For some people, escapism means getting away from a world where their race limits their choices.
This hyper-fixation on race is entirely American thing. Outside of your states we generally don't have that problem. May have something to do with living in 99.99% mono-racial countries and having ancient grudges that focus our xenophobia more on cultural differences than silly skin colour.
Six of one, half-dozen of the other. Xenophobia is xenophobia, and it's not helpful regardless of its form. Especially when 'race' is semantic'd into a dig at Muricans over racism instead of the player taking the obvious meaning of "species" when someone uses the word "race" in a D&D discussion.
I'm not against the idea of species being bound to evil in of itself, but I think D&D does it kind of badly for humanoids in my limited experience. The problem I have with evil orcs and goblinoids is that they otherwise seem completely mundane. Fighting them doesn't feel like fighting the spawn of metaphysical darkness or manifestations of natures cruelty, but just like fighting bandits with bigger teeth, and personally I get bored fighting bandits pretty quickly if there's not some twist. Them being created by evil gods also doesn't look to be completely thought out either, if that's the case why do they otherwise act like other peoples? People that are mostly like us but forced to fight us by some curse is an idea that has legitimate storytelling potential, but is largely untapped. As such I tend to favor fiends, undead, aberrations, lycanthropes, and the blights I recently heard of as opponents.
Speaking to friends of different races in both the UK and other countries, their experience would suggest different.
English-speaking countries are influenced by American culture to such degree they pretty much part of the same culture. But the world is not limited to the Anglosphere. From our side your weird obsession with skin color just looks silly. And projecting it into a fantasy world goes from silly to stupid. And when you insist the rest of the world should share your obsessions and seek imaginary racism where there's none this crosses to annoying. Just stop. Goblins or orks are not some elaborate offensive representation of minorities. They're monsters from fairy tales written by medieval Europeans who didn't even know humans can come in different shades aside those provided by tan.
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"From our side your weird obsession with skin color just looks silly"
Again, experience of friends from non-English-speaking countries would suggest otherwise. Skin colour related racism is strong in France and Germany, for instance.
Also, it isn't necessarily about racism. Considering an entire group to be evil evokes all sorts of attrocities throughout history, as well as in recent times. I don't call anyone racist or bigoted for playing a game where they have such absolutes, but I don't want that absolute in my game. If nothing else, I find it lazy and boring. I have no objection to in world characters thinking that an entire group is irredeemably evil, as long as that is not actually true: it's an interesting story to explore in that case, not a lazy plot point made to avoid thinking and give a group some canon fodder to slaughter without consequence.
Hmm.. This idea of inherently good and evil beings is so foreign to how I view the world that I guess I'll only ever be able to play in homebrew settings. I view the classic idea of objective morality to be sort of... nonsensical,, It just doesn't make sense to me.. I don't really know what being inherently evil/good is even supposed to mean nor how it would affect people's minds..
In a world where murdering an entire village of any sentient race without hestitation can be considered "good", the concept og good loses all meaning to me.
Considering an entire group to be evil evokes all sorts of attrocities throughout history, as well as in recent times. I don't call anyone racist or bigoted for playing a game where they have such absolutes, but I don't want that absolute in my game. If nothing else, I find it lazy and boring. I have no objection to in world characters thinking that an entire group is irredeemably evil, as long as that is not actually true: it's an interesting story to explore in that case, not a lazy plot point made to avoid thinking and give a group some canon fodder to slaughter without consequence.
I find it better to look at the problem from another perspective. As I GM a setting where all sides, including players, would be evil or "alien-morality" type neutral in DnD terms it generally boils down to "are they our enemies". In regards to the OP goblin problem, those goblins are enemy soldiers. They have to die not because they're evil but because they're fighting against us and would kill out people given chance. Less band of heroes, more squad of soldiers mentality.
To come back to the original topic, I am really wondering whether the multiplicity of sentient races in a world does not actually diminish the racism effects in the settings.
It does not prevent some races from being absolutely xenophobic, and for special hatred between specific races to overwhelm many other considerations, but most races also have racial allies, for example the other semi-humans.
What do you think ?
To quote Sir Terry: "Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green."
Hmm.. This idea of inherently good and evil beings is so foreign to how I view the world that I guess I'll only ever be able to play in homebrew settings.
Nah. 5e mostly threw out that innately-evil stuff, and made a point about evil cultures, not evil races. It used to be that way, but not anymore, and the people that claim that races are still innately evil are the ones with homebrew.
The only beings innately evil are fiends, undead, and oddly gnolls (an exception that not all settings agree with).
Hmm.. This idea of inherently good and evil beings is so foreign to how I view the world that I guess I'll only ever be able to play in homebrew settings.
Nah. 5e mostly threw out that innately-evil stuff, and made a point about evil cultures, not evil races. It used to be that way, but not anymore, and the people that claim that races are still innately evil are the ones with homebrew.
The only beings innately evil are fiends, undead, and oddly gnolls (an exception that not all settings agree with).
I guess I'm not a fan of using "good" and "evil" as alignments to begin with, like.. what does labeling somethnig "evil" even mean in real terms?.. I don't really think that's how minds work personally.. When I think about my own character's alignments, in my mind, I replace the traditional terms with somethnig like this :
Good = Is motivated mainly by the overall well being of sentient life and is willing sacrifice their own well being to achieve it. Neutral = Is motivated mainly by the well being of themselves/their group above other sentient life, but is not willing to cause unnecessary harm Evil = Is motived mainly by the well being of themselves/their group and is willing to cause others harm to achieve that goal.
In a world where murdering an entire village of any sentient race without hestitation can be considered "good", the concept og good loses all meaning to me.
Well, if you travel back in time and ask random eastern European is murdering entire camp of Tatar raiders (women and kids included) is a good thing 10 out of 10 would answer with "Yes". Sapience and free will is fine and dandy but if your civilization is build on the foundation of raining and pillaging you should expect no mercy from the people you raid and pillage. Now you ad clearly non-human looks and ways of thinking with DnD monsters and it's even easier.
Also a nitpick, it's sapience not sentience that separates people from animals. Sentience just means you can perceive subjectively. Most animals with central neural system are sentient. Hope you've learned something and would stop using the wrong term.
In a world where murdering an entire village of any sentient race without hestitation can be considered "good", the concept og good loses all meaning to me.
Well, if you travel back in time and ask random eastern European is murdering entire camp of Tatar raiders (women and kids included) is a good thing 10 out of 10 would answer with "Yes". Sapience and free will is fine and dandy but if your civilization is build on the foundation of raining and pillaging you should expect no mercy from the people you raid and pillage. Now you ad clearly non-human looks and ways of thinking with DnD monsters and it's even easier.
Also a nitpick, it's sapience not sentience that separates people from animals. Sentience just means you can perceive subjectively. Most animals with central neural system are sentient. Hope you've learned something and would stop using the wrong term.
Even if I were to agree with you on that being the case ( I'm not super sharp on eastern european history I'm afraid ).. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here? I'm sure there are plenty of peoples who've had views on morality which is strongly disagree with.
I mean I appreicate the clarification, but I I think sentient works perfectly fine for this particular discussion... Also, the last bit there.. sounds a lil bit condescending to-- I hope you didn't mean it that way :P
Hmm.. This idea of inherently good and evil beings is so foreign to how I view the world that I guess I'll only ever be able to play in homebrew settings.
Nah. 5e mostly threw out that innately-evil stuff, and made a point about evil cultures, not evil races. It used to be that way, but not anymore, and the people that claim that races are still innately evil are the ones with homebrew.
The only beings innately evil are fiends, undead, and oddly gnolls (an exception that not all settings agree with).
I guess I'm not a fan of using "good" and "evil" as alignments to begin with, like.. what does labeling somethnig "evil" even mean in real terms?.. I don't really think that's how minds work personally.. When I think about my own character's alignments I the traditional terms with somethnig like this :
Good = Is motivated mainly by the overall well being of sentient life and is willing sacrifice their own well being to achieve it. Neutral = Is motivated mainly by the well being of themselves/their group above other sentient life, but is not willing to cause unnecessary harm Evil = Is motived mainly by the well being of themselves/their group and is willing to cause others harm to achieve that goal.
In this sense, I view most people as neutral.
Alignment discussions are a @#$%ing mess. There's never a good answer.
My personal answer is "what god so you follow." If you're an assassin following the god of murder, then you're "aligned" with them and their home plane. Which is a total houserule, but works better than some shallow interpretation of personalities, I find.
Hmm.. This idea of inherently good and evil beings is so foreign to how I view the world that I guess I'll only ever be able to play in homebrew settings.
Nah. 5e mostly threw out that innately-evil stuff, and made a point about evil cultures, not evil races. It used to be that way, but not anymore, and the people that claim that races are still innately evil are the ones with homebrew.
The only beings innately evil are fiends, undead, and oddly gnolls (an exception that not all settings agree with).
I guess I'm not a fan of using "good" and "evil" as alignments to begin with, like.. what does labeling somethnig "evil" even mean in real terms?.. I don't really think that's how minds work personally.. When I think about my own character's alignments I the traditional terms with somethnig like this :
Good = Is motivated mainly by the overall well being of sentient life and is willing sacrifice their own well being to achieve it. Neutral = Is motivated mainly by the well being of themselves/their group above other sentient life, but is not willing to cause unnecessary harm Evil = Is motived mainly by the well being of themselves/their group and is willing to cause others harm to achieve that goal.
In this sense, I view most people as neutral.
Alignment discussions are a @#$%ing mess. There's never a good answer.
My personal answer is "what god so you follow." If you're an assassin following the god of murder, then you're "aligned" with them and their home plane. Which is a total houserule, but works better than some shallow interpretation of personalities, I find.
Hmm I think the best answer is just to pick your alignment as sort of a reminder to yourself of whether your char is an ******* or not :P That kinda stuff.. Then build the rest of the personality from here.. People are complex.. so yea we'll never be able to pin them down to a few sentences.. Not really thinking about things int erms of alignment is the best thing you can do imo... My original point was more that.. I cannot imagine what a person being "evil" in the mythological sense actually means ya know.
In some settings, I'm sure your system could make sense yea... I guess it would require some investment from the players to read up on the various gods.
Speaking from AD&D beginnings, the part I like about less focus on D&D alignment in 5e is that we can have scenarios that challenge traditional views of things and provide the heroes the quandary of trying to do what's best for everyone when it's well-known that people who think they know what's best for everyone likely don't.
We can encounter something that seems so simple but turns into something more complicated than how it first appears or turns out to be exactly what it appears to be. Doubt is a great way to make thing interesting.
...but there's nothing to say that it can't be we=good and they=bad simplicity, too. Nothing WotC states so far has made it impossible nor will make it impossible for players to experience focused games without complicated moral-quandary plots.
Because it's our choices that determine everything at our tables, all arguments on right/wrong ways to play D&D fall apart when we can choose our tables and becomes oppressive once we try to impose our ways upon other people's tables.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider. My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong. I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲 “It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
For some people, escapism means getting away from a world where their race limits their choices.
This hyper-fixation on race is entirely American thing. Outside of your states we generally don't have that problem. May have something to do with living in 99.99% mono-racial countries and having ancient grudges that focus our xenophobia more on cultural differences than silly skin colour.
That's definitely not true. Europe and India, for example, have an Islamophobia problem. Or are you not counting that as race? Or just look at Brexit. The Brits want to get rid of the Poles.
Once again this thread has deviated off topic in to the realm of things not appropriate per site rules. For the sake of avoiding any further off topic or unsuitable discussions, the thread will be locked
Six of one, half-dozen of the other. Xenophobia is xenophobia, and it's not helpful regardless of its form. Especially when 'race' is semantic'd into a dig at Muricans over racism instead of the player taking the obvious meaning of "species" when someone uses the word "race" in a D&D discussion.
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Personal take:
I'm not against the idea of species being bound to evil in of itself, but I think D&D does it kind of badly for humanoids in my limited experience. The problem I have with evil orcs and goblinoids is that they otherwise seem completely mundane. Fighting them doesn't feel like fighting the spawn of metaphysical darkness or manifestations of natures cruelty, but just like fighting bandits with bigger teeth, and personally I get bored fighting bandits pretty quickly if there's not some twist. Them being created by evil gods also doesn't look to be completely thought out either, if that's the case why do they otherwise act like other peoples? People that are mostly like us but forced to fight us by some curse is an idea that has legitimate storytelling potential, but is largely untapped. As such I tend to favor fiends, undead, aberrations, lycanthropes, and the blights I recently heard of as opponents.
But it is inevitable. It's built into humans on genetic level. You may change its vector but never get rid of it.
Except with genetic engineering or maybe very advanced eugenics. But we're not good enough in genetics to even start looking that way.
"This hyper-fixation on race is entirely American thing"
Speaking to friends of different races in both the UK and other countries, their experience would suggest different.
English-speaking countries are influenced by American culture to such degree they pretty much part of the same culture. But the world is not limited to the Anglosphere. From our side your weird obsession with skin color just looks silly. And projecting it into a fantasy world goes from silly to stupid. And when you insist the rest of the world should share your obsessions and seek imaginary racism where there's none this crosses to annoying. Just stop. Goblins or orks are not some elaborate offensive representation of minorities. They're monsters from fairy tales written by medieval Europeans who didn't even know humans can come in different shades aside those provided by tan.
This is a reminder to keep things on topic, not to get into topics inappropriate for the site and against site rules, and to treat each other with courtesy and respect.
If violations of the above, or any site rules for that matter, persist, the moderation team will be forced to lock this thread.
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
"From our side your weird obsession with skin color just looks silly"
Again, experience of friends from non-English-speaking countries would suggest otherwise. Skin colour related racism is strong in France and Germany, for instance.
Also, it isn't necessarily about racism. Considering an entire group to be evil evokes all sorts of attrocities throughout history, as well as in recent times. I don't call anyone racist or bigoted for playing a game where they have such absolutes, but I don't want that absolute in my game. If nothing else, I find it lazy and boring. I have no objection to in world characters thinking that an entire group is irredeemably evil, as long as that is not actually true: it's an interesting story to explore in that case, not a lazy plot point made to avoid thinking and give a group some canon fodder to slaughter without consequence.
Hmm.. This idea of inherently good and evil beings is so foreign to how I view the world that I guess I'll only ever be able to play in homebrew settings. I view the classic idea of objective morality to be sort of... nonsensical,, It just doesn't make sense to me.. I don't really know what being inherently evil/good is even supposed to mean nor how it would affect people's minds..
In a world where murdering an entire village of any sentient race without hestitation can be considered "good", the concept og good loses all meaning to me.
I find it better to look at the problem from another perspective. As I GM a setting where all sides, including players, would be evil or "alien-morality" type neutral in DnD terms it generally boils down to "are they our enemies". In regards to the OP goblin problem, those goblins are enemy soldiers. They have to die not because they're evil but because they're fighting against us and would kill out people given chance. Less band of heroes, more squad of soldiers mentality.
To quote Sir Terry: "Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trolls and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green."
Nah. 5e mostly threw out that innately-evil stuff, and made a point about evil cultures, not evil races. It used to be that way, but not anymore, and the people that claim that races are still innately evil are the ones with homebrew.
The only beings innately evil are fiends, undead, and oddly gnolls (an exception that not all settings agree with).
I guess I'm not a fan of using "good" and "evil" as alignments to begin with, like.. what does labeling somethnig "evil" even mean in real terms?.. I don't really think that's how minds work personally.. When I think about my own character's alignments, in my mind, I replace the traditional terms with somethnig like this :
Good = Is motivated mainly by the overall well being of sentient life and is willing sacrifice their own well being to achieve it.
Neutral = Is motivated mainly by the well being of themselves/their group above other sentient life, but is not willing to cause unnecessary harm
Evil = Is motived mainly by the well being of themselves/their group and is willing to cause others harm to achieve that goal.
In this sense, I view most people as neutral.
Well, if you travel back in time and ask random eastern European is murdering entire camp of Tatar raiders (women and kids included) is a good thing 10 out of 10 would answer with "Yes". Sapience and free will is fine and dandy but if your civilization is build on the foundation of raining and pillaging you should expect no mercy from the people you raid and pillage. Now you ad clearly non-human looks and ways of thinking with DnD monsters and it's even easier.
Also a nitpick, it's sapience not sentience that separates people from animals. Sentience just means you can perceive subjectively. Most animals with central neural system are sentient. Hope you've learned something and would stop using the wrong term.
Even if I were to agree with you on that being the case ( I'm not super sharp on eastern european history I'm afraid ).. I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here? I'm sure there are plenty of peoples who've had views on morality which is strongly disagree with.
I mean I appreicate the clarification, but I I think sentient works perfectly fine for this particular discussion... Also, the last bit there.. sounds a lil bit condescending to-- I hope you didn't mean it that way :P
Alignment discussions are a @#$%ing mess. There's never a good answer.
My personal answer is "what god so you follow." If you're an assassin following the god of murder, then you're "aligned" with them and their home plane. Which is a total houserule, but works better than some shallow interpretation of personalities, I find.
Hmm I think the best answer is just to pick your alignment as sort of a reminder to yourself of whether your char is an ******* or not :P That kinda stuff.. Then build the rest of the personality from here.. People are complex.. so yea we'll never be able to pin them down to a few sentences.. Not really thinking about things int erms of alignment is the best thing you can do imo... My original point was more that.. I cannot imagine what a person being "evil" in the mythological sense actually means ya know.
In some settings, I'm sure your system could make sense yea... I guess it would require some investment from the players to read up on the various gods.
Speaking from AD&D beginnings, the part I like about less focus on D&D alignment in 5e is that we can have scenarios that challenge traditional views of things and provide the heroes the quandary of trying to do what's best for everyone when it's well-known that people who think they know what's best for everyone likely don't.
We can encounter something that seems so simple but turns into something more complicated than how it first appears or turns out to be exactly what it appears to be. Doubt is a great way to make thing interesting.
...but there's nothing to say that it can't be we=good and they=bad simplicity, too. Nothing WotC states so far has made it impossible nor will make it impossible for players to experience focused games without complicated moral-quandary plots.
Because it's our choices that determine everything at our tables, all arguments on right/wrong ways to play D&D fall apart when we can choose our tables and becomes oppressive once we try to impose our ways upon other people's tables.
Human. Male. Possibly. Don't be a divider.
My characters' backgrounds are written like instruction manuals rather than stories. My opinion and preferences don't mean you're wrong.
I am 99.7603% convinced that the digital dice are messing with me. I roll high when nobody's looking and low when anyone else can see.🎲
“It's a bit early to be thinking about an epitaph. No?” will be my epitaph.
That's definitely not true. Europe and India, for example, have an Islamophobia problem. Or are you not counting that as race? Or just look at Brexit. The Brits want to get rid of the Poles.
Once again this thread has deviated off topic in to the realm of things not appropriate per site rules. For the sake of avoiding any further off topic or unsuitable discussions, the thread will be locked
Find my D&D Beyond articles here