Wow this is dragging on at light speed. I went to bed and came back to find a forum topic went from 2 pages to 10?! Croikey.
If people are incapable of splitting down the middle from realism and fantasy then that group shouldn't be anywhere near games in the first place. This feels like a debate at the gaming table suddenly begins to take a turn to becoming an OOC conversation, leading to an argument phase that basically grows way out of proportion. It's not really helping anyone and I feel like this whole discussion board isn't making any kind of leeway. It's just one big venting board.
Seriously, though, have you never read a good book or seen a good movie and gotten ideas from it or been moved by it in some way?
Nope. I stopped reading there because I was afraid I would type something nasty. When you begin to think too deeply in to something as simple as a tabletop roleplaying game, you should not be playing in the first place. We all get attached to characters because of the development that takes your characters on the journey. What you shouldn't do is get so connected that you treat it like a second life and entrench yourself within the realms that isn't your own.
There are different levels of roleplay and the DM's guide does make this abundantly clear; this is where the two of us are different. I can respect that you want to take the next step beyond the norm for players and 'see past' just a character sheet with numbers and text on it. Except, I would never go this far and see what makes D&D fun in the first place: A game. I'm a gamer, I enjoy it a lot and have spent a lot of my life sitting at a computer desk doing just that. Me and mates, we roll numbers, see what happens and then we have a good ol' lark about it. What we don't do is poke at something and go "does anyone find drow to be a racial stereotype of something in real-life?" Never before have I heard this until yesterday. I knew that D&D was considered satanism back in god-knows-when of the 80's or late 70's when Gary Gygax was bringing it up.
Games, movies and books are all good ideas to get inspiration off or take snippets to convert in to something of your own making. Recently all I've done is copy a roleplaying MMO game and tried to make rules for it to fit a tabletop game, because the developers ran out of money or the fanbase just died out as fast as it rose. Grimmwood. I love the setting for it, the art style is fantastically done by a man named Filip Tsonkin that broadens an entirely new world for players to jump in to... and it was squandered on an interactive PC game. Reckon they could've made more money by developing it in to a tabletop and all I'm doing is trying to put a slither of life back in to it by any means necessary in hopes to make it fun for me and the guys I play with.
Nope. I stopped reading there because I was afraid I would type something nasty. When you begin to think too deeply in to something as simple as a tabletop roleplaying game, you should not be playing in the first place. We all get attached to characters because of the development that takes your characters on the journey. What you shouldn't do is get so connected that you treat it like a second life and entrench yourself within the realms that isn't your own.
What a condescending and anti-intellectual attitude to hold. Thinking and talking about how our real world influences the fantasy worlds that we create is far from "thinking too deeply." It's the basis of literary criticism, not a pathology.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
@Kotath That was very enlightening. Thank you for that.
@Nat_30 Unfortunately that's just my view on it. I agree to having a different perspective on it now from reading Kotath's point of view and watching how I speak to people. It does not mean I will change my mind about it but it definitely means I will try to be more tactful about it.
Seriously, though, have you never read a good book or seen a good movie and gotten ideas from it or been moved by it in some way?
Nope. I stopped reading there because I was afraid I would type something nasty. When you begin to think too deeply in to something as simple as a tabletop roleplaying game, you should not be playing in the first place. We all get attached to characters because of the development that takes your characters on the journey. What you shouldn't do is get so connected that you treat it like a second life and entrench yourself within the realms that isn't your own.
There are different levels of roleplay and the DM's guide does make this abundantly clear; this is where the two of us are different. I can respect that you want to take the next step beyond the norm for players and 'see past' just a character sheet with numbers and text on it. Except, I would never go this far and see what makes D&D fun in the first place: A game. I'm a gamer, I enjoy it a lot and have spent a lot of my life sitting at a computer desk doing just that. Me and mates, we roll numbers, see what happens and then we have a good ol' lark about it. What we don't do is poke at something and go "does anyone find drow to be a racial stereotype of something in real-life?" Never before have I heard this until yesterday. I knew that D&D was considered satanism back in god-knows-when of the 80's or late 70's when Gary Gygax was bringing it up.
Games, movies and books are all good ideas to get inspiration off or take snippets to convert in to something of your own making. Recently all I've done is copy a roleplaying MMO game and tried to make rules for it to fit a tabletop game, because the developers ran out of money or the fanbase just died out as fast as it rose. Grimmwood. I love the setting for it, the art style is fantastically done by a man named Filip Tsonkin that broadens an entirely new world for players to jump in to... and it was squandered on an interactive PC game. Reckon they could've made more money by developing it in to a tabletop and all I'm doing is trying to put a slither of life back in to it by any means necessary in hopes to make it fun for me and the guys I play with.
If anything I said offended you I do apologise.
The whole point of any art form is to make people feel something, to make people think. Storytelling is an art form like any other. D&D is a form of storytelling as valid as any novel.
The very fact that this thread exists, is evoking emotions, thoughts, and discourse means that the art is doing what it is meant to do. There is nothing wrong with that. In short, D&D is more than “just a game.”
It is a way for people to communicate ideas and feelings more deeply than just words can ever convey. It is quite frankly life in many ways. We have all, every one of us in this forum (even the lurkers), have all been enriched by this exchange of thoughts and emotions. We are all better because of this conversation.
I just hope that in another 50 years, people are still improving themselves and each other through their experiences with D&D. That has been my concern this whole time. That future generations will not have this same opportunity that we have had. I strongly feel that it is important that D&D continues to be a medium of art that continues to give people reasons to feel and to think.
It is getting lost in the weeds to argue over whether a certain race has explicit coding to certain races across certain artistic representations of them, others insist that they see no such direct coding.
The thing is-- it doesn't really matter if there is a direct 1:1 correlation between a race and a real life group of people. Ultimately, just think about what "evil races" fundamentally means within the context of the setting.
Also-- it being fiction doesn't matter. Fiction is a medium in which we express things that aren't, but imaginably could be and, on occasion, how we perhaps we feel things should be. I think that later one is an issue. The fact that D&D makes value judgments-- it claims an objective morality and lists some actions and motivations as good and others as evil. So it is directly expressing a statement about how things should be. And if we find that the things that the game has decided to list as "good" and "evil" by "objective standards" do not match up with what we in real life would call "good" and "evil" if they were performed by a real life person upon another real life person, then it is worth examination.
And no one is saying that because characters to negative things in D&D that their players are going to go out and to those negative things. Certainly there are plenty of games where you out-and-out play a bad guy, or are just given tons of power and unleashed upon NPCs who can't fight back and allowed to absolutely wreck them and everything else to your hearts content. But when you turn on GTA, turn on god mode and all weapons, cause a tank to spawn in and just go to town on the NPC populous-- you also aren't given a pat on the head and a "Lawful Good" gold sticker.
Anyway, what do these races represent? Like undead and werewolves-- those can represent spreading disease that robs people of their sense of selves and turns them into a weapon and tool for spreading the disease. Undead can also represent the echo of some evil actions that someone took in the past and now affect what happens in the present. They, and also golems, also work as stand-ins to express that the villain's methods or goals are just so selfish and destructive that no one would ever willingly, intentionally work for them and so they use mindless slaves with no free thought to accomplish their goals. Demons/Devils can be the physical manifestations the feelings and urges that cause people to turn on each other and create disharmony, ruining the ability of people to cooperate and rotting the roots of society. Vampires and evil fae can represent how having unchecked power and no consequences can deeply rot one's soul.
There are all these other various options of supernatural enemies that one can do physical battle against. But message, what metaphor is being conveyed by "evil races"?
That is something distinctly different from an evil organization. One could be a member of an evil organization, they could be instantly recognizable from their uniforms or other marks they use to identify one another. An evil organization is something that one has presumably chosen to join, even if that choice was made due to deep manipulation or under duress. But this isn't an organization-- we are talking about the idea that simply having the genes that cause one to manifest certain phenotypes determines one is evil.
They are people, of a sort, they are born, they are raised to adulthood by some sort of family or community, they have various experiences across their lives and those experiences shape them, have various unique preferences when it comes to food, music, clothing, etc. They are capable of all the emotions that any fictional human character in the setting could feel and they suffer when harmed just like any fictional human character. They are, for lack of a better word in English, "human"-- as much as the dwarfs or elfs or halflings or any if the other "humans" who are bigger, shorter, beefier or have pointy ears, horns, tails, fur, tusks or whatever else-- mentally, emotionally, and generally physiologically they are "humans", more so than the closest living related species to humans that currently exist in real life on the planet. You can't really have a conversation with a chimpanzee outside of perhaps the handful that have learned sign language and, even then, there would be less common ground to have a conversation about than if a human were to be prevented from attacking one another and have a conversation with a Goblin in Forgotten Realms or Eberron. If there were real hominid species that were very much like the races in D&D, we would almost certainly just call them human and consider human to cover a larger group of species. (Actually-- we'd probably interbreed until it was difficult to draw a clear line between where one began and the other ended unless we have been isolated from one another entirely for the past 50,000 years)
But based on their physical characteristics alone, you can be absolutely certain they are entirely evil. Immediately, upon just glancing at them, you can be certain that if you are wandering in the wilderness and encounter an Orc that it is evil and you should kill it on sight but if you encounter an elf (who isn't the one dark skinned variety) then you can put your weapons away and relax because it is a social encounter. Sure, whether it be 1/100 or 1/1000 the DM will pull a fast one where it turns out that Orc was actually friendly and would have warned you and helped you had you not killed him or it will turn out that the elf is the one rare High Elf who has gone insane and will fireball you when you try to approach him. But outside of that 1% or 0.1% circumstances, you can automatically know one's morality by their physical characteristics alone.
A lot of the time, in fact, there really is no actual attempt to even establish a lot of the time that any actual cruelty or crime had been enacted. All that needs to be said is that you turn the corner, there are a few Kobolds there-- roll initiative, we are going to slaughter them all for the crime of existing. And be confident that we are in the right for doing so because their stat block say "evil".
This isn't a new thing-- people have been arguing over this thing for decades. I think the classic example is the Paladin and the baby goblins.
Paladins, back in the day, were Lawful Good. They were enforced to be Lawful Good. If they were not Lawful Good then they would lose their powers. So this Paladin and his party go in and kill all the adult goblins, as you do, get to the back of the den and-- there are the babies. What does he do?
Does he spend days transporting the goblin babies back to his church, hopefully keeping as many of them alive during the long march, and turn them over to his church to be reeducated and civilized and indoctrinated into being servants of his church?
Does he kill them on the spot because they are just fundamentally born evil and are incapable of being any other way so allowing them to grow up is just letting more evil people into the world?
Does he just walk away from the situation, knowing that without any adults to feed or protect them that most if not all of the babies would die and just say that he is "leaving it in his god's hands"?
Does he go through and slit each of their throats because it is kinder and cleaner than allowing them to starve to death?
Does he just leave the cave and allow his party to have fun stomping baby goblin skulls, knowing full well that is what they are going to do and tell himself that by simply not participating that he is in no way responsible and has done no harm?
There were people who would argue strongly with conviction that each of these paths was the proper "Lawful Good" action and decry the others as either evil or foolish and pointless. And, of course, there are those who said they would rant and scream at the DM for being a "bad DM" for even inserting this scenario in the adventure and ever acknowledging that evil races are at any time in their existence merely helpless babies.
The thing is, there is one term that describes all of these choices-- ethnic cleansing. Sounds harsh, doesn't it? But that's what it is called when we talk about those things being done to peoples in real life. Everything from out-and-out slaughtering them all to putting them into reeducation camps to be trained to be servants.
its time to get really philosophical here. We know that there are groups in this world who have done and still do these things to other peoples. I hope we can all agree that doing so is bad, even evil. But here is the thing-- why is it evil?
Is it bad because they are merely choosing the wrong target? If one says that ethnically cleansing goblins is good, then ethnic cleansing is good-- just so long as you choose the right target.
But then we need to admit that we all see the world through the filter of our own senses. Whatever we call "reality" is merely our perceptions and experiences. And all of these ethnic cleansings come with propaganda campaigns where those who carry it out are taught that those they are targeting are entirely, irredeemably, objectively evil. Their reality when they carry out the ethnic cleansing is that they are doing it to an objectively evil and irredeemable people.
Now you might want to claim that "surely they don't actually believe the propaganda" but anyone who has heard someone go on a racist tirade, someone who doesn't even have enough conviction in their beliefs to really do something about it, would know that is just simply not the case. They believe it.
So if the only thing they did wrong was choose the wrong target, then how can you call their actions evil because they just merely made an honest mistake about who they should have ethnically cleansed.
One might say that they know for a fact that none of the human groups on earth that we call "races" are so fundamentally objectively evil that one should do that to them. But that is just your own personal perceptions and experiences. That's your reality because you have chosen to accept that as reality-- but not everyone else in the world has had those perceptions and experiences, and maybe if they had them then they would change their minds-- but that's just not the case.
And, yes, you can point to the Monster Manual where the alignment for Orcs and Goblins and Kobolds and such says "evil" and declare that since this book dictates the reality of the Dungeons and Dragons game world and so you can feel confident that ethnic cleansing against that group is good and righteous. The thing is-- your characters haven't seen that monster manual, they don't "know" it to be any more objectively real than those who carry out such acts on other humans in real life. Furthermore-- I am confident in saying that you never checked Monster Manual: Planet Earth and made absolutely certain that none of the human categories were listed as being "usually evil". And I am sure you haven't met them all either-- so who are you to solely dictate what is and is not objective reality?
The only was in which ethnic cleansing can be declared to be truly evil is this-- even if all of the propaganda and the accusations were absolutely true, even if the group were to be absolutely as objectively, irredeemably totally evil and totally in league with "the devil" with only 1% or 0.1% "good apples" then it would still be wrong to hunt them down and exterminate them all and smash their babies heads in or turn them over to religious reeducation and indoctrination. Only if whomever was ethnically cleansed was no different from the goblins or the orcs, only then can one say the ethnic cleansing is an inherently evil practice.
So then we have to go back to the Paladin example. He has no good choices. Once they had decided to bust into the goblin den and slaughter them all for being goblins and therefore a nuisance, there was no good option about what to do with the baby goblins. Personally I feel that the religious reeducation is probably the least evil choice-- but who is to say that after you derail your adventure to carry dozens of wailing baby goblins back to the temple to be raised there, that the Cleric at the temple or the folk in the nearby town aren't just going to kill them all anyway the moment your back is turned because among them are enough of those who have the strong conviction that one of the other options is what should have been done?
So it ultimately does not make the least bit of difference whether or not one sees Drow, Orcs, Goblins and Hobgoblins directly reflecting a particular PoC. The abstraction of labeling certain people "evil" based on the physical characteristics they were born with and enacting racial violence on them. The message of pro-ethnic cleansing is part of the setting even if no one agrees which group the setting is advocating the ethnic cleansing of-- the best possible case scenario is that it is wish fulfillment for someone that wishes there was a group they could ethnically cleanse without hesitation or guilt.
And what positive could possibly comes out of having objectively "good" and objectively "evil" races in the setting?
You can still have evil humanoids in your game-- you just merely need to make it about them belonging to particular evil organizations rather than belonging to particular races. You could still have demon cults, you could still have anarchist groups, you could still have an evil overlord who militarizes his country and uses his forces to suppress those in his borders and carry out missions of subversion in others, you can still have raiders, bandits, pirates and robbers.
Eldar Scrolls does this, Wizardry does this, WarCraft does this... even Pathfinder does this. Honestly, D&D is just completely behind the times in this regard.
And the funny thing is-- its not like the D&D campaign worlds don't already support this. There were regions in the Forgotten Realms that had mostly good-aligned orcs being written way back late 1980s and early 1990s. It wouldn't be shocking or untoward to see a group of Hobgoblins drinking at the pub with everyone else as they look for leads to where they can go fight for some coin.
And certainly Eberron is written in such a way that it always allowed for the distinction between "good races" and "evil races" to be erased entirely-- with the one caveat being that it gave special powers and attention to the particular races that were in the PHB during the edition it was first conceived.
Its just the core D&D books, and as an extension the generic D&D world that officially still waves the banner of there being strictly "good races" and "evil races".
And, really, maybe its an opportunity. Maybe its time to give a bit more thought to these races. The racial stats for Orcs, Hobgoblins, Goblins, Kobolds, etc.-- they all indicate very strongly that WotC has never given proper thought to what they might be good at beyond the most obvious surface-level physical traits and what sort of fighting method they might use against players. The lack of non-combat bonuses in their stat blocks really speaks to a fundamental, basic aspect in the world building that could be given a lot more thought, care and attention.
Maybe in 6E, all of the basic 1st level common races in Dungeons and Dragons can appear in the PHB as races. If they can make room for Dragonborn and Tiefling, they can certainly make room for Orcs and Goblins. In fact, by 6E instead of having distinct subraces, maybe there can be a list of common traits that the race and its subraces often have and a player can choose whichever ones they like. That would eliminate the need for specific "Half-Elf" and "Half-Orc" races as one could just choose traits from both the human category and the elf/orc category to produce such a thing. And if one wants to be a Half-Dwarf, they could use the same method.
It is getting lost in the weeds to argue over whether a certain race has explicit coding to certain races across certain artistic representations of them, others insist that they see no such direct coding.
The thing is-- it doesn't really matter if there is a direct 1:1 correlation between a race and a real life group of people. Ultimately, just think about what "evil races" fundamentally means within the context of the setting.
Also-- it being fiction doesn't matter. Fiction is a medium in which we express things that aren't, but imaginably could be and, on occasion, how we perhaps we feel things should be. I think that later one is an issue. The fact that D&D makes value judgments-- it claims an objective morality and lists some actions and motivations as good and others as evil. So it is directly expressing a statement about how things should be. And if we find that the things that the game has decided to list as "good" and "evil" by "objective standards" do not match up with what we in real life would call "good" and "evil" if they were performed by a real life person upon another real life person, then it is worth examination.
And no one is saying that because characters to negative things in D&D that their players are going to go out and to those negative things. Certainly there are plenty of games where you out-and-out play a bad guy, or are just given tons of power and unleashed upon NPCs who can't fight back and allowed to absolutely wreck them and everything else to your hearts content. But when you turn on GTA, turn on god mode and all weapons, cause a tank to spawn in and just go to town on the NPC populous-- you also aren't given a pat on the head and a "Lawful Good" gold sticker.
Anyway, what do these races represent? Like undead and werewolves-- those can represent spreading disease that robs people of their sense of selves and turns them into a weapon and tool for spreading the disease. Undead can also represent the echo of some evil actions that someone took in the past and now affect what happens in the present. They, and also golems, also work as stand-ins to express that the villain's methods or goals are just so selfish and destructive that no one would ever willingly, intentionally work for them and so they use mindless slaves with no free thought to accomplish their goals. Demons/Devils can be the physical manifestations the feelings and urges that cause people to turn on each other and create disharmony, ruining the ability of people to cooperate and rotting the roots of society. Vampires and evil fae can represent how having unchecked power and no consequences can deeply rot one's soul.
There are all these other various options of supernatural enemies that one can do physical battle against. But message, what metaphor is being conveyed by "evil races"?
That is something distinctly different from an evil organization. One could be a member of an evil organization, they could be instantly recognizable from their uniforms or other marks they use to identify one another. An evil organization is something that one has presumably chosen to join, even if that choice was made due to deep manipulation or under duress. But this isn't an organization-- we are talking about the idea that simply having the genes that cause one to manifest certain phenotypes determines one is evil.
They are people, of a sort, they are born, they are raised to adulthood by some sort of family or community, they have various experiences across their lives and those experiences shape them, have various unique preferences when it comes to food, music, clothing, etc. They are capable of all the emotions that any fictional human character in the setting could feel and they suffer when harmed just like any fictional human character. They are, for lack of a better word in English, "human"-- as much as the dwarfs or elfs or halflings or any if the other "humans" who are bigger, shorter, beefier or have pointy ears, horns, tails, fur, tusks or whatever else-- mentally, emotionally, and generally physiologically they are "humans", more so than the closest living related species to humans that currently exist in real life on the planet. You can't really have a conversation with a chimpanzee outside of perhaps the handful that have learned sign language and, even then, there would be less common ground to have a conversation about than if a human were to be prevented from attacking one another and have a conversation with a Goblin in Forgotten Realms or Eberron. If there were real hominid species that were very much like the races in D&D, we would almost certainly just call them human and consider human to cover a larger group of species. (Actually-- we'd probably interbreed until it was difficult to draw a clear line between where one began and the other ended unless we have been isolated from one another entirely for the past 50,000 years)
But based on their physical characteristics alone, you can be absolutely certain they are entirely evil. Immediately, upon just glancing at them, you can be certain that if you are wandering in the wilderness and encounter an Orc that it is evil and you should kill it on sight but if you encounter an elf (who isn't the one dark skinned variety) then you can put your weapons away and relax because it is a social encounter. Sure, whether it be 1/100 or 1/1000 the DM will pull a fast one where it turns out that Orc was actually friendly and would have warned you and helped you had you not killed him or it will turn out that the elf is the one rare High Elf who has gone insane and will fireball you when you try to approach him. But outside of that 1% or 0.1% circumstances, you can automatically know one's morality by their physical characteristics alone.
A lot of the time, in fact, there really is no actual attempt to even establish a lot of the time that any actual cruelty or crime had been enacted. All that needs to be said is that you turn the corner, there are a few Kobolds there-- roll initiative, we are going to slaughter them all for the crime of existing. And be confident that we are in the right for doing so because their stat block say "evil".
This isn't a new thing-- people have been arguing over this thing for decades. I think the classic example is the Paladin and the baby goblins.
Paladins, back in the day, were Lawful Good. They were enforced to be Lawful Good. If they were not Lawful Good then they would lose their powers. So this Paladin and his party go in and kill all the adult goblins, as you do, get to the back of the den and-- there are the babies. What does he do?
Does he spend days transporting the goblin babies back to his church, hopefully keeping as many of them alive during the long march, and turn them over to his church to be reeducated and civilized and indoctrinated into being servants of his church?
Does he kill them on the spot because they are just fundamentally born evil and are incapable of being any other way so allowing them to grow up is just letting more evil people into the world?
Does he just walk away from the situation, knowing that without any adults to feed or protect them that most if not all of the babies would die and just say that he is "leaving it in his god's hands"?
Does he go through and slit each of their throats because it is kinder and cleaner than allowing them to starve to death?
Does he just leave the cave and allow his party to have fun stomping baby goblin skulls, knowing full well that is what they are going to do and tell himself that by simply not participating that he is in no way responsible and has done no harm?
There were people who would argue strongly with conviction that each of these paths was the proper "Lawful Good" action and decry the others as either evil or foolish and pointless. And, of course, there are those who said they would rant and scream at the DM for being a "bad DM" for even inserting this scenario in the adventure and ever acknowledging that evil races are at any time in their existence merely helpless babies.
The thing is, there is one term that describes all of these choices-- ethnic cleansing. Sounds harsh, doesn't it? But that's what it is called when we talk about those things being done to peoples in real life. Everything from out-and-out slaughtering them all to putting them into reeducation camps to be trained to be servants.
its time to get really philosophical here. We know that there are groups in this world who have done and still do these things to other peoples. I hope we can all agree that doing so is bad, even evil. But here is the thing-- why is it evil?
Is it bad because they are merely choosing the wrong target? If one says that ethnically cleansing goblins is good, then ethnic cleansing is good-- just so long as you choose the right target.
But then we need to admit that we all see the world through the filter of our own senses. Whatever we call "reality" is merely our perceptions and experiences. And all of these ethnic cleansings come with propaganda campaigns where those who carry it out are taught that those they are targeting are entirely, irredeemably, objectively evil. Their reality when they carry out the ethnic cleansing is that they are doing it to an objectively evil and irredeemable people.
Now you might want to claim that "surely they don't actually believe the propaganda" but anyone who has heard someone go on a racist tirade, someone who doesn't even have enough conviction in their beliefs to really do something about it, would know that is just simply not the case. They believe it.
So if the only thing they did wrong was choose the wrong target, then how can you call their actions evil because they just merely made an honest mistake about who they should have ethnically cleansed.
One might say that they know for a fact that none of the human groups on earth that we call "races" are so fundamentally objectively evil that one should do that to them. But that is just your own personal perceptions and experiences. That's your reality because you have chosen to accept that as reality-- but not everyone else in the world has had those perceptions and experiences, and maybe if they had them then they would change their minds-- but that's just not the case.
And, yes, you can point to the Monster Manual where the alignment for Orcs and Goblins and Kobolds and such says "evil" and declare that since this book dictates the reality of the Dungeons and Dragons game world and so you can feel confident that ethnic cleansing against that group is good and righteous. The thing is-- your characters haven't seen that monster manual, they don't "know" it to be any more objectively real than those who carry out such acts on other humans in real life. Furthermore-- I am confident in saying that you never checked Monster Manual: Planet Earth and made absolutely certain that none of the human categories were listed as being "usually evil". And I am sure you haven't met them all either-- so who are you to solely dictate what is and is not objective reality?
The only was in which ethnic cleansing can be declared to be truly evil is this-- even if all of the propaganda and the accusations were absolutely true, even if the group were to be absolutely as objectively, irredeemably totally evil and totally in league with "the devil" with only 1% or 0.1% "good apples" then it would still be wrong to hunt them down and exterminate them all and smash their babies heads in or turn them over to religious reeducation and indoctrination. Only if whomever was ethnically cleansed was no different from the goblins or the orcs, only then can one say the ethnic cleansing is an inherently evil practice.
So then we have to go back to the Paladin example. He has no good choices. Once they had decided to bust into the goblin den and slaughter them all for being goblins and therefore a nuisance, there was no good option about what to do with the baby goblins. Personally I feel that the religious reeducation is probably the least evil choice-- but who is to say that after you derail your adventure to carry dozens of wailing baby goblins back to the temple to be raised there, that the Cleric at the temple or the folk in the nearby town aren't just going to kill them all anyway the moment your back is turned because among them are enough of those who have the strong conviction that one of the other options is what should have been done?
So it ultimately does not make the least bit of difference whether or not one sees Drow, Orcs, Goblins and Hobgoblins directly reflecting a particular PoC. The abstraction of labeling certain people "evil" based on the physical characteristics they were born with and enacting racial violence on them. The message of pro-ethnic cleansing is part of the setting even if no one agrees which group the setting is advocating the ethnic cleansing of-- the best possible case scenario is that it is wish fulfillment for someone that wishes there was a group they could ethnically cleanse without hesitation or guilt.
And what positive could possibly comes out of having objectively "good" and objectively "evil" races in the setting?
You can still have evil humanoids in your game-- you just merely need to make it about them belonging to particular evil organizations rather than belonging to particular races. You could still have demon cults, you could still have anarchist groups, you could still have an evil overlord who militarizes his country and uses his forces to suppress those in his borders and carry out missions of subversion in others, you can still have raiders, bandits, pirates and robbers.
Eldar Scrolls does this, Wizardry does this, WarCraft does this... even Pathfinder does this. Honestly, D&D is just completely behind the times in this regard.
And the funny thing is-- its not like the D&D campaign worlds don't already support this. There were regions in the Forgotten Realms that had mostly good-aligned orcs being written way back late 1980s and early 1990s. It wouldn't be shocking or untoward to see a group of Hobgoblins drinking at the pub with everyone else as they look for leads to where they can go fight for some coin.
And certainly Eberron is written in such a way that it always allowed for the distinction between "good races" and "evil races" to be erased entirely-- with the one caveat being that it gave special powers and attention to the particular races that were in the PHB during the edition it was first conceived.
Its just the core D&D books, and as an extension the generic D&D world that officially still waves the banner of there being strictly "good races" and "evil races".
And, really, maybe its an opportunity. Maybe its time to give a bit more thought to these races. The racial stats for Orcs, Hobgoblins, Goblins, Kobolds, etc.-- they all indicate very strongly that WotC has never given proper thought to what they might be good at beyond the most obvious surface-level physical traits and what sort of fighting method they might use against players. The lack of non-combat bonuses in their stat blocks really speaks to a fundamental, basic aspect in the world building that could be given a lot more thought, care and attention.
Maybe in 6E, all of the basic 1st level common races in Dungeons and Dragons can appear in the PHB as races. If they can make room for Dragonborn and Tiefling, they can certainly make room for Orcs and Goblins. In fact, by 6E instead of having distinct subraces, maybe there can be a list of common traits that the race and its subraces often have and a player can choose whichever ones they like. That would eliminate the need for specific "Half-Elf" and "Half-Orc" races as one could just choose traits from both the human category and the elf/orc category to produce such a thing. And if one wants to be a Half-Dwarf, they could use the same method.
You know I wouldn't mind the changes in the races, if it were they were to make 6e, at least it would be the start of a new edition.
So Orcs and Drow stop being evil. Then that must also extend to: Goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, Ogres, grimlocks, illithid, duergar, beholders, dragons, basically every race with an Int above 5. So what’s left? Once the game has been gutted to the point where everything is generic and basically interchangeable, what happens to diversity?
They can all be evil. It is just that they would not be evil for being members of those races. They would be evil for either being members of certain organizations or because they have so much power, either physically or magically, that they would almost naturally see humans as food or servants. And that would be particularly true for those who basically never encounter humans.
It would just mean that, on the flip side, you go to the city where all the Dwarfs, Elves, Halflings, Gnomes and Humans all gather and trade and craft-- that there are going to be some orcs, drow, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, and ogres there too. And maybe the only reason you wouldn't likely see grimlocks, illithid, and duergar is because they like to live underground and avoid sunlight and virtually all human (and human ally) cities are above ground and as well lit as possible. Beholders and Dragons generally don't like to live around others as a general rule.
But there could be a local Illithid! Imagine if the one Illithid in the city were to run a casino where they can use their mind-reading powers to ensure the house always wins or they put on stage shows where they read the minds and hypnotize volunteers from the audience or maybe they are the primary source for the local tabloid newspaper because no secret can stay safe from them or maybe the Illithid runs a psychotherapist clinic... there are quite a lot of possibilities with the "squid faced person who can read minds" beyond the simple "kill it with fire!!"
And, really, for random wilderness encounters? Instead of the armed raiders/bandits you run into always being a group of nothing but Orcs, they could instead be Mountain Dwarfs or High Elves or Halflings. In fact, the people who are wandering around the countryside looking for people to kill and take their stuff could be a mix of all of the common races. Honestly, the battle profiles for goblins, orcs, hobgoblins and so on in the Monster Manual are all pretty generic with just a couple minor tweaks and one special combat skill.
Afterall-- it isn't enough to simply have the traditional "bad guy" races appear as good guys-- the true balance would be having the traditional "good guy" races being bad guys too.
So all that is needed is one set of various bandit stats and then an optional list of common races that give you adjustments to the basic stats and an iconic battle tactic for that race.
Fighting a bandit group of an orc, an elf, a dwarf, and dragonborn is more diversity than fighting a group of 4 orcs.
My main point is, if you don't like this change, it literally does nothing to you. Just keep it as is at your table. WotC publishes the rules, but the DM determines them.
If you want to keep racist Vistani and savage-stupid orcs, you're more than free to do so. Most people I've talked to are happy about the change.
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So? They are fictional representatives of people. Either they are fictional depictions of sentient beings (people), with free will and the ability to choose how they think, or they are literally non-sentient. Which do you think makes for better stories?
They still be fictional...
You can rationalise all you want, they still arn't real...
What makes better stories is the players/DM interactions, i've seen shitty characters contribute to great story telling cause the DM/player did the job, i've seen Good characters been totaly useless or an annoyance cause the Dm/Player played were fools...
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"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
I really think that WotC is using this as a start for a change to a better game, where 5th edition is a great game as it is changing the humanoids to any alignment is opening growth of the games story lines that it has and will have going forward. With the proposed ability score modifications that will be included in the yet unannounced book coming out later this year, that can also us as the players choose where we put said mods to the ability scores for character generation. This may really open up character design that really stands out, half-orc Wizards or Bards things we generally don't do now as they are not optimized so they aren't done.
So Orcs and Drow stop being evil. Then that must also extend to: Goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, Ogres, grimlocks, illithid, duergar, beholders, dragons, basically every race with an Int above 5. So what’s left? Once the game has been gutted to the point where everything is generic and basically interchangeable, what happens to diversity?
bandit group of an orc, an elf, a dwarf, and dragonborn is more diversity than fighting a group of 4 orcs.
That is not what diversity is, at all, and I am no expert. I''ve never heard someone arguing that demons should not all be evil, or orcs. If they are, I would say now we are being silly.
Diversity is representation of people of color and LGBTQ in DMSguild & WOTC content.
I asked on reddit if there were famous Forgotten Realms POC/LGBTQ people I could use as image art for my (public facing) project.
The response from 50% of the redditers was outrage that I could ask such a question, that I was "making trouble" suggesting that D&D was not diverse. The other 50% gave me what I needed, mostly from very recent years where WOTC has become more diverse in their writing.
The stock response is "you can do whatever you want, so D&D is diverse, just do it in your game, don't bother us with discussions of diversity".
It is still a touchy subject as you can see from this thread.
I think that Demons and other fiends should be almost completely evil, but given the fact that Angels and celestials can fall, why can't demons and devils have agency to rise? Sure, they're beings of evil, but they have personalities and ideals as well.
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So Orcs and Drow stop being evil. Then that must also extend to: Goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, Ogres, grimlocks, illithid, duergar, beholders, dragons, basically every race with an Int above 5. So what’s left? Once the game has been gutted to the point where everything is generic and basically interchangeable, what happens to diversity?
bandit group of an orc, an elf, a dwarf, and dragonborn is more diversity than fighting a group of 4 orcs.
That is not what diversity is, at all, and I am no expert. I''ve never heard someone arguing that demons should not all be evil, or orcs. If they are, I would say now we are being silly.
Diversity is representation of people of color and LGBTQ in DMSguild & WOTC content.
I asked on reddit if there were famous Forgotten Realms POC/LGBTQ people I could use as image art for my (public facing) project.
The response from 50% of the redditers was outrage that I could ask such a question, that I was "making trouble" suggesting that D&D was not diverse. The other 50% gave me what I needed, mostly from very recent years where WOTC has become more diverse in their writing.
The stock response is "you can do whatever you want, so D&D is diverse, just do it in your game, don't bother us with discussions of diversity".
It is still a touchy subject as you can see from this thread.
I understand that you have your own personal crusade, and that's all well and good. I am all for it,
But your demand of laying exclusive claim to a word that has existed for 600 years in common parlance so that it can be applied narrowly to your own personal crusade and attacking people for even using that word you think should be yours and yours alone is no way to keep allies in that cause.
The conversation you decide to object to has nothing to do with various physical and sexual traits of the person behind the DM screen.
The conversation entirely involved one person objecting to the idea that more and more things were labeled as "can't be a bad guy" and thus the number of options for kinds of opponents they could present to the players was limited. And I responded that the number of shapes and colors of not only those opponents, but of the people you meet in town, is actually greater not smaller when one erases the line between strictly "good" and strictly "evil" races.
That is by definition greater diversity as much as you want to make that word apply exclusively to sexuality.
There is no particular shortage of dark skinned human people in Faerun. Vajra Safahr, Dove Falconhand, Shandie and Hexxat are four I found right away with even the most cursory google search of Forgotten Realms characters on the list of famous women in the setting. And that is putting aside that there are entire nations/continents of non-white coded people on Faerun. It makes me think that you didn't even do the most cursory before both assuming and declaring that no such thing existed.
That is not what diversity is, at all, and I am no expert. I''ve never heard someone arguing that demons should not all be evil, or orcs. If they are, I would say now we are being silly.
So why all evil?
I never said "all", nobody is arguing "every single last one". And naturally you can create a campaign where orcs are good and handsome. WOTC can do that too. Nobody cares.
But anyone who watched the lord of the rings movie, and read all the D&D content produced over 40 years, they have always been depicted as evil.
I think that Demons and other fiends should be almost completely evil, but given the fact that Angels and celestials can fall, why can't demons and devils have agency to rise? Sure, they're beings of evil, but they have personalities and ideals as well.
Sure that sounds like a pretty good story line.
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I know right?? I just made to vent too. Last time I was on it was 6 pages. XD
I stopped reading here I'm afraid.
Nope. I stopped reading there because I was afraid I would type something nasty. When you begin to think too deeply in to something as simple as a tabletop roleplaying game, you should not be playing in the first place. We all get attached to characters because of the development that takes your characters on the journey. What you shouldn't do is get so connected that you treat it like a second life and entrench yourself within the realms that isn't your own.
There are different levels of roleplay and the DM's guide does make this abundantly clear; this is where the two of us are different. I can respect that you want to take the next step beyond the norm for players and 'see past' just a character sheet with numbers and text on it. Except, I would never go this far and see what makes D&D fun in the first place: A game. I'm a gamer, I enjoy it a lot and have spent a lot of my life sitting at a computer desk doing just that. Me and mates, we roll numbers, see what happens and then we have a good ol' lark about it. What we don't do is poke at something and go "does anyone find drow to be a racial stereotype of something in real-life?" Never before have I heard this until yesterday. I knew that D&D was considered satanism back in god-knows-when of the 80's or late 70's when Gary Gygax was bringing it up.
Games, movies and books are all good ideas to get inspiration off or take snippets to convert in to something of your own making. Recently all I've done is copy a roleplaying MMO game and tried to make rules for it to fit a tabletop game, because the developers ran out of money or the fanbase just died out as fast as it rose. Grimmwood. I love the setting for it, the art style is fantastically done by a man named Filip Tsonkin that broadens an entirely new world for players to jump in to... and it was squandered on an interactive PC game. Reckon they could've made more money by developing it in to a tabletop and all I'm doing is trying to put a slither of life back in to it by any means necessary in hopes to make it fun for me and the guys I play with.
If anything I said offended you I do apologise.
What a condescending and anti-intellectual attitude to hold. Thinking and talking about how our real world influences the fantasy worlds that we create is far from "thinking too deeply." It's the basis of literary criticism, not a pathology.
"We're the perfect combination of expendable and unkillable!"
@Kotath That was very enlightening. Thank you for that.
@Nat_30 Unfortunately that's just my view on it. I agree to having a different perspective on it now from reading Kotath's point of view and watching how I speak to people. It does not mean I will change my mind about it but it definitely means I will try to be more tactful about it.
Mezz,
That’s really shitty that you had to endure those things. That’s awful. Nobody should have to endure hate like that.
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The whole point of any art form is to make people feel something, to make people think. Storytelling is an art form like any other. D&D is a form of storytelling as valid as any novel.
The very fact that this thread exists, is evoking emotions, thoughts, and discourse means that the art is doing what it is meant to do. There is nothing wrong with that. In short, D&D is more than “just a game.”
It is a way for people to communicate ideas and feelings more deeply than just words can ever convey. It is quite frankly life in many ways. We have all, every one of us in this forum (even the lurkers), have all been enriched by this exchange of thoughts and emotions. We are all better because of this conversation.
I just hope that in another 50 years, people are still improving themselves and each other through their experiences with D&D. That has been my concern this whole time. That future generations will not have this same opportunity that we have had. I strongly feel that it is important that D&D continues to be a medium of art that continues to give people reasons to feel and to think.
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It is getting lost in the weeds to argue over whether a certain race has explicit coding to certain races across certain artistic representations of them, others insist that they see no such direct coding.
The thing is-- it doesn't really matter if there is a direct 1:1 correlation between a race and a real life group of people. Ultimately, just think about what "evil races" fundamentally means within the context of the setting.
Also-- it being fiction doesn't matter. Fiction is a medium in which we express things that aren't, but imaginably could be and, on occasion, how we perhaps we feel things should be. I think that later one is an issue. The fact that D&D makes value judgments-- it claims an objective morality and lists some actions and motivations as good and others as evil. So it is directly expressing a statement about how things should be. And if we find that the things that the game has decided to list as "good" and "evil" by "objective standards" do not match up with what we in real life would call "good" and "evil" if they were performed by a real life person upon another real life person, then it is worth examination.
And no one is saying that because characters to negative things in D&D that their players are going to go out and to those negative things. Certainly there are plenty of games where you out-and-out play a bad guy, or are just given tons of power and unleashed upon NPCs who can't fight back and allowed to absolutely wreck them and everything else to your hearts content. But when you turn on GTA, turn on god mode and all weapons, cause a tank to spawn in and just go to town on the NPC populous-- you also aren't given a pat on the head and a "Lawful Good" gold sticker.
Anyway, what do these races represent? Like undead and werewolves-- those can represent spreading disease that robs people of their sense of selves and turns them into a weapon and tool for spreading the disease. Undead can also represent the echo of some evil actions that someone took in the past and now affect what happens in the present. They, and also golems, also work as stand-ins to express that the villain's methods or goals are just so selfish and destructive that no one would ever willingly, intentionally work for them and so they use mindless slaves with no free thought to accomplish their goals. Demons/Devils can be the physical manifestations the feelings and urges that cause people to turn on each other and create disharmony, ruining the ability of people to cooperate and rotting the roots of society. Vampires and evil fae can represent how having unchecked power and no consequences can deeply rot one's soul.
There are all these other various options of supernatural enemies that one can do physical battle against. But message, what metaphor is being conveyed by "evil races"?
That is something distinctly different from an evil organization. One could be a member of an evil organization, they could be instantly recognizable from their uniforms or other marks they use to identify one another. An evil organization is something that one has presumably chosen to join, even if that choice was made due to deep manipulation or under duress. But this isn't an organization-- we are talking about the idea that simply having the genes that cause one to manifest certain phenotypes determines one is evil.
They are people, of a sort, they are born, they are raised to adulthood by some sort of family or community, they have various experiences across their lives and those experiences shape them, have various unique preferences when it comes to food, music, clothing, etc. They are capable of all the emotions that any fictional human character in the setting could feel and they suffer when harmed just like any fictional human character. They are, for lack of a better word in English, "human"-- as much as the dwarfs or elfs or halflings or any if the other "humans" who are bigger, shorter, beefier or have pointy ears, horns, tails, fur, tusks or whatever else-- mentally, emotionally, and generally physiologically they are "humans", more so than the closest living related species to humans that currently exist in real life on the planet. You can't really have a conversation with a chimpanzee outside of perhaps the handful that have learned sign language and, even then, there would be less common ground to have a conversation about than if a human were to be prevented from attacking one another and have a conversation with a Goblin in Forgotten Realms or Eberron. If there were real hominid species that were very much like the races in D&D, we would almost certainly just call them human and consider human to cover a larger group of species. (Actually-- we'd probably interbreed until it was difficult to draw a clear line between where one began and the other ended unless we have been isolated from one another entirely for the past 50,000 years)
But based on their physical characteristics alone, you can be absolutely certain they are entirely evil. Immediately, upon just glancing at them, you can be certain that if you are wandering in the wilderness and encounter an Orc that it is evil and you should kill it on sight but if you encounter an elf (who isn't the one dark skinned variety) then you can put your weapons away and relax because it is a social encounter. Sure, whether it be 1/100 or 1/1000 the DM will pull a fast one where it turns out that Orc was actually friendly and would have warned you and helped you had you not killed him or it will turn out that the elf is the one rare High Elf who has gone insane and will fireball you when you try to approach him. But outside of that 1% or 0.1% circumstances, you can automatically know one's morality by their physical characteristics alone.
A lot of the time, in fact, there really is no actual attempt to even establish a lot of the time that any actual cruelty or crime had been enacted. All that needs to be said is that you turn the corner, there are a few Kobolds there-- roll initiative, we are going to slaughter them all for the crime of existing. And be confident that we are in the right for doing so because their stat block say "evil".
This isn't a new thing-- people have been arguing over this thing for decades. I think the classic example is the Paladin and the baby goblins.
Paladins, back in the day, were Lawful Good. They were enforced to be Lawful Good. If they were not Lawful Good then they would lose their powers. So this Paladin and his party go in and kill all the adult goblins, as you do, get to the back of the den and-- there are the babies. What does he do?
Does he spend days transporting the goblin babies back to his church, hopefully keeping as many of them alive during the long march, and turn them over to his church to be reeducated and civilized and indoctrinated into being servants of his church?
Does he kill them on the spot because they are just fundamentally born evil and are incapable of being any other way so allowing them to grow up is just letting more evil people into the world?
Does he just walk away from the situation, knowing that without any adults to feed or protect them that most if not all of the babies would die and just say that he is "leaving it in his god's hands"?
Does he go through and slit each of their throats because it is kinder and cleaner than allowing them to starve to death?
Does he just leave the cave and allow his party to have fun stomping baby goblin skulls, knowing full well that is what they are going to do and tell himself that by simply not participating that he is in no way responsible and has done no harm?
There were people who would argue strongly with conviction that each of these paths was the proper "Lawful Good" action and decry the others as either evil or foolish and pointless. And, of course, there are those who said they would rant and scream at the DM for being a "bad DM" for even inserting this scenario in the adventure and ever acknowledging that evil races are at any time in their existence merely helpless babies.
The thing is, there is one term that describes all of these choices-- ethnic cleansing. Sounds harsh, doesn't it? But that's what it is called when we talk about those things being done to peoples in real life. Everything from out-and-out slaughtering them all to putting them into reeducation camps to be trained to be servants.
its time to get really philosophical here. We know that there are groups in this world who have done and still do these things to other peoples. I hope we can all agree that doing so is bad, even evil. But here is the thing-- why is it evil?
Is it bad because they are merely choosing the wrong target? If one says that ethnically cleansing goblins is good, then ethnic cleansing is good-- just so long as you choose the right target.
But then we need to admit that we all see the world through the filter of our own senses. Whatever we call "reality" is merely our perceptions and experiences. And all of these ethnic cleansings come with propaganda campaigns where those who carry it out are taught that those they are targeting are entirely, irredeemably, objectively evil. Their reality when they carry out the ethnic cleansing is that they are doing it to an objectively evil and irredeemable people.
Now you might want to claim that "surely they don't actually believe the propaganda" but anyone who has heard someone go on a racist tirade, someone who doesn't even have enough conviction in their beliefs to really do something about it, would know that is just simply not the case. They believe it.
So if the only thing they did wrong was choose the wrong target, then how can you call their actions evil because they just merely made an honest mistake about who they should have ethnically cleansed.
One might say that they know for a fact that none of the human groups on earth that we call "races" are so fundamentally objectively evil that one should do that to them. But that is just your own personal perceptions and experiences. That's your reality because you have chosen to accept that as reality-- but not everyone else in the world has had those perceptions and experiences, and maybe if they had them then they would change their minds-- but that's just not the case.
And, yes, you can point to the Monster Manual where the alignment for Orcs and Goblins and Kobolds and such says "evil" and declare that since this book dictates the reality of the Dungeons and Dragons game world and so you can feel confident that ethnic cleansing against that group is good and righteous. The thing is-- your characters haven't seen that monster manual, they don't "know" it to be any more objectively real than those who carry out such acts on other humans in real life. Furthermore-- I am confident in saying that you never checked Monster Manual: Planet Earth and made absolutely certain that none of the human categories were listed as being "usually evil". And I am sure you haven't met them all either-- so who are you to solely dictate what is and is not objective reality?
The only was in which ethnic cleansing can be declared to be truly evil is this-- even if all of the propaganda and the accusations were absolutely true, even if the group were to be absolutely as objectively, irredeemably totally evil and totally in league with "the devil" with only 1% or 0.1% "good apples" then it would still be wrong to hunt them down and exterminate them all and smash their babies heads in or turn them over to religious reeducation and indoctrination. Only if whomever was ethnically cleansed was no different from the goblins or the orcs, only then can one say the ethnic cleansing is an inherently evil practice.
So then we have to go back to the Paladin example. He has no good choices. Once they had decided to bust into the goblin den and slaughter them all for being goblins and therefore a nuisance, there was no good option about what to do with the baby goblins. Personally I feel that the religious reeducation is probably the least evil choice-- but who is to say that after you derail your adventure to carry dozens of wailing baby goblins back to the temple to be raised there, that the Cleric at the temple or the folk in the nearby town aren't just going to kill them all anyway the moment your back is turned because among them are enough of those who have the strong conviction that one of the other options is what should have been done?
So it ultimately does not make the least bit of difference whether or not one sees Drow, Orcs, Goblins and Hobgoblins directly reflecting a particular PoC. The abstraction of labeling certain people "evil" based on the physical characteristics they were born with and enacting racial violence on them. The message of pro-ethnic cleansing is part of the setting even if no one agrees which group the setting is advocating the ethnic cleansing of-- the best possible case scenario is that it is wish fulfillment for someone that wishes there was a group they could ethnically cleanse without hesitation or guilt.
And what positive could possibly comes out of having objectively "good" and objectively "evil" races in the setting?
You can still have evil humanoids in your game-- you just merely need to make it about them belonging to particular evil organizations rather than belonging to particular races. You could still have demon cults, you could still have anarchist groups, you could still have an evil overlord who militarizes his country and uses his forces to suppress those in his borders and carry out missions of subversion in others, you can still have raiders, bandits, pirates and robbers.
Eldar Scrolls does this, Wizardry does this, WarCraft does this... even Pathfinder does this. Honestly, D&D is just completely behind the times in this regard.
And the funny thing is-- its not like the D&D campaign worlds don't already support this. There were regions in the Forgotten Realms that had mostly good-aligned orcs being written way back late 1980s and early 1990s. It wouldn't be shocking or untoward to see a group of Hobgoblins drinking at the pub with everyone else as they look for leads to where they can go fight for some coin.
And certainly Eberron is written in such a way that it always allowed for the distinction between "good races" and "evil races" to be erased entirely-- with the one caveat being that it gave special powers and attention to the particular races that were in the PHB during the edition it was first conceived.
Its just the core D&D books, and as an extension the generic D&D world that officially still waves the banner of there being strictly "good races" and "evil races".
And, really, maybe its an opportunity. Maybe its time to give a bit more thought to these races. The racial stats for Orcs, Hobgoblins, Goblins, Kobolds, etc.-- they all indicate very strongly that WotC has never given proper thought to what they might be good at beyond the most obvious surface-level physical traits and what sort of fighting method they might use against players. The lack of non-combat bonuses in their stat blocks really speaks to a fundamental, basic aspect in the world building that could be given a lot more thought, care and attention.
Maybe in 6E, all of the basic 1st level common races in Dungeons and Dragons can appear in the PHB as races. If they can make room for Dragonborn and Tiefling, they can certainly make room for Orcs and Goblins. In fact, by 6E instead of having distinct subraces, maybe there can be a list of common traits that the race and its subraces often have and a player can choose whichever ones they like. That would eliminate the need for specific "Half-Elf" and "Half-Orc" races as one could just choose traits from both the human category and the elf/orc category to produce such a thing. And if one wants to be a Half-Dwarf, they could use the same method.
You know I wouldn't mind the changes in the races, if it were they were to make 6e, at least it would be the start of a new edition.
They can all be evil. It is just that they would not be evil for being members of those races. They would be evil for either being members of certain organizations or because they have so much power, either physically or magically, that they would almost naturally see humans as food or servants. And that would be particularly true for those who basically never encounter humans.
It would just mean that, on the flip side, you go to the city where all the Dwarfs, Elves, Halflings, Gnomes and Humans all gather and trade and craft-- that there are going to be some orcs, drow, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, and ogres there too. And maybe the only reason you wouldn't likely see grimlocks, illithid, and duergar is because they like to live underground and avoid sunlight and virtually all human (and human ally) cities are above ground and as well lit as possible. Beholders and Dragons generally don't like to live around others as a general rule.
But there could be a local Illithid! Imagine if the one Illithid in the city were to run a casino where they can use their mind-reading powers to ensure the house always wins or they put on stage shows where they read the minds and hypnotize volunteers from the audience or maybe they are the primary source for the local tabloid newspaper because no secret can stay safe from them or maybe the Illithid runs a psychotherapist clinic... there are quite a lot of possibilities with the "squid faced person who can read minds" beyond the simple "kill it with fire!!"
And, really, for random wilderness encounters? Instead of the armed raiders/bandits you run into always being a group of nothing but Orcs, they could instead be Mountain Dwarfs or High Elves or Halflings. In fact, the people who are wandering around the countryside looking for people to kill and take their stuff could be a mix of all of the common races. Honestly, the battle profiles for goblins, orcs, hobgoblins and so on in the Monster Manual are all pretty generic with just a couple minor tweaks and one special combat skill.
Afterall-- it isn't enough to simply have the traditional "bad guy" races appear as good guys-- the true balance would be having the traditional "good guy" races being bad guys too.
So all that is needed is one set of various bandit stats and then an optional list of common races that give you adjustments to the basic stats and an iconic battle tactic for that race.
Fighting a bandit group of an orc, an elf, a dwarf, and dragonborn is more diversity than fighting a group of 4 orcs.
My campaign world already works that way and has since the mid ‘90s.
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My main point is, if you don't like this change, it literally does nothing to you. Just keep it as is at your table. WotC publishes the rules, but the DM determines them.
If you want to keep racist Vistani and savage-stupid orcs, you're more than free to do so. Most people I've talked to are happy about the change.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
They still be fictional...
You can rationalise all you want, they still arn't real...
What makes better stories is the players/DM interactions, i've seen shitty characters contribute to great story telling cause the DM/player did the job, i've seen Good characters been totaly useless or an annoyance cause the Dm/Player played were fools...
"Normality is but an Illusion, Whats normal to the Spider, is only madness for the Fly"
Kain de Frostberg- Dark Knight - (Vengeance Pal3/ Hexblade 9), Port Mourn
Kain de Draakberg-Dark Knight lvl8-Avergreen(DitA)
I really think that WotC is using this as a start for a change to a better game, where 5th edition is a great game as it is changing the humanoids to any alignment is opening growth of the games story lines that it has and will have going forward. With the proposed ability score modifications that will be included in the yet unannounced book coming out later this year, that can also us as the players choose where we put said mods to the ability scores for character generation. This may really open up character design that really stands out, half-orc Wizards or Bards things we generally don't do now as they are not optimized so they aren't done.
That is not what diversity is, at all, and I am no expert. I''ve never heard someone arguing that demons should not all be evil, or orcs. If they are, I would say now we are being silly.
Diversity is representation of people of color and LGBTQ in DMSguild & WOTC content.
I asked on reddit if there were famous Forgotten Realms POC/LGBTQ people I could use as image art for my (public facing) project.
The response from 50% of the redditers was outrage that I could ask such a question, that I was "making trouble" suggesting that D&D was not diverse.
The other 50% gave me what I needed, mostly from very recent years where WOTC has become more diverse in their writing.
The stock response is "you can do whatever you want, so D&D is diverse, just do it in your game, don't bother us with discussions of diversity".
It is still a touchy subject as you can see from this thread.
I think that Demons and other fiends should be almost completely evil, but given the fact that Angels and celestials can fall, why can't demons and devils have agency to rise? Sure, they're beings of evil, but they have personalities and ideals as well.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
I understand that you have your own personal crusade, and that's all well and good. I am all for it,
But your demand of laying exclusive claim to a word that has existed for 600 years in common parlance so that it can be applied narrowly to your own personal crusade and attacking people for even using that word you think should be yours and yours alone is no way to keep allies in that cause.
The conversation you decide to object to has nothing to do with various physical and sexual traits of the person behind the DM screen.
The conversation entirely involved one person objecting to the idea that more and more things were labeled as "can't be a bad guy" and thus the number of options for kinds of opponents they could present to the players was limited. And I responded that the number of shapes and colors of not only those opponents, but of the people you meet in town, is actually greater not smaller when one erases the line between strictly "good" and strictly "evil" races.
That is by definition greater diversity as much as you want to make that word apply exclusively to sexuality.
There is no particular shortage of dark skinned human people in Faerun. Vajra Safahr, Dove Falconhand, Shandie and Hexxat are four I found right away with even the most cursory google search of Forgotten Realms characters on the list of famous women in the setting. And that is putting aside that there are entire nations/continents of non-white coded people on Faerun. It makes me think that you didn't even do the most cursory before both assuming and declaring that no such thing existed.
I never said "all", nobody is arguing "every single last one". And naturally you can create a campaign where orcs are good and handsome. WOTC can do that too. Nobody cares.
But anyone who watched the lord of the rings movie, and read all the D&D content produced over 40 years, they have always been depicted as evil.
Sure that sounds like a pretty good story line.