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A-EftP - Is it wrong to smash the enemy Slith eggs?


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It's a bit of a moral dilemma: either commit an atrocity against the Sliths (kill a bunch of innocent babies), or commit an atrocity against Avernum (let those babies grow up into an army to attack your home).


Upon reflection, does anyone else think it's odd that we refer to slith eggs as "babies?" I don't want to turn this into a debate over the morality of abortion, but it does seem odd that the discussion so far has accepted an idea so controversial in the real world (i.e. that the terms "fetus/embryo" and "baby" mean the same thing) without question.
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Well this is the difference between mammals and reptiles in the form that their unborn offspring take. Besides in the real world, the idea of killing your foes offspring is given in the Bible in wiping out the whole of your enemies down to the last one even if it's a baby.

 

The moral debate is if you spare the offspring will they grow up to be like the parents or will they change.

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There are good reptiles not far away, one could give the information about the eggs with good consequences on future little reptiles survival and further education.

Why not to give this -after decision- option to the people of Gnass?

 

However, the Bible isn't a proper source of inspiration or good suggestions on this kind of dilemmas, for civilized beings I mean.

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Those few verses are not the same as the Bible as a whole. But let's just leave it at that for here, folks. Spiderweb Software doesn't pay web hosting for religious flame wars that turn away customers, so we mods try to nip those in the bud. Please consider this a nip.

 

It's a bit frustrating that the game gives you a choice that becomes a major moral dilemma if you think about it realistically, but then doesn't let you resolve the dilemma in ways that you realistically could. You don't get to pick the eggs up and carry them to the 'good slith' village, for instance.

 

This is unfortunately typical for a lot of the moral dilemmas in Jeff's games. The games just aren't sophisticated enough to handle them fully. But I think you have to just accept this as a genre limitation. Jeff's games are simple games. I find that if I take this view, I can often find ways to re-evaluate the games' limitations as strengths.

 

The character of Hamlet, for instance, is famously flawed as literary construction, because it's just never adequately explained why he doesn't simply stab Claudius and take over the kingdom in Act I Scene I. That's because it's a play, and there's no omniscient narrator to tip the reader off. Shakespeare provided just enough of a coherent story to hook you into wanting to make sense of it all. So every director, reader or viewer has to wrestle with the question for themselves.

 

To me, things like these slith eggs are sort of similar. There's enough of a story that I want an episode like this to make sense, but the game will never tell me in clear text that I did the right thing. It's up to me to come up with my own rationalization. If I do, Jeff's story becomes partly mine, and the game really does become a role-playing game.

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Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity
This is unfortunately typical for a lot of the moral dilemmas in Jeff's games. The games just aren't sophisticated enough to handle them fully.

IMHO nothing short of a tabletop RPG with a human dungeon master can deal with the creativity necessary to solve moral dilemmas. You could try to raise the Slith eggs yourself, to be your own loyal army; or you could hard-boil them all and carry them as food.

I agree, by the way, that the games' simplicity can be seen as a strength. If I wanted to confront and resolve hard, realistic moral dilemmas for awhile, why would I buy a computer game to do it?
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Originally Posted By: blackwight
Sparing the eggs will weaken your enemy's resolve. They won't be soldiers until the war is over; and how will they justify hating humans after they were shown mercy?


Agreed on advantages. Taking the eggs to Gnass would however have the same advantage and the further one to have one day more friendly reptiles in the area. The bad ones would never have a friendly behavior to justify just because they will never know about the, say, eggnapping.
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Originally Posted By: Superba
Originally Posted By: blackwight
Sparing the eggs will weaken your enemy's resolve. They won't be soldiers until the war is over; and how will they justify hating humans after they were shown mercy?


Agreed on advantages. Taking the eggs to Gnass would however have the same advantage and the further one to have one day more friendly reptiles in the area. The bad ones would never have a friendly behavior to justify just because they will never know about the, say, eggnapping.

At least being able to tell Gnass about the eggs that you've left there so they can get them and take care of them would be a good solution. I was hoping that we'd get that opportunity, but we don't.
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Originally Posted By: The Turtle Moves
The Gnass sliths are probably not keen on the idea of taking a long, dangerous journey to try to save the eggs of a bunch of savages who will probably be happy to kill them for their trouble.

Eath herself (the slith overseeing the hatchlings in Gnass) came from Sss-Thss's castle. She might be very interested in saving more little ones from being raised as savages. Especially after you've slaughtered Sss-Thss and the other savage adult sliths around.

It's a question of nature versus nurture, and you do learn a little something in Fort Remote after you kill Sss-Thss that puts a different spin on the idea of the sliths having a violent nature.
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I'm not disputing the power of nurture over nature; I'm just saying that the sliths at Gnass are unlikely to think it worth the risk. They might legitimately wonder if you had missed some of the savages (which you did), and even if not, some neighboring tribe might have moved in meamwhile. And it might not even be feasible to move the eggs.

 

I must say, the thought of a slith-egg omelet has a kind of horrible fascination.

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Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S
Possibly because assassinating the king would not result in being named the new king?

Or because he decides "well, maybe I should make sure I wasn't just hallucinating?"

Quite possibly, but the play doesn't go into much detail on the political situation. Being 'Prince of Denmark' sure sounds as though it ought to count for something, so it's weird that the issue of claiming power doesn't even seem to come up. And a vision of a ghost is certainly a problematic motive for murder, but Hamlet never actually expresses much doubt about his father's ghost.

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Really, why WOULD he "simply stab Claudius" in Act I Scene I?

His lines and stage directions imply that he feels he should have done so, and don't present a coherent explanation for why he didn't. The standard interpretation is that the real reason is just something in Hamlet's character, but this is rather circular reasoning. Everybody wants to make the story make sense, but everybody has to invent part of the story themselves in order to do so.
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It's implied that Hamlet is unsure of the truth of his father's ghost's accusation and therefore goes on for several acts trying to determine the truth using a play within Hamlet to elicit a guilty reaction. Then after Hamlet is sure he is unable to kill his uncle at the first chance because his uncle is praying and killing him in the act of prayer would insure that the soul would go to heaven.

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I bypass the dilemma entirely by role-playing my party. Although three of the four are "morally upstanding" and wouldn't have smashed the eggs, one of them is a "practical-minded" tactician who has no qualms about doing what is necessary for victory in war. As the other three were leaving them alone, he goes over and stabs them. Any objections from the other three became irrelevant once they were being assaulted by one pissed slith war-chief.

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His later lines imply that he wishes he had just acted, yes, rather than waiting, but this is done in a pretty generally self-critical way: "Why can't I just act instead of overthinking and overanalyzing everything, putting off direct action for indirections that find directions?" He says that very directly in the "How all occasions" speech, and it lines up quite neatly with his philosophizing with Horatio just after he sees the ghost, with his plotting and trying to use the play to confirm Claudius's guilt, etc. None of this has to be invented, it's all there in the text.

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There are some obvious simple answers to the "why not" question that I listed above; I'm not sure how much deeper into a character's psyche you're going to get in a work of this length. What do you want Shakespeare to do, have Hamlet go through psychoanalysis on stage?

 

Personally, I fail to see how a character with realistically complex and contradictory motivations and drives can be considered "flawed as literary construction" on that account.

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Maybe my wording was poor. Obviously Hamlet is a great character, a masterpiece by the world's most famous writer (and not just in English). But Hamlet is great precisely because Shakespeare didn't explain him too much. I called him flawed in the sense that he's missing some important parts. It's not really clear what's behind his actions. Is he brilliant, or is he maybe not nearly as clever as he thinks he is? Is he a scarred victim, or a spoiled jerk? And what does he have against Rosencrantz and Gildenstern, anyway? He can be played convincingly as many very different kinds of people. The fact that that's possible shows that Hamlet is a great role but not a definite character.

 

I didn't mean any of this as a criticism of Shakespeare. Hamlet is a terrible disappointment if you want him to be a character like the ones in a Dickens novel, but if you recognize that Shakespeare was doing something different from that, you can enjoy one of the best works of art anyone has ever made. I'm not comparing Jeff to Shakespeare, but I introduced Hamlet in order to make the point that if you take a cool medium the right way, then less can be more. "Why can't I save the baby sliths?" is like "Why didn't Hamlet get on with the job?" The text never really says, but there are enough hooks to hang a theory of your own on, so try one and see how it goes.

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You do can save the eggs, when you accept the risk.

Mind that in each and every cave or other hidden place with foes in AEFTP, you can still find new foes, when you go back there after a while, even if you previously kill them all.

So some reptile is likely to take care of the eggs.

When you chose not to smash them, the price to save baby sliths is that maybe they will grow up as hostile to humans. But even this forecast it's not for sure, according to your party massive interference in Avernum powers balance.

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