Goblin Camp Bad (Spoilers)

[Voidfarer]

Been having a great time so far, but it's honestly bizarre to me how unfinished this area feels.

You know Halsin has the form of a bear and you know he's in the camp. You can deduce the bear in the cage is Halsin. This is all you can do because there is no detect magic.

Halsin (who is our good-guy alternative to the potentially child-killing Kagha) kills children in his introduction and there's no way to prevent that. Once you approach, he's breaking out of his cage. If you don't help, he will lose the fight very, very badly. He waited all this time and chose to mount his escape without warning when (to his knowledge) 4 True Soul warriors entered the room. This makes Halsin's character look really bad. There's no opportunity to speak to him before he does this.

Halsin says you took a big risk letting a bear out of a cage -- even if you didn't. There's no option to say you knew it was him.

Halsin asks you to kill the 3 goblin leaders but suggests he not come with you because the whole camp will attack if they see you. The takeaway from that is that you should discretely remove the leaders -- cut off the heads and the body will die. And then this section completely falls apart.

* There is an intended route to discreetly kill True Soul Gut. She ushers you away and locks the door. If you keep talking to her she gives you a sleeping potion. But even this breaks down because if you refuse to drink it, you're knocked out and kidnapped without a saving throw anyway.

* There is a possible way to discreetly kill Minthara if you are quick and can take care of her guards.

* And then Dror is just a big middle finger to this playstyle. He's coded to make the entire camp hostile as soon as he dies, even if you do it without anyone seeing you. There are even patch notes that addressed a "bug" that was causing some goblins to *not* turn hostile upon his death. There's no option to trick him into follow you somewhere, he doesn't have any routine. If you're rescuing Halsin you just have to fight your way out which undermines the idea of not putting the camp on high alert and calls into question why the discrete options are available at all for the other two leaders.

There's also the spider pit where you can convince the giant spiders to rush out of their cage and eat the goblins. But the spiders are so weak that they can't even take on the goblins at the gate if you let them fight alone.

My point is everything about Goblin Camp is feels weak from a design perspective, a story perspective, and a roleplaying perspective. The Halsin stuff is underdeveloped, they dangle the stealth approach in your face and then throw it away. But worst of all True Soul Gut breaks the rules of the game to force a "captive" sub-plot -- which is one of the things you should never do as a DM.

[RhodosGuard]

Halsin only kills the Goblin Children if he has a higher initiative than them.
Otherwise YOU kill the children, unless you do not kill them, in which case they go alarm the entire camp, turning everyone hostile.

You are stuck between a Rock and a hard place and even Halsin says, that killing is never his first choice, but if it is between killing 2 goblin children and being piled on by Goblins because they alarmed everyone, the choice is not if, but when you kill them.

Also, no, the indication is not that you should take the leaders out discreetly, the takeaway is, that it is easier to get close to the leaders and formulate a plan to take them out one by one, if you do not turn the entire camp hostile at once by coming out the gate with a bear.

And following this, your entire thread falls apart because it hinges on your wrong interpretation of halsins words.

Edit:
YOu are not supposed to save as many goblins as possible, the reason the quest is to kill the leaders, is that they can recover and reorganize under whichever one remains. And again, the reason Halsin says it's not optimal to turn everyone hostile immediatly, is because you cant plan and/or do other things in the camp safely if you take him.

[Voidfarer]

Originally posted by RhodosGuard:

Also, no, the indication is not that you should take the leaders out discreetly.

It actually is. The exact thing Halsin says to you is: "If I join you, we'll likely have to slaughter the whole place. You may want to use discretion when approaching the leaders."

And then you have to slaughter the whole place anyway because Dror's death triggers all remaining goblins to go hostile.

[RhodosGuard]

Originally posted by Slugga:

Originally posted by RhodosGuard:

Also, no, the indication is not that you should take the leaders out discreetly.

It actually is. The exact thing Halsin says to you is: "If I join you, we'll likely have to slaughter the whole place. You may want to use discretion when approaching the leaders."

And then you have to slaughter the whole place anyway because Dror's death triggers all remaining goblins to go hostile.

It says you may want to use discretion when approaching them, not "play this like a stealth game now"

You can still use discretion when approaching them. You have infinite time to prepare and plan, to position your teammates and create an environment to kill the leaders.

You also dont neccessarily need to kill all of them, just because they turn hostile.

What I usually do is kill Gut when I get there, go around her area, free Volo and Liam, get Loviatars Love, go to the prison, free halsin, go immediatly to Minthara, make sure the Eye dies quickly, kill everyone around her area, go to Ragzlin, kill everyone in the room.

That's when combat ends. You exit the room Ragzlin was in, you go back to the prison, kill the 3 goblins there, tell Halsin you've been a good boy, then teleport back to the grove, big party, spend the night with a companion and you never have to return back there.

Again, dispatching them discreetly and approaching them with discretion are 2 different things.