Kill-On-Sight Enemies

[Wiseman]

This has been bothering me for a while. Why is this a thing? Or more accurately, why do we need to even have kill-on-sight races? Is it just laziness? Because it's not that hard to simply have your orcs or whatever doing something evil, threatening innocent lives and so forth. Is it that hard to do?

[Grek]

Why is this in this forum?

[hyzmarca]

This has been bothering me for a while. Why is this a thing? Or more accurately, why do we need to even have kill-on-sight races? Is it just laziness? Because it's not that hard to simply have your orcs or whatever doing something evil, threatening innocent lives and so forth. Is it that hard to do?

If we didn't kill them, then they'd get uppity and start trying to eat at our lunch counters and send their children to our schools.

[maglag]

This has been bothering me for a while. Why is this a thing? Or more accurately, why do we need to even have kill-on-sight races? Is it just laziness? Because it's not that hard to simply have your orcs or whatever doing something evil, threatening innocent lives and so forth. Is it that hard to do?

Actually it is. If there are innocent people nearby being attacked by the psycho monsters and the party is expected to save them then the PCs cannot simply drop a cloudkill or spend turns buffing or just teleport around. Then they need to escort the innocents to safety.

An escapist fantasy needs worthy enemies to murderize no questions asked without worries such as collateral damage.

[Kaelik]

This has been bothering me for a while. Why is this a thing? Or more accurately, why do we need to even have kill-on-sight races? Is it just laziness? Because it's not that hard to simply have your orcs or whatever doing something evil, threatening innocent lives and so forth. Is it that hard to do?

So you mean specifically kill on sight races or kill on sight enemies? Personally I don't want to harass my players with a guilt trip when they kill the bandits before the bandits murder one of them. If you reasonably expect enemies to be a threat, you should damn well be fine killing them without having a chat about it first. So if you seem armed humans set up in an ambush on the trail, or reveling in the loot from a caravan, you can just murder them. And if there are humans wearing the uniform of the enemy country, then you can just kill them.

As for evil races... I don't know, obviously first you have to remove all the outsiders, since like, all of them are basically defined by their opposition to certain people no matter what, so they will be "kill on sight" for someone.

Then if you have any racial empires at all, such as the dwarvish empire, or the orcish empire, then anyone at war with them is likely going to turn that race into a kill on sight race for them.

But if you remove the concept of Orc Tribes or Dwarven Kingdoms from your world, in addition to outsiders, then you won't have any kill on sight races.

Well, except intelligent Aberrations which are usually defined based on their human eating tendencies.

[fbmf]

Why is this in this forum?

Moved to IMHO. ( Forgot to note earlier this a few hours ago when I did it.)
[/The Great Fence Builder Speaks]

[OgreBattle]

This has been bothering me for a while. Why is this a thing? Or more accurately, why do we need to even have kill-on-sight races? Is it just laziness? Because it's not that hard to simply have your orcs or whatever doing something evil, threatening innocent lives and so forth. Is it that hard to do?

Sometimes you just want to kill some bad dudes in the few hours a week you have to game with people who are (hopefully) your friends.

In a previous thread that went on for 9 pages, we talk about enemies that are OK to kill and the morality of even writing such a thing:
http://www.tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=55 ... sc&start=0

Ancient History then brings up the vegan friendly choice of orcwort

[FatR]

(1)The scope of threat. People, for some reasons, are unimpressed with antagonists that just massacre half or more of the populations (entire populations save for those who managed to run when their leader is pissed off), destroy the environment so badly that breadbasket of the world turns into impoverished desert lands, or genocide everyone who is not them, chasing survivors into unhospitable lands. They want existential threats to the humanity. That's probably the main reason why one fantasy writer after another, no matter how subsersive they believe themselves to be, adds races whose whole schtick is massacring humans on sight (and you're really lucky if they won't rape you first or turn you into a zombie afterwards), and who therefore must be killed on sight.

(2)The nature of PCs' activities specifically in DnD. As I said before, as long as an average adventure is a massive bloodbath, antagonists have to be irreedeemable and impossible to reconcile with, or at least that is the simplest way to stop players doubt their actions. (Though as of recently I started questioning if I'm exceptional as a player in needing a reason to kill and loot in the game, instead of a persistent reason to restrict those activities. It seems that whenever a GM indicates that doing terrible things won't be punished for out-of-game reasons, most players leap at the chance.) And automatons or mere predators have a limilted scope of usefulness as antagonists.

(3)And, unfortunately, verissimilitude. Historically the three main ways of interaction between groups of people with significantly different customs and ways of life were assimilation, expulsion and extermination, and any group resistant to assimiliation was at some point subjected to the latter two. When your different group is a separate species, it is naturally and obviously unassimilable (even if their physiological and psychological makeup is sufficiently compatible to make living in the same settlement as humans even possible). Like, you don't even want goblin women if you crush goblins in battle, and vice versa. Therefore the probability of any given war being waged solely to cleanse the territory from the competing species increases greatly, and over time this is bound to build up implacable inter-species enmity, where neither side expects or grants quarter. And in DnDland specifically for each enlightened high-level despot who engineers condition under which multiple species can coexist with his high-level powers there is a high-level asshole, who preaches race war and strong crushing the weak, or even deliberately engineers sapient species to be hostile, aggressive and destructive.

[Zaranthan]

I don't think a creature that forms civilization being kill on sight has a place in 2016. The MM has plenty of actual monsters that have no interest in letting you live once they lay eyes on you, and lots of them are intelligent and even human-like, so you can have all the tactical variety you want.

If you have a race that builds villages, you need an excuse for any members of it you want to be red dots. If they're an armed warband, fine, there's no need to dither about offering quarter. But if they're civilians leading pack mules, they're people and you need to talk to them if you want to keep pretending you're not the bad guys.

[Kaelik]

I don't think a creature that forms civilization being kill on sight has a place in 2016. The MM has plenty of actual monsters that have no interest in letting you live once they lay eyes on you, and lots of them are intelligent and even human-like, so you can have all the tactical variety you want.

Mind Flayers, Demons, Devils, and Inevitables all have civilizations.

If they are going to kill you on sight, then it's time to admit that civilization or no, you are probably attacking first and asking questions later.

[hyzmarca]

I don't think a creature that forms civilization being kill on sight has a place in 2016. The MM has plenty of actual monsters that have no interest in letting you live once they lay eyes on you, and lots of them are intelligent and even human-like, so you can have all the tactical variety you want.

Mind Flayers, Demons, Devils, and Inevitables all have civilizations.

If they are going to kill you on sight, then it's time to admit that civilization or no, you are probably attacking first and asking questions later.

None of those kill you on sight.

Mind Flayers will keep you around for a snack.
Demons and Devils will make deals with you.
Inevitables will ignore you unless you commit one of their pet peeves.

[virgil]

I don't think a creature that forms civilization being kill on sight has a place in 2016.

If we can use Nazis & Cybermen for an introspective-free body count, we can have designated monsters be just as kill-on-sight while retaining the trappings of civilization.

[Kaelik]

Mind Flayers will keep you around for a snack.

Eating you later after incapacitating you now is not noticeably different from killing you now, and also, there are plenty of times that they will just eat you now.

Demons and Devils will make deals with you.

Or kill you on sight without talking to you at all.

Inevitables will ignore you unless you commit one of their pet peeves.

In which case, they kill you on sight. If the PCs run into an inevitable on the material plane, chances are very good that they did so because that inevitable is a specific kill squad out to murder them personally for committing a pet peeve.

[hyzmarca]

I don't think a creature that forms civilization being kill on sight has a place in 2016.

If we can use Nazis & Cybermen for an introspective-free body count, we can have designated monsters be just as kill-on-sight while retaining the trappings of civilization.

Why can't we just be Daleks and have everything for an introspective-free body count?

[Mechalich]

(3)And, unfortunately, verissimilitude. Historically the three main ways of interaction between groups of people with significantly different customs and ways of life were assimilation, expulsion and extermination, and any group resistant to assimiliation was at some point subjected to the latter two. When your different group is a separate species, it is naturally and obviously unassimilable (even if their physiological and psychological makeup is sufficiently compatible to make living in the same settlement as humans even possible). Like, you don't even want goblin women if you crush goblins in battle, and vice versa. Therefore the probability of any given war being waged solely to cleanse the territory from the competing species increases greatly, and over time this is bound to build up implacable inter-species enmity, where neither side expects or grants quarter. And in DnDland specifically for each enlightened high-level despot who engineers condition under which multiple species can coexist with his high-level powers there is a high-level asshole, who preaches race war and strong crushing the weak, or even deliberately engineers sapient species to be hostile, aggressive and destructive.

To add to this, I would say the nature of fantasy combat and warfare makes kill on sight easier to accomplish. Historically it was fairy easy for elites who got their shit together to raise an army, maraud beyond the borders, and murder everyone from ethnic group B that they didn't like. But, they could never find them all, or in many cases even most of them. If your desperate tribe pulled up sticks and retreated into marginal mountain valleys sending troops to root you out suddenly became impossibly expensive and extremely difficult, meaning most tyrants gave up sooner or later. In fantasy, not so much.

Fantasy warfare is astonishingly lethal and also astonishingly cheap at the same time. A single high-level spellcaster can run a campaign of implacable genocide out of their basement. So the economic incentives of genocidal warfare are actually greater in the fantasy context.

[Pixels]

If you have irredeemable villains and unreasoning beasts as antagonists, then kill on sight is the only option. For example, trying to talk with Horrors is a bad idea in Earthdawn. They are incarnations of suffering, evil, and destruction; their existence is antithetical to Namegivers'. Anything they offer is tainted, even if it isn't immediately obvious how. You can deal with them, but you shouldn't.

[Josh_Kablack]

Well D&D combat mechanics have never handled non lethal options terribly well, and it's whole lot easier to write flavor text that justifies kill-on-sight than it is to patch the grappling and restraining rules or to tweak fleeing and pursuit rules that don't result in auto-win for one side, or to come up with a workable social skills system.......

[Stahlseele]

Are they infectious without easy cheap available remedy? KOS
Are they viewing you as a food/ressource that endangers your Freedom/life? KOS
Are you a KOS for them and they are actually a threat to you? KOS
Doesn't matter WHO they are. If any of these are true, that means even your neighbour is a KOS enemy.

[Wiseman]

I'm sorry. Maybe I should have been more clear. My issue is treating creatures like Orcs or Gnolls or Goblins as irredeemably evil and kill on sight.

[Stahlseele]

Why?
If the universe says they are, then they are.
If the universe says that the sun is green, you accept that as well don't you?
Shadowrun Orks and Goblins are not evil for example.
Warhammer 40K Orks . . are not evil but certainly KOS. Because their idea of right and just and proper and fun is 99,9% fighting to the death. Well, actually it's 100% that, the 0,01% just tries to milk you a bit and have some additional fun before they get to the crumping.

[hyzmarca]

(3)And, unfortunately, verissimilitude. Historically the three main ways of interaction between groups of people with significantly different customs and ways of life were assimilation, expulsion and extermination, and any group resistant to assimiliation was at some point subjected to the latter two. When your different group is a separate species, it is naturally and obviously unassimilable (even if their physiological and psychological makeup is sufficiently compatible to make living in the same settlement as humans even possible). Like, you don't even want goblin women if you crush goblins in battle, and vice versa. Therefore the probability of any given war being waged solely to cleanse the territory from the competing species increases greatly, and over time this is bound to build up implacable inter-species enmity, where neither side expects or grants quarter. And in DnDland specifically for each enlightened high-level despot who engineers condition under which multiple species can coexist with his high-level powers there is a high-level asshole, who preaches race war and strong crushing the weak, or even deliberately engineers sapient species to be hostile, aggressive and destructive.

To add to this, I would say the nature of fantasy combat and warfare makes kill on sight easier to accomplish. Historically it was fairy easy for elites who got their shit together to raise an army, maraud beyond the borders, and murder everyone from ethnic group B that they didn't like. But, they could never find them all, or in many cases even most of them. If your desperate tribe pulled up sticks and retreated into marginal mountain valleys sending troops to root you out suddenly became impossibly expensive and extremely difficult, meaning most tyrants gave up sooner or later. In fantasy, not so much.

Fantasy warfare is astonishingly lethal and also astonishingly cheap at the same time. A single high-level spellcaster can run a campaign of implacable genocide out of their basement. So the economic incentives of genocidal warfare are actually greater in the fantasy context.

I have to disagree.

If a dispute over land usage rights devolves into high-level magic genocide, then the result won't be the extermination of a single race, it will be the extermination of all races involved, and possibly some that aren't involved.

Because orcs have high-level spellcasters, too. The end result is like that episode of Star Trek with the guy who is white on the left and black on the right, and the other guy who is black on the left and white on the right and they try to kill each other even though they're the last of their kind, because they're just that racist.

Maybe in a few centuries they'll both be embarrassed over the whole thing. In the meantime all life on their planet has been exterminated due to the escalation of their race war into open magical warfare.

High level spellcasters are MAD. They make race wars and kill on sight policies less likely. Because if a level 20 wizard cares enough about the life of a dirt farmer (which he doesn't, but hypothetically) to fight a genocidal race war over it, then he cares enough to restrain himself from doing so.

[tussock]

Used to be a thing that the Orc gods made all the Orcs born in that they hated Elves, due to an origin conflict between the chief Orc god and chief Elf god.

So if you had an Elf in the party, and you ran into Orcs, the regular table of "what happens now" was replaced with "the orcs immediately attack to kill you all".

Goblins similarly hated Dwarves (the Dwarf gods drove the Goblin gods into the deeps), Kobolds hated Gnomes (the Gnome god tricked the Kobold god out of owning the world), there was a big table of it and everything. Given that there was almost always an Elf and a Dwarf in the party, because they were better than you, it meant that Orcs and Goblins would always attack the PCs.

So what do you do about an identifiable type of monster that always tries to murder your whole party every time they see you? That's right, you murder them first.

--

But now days, we need Orcs to be bad guys in some specific way, because they're complex and stuff, which given the typical population demographics probably means there's dozens of actively evil human groups for every such monster group, and you are being horribly racist to just go after the monsters.

And really, fighting a variety of monsters and even humanoids with different pets is just more interesting that fighting the 90% humans you should be fighting in a "not lazy or racist" world.

--

So my choice is to have the monsters be monsters. Orcs included. The value of having them as another forehead alien for people to angst over is vastly less than having manticore-riding cliff-dwelling war-spawn who do horrific night raids to please their evil gods, and then withdraw into caves that are really hard for the militia to deal with.

They're also a convenient metaphor for the problems of the unemployed and grimdark soldiery in a post-apocalyptic (post-war, post-plague, post-monster, whatever) medieval setting, without having to deal with anachronistic concepts of healthcare.

[Kaelik]

I'm sorry. Maybe I should have been more clear. My issue is treating creatures like Orcs or Gnolls or Goblins as irredeemably evil and kill on sight.

Well then... yeah, just don't make Orcs and Gnolls and Goblins irredeemably evil.

They will still often be kill on sight, because again, if the Orc Tribes are going to kill you, then you kill the Orc Tribe Warriors first, and then you are faced with a terrible ethical decision that amounts to:

a) Kill the Innocent Children.
b) Let them grow up to be monsters like their parents.
c) Let them starve to death because you killed everyone who could raise them.
d) Abduct them into your society, and also they will probably be wards of the state, and still disadvantaged, and it feels a lot like slavery, and there will still be a bunch of 10 year olds who border the gap between hatred of you and your nation, and never fully participating, but still too young for you to ever feel okay killing them.

[OgreBattle]

You can also have a setting where lives aren't very valuable and killing is socially acceptable, like Mad Max and Dorohedoro

[FatR]

High level spellcasters are MAD.

No. That's just completely factually untrue. Indeed, the nature of high level spellcaster powers in any edition of DnD proper incentivizes striking at any enemy high-level enough to conceivably be a problem to you as soon as you discover him, because offense generally oustrips defense (as with MAD) and collateral damage from the fight itself is very small (totally not like MAD).

The idea of "balance of power" was a really poor explanation why Elminster and his fuck toys do not kill a major bad guy per day; and repurposing this explanation does not make it better.