Has anyone else been having a lot of trouble with this site? I haven't been able to post for days at a time because the post editor won't load for me.
It happened all the time on my old laptop, and I haven't the slightest idea why because it seemed completely arbitrary. I was never able to "fix" it, but in my case I was able to circumvent it by switching to a different browser (firefox to chrome, chrome to edge, edge back to firefox) and posting there while DDB fritzed out on the other browser, and it hasn't happened since I got a new laptop. Haven't the foggiest clue why that would be.
The idea of some sort of ideal of 'objectivity' in a debate is the ideal state to aspire to is somewhat loaded. Many times the argument is used to tone police victims of the subtler forms of harassment and invalidating their actual hurt because they dare to get heated or express their pain. Emotions and their expressions are valid forms of communication and don't negate someone's rationality.
Also, pointing to the western enlightenment period as if it solved all illogic is ... suspect at best.
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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!
the point Veranti was making is that all statements can be challenged scientifically. then they can either be proven wrong or right. in the 17th century, you were not allowed to challenge the church unless you really didn't value your head remaining attached.
I am not saying I agree, as racism and the perception of racism are all subjective, but I do agree that all statements can be challenged. if I didn't I couldn't believe in democracy.
The existence of God has, so far, been impossible to prove or disprove, with the lack of proof being treated as scientific proof... despite it not actually being such.
no-one mentioned god. I am pretty sure if you re read all Veranti mentioned was that before the enlightenment, you could not challenge the church- despite the fact you can't prove or disprove that god exists, you can still debate it. also I am pretty sure the idea of racism only came about after the enlightenment.
just to be clear, I am not taking sides, just trying to clear up a statement someone else made.
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“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
I'm both impressed and disappointed that this thread has gone on for over twenty pages. All I can really say is that if enough people are upset enough over something in D&D to cause a sustained negative reaction...what does it hurt Wizards to fix it? What does it really hurt to say that a given orcish tribe is evil because they chose to be evil, rather than because they are orcs and ergo must be evil? This is D&D - we've been murdering evil cults full of robe-wearing yaybos for forty years now and nobody's ever batted an eye because of the inherent, fundamental idea that somebody chose to join a cult and thus they deserve whatever's coming their way. And in situations where this is not the case, entire adventures are built around 'redeeming' involuntary cultists.
If you want evil orcs in your game, put them there. Make them evil because of factors other than their inherent orcishness. An orcish raider band can be evil without orcs being genetically evil to the very last cell of their beings. Drow civilization can be deeply ****ed up and entirely loathsome from the influence of a corrupting spider goddess without drow themselves being genetically evil.
That's really all Wizards seems to be doing. They're avoiding the stigma of labeling something genetically evil, or labeling something genetically inferior a'la the Volo's Guide to DM Headaches orc. Is that really such an awful problem?
^^^^This.
You want universally evil orcs, fine. It's your game, make any bullcrap explanation for that if you want to.
The point of this change is that Orcs in every setting aren't that. The default should be orcs that can choose how they act like humans, and in your settings or lore, if you want justified racism and genocide, just make them evil. The game should be as open as possible, and your choice for who is evil or good shouldn't be forced onto other settings and other people's campaigns. It should take work to make D&D less inclusive, not more.
That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
also in LOtR, aren't Orcs fallen elves? the same with drow if I am not mistaken. if I was WOtC I would rule that any elf could become a drow if it falls to darkness. any Dragonlance fans out there know what I am getting at.
the point Veranti was making is that all statements can be challenged scientifically. then they can either be proven wrong or right. in the 17th century, you were not allowed to challenge the church unless you really didn't value your head remaining attached.
I am not saying I agree, as racism and the perception of racism are all subjective, but I do agree that all statements can be challenged. if I didn't I couldn't believe in democracy.
The existence of God has, so far, been impossible to prove or disprove, with the lack of proof being treated as scientific proof... despite it not actually being such.
no-one mentioned god. I am pretty sure if you re read all Veranti mentioned was that before the enlightenment, you could not challenge the church- despite the fact you can't prove or disprove that god exists, you can still debate it. also I am pretty sure the idea of racism only came about after the enlightenment.
just to be clear, I am not taking sides, just trying to clear up a statement someone else made.
Well, I mean trans-Atlantic slavery started roughly 200 (1520s) years before the Enlightenment (1720s) and the later Enlightenment was when we saw the birth of abolitionism by many people who couldn't justify the institution any longer. While the 19th century did see the use of pseudo-science to legitimise imperialism and those invented the concept of race (which does not exist in terms of biology), what most people would (maybe incorrectly) call racism well-predates the Enlightenment.
That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
If you can't understand the difference between "This breed of people is always evil, always bad, always your enemy, and should generally be killed or driven off on sight, unless your DM makes a specific exception and gives them permission to be real people" and "This breed of people has these traits, this culture, and this history; they've long been at odds with this other group of people, but they're still real people unless your DM decides they've been hit with a species-wide curse or some such", then I doubt there's anything I can say that would change your mind.
Suffice it to say that some people don't like the notion of an entire category of sapient individuals who are capable of speech, reason, and imagination being declared Always Chaotic Evil and perfectly acceptable targets to genocide on sight, worry-free. There are plenty of really good reasons why that's not really a good idea, and it's one of the reasons I'm so incredibly thrilled by the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and its treatment of interspecies, international relations and politics.
Yeah, it's the difference between creating a world that has essentialism baked into it and one that acknowledges people as people, fully capable of making their own decisions abut themselves, even if they are from a particular culture.
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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!
The idea of some sort of ideal of 'objectivity' in a debate is the ideal state to aspire to is somewhat loaded. Many times the argument is used to tone police victims of the subtler forms of harassment and invalidating their actual hurt because they dare to get heated or express their pain. Emotions and their expressions are valid forms of communication and don't negate someone's rationality.
Also, pointing to the western enlightenment period as if it solved all illogic is ... suspect at best.
I think it's fair to say it solved a lot of the problems facing mankind and continues to go on to solve a lot of problems facing mankind. Directly from the Enlightenment we've developed:
Free Markets, which saw the reduction of extreme poverty reduce from nearly 90% in 1820 to about 10% today. And you can watch when countries liberalise their ecnomies-- like India which opened their markets with the fall of Communism which saw an explosion of wealth across the board. Obviously when Deng Xiaoping started his economic reforms in China, we also saw an economic explosion that, while it hasn't eliminated poverty, has seen about a 75% reduction in extreme poverty since 2000.
We've seen almost every country in the world adopt democracy. We have adopted universal human rights. We've seen many of the advances of feminism and in reductions of racist policies thanks to Enlightenment philosophy. The whole "Everyone was born equal", which was revolutionary at the time, is an Enlightenment slogan. The American constitution, if you're into that, absolutely a document whose values stem from the centre of the Enlightenment. The idea that people should be free and equal is not something that has existed forever and it was spoken at a time where Feudalism and aristocratic society were not a distant memory. If you don't think the Enlightenment didn't solve everything, may I ask if you are looking for a plot of land to become a serf on?
Maybe you attribute some of these advances to science. Well, science and the scientific method are also extensions of the enlightenment project. The idea that things in this world should be arranged rationally and not based on divine law or arbitrary rule, that we should find the truths of nature (physics, biology, chemistry) and use those to build a rational system that was truly open to anyone who had a functioning brain to see how things were done and why they were done: the end of arbitrariness and in many ways authority. It was a democratic moment like no other in history because it was the moment where the idea that a guy with a book could tell you what to do. No-one had a monopoly on wisdom or knowledge or information, but instead, it was laid out in the open and if you understood how it functioned in Europe, you understood how it functioned in America or in Asia. Or on the moon. Because it isn't a system affected by human beings. If you tell me the experiment you ran and I can replicate those results without ever talking to you directly or participating. That's a revolutionary idea. We didn't get a new priest class, but rather we destroyed the possibility of a priesthood as it had existed throughout history as the gatekeepers of knowledge.
No, of course the 18th century wasn't a paradise. No one is claiming that. No one is claiming that Ancient Athens was great place to live either, but we still remember Socrates for his wisdom. We still talk about Pythagoras and Euclid and their societies were much worse than 18th century Europe. And we still talk about Kant and Rousseau and Hegel and John Locke and Adam Smith because they made huge steps from making their world considerably better than the world they inherited.
Even though we have some rough patches these days, we live in a pretty great period of human existence. Arguably the best by far if you ask some of the 1.2 billion (1,200,000,000) people who were raised out of extreme poverty in the last thirty years (yeah, in 1990 there was 1.9 billion people in extreme poverty. Today, there is only about 700 million) and the foundation for all of our progress was constructed back then in the 18th century. History takes time to develop and not every development is significant only for the era in which it first happened: the first animals started to adapt to the land 530 million years ago, but I am, and I suspect many other people here can see the benefit of their long gone actions.
Heh. You argue the glory and uplifting of the Enlightenment, and one of its central precepts that "all people are born, and should be, free and equal"...in a thread where you're arguing bitterly that several species in the game should retain their Always Chaotic Evil tag and be forced to seek explicit DM permission to be real people.
I'm not sure about you, but having to ask someone else to give you permission to be a real person is kind of the fundamental core of racism, and something more counter to the ideals of the Enlightenment I can hardly imagine.
Just as an interesting note. I picked up the latest edition of the Shadowrun core rules last Christmas (I know, I KNOW, big mistake. How was I supposed to know how awful the rules were? I just saw a cool book for a system I'd always wanted to learn). In it, racism is a huge part of global culture and a core issue facing goblinoid folks...but the book also goes out of its way to establish that this racism is based in old legends, pig-headedness, and the cynicism of the times and not out of any inherent malevolence or deficiency in goblinoid folks. It furthermore goes out of its way to establish that killing people is murder, even gangers or goblinoids, and if your runner team accrues a high enough body count it will bring the hammer down on itself. When was the last time you saw a 5e party beyond fifth level with a body count not in the triple digits?
This is Shadowrun. Shadowrun. One of the most cynical, life-sucks-deal-chummer, dark and dreary depictions of a fantastical world ever...and it still deals with racism better than D&D does. How's that work? How has this game ****ed up that badly?
the point Veranti was making is that all statements can be challenged scientifically. then they can either be proven wrong or right. in the 17th century, you were not allowed to challenge the church unless you really didn't value your head remaining attached.
I have no idea where this thread is going, but this is not a true statement. A very rough translation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems is that within any given formal logical framework, there will always be some statements that are true which cannot be challenged within that framework.
I'm both impressed and disappointed that this thread has gone on for over twenty pages. All I can really say is that if enough people are upset enough over something in D&D to cause a sustained negative reaction...what does it hurt Wizards to fix it? What does it really hurt to say that a given orcish tribe is evil because they chose to be evil, rather than because they are orcs and ergo must be evil? This is D&D - we've been murdering evil cults full of robe-wearing yaybos for forty years now and nobody's ever batted an eye because of the inherent, fundamental idea that somebody chose to join a cult and thus they deserve whatever's coming their way. And in situations where this is not the case, entire adventures are built around 'redeeming' involuntary cultists.
If you want evil orcs in your game, put them there. Make them evil because of factors other than their inherent orcishness. An orcish raider band can be evil without orcs being genetically evil to the very last cell of their beings. Drow civilization can be deeply ****ed up and entirely loathsome from the influence of a corrupting spider goddess without drow themselves being genetically evil.
That's really all Wizards seems to be doing. They're avoiding the stigma of labeling something genetically evil, or labeling something genetically inferior a'la the Volo's Guide to DM Headaches orc. Is that really such an awful problem?
^^^^This.
You want universally evil orcs, fine. It's your game, make any bullcrap explanation for that if you want to.
The point of this change is that Orcs in every setting aren't that. The default should be orcs that can choose how they act like humans, and in your settings or lore, if you want justified racism and genocide, just make them evil. The game should be as open as possible, and your choice for who is evil or good shouldn't be forced onto other settings and other people's campaigns. It should take work to make D&D less inclusive, not more.
That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
You're not correct in encapsulating the argument as "Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good." What's being said from what I've read in this thread as well as WOTC's press on the matter, is that all the humanoid races, meaning traditional player races going back to the game's inception as well as the races that have been traditionally regarded as "monstrous" but have increasingly been exposed as a player option in various iterations of the game, should all be thought of as "peoples". With that understanding, or using that understanding, Wizards is acknowledging there is a tradition in swords and sorcery fantasy going back to at least Tolkien (and even further back into the range of European mythology he appropriates) where "monstrous" peoples were evoked using language with an uncomfortable resonance to the way white people in the real world have "othered" largely peoples of color (and sometimes themselves) to further an agenda of conquest and continued suppression (i.e. evoking valuations of "savages", "barbaric", worshippers of "strange, cruel superstitions" or maybe just "primitive" all as justification to kill with impunity, take land, and force the survivors to comport to your power structure at sword or gunpoint).
In the fantasy genre, recognition and critiques of the above uncomfortable resonance actually go back at least to some of Moorcock's critiques of Tolkien. Wizards acknowledges the game lore they've inherited is problematic and has made steps in the past that weren't always successful but will be trying to present peoples in D&D as not being inherently monstrous or good or evil. I'd extrapolate from there within the hobby (like my current understanding of the World of Warcraft lore) to suggest that conflict may arise between peoples in D&D, wars will still be fought, but when it comes to the "peoples" of D&D inherent monstrosity will not be the driver of said conflict. So, lore-wise it seems the game's going in a direction where "orcs are raiding the frontier" the lore begs for a more sophisticated "why" as opposed to "it's what orcs do."
This does beg a question about "good" and "evil" in the D&D lore (I mean good and evil are functionally elemental forces in the lore like law and chaos, emanating from planes of existence, influencing the game's prime plane, you can start with Milton to see where the good evil heaven and hell dichotomy begins to find critique).
Nothing is going to stop you from simplifying the moral terms for conflict between peoples, it happens in the real world all the time. However, Wizards will be presenting a more nuanced view of the moral alignment/valuation of peoples going forward. This makes some players uncomfortable or frustrated, but Wizards believes its adjustment needed to better reflect their values as a company (and no one's going to stop anyone from seeing a market perspective at play there too).
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
If you can't understand the difference between "This breed of people is always evil, always bad, always your enemy, and should generally be killed or driven off on sight, unless your DM makes a specific exception and gives them permission to be real people" and "This breed of people has these traits, this culture, and this history; they've long been at odds with this other group of people, but they're still real people unless your DM decides they've been hit with a species-wide curse or some such", then I doubt there's anything I can say that would change your mind.
Suffice it to say that some people don't like the notion of an entire category of sapient individuals who are capable of speech, reason, and imagination being declared Always Chaotic Evil and perfectly acceptable targets to genocide on sight, worry-free. There are plenty of really good reasons why that's not really a good idea, and it's one of the reasons I'm so incredibly thrilled by the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and its treatment of interspecies, international relations and politics.
I can understand the difference, but I don't live in a world of absolute extremes where I assume a make-believe is so inflexible as to brook no tampering. We live in a world in which drow are evil, but Drizzt still exists. If you are viewing the world in such absolutes that ... did you think that they were all chaotic too? Did you assume all elves are good? Did you assume that all elves had to be chaotic good unless the GM gave explicit permission to treat them as evil? Do you feel compelled to talk to an elf or human or dwarf even when they're murderers or assassins? "I know you're trying to kill this person I'm protecting, but because of your innate goodness, I must seek a non-violent solution"?
I'm guessing the answer is no, so why you hold up a higher restriction for orcs? I mean I was never so restricted by the generic fantasy tropes written in a players handbook.
I don't like the idea that orcs are basically human with a different skin colour that sees the world like you or I might because I don't have the imagination to consider that intelligent life might not resemble me or people I think are like me. That you treat them like people (or elves or dwarves or Gith) is actually, were they real, deeply racist. You're forcing and projecting your identity and sensibilities on an alien being who would have developed along different cultural and biological lines (I'm guessing orcish endocrinology would be nothing resembling our own.) In the end, it's not about the orcs: its about you and your assumptions of this world. Yeah, it would be a miserable thing to say "this group of humans is evil by their nature" (or even by their culture) but when you try to map your humanity onto what could only realistically be an alien psychology, you deny the orcs their own identity because you are uncomfortable with that identity as presented. I don't know what skin colour you have, but that almost seems like an attempt to be a white saviour to a fictional people. I apologise for that comment because it seems too much like an insult. I don't mean it like that. I mean that it seems to me a flawed world view when it is forced to live up to the expectations it holds for other people.
Lastly, popular doesn't necessarily mean right. Just because a bunch of people think or feel something, doesn't mean it has merit. Your assumption that all people are innately good but learn to be evil (which is what I assume what you mean by being uncomfortable with intelligent beings being innately evil) is you universalising your experience with human beings. We aren't talking about Homo Sapiens here and assuming that your psychology maps to all other sapient life and rejecting sapient life that doesn't fit your theory of intelligence is just as discriminatory and oppressive as any other generalisation based on biology. We are absolutely talking about a fictional people but you are trying to define them just as much as the definition you are objecting to. You just prefer your own definition.
The idea of some sort of ideal of 'objectivity' in a debate is the ideal state to aspire to is somewhat loaded. Many times the argument is used to tone police victims of the subtler forms of harassment and invalidating their actual hurt because they dare to get heated or express their pain. Emotions and their expressions are valid forms of communication and don't negate someone's rationality.
Also, pointing to the western enlightenment period as if it solved all illogic is ... suspect at best.
I think it's fair to say it solved a lot of the problems facing mankind and continues to go on to solve a lot of problems facing mankind. Directly from the Enlightenment we've developed:
Free Markets, which saw the reduction of extreme poverty reduce from nearly 90% in 1820 to about 10% today. And you can watch when countries liberalise their ecnomies-- like India which opened their markets with the fall of Communism which saw an explosion of wealth across the board. Obviously when Deng Xiaoping started his economic reforms in China, we also saw an economic explosion that, while it hasn't eliminated poverty, has seen about a 75% reduction in extreme poverty since 2000.
We've seen almost every country in the world adopt democracy. We have adopted universal human rights. We've seen many of the advances of feminism and in reductions of racist policies thanks to Enlightenment philosophy. The whole "Everyone was born equal", which was revolutionary at the time, is an Enlightenment slogan. The American constitution, if you're into that, absolutely a document whose values stem from the centre of the Enlightenment. The idea that people should be free and equal is not something that has existed forever and it was spoken at a time where Feudalism and aristocratic society were not a distant memory. If you don't think the Enlightenment didn't solve everything, may I ask if you are looking for a plot of land to become a serf on?
Maybe you attribute some of these advances to science. Well, science and the scientific method are also extensions of the enlightenment project. The idea that things in this world should be arranged rationally and not based on divine law or arbitrary rule, that we should find the truths of nature (physics, biology, chemistry) and use those to build a rational system that was truly open to anyone who had a functioning brain to see how things were done and why they were done: the end of arbitrariness and in many ways authority. It was a democratic moment like no other in history because it was the moment where the idea that a guy with a book could tell you what to do. No-one had a monopoly on wisdom or knowledge or information, but instead, it was laid out in the open and if you understood how it functioned in Europe, you understood how it functioned in America or in Asia. Or on the moon. Because it isn't a system affected by human beings. If you tell me the experiment you ran and I can replicate those results without ever talking to you directly or participating. That's a revolutionary idea. We didn't get a new priest class, but rather we destroyed the possibility of a priesthood as it had existed throughout history as the gatekeepers of knowledge.
No, of course the 18th century wasn't a paradise. No one is claiming that. No one is claiming that Ancient Athens was great place to live either, but we still remember Socrates for his wisdom. We still talk about Pythagoras and Euclid and their societies were much worse than 18th century Europe. And we still talk about Kant and Rousseau and Hegel and John Locke and Adam Smith because they made huge steps from making their world considerably better than the world they inherited.
Even though we have some rough patches these days, we live in a pretty great period of human existence. Arguably the best by far if you ask some of the 1.2 billion (1,200,000,000) people who were raised out of extreme poverty in the last thirty years (yeah, in 1990 there was 1.9 billion people in extreme poverty. Today, there is only about 700 million) and the foundation for all of our progress was constructed back then in the 18th century. History takes time to develop and not every development is significant only for the era in which it first happened: the first animals started to adapt to the land 530 million years ago, but I am, and I suspect many other people here can see the benefit of their long gone actions.
You need to change your Username to Candide, if you were aware of the irony.
What your narrative proclaiming we live in the best of all possible worlds trajectory misses is that after whatever great society the enlightenment established, women and people of color still had to fight for equitable inclusion and agency and are still in that fight. You admit that the world has evolved or advanced the englightment ideals you hold dear, and seem to admit that things could still be made better. The editorial decision of WOTC, in their view participates in that advancement, but for some reason you've staked a flag on the conservative hill in this debate. I scratch my head at that as much as your move to dismiss the "we're arguing about a game when there's real world problems" belittling, yet you write so much in this thread.
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Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Not sure if this was mentioned before (this is a topic that's peaking my interest but feel like sharing stuff right now instead of reading everything before :p so hopefully I'll be sharing some new point of view)
First of all I gotta say that what bothers me about this is just another example of the censorship problem: Something could be organic or natural but with just a small amount of perversion it becomes "evil" so when someone points that out it just blows out of proportion and people feel that it is easy to buy that opinion.
We can't draw parallels in a world that works different, we know for a fact the deities of the forgotten realms and how and why they shaped the world in the way they did it...we can't say the same about our reality. Every game, movies, etc. is subjected to "suspension of disbelief" which pretty much says it all...don't bring your crazy sh*t here and have a good time, use it to become a better person and that's it.
If something is a caricaturized version of something is because they do have opinions and behaviors that makes them unique, blowing that a little bit out of proportion will create something significant and memorable. (same thing happens with people drawing caricatures of tourists and its ok, because regardless of the artist opinion he is attempting to create something fun)
Yeah, it's the difference between creating a world that has essentialism baked into it and one that acknowledges people as people, fully capable of making their own decisions abut themselves, even if they are from a particular culture.
If the problem with a given race is how they are presented in a given setting, shouldn't that setting be retired, and a new setting be created? Because as we go back and forth on this and everyone goes around the circle, nobody seems to be addressing the Tarrasque in the room that is the setting itself. A given race having the "average Alignment" of being either evil or good is a worldbuilding issue, not a genetic one. The societies that are primarily composed of that race will have a shared history of interactions with other races, or even within their own race as disparate groups emerge (if they do).
Because let's be clear, the only reason DnD Orcs have an "average Alignment" of Evil is because they are written that way. They devote their lives to extolling the virtues of their brutal gods that demand the spoils of war as a form of worship. Their society naturally forms around those virtues, and the peoples within that society embody those ideals. It would be rather easy to change that. Create a new setting, and in that setting, the Orcs that live there have different gods. The societies those Orcs have built over their existence might have a similar devotion to these new gods, or their societies might be agnostic of the Orcish pantheon and look nothing like a theocracy.
I would definitely have a problem with retconning existing lore to suddenly make the "average Alignment" of the Orcs as a whole change from Evil to Neutral -- or worse, Good -- because it is a retcon. It would mean that the established lore of the primary setting is arbitrary and vulnerable to the winds of shifts in current opinion. But I wouldn't have any problem at all with the focus of the game having a change of venue to a different setting. Such a break would allow WotC to change all the "racist" things they want all at once and effectively start fresh, if it is determined such a thing is needed.
That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
If you can't understand the difference between "This breed of people is always evil, always bad, always your enemy, and should generally be killed or driven off on sight, unless your DM makes a specific exception and gives them permission to be real people" and "This breed of people has these traits, this culture, and this history; they've long been at odds with this other group of people, but they're still real people unless your DM decides they've been hit with a species-wide curse or some such", then I doubt there's anything I can say that would change your mind.
Suffice it to say that some people don't like the notion of an entire category of sapient individuals who are capable of speech, reason, and imagination being declared Always Chaotic Evil and perfectly acceptable targets to genocide on sight, worry-free. There are plenty of really good reasons why that's not really a good idea, and it's one of the reasons I'm so incredibly thrilled by the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and its treatment of interspecies, international relations and politics.
I can understand the difference, but I don't live in a world of absolute extremes where I assume a make-believe is so inflexible as to brook no tampering. We live in a world in which drow are evil, but Drizzt still exists. If you are viewing the world in such absolutes that ... did you think that they were all chaotic too? Did you assume all elves are good? Did you assume that all elves had to be chaotic good unless the GM gave explicit permission to treat them as evil? Do you feel compelled to talk to an elf or human or dwarf even when they're murderers or assassins? "I know you're trying to kill this person I'm protecting, but because of your innate goodness, I must seek a non-violent solution"?
I'm guessing the answer is no, so why you hold up a higher restriction for orcs? I mean I was never so restricted by the generic fantasy tropes written in a players handbook.
I don't like the idea that orcs are basically human with a different skin colour that sees the world like you or I might because I don't have the imagination to consider that intelligent life might not resemble me or people I think are like me. That you treat them like people (or elves or dwarves or Gith) is actually, were they real, deeply racist. You're forcing and projecting your identity and sensibilities on an alien being who would have developed along different cultural and biological lines (I'm guessing orcish endocrinology would be nothing resembling our own.) In the end, it's not about the orcs: its about you and your assumptions of this world. Yeah, it would be a miserable thing to say "this group of humans is evil by their nature" (or even by their culture) but when you try to map your humanity onto what could only realistically be an alien psychology, you deny the orcs their own identity because you are uncomfortable with that identity as presented. I don't know what skin colour you have, but that almost seems like an attempt to be a white saviour to a fictional people. I apologise for that comment because it seems too much like an insult. I don't mean it like that. I mean that it seems to me a flawed world view when it is forced to live up to the expectations it holds for other people.
Lastly, popular doesn't necessarily mean right. Just because a bunch of people think or feel something, doesn't mean it has merit. Your assumption that all people are innately good but learn to be evil (which is what I assume what you mean by being uncomfortable with intelligent beings being innately evil) is you universalising your experience with human beings. We aren't talking about Homo Sapiens here and assuming that your psychology maps to all other sapient life and rejecting sapient life that doesn't fit your theory of intelligence is just as discriminatory and oppressive as any other generalisation based on biology. We are absolutely talking about a fictional people but you are trying to define them just as much as the definition you are objecting to. You just prefer your own definition.
I can understand the difference, but I don't live in a world of absolute extremes where I assume a make-believe is so inflexible as to brook no tampering. We live in a world in which drow are evil, but Drizzt still exists. If you are viewing the world in such absolutes that ... did you think that they were all chaotic too? Did you assume all elves are good? Did you assume that all elves had to be chaotic good unless the GM gave explicit permission to treat them as evil? Do you feel compelled to talk to an elf or human or dwarf even when they're murderers or assassins? "I know you're trying to kill this person I'm protecting, but because of your innate goodness, I must seek a non-violent solution"?
I'm guessing the answer is no, so why you hold up a higher restriction for orcs? I mean I was never so restricted by the generic fantasy tropes written in a players handbook.
I don't like the idea that orcs are basically human with a different skin colour that sees the world like you or I might because I don't have the imagination to consider that intelligent life might not resemble me or people I think are like me. That you treat them like people (or elves or dwarves or Gith) is actually, were they real, deeply racist. You're forcing and projecting your identity and sensibilities on an alien being who would have developed along different cultural and biological lines (I'm guessing orcish endocrinology would be nothing resembling our own.) In the end, it's not about the orcs: its about you and your assumptions of this world. Yeah, it would be a miserable thing to say "this group of humans is evil by their nature" (or even by their culture) but when you try to map your humanity onto what could only realistically be an alien psychology, you deny the orcs their own identity because you are uncomfortable with that identity as presented. I don't know what skin colour you have, but that almost seems like an attempt to be a white saviour to a fictional people. I apologise for that comment because it seems too much like an insult. I don't mean it like that. I mean that it seems to me a flawed world view when it is forced to live up to the expectations it holds for other people.
Lastly, popular doesn't necessarily mean right. Just because a bunch of people think or feel something, doesn't mean it has merit. Your assumption that all people are innately good but learn to be evil (which is what I assume what you mean by being uncomfortable with intelligent beings being innately evil) is you universalising your experience with human beings. We aren't talking about Homo Sapiens here and assuming that your psychology maps to all other sapient life and rejecting sapient life that doesn't fit your theory of intelligence is just as discriminatory and oppressive as any other generalisation based on biology. We are absolutely talking about a fictional people but you are trying to define them just as much as the definition you are objecting to. You just prefer your own definition.
What this is called, in scientific terms, is "fishing for a reason to be right."
You have changed the narrative, moved the goalposts, and otherwise obfuscated the point because you are against the idea of D&D lore changing. You're entitled to that opinion, but please don't couch it as other people being a bunch of Philistines unable to understand your truly objective and Enlightened viewpoint. You want Always Chaotic Evil races to exist. I'm not going to posit as to why, because unlike you I'm going to endeavor to avoid assuming your motives, but you then state that orcish physiognomy and 'endocrinology' is so alien to humanity that they cannot possible be anything but slavering brutes we can only understand by stabbing them repeatedly in the face.
Reminder: this is a species which is so close to humanity that they can interbreed with humanity. Their 'endocrinology' can't be that far off. They have the same general body arrangement as a human being, they have the same emotional range if usually with very different emphases, they communicate using the same method we do and can do so in the same languages we do. If this thing was a starfish alien with a decentralized nervous system that communicated via psychic scent vapor emitted from its cloaca, then perhaps the physiognomy argument would hold water. It is not. It is a big green dude with anger problems and a fiery need for better dentists.
This decision has nothing to do with you, or invalidating your desire for certain species to always be evil, murderous arsewagons. Wizards is changing their mind on how to portray certain species in their game because forty years of social progress means that some of the things D&D got away with back then don't work anymore, and it's not only better for their PR to fix it (and believe me, Wizards needs all the good PR they can get, buncha walking colostomy bags they are), but it's better for worldbuilding and the game in general, too.
What makes a better narrative: orcs raiding the frontiers because that's just how they are, with their insatiable genetic need to pillage our fields, burn our churches and do unmentionable things to our women? Or orcs raiding the frontier because centuries of constant human expansion have pushed the orcish tribes off of arable land and into the desolate reaches where farming is too poor to sustain them, and so their culture has developed to prize the strength and ferocity required to take what they need from those who have more than they could ever want already? Orcs who raid because they see the frontier as their land, their hunting grounds, and the human settlers who live on it as squatters and thieves who stole what belonged to the orcs and the Old Gods?
This is a ridiculous subject. These are not real races, thus cannot be subject to the label "minority group". There is no ethics, no rights, nor any reason to even consider equality or representation of fictive/imaginative "races". It's like people invent issues for the sake and of complaining.
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ArtificeMeal has been complaining of that for weeks.
I have found that refreshing the page and re-saving the edits usually fixes it.
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It happened all the time on my old laptop, and I haven't the slightest idea why because it seemed completely arbitrary. I was never able to "fix" it, but in my case I was able to circumvent it by switching to a different browser (firefox to chrome, chrome to edge, edge back to firefox) and posting there while DDB fritzed out on the other browser, and it hasn't happened since I got a new laptop. Haven't the foggiest clue why that would be.
The idea of some sort of ideal of 'objectivity' in a debate is the ideal state to aspire to is somewhat loaded. Many times the argument is used to tone police victims of the subtler forms of harassment and invalidating their actual hurt because they dare to get heated or express their pain. Emotions and their expressions are valid forms of communication and don't negate someone's rationality.
Also, pointing to the western enlightenment period as if it solved all illogic is ... suspect at best.
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!
no-one mentioned god. I am pretty sure if you re read all Veranti mentioned was that before the enlightenment, you could not challenge the church- despite the fact you can't prove or disprove that god exists, you can still debate it. also I am pretty sure the idea of racism only came about after the enlightenment.
just to be clear, I am not taking sides, just trying to clear up a statement someone else made.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
also in LOtR, aren't Orcs fallen elves? the same with drow if I am not mistaken. if I was WOtC I would rule that any elf could become a drow if it falls to darkness. any Dragonlance fans out there know what I am getting at.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
Well, I mean trans-Atlantic slavery started roughly 200 (1520s) years before the Enlightenment (1720s) and the later Enlightenment was when we saw the birth of abolitionism by many people who couldn't justify the institution any longer. While the 19th century did see the use of pseudo-science to legitimise imperialism and those invented the concept of race (which does not exist in terms of biology), what most people would (maybe incorrectly) call racism well-predates the Enlightenment.
If you can't understand the difference between "This breed of people is always evil, always bad, always your enemy, and should generally be killed or driven off on sight, unless your DM makes a specific exception and gives them permission to be real people" and "This breed of people has these traits, this culture, and this history; they've long been at odds with this other group of people, but they're still real people unless your DM decides they've been hit with a species-wide curse or some such", then I doubt there's anything I can say that would change your mind.
Suffice it to say that some people don't like the notion of an entire category of sapient individuals who are capable of speech, reason, and imagination being declared Always Chaotic Evil and perfectly acceptable targets to genocide on sight, worry-free. There are plenty of really good reasons why that's not really a good idea, and it's one of the reasons I'm so incredibly thrilled by the Explorer's Guide to Wildemount and its treatment of interspecies, international relations and politics.
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Yeah, it's the difference between creating a world that has essentialism baked into it and one that acknowledges people as people, fully capable of making their own decisions abut themselves, even if they are from a particular culture.
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!
I think it's fair to say it solved a lot of the problems facing mankind and continues to go on to solve a lot of problems facing mankind. Directly from the Enlightenment we've developed:
Free Markets, which saw the reduction of extreme poverty reduce from nearly 90% in 1820 to about 10% today. And you can watch when countries liberalise their ecnomies-- like India which opened their markets with the fall of Communism which saw an explosion of wealth across the board. Obviously when Deng Xiaoping started his economic reforms in China, we also saw an economic explosion that, while it hasn't eliminated poverty, has seen about a 75% reduction in extreme poverty since 2000.
We've seen almost every country in the world adopt democracy. We have adopted universal human rights. We've seen many of the advances of feminism and in reductions of racist policies thanks to Enlightenment philosophy. The whole "Everyone was born equal", which was revolutionary at the time, is an Enlightenment slogan. The American constitution, if you're into that, absolutely a document whose values stem from the centre of the Enlightenment. The idea that people should be free and equal is not something that has existed forever and it was spoken at a time where Feudalism and aristocratic society were not a distant memory. If you don't think the Enlightenment didn't solve everything, may I ask if you are looking for a plot of land to become a serf on?
Maybe you attribute some of these advances to science. Well, science and the scientific method are also extensions of the enlightenment project. The idea that things in this world should be arranged rationally and not based on divine law or arbitrary rule, that we should find the truths of nature (physics, biology, chemistry) and use those to build a rational system that was truly open to anyone who had a functioning brain to see how things were done and why they were done: the end of arbitrariness and in many ways authority. It was a democratic moment like no other in history because it was the moment where the idea that a guy with a book could tell you what to do. No-one had a monopoly on wisdom or knowledge or information, but instead, it was laid out in the open and if you understood how it functioned in Europe, you understood how it functioned in America or in Asia. Or on the moon. Because it isn't a system affected by human beings. If you tell me the experiment you ran and I can replicate those results without ever talking to you directly or participating. That's a revolutionary idea. We didn't get a new priest class, but rather we destroyed the possibility of a priesthood as it had existed throughout history as the gatekeepers of knowledge.
No, of course the 18th century wasn't a paradise. No one is claiming that. No one is claiming that Ancient Athens was great place to live either, but we still remember Socrates for his wisdom. We still talk about Pythagoras and Euclid and their societies were much worse than 18th century Europe. And we still talk about Kant and Rousseau and Hegel and John Locke and Adam Smith because they made huge steps from making their world considerably better than the world they inherited.
Even though we have some rough patches these days, we live in a pretty great period of human existence. Arguably the best by far if you ask some of the 1.2 billion (1,200,000,000) people who were raised out of extreme poverty in the last thirty years (yeah, in 1990 there was 1.9 billion people in extreme poverty. Today, there is only about 700 million) and the foundation for all of our progress was constructed back then in the 18th century. History takes time to develop and not every development is significant only for the era in which it first happened: the first animals started to adapt to the land 530 million years ago, but I am, and I suspect many other people here can see the benefit of their long gone actions.
Heh. You argue the glory and uplifting of the Enlightenment, and one of its central precepts that "all people are born, and should be, free and equal"...in a thread where you're arguing bitterly that several species in the game should retain their Always Chaotic Evil tag and be forced to seek explicit DM permission to be real people.
I'm not sure about you, but having to ask someone else to give you permission to be a real person is kind of the fundamental core of racism, and something more counter to the ideals of the Enlightenment I can hardly imagine.
Just as an interesting note. I picked up the latest edition of the Shadowrun core rules last Christmas (I know, I KNOW, big mistake. How was I supposed to know how awful the rules were? I just saw a cool book for a system I'd always wanted to learn). In it, racism is a huge part of global culture and a core issue facing goblinoid folks...but the book also goes out of its way to establish that this racism is based in old legends, pig-headedness, and the cynicism of the times and not out of any inherent malevolence or deficiency in goblinoid folks. It furthermore goes out of its way to establish that killing people is murder, even gangers or goblinoids, and if your runner team accrues a high enough body count it will bring the hammer down on itself. When was the last time you saw a 5e party beyond fifth level with a body count not in the triple digits?
This is Shadowrun. Shadowrun. One of the most cynical, life-sucks-deal-chummer, dark and dreary depictions of a fantastical world ever...and it still deals with racism better than D&D does. How's that work? How has this game ****ed up that badly?
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I have no idea where this thread is going, but this is not a true statement. A very rough translation of Gödel's incompleteness theorems is that within any given formal logical framework, there will always be some statements that are true which cannot be challenged within that framework.
You're not correct in encapsulating the argument as "Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good." What's being said from what I've read in this thread as well as WOTC's press on the matter, is that all the humanoid races, meaning traditional player races going back to the game's inception as well as the races that have been traditionally regarded as "monstrous" but have increasingly been exposed as a player option in various iterations of the game, should all be thought of as "peoples". With that understanding, or using that understanding, Wizards is acknowledging there is a tradition in swords and sorcery fantasy going back to at least Tolkien (and even further back into the range of European mythology he appropriates) where "monstrous" peoples were evoked using language with an uncomfortable resonance to the way white people in the real world have "othered" largely peoples of color (and sometimes themselves) to further an agenda of conquest and continued suppression (i.e. evoking valuations of "savages", "barbaric", worshippers of "strange, cruel superstitions" or maybe just "primitive" all as justification to kill with impunity, take land, and force the survivors to comport to your power structure at sword or gunpoint).
In the fantasy genre, recognition and critiques of the above uncomfortable resonance actually go back at least to some of Moorcock's critiques of Tolkien. Wizards acknowledges the game lore they've inherited is problematic and has made steps in the past that weren't always successful but will be trying to present peoples in D&D as not being inherently monstrous or good or evil. I'd extrapolate from there within the hobby (like my current understanding of the World of Warcraft lore) to suggest that conflict may arise between peoples in D&D, wars will still be fought, but when it comes to the "peoples" of D&D inherent monstrosity will not be the driver of said conflict. So, lore-wise it seems the game's going in a direction where "orcs are raiding the frontier" the lore begs for a more sophisticated "why" as opposed to "it's what orcs do."
This does beg a question about "good" and "evil" in the D&D lore (I mean good and evil are functionally elemental forces in the lore like law and chaos, emanating from planes of existence, influencing the game's prime plane, you can start with Milton to see where the good evil heaven and hell dichotomy begins to find critique).
Nothing is going to stop you from simplifying the moral terms for conflict between peoples, it happens in the real world all the time. However, Wizards will be presenting a more nuanced view of the moral alignment/valuation of peoples going forward. This makes some players uncomfortable or frustrated, but Wizards believes its adjustment needed to better reflect their values as a company (and no one's going to stop anyone from seeing a market perspective at play there too).
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I can understand the difference, but I don't live in a world of absolute extremes where I assume a make-believe is so inflexible as to brook no tampering. We live in a world in which drow are evil, but Drizzt still exists. If you are viewing the world in such absolutes that ... did you think that they were all chaotic too? Did you assume all elves are good? Did you assume that all elves had to be chaotic good unless the GM gave explicit permission to treat them as evil? Do you feel compelled to talk to an elf or human or dwarf even when they're murderers or assassins? "I know you're trying to kill this person I'm protecting, but because of your innate goodness, I must seek a non-violent solution"?
I'm guessing the answer is no, so why you hold up a higher restriction for orcs? I mean I was never so restricted by the generic fantasy tropes written in a players handbook.
I don't like the idea that orcs are basically human with a different skin colour that sees the world like you or I might because I don't have the imagination to consider that intelligent life might not resemble me or people I think are like me. That you treat them like people (or elves or dwarves or Gith) is actually, were they real, deeply racist. You're forcing and projecting your identity and sensibilities on an alien being who would have developed along different cultural and biological lines (I'm guessing orcish endocrinology would be nothing resembling our own.) In the end, it's not about the orcs: its about you and your assumptions of this world. Yeah, it would be a miserable thing to say "this group of humans is evil by their nature" (or even by their culture) but when you try to map your humanity onto what could only realistically be an alien psychology, you deny the orcs their own identity because you are uncomfortable with that identity as presented. I don't know what skin colour you have, but that almost seems like an attempt to be a white saviour to a fictional people. I apologise for that comment because it seems too much like an insult. I don't mean it like that. I mean that it seems to me a flawed world view when it is forced to live up to the expectations it holds for other people.
Lastly, popular doesn't necessarily mean right. Just because a bunch of people think or feel something, doesn't mean it has merit. Your assumption that all people are innately good but learn to be evil (which is what I assume what you mean by being uncomfortable with intelligent beings being innately evil) is you universalising your experience with human beings. We aren't talking about Homo Sapiens here and assuming that your psychology maps to all other sapient life and rejecting sapient life that doesn't fit your theory of intelligence is just as discriminatory and oppressive as any other generalisation based on biology. We are absolutely talking about a fictional people but you are trying to define them just as much as the definition you are objecting to. You just prefer your own definition.
You need to change your Username to Candide, if you were aware of the irony.
What your narrative proclaiming we live in the best of all possible worlds trajectory misses is that after whatever great society the enlightenment established, women and people of color still had to fight for equitable inclusion and agency and are still in that fight. You admit that the world has evolved or advanced the englightment ideals you hold dear, and seem to admit that things could still be made better. The editorial decision of WOTC, in their view participates in that advancement, but for some reason you've staked a flag on the conservative hill in this debate. I scratch my head at that as much as your move to dismiss the "we're arguing about a game when there's real world problems" belittling, yet you write so much in this thread.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Not sure if this was mentioned before (this is a topic that's peaking my interest but feel like sharing stuff right now instead of reading everything before :p so hopefully I'll be sharing some new point of view)
First of all I gotta say that what bothers me about this is just another example of the censorship problem: Something could be organic or natural but with just a small amount of perversion it becomes "evil" so when someone points that out it just blows out of proportion and people feel that it is easy to buy that opinion.
We can't draw parallels in a world that works different, we know for a fact the deities of the forgotten realms and how and why they shaped the world in the way they did it...we can't say the same about our reality. Every game, movies, etc. is subjected to "suspension of disbelief" which pretty much says it all...don't bring your crazy sh*t here and have a good time, use it to become a better person and that's it.
If something is a caricaturized version of something is because they do have opinions and behaviors that makes them unique, blowing that a little bit out of proportion will create something significant and memorable. (same thing happens with people drawing caricatures of tourists and its ok, because regardless of the artist opinion he is attempting to create something fun)
So, hopefully I can come at this from a different angle that shows my question/concern regarding this topic better...
If the problem with a given race is how they are presented in a given setting, shouldn't that setting be retired, and a new setting be created? Because as we go back and forth on this and everyone goes around the circle, nobody seems to be addressing the Tarrasque in the room that is the setting itself. A given race having the "average Alignment" of being either evil or good is a worldbuilding issue, not a genetic one. The societies that are primarily composed of that race will have a shared history of interactions with other races, or even within their own race as disparate groups emerge (if they do).
Because let's be clear, the only reason DnD Orcs have an "average Alignment" of Evil is because they are written that way. They devote their lives to extolling the virtues of their brutal gods that demand the spoils of war as a form of worship. Their society naturally forms around those virtues, and the peoples within that society embody those ideals. It would be rather easy to change that. Create a new setting, and in that setting, the Orcs that live there have different gods. The societies those Orcs have built over their existence might have a similar devotion to these new gods, or their societies might be agnostic of the Orcish pantheon and look nothing like a theocracy.
I would definitely have a problem with retconning existing lore to suddenly make the "average Alignment" of the Orcs as a whole change from Evil to Neutral -- or worse, Good -- because it is a retcon. It would mean that the established lore of the primary setting is arbitrary and vulnerable to the winds of shifts in current opinion. But I wouldn't have any problem at all with the focus of the game having a change of venue to a different setting. Such a break would allow WotC to change all the "racist" things they want all at once and effectively start fresh, if it is determined such a thing is needed.
Just say you like racism and leave, dang
What this is called, in scientific terms, is "fishing for a reason to be right."
You have changed the narrative, moved the goalposts, and otherwise obfuscated the point because you are against the idea of D&D lore changing. You're entitled to that opinion, but please don't couch it as other people being a bunch of Philistines unable to understand your truly objective and Enlightened viewpoint. You want Always Chaotic Evil races to exist. I'm not going to posit as to why, because unlike you I'm going to endeavor to avoid assuming your motives, but you then state that orcish physiognomy and 'endocrinology' is so alien to humanity that they cannot possible be anything but slavering brutes we can only understand by stabbing them repeatedly in the face.
Reminder: this is a species which is so close to humanity that they can interbreed with humanity. Their 'endocrinology' can't be that far off. They have the same general body arrangement as a human being, they have the same emotional range if usually with very different emphases, they communicate using the same method we do and can do so in the same languages we do. If this thing was a starfish alien with a decentralized nervous system that communicated via psychic scent vapor emitted from its cloaca, then perhaps the physiognomy argument would hold water. It is not. It is a big green dude with anger problems and a fiery need for better dentists.
This decision has nothing to do with you, or invalidating your desire for certain species to always be evil, murderous arsewagons. Wizards is changing their mind on how to portray certain species in their game because forty years of social progress means that some of the things D&D got away with back then don't work anymore, and it's not only better for their PR to fix it (and believe me, Wizards needs all the good PR they can get, buncha walking colostomy bags they are), but it's better for worldbuilding and the game in general, too.
What makes a better narrative: orcs raiding the frontiers because that's just how they are, with their insatiable genetic need to pillage our fields, burn our churches and do unmentionable things to our women? Or orcs raiding the frontier because centuries of constant human expansion have pushed the orcish tribes off of arable land and into the desolate reaches where farming is too poor to sustain them, and so their culture has developed to prize the strength and ferocity required to take what they need from those who have more than they could ever want already? Orcs who raid because they see the frontier as their land, their hunting grounds, and the human settlers who live on it as squatters and thieves who stole what belonged to the orcs and the Old Gods?
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This is a ridiculous subject. These are not real races, thus cannot be subject to the label "minority group". There is no ethics, no rights, nor any reason to even consider equality or representation of fictive/imaginative "races". It's like people invent issues for the sake and of complaining.