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Have the women and kids / non combatants simply not be there. Maybe the humanoids present are an advance force, securing the ruins before the rest of the tribe arrive. Maybe they are a breakaway group. Maybe a disease or famine has run through their settlement and all the weaker (non combatant) members have succumbed. Maybe this group is so bad ass that every single tribe member is armed and dangerous. Kids grow up fast or not at all.
You CAN say that for your game the non-combatants aren't "innocents" like Human/elf/dwarf/halfling women and children are. You can decide that for your game they are spawn, born evil, inhuman, and so it is morally OK to exterminate them just as you'd exterminate rats or giant spiders, or a demon.
On the other hand, if you want to say that ARE "innocents", then let the PCs save them just like as if they were halfling women and children enslaved by the evil combatants, and have the women thank the PCs or freeing them from the cruel domination, and they look forward to raising their children in peace someplace where they won't cause any trouble.
Pick either, if you don't want to get bogged down with moral dillemmas, just pick one and tell the players that's how the world is here, and be done with it.
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Tell your players upfront whether or not you have your "monster" races be Always Chaotic Evil all the way to the children with no hope of change. Many players really do not enjoy having genocide and baby-killing forced on their characters as a "proper" course of action, and having it sprung on them just leads to misery.
Taking Asphesteros' two examples for example, I wouldn't want to play in the first one at all. The second though, I would actually enjoy being in.
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If the character base is neutral, then just leave them to fend for themselves. Orc females can be just as ferocious as their male counterparts. They can plunder and provide for their young as easily as males. Same with Kobolds and Goblins.
So what do you do if you end up fighting Female Orcs that are plundering villages because they have to feed their babies/young?
If you kill the female Orcs, the poor babies die of hunger... so what do you do?
...Or what if they female orcs are just normal humans driven to raid and plunder to feed their families?
My mind hurts...
the valiant heros slay the horde of (goblin/kobold/orc/whatever) bad guys and now are stuck with the tribes' women and children... what do you do?
Grab 100' of chain and find a deep well?
the valiant heros slay the horde of (goblin/kobold/orc/whatever) bad guys and now are stuck with the tribes' women and children... what do you do?
If the PCs are good? Either nothing or, if these are human lands, find a way to resettle them elsewhere. Finding a way to arrange for a surrender can also help, if there's even 1% chance that the tribe will honor if it has a choice.
Killing people who haven't raised a hand against you and can't defend themselves is not something a good character should do, especially as goblins, orks and the like aren't necessarily evil.
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If the party has a cleric, have him convert them. Gotta get some mileage out of that diplomacy class skill, after all, do some proselytizing / evangelizing.
Otherwise, kill them all, drive them off, recruit them to work the mines, haul them away to sell into slavery, cook and eat them, send them ahead of you to check for traps, whatever suits your fancy.
Just don't turn them into undead, 'cause that's evil.
the valiant heros slay the horde of (goblin/kobold/orc/whatever) bad guys and now are stuck with the tribes' women and children... what do you do?
I'm working on this in an adventure I'm doing now. I need some type of fix here. Maybe a monster like a goblin that doesn't have non-combatants? does anyone know one?
There is no such thing as evil non-combatants.
If they were neutral non-combatants, I could see leeway, but evil... no. Evil is plague that seeps through the drainer of justice. One must erradicate it at its core or it will just come back like weeds of the foulest plants. Don't worry, they will thank you for saving them from being capable of evil acts.Remember, every evil living creature empowers evil gods by worship, killing them means less evil god power. So that is a good act.
Aren't the females and children of most of these always evil races usually just as vicious as the males? I mean for Kobolds it hardly makes a difference which gender you have, I don't see why female gnolls, goblins and orcs wouldnt have just as much murder on their minds as the males.
Well okay the children might say a little too much, but from what i've heard of goblin parenting, those little ones should be determined to kill pretty early on. If not, they should be brought somewhere where they could be actually raised to be non-evil.
While this isn't intended to be the be all of the discussion, I remember reading a similar discussion on one of the websites that had archived some of Gary Gygax's q&a sessions. He indicated that it would be the moral imperative of (and I believe he was speaking to a question about a LG paladin) the PCs to kill all the creatures as they were evil and could not be redeemed as they were, in their very nature, evil and would later grow up to be killers of innocents. I think some of the discussion also went on to delineate the choice of being good/evil we have and the embodiment of evil that creatures in the D&D world are?
You might want to check out the movie _Pandorum_ which has an interesting example of "innocent" children of man-eating creatures and what they might be capable of doing.
Use that moral hesitation to your storytelling advantage. Have the women and children hiding in the last area visited by the invading heroes and have a lone kobold/goblinoid witch sacrificing them as the heroes enter. "Better they die by my hand than yours Longshanks! With their blood I curse you!" You get the idea. Let that image fester in their minds and then develop the nature (if any) of the curse placed upon them for their crimes against the clan. The players imagination will do most of the work for you.
The whole idea that female kobolds (et cetera) are noncombatants is sexist. It's just as unacceptable as the ageist attitudes against the young and old. Give combat stats to everything. Apply simple templates where applicable (such as the young template for the children). Make sure that kobold mothers have the ferocity extraordinary ability that triggers when their hatchlings are attacked.
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Make sure your players know if killing evil creatures who are innocent is an evil act. Then let them figure it out. The only reason they shouldn't know is if they've been living under a rock.
Last I checked, most cultural eradication had a religious rationalization. Let's review what the paladin's concept is based on?
You need to ask yourself: What kind of world do I want?
In one, you have the ol' fashioned alignments. Creatures are always evil and are born that way. Baby goblins will try to choke you if you give me a bottle of milk. The world is black and white. There are good and evil....err 9 alignments and that's that. Neutral you can let slide if they behave themselves but evil MUST be destroyed no matter how cute it is.
In the second, you have a more sophisticated and modern view. There is no good or evil, just conflicting cultural norms. Evil is a relative term. Maybe they are just misunderstand and the "heroes" are the villains to them? What you have to to do is design a "skill challenge" or role-playing type of adventure where the PCs bring the human and goblin villages together to come to a mutual understanding and respect of each other.
The third way is a mixture of the two. Evil is evil and good is good, but anything or anybody can become good or evil. In this view, ideas, not beings, are inherently good or evil. Evil alignments mean they believe in the evil ideals. A goblin child chooses to follow good or evil as he matures, just like a human child does. It has elements of both of the two approaches above. To me, this is the unofficial current viewpoint in the Pathfinder/D&D games now. In this case, you want to "re-educate" the goblins so they adopt the human culture, or at least the parts of it that are less willing to go raiding.
James Jacobs and Jason Bulmahn are not going to come around to your house and take away your Pathfinder books if you don’t include 35% non combatants.
We can't know that.
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The simplest answer is this; Okay so the Goblins, or whatever, presumably are causing problems in the local area; their killing local crops, occasionally killing local farmers, raiding caravans, carrying off the occasional kid as a slave or whatever; simply put this can not be allowed to stand.
Well you have a few options, but i think the simplest one is to have the 'Goblin' tribe act naturally and organically. They resist the intruders, fight them, but as it becomes apparent they are getting slaughtered they retreat to regroup, or retreat entirely. One thing I've noticed very often that people seem to do is make 'monsters' all zombie-like in their dedication to killing. In truth most beings will prefer to live, and large portions of a goblin tribe are going to be the same. Hell, an easy scene is to have the PC's fighting the Goblins, till one Goblin stabs another in the back and tries to get the tribe to follow him in getting the hell out of there; there are worse ways to become Tribal Chieftain.
Good PC's shouldn't commit genocide in general, and in general, shouldn't need to. The problem is the goblin tribe attacking locals and so forth; resolve that problem and 'killing every last one of them' is either psychotic, or endemic of 'video-game' type thought.
Some-one else pointed out that granting XP not for killing the non-combatants, but for ensuring they live, or leave the area or whatever, is also effective. Unless that is the type of game you want, success and reward should not always be a measure fo the number of bodies in your wake.
Satirical or not, rape jokes are not funny and will not be tolerated.
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