Making one term to cover Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws is going to let me stop having to type "Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws" and that will be helpful for WOTC from a logistical perspective. Do a search for ... I think the order it comes in is, "an ability check, a saving throw, or an attack roll" and see how many times it comes up. It's awkward and having one term to refer to all of them when a feature affects all of them, like say Inspiration, is going to be so much more convenient. It is a term of convenience in order to package Ability Checks, Saving Throws, and Attack Rolls all into one thing. You do not have to refer to any of those, individually, as a d20 Test, but it sure as heck gets easier to refer to all of them at once if you have one term for the lot.
Does that make sense? You're objecting to something that is purely a term of convenience. It's like ... I dunno, insisting that each letter in the alphabet always be referred to by it's own name when we have the catchall term "letter" or "alphabet."
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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!
Why? Orcs, goblins, and bugbears are the generic badguys. It’s even encouraged in beginner adventures such as Lost Mines.
In ice spire peak there is a group of orcs, but the narriative is far more grey. They have been forced out by the dragon and so are encroaching on human lands, when I ran that stater campaign it allows me to RP the orcs far more sympathetically, and the players came up with really clever non combat options to get the orcs on side and working with the townsfolk.
Lost Mines is being moved out of print I think so they can make more nuanced clever stories.
You mean the adventure that WotC is turning into a full campaign?
Why? Orcs, goblins, and bugbears are the generic badguys. It’s even encouraged in beginner adventures such as Lost Mines.
In ice spire peak there is a group of orcs, but the narriative is far more grey. They have been forced out by the dragon and so are encroaching on human lands, when I ran that stater campaign it allows me to RP the orcs far more sympathetically, and the players came up with really clever non combat options to get the orcs on side and working with the townsfolk.
Lost Mines is being moved out of print I think so they can make more nuanced clever stories.
You mean the adventure that WotC is turning into a full campaign?
Hopefully it will be much more nuanced once they expand it into a full length campaign. Actually, I’m confident it will be.
Why? Orcs, goblins, and bugbears are the generic badguys. It’s even encouraged in beginner adventures such as Lost Mines.
Because they can be more, and generic badguys are boring. If I want generic badguys, I'll use demons (and I have, even in my Eberron campaign). If I want nuanced characters with different motivations and viewpoints, I'll use humanoids. That includes Orcs, Goblins, and Bugbears.
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Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Why? Orcs, goblins, and bugbears are the generic badguys. It’s even encouraged in beginner adventures such as Lost Mines.
Because they can be more, and generic badguys are boring. If I want generic badguys, I'll use demons (and I have, even in my Eberron campaign). If I want nuanced characters with different motivations and viewpoints, I'll use humanoids. That includes Orcs, Goblins, and Bugbears.
Demons (most of them at least) are pure evil. Orcs and goblinoids are not.
Why? Orcs, goblins, and bugbears are the generic badguys. It’s even encouraged in beginner adventures such as Lost Mines.
Because they can be more, and generic badguys are boring. If I want generic badguys, I'll use demons (and I have, even in my Eberron campaign). If I want nuanced characters with different motivations and viewpoints, I'll use humanoids. That includes Orcs, Goblins, and Bugbears.
Surely that’s being specieist against demons? Don’t they also feel pain? Don’t they also have hopes and dreams and aspirations? Don’t they also laugh or cry? What on earth is the difference in saying Orcs are bad guys or demons are bad guys? It’s exactly the same thing, and highly hypocritical to say it’s fine to label every single demon as evil and twisted bad guys, but it’s not okay to say the same about orcs. PMSL do you not understand that?
I can pretty much guarantee that nobody I know, and none of the places I play are going to stop saying ‘make a perception roll’ and start saying ‘make a perception d20 test’.
Well good, because that would be incorrect. "d20 test" is an umbrella term that encompasses ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws. Since a perception checkis an ability check and not an attack roll or a saving throw, there's no reason to call it a d20 test, and in fact, doing so would probably obfuscate useful information.
Are you just whining about this because you don't actually understand it?
Bold by me for effect. So you are saying that whilst an ability check is covered by the term d20 test, that in fact there’s no actual reason to call it that? Do you not see how you have contradicted yourself and how silly your argument sounds?
Making one term to cover Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws is going to let me stop having to type "Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws" and that will be helpful for WOTC from a logistical perspective. Do a search for ... I think the order it comes in is, "an ability check, a saving throw, or an attack roll" and see how many times it comes up. It's awkward and having one term to refer to all of them when a feature affects all of them, like say Inspiration, is going to be so much more convenient. It is a term of convenience in order to package Ability Checks, Saving Throws, and Attack Rolls all into one thing. You do not have to refer to any of those, individually, as a d20 Test, but it sure as heck gets easier to refer to all of them at once if you have one term for the lot.
I do understand what you are saying but be honest, how many times during a session would you need to refer to all 3 at the same time? Maybe during a session 0 or in the first couple of sessions where you are teaching completely new players. I mean I can’t really remember ever doing it even once in a regular session. So yeah, I think they are wasting time coming up with new names for things that don’t really matter and not enough time on the things that do matter. You only need to look at the new Spelljammer material to see how poor and unoriginal it is, they just ripped stuff out of the original 2e stuff and dumbed it down. I mean Astral Elf is just a mixture of High Elf and Eladrin, with the word Astral in front of the name. It could have been so much better, they could have provided a wealth of information about them, An Imperial highly developed space faring society. But now, instead they spent their time changing role-playing game to digital play experience and creating a new name for something barely ever mentioned, nobody asked for or wanted.
It's more the books that we have the term, not so much for the table.
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If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
I can pretty much guarantee that nobody I know, and none of the places I play are going to stop saying ‘make a perception roll’ and start saying ‘make a perception d20 test’.
Well good, because that would be incorrect. "d20 test" is an umbrella term that encompasses ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws. Since a perception checkis an ability check and not an attack roll or a saving throw, there's no reason to call it a d20 test, and in fact, doing so would probably obfuscate useful information.
Are you just whining about this because you don't actually understand it?
Bold by me for effect. So you are saying that whilst an ability check is covered by the term d20 test, that in fact there’s no actual reason to call it that? Do you not see how you have contradicted yourself and how silly your argument sounds?
So, you really do just not understand what "umbrella term" means at all, then. It's really hard to have a productive conversation when, when confronted with language you don't understand, you just make stuff up to get mad about instead of learning.
Surely that’s being specieist against demons? Don’t they also feel pain? Don’t they also have hopes and dreams and aspirations? Don’t they also laugh or cry? What on earth is the difference in saying Orcs are bad guys or demons are bad guys? It’s exactly the same thing, and highly hypocritical to say it’s fine to label every single demon as evil and twisted bad guys, but it’s not okay to say the same about orcs. PMSL do you not understand that?
Demons aren't supposed to be free willed peoples, they are extra planar beings whose essence is aligned with a plane of Chaos and Evil. That's different from orcs and goblinoids, who are explicitly written as free willed peoples. You don't seem to like the fact that orcs and goblinoids are written as people, but they are. Just say it clearly, you don't regard orcs and goblinoids as people.
I can pretty much guarantee that nobody I know, and none of the places I play are going to stop saying ‘make a perception roll’ and start saying ‘make a perception d20 test’.
Well good, because that would be incorrect. "d20 test" is an umbrella term that encompasses ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws. Since a perception checkis an ability check and not an attack roll or a saving throw, there's no reason to call it a d20 test, and in fact, doing so would probably obfuscate useful information.
Are you just whining about this because you don't actually understand it?
Bold by me for effect. So you are saying that whilst an ability check is covered by the term d20 test, that in fact there’s no actual reason to call it that? Do you not see how you have contradicted yourself and how silly your argument sounds?
You're ... really not doing yourself any favors in carrying out this argument. You are making yourself look rather foolish, to be honest. This argument makes you look deliberately ignorant of what an "umbrella term" is.
Making one term to cover Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws is going to let me stop having to type "Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws" and that will be helpful for WOTC from a logistical perspective. Do a search for ... I think the order it comes in is, "an ability check, a saving throw, or an attack roll" and see how many times it comes up. It's awkward and having one term to refer to all of them when a feature affects all of them, like say Inspiration, is going to be so much more convenient. It is a term of convenience in order to package Ability Checks, Saving Throws, and Attack Rolls all into one thing. You do not have to refer to any of those, individually, as a d20 Test, but it sure as heck gets easier to refer to all of them at once if you have one term for the lot.
I do understand what you are saying but be honest, how many times during a session would you need to refer to all 3 at the same time? Maybe during a session 0 or in the first couple of sessions where you are teaching completely new players. I mean I can’t really remember ever doing it even once in a regular session. So yeah, I think they are wasting time coming up with new names for things that don’t really matter and not enough time on the things that do matter.
Do you not see that they are saving themselves work in the future? If my business were writing and I had to write rules with specificity I would do exactly the same thing.
You only need to look at the new Spelljammer material to see how poor and unoriginal it is, they just ripped stuff out of the original 2e stuff and dumbed it down. I mean Astral Elf is just a mixture of High Elf and Eladrin, with the word Astral in front of the name. It could have been so much better, they could have provided a wealth of information about them, An Imperial highly developed space faring society. But now, instead they spent their time changing role-playing game to digital play experience and creating a new name for something barely ever mentioned, nobody asked for or wanted.
So you disliked Spelljammer and are bringing that up in this argument where it is tangential at best. You're also complaining about them making a VTT when that is basically the number one thing people have been asking of DNDBeyond for years and years. And you're saying it's wasting time and that no one wanted it?
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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!
So, you really do just not understand what "umbrella term" means at all, then. It's really hard to have a productive conversation when, when confronted with language you don't understand, you just make stuff up to get mad about instead of learning.
Oh I absolutely understand what an umbrella term is, and you getting nasty and calling me an idiot is not making my argument any less.
Surely that’s being specieist against demons? Don’t they also feel pain? Don’t they also have hopes and dreams and aspirations? Don’t they also laugh or cry? What on earth is the difference in saying Orcs are bad guys or demons are bad guys? It’s exactly the same thing, and highly hypocritical to say it’s fine to label every single demon as evil and twisted bad guys, but it’s not okay to say the same about orcs. PMSL do you not understand that?
Demons aren't supposed to be free willed peoples, they are extra planar beings whose essence is aligned with a plane of Chaos and Evil. That's different from orcs and goblinoids, who are explicitly written as free willed peoples. You don't seem to like the fact that orcs and goblinoids are written as people, but they are. Just say it clearly, you don't regard orcs and goblinoids as people.
I can pretty much guarantee that nobody I know, and none of the places I play are going to stop saying ‘make a perception roll’ and start saying ‘make a perception d20 test’.
Well good, because that would be incorrect. "d20 test" is an umbrella term that encompasses ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws. Since a perception checkis an ability check and not an attack roll or a saving throw, there's no reason to call it a d20 test, and in fact, doing so would probably obfuscate useful information.
Are you just whining about this because you don't actually understand it?
Bold by me for effect. So you are saying that whilst an ability check is covered by the term d20 test, that in fact there’s no actual reason to call it that? Do you not see how you have contradicted yourself and how silly your argument sounds?
You're ... really not doing yourself any favors in carrying out this argument. You are making yourself look rather foolish, to be honest. This argument makes you look deliberately ignorant of what an "umbrella term" is.
Making one term to cover Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws is going to let me stop having to type "Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws" and that will be helpful for WOTC from a logistical perspective. Do a search for ... I think the order it comes in is, "an ability check, a saving throw, or an attack roll" and see how many times it comes up. It's awkward and having one term to refer to all of them when a feature affects all of them, like say Inspiration, is going to be so much more convenient. It is a term of convenience in order to package Ability Checks, Saving Throws, and Attack Rolls all into one thing. You do not have to refer to any of those, individually, as a d20 Test, but it sure as heck gets easier to refer to all of them at once if you have one term for the lot.
I do understand what you are saying but be honest, how many times during a session would you need to refer to all 3 at the same time? Maybe during a session 0 or in the first couple of sessions where you are teaching completely new players. I mean I can’t really remember ever doing it even once in a regular session. So yeah, I think they are wasting time coming up with new names for things that don’t really matter and not enough time on the things that do matter.
Do you not see that they are saving themselves work in the future? If my business were writing and I had to write rules with specificity I would do exactly the same thing.
You only need to look at the new Spelljammer material to see how poor and unoriginal it is, they just ripped stuff out of the original 2e stuff and dumbed it down. I mean Astral Elf is just a mixture of High Elf and Eladrin, with the word Astral in front of the name. It could have been so much better, they could have provided a wealth of information about them, An Imperial highly developed space faring society. But now, instead they spent their time changing role-playing game to digital play experience and creating a new name for something barely ever mentioned, nobody asked for or wanted.
So you disliked Spelljammer and are bringing that up in this argument where it is tangential at best. You're also complaining about them making a VTT when that is basically the number one thing people have been asking of DNDBeyond for years and years. And you're saying it's wasting time and that no one wanted it?
This is far to much to break down on my phone, so simply put;
1. Orcs and goblins weren’t free willed playable races, they were monsters, made to be evil by their gods. They were never good aligned, and never free willed which makes them no different to devils and demons. D&D lore has now changed to make orcs and goblins not intrinsically evil - I have no problem with that, but your argument that demons and devils are made to be pure evil and not have any free will is as hypocritical as saying that orc and goblins used to be thought of as that. Surely you can see the hypocrisy? I mean Demons and Devils are people too.
2. No, I don’t see orcs and goblins as people. Nor do I see elves or halflings or dragonborn as people. Because they aren’t real, they are figments of someone’s imagination. That’s like saying Prof Plum in Cluedo is real, or the racing car in Monopoly is a real car.
3. I’m British, educated beyond degree level, and english is my native language. I know what an umbrella term is, and I still think it is unnecessary. If a group of individual things are practically never referred to as a group then there really is no need to spend time and money developing a name for that group of things. You calling me stupid doesn’t invalidate my point and in fact only serves to make your stance weaker. It is a well known fact that in any debate, when one side is reduced to insulting the other participants rather than defending their stance then that side has already lost the debate.
4. Yes I mentioned Spelljammer specifically as an example of what they should have been spending more time on rather than creating a new term for a group of things that are never referred to as a group.
5. I have never once mentioned a vtt in any of my posts until this very sentence.
I really don't get why WoTC didn't include ASIs in the Background sooner and why some people don't like the change: It just makes the most sense and is the best way to build a "natural" feeling character. It represents the best how your PC lived and what they experienced in life before becoming an adventurer.
Sure, Elves getting +2 Dex makes sense because they are, on average, more dexterous people and use bows to fight than, say, Dragonborn. But there are undoubtedly Elves that focus on studying nature or arcane knowledge, or work as blacksmiths for those nice elven armors. Why would they also get a +2 Dex, when they never fired a bow, but learned how to cast spells or built muscles from all the hammering.
[Sic]
To those of us who liked fixed racial ASIs, we feel that the 27 points you get for point-buy represent the what your character did with their lives and that the +2/+1 were there to represent a genetic predisposition towards certain activities and skills.
And to the majority the view was that the dice roll gave you a sense of the genetics and then on top you had to be big strong half orc, we can go round and round on this the fact is that putting ASIs into the background solves issues that where real, it also means balanced parties, no more will my players really cool half orc wizard concept be hamstrung and run behind by the 3 other optimized characters in the party. All of whom are half elf because it gives them a cool +4 total to ASI. Now he can roleplay that cool character idea and be as good as the other characters at the table meaning they all progress at the same rate.
You don’t have to @ me brah, I was just explaining my point of view to someone else. You and I obviously disagree, so you don’t need to keep telling me how I’m wrong because I think and feel a different way about things than you do. You have your opinions and I have mine. Let’s just be civil and leave it at that. Shall we?
Surely that’s being specieist against demons? Don’t they also feel pain? Don’t they also have hopes and dreams and aspirations? Don’t they also laugh or cry? What on earth is the difference in saying Orcs are bad guys or demons are bad guys? It’s exactly the same thing, and highly hypocritical to say it’s fine to label every single demon as evil and twisted bad guys, but it’s not okay to say the same about orcs. PMSL do you not understand that?
Demons aren't supposed to be free willed peoples, they are extra planar beings whose essence is aligned with a plane of Chaos and Evil. That's different from orcs and goblinoids, who are explicitly written as free willed peoples. You don't seem to like the fact that orcs and goblinoids are written as people, but they are. Just say it clearly, you don't regard orcs and goblinoids as people.
I can pretty much guarantee that nobody I know, and none of the places I play are going to stop saying ‘make a perception roll’ and start saying ‘make a perception d20 test’.
Well good, because that would be incorrect. "d20 test" is an umbrella term that encompasses ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws. Since a perception checkis an ability check and not an attack roll or a saving throw, there's no reason to call it a d20 test, and in fact, doing so would probably obfuscate useful information.
Are you just whining about this because you don't actually understand it?
Bold by me for effect. So you are saying that whilst an ability check is covered by the term d20 test, that in fact there’s no actual reason to call it that? Do you not see how you have contradicted yourself and how silly your argument sounds?
You're ... really not doing yourself any favors in carrying out this argument. You are making yourself look rather foolish, to be honest. This argument makes you look deliberately ignorant of what an "umbrella term" is.
Making one term to cover Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws is going to let me stop having to type "Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws" and that will be helpful for WOTC from a logistical perspective. Do a search for ... I think the order it comes in is, "an ability check, a saving throw, or an attack roll" and see how many times it comes up. It's awkward and having one term to refer to all of them when a feature affects all of them, like say Inspiration, is going to be so much more convenient. It is a term of convenience in order to package Ability Checks, Saving Throws, and Attack Rolls all into one thing. You do not have to refer to any of those, individually, as a d20 Test, but it sure as heck gets easier to refer to all of them at once if you have one term for the lot.
I do understand what you are saying but be honest, how many times during a session would you need to refer to all 3 at the same time? Maybe during a session 0 or in the first couple of sessions where you are teaching completely new players. I mean I can’t really remember ever doing it even once in a regular session. So yeah, I think they are wasting time coming up with new names for things that don’t really matter and not enough time on the things that do matter.
Do you not see that they are saving themselves work in the future? If my business were writing and I had to write rules with specificity I would do exactly the same thing.
You only need to look at the new Spelljammer material to see how poor and unoriginal it is, they just ripped stuff out of the original 2e stuff and dumbed it down. I mean Astral Elf is just a mixture of High Elf and Eladrin, with the word Astral in front of the name. It could have been so much better, they could have provided a wealth of information about them, An Imperial highly developed space faring society. But now, instead they spent their time changing role-playing game to digital play experience and creating a new name for something barely ever mentioned, nobody asked for or wanted.
So you disliked Spelljammer and are bringing that up in this argument where it is tangential at best. You're also complaining about them making a VTT when that is basically the number one thing people have been asking of DNDBeyond for years and years. And you're saying it's wasting time and that no one wanted it?
This is far to much to break down on my phone, so simply put;
1. Orcs and goblins weren’t free willed playable races, they were monsters, made to be evil by their gods. They were never good aligned, and never free willed which makes them no different to devils and demons. D&D lore has now changed to make orcs and goblins not intrinsically evil - I have no problem with that, but your argument that demons and devils are made to be pure evil and not have any free will is as hypocritical as saying that orc and goblins used to be thought of as that. Surely you can see the hypocrisy? I mean Demons and Devils are people too.
2. No, I don’t see orcs and goblins as people. Nor do I see elves or halflings or dragonborn as people. Because they aren’t real, they are figments of someone’s imagination. That’s like saying Prof Plum in Cluedo is real, or the racing car in Monopoly is a real car.
3. I’m British, educated beyond degree level, and english is my native language. I know what an umbrella term is, and I still think it is unnecessary. If a group of individual things are practically never referred to as a group then there really is no need to spend time and money developing a name for that group of things. You calling me stupid doesn’t invalidate my point and in fact only serves to make your stance weaker. It is a well known fact that in any debate, when one side is reduced to insulting the other participants rather than defending their stance then that side has already lost the debate.
4. Yes I mentioned Spelljammer specifically as an example of what they should have been spending more time on rather than creating a new term for a group of things that are never referred to as a group.
5. I have never once mentioned a vtt in any of my posts until this very sentence.
Orcs and goblinoids are people, and just as capable of being good or evil as any other person. Demons and devils are the embodiment of pure evil (chaotic and lawful respectively). Though they can exert free will and rebel against their nature, just like angels can fall to darkness, it’s much more difficult and much less common for them to do so than it is for the numerous free-willed species of the Material Plane to choose a moral (good or evil) and ethical (lawful or chaotic) alignment that suits their personality.
Sorry. That sounded like an academic treatise lol. But this is a complicated and very deep subject.
“Orcs and goblinoids are people, and just as capable of being good or evil as any other person. Demons and devils are the embodiment of pure evil (chaotic and lawful respectively).”
But that is exactly what orcs and goblins were to begin with, they literally could not exert free will and defy their gods. D&D lore has now changed to have orcs and goblins as playable races, same as drow. They are no longer intrinsically evil and are fully capable of making their own choices about their morals and behaviours. And I am fully for this. Some of my favourite characters in recent years have been a goblin paladin, a drow bard, and a goblin drunken master monk. I love that the lore has changed.
My argument is that someone basically said that they aren’t using orcs as a generic bad guy race any more, but they are using demons and devils because they are all intrinsically evil and have no free will. Surely people can see that this argument is completely flawed and hypocritical? Surely I am not the only person here that thinks if it is wrong to say race ‘a’ is intrinsically evil and has no free will, then surely it is just as equally wrong to say that race ‘b’ is intrinsically evil and has no free will? If the lore has been changed to make ‘a’ an acceptable race then surely the lore should be changed for ‘b’ otherwise you are literally just substituting one racist opinion for another. Either all races are considered to be free to live and chose, or none are.
Honestly, I don't see a problem with generic bad guy groups so long as you keep it setting accurate. It can arguably create even more interesting stories, especially with how many races are made evil by their god.
You force a DM to think a specific way when home brewing, for 20 years in my campaigns orcs have never been made evil and have been able to run the full spectrum of alignments, that makes for more interesting stories and makes players stop and think more. Is there a way out of this that does not involve hitting stuff.
Did you not see the part where I said setting accurate, your generically evil but reasonable to be fought at low levels bad guy can be frickin halflings for all I care. Because sometimes believe it or not, I just want to roll some dice and kill a thing without having to stop without having to stop for a 50 minute RP about the moral quandry of what were doing.
Orcs, goblins, and many other humanoids aren't monsters. They might act evil, but now they have a better reason than "because they're orcs".
They were considered to be though, by many of us in the past. They were the demons and devils of my day. They lived to kill, and various other foul deeds. Players like myself would regularly hunt them down, in fact in several games there was a bounty of 1gp per set of goblin ears brought back to civilisation. Times change, and if we are going to change then it should be complete. Otherwise in 20 years time this conversation will just be repeated with the next generation standing up for the rights of demons.
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Making one term to cover Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws is going to let me stop having to type "Ability Checks, Attack Rolls, and Saving Throws" and that will be helpful for WOTC from a logistical perspective. Do a search for ... I think the order it comes in is, "an ability check, a saving throw, or an attack roll" and see how many times it comes up. It's awkward and having one term to refer to all of them when a feature affects all of them, like say Inspiration, is going to be so much more convenient. It is a term of convenience in order to package Ability Checks, Saving Throws, and Attack Rolls all into one thing. You do not have to refer to any of those, individually, as a d20 Test, but it sure as heck gets easier to refer to all of them at once if you have one term for the lot.
Does that make sense? You're objecting to something that is purely a term of convenience. It's like ... I dunno, insisting that each letter in the alphabet always be referred to by it's own name when we have the catchall term "letter" or "alphabet."
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 mean the adventure that WotC is turning into a full campaign?
Hopefully it will be much more nuanced once they expand it into a full length campaign. Actually, I’m confident it will be.
Because they can be more, and generic badguys are boring. If I want generic badguys, I'll use demons (and I have, even in my Eberron campaign). If I want nuanced characters with different motivations and viewpoints, I'll use humanoids. That includes Orcs, Goblins, and Bugbears.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Demons (most of them at least) are pure evil. Orcs and goblinoids are not.
Surely that’s being specieist against demons? Don’t they also feel pain? Don’t they also have hopes and dreams and aspirations? Don’t they also laugh or cry? What on earth is the difference in saying Orcs are bad guys or demons are bad guys? It’s exactly the same thing, and highly hypocritical to say it’s fine to label every single demon as evil and twisted bad guys, but it’s not okay to say the same about orcs. PMSL do you not understand that?
Bold by me for effect. So you are saying that whilst an ability check is covered by the term d20 test, that in fact there’s no actual reason to call it that? Do you not see how you have contradicted yourself and how silly your argument sounds?
I do understand what you are saying but be honest, how many times during a session would you need to refer to all 3 at the same time? Maybe during a session 0 or in the first couple of sessions where you are teaching completely new players. I mean I can’t really remember ever doing it even once in a regular session. So yeah, I think they are wasting time coming up with new names for things that don’t really matter and not enough time on the things that do matter. You only need to look at the new Spelljammer material to see how poor and unoriginal it is, they just ripped stuff out of the original 2e stuff and dumbed it down. I mean Astral Elf is just a mixture of High Elf and Eladrin, with the word Astral in front of the name. It could have been so much better, they could have provided a wealth of information about them, An Imperial highly developed space faring society. But now, instead they spent their time changing role-playing game to digital play experience and creating a new name for something barely ever mentioned, nobody asked for or wanted.
It's more the books that we have the term, not so much for the table.
If you're not willing or able to to discuss in good faith, then don't be surprised if I don't respond, there are better things in life for me to do than humour you. This signature is that response.
So, you really do just not understand what "umbrella term" means at all, then. It's really hard to have a productive conversation when, when confronted with language you don't understand, you just make stuff up to get mad about instead of learning.
Demons aren't supposed to be free willed peoples, they are extra planar beings whose essence is aligned with a plane of Chaos and Evil. That's different from orcs and goblinoids, who are explicitly written as free willed peoples. You don't seem to like the fact that orcs and goblinoids are written as people, but they are. Just say it clearly, you don't regard orcs and goblinoids as people.
You're ... really not doing yourself any favors in carrying out this argument. You are making yourself look rather foolish, to be honest. This argument makes you look deliberately ignorant of what an "umbrella term" is.
Do you not see that they are saving themselves work in the future? If my business were writing and I had to write rules with specificity I would do exactly the same thing.
So you disliked Spelljammer and are bringing that up in this argument where it is tangential at best. You're also complaining about them making a VTT when that is basically the number one thing people have been asking of DNDBeyond for years and years. And you're saying it's wasting time and that no one wanted it?
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!
Oh I absolutely understand what an umbrella term is, and you getting nasty and calling me an idiot is not making my argument any less.
This is far to much to break down on my phone, so simply put;
1. Orcs and goblins weren’t free willed playable races, they were monsters, made to be evil by their gods. They were never good aligned, and never free willed which makes them no different to devils and demons. D&D lore has now changed to make orcs and goblins not intrinsically evil - I have no problem with that, but your argument that demons and devils are made to be pure evil and not have any free will is as hypocritical as saying that orc and goblins used to be thought of as that. Surely you can see the hypocrisy? I mean Demons and Devils are people too.
2. No, I don’t see orcs and goblins as people. Nor do I see elves or halflings or dragonborn as people. Because they aren’t real, they are figments of someone’s imagination. That’s like saying Prof Plum in Cluedo is real, or the racing car in Monopoly is a real car.
3. I’m British, educated beyond degree level, and english is my native language. I know what an umbrella term is, and I still think it is unnecessary. If a group of individual things are practically never referred to as a group then there really is no need to spend time and money developing a name for that group of things. You calling me stupid doesn’t invalidate my point and in fact only serves to make your stance weaker. It is a well known fact that in any debate, when one side is reduced to insulting the other participants rather than defending their stance then that side has already lost the debate.
4. Yes I mentioned Spelljammer specifically as an example of what they should have been spending more time on rather than creating a new term for a group of things that are never referred to as a group.
5. I have never once mentioned a vtt in any of my posts until this very sentence.
You don’t have to @ me brah, I was just explaining my point of view to someone else. You and I obviously disagree, so you don’t need to keep telling me how I’m wrong because I think and feel a different way about things than you do. You have your opinions and I have mine. Let’s just be civil and leave it at that. Shall we?
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Orcs and goblinoids are people, and just as capable of being good or evil as any other person. Demons and devils are the embodiment of pure evil (chaotic and lawful respectively). Though they can exert free will and rebel against their nature, just like angels can fall to darkness, it’s much more difficult and much less common for them to do so than it is for the numerous free-willed species of the Material Plane to choose a moral (good or evil) and ethical (lawful or chaotic) alignment that suits their personality.
Sorry. That sounded like an academic treatise lol. But this is a complicated and very deep subject.
“Orcs and goblinoids are people, and just as capable of being good or evil as any other person. Demons and devils are the embodiment of pure evil (chaotic and lawful respectively).”
But that is exactly what orcs and goblins were to begin with, they literally could not exert free will and defy their gods. D&D lore has now changed to have orcs and goblins as playable races, same as drow. They are no longer intrinsically evil and are fully capable of making their own choices about their morals and behaviours. And I am fully for this. Some of my favourite characters in recent years have been a goblin paladin, a drow bard, and a goblin drunken master monk. I love that the lore has changed.
My argument is that someone basically said that they aren’t using orcs as a generic bad guy race any more, but they are using demons and devils because they are all intrinsically evil and have no free will. Surely people can see that this argument is completely flawed and hypocritical? Surely I am not the only person here that thinks if it is wrong to say race ‘a’ is intrinsically evil and has no free will, then surely it is just as equally wrong to say that race ‘b’ is intrinsically evil and has no free will? If the lore has been changed to make ‘a’ an acceptable race then surely the lore should be changed for ‘b’ otherwise you are literally just substituting one racist opinion for another. Either all races are considered to be free to live and chose, or none are.
Did you not see the part where I said setting accurate, your generically evil but reasonable to be fought at low levels bad guy can be frickin halflings for all I care. Because sometimes believe it or not, I just want to roll some dice and kill a thing without having to stop without having to stop for a 50 minute RP about the moral quandry of what were doing.
They were considered to be though, by many of us in the past. They were the demons and devils of my day. They lived to kill, and various other foul deeds. Players like myself would regularly hunt them down, in fact in several games there was a bounty of 1gp per set of goblin ears brought back to civilisation. Times change, and if we are going to change then it should be complete. Otherwise in 20 years time this conversation will just be repeated with the next generation standing up for the rights of demons.