Good is not Stupid: The Orc Baby Dilemma

Spoony calls this the “Prisoner Dilemma,” the idea that the adventurers encounter an orc village, kill the warriors, and then are left with the problem of whether or not to kill orc women, children, and babies. The orcs fail their morale check and surrender. What should the players do? [By the way, there is a standard philosophical dilemma called The Prisoner’s Dilemma — it doesn’t apply here]

This happens a lot in my game. I don’t have alignments in my system, so it is up to the players to decide what to do, but typically they allow the women and children to flee if they face no current threat. If they are demonic or vampiric babies, they will typically be killed.

This assumes, of course, that the party has slaughtered all the defenders already. More often, there is an escalation as the combat continues, with misunderstandings and violence increasing during the encounter. See A Dark Day for Ramsey for an example of that. Varna was being served by both a demon and a fire elemental, and the villagers were terrified by both and responded by firing arrows at Varna in an attempt to drive him away. Varna was never one for a soft answer, and he also overestimated his control over his spirits. He tried to use a Jaldak as a policeman, but the Jaldak began eating people and the incident continued to escalate from there. Now there’s a whole country (and perhaps an empire) that seek justice against the party.  Thank goodness it never got down to women and children.

In a game with alignments, it also comes to the relative threat or evil of the monster in question. As I’ve said before, good is not stupid and there is good evidence that Gygax and others would agree. But good players are often merciful, especially if they are in a campaign where they are powerful and good usually wins. It is like Maslowe’s hierarchy of needs. If we don’t need to kill them, and we can easily defeat them if they try it again, then we don’t have to kill them. If they are dangerous monsters that will kill others if we don’t stop them now, then they should die. And it is perfectly ok to do so in that question, and even Lawful Goods can do that.

Unless, of course, one believes that Lawful Good means Lawful Stupid. There’s 32 pages of people arguing about this at enworld.org

An interesting corollary on this is that Lawful societies set limits on the behavior of their members. Lawful Good and Lawful Neutral may honor the restrictions advocated by their Lawful Evil enemies. If all have claimed that killing babies is wrong (which is likely), then none of them will do it without alignment shock, including Lawful Evil characters.