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.
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.
Draw Steel lore is cooler
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 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.
Gary Gygax on how "nits make lice" and other awfulnesses
A setting with evil races is a setting in which genocide is implicitly justified. Anyone who finds appeal in such a setting should think long and hard about why.
Can you give some context?
But saying that Orc and Drow are biologically evil feel like good old racism. The whole Drow let’s take a nice race and make an evil dark-skinned version of them way more problematic than the Drow is blackface debate
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
Meh, I really don’t give two shits about it either way. In my campaigns, I’ll just ignore this and have orcs and goblins default to evil unless my party decides to do something that requires them to be more nuanced. But most of the time I just need fantasy bugs that can be squashed without any moral dilemma attached.
That doesn’t mean that other groups can’t have their nuanced orcs that have tragic generational trauma attached. It’s just not something I need for my average dungeon crawl. That’s the beauty of the hobby. There’s no one right way to go about it.
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.
The root of orcs as we think of them is Lord of the Rings, where they’re corrupted elves (or something like that). Literarily, they represent the evils of war. Tolkien orcs are evil.
Orcs have seen the furthest drift from those roots of anything from LotR. Dwarves, elves, orcs, and halflings saw some drift to generalize them for other tabletop settings. But the traits settled on for orcs in the 90s and 00s (strong, nomadic, clan society, warlike, brutal, noble savage stuff) can now feel insulting, because those traits are so often used in racist contexts, so orcs have seen a second drift away from those, too.
I don’t see much of a point to orcs anymore and don’t use them. Regarding 5e, I haven’t read its finished modern take on orcs but if I want Fantasy Mexico I’m just going to use human Fantasy Mexico.
I do disagree that fantasy villains need motivations beyond existing. Conscience and free will are required for protagonists, optional for antagonists. Illithids, vampires, and early Pathfinder goblins come to mind from fantasy. Strahd’s reason for being a villain is that he’s mopey. Everything in Cthulhu, likewise, lacks comprehensible motivation.
It’s hard to make an inherently evil villain that is a foil to the PC, but not every villain needs to be a foil. As a GM it can be really fun to wallow in a villain being unrepentantly, unthinkingly horrible.
If a few minutes of reading TvTropes is anything to go by, the Tolkien never officially decided on an origin for his orcs. All of the possibilities he considered clashed with his legendarium somehow. And he had some of them that actively resisted Sauron, which makes them ‘not strictly evil’ I suppose.
You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own. A dog would have more capacity for evil. But the interesting question would ask who would have the capacity to create such machines, who believes that violence is an acceptable method of achieving their goals. You say that conscience is optional for antagonists? I’d say that a complete lack of empathy is the defining quality of evil, what drives them to seek power without any care for others.
Plus, having orcs lets you roll up a whole pile of mooks for your players to fight whenever you like, and if they happen to be trying to advance your BBEG’s goal while completely indifferent to whether they cause pain and suffering along the way, all the better. Can’t give the masterplan away if they were completely indifferent to why they were asked to do something and never asked questions about it, but it gives your players some goals to work towards and some puzzles to chew on.
And yeah, Strahd’s entire backstory and motivation being ‘he is a dick’ is difficult to make interesting. A well-intentioned extremist that thought they needed power that they then could not control and which led them to darkness has the potential for some characterisation. Strahd wanted the booty but could not get the booty and is angry about it. Plus that module is just two hundred hours of one TPK after another.
You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own.
Philosophically debatable, but a reasonable perspective. More germane to TTRPGs, I think it’s a legitimately interesting way to frame orcs, both more in line with the original source material (which as you say is nebulous to their origin) and interesting for players and GMs to deal with.
To me it’s so important that different ancestries/creatures be legitimately alien. If I can find a facsimile of an ancestry in real life Earth, it’s not foreign enough that I want an ancestry. I don’t need orcs that are tribal warriors or Mexican, we have Mexico and tribes on Earth. This is one area where Pathfinder and D&D both miss the mark for me… but not Warhammer, where they’re a psychic fungus, or LotR, where they’re test tube mooks.
I’d say that a complete lack of empathy is the defining quality of evil, what drives them to seek power without any care for others.
Definitely a good way to make a villain. But I’m not convinced any one trait makes a good villain! There are a lot of villains who have empathy, across media. Adrian Veidt in Watchmen, Roy Batty in Bladerunner, Lucifer in Paradise Lost, Nemo in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. All heroes are alike; each great villain is evil in their own way.
I ran Ravenloft in 3.5 and adored playing Strahd, it’s so fun to twirl the figurative moustache. To me a huge strength of tabletop is that we get to savor things more emotionally vs intellectually compared to other entertainment, since we’re acting it out, and with simple characters you can flat out bathe in it. I don’t play 5e but I would run Ravenloft if it meant getting to run rampant with Strahd again.
Anyone who has never GMed before, believe me, I’ve never found anything like Snidley Whiplashing it up, 22 ounces of fresh cut ham on rye. All the joy of being despicable, none of the culpability.
You can’t be evil if you don’t have free will. A tool has no evil except from what comes from the hand that wields it. So to me, orcs make more sense as a constructed organic machine, little better than automatons, and with no moral sense of their own.
This paradox, I.e., if orcs have free will, they can be truely evil, and not just a tool. But if they’re predestined to be basically evil as a race, can they really have free will? I think is basically unresolvable. That’s why Tolkien could never find a clear answer.
I mean, if merely existing is enough motivation for IRL executives to be evil piles of shit, I don’t see a need for fictional characters to need much motivation… Some people clearly just enjoy lording over others…
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.
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
So, you’re playing human CEOs
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.
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
Seems more like a youtube hooby problem. Small YouTuber makes a good point, big YouTuber steals point, small YouTubers steal point.
