Morality and Murderhobos

Look, I'm not saying anything remotely similar to "all player character actions are absolved" because monsters are thieves. Nor am I saying anything about whether playing murderhobos is good or bad. What I'm saying is that if you're getting morally squeamish about "breaking into people's homes, murdering them, and stealing their possessions," it's because you've set up a situation where PC actions are almost certainly immoral. You created a monster, not the game.

Example 1: Aberrant Hive Mind says:

What I'm getting at is what if the goblins invaded because they were simply taking what they felt were rightfully theirs? It happens constantly in the real world, and it is a cyclical human sort of thing to lay claim to something and push morality aside to take it back. This is essentially the major flaw in your argument.

No, that's not a flaw in my argument. It's an example of my argument. If you choose to give goblins a history and suggest that they are only "fighting back", you are adding something to the game. You are interpreting fantasy elements in such a way that it makes the actions of the goblins somewhat justifiable. That's fine, if that's what you want; but you can't then go on to claim that the game is morally flawed because of the way you interpreted goblins. It was your choice, all along.

Similarly, Richard makes a comment that:

...you seem to be saying that the violence in the game is justified because you're only taking stuff from thieves, but this line of reasoning was used against native Americans in the 19th century

No, not at all. Laying aside whether this line of reasoning was ever actually used against Native Americans, what I'm saying is that goblins aren't anything like Native Americans, or any other cultural group on the losing side in a historical conflict, unless you choose to make them similar. Stories of goblins go back centuries, if not millennia, before Europeans ever saw a Native American. Goblins were never perceived as being a species or human-like culture until at least the 19th century, when fantasy writers started to portray them as if they were a weird variety of human. There were actually more like a type of demon. And no, I don't mean they were called "demons" to dehumanize them; they were never, ever human, or even animal. That's not propaganda thought up to smear goblins; they weren't real, they were nightmares.

You can make goblinoids analogous to humans, if that's what you want. But, as I once put it in another argument, "You break it, you bought it." You own any changes you make to the game, and you are responsible for any implications that arise from those changes. You own any encounter notes that you write up or decide to use in the game, and you are responsible for the implications of saying something like "The goblins have a chest full of silver they've received in trade for gems they've been mining peacefully."