I recall a line from either the Core Rulebook or the Bestiary that disagreed with that statement.For example, Wraiths are always evil, but they don't have the evil subtype because they are not outsiders.
By that logic, the empyreal lord Ragathiel should be evil (and have the subtype), since he is a fiend and those are always evil.
I'm sorry, but there are canonical exceptions to these "always evil" humanoids. There was a Chaotic Neutral drow in Second Darkness, for example.
I always liked Sarenrae for this kind of stuff. Drop the babies off at one of her temples. The Clerics or Monks or Paladins do their best to raise them, and if it fails, they take the canonically Good path of brutally slaughtering irredeemable Evil. Praise The Sun.
Rofl
The OP did not specify what campaign world this happened in...
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I was told a story recently by a friend of where his brother was playing a paladin where there was a similar 'goblin babies' situation.
The party were about to enter into a discussion about the moral implications when the paladin cried 'EVIL FROM BIRTH!' and charged.
Cue shock and hilarity from all.
I believe many people here are addressing the wrong point, for a couple of reasons.
First, the race of the creature is mere detail. The main issue seems to me to be that the helpless young of intelligent beings were slain out of hand, for the heinous crime of existing. That's evil.
Second, it doesn't matter whether all orcs are evil or not. A PC's morality is determined by what he does, not what other creatures do. If killing helpless, elderly/infirm, or surrendered adults of good alignment is an evil act, it remains an evil act if those helpless, elderly/infirm, or surrendered adults are neutral or evil.
Now, committing a single evil act shouldn't change the PC's alignment, espdecially if he feels conflicted about it, but...yeah, killing kids is evil. It just is.
I do agree with thejeff that the GM set up a no-win situation, but the players could have tried to force the issue. Just because the GM hadn't previously established the existence of an orphanage to reform non-human infants, doesn't mean there wasn't one somewhere; the PCs apparently didn't ask.
Wait, how is having a kid who is evil incarnate a mature story element?
As much as I appreciate JJ being against baby killing, some of the stuff in that post makes no sense to me.
There is plenty of horror fiction dealing with evil incarnate in the shape of a child. The Omen series, The War of the Flowers, Eden Lake, The Children, Children of the Corn, etc. Where protagonists are faced with the choice of letting a child go who is destined to destroy the world, or worse, having to choose between defending themselves with lethal force, or letting a pack of murderous children do them in. You can do complex stories on the theme without being immature. I think that is what JJ was getting at.
Personally I don't think baby orcs or baby goblins fit those story elements, and it would be an evil act in the game I ran.
Besides being an evil alignment, what have the orc toddlers done that deserves death?
Was it required for your survival, or the survival of others?
At best you might argue that it is a neutral act if the adventurer is Orckiller McRevenger, and has some huge personal grudge against all orcs of that particular tribe. Some sort of blood feud that leaves no ally or generation to be spared by either side.
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...it remains an evil act if those helpless, elderly/infirm, or surrendered adults are neutral or evil.
Not necessarily. If you KNOW that they personally have committed murders/pillaging etc, then killing them would be executions, not murders.
Admittedly - you couldn't do so in the modern day - but it's unlikely most settings have a robust justice system.
After all - if you're hunting down evildoers, you aren't stopped from finishing them off if, when they're down to 3hp they hold up their hands "I give up! Take me in officer. I have seen the error of my ways and totally won't try to escape once I get my spell slots back tomorrow." *smirk*.
There is plenty of horror fiction dealing with evil incarnate in the shape of a child. The Omen series, The War of the Flowers, Eden Lake, The Children, Children of the Corn, etc. Where protagonists are faced with the choice of letting a child go who is destined to destroy the world, or worse, having to choose between defending themselves with lethal force, or letting a pack of murderous children do them in. You can do complex stories on the theme without being immature.
I'm not familiar with all of the sources you cited, but for the most part I agree in principle.
As for "a child who is destined to destroy the world", I don't believe in destiny as an immutable thing. This is basically the "kill Hitler as a child" situation. In our timeline, Hitler was shaped by his experiences, made choices, and did what he did. Different experiences could have led to different choices. He wasn't born evil.
Now, in some stories the child isn't truly a child at all, but a demon who is masquerading as a human child. That you can kill with no qualms. I'm not sure how Damien would qualify here. Was he a human child who was molded into the Antichrist by guided experience, or was he a demon soul brought into the world through the mechanism of human birth?
If you are being attacked by a pack of murderous children, you are entitled to use whatever means are necessary to survive, but the key word there is necessary. You can't outrun them? You can't stop at injuring/disabling them? Perhaps you can't, and if you can't, using lethal force in self defense isn't evil.
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Leaving them there defenseless, waiting to be eaten by something else could be seen as evil as killing them. It could be seen as more humane to dispatch them quickly and painlessly than to leave them to die of starvation or other predators.
Short of finding them a new home, one option is to leaving a care-taker alive, maybe just staggered or otherwise able to recover.
It is best to just generally avoid these types of situations.
Leaving them there defenseless, waiting to be eaten by something else could be seen as evil as killing them. It could be seen as more humane to dispatch them quickly and painlessly than to leave them to die of starvation or other predators.
Short of finding them a new home, one option is to leaving a care-taker alive, maybe just staggered or otherwise able to recover.
It is best to just generally avoid these types of situations.
that's why if you get into a fender bender with another vehicle, and then walk up to that vehicle and find two dead adults and a baby, the humane choice is to put the baby down, cause i mean, its the easiest one.
ALSO: whoever said the alignment of the bebes didn't matter is right.
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that's why if you get into a fender bender with another vehicle, and then walk up to that vehicle and find two dead adults and a baby, the humane choice is to put the baby down, cause i mean, its the easiest one.Leaving them there defenseless, waiting to be eaten by something else could be seen as evil as killing them. It could be seen as more humane to dispatch them quickly and painlessly than to leave them to die of starvation or other predators.
Short of finding them a new home, one option is to leaving a care-taker alive, maybe just staggered or otherwise able to recover.
It is best to just generally avoid these types of situations.
A. Hell of a fender bender.
B. What if they're zombie adults with a zombie baby that'll grow up to be a zombie and all zombies are evil? I'm not saying it applies in all settings, but in some settings all orcs are evil full stop. That's not the case in Golarion (even though all undead are because *REASONS*) but it might be in the setting they're playing in.
Which is why setting matters here.
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Yes... because that's totally NOT evil. Lol.Those are valuable commodities.
Sell them to a nearby country with legal slavery.
Really?
A home, food, a place in society, and possibly an education?
There are no Orc orphanages.
You either kill them, sell them, or take responsibility for them yourself.
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I think it hypocritical to play a combat game and not accept spilled blood.
I think it's hypocritical to play a game about racial interactions and not look deeper at the hypocrisy and superiority complex of our ancestors.
Hard and realistic means a hard choice, do you leave toddlers to the caprice of nature or a sword of mercy? Will your social blinders fix the problem or cause that particular goblin to become a larger force of destruction? Will that goblin grow up to throw the torch that burns down grandma's house? Are hard-bitten fighters capable or delicate enough to become babysitters? What would Conan do?
And there lies the point of this game. If you believe that "evil" is passed down by genetics, nature vs. nurture, or that even something is "evil" because it simply likes violence (have you seen the Super Bowl? Were Romans all chaotic evil because they loved their Games? Do you think Michael Bay movies are better than goblin theater because they are *simulated* violence?) and commits infanticide (I'd like to remind you that there's quite a few references in the Bible of mothers eating their babies to survive after a city was razed)... these are things you have to justify.
"I murder strangers on sight, based on race, but I spare the children, so I am a good guy."
I agree with the sentiment. Encourage your players to talk to the Orcs first. Subvert their expectations.
This was a huge discussion before it was a discussion here, relating to the ROTRL initial scenario where goblin babies are found as part of the crawl.
Darn, now i'm going forward knowing we have to kill babies.
Moral issues will be coming for the party.
You don't HAVE to kill the babies is what we saying, son.
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For me, it's an evil act. But the PC argued the Bestiary says orcs are bad people. Also I remembered reading drow could only by Evil, so I supposed the same happended with orcs.
Are ther examples of non-Evil orcs in Golarion? All I've seen are evil, AFAIK.
hmmm I didn't know that barbarians had access to the giant meta books that underpin the cosmic structure of his universe, that is a very hooked up barbarian.
On a less facetious note no it's evil. If I can exchange the unimportant word orc with say human, elf, or black and it is repugnant than it's evil. Now what to do with those kids could be hard, potentially harder than the actual act of killing the whole orc camp (who will take in these orcs and will they treat them right?) but assuming your party is full of heroes of the not evil persuasion than that is part of the job! Hell you could have a whole quest in and of itself trying to figure out what to do with these little lives and could lead to some interesting growth for all these erstwhile killers. And if a quest of proof of moral alignment isn't something you want to explore completely (we all have stories we might want to focus on and sometimes this particular quest might not be what you as the gm or most of your party want to focus on) you can always present the option for them to give them to someone they can trust like a good church they are friends with, a friendly orphanage, or a family they are particularly close with.
So by that logic killing any intelligent humanoids an evil act and every character should be doing nonlethal damage against them lest they shift on the alignment table?
Not really. If someone is trying to kill you, I doubt you can be bothered to deliver nonlethal rather than fight for your life. I think that's how Good works.
What I'm saying is that "there's an orc village, let's raid it!" makes Evil/Good nothing more than Horde/Alliance, since you are not even bothering to have a moral high ground.
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Killing babies/children is Evil. Killing noncombatants who haven't committed any crimes is Evil. Killing noncombatants who've committed horrible crimes is called 'execution' and is not Evil, but requires evidence of what they've done (though that's often not hard to come by in, say, an Orc camp in Pathfinder).
...I found the post I was thinking of. Take from it what you want.
** spoiler omitted **
Thanks for posting that, I was worried I was gonna have to go find it...
I recall a line from either the Core Rulebook or the Bestiary that disagreed with that statement.For example, Wraiths are always evil, but they don't have the evil subtype because they are not outsiders.By that logic, the empyreal lord Ragathiel should be evil (and have the subtype), since he is a fiend and those are always evil.
I'm sorry, but there are canonical exceptions to these "always evil" humanoids. There was a Chaotic Neutral drow in Second Darkness, for example.
For the record, even Fiends can canonically redeem themselves (and in doing so, lose the Evil subtype). So, Ragathiel presumably did that.
No Alignments are actually absolute in Golarion with the exception of those of creatures with Int 2 or less (and the Bestiary generally supports that being true outside Golarion as well).
"I murder strangers on sight, based on race, but I spare the children, so I am a good guy."
This would indeed, not make you a good guy. But who says they're killing every Orc they meet? I don't think anyone's suggested that...
You don't get to go around attacking people based on race and remain Good. Now, if you walk up in a friendly fashion and are attacked, or are responding to them raiding human villages repeatedly, that's a whole different thing.
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Thing is, there is good chance that there is no "good church, or friendly orphanage" that would take them in.
Orcs are naturally strong, dim, and their culture promotes violence.
So, selling them into slavery, or raising them yourself, are usually the only options, outside of mercy killing them.
Giving them to an Orc tribe, means they will grow up, and kill innocents, and if you meet them again, you will likely have to kill them.
You don't HAVE to kill the babies is what we saying, son.
My char would definitely be hesitant, but i'm sure the rest will think them weed to be ripped away. Chances of those babies surviving are slim :/
That's all kinds of messed up.
I know, i hope i'm wrong. I'd think it'd be a blast raising a goblin baby, though being a local from Sandpoint, it'd be a mixed feeling.
But seriously, though we are G aligned, i think it'll go somewhere along the lines of: .."but goblins are evil wicked creatures, they will attack Sandpoint when they come of age. We could leave them here, but we'd leave a new tribe able for future raids".