I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to “I’m an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race”. And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don’t know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
No, you’re not alone. There has been much ink spelled in defense of the removal of geneaological morality from the game, and from Pathfinder before it. It’s just that most of that ink has been in replies to people being cranky about the removal in the first place.
Good and evil being a racial trait is just something that about 1/3 of society seems to take for granted. It’s a belief they may not even know they have until someone does something that stops reinforcing that belief. These silent, often unnoticed beliefs are often the corner stones of ideologies, and people don’t like having their ideologies questioned or challenged. Or even highlighted, in many cases.
So, people who have an ideological belief that good and evil are simple concepts, that good and evil are inherent qualities of a person, and that good and evil are tied to heritage are going to be primed to be giant whiny babies about racial alignment being removed, and to put up a giant stink,while those who see it as a commom sense move are not going to be front and centre making headlines about it. They’ll be in the comments, getting down-voted by the tilted reactionaries who like their simplistic, black-and-white world.
Man, this was always sad when I finally realized it.
I always thought “racial alignment” was about the culture of those races conditioning those who grew up in those civilizations being raised with certain beliefs to serve as a guideline in how individuals of those races would be depicted in setting. (Or supernatural compulsions for things like Devils, Demons, Modrons, etc… but that’s different)
Then I realized most people that I played with just used it as an excuse to be openly racist.
It’s for the best that the system is being removed, people just don’t know how to use it without causing problems. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Gonna write my short story about the orc barbarians who destroy human colonies that get too close to orc territory, not because they’re inherently evil, but because they’ve seen what human greed for power and domination does to subjugated races, the flow of magic, and the health of the earth. So they view humans as evil.
“Your kind knows nothing but exploitation! You drain the lands of their nutrients to feed cities of sycophants until they are fat! Tell me, adventurer, when was the last time you heard of a dragon attacking an orc caravan? We have no fear of such beings as they only attack the depraved greed of man.”
“Attacked the village? Do your handlers even lie to hired blades? Yes we burned the village you call Argath, but no one was harmed. Humans, as dangerous as you are, are still cowards. Surrounding a mining village and telling them to leave when they’re outnumbered ten to one is hardly, what you would call, a negotiation. We sent hunters to escort them out of the mountains of Gri’ut Kar and burned the village to ensure the trek was one way.”
Draw Steel lore is cooler
It’s a matter of world building. Orcs can be noble savages, or violent monsters. The main problem is humanizing these creatures. If you instead imagine a separate evolutionary path, then the race can be inherently “evil”.
If orcs have evolved for conflict and violence far beyond human levels, then by our standards they would be evil. At least by the philosophy of a middle ages like world. Catholics and Protestants considered each other evil for a few hundred years. A violent species that destroys humans on sight due to their violent instincts would easily be evil. Exceptions could exist, but the mass of individuals would be “evil”.
New lore: orcs are evolved from ducks. That explains everything
Just look for better settings. You can even keep the DnD rules if you’re feeling kinda lazy and just swap some names.
I think that it’s highly setting dependant, and also dependant on the kind of game your DM is running. I’ve exclusively run things in my own setting, so any particular race’s natural alignment was more of a suggestion than a requirement.
Now what really threw me for a loop was orks loosing the ‘powerful build’ feature. Orks can be twinks now and I love it.
In theory I like the removal of race-based alignment from the game.
In practice, I hate the way WotC went about doing it, and it was actually one of the reasons I switched away from D&D and to Pathfinder (I bought the Pathfinder core rulebook for Christmas just a few weeks before the OGL thing), because I was sick of how lazy WotC’s development was being.
WotC could have doubled down on the idea that those “evil” races are so not because of the races themselves, but because of the currently-dominant culture among those races. Emphasise outliers like Drizzt, or the complexity of the Many Arrows Tribe. Instead, they ripped away pages full of lore from digital copies of books people had already paid for, with no recompense.
I’m also bitter that they removed one of the most poignant anti-racist messages in the game. They removed the “alignment” section on every race’s stats, but that included this beauty:
Tieflings might not have an innate tendency toward evil, but many of them end up there.
It’s an incredibly powerful commentary on how the way people are treated by others can end up affecting how they behave. How if you always act with suspicion or outright hostility towards someone merely because of how they look, and never give them a fair chance to prove otherwise, they might just end up acting the part. They might not feel they have any other choice.
I explicitly looked for “evil races ttrpg” in YouTube and most of the results are from 2-5 years ago.
Who’s blowing up the algorithm by raising a dead topic?
I remember there being a bunch of drama about it when the current edition-that-is-officially-not-an-edition of D&D was coming out, and that fits with the period you mention
What have I missed?
One of the frustrating things about humans and mass communication is the “for me it’s Tuesday” effect. For someone, this is the first time they’ve encountered “maybe orcs being innately evil isn’t a good idea”. They want to explore it and go through their feelings and blah blah blah. It’s a day that might change their life. For someone else, it’s Tuesday. We’ve had this conversation a thousand times before. It’s old hat.
It’s hard to be patient to faceless newcomer #3742 when you’ve already done this conversation so many times. They feel stupid and slow because they blend in with all the other people who brought this up. They’re bringing up points they feel are fresh and clever but have been discussed and settled already. But they’re a person seeing it for the first time. Somehow.
It feels like “are you stupid? We just went over this”, but that’s an illusion. It’s new to them .
(This doesn’t account for bad faith actors, who are trash and should go away)
Adding on to everything you’ve said, the people most likely encountering these topics for the first time usually are adolescents. I feel it helps my patience trying to keep that in mind when talking with them, since it makes sense that they may not have encountered the topic before.
Yup, it helps to remember that they’re 1 of today’s lucky 10,000. That said, I do think it’s reasonable to say that certain fantasy races might tend to think in certain ways, or have certain opinions, even if only because that’s what they’re brought up with. It means you can have interesting “ugly duckling” scenarios where one is brought up by a different race and ends up with their outlook instead.
I think “cultural values” are a better mechanism for that. Like america teaches that capitalism and individualism are good values. Anyone raised here gets a lot of that, but it’s not an innate property of being from Ohio
One of the most popular DnD characters is a member of an “evil” race who proves that it’s not a racial feature but a cultural one.
(Yes I’m talking about Drizzt, AKA why every DnD group from ~1990 to ~2005 had that guy who wanted to play a drow ranger.)
I’d suggest even before then in the early character guides with the idea that one could play a half-orc. Plus a good DM would give the party options in talking to “monsters” instead of just fighting their way through. A group of goblins probably wasn’t evil, they were just trying to survive like anyone else, and sometimes they had to work with the actual evil in the game because they were tools being used for other purposes.
D&D took a lot from Tolkien, but I don’t think the mythology was included. In wiki footnotes someone had an article in a 1982 Dragon magazine on the background of orcs from a half-orc viewpoint, but I can’t find reference anywhere on that. Point being, Tolkien orcs were created by evil for evil purposes and aren’t simply just a race of creatures. D&D orcs aren’t like that from my understanding.
The article you’re looking for is in Dragon #62 - The half-orc point of view. There’s a whole series of them and they’re all good reads.
Yep, thanks. And I found a source that has an archive here. And it seems that the canon (at least back then) followed Tolkien’s lore a bit in that the orcs were made as revenge for being unfairly treated, but it’s not quite as direct with suggesting evil was directly “poured” into them but more that they’re just following the commands given without thinking about it. So is that evil, or just mislead through generations?
Drizzt is dripping with riiiiiiizzzzzzzzz
God, even I took psych damage from the cringe
Does his rizz come from his drip?
Ms. Drizzt, isn’t that the kindergarten teacher that has a magic school bus?
No that’s Ms.Frizzle.
Drizzt is that dude who sings in Limp Bizkit
No that’s Fred Durst.
Drizzt is the outer colored part of the peel of a citrus fruit.
In that case, however, Drow are the descendants of elves that followed a god that betrayed Corellon. They aren’t innately evil, they are innately good/chaotic and programmed to be evil/lawful (by DND logic).
Orcs are theoretically opposite. Evil/chaotic by essentialist, divinely mandated nature and capable of learning otherwise.
More importantly, they’re people the PCs can murder for gold with no discussion about morality… And while that’s convenient for some DMs it does have some very, very obvious problems.
I’m fine with orcs and what not being normal for the most part but I think creatures like demons should be as close to naturally evil as possible maybe just no evolved empathy
I choose to play demons as though they can have empathy, but it’s always calculated empathy.
They are intentionally and willfully choosing to act with empathy because it meets some other goal, so even though all demons are fundamentally evil, they are not all fundamentally despicable.
I say it like it’s some high holy road concept thing, but it’s just more of a general guideline.
Demons will do anything they want to do as long as it meets their current objective.
Assuming we’re talking about humanoid demon creatures and not some sort of like ethereal “presence of evil” demon.
So, you’re playing human CEOs
I did have idea for a high ranking demon lord or whatever that sees overcoming his nature as a way of becoming more powerful in that to be able to act and think truly selflessly would be alien enough to his peers that it could give him an advantage so he’s taken on the form of a traveling hero but has laspes into cruelty and his true power level if he gets too annoyed by his foes
I long for the day when people stop kissing Tolkein’s ass and try to make everything about him, whatever direction it goes.
I’m all for a broader scope in the lore of any ancestry in a game. As a Forever DGM a limited scope just means less chance I’m going to use them in a campaign.
Evil isn’t an ancestry it’s a mental illness.
I came to say something similar. Evil is just generational trauma. Sometimes someone who suffers from generational trauma will choose not to continue the chain of trauma but usually the abused become the abusers.
If a whole society is built like Menzoberranzan it’d be really hard to be a good person. 99% of people who tried to be good would just die or get taken advantage of.
Yes. Simply put, yes, this was 1000% the right choice for WotC to make, and fuck them for not making it 30 years earlier.
Zero questions here, the only tables I stayed at long term were the ones where orcs and elves and humans had a precisely equal chance of being good or evil. The ones I left? The DMs and players who wanted an instant, easy ‘kill this’ marker were invariably super bigoted in the real world too.
