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.
This really is one of those “Wow, some people really do only play one game” things isn’t it?
If you go outside the world of D&D and a handful of games that were released back in the eighties that were just doing things because D&D did them, the entire notion of alignments basically doesn’t exist. That’s not to say that you won’t find species / races being described as inherently evil, there was still a lot of that, but it gets less and less as you move towards the modern era of RPGs.
I’m not saying this to shit on anyone, but I just really wish that every D&D player would play just one other game at least one time. Go try out Hearth or Spire. Play some Blades in The Dark or a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Try a Numenera one shot, maybe some Deadlands or Shadowrun. Broaden your horizons a little with Werewolf or Vampire, try out Nights Black Agents or Call of Cthulhu or The Dresden Files. If you want something a little more crunchy give Exalted a go.
I could literally keep going for pages and pages. There are so many God damn games out there. It always blows my mind to see this kind of drama going down over one single game when it really just one single game, and it feels like so much of this drama wouldn’t even happen if some of these people had ever been exposed to the idea that games could be anything else.
All of which is to say that you’re right, but also that I can barely believe that people are still having this argument.
I wish it was true that this is only “people who only play D&D” problem but I have also seen those argument with people who participate in rpg online communities or forums where they know and play other games. I’ve seen videos whining about orcs come from same channel with something like a 100 reviews of various different rpgs. Sadly I do not think this is only people who only play D&D who are the problem here.
Agreed but each time people forget that DnD isn’t the default context for some groups/communities/countried … it’s annoying.