make particular decisions, but can you fairly expect them to have an adult's level of life experience without the corresponding life events first? And if not, is it really fair to treat them as harshly as an adult, if gentler alternatives are available? Given how easy it would be to have dragons to start being adult-level threats after a period of growing to adulthood like nearly every other living species in the game (which as mentioned is what 4th edition D&D did), instead of "they're newborns, except adults every way other than being newly born"....

Which I don't think would be a problem, except for the existence of the "always"-level alignment in the stat block, which is another thing the Giant thinks the game could do without. With your examples, you've got individual creatures acting in a bad way and adventurers posed to stop bad actions. Which makes sense, but do recall that in-universe dragons are typically dealt with on the individual or small group level (there are exceptions). At the design level, declaring an entire species to be evil outside of some exceedingly rare exceptions has harsher implications. (To kind of look at it, consider your dryad example: would it acceptable for the hypothetical group of adventurers to kill any dryad they see, solely because the one dryad tried to strangle them?)

When the two are combined, you have "this baby dragon that just came out of an egg a couple days ago? The rules insist he's evil; even though he's barely had a chance to do anything, evil or otherwise." How far downhill it goes from there is debatable, but hopefully it's apparent why the combination could provoke objections.

[Grim Portent]

The dragon thing always made more sense to me with alignment being based on personality and moral outlook than deeds, and in the context of real reptiles like snakes.

A snake is perfectly capable of hunting and killing within a few hours of hatching/being born, they just don't need to for a week or so because they still have a yolk sac until their first shed, and for most of them there's little if any observed behavioral differences between a week old newborn and a 12 year old adult other than the adult's not eating for big chunks of the year as they look for mates. Lizards are much the same, hunting shortly after birth and generally behaving like tiny adults, as opposed to mammals which spend a long time being useless piles of skin and bone.

If we assume dragons are like most real reptiles and are fully functional shortly after leaving the womb/egg and act like adults in most ways then it's entirely sensible for them to be able to be evil from birth. If a creature is born intelligent and with an instinctive desire to kill and eat people, and the capacity to know it's victims feel pain, then unless it decides of it's own volition that killing people is wrong it's fair to call it evil. If it would kill people given the chance but has simply not gotten to yet it seems sensible to consider it evil, lack of opportunity doesn't mean lack of desire after all.

A similar thing should apply to Lizardfolk and Snakemen of various kinds really, they should be born as tiny adults rather than something analagous to a mammalian baby, with the only real difference being lack of knowledge on the young ones part rather than reduced capacity for thought or less instinctive behaviors. They'd make more sense to me as small carnivores running around catching bugs and rodents in whatever settlement they live in than beings that need spoonfed meat by their parents.

[Kalmegil]

Just thought it needed saying, for no particular reason: I am happy with absolutely everything about OoTS: the ongoing comic, the Kickstarter rewards, and the merchandise (especially the PDFs, even though I have the books). I look forward to each update and love where the story is going.

[Snails]

Don't worry about it, you weren't; I know my phrasing was...probably excessively blunt.

It's not just human-centric. There are no "as intelligent as an adult human after birth" species. It might be possible to write one and be interesting. But "it's as intelligent as an adult human and coincidentally, without needing to know anything about it but its species, you know it has the personality of a really vile adult human" does nothing but provide a flimsy justification for treating the species as a kind of nominally-sapient (nominally, because if you can predict that they'll all behave like bandits they aren't actually sapient in any meaningful way) virus.

IMNSHO Tolkien put orcs in Middle Earth as a nominally-sapient bipedal virus, that we are supposed to automatically dread and cheerfully chop into kibble. Being a rather serious thinker, Tolkien did come to recognize there was a bit of a problem with the orcs as depicted.

D&D in no way fixes this issue, rather it just happily sweeps it under the rug.

So, while I do not disagree with the Giant's point about youthful dragons, I actually think it is not important in the big picture. The bigger challenge is Redcloak's critique: why (or whether) it is okay to populate large swaths of our fantasy world with creatures overtly intended for slaughter.

[goodpeople25]

Don't worry about it, you weren't; I know my phrasing was...probably excessively blunt.

It's not just human-centric. There are no "as intelligent as an adult human after birth" species. It might be possible to write one and be interesting. But "it's as intelligent as an adult human and coincidentally, without needing to know anything about it but its species, you know it has the personality of a really vile adult human" does nothing but provide a flimsy justification for treating the species as a kind of nominally-sapient (nominally, because if you can predict that they'll all behave like bandits they aren't actually sapient in any meaningful way) virus.

Yes I understand that, and that is a key issue but what I think is human centric is bringing our preconceptions of babies into it ag all, I don't think really adds anything. What you raise seems more tied into dealing with sapient races and in born alignments to me. I don't know the baby thing works as a specific sure but to me it dosen't work as a genral and that how it seems portrayed to me.

[Kish]

Again: It's not human-centric. It would be human-centric if there was some species in the real world that had "as intelligent as a human adult" babies. As it is, it's...verisimilitude. Sapient babies don't have fully-formed personalities, particularly consistent-across-a-species ones.

Seanan McGuire's InCryptid books have a pretty good portrayal of an "Always Chaotic Evil" race, I think. Spoilers follow...

Spoiler: cuckoos

Show

Johrlacs, in that world, are powerful telepaths and near-universal sociopaths. This is because while a Johrlac female is pregnant, her fetus spends the eleven months of the pregnancy having its developing brain automatically bathed in its mother's telepathic thoughts: thoughts of sadism and cruelty and selfishness, thoughts of everything else that lives being playthings. Their mothers quickly abandon them after they're born, but their telepathy attracts humans who adopt the "beautiful, adorable human baby," not knowing that by doing so, they've volunteered for a starring role in an extra-gruesome horror movie.

They're not actually a race of sociopaths. Rather, they're exiles from another dimension--a harsh world where the Johrlac dealt with sociopathy among their people by throwing the sociopaths into a pocket dimension, not realizing that the dimension, while their portal to it was one-way, also opened onto Earth. The sociopathy is passed down from mother to child. However...

Occasionally, a Johrlac is a mutant: lacking projective telepathy, or lacking receptive telepathy. Those who lack projective telepathy are recognized as defective and killed by their mothers immediately after birth. Those who have projective telepathy but lack receptive telepathy, however, can get a human family to adopt them using their projective telepathy, and grow up normally. They're not Always Chaotic Evil; they have the same "favors no alignment" quality as humans.

Ready for the punchline?

To my knowledge, no evil Johrlac has ever appeared onstage in the books. Two Johrlacs are major characters. One is a "no receptive telepathy" mutant. The other is her adoptive daughter, a project she took on to see whether, if she adopted a typical sadistic Johrlac baby, she could undo the conditioning she'd received from her biological mother. Both would be good-aligned in D&D terms.

[goodpeople25]

Again: It's not human-centric. It would be human-centric if there was some species in the real world that had "as intelligent as a human adult" babies. As it is, it's...verisimilitude. Sapient babies don't have fully-formed personalities, particularly consistent-across-a-species ones.

Seanan McGuire's InCryptid books have a pretty good portrayal of an "Always Chaotic Evil" race, I think. Spoilers follow...

Spoiler: cuckoos

Show

Johrlacs, in that world, are powerful telepaths and near-universal sociopaths. This is because while a Johrlac female is pregnant, her fetus spends the eleven months of the pregnancy having its developing brain automatically bathed in its mother's telepathic thoughts: thoughts of sadism and cruelty and selfishness, thoughts of everything else that lives being playthings. Their mothers quickly abandon them after they're born, but their telepathy attracts humans who adopt the "beautiful, adorable human baby," not knowing that by doing so, they've volunteered for a starring role in an extra-gruesome horror movie.

They're not actually a race of sociopaths. Rather, they're exiles from another dimension--a harsh world where the Johrlac dealt with sociopathy among their people by throwing the sociopaths into a pocket dimension, not realizing that the dimension, while their portal to it was one-way, also opened onto Earth. The sociopathy is passed down from mother to child. However...

Occasionally, a Johrlac is a mutant: lacking projective telepathy, or lacking receptive telepathy. Those who lack projective telepathy are recognized as defective and killed by their mothers immediately after birth. Those who have projective telepathy but lack receptive telepathy, however, can get a human family to adopt them using their projective telepathy, and grow up normally. They're not Always Chaotic Evil; they have the same "favors no alignment" quality as humans.

Ready for the punchline?

To my knowledge, no evil Johrlac has ever appeared onstage in the books. Two Johrlacs are major characters. One is a "no receptive telepathy" mutant. The other is her adoptive daughter, a project she took on to see whether, if she adopted a typical sadistic Johrlac baby, she could undo the conditioning she'd received from her biological mother. Both would be good-aligned in D&D terms.

My human centric line wasn't really about the capacity for thought part (I'm not just talking about the topic at hand, My apologies for that) yeah there's no baseline for that. It's other points in that series of quotes. (I could just be reading into it too much of course) Helplessness I think is the one that stuck out the most.

[Xyril]

There are no "as intelligent as an adult human after birth" species. It might be possible to write one and be interesting. But "it's as intelligent as an adult human and coincidentally, without needing to know anything about it but its species, you know it has the personality of a really vile adult human" does nothing but provide a flimsy justification for treating the species as a kind of nominally-sapient (nominally, because if you can predict that they'll all behave like bandits they aren't actually sapient in any meaningful way) virus.

In the Stargate TV franchise, the first major antagonist was a species for whom this was more or less true--they're born with the memories possessed by the parents at the time of birth (or conception, I assume, in the case of the father), as well as the memories of previous generations by recursion. It's not anything like soft sci-fi cloning--the newborns don't seem to believe that they actually lived the memories they inherited--but in terms of understanding the world and having tangible skills, they're more intelligent than an adult human.

I don't know if you would consider them an interestingly written example, but the show did make some effort to use them to raise some interesting questions, particularly vis-a-vis free will. Individuals do seem to have free will, and given the nature of the 'evil' race's society, patricide isn't that uncommon, but the inherited memories do play a strong role in influencing them. Inheriting "evil" memories doesn't necessarily mean you're predestined to be evil--one of the aliens rebelled against her heritage and became pretty benevolent. On the other hand, every single one of her descendants shown on the show followed in her footsteps.

[Kish]

Who said what about helplessness? I don't remember that; I'd search the thread, but the search function's currently busted.

[goodpeople25]

Who said what about helplessness? I don't remember that; I'd search the thread, but the search function's currently busted.

I was talking about the qoutes from the giant in my original post. As I said I apologize for not following the current topic at hand perfectly.

[JoeyTheNeko]

unlike bandana, my arms are not tied behind my back.

so I will happily facepalm at andi's unvarnished stupidity. cannot wait for whatever the thing bandana was about to talk about shows up to ruin andi's day.

[factotum]

A snake is perfectly capable of hunting and killing within a few hours of hatching/being born, they just don't need to for a week or so because they still have a yolk sac until their first shed, and for most of them there's little if any observed behavioral differences between a week old newborn and a 12 year old adult other than the adult's not eating for big chunks of the year as they look for mates. Lizards are much the same, hunting shortly after birth and generally behaving like tiny adults, as opposed to mammals which spend a long time being useless piles of skin and bone.

Two things there:

a) Even in D&D, regular snakes and lizards are not considered Evil whatever they do, because they're animals and don't have the intellect to distinguish Good from Evil.

b) Yes, a dragon may well be more capable as a newborn than a typical human child is--but that still doesn't mean they have the life experience to have chosen how they act, any more than a newborn human child.

For what it's worth, I agree with the Giant on "always" alignments. The only creatures who should ever come with a baked-in alignment from "birth" are Outsiders, who generally get formed from the same material as their plane and thus share its alignment. Dragons will generally be raised by their parents to consider themselves the top of the food chain and everything else--including humans, elves etc.--as their main food supply, so they will most likely *become* evil over the course of their lives, but IMHO they should be Neutral at birth.