“Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies. The old adage about nits making lice applies. Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before they can backslide.
[…]
Chivington might have been quoted as saying “nits make lice,” but he is certainly not the first one to make such an observation as it is an observable fact. If you have read the account of wooden Leg, a warrior of the Cheyenne tribe that fought against Custer et al., he dispassionately noted killing an enemy squaw for the reason in question.”
Love to use historical genocidal racism as a basis for a morality system! Its apolitical though, you’re not allowed to have reservations about an admitted racist representing certain peoples as inherently evil and worthy of extermination. That’s not even getting into DnD portrayals of “darkest Africa” and “the mysterious Orient”
Yeah, that’s about what I expected. And the Forgotten Realms, which Baldur’s Gate takes place in, is decades old and built on these same racist foundations. And a lot of it gets unquestioned. Goblins are still ontologically evil in the game and it’s always OK to kill them, and the concept of “surrender” does not exist. The Orientalist shit is all canon to the world, but they’re loathe to retcon it so instead they just ignore it. Meanwhile D&D as a system took forever to realize that maybe races shouldn’t be evil by their very nature but then they proceed to create fantasy British people enslaving monkey people in the year of Juche 111.
Gygax pill me please. Didn’t he want you to only be able to play as humans? What other wonderful chauvinisms did he have?
Gygax on alignment:
“Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies. The old adage about nits making lice applies. Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before they can backslide.
[…]
Chivington might have been quoted as saying “nits make lice,” but he is certainly not the first one to make such an observation as it is an observable fact. If you have read the account of wooden Leg, a warrior of the Cheyenne tribe that fought against Custer et al., he dispassionately noted killing an enemy squaw for the reason in question.”
Love to use historical genocidal racism as a basis for a morality system! Its apolitical though, you’re not allowed to have reservations about an admitted racist representing certain peoples as inherently evil and worthy of extermination. That’s not even getting into DnD portrayals of “darkest Africa” and “the mysterious Orient”
Yeah, that’s about what I expected. And the Forgotten Realms, which Baldur’s Gate takes place in, is decades old and built on these same racist foundations. And a lot of it gets unquestioned. Goblins are still ontologically evil in the game and it’s always OK to kill them, and the concept of “surrender” does not exist. The Orientalist shit is all canon to the world, but they’re loathe to retcon it so instead they just ignore it. Meanwhile D&D as a system took forever to realize that maybe races shouldn’t be evil by their very nature but then they proceed to create fantasy British people enslaving monkey people in the year of Juche 111.
I haven’t really been following DND releases in recent years, what’s this referring to?
One of the 5e Spelljammer books IIRC. This article goes over it pretty well.
Damn, pretty crazy that they went backwards with the Hazodee lore, especially considering how old the original Spelljammer is.