Then again we get to the issue that making one race distinct from another results in racial tendencies and the only way not to have those is to make the races largely indistinguishable
We are very clearly having two different conversations at this point, so I'll just re-state what I said originally
From a real-world perspective, we've got a long way to go before any suggestion that one group of people is inherently smarter/stronger/wiser than another, even in a fantasy setting, is going to come without associations and connotations that don't belong in the game
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Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
There is something wrong with telling me that I've been playing/using base varient Orcs wrong for twenty years.
If you are going to take all of my monsters away and turn them all into people, what are you giving me in exchange for them to use as villains?
I am pretty sure no one here is saying you are playing D&D wrong. Practically no one outside of your table cares how you play, not even Wizards. Please do not put words in other's mouths and make a strawman out of them. I am tired of people twisting others' words and misrepresenting their views. There are no shortage of villainous people in D&D. No one is stopping you from incorporating dumbass orcs, [REDACTED], or whatever else you want into your game. Hell, I incorporate a bunch of innuendos in my game that would probably make that nude succubus from 1e Monster Manual blush. Wizards wants to make the game more inclusive and available to a wider audience, so they are removing elements from their publications that would get in the way of that goal, but you can always homebrew those elements back into your game if you want.
I do not give a damn about the ESRB, and if I ever have kids and they want to play Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, I will let them. Similarly, if my kids want to explore controversial themes and their darkest fantasies in D&D, I would not mind either; I much rather be the first one to find out and guide them through it than having that spring up at someone else's table outside of my supervision. HOWEVER, not every person is like me, and most Americans are going to flip out if they find out their children are playing FATAL or Lamentations of the Flame Princess. By the same token, many Americans are uncomfortable with certain racial depictions and prejudices, and seeing similar things in D&D would turn them off from the hobby. D&D and TTRPGs in general are already climbing an extremely steep hill in getting people to play and stay with the hobby, especially in comparison to other more flashy hobbies. Sitting around playing pretend is not exactly what most people find fun, and Wizards does not need to turn off people who might find it fun by traumatizing them with racial depictions.
Notes: There's no need to list out any/all offensive acts from human history you can think of.
I don't care if the ASIs are fixed or variable. However, I ask myself, are there really people who think one thing or another it's negative? I do not mean on a mechanical level, if not on an ideological level.
I imagine that there will be, and that they will have their reasons. But it really surprises me. Why embitter one's existence in one way or another?
If you are going to take all of my monsters away and turn them all into people, what are you giving me in exchange for them to use as villains?
You can use people as villains. Literally no one is stopping you. As has been said over and over, you can even keep using orcs as villains! But I think it's worth doing some introspection and asking yourself why it's so important to you that the villainous nature of the enemies you face be based on their race rather than the choices they've made.
There's plenty of things that are not people and don't look like people to smash in D&D. I don't know if I have time to unpack all of what's going on here, but maaaaybe the urge to have antagonists that look like people but which one can safely categorize as not people because the Powers That Be say so is umm ... problematic?
They don't look like people. At least not to any greater extent than Frankensteins Monster or the creature from the black Lagoon do. I though this was a purposeful thing in art about monsters too, no? Wasn't there some research done or something that said Monsters who look similar to people are scarier than ones that don't because psycologically, the audiance might see the somewhat person shaped monster as a dark reflection of something inside of themselves, and that espect of familiarity is more unerving than a completely alien image?
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
There's plenty of things that are not people and don't look like people to smash in D&D. I don't know if I have time to unpack all of what's going on here, but maaaaybe the urge to have antagonists that look like people but which one can safely categorize as not people because the Powers That Be say so is umm ... problematic?
They don't look like people. At least not to any greater extent than Frankensteins Monster or the creature from the black Lagoon do. I though this was a purposeful thing in art about monsters too, no? Wasn't there some research done or something that said Monsters who look similar to people are scarier than ones that don't because psycologically, the audiance might see the somewhat person shaped monster as a dark reflection of something inside of themselves, and that espect of familiarity is more unerving than a completely alien image?
Ok I'm finding talking about this with you to be low key distressing, most likely not on purpose, so don't worry I'm not blaming you, but I may back out of this conversation and let other people educate you a bit more.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
There's plenty of things that are not people and don't look like people to smash in D&D. I don't know if I have time to unpack all of what's going on here, but maaaaybe the urge to have antagonists that look like people but which one can safely categorize as not people because the Powers That Be say so is umm ... problematic?
They don't look like people. At least not to any greater extent than Frankensteins Monster or the creature from the black Lagoon do. I though this was a purposeful thing in art about monsters too, no? Wasn't there some research done or something that said Monsters who look similar to people are scarier than ones that don't because psycologically, the audiance might see the somewhat person shaped monster as a dark reflection of something inside of themselves, and that espect of familiarity is more unerving than a completely alien image?
You're talking about the Uncanny Valley. Which, in short, states that something which appears almost-but-not-quite human stands a chance of being off-putting and eliciting feelings of revulsion. There are a number of postulations behind the existence of the Uncanny Valley, with 'dark reflection' being only one of them and not one I've heard before. Other explanations include the avoidance of disease or deformity, by causing those suffering from disfiguring such maladies to be shunned and thus harm the gene pool less, as well as several variations on Rejection Of 'Other'ness, i.e. rejection of something that intrudes or threatens one's concept of the human ideal or humanity's place in the world.
"Rejection of Otherness" can also, in different forms, be referred to as racism/sexism/creedism/whatever-ism. In point of fact, "Rejection of Otherness" is the core kernel of all such beliefs. "The 'Others' are not like us, therefore they are less than us." The Uncanny Valley deals with atavistic, animalistic gut rejection of such things, a reaction one cannot control but can, if required, learn to suppress.
Artistic depictions of orcs vary, but generally not by enough to place them in the realms of zombies, flesh golems, sahuagin, or other "Frankenstein's Monster/Black Lagoon"-esque creatures. They are also not described that way - orcs have always been a close analogue of humanity in that they are a living, breathing, breeding species with its own languages, cultures, and aspirations. Often as not those cultures and aspirations are sharply, violently opposed to humanity's, but they have always existed. Consigning an entire species of sapient, theoretically free-willed people to the status of Uncanny Valley subhuman monsters and thereby turning them into guilt-free murder dolls will never sit right with some people.
The disconnect here is that you believe people are deliberately choosing to 'humanize' orcs and other such species and are trying to figure out why they would do that and why they're trying to "make" you do it. First of all, nobody's making you do anything, as we've all told everybody eleven hundred thousand million billion times. Second of all...folks like Ophidian didn't wake up one day and decide "you know what? I'm gonna look at orcs differently!" They've always seen the humanity in orcs. They can't not see the humanity these nonhuman species, the fact that even though they're a different color and with different builds and occasionally come with impressive dentition, these people are still people. They've always been people. And other, real-life people treating them as guilt-free murder dolls is jarring, unpleasant, and reminds them entirely too much of the way real-life human beings, in the real world, ignore and disregard their own person-ness because they're not the same kind of person as the ones doing the ignoring.
Your beliefs and experiences are true to you. They are not universal. Please try to empathize and understand with the folks who cannot not see nonhuman species in D&D as being just as worthy of personhood as humans are. If you can say it's okay for a devil-blooded tiefling to be their own person, with their own beliefs and their own validity, despite their horrific* appearance, why can't the same be said for orcs?
There's plenty of things that are not people and don't look like people to smash in D&D. I don't know if I have time to unpack all of what's going on here, but maaaaybe the urge to have antagonists that look like people but which one can safely categorize as not people because the Powers That Be say so is umm ... problematic?
They don't look like people. At least not to any greater extent than Frankensteins Monster or the creature from the black Lagoon do. I though this was a purposeful thing in art about monsters too, no? Wasn't there some research done or something that said Monsters who look similar to people are scarier than ones that don't because psycologically, the audiance might see the somewhat person shaped monster as a dark reflection of something inside of themselves, and that espect of familiarity is more unerving than a completely alien image?
Ok I'm finding talking about this with you to be low key distressing, most likely not on purpose, so don't worry I'm not blaming you, but I may back out of this conversation and let other people educate you a bit more.
I get what you mean. Take some time off the convo and maybe you’ll feel better.
What was Tiny Too-Smart doing in an orcish raider gang? The people who'd hate him most would generally be other orcs, especially typical orcish raiders.
Why did the players kill an obviously atypical orc, small and weak and presumably not trying to fight back but instead cowering somewhere away from the fight, or at the very least clearly desperately afraid and trying his best to live rather than harm his enemies?
See, if your DM runs an entirely typical orc raider gang encounter and then says "Oh, you guys killed Tiny Too-Smart" without giving the players any clue beforehand that one of these orcs wasn't a typical orcish raider? If he just picks one dead orc in the bunch and then retroactively heaps a sobby backstory on that dead orc? That's what we in the business like to call a "Dick Move". It's a shameless, pointless, careless attempt to jerk on people's emotions and punish them for an action they had no way to know they weren't supposed to take, and the players are right to be upset about that. It's poor storytelling and it tarnishes the DM's game.
If the DM does make it plain that Tiny's not a typical orc - small, weak, clearly terrified and not at all eager to participate in the fight - and the players merder the shit out of Tiny anyways? First of all, that group is not likely to lose any sleep over Tiny's story anyways. Players can be terrifyingly callous, and many of them will cheerfully give zero shits about Tiny Too-Smart and his attempts to rise above his people's reputation. To quote many thousands of murderhobos across the globe: "Sucks to be him. Guess he shouldn't have been an orc." Second of all, they did that their own ass selves and if they're gonna lose sleep over it? That was the choice they made. Might it 'spoil the fun'? Certainly! But 'fun' isn't always how you have fun with a D&D game. Sometimes the games you walk away from feeling like an absolute monster, an anguished sack of misery agonizing over the choices you made, are the absolute best games that you remember forever because those are the campaign turning points and the moments of highest tension and engagement.
If the DM makes it plain that Tiny is not a typical orc and the party doesn't kill Tiny, but instead captures/spares him? Congratulations - you have discovered Plot! How did Tiny end up in that warband? What were they planning, and why would they need an outcast exile who mostly just tended his garden and helped out the local orphanage? Why did the raiders trust Tiny with weapons even though he wasn't really on their side and they presumably knew it? All very good questions that merit investigating, and which could make a few sessions of splendid play. That sort of shit is good D&D. I'd be down to figure out what the deal with Tiny Too-Smart is and what the orcs in the region are up to such that Tiny felt the need to try and do something about it himself despite his legion of inadequacies...or what they're up to such that they coerced Tiny into rejoining the band even though they all hate him and he hates them.
Plenty of cool story potential there! None of which would be possible if orcs were just A.C.E.F. cardboard cutouts with no personalities beyond mindless slobbering psycho raider!
Tiny was vising his mother.
He'd brought her some loot to try and bargain for the release of a few hostages from the village. Nods, hence the name. It wasn't the villages who named him that.
How were the PC's to know? Tiny looks like any other Orc (he's only tiny by Orc standards), he smells like any other Orc, he carries some treasure like any other Orc, He speaks like any other orc, he's in the cave with all the other Orcs, and inspite of himself he doesn't want to see his family slaughtered and would likely be participating in the fight to defend their lives, vs just trying to sit it out.
Yes, well notwithstanding it being a move worthy of Ceasars close friend Biggus Dicus, it's still an entirely trope appropriate move to use for an adventure hook. Didn't Herculese accidentially kill his friend wife once and had to atone for it; didn't Cu Cullen kill his wifes father and firends favorite hound; didn't Angel the Joss Whedon character accidentially kill that demon one time because that's usually what he has to do when Cordillia get's a vision about a Demon; but that time his rush to judgement resulted in his killing a guardian of a pregnant woman whose child had a destiny of mesianic proportions. The hero(s) having to quest to correct a mistake is a known aspect of these kinds of stories. In this case the PC's upon realizing they accidentially killed a local folk hero, might have to journey with his body to the nearest temple of so and so to get him resurected, and must somehow convince the cleric that this is a fine fellow worthy of her services in spite of appearances; even though orcs have often raided that temple too. Then if and when Tiny is successfully revived, he might have a message for the PC's from the god of that temple giving them their next plot hook in the campaign. -
Not that any of this actually matters, the point of the example wasnt how great a plot hook it could be, it was that players shouldn't have to worry that the creatures they are slaying are more than they appear to be unless the DM has set it up that way.
Perhaps, but in this case I'm talking about me as a DM and using the RAW and an old module Orc encounter. I'm saying if I give my players a combat encounter, I want them to feel comfortable resolving it and not have to worry about it secretly being a test of their abilities to Ghandi there way through an adventure. If I intended to use a character like Tiny as a plothook, I would drop hints in advance; though the players might not know that about me; but I don't want them expecting or looking for one or more 'Tiny's' in every enounter.
If you are going to take all of my monsters away and turn them all into people, what are you giving me in exchange for them to use as villains?
You can use people as villains. Literally no one is stopping you. As has been said over and over, you can even keep using orcs as villains! But I think it's worth doing some introspection and asking yourself why it's so important to you that the villainous nature of the enemies you face be based on their race rather than the choices they've made.
I've already said, there are reasons to not want to use people as villains. When villains are people, a lawful and/or good party shouldn't be killing them. They should be taking them back to the local constabulary for a fair trial and if convicted, allowing the local athorities to do the executing if such is what the sentance is.
I don't want to convey a sentiment that it is okay for the heroes to kill people.
It is however definetly okay for the heroes to slay monsters.
No, but that is an incorrect application of the term race IMHO. That's what we mean by such things creeping into this game that don't belong.
Orcs, aren't meant to have that kind of free agency to actually be able to make their own choices and decisions, and be judged as individuals etc. -hence INT(6) and apparently CHA(6) too? When you are fighting Orcs, you are not actually fighting Orcs, you are fighting Gruumsh. Orcs are the weapon that Gruumsh is weilding against you. They are a living weapon, but still that is their purpose for which they were created: to be an extiension of the will of Gruumsh, to conquor and subjugate, onto the material plane. Gruumsh literally created them for that specific function and basically programmed it into them.
The perception of trying to anthropomorphize/humanize/empathize as though you were talking about a race of human beings with free will and independent thought and not a creation of an evil god compelled to it's bidding is where things go awry.
Free-agency is a disction between people and things. If you give a creature free-agency, then it's become a person and we shouldn't even be saying "it". That is not a fate that should be worthy of every monster in the book and anyone with more than 2 points of INT. Doing so takes away from being in a world full of monsters; that are they're for you to hack your way through. I don't want to hack my way through bunches of people. Making monsters into people changes the nature of gameplay as it either requires you to use negotiation more, and Sword&Sorcery less; or it requires you to forgoe being the classically defined hero/goodguy/champion and basically makes you a murder-hobo.
Frankly, the idea of just killing stuff for fun and not thinking about the ramifications, and not wanting to think about them, is problematic. It just is. We've all come to expect it at this point, and it's very entrenched in the genre, but nothing in this universe is apolitical, especially not the status quo.
Does it make you a bad person if you still enjoy these things? No. Does it mean the writers of the game are or were bad people? Also no. Let's not even start on that.
Is D&D made better by forcing the very monsters you have to fight as part of the core gameplay loop to be fully relatable persons? No, probably not, because it's designed from the ground up to be problematic. It's fundamental -- it's in the fundaments. The game is built on a foundation of bad politics. You've got sexism, eugenics, mental health stigma, cultural appropriation, racial stereotyping, imperialism, the works. And I'm not talking about "these things exist in the world so they're depicted in the game for the sake of completeness." I'm talking about "these worldviews are in no small way baked into the core assumptions of the game, for various reasons, and these aspects are largely unquestioned, even supported and favored over their alternatives." It's also incredible, as anyone who's played a good game of it can tell you, so you can see why people want to salvage it as much as possible. Thus, the conundrum.
This conversation makes me so tired because it's like watching the Avengers infighting for weeks while Loki continues to do whatever he wants with the Tesseract. I don't know if that analogy works but I'm mentally exhausted. And I'm barely even contributing! I can't even imagine how much useful energy is being sucked out of some of you by this illusory culture war. You could build an arc reactor with all that. (Yeah, I think I'm losing it.)
... players shouldn't have to worry that the creatures they are slaying are more than they appear to be unless the DM has set it up that way.
They never do. Creatures are never more than they appear unless the DM has set it up that way. That's what the DM does - set up the environment for the PCs to interact with.
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And I'm not talking about "these things exist in the world so they're depicted in the game for the sake of completeness." I'm talking about "these worldviews are in no small way baked into the core assumptions of the game, for various reasons, and these aspects are largely unquestioned, even supported and favored over their alternatives." It's also incredible, as anyone who's played a good game of it can tell you, so you can see why people want to salvage it as much as possible. Thus, the conundrum.
At one point in this thread, in the "what's wrong with saying one race is smarter on average than another anyway?" tangent, I started to type this whole rant about how having One True Number for intelligence is bad from the jump, with links to, like, the wiki pages for Howard Gardner and the Bell Curve and stuff, and I just scrapped it as not worth the effort
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Just because he's not called Gruumsh in other worlds doesn't mean that as a concept he doesn't exist. If these worlds are any where near as fleshed out as Greyhawk and Kalimar etc. There will be a reletively large number of gods whose names don't matter as much as the fact that all the portfolio elements are covered by someone; or a fewer number of gods with wider porfolio elements. i.e. There will be a god whose domain for all intents an purposes is or includes "Slaughter". This god might not be affiliated with Orcs in a particular campaign setting, but the setting must have someone who are the bad guys. If you don't have bad guys, you can't have good guys.
Is the RAW taking multiple settings into account during the descriptions or are the referencing a default setting such as faerun? I don't really care about how different all these other settings are that I've never been in. My concern is that the one or two long running settings that I do always play, don't fundamentally change on me. My top 3 settings are Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Kalimar. Orc's aren't an issue in Ravenloft, InKalimar they already got humanized Orcs in 3.5; I dug it up last night when looking to see if there were any settings that let you play as a full-blooded Orc. The backdrop of Kalimar in the first place though is a human-centric empire that persecutes everyone else, and where there are human groups who are for more evil and monstrous than your typical orcs.
Greyhawk was the standard setting of 3e and Forgotten Realms was the other main one almost everyone I knew used besides Greyhawk. I'm not sure what 5e is doing for it's prime material plance concept, they seem to be sharing it with multiple worlds, but I pretty much only use Greyhawk, Kalimar, and Ravenloft. In Greyhawk at least, Gruumsh is Gruumsh and he likes his Orcs to have an intelligence score of 6 (8-2) so they can be nearly mindless, unquestioning, obediant, thugs and villains, who can't understand that murdering and enslaving folk is wrong. - An Orc with an intelligence score of 13 (15-2) is likely smart enough to realize Gruumsh is an Explitive and his ways are wrong, and so leave the tribe and strike out on his own to become an adventurer.
No. Just, no. Sorry, I really don't mean to be rude, but I'm fed up with people talking about things that they know next-to-nothing about. You said yourself that you don't know much about Eberron (even mispelling it as Oberron, which is closer to the name of an Archfey than the name of the setting). Seriously, you don't know what you are talking about. If you want to know (by reading more about Eberron), buy books about it, watch videos on it, read its wiki, the creator's blog about it, etc.
Sorry, man, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you can't talk about it as if you did.
There is no Gruumsh figure in Eberron. None. Nada. The gods aren't even confirmed to exist in the world. It's up for debate amongst the fanbase in the real world and scholars (including the Dragons) in the setting. Even its creation myth is completely probable to just be a legend.
There is no Gruumsh in Eberron. The Orcs in Eberron are just as likely to be good/evil/any-other-alignment as humans, elves, dwarves, and any other race. There are Demon Overlords whose identity is "Slaughter", but they are not Gruumsh, did not create the Orcs or any other Humanoid Races, and there are basically no group of people (i.e. humanoids) in the setting that have a pre-determined alignment. It applies to Orcs, it applies to Drow, it applies to Kobolds, it applies to Gnolls, it applies to Duergar, it applies to Dragons, it applies to Giants, and it applies to Goblinoids in the setting. The closest things in the setting to groups of evil people (the Order of the Emerald Claw, the Path of Inspiration, the Cults of the Dragon Below) are religions whose entire purpose is to bring harm/domination to others, and membership in them is voluntary.
Even in Exandria, a world where Gruumsh exists much like he does in many other D&D worlds, still allows orcs to have free will. Yes, they're cursed to be more violent than other races by Gruumsh, but individuals and even whole cultures of Orcs can break free of his grasp and stop being evil. The Kryn Dynasty in Wildemount is made up of mostly Drow, Orcs, Goblinoids, and Gnolls, and while their creator deities/demon lords did try to keep them under their control using their godly might, the gods do not and cannot have infinite power, and thus can't keep absolute control of the races that they created (because if an adventuring party or another God can kill/imprision the God or an Avatar/Aspect of it, it's not Omnipotent, and thus cannot have complete, utter control of the races/peoples it created).
(By the way, the base campaign setting in D&D 5e is the Forgotten Realms, which also has the typical version of Gruumsh, but also has had two major groups of Orcs that broke free of his grasp: the Odontis and the Mountain Orcs of King Obould Many-Arrows.)
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(By the way, the base campaign setting in D&D 5e is the Forgotten Realms, which also has the typical version of Gruumsh, but also has had two major groups of Orcs that broke free of his grasp: the Odontis and the Mountain Orcs of King Obould Many-Arrows.)
Two of many examples of both TSR and WotC going against absolutist alignment in canon. If it isn't even a thing for the setting in general, it shouldn't be a thing for NPCs and certainly not for PCs. Even aside from the moral arguments, there's not even a real "but that's just how it is" argument to make since evidently it isn't.
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Just because he's not called Gruumsh in other worlds doesn't mean that as a concept he doesn't exist. If these worlds are any where near as fleshed out as Greyhawk and Kalimar etc. There will be a reletively large number of gods whose names don't matter as much as the fact that all the portfolio elements are covered by someone; or a fewer number of gods with wider porfolio elements. i.e. There will be a god whose domain for all intents an purposes is or includes "Slaughter". This god might not be affiliated with Orcs in a particular campaign setting, but the setting must have someone who are the bad guys. If you don't have bad guys, you can't have good guys.
Is the RAW taking multiple settings into account during the descriptions or are the referencing a default setting such as faerun? I don't really care about how different all these other settings are that I've never been in. My concern is that the one or two long running settings that I do always play, don't fundamentally change on me. My top 3 settings are Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Kalimar. Orc's aren't an issue in Ravenloft, InKalimar they already got humanized Orcs in 3.5; I dug it up last night when looking to see if there were any settings that let you play as a full-blooded Orc. The backdrop of Kalimar in the first place though is a human-centric empire that persecutes everyone else, and where there are human groups who are for more evil and monstrous than your typical orcs.
Greyhawk was the standard setting of 3e and Forgotten Realms was the other main one almost everyone I knew used besides Greyhawk. I'm not sure what 5e is doing for it's prime material plance concept, they seem to be sharing it with multiple worlds, but I pretty much only use Greyhawk, Kalimar, and Ravenloft. In Greyhawk at least, Gruumsh is Gruumsh and he likes his Orcs to have an intelligence score of 6 (8-2) so they can be nearly mindless, unquestioning, obediant, thugs and villains, who can't understand that murdering and enslaving folk is wrong. - An Orc with an intelligence score of 13 (15-2) is likely smart enough to realize Gruumsh is an Explitive and his ways are wrong, and so leave the tribe and strike out on his own to become an adventurer.
No. Just, no. Sorry, I really don't mean to be rude, but I'm fed up with people talking about things that they know next-to-nothing about. You said yourself that you don't know much about Eberron (even mispelling it as Oberron, which is closer to the name of an Archfey than the name of the setting). Seriously, you don't know what you are talking about. If you want to know (by reading more about Eberron), buy books about it, watch videos on it, read its wiki, the creator's blog about it, etc.
Sorry, man, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you can't talk about it as if you did.
There is no Gruumsh figure in Eberron. None. Nada. The gods aren't even confirmed to exist in the world. It's up for debate amongst the fanbase in the real world and scholars (including the Dragons) in the setting. Even its creation myth is completely probable to just be a legend.
There is no Gruumsh in Eberron. The Orcs in Eberron are just as likely to be good/evil/any-other-alignment as humans, elves, dwarves, and any other race. There are Demon Overlords whose identity is "Slaughter", but they are not Gruumsh, did not create the Orcs or any other Humanoid Races, and there are basically no group of people (i.e. humanoids) in the setting that have a pre-determined alignment. It applies to Orcs, it applies to Drow, it applies to Kobolds, it applies to Gnolls, it applies to Duergar, it applies to Dragons, it applies to Giants, and it applies to Goblinoids in the setting. The closest things in the setting to groups of evil people (the Order of the Emerald Claw, the Path of Inspiration, the Cults of the Dragon Below) are religions whose entire purpose is to bring harm/domination to others, and membership in them is voluntary.
Even in Exandria, a world where Gruumsh exists much like he does in many other D&D worlds, still allows orcs to have free will. Yes, they're cursed to be more violent than other races by Gruumsh, but individuals and even whole cultures of Orcs can break free of his grasp and stop being evil. The Kryn Dynasty in Wildemount is made up of mostly Drow, Orcs, Goblinoids, and Gnolls, and while their creator deities/demon lords did try to keep them under their control using their godly might, the gods do not and cannot have infinite power, and thus can't keep absolute control of the races that they created (because if an adventuring party or another God can kill/imprision the God or an Avatar/Aspect of it, it's not Omnipotent, and thus cannot have complete, utter control of the races/peoples it created).
(By the way, the base campaign setting in D&D 5e is the Forgotten Realms, which also has the typical version of Gruumsh, but also has had two major groups of Orcs that broke free of his grasp: the Odontis and the Mountain Orcs of King Obould Many-Arrows.)
The Zakhara setting also did away with the "all Orcs are evil" trope, and this in 2nd edition. And Zakhara is also on Torril.
You're talking about the Uncanny Valley. Which, in short, states that something which appears almost-but-not-quite human stands a chance of being off-putting and eliciting feelings of revulsion. There are a number of postulations behind the existence of the Uncanny Valley, with 'dark reflection' being only one of them and not one I've heard before. Other explanations include the avoidance of disease or deformity, by causing those suffering from disfiguring such maladies to be shunned and thus harm the gene pool less, as well as several variations on Rejection Of 'Other'ness, i.e. rejection of something that intrudes or threatens one's concept of the human ideal or humanity's place in the world.
"Rejection of Otherness" can also, in different forms, be referred to as racism/sexism/creedism/whatever-ism. In point of fact, "Rejection of Otherness" is the core kernel of all such beliefs. "The 'Others' are not like us, therefore they are less than us." The Uncanny Valley deals with atavistic, animalistic gut rejection of such things, a reaction one cannot control but can, if required, learn to suppress.
Artistic depictions of orcs vary, but generally not by enough to place them in the realms of zombies, flesh golems, sahuagin, or other "Frankenstein's Monster/Black Lagoon"-esque creatures. They are also not described that way - orcs have always been a close analogue of humanity in that they are a living, breathing, breeding species with its own languages, cultures, and aspirations. Often as not those cultures and aspirations are sharply, violently opposed to humanity's, but they have always existed. Consigning an entire species of sapient, theoretically free-willed people to the status of Uncanny Valley subhuman monsters and thereby turning them into guilt-free murder dolls will never sit right with some people.
The disconnect here is that you believe people are deliberately choosing to 'humanize' orcs and other such species and are trying to figure out why they would do that and why they're trying to "make" you do it. First of all, nobody's making you do anything, as we've all told everybody eleven hundred thousand million billion times. Second of all...folks like Ophidian didn't wake up one day and decide "you know what? I'm gonna look at orcs differently!" They've always seen the humanity in orcs. They can't not see the humanity these nonhuman species, the fact that even though they're a different color and with different builds and occasionally come with impressive dentition, these people are still people. They've always been people. And other, real-life people treating them as guilt-free murder dolls is jarring, unpleasant, and reminds them entirely too much of the way real-life human beings, in the real world, ignore and disregard their own person-ness because they're not the same kind of person as the ones doing the ignoring.
Your beliefs and experiences are true to you. They are not universal. Please try to empathize and understand with the folks who cannot not see nonhuman species in D&D as being just as worthy of personhood as humans are. If you can say it's okay for a devil-blooded tiefling to be their own person, with their own beliefs and their own validity, despite their horrific* appearance, why can't the same be said for orcs?
Ah, that's the one, thank you!. ...The paragrapgh at the top of the link used the word verisimilitude again... but yeah, that's what I was thinking of.
The Orc images I'm most Familiar with, Krusk for 3e not withstanding are the LotR ones and the previous versions from the animated films. My first Orcs in youth were these ones:
On one hand, I would like to see what those singing ones would do with their time after the Dark Lord was vanquished, but OTOH if the Dark lord had yet to be vanquished, I don't know that it would be wise to give them the benefit of the doubt just before a battle scene.
The disconnect here is that you believe people are deliberately choosing to 'humanize' orcs and other such species and are trying to figure out why they would do that and why they're trying to "make" you do it.
Yes! That's it exactly! Thank you.
Ah, well, people keep saying they're not trying to 'make me' do it; but really, IMHO, if you make it the official RAW, then to at least some extent, I really do have to do it too.
If nothing else, other people begin to expect of me that I will, and feel put out whenever I try not to. Like with the example a few pages ago about a halfling Berserker. When I say "Halflings get a -2 to STR, and they say they need a 20 in Stregthn and I say then play a human or half-orc or dwarf, and they're all like "aww you suck! that's not fair ,etc). Ya know I have to eventually begrudgingly allow it to happen.
If the RAW didn't do that and kept it clear and concise and well known, that halflings just aren't actually that strong, rather they are quick instead. The player would not automatically expect or feel entitled to have a max strength halfling.
And other, real-life people treating them as guilt-free murder dolls is jarring, unpleasant, and reminds them entirely too much of the way real-life human beings, in the real world, ignore and disregard their own person-ness because they're not the same kind of person as the ones doing the ignoring.
Your beliefs and experiences are true to you. They are not universal. Please try to empathize and understand with the folks who cannot not see nonhuman species in D&D as being just as worthy of personhood as humans are. If you can say it's okay for a devil-blooded tiefling to be their own person, with their own beliefs and their own validity, despite their horrific* appearance, why can't the same be said for orcs?
The drawing comparisons to real life is also what we mean. It's an inverse of the thing I'm doing where they see an image reminisent of IRL experiences and so are rejecting that image despite author intentions. Gary didn't sit down one day and decide to base Orcs on the victorian perception of BIPOC people. Tolkien didn't either did he? Most early edition creatures I heard/thought came straight from actual myths and folklore. Drow for example are based on Kunal Trow. There is no genuine association with the experiences of IRL human beings to draw parrelels to. The similarities are an illusion.
Lorewise?: Orcs aren't evil because they look different or scary. Orcs are evil becuase their god designed them to be evil. Even if they looked angelic, they'd still be evil. An orc with 20 CHA is still evil. Unless there is a specific reason that Orc somehow was able to avoid the conditioning of their god, it was built with the internal architecture of evilness.
Tieflings on the other hand, aren't a product of special creation for a specific purpose, are they? Tiefligs are a bit new to the lore for me, but as I understand it they and assimars are like Sorcer Bloodlines but taken to the point of being a race. They aren't half-outsiders, but they are nevertheless descended from outsider and human pairings. No supernatural entity is specifically going out of its way to impede their intelectual development or to restrict their free-agency.
It's Gruumsh's fault that Orcs are evil. Tieflings have no one making them evil by default. They do have fiendish blood, but that's not necessarily enough to do it. You need a Will imposing itself over you to rob you of your free-agency to 'make you evil by default; or good by default as the case may be. Ironically, sometimes 'good' Outsiders might try to impose their will over mortal beings too. Rejection of the Gift - YouTube
From the meta perspectve, tieflings were not designed to be evil, or to be used in the capacity of villain, then subsequently adapted otherwise. They were designed in the first pace to be a PC race affilated with the warlock class. Orcs OTOH were designed to be evil and to be used as villanous henchmen, by the TSR development team/Gary?, no?
Again, my side doesn't necesarily get upset when new species are introduced to be or not be evil, or to fill a new pc or npc role; i.e goliaths for example; we mostly get upset when older content gets retconned; particulary when it's not for an in-universe reason, but specifically because conclusions are being drawn about real world parrallels that are simply false, and the suits in charge of the company think they can make more money by pretending those parrelels are real and moving to fix them.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
And I'm not talking about "these things exist in the world so they're depicted in the game for the sake of completeness." I'm talking about "these worldviews are in no small way baked into the core assumptions of the game, for various reasons, and these aspects are largely unquestioned, even supported and favored over their alternatives." It's also incredible, as anyone who's played a good game of it can tell you, so you can see why people want to salvage it as much as possible. Thus, the conundrum.
At one point in this thread, in the "what's wrong with saying one race is smarter on average than another anyway?" tangent, I started to type this whole rant about how having One True Number for intelligence is bad from the jump, with links to, like, the wiki pages for Howard Gardner and the Bell Curve and stuff, and I just scrapped it as not worth the effort
It's the next step in the conversation. Whether we get there now, or later, we're going there. I would be pretty proud of this hobby community if we were at the forefront of applying this kind of analysis to our media, rather than dragged along kicking and screaming.
(I'm so relieved to hear that there's even one other person using this lens at the moment.)
No. Just, no. Sorry, I really don't mean to be rude, but I'm fed up with people talking about things that they know next-to-nothing about. You said yourself that you don't know much about Eberron (even mispelling it as Oberron, which is closer to the name of an Archfey than the name of the setting). Seriously, you don't know what you are talking about. If you want to know (by reading more about Eberron), buy books about it, watch videos on it, read its wiki, the creator's blog about it, etc.
That's actually a spelling error. I know Ebberon is spelled with an "e" and Oberron and Titanya are the Lords of Avalon.
Sorry, man, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you can't talk about it as if you did. There is no Gruumsh figure in Eberron. None. Nada. The gods aren't even confirmed to exist in the world. It's up for debate amongst the fanbase in the real world and scholars (including the Dragons) in the setting. Even its creation myth is completely probable to just be a legend. There is no Gruumsh in Eberron. The Orcs in Eberron are just as likely to be good/evil/any-other-alignment as humans, elves, dwarves, and any other race.
If it's inconclusive in Eberon whether or not the gods are even there ...weren't they dragons?; how does one know it isn't the standard great wheel pantheon that is these hidden gods and they are distant in Eberron because Ebberon is 'further away' from the hub/prime material plane which is apparently Faerun.
Well, Ducky for the Orcs of Ebberron, but as with the the Drow, I don't know that these Orcs are actually native to Ebberron and not decended from extraplanar travelers. Eitherway, when asked why Orcs are evil, I answer Gruumsh. If you say "but Gruumsh isn't here; and I ask, are Orcs evil there? -and you say, no. Well there you go. Orcs are evil here (Faerun/Oerth) because this is where Guumsh is, and Gruumsh is why Orcs are evil. If you want to free the Orcs here from their bonds of evilness, let's make an official cannon capaign where we kill Gruumsh, and reforge the Mantle of Slaughter into something else.
There are Demon Overlords whose identity is "Slaughter", but they are not Gruumsh, did not create the Orcs or any other Humanoid Races, and there are basically no group of people (i.e. humanoids) in the setting that have a pre-determined alignment. It applies to Orcs, it applies to Drow, it applies to Kobolds, it applies to Gnolls, it applies to Duergar, it applies to Dragons, it applies to Giants, and it applies to Goblinoids in the setting. The closest things in the setting to groups of evil people (the Order of the Emerald Claw, the Path of Inspiration, the Cults of the Dragon Below) are religions whose entire purpose is to bring harm/domination to others, and membership in them is voluntary.
Even in Exandria, a world where Gruumsh exists much like he does in many other D&D worlds, still allows orcs to have free will. Yes, they're cursed to be more violent than other races by Gruumsh, but individuals and even whole cultures of Orcs can break free of his grasp and stop being evil. The Kryn Dynasty in Wildemount is made up of mostly Drow, Orcs, Goblinoids, and Gnolls, and while their creator deities/demon lords did try to keep them under their control using their godly might, the gods do not and cannot have infinite power, and thus can't keep absolute control of the races that they created (because if an adventuring party or another God can kill/imprision the God or an Avatar/Aspect of it, it's not Omnipotent, and thus cannot have complete, utter control of the races/peoples it created).
What are you trying to propose about Orcs outside of Ebberron and in the standard planes? I don't get if you are trying to tell me that Ebberron Orcs and others such as Exandria should be a subtype; or are you trying to say, because these Orcs arn't evil, neither are mine. I don't care if your Orcs aren't evil: my Orcs definitely are.
The important thing is that people who think the evil comes from biology or more specifically think the evil isn't real because the idea that evil can come from biology isn't real and they think those who say orcs are evil are saying so because they think the evil comes from biology; are wrong about that. The evil is real; and it comes, as it always has; from an extaraplnar source; from the creator of the orcs.
(By the way, the base campaign setting in D&D 5e is the Forgotten Realms, which also has the typical version of Gruumsh, but also has had two major groups of Orcs that broke free of his grasp: the Odontis and the Mountain Orcs of King Obould Many-Arrows.)
When in the lore did this happen and is their lore behind how it happened? I'm not going to take it as cannon until I'm sure it actually is.
The Zakhara setting also did away with the "all Orcs are evil" trope, and this in 2nd edition. And Zakhara is also on Torril.
Ditto.
and I looked this up last night; Kalimar also did away with the all 'Orcs are evil' back in 3.5 and made Orcs playable there too. Kalimar is another world where as far as I can tell, there is no Gruumsh either. There are worse gods then Gruumsh though and they use humans as there agents rather than Orcs. There is an entire country called the Theocracy of Slen that is a servant to a god of slavery whose clerics roam about capturing folk and breaking their spirits and putting them to work for the theocracy.
Sorry, man, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you can't talk about it as if you did. There is no Gruumsh figure in Eberron. None. Nada. The gods aren't even confirmed to exist in the world. It's up for debate amongst the fanbase in the real world and scholars (including the Dragons) in the setting. Even its creation myth is completely probable to just be a legend. There is no Gruumsh in Eberron. The Orcs in Eberron are just as likely to be good/evil/any-other-alignment as humans, elves, dwarves, and any other race.
If it's inconclusive in Eberon whether or not the gods are even there ...weren't they dragons?; how does one know it isn't the standard great wheel pantheon that is these hidden gods and they are distant in Eberron because Ebberon is 'further away' from the hub/prime material plane which is apparently Faerun.
It's . . . complicated. Seriously, it would be easier for everyone if you just went and read the lore for Eberron. Eberron: Rising from the Last War did an amazing job at explaining the setting. For a simplified rundown, see the spoiler below:
The Creation Myth of Eberron involves 3 Dragons, called the Progenitor Dragons, that supposedly created the world of Eberron and the 13 Planes of Existence that "orbit" around it. The Progenitor Dragons are Khyber (the Evil Queen, Mother of Demons), Eberron (kinda like Mother Nature), and Siberys (the father of celestials, creator of the Draconic Prophecy, and now shattered into a crystalline ring around the planet).
Long story short, Khyber killed Siberys (who became the Ring of Siberys, the ring of Siberys Dragonshards that orbits the planet), and Eberron embraced Khyber to trap her and keep her from destroying the rest of the Multiverse. This formed the Planet of Eberron, with Eberron being the physical world and Khyber being the Underdark, which is filled with a bunch of Demiplanes of Aberrations and Fiends.
However, Siberys, Eberron, and Khyber aren't really worshipped by most of the cultures of the world of Eberron. Instead, the Dark Six and Sovereign Host most commonly are, as well as the Silver Flame (magical force that imprisons the demons in Khyber, created by a sacrifice of couatls to protect the world from being destroyed by them), and a few other non-Progenitor examples (Path of Inspiration, Cults of the Dragon Below, the Blood of Vol, etc). The Dark Six and Sovereign Host are occasionally represented as dragons (most commonly by the Dragons of Argonnessen, the continent filled with dragons), but may or may not actually exist.
Well, Ducky for the Orcs of Ebberron, but as with the the Drow, I don't know that these Orcs are actually native to Ebberron and not decended from extraplanar travelers. Eitherway, when asked why Orcs are evil, I answer Gruumsh. If you say "but Gruumsh isn't here; and I ask, are Orcs evil there? -and you say, no. Well there you go. Orcs are evil here (Faerun/Oerth) because this is where Guumsh is, and Gruumsh is why Orcs are evil. If you want to free the Orcs here from their bonds of evilness, let's make an official cannon capaign where we kill Gruumsh, and reforge the Mantle of Slaughter into something else.
My point was that Gruumsh does not exist in most of the world of the D&D Multiverse, including some worlds where Orcs do exist, and even in the ones where he absolutely does exist, he doesn't have complete sway over the Orcs cultures and minds.
If you want to kill Gruumsh and free the Orcs of their enslavement by him in your campaign, feel free to do so. That sounds like a fun campaign. However, Gruumsh is not Omnipresent in the D&D Multiverse, and neither is he Omnipotent in the worlds that he does exist in. The people arguing for removing base alignments and similar features from Orcs, Drow, and similar races in D&D 5e's ruleset use Eberron, Exandria, Ravnica, and similar examples as reasons to not have base alignments for races, because while they might be evil in one world, they're not in every world. There's no reason to list the base alignment for Orcs in an official D&D 5e product when there are plenty of worlds (official and homebrew) that don't have automatically evil orcs.
There are Demon Overlords whose identity is "Slaughter", but they are not Gruumsh, did not create the Orcs or any other Humanoid Races, and there are basically no group of people (i.e. humanoids) in the setting that have a pre-determined alignment. It applies to Orcs, it applies to Drow, it applies to Kobolds, it applies to Gnolls, it applies to Duergar, it applies to Dragons, it applies to Giants, and it applies to Goblinoids in the setting. The closest things in the setting to groups of evil people (the Order of the Emerald Claw, the Path of Inspiration, the Cults of the Dragon Below) are religions whose entire purpose is to bring harm/domination to others, and membership in them is voluntary.
Even in Exandria, a world where Gruumsh exists much like he does in many other D&D worlds, still allows orcs to have free will. Yes, they're cursed to be more violent than other races by Gruumsh, but individuals and even whole cultures of Orcs can break free of his grasp and stop being evil. The Kryn Dynasty in Wildemount is made up of mostly Drow, Orcs, Goblinoids, and Gnolls, and while their creator deities/demon lords did try to keep them under their control using their godly might, the gods do not and cannot have infinite power, and thus can't keep absolute control of the races that they created (because if an adventuring party or another God can kill/imprision the God or an Avatar/Aspect of it, it's not Omnipotent, and thus cannot have complete, utter control of the races/peoples it created).
What are you trying to propose about Orcs outside of Ebberron and in the standard planes? I don't get if you are trying to tell me that Ebberron Orcs and others such as Exandria should be a subtype; or are you trying to say, because these Orcs , arn't evil, neither are mine. I don't care if your Orcs aren't evil: my Orcs definitely are.
No, I'm saying that the base game's orcs shouldn't have a listed alignment because they are not the rule for the D&D Multiverse. They're just one example. If other examples exist, don't include one world's example as the "assumed" or "base" example. Keep your Orcs evil all you like, just don't try to force your world's orcs into my games.
The important thing is that people who think the evil comes from biology or more specifically think the evil isn't real because the idea that evil can come from biology isn't real and they think those who say orcs are evil are saying so because they think the evil comes from biology; are wrong about that. The evil is real; and it comes, as it always has; from an extaraplnar source; from the creator of the orcs.
If biology is what makes a creature evil, why have them be Humanoids in the first place? Have them be Monstrosities, or Fiends, or Aberrations (most orcs in the Forgotten Realms are invaders from another world, after all), or even Plants (Fungus subtype) if they're like the Orks from WH4k. Also, if they are Humanoids and are just mind-controlled/cursed by their creator to have evil tendencies, that makes it an evil act to kill them, because they're innocent and the real evil is the person/god (Gruumsh) that enslaved them to act in that manner.
(By the way, the base campaign setting in D&D 5e is the Forgotten Realms, which also has the typical version of Gruumsh, but also has had two major groups of Orcs that broke free of his grasp: the Odontis and the Mountain Orcs of King Obould Many-Arrows.)
When in the lore did this happen and is their lore behind how it happened? I'm not going to take it as cannon until I'm sure it actually is.
D&D 2e for the Odonti Orcs (over 25 years ago), and D&D 4e for the Kingdom of Many-Arrows (13 years ago).
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
We are very clearly having two different conversations at this point, so I'll just re-state what I said originally
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
I am pretty sure no one here is saying you are playing D&D wrong. Practically no one outside of your table cares how you play, not even Wizards. Please do not put words in other's mouths and make a strawman out of them. I am tired of people twisting others' words and misrepresenting their views. There are no shortage of villainous people in D&D. No one is stopping you from incorporating dumbass orcs, [REDACTED], or whatever else you want into your game. Hell, I incorporate a bunch of innuendos in my game that would probably make that nude succubus from 1e Monster Manual blush. Wizards wants to make the game more inclusive and available to a wider audience, so they are removing elements from their publications that would get in the way of that goal, but you can always homebrew those elements back into your game if you want.
I do not give a damn about the ESRB, and if I ever have kids and they want to play Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, I will let them. Similarly, if my kids want to explore controversial themes and their darkest fantasies in D&D, I would not mind either; I much rather be the first one to find out and guide them through it than having that spring up at someone else's table outside of my supervision. HOWEVER, not every person is like me, and most Americans are going to flip out if they find out their children are playing FATAL or Lamentations of the Flame Princess. By the same token, many Americans are uncomfortable with certain racial depictions and prejudices, and seeing similar things in D&D would turn them off from the hobby. D&D and TTRPGs in general are already climbing an extremely steep hill in getting people to play and stay with the hobby, especially in comparison to other more flashy hobbies. Sitting around playing pretend is not exactly what most people find fun, and Wizards does not need to turn off people who might find it fun by traumatizing them with racial depictions.
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I don't care if the ASIs are fixed or variable. However, I ask myself, are there really people who think one thing or another it's negative? I do not mean on a mechanical level, if not on an ideological level.
I imagine that there will be, and that they will have their reasons. But it really surprises me. Why embitter one's existence in one way or another?
You can use people as villains. Literally no one is stopping you. As has been said over and over, you can even keep using orcs as villains! But I think it's worth doing some introspection and asking yourself why it's so important to you that the villainous nature of the enemies you face be based on their race rather than the choices they've made.
They don't look like people. At least not to any greater extent than Frankensteins Monster or the creature from the black Lagoon do. I though this was a purposeful thing in art about monsters too, no? Wasn't there some research done or something that said Monsters who look similar to people are scarier than ones that don't because psycologically, the audiance might see the somewhat person shaped monster as a dark reflection of something inside of themselves, and that espect of familiarity is more unerving than a completely alien image?
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Ok I'm finding talking about this with you to be low key distressing, most likely not on purpose, so don't worry I'm not blaming you, but I may back out of this conversation and let other people educate you a bit more.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
You're talking about the Uncanny Valley. Which, in short, states that something which appears almost-but-not-quite human stands a chance of being off-putting and eliciting feelings of revulsion. There are a number of postulations behind the existence of the Uncanny Valley, with 'dark reflection' being only one of them and not one I've heard before. Other explanations include the avoidance of disease or deformity, by causing those suffering from disfiguring such maladies to be shunned and thus harm the gene pool less, as well as several variations on Rejection Of 'Other'ness, i.e. rejection of something that intrudes or threatens one's concept of the human ideal or humanity's place in the world.
"Rejection of Otherness" can also, in different forms, be referred to as racism/sexism/creedism/whatever-ism. In point of fact, "Rejection of Otherness" is the core kernel of all such beliefs. "The 'Others' are not like us, therefore they are less than us." The Uncanny Valley deals with atavistic, animalistic gut rejection of such things, a reaction one cannot control but can, if required, learn to suppress.
Artistic depictions of orcs vary, but generally not by enough to place them in the realms of zombies, flesh golems, sahuagin, or other "Frankenstein's Monster/Black Lagoon"-esque creatures. They are also not described that way - orcs have always been a close analogue of humanity in that they are a living, breathing, breeding species with its own languages, cultures, and aspirations. Often as not those cultures and aspirations are sharply, violently opposed to humanity's, but they have always existed. Consigning an entire species of sapient, theoretically free-willed people to the status of Uncanny Valley subhuman monsters and thereby turning them into guilt-free murder dolls will never sit right with some people.
The disconnect here is that you believe people are deliberately choosing to 'humanize' orcs and other such species and are trying to figure out why they would do that and why they're trying to "make" you do it. First of all, nobody's making you do anything, as we've all told everybody eleven hundred thousand million billion times. Second of all...folks like Ophidian didn't wake up one day and decide "you know what? I'm gonna look at orcs differently!" They've always seen the humanity in orcs. They can't not see the humanity these nonhuman species, the fact that even though they're a different color and with different builds and occasionally come with impressive dentition, these people are still people. They've always been people. And other, real-life people treating them as guilt-free murder dolls is jarring, unpleasant, and reminds them entirely too much of the way real-life human beings, in the real world, ignore and disregard their own person-ness because they're not the same kind of person as the ones doing the ignoring.
Your beliefs and experiences are true to you. They are not universal. Please try to empathize and understand with the folks who cannot not see nonhuman species in D&D as being just as worthy of personhood as humans are. If you can say it's okay for a devil-blooded tiefling to be their own person, with their own beliefs and their own validity, despite their horrific* appearance, why can't the same be said for orcs?
Please do not contact or message me.
I get what you mean. Take some time off the convo and maybe you’ll feel better.
Tiny was vising his mother.
He'd brought her some loot to try and bargain for the release of a few hostages from the village. Nods, hence the name. It wasn't the villages who named him that.
How were the PC's to know? Tiny looks like any other Orc (he's only tiny by Orc standards), he smells like any other Orc, he carries some treasure like any other Orc, He speaks like any other orc, he's in the cave with all the other Orcs, and inspite of himself he doesn't want to see his family slaughtered and would likely be participating in the fight to defend their lives, vs just trying to sit it out.
Yes, well notwithstanding it being a move worthy of Ceasars close friend Biggus Dicus, it's still an entirely trope appropriate move to use for an adventure hook. Didn't Herculese accidentially kill his friend wife once and had to atone for it; didn't Cu Cullen kill his wifes father and firends favorite hound; didn't Angel the Joss Whedon character accidentially kill that demon one time because that's usually what he has to do when Cordillia get's a vision about a Demon; but that time his rush to judgement resulted in his killing a guardian of a pregnant woman whose child had a destiny of mesianic proportions. The hero(s) having to quest to correct a mistake is a known aspect of these kinds of stories. In this case the PC's upon realizing they accidentially killed a local folk hero, might have to journey with his body to the nearest temple of so and so to get him resurected, and must somehow convince the cleric that this is a fine fellow worthy of her services in spite of appearances; even though orcs have often raided that temple too. Then if and when Tiny is successfully revived, he might have a message for the PC's from the god of that temple giving them their next plot hook in the campaign. -
Not that any of this actually matters, the point of the example wasnt how great a plot hook it could be, it was that players shouldn't have to worry that the creatures they are slaying are more than they appear to be unless the DM has set it up that way.
Perhaps, but in this case I'm talking about me as a DM and using the RAW and an old module Orc encounter. I'm saying if I give my players a combat encounter, I want them to feel comfortable resolving it and not have to worry about it secretly being a test of their abilities to Ghandi there way through an adventure. If I intended to use a character like Tiny as a plothook, I would drop hints in advance; though the players might not know that about me; but I don't want them expecting or looking for one or more 'Tiny's' in every enounter.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
I've already said, there are reasons to not want to use people as villains. When villains are people, a lawful and/or good party shouldn't be killing them. They should be taking them back to the local constabulary for a fair trial and if convicted, allowing the local athorities to do the executing if such is what the sentance is.
I don't want to convey a sentiment that it is okay for the heroes to kill people.
It is however definetly okay for the heroes to slay monsters.
No, but that is an incorrect application of the term race IMHO. That's what we mean by such things creeping into this game that don't belong.
Orcs, aren't meant to have that kind of free agency to actually be able to make their own choices and decisions, and be judged as individuals etc. -hence INT(6) and apparently CHA(6) too? When you are fighting Orcs, you are not actually fighting Orcs, you are fighting Gruumsh. Orcs are the weapon that Gruumsh is weilding against you. They are a living weapon, but still that is their purpose for which they were created: to be an extiension of the will of Gruumsh, to conquor and subjugate, onto the material plane. Gruumsh literally created them for that specific function and basically programmed it into them.
The perception of trying to anthropomorphize/humanize/empathize as though you were talking about a race of human beings with free will and independent thought and not a creation of an evil god compelled to it's bidding is where things go awry.
Free-agency is a disction between people and things. If you give a creature free-agency, then it's become a person and we shouldn't even be saying "it". That is not a fate that should be worthy of every monster in the book and anyone with more than 2 points of INT. Doing so takes away from being in a world full of monsters; that are they're for you to hack your way through. I don't want to hack my way through bunches of people. Making monsters into people changes the nature of gameplay as it either requires you to use negotiation more, and Sword&Sorcery less; or it requires you to forgoe being the classically defined hero/goodguy/champion and basically makes you a murder-hobo.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Frankly, the idea of just killing stuff for fun and not thinking about the ramifications, and not wanting to think about them, is problematic. It just is. We've all come to expect it at this point, and it's very entrenched in the genre, but nothing in this universe is apolitical, especially not the status quo.
Does it make you a bad person if you still enjoy these things? No. Does it mean the writers of the game are or were bad people? Also no. Let's not even start on that.
Is D&D made better by forcing the very monsters you have to fight as part of the core gameplay loop to be fully relatable persons? No, probably not, because it's designed from the ground up to be problematic. It's fundamental -- it's in the fundaments. The game is built on a foundation of bad politics. You've got sexism, eugenics, mental health stigma, cultural appropriation, racial stereotyping, imperialism, the works. And I'm not talking about "these things exist in the world so they're depicted in the game for the sake of completeness." I'm talking about "these worldviews are in no small way baked into the core assumptions of the game, for various reasons, and these aspects are largely unquestioned, even supported and favored over their alternatives." It's also incredible, as anyone who's played a good game of it can tell you, so you can see why people want to salvage it as much as possible. Thus, the conundrum.
This conversation makes me so tired because it's like watching the Avengers infighting for weeks while Loki continues to do whatever he wants with the Tesseract. I don't know if that analogy works but I'm mentally exhausted. And I'm barely even contributing! I can't even imagine how much useful energy is being sucked out of some of you by this illusory culture war. You could build an arc reactor with all that. (Yeah, I think I'm losing it.)
They never do. Creatures are never more than they appear unless the DM has set it up that way. That's what the DM does - set up the environment for the PCs to interact with.
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At one point in this thread, in the "what's wrong with saying one race is smarter on average than another anyway?" tangent, I started to type this whole rant about how having One True Number for intelligence is bad from the jump, with links to, like, the wiki pages for Howard Gardner and the Bell Curve and stuff, and I just scrapped it as not worth the effort
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
No. Just, no. Sorry, I really don't mean to be rude, but I'm fed up with people talking about things that they know next-to-nothing about. You said yourself that you don't know much about Eberron (even mispelling it as Oberron, which is closer to the name of an Archfey than the name of the setting). Seriously, you don't know what you are talking about. If you want to know (by reading more about Eberron), buy books about it, watch videos on it, read its wiki, the creator's blog about it, etc.
Sorry, man, but if you don't know what you're talking about, you can't talk about it as if you did.
There is no Gruumsh figure in Eberron. None. Nada. The gods aren't even confirmed to exist in the world. It's up for debate amongst the fanbase in the real world and scholars (including the Dragons) in the setting. Even its creation myth is completely probable to just be a legend.
There is no Gruumsh in Eberron. The Orcs in Eberron are just as likely to be good/evil/any-other-alignment as humans, elves, dwarves, and any other race. There are Demon Overlords whose identity is "Slaughter", but they are not Gruumsh, did not create the Orcs or any other Humanoid Races, and there are basically no group of people (i.e. humanoids) in the setting that have a pre-determined alignment. It applies to Orcs, it applies to Drow, it applies to Kobolds, it applies to Gnolls, it applies to Duergar, it applies to Dragons, it applies to Giants, and it applies to Goblinoids in the setting. The closest things in the setting to groups of evil people (the Order of the Emerald Claw, the Path of Inspiration, the Cults of the Dragon Below) are religions whose entire purpose is to bring harm/domination to others, and membership in them is voluntary.
Even in Exandria, a world where Gruumsh exists much like he does in many other D&D worlds, still allows orcs to have free will. Yes, they're cursed to be more violent than other races by Gruumsh, but individuals and even whole cultures of Orcs can break free of his grasp and stop being evil. The Kryn Dynasty in Wildemount is made up of mostly Drow, Orcs, Goblinoids, and Gnolls, and while their creator deities/demon lords did try to keep them under their control using their godly might, the gods do not and cannot have infinite power, and thus can't keep absolute control of the races that they created (because if an adventuring party or another God can kill/imprision the God or an Avatar/Aspect of it, it's not Omnipotent, and thus cannot have complete, utter control of the races/peoples it created).
(By the way, the base campaign setting in D&D 5e is the Forgotten Realms, which also has the typical version of Gruumsh, but also has had two major groups of Orcs that broke free of his grasp: the Odontis and the Mountain Orcs of King Obould Many-Arrows.)
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Two of many examples of both TSR and WotC going against absolutist alignment in canon. If it isn't even a thing for the setting in general, it shouldn't be a thing for NPCs and certainly not for PCs. Even aside from the moral arguments, there's not even a real "but that's just how it is" argument to make since evidently it isn't.
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The Zakhara setting also did away with the "all Orcs are evil" trope, and this in 2nd edition. And Zakhara is also on Torril.
Ah, that's the one, thank you!. ...The paragrapgh at the top of the link used the word verisimilitude again... but yeah, that's what I was thinking of.
The Orc images I'm most Familiar with, Krusk for 3e not withstanding are the LotR ones and the previous versions from the animated films. My first Orcs in youth were these ones:
Then: these ones.
On one hand, I would like to see what those singing ones would do with their time after the Dark Lord was vanquished, but OTOH if the Dark lord had yet to be vanquished, I don't know that it would be wise to give them the benefit of the doubt just before a battle scene.
Yes! That's it exactly! Thank you.
Ah, well, people keep saying they're not trying to 'make me' do it; but really, IMHO, if you make it the official RAW, then to at least some extent, I really do have to do it too.
If nothing else, other people begin to expect of me that I will, and feel put out whenever I try not to. Like with the example a few pages ago about a halfling Berserker. When I say "Halflings get a -2 to STR, and they say they need a 20 in Stregthn and I say then play a human or half-orc or dwarf, and they're all like "aww you suck! that's not fair ,etc). Ya know I have to eventually begrudgingly allow it to happen.
If the RAW didn't do that and kept it clear and concise and well known, that halflings just aren't actually that strong, rather they are quick instead. The player would not automatically expect or feel entitled to have a max strength halfling.
The drawing comparisons to real life is also what we mean. It's an inverse of the thing I'm doing where they see an image reminisent of IRL experiences and so are rejecting that image despite author intentions. Gary didn't sit down one day and decide to base Orcs on the victorian perception of BIPOC people. Tolkien didn't either did he? Most early edition creatures I heard/thought came straight from actual myths and folklore. Drow for example are based on Kunal Trow. There is no genuine association with the experiences of IRL human beings to draw parrelels to. The similarities are an illusion.
Lorewise?: Orcs aren't evil because they look different or scary. Orcs are evil becuase their god designed them to be evil. Even if they looked angelic, they'd still be evil. An orc with 20 CHA is still evil. Unless there is a specific reason that Orc somehow was able to avoid the conditioning of their god, it was built with the internal architecture of evilness.
Tieflings on the other hand, aren't a product of special creation for a specific purpose, are they? Tiefligs are a bit new to the lore for me, but as I understand it they and assimars are like Sorcer Bloodlines but taken to the point of being a race. They aren't half-outsiders, but they are nevertheless descended from outsider and human pairings. No supernatural entity is specifically going out of its way to impede their intelectual development or to restrict their free-agency.
It's Gruumsh's fault that Orcs are evil. Tieflings have no one making them evil by default. They do have fiendish blood, but that's not necessarily enough to do it. You need a Will imposing itself over you to rob you of your free-agency to 'make you evil by default; or good by default as the case may be. Ironically, sometimes 'good' Outsiders might try to impose their will over mortal beings too. Rejection of the Gift - YouTube
From the meta perspectve, tieflings were not designed to be evil, or to be used in the capacity of villain, then subsequently adapted otherwise. They were designed in the first pace to be a PC race affilated with the warlock class. Orcs OTOH were designed to be evil and to be used as villanous henchmen, by the TSR development team/Gary?, no?
Again, my side doesn't necesarily get upset when new species are introduced to be or not be evil, or to fill a new pc or npc role; i.e goliaths for example; we mostly get upset when older content gets retconned; particulary when it's not for an in-universe reason, but specifically because conclusions are being drawn about real world parrallels that are simply false, and the suits in charge of the company think they can make more money by pretending those parrelels are real and moving to fix them.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
It's the next step in the conversation. Whether we get there now, or later, we're going there. I would be pretty proud of this hobby community if we were at the forefront of applying this kind of analysis to our media, rather than dragged along kicking and screaming.
(I'm so relieved to hear that there's even one other person using this lens at the moment.)
That's actually a spelling error. I know Ebberon is spelled with an "e" and Oberron and Titanya are the Lords of Avalon.
If it's inconclusive in Eberon whether or not the gods are even there ...weren't they dragons?; how does one know it isn't the standard great wheel pantheon that is these hidden gods and they are distant in Eberron because Ebberon is 'further away' from the hub/prime material plane which is apparently Faerun.
Well, Ducky for the Orcs of Ebberron, but as with the the Drow, I don't know that these Orcs are actually native to Ebberron and not decended from extraplanar travelers. Eitherway, when asked why Orcs are evil, I answer Gruumsh. If you say "but Gruumsh isn't here; and I ask, are Orcs evil there? -and you say, no. Well there you go. Orcs are evil here (Faerun/Oerth) because this is where Guumsh is, and Gruumsh is why Orcs are evil. If you want to free the Orcs here from their bonds of evilness, let's make an official cannon capaign where we kill Gruumsh, and reforge the Mantle of Slaughter into something else.
What are you trying to propose about Orcs outside of Ebberron and in the standard planes? I don't get if you are trying to tell me that Ebberron Orcs and others such as Exandria should be a subtype; or are you trying to say, because these Orcs arn't evil, neither are mine. I don't care if your Orcs aren't evil: my Orcs definitely are.
The important thing is that people who think the evil comes from biology or more specifically think the evil isn't real because the idea that evil can come from biology isn't real and they think those who say orcs are evil are saying so because they think the evil comes from biology; are wrong about that. The evil is real; and it comes, as it always has; from an extaraplnar source; from the creator of the orcs.
When in the lore did this happen and is their lore behind how it happened? I'm not going to take it as cannon until I'm sure it actually is.
Ditto.
and I looked this up last night; Kalimar also did away with the all 'Orcs are evil' back in 3.5 and made Orcs playable there too. Kalimar is another world where as far as I can tell, there is no Gruumsh either. There are worse gods then Gruumsh though and they use humans as there agents rather than Orcs. There is an entire country called the Theocracy of Slen that is a servant to a god of slavery whose clerics roam about capturing folk and breaking their spirits and putting them to work for the theocracy.
Evil Humans are the scariest of all monsters ;-|
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
It's . . . complicated. Seriously, it would be easier for everyone if you just went and read the lore for Eberron. Eberron: Rising from the Last War did an amazing job at explaining the setting. For a simplified rundown, see the spoiler below:
The Creation Myth of Eberron involves 3 Dragons, called the Progenitor Dragons, that supposedly created the world of Eberron and the 13 Planes of Existence that "orbit" around it. The Progenitor Dragons are Khyber (the Evil Queen, Mother of Demons), Eberron (kinda like Mother Nature), and Siberys (the father of celestials, creator of the Draconic Prophecy, and now shattered into a crystalline ring around the planet).
Long story short, Khyber killed Siberys (who became the Ring of Siberys, the ring of Siberys Dragonshards that orbits the planet), and Eberron embraced Khyber to trap her and keep her from destroying the rest of the Multiverse. This formed the Planet of Eberron, with Eberron being the physical world and Khyber being the Underdark, which is filled with a bunch of Demiplanes of Aberrations and Fiends.
However, Siberys, Eberron, and Khyber aren't really worshipped by most of the cultures of the world of Eberron. Instead, the Dark Six and Sovereign Host most commonly are, as well as the Silver Flame (magical force that imprisons the demons in Khyber, created by a sacrifice of couatls to protect the world from being destroyed by them), and a few other non-Progenitor examples (Path of Inspiration, Cults of the Dragon Below, the Blood of Vol, etc). The Dark Six and Sovereign Host are occasionally represented as dragons (most commonly by the Dragons of Argonnessen, the continent filled with dragons), but may or may not actually exist.
My point was that Gruumsh does not exist in most of the world of the D&D Multiverse, including some worlds where Orcs do exist, and even in the ones where he absolutely does exist, he doesn't have complete sway over the Orcs cultures and minds.
If you want to kill Gruumsh and free the Orcs of their enslavement by him in your campaign, feel free to do so. That sounds like a fun campaign. However, Gruumsh is not Omnipresent in the D&D Multiverse, and neither is he Omnipotent in the worlds that he does exist in. The people arguing for removing base alignments and similar features from Orcs, Drow, and similar races in D&D 5e's ruleset use Eberron, Exandria, Ravnica, and similar examples as reasons to not have base alignments for races, because while they might be evil in one world, they're not in every world. There's no reason to list the base alignment for Orcs in an official D&D 5e product when there are plenty of worlds (official and homebrew) that don't have automatically evil orcs.
No, I'm saying that the base game's orcs shouldn't have a listed alignment because they are not the rule for the D&D Multiverse. They're just one example. If other examples exist, don't include one world's example as the "assumed" or "base" example. Keep your Orcs evil all you like, just don't try to force your world's orcs into my games.
If biology is what makes a creature evil, why have them be Humanoids in the first place? Have them be Monstrosities, or Fiends, or Aberrations (most orcs in the Forgotten Realms are invaders from another world, after all), or even Plants (Fungus subtype) if they're like the Orks from WH4k. Also, if they are Humanoids and are just mind-controlled/cursed by their creator to have evil tendencies, that makes it an evil act to kill them, because they're innocent and the real evil is the person/god (Gruumsh) that enslaved them to act in that manner.
D&D 2e for the Odonti Orcs (over 25 years ago), and D&D 4e for the Kingdom of Many-Arrows (13 years ago).
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