I mean well of course everyone has different styles of play that suit different people differently, but that's not the same thing as saying "there's no more epic tales of good and evil anymore!"
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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!
One of Tolkien's possible stories for how the orcs came to be is they were once elves; corrupted by Morgoth. Orcs are thus associated with evil in a cosmological sense, but they're also victims. They didn't choose to be evil because they were made that way. And that's how D&D treated them for the longest time. They're evil because someone else made them to be evil. Killing them is only "good" in the sense that it's ridding the world of evil. And early D&D tried to strip this of any and all nuance. Gygax himself once wrote that even if an orc swore to reject evil and embrace lawful goodness, a paladin would be right to slay the orc before it could recant. And I shouldn't have to say how messed up this is.
Some of it might come from embracing the writings of Moorcock. He's where we got the earliest alignments from. Law stood in as much for organized "civilization" as it did for the status quo of its inhabitants being the dominant powers in the world. Chaos wasn't just the wilds, but also change. It's rudimentary, but an oversimplification of the politics would be lawful = conservative/regressive and chaos = liberal/progressive. The thing is change is the only constant, so Law, almost by definition, became a reaction to Chaos. I think the additions of the Good-to-Evil axis became necessary to justify Law and Chaos was because the writing was on the wall.
So what we now have is a more nuanced view. Orcs might have initially been created by chaotic evil, however you wish to define that, but it doesn't have to define them. They're still sentient, sapient, intelligent life. Orcs can reason, and they can choose for themselves. So, naturally, they don't all choose to follow a deity who is something of an abusive parent. And every other "evil" people should be given the same treatment.
Maybe that's gray. Maybe it's just not simplistic storytelling. I don't know. I just know what I like. And I like the evolution.
I don't think modern stories or games are any less mythical, I think we just expanded our repertoire of myths. We have a lot of characters that are symbols, they just don't have to wear the same faces as they have worn since Grampa Tolkien's day. Characters can very much be symbols using a different parlance than the ones you're used to. And we also don't have to rely on entire groups of people being the same symbol.
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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!
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a book. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
I don't think there's really a "new way" of gaming, to be honest.
-If anything has been lost it's that people have less patience because we're kind of in the internet dating age, where a new group can be found with a swipe.
-I'm also not fond of how memey everything has gotten, but that's just a personal gripe, I don't think anything's actually wrong with it.
-Kind of along those lines I also don't like how much mmo's have affected the hobby, they are different mediums and deserve different ways of thought.
I don't really think we've actually lost anything of the old ways, they're still there. We just learned that some of the traditional tropes we used weren't the most sensitive and just learned new ways to bring the epic and the mythic. We don't need an entire race of people to represent evil when we can evoke the myth and symbols of evil in different ways.
Like, here's an example from the discussion on D&D and disability with Todd Kenreck and Jen Kretchmer: traditionally we've represented evil characters with some kind of "deformity" whether that be facial scars or limb differences, but that sucks for people with scars and limb differences who are only able to see themselves depicted as villains in media. So we do reserving that as something only for villains. I've been seeing sympathetic characters with limb differences lately, I think the latest was in Seis Manos, on Netflix. It's been nice.
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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!
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a books. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
There is a style of anime that I had in mind which, frankly, I couldn't remember the name of and didn't know how to go about finding it. This style often takes place in settings such as schools, athletic clubs, etc. and focus on "day in the life" stories.
I acknowledge that I should have been more precise than just say "anime." I didn't know how to find the specific genre name.
Having said that, I did not say that Japanese anime is causing the problem, did I?
As for tieflings, there is no reason at all that there need to be tieflings anywhere else in the campaign world. The one in the party could be the _only_ one in existence. PCs are meant to be exceptional. And, if it is the only tiefling in the world, then the typical NPC won't know what they are looking at and will have an extreme reaction.
I don't think there's really a "new way" of gaming, to be honest.
-If anything has been lost it's that people have less patience because we're kind of in the internet dating age, where a new group can be found with a swipe.
-I'm also not fond of how memey everything has gotten, but that's just a personal gripe, I don't think anything's actually wrong with it.
-Kind of along those lines I also don't like how much mmo's have affected the hobby, they are different mediums and deserve different ways of thought.
I don't really think we've actually lost anything of the old ways, they're still there. We just learned that some of the traditional tropes we used weren't the most sensitive and just learned new ways to bring the epic and the mythic. We don't need an entire race of people to represent evil when we can evoke the myth and symbols of evil in different ways.
Like, here's an example from the discussion on D&D and disability with Todd Kenreck and Jen Kretchmer: traditionally we've represented evil characters with some kind of "deformity" whether that be facial scars or limb differences, but that sucks for people with scars and limb differences who are only able to see themselves depicted as villains in media. So we do reserving that as something only for villains. I've been seeing sympathetic characters with limb differences lately, I think the latest was in Seis Manos, on Netflix. It's been nice.
I kind of question that as things like 'scarred badass' tend to be common among the heroic side as well. But I do certainly agree that there is a bunch of lazy set-up in which the pretty people are all either actually good by the end of the story and/or the sort of evil person who uses their good looks for evil ends (like a seductress). I'm thinking of games like Triangle Strategy where you can tell who is actually good/redeemable and evil just by looking at their character art or Fire Emblem where you can pretty much tell who is actually recruitable based on how good they look.
They gained traction once they put them in as core in 4e and multiple DND sourced games.
I was going to say this. The change to 4E was a big deal for tieflings. Yes, they all became "Children of Asmodeus" through some divine prank. It also wasn't their fault. They were reminders of the arrogance and folly of a human empire long ago. For my games in the Forgotten Realms, I made it Netheril. And I think Matt Mercer did something similar with tieflings in Exandria with the Age of Arcanum. He really likes 4E, if you haven't noticed.
But I digress. Throughout the D&D multiverse, tieflings have been walking around as adventurers, even heroes, and just regular folk for well over a hundred years. In some placed, far longer. And they're more of a sore spot to remind them of past mistakes; which not everyone takes well to. Some don't like to be reminded, so they lash out. Others view them welcomingly, like a cautionary tale to be learned from. And still more probably just take pity on them because, at the end of the day, tieflings are people who a fair number (I'd wager) don't view as people. They see them as something bigger than that, for good and for ill.
I quite preferred when Tieflings we’re more “exotic” and primarily a Planescape race. It made them feel more special.
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a book. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
Ascension of a bookworm really is in a setting where if a peasant so much as inconveniences a noble it can be "off with their head!" Literally a crime for a peasant to hurt a noble in anyway, even in self-defense.
Anyways, races have many appeals, it's foolish to think there is only one answer that question, the fact is some appealing factors will catch people and others won't. So one of the appealing factors for you with Tiefling was the whole "outcast" angle, it maybe for some others too but others might like the connections to the lower realms themselves, the lore of the race in other areas or even just the aesthetic of how the race generally looks. Prior to 4E I believe the race also was one of the most customizable with various skin colours and mixture of subtle and not subtle features to choose from.
Yea. That's... kind of my point. It's a show about a girl who just wants to make a book and it's setting is DEFINATELY not one where everything turns out happy and everyone gets along and the such. Rising of the Shield Hero, Goblin Slayer, Overlord, and plenty of other anime don't fill the 'where everybody is happy and character inclusivity is the name of the game. There’s no real good or evil, or rather the edges have been dulled.' description provided.
Heh. All this reminds me of a story my old DM told me. He was in a Star Wars game and one of his fellow players insisted, up and down, that only good Jedi wore brown robes and could use blue or green lightsabers. The DM then proceeded to make a Sith that looked like Obi Wan, blue lightsaber and brown robe included. Apparently that guy, years later, was still convinced the obviously evil Sith was a good guy.
Might have been my DM pulling my leg, but its kinda funny story.
Tieflings being discriminated against is a cultural thing, which means it's subject to change from setting to setting and from table to table. It doesn't have to be baked into the rules for it to be an element in your setting, and removing it from the race lore makes it possible for more people to introduce them however they wish. The devs had specifically said they are moving toward more setting neutral writing for races and monsters, so that people can fit them in their campaigns in more flexible ways.
So they're not making tieflings more widely accepted, they are leaving it up to you how accepted they are.
Completely agree. In our company of friends, we never bother with the difference between half-orcs and orcs, we just call them orcs and there's almost always someone who's playing one. We grew up on Warcraft and Elder scrolls and would rather see orcs as a race with savage roots and troubled past, perhaps problematic reputation, but still, free people with their own identity, philospohy, and sense of humor, rather than faceless mob in the service of evil god of random violence. Same with tieflngs. Of course, there is a smell of wokeism behind it - but no one bans you from making evil violent classic orcs, perverted sadistic drukhari, communist dwarves (it is a strange recurring theme I always run in my games btw, can't help but associate dwarves with Marx and laborer's revolution), nazi Imperium of Man and whatnot.
I find the argument that being inclusive prevents DMs from having “Good vs Evil” plots, or from using Truly Villainous Villains, very narrow minded. The game has plenty of solidly evil monsters (aberrations, fiends, undead) without needing to also make entire sentient species (which will probably forever unfortunately be called “races” in d&d) also be evil. Racism is a very sensitive topic, and the game as a whole is improved if this becomes something unique to home tables, rather than baked in.
My last campaign was very “shades of gray” in terms of morality. From elves to orcs, members of all the species could be good or evil, just like people on Earth. And just like on Earth, most “bad guys” are bad because of their unfortunate upbringing, or because of differences in opinion. Of course, there are also sociopaths, so true villains can be made from any species. But the idea of having carte blanche to kill people just because they have a certain color skin, and not because of their actions, doesn’t belong in the base game.
I also made heavy use of aberrations, fiends, and undead. One of the main villains was a rakshasa, and it was hard core villainous. There was no gray, no “I’m just misunderstood”, no “I had a rough childhood and I just need to be loved.” It was Evil, and needed to be put down.
I think I'm somewhere in the middle in this - absolutely there should be suspicion and in-game racism against tieflings - but for absolutely no good reason. As a d&d race they should be no more innately good nor evil than any other. No D&D sentient races should be innately good or evil IMO, certainly not any playable ones; but even some monsters are dubious; why exactly is that perfectly sentient eg. manticore innately evil?
Back to Tieflings - they can serve as a great metaphor for real world discrimination - they should be d&d's version of mutants from Marvel comics; feared and even hated, but generally just a wide range of perfectly normal attitudes - some good or heroic, some bad and even evil etc. but all wrongly judged just because of their genetics. It makes for great storytelling and can hold a mirror up to real world bigotry.
No matter what world or setting you look at there are races depicted as inherently and purely evil with legitimate stories for such creations, aka.. the villains of the setting.
Untrue, there are entire franchises, even in D&D, where villainy is unrelated to race. The evils in Eberron, for example, are evil because of corruption or choice. It is completely orthogonal to race. It is not a necessary or inherent element of stories or settings.
What 1D&D is trying to tell us is that this sort of story element is no longer possible or allowed, it is now against the premise of the game to have a story that says "this race was created for evil" and they are re-writing the races (and they WILL continue to do this everywhere this legacy exists like for example in Dragonlance) to fit into that premise.
I don't read it that way at all. They are just making it so that it's not a default. I mean look at their take on canon, where they say "Your version of the Forgotten Realms has its own canon, which doesn’t make it any less valid than anyone else’s version."
This approach to the design of the game is purely politically motivated, it has nothing actually to do with D&D and everything to do with woke culture. Mind you I don't really have an issue with woke culture as a whole, I do think D&D needed some modernization of its morale sensibilities but it's become a social movement of overcompensation and such movements historically backfire and have the exact opposite effect of what they are trying to achieve. This isn't going to make the world less racist, it will create more racism and make it easier for racists to justify racism.
It's a simple aspect of human behavior, you tell a person they shouldn't be racist because it's bad for society by showing them how and it's hard to argue, you tell a person they are not allowed to be racist because we are laying down the law and they will be racist just to prove how wrong you are about your assumption that you can control their behavior.
Wow, this is such an awful take on this. How is "we want to portray all people as fully formed and self willed" a political take? I reject that notion entirely. And the idea that because some people will deliberately be racist out of sheer stubbornness means that what ... we should stop telling the truth? That we should cater to deplorable notions so as not to arouse the ire of the ignorant? Yeah, I reject that, too.
WOTC could have avoided this entire headache by simply removing alignment from the game entirely as this in itself is a completely unrealistic premise, a gameist idea that does not actually depict anything from the real world. They didn't because they are trying to prove a political point, rather than just making the game better. What purpose does alignment actually serve (or has ever served) in the game other than creating hostility at the table. It always has been and always be a pointlessly stupid concept.
I agree alignment should be removed, but I've never thought for one second that they included alignment in the PHB in 2014 in anticipation of things like the BLM movement in 2020 in order to just make a point later on, that's an extremely convoluted plot and a silly idea. No, they included alignment because 5E was a nostalgia game meant to recapture people who left the game in the wake of 4E.
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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!
I love tiffles. They're far and away my favorite PC species. I could be a sexy, sexy devil girl in every D&D game I play from now until I quit and probably not get bored with it.
I can take or leave the default lore of them being considered "devil-tainted evil monstrosities". I mean it - I can easily play into the Shunned From Society angle, play up their role as marginalized fringe folk, and enjoy that tale. I can also enjoy them simply being accepted as part of society - perhaps with ominous looks, but also total panty soakers alluring and charismatic. I could, for that matter, play up a tiffle who loudly, obnoxiously believes her kind are Discriminated Against despite there being little evidence of it, and despite the other characters rolling their eyes at the display. That last one would be touchy, it's a very annoying quirk to give a character, but I could imagine scenarios where it might be part of a flawed personality that learns over time whilst having other redeeming qualities in the interim.
Mostly? I just love the Devil Person aesthetic and enjoy the touch/hint of darkness that comes from Infernal heritage. Is it edgy? Yeah, sure. Doesn't make it bad. Edgy works fine in moderate doses, it's only when somebody goes hog wild bananas with it that it gets truly cringy. Elsewise a little grit never hurt anybody and often tends to improve the experience.
Untrue, there are entire franchises, even in D&D, where villainy is unrelated to race. The evils in Eberron, for example, are evil because of corruption or choice. It is completely orthogonal to race. It is not a necessary or inherent element of stories or settings.
Sighting one exception does not change the reality that purely evil racists do exist and are part of the collective fantasy of D&D and this is a critical function of the premise of the game.
. . . Did you not read your own post? Because you said "No matter what world or setting you look atthere are races depicted as inherently and purely evil with legitimate stories for such creations." Ophidimancer proved this absolute claim untrue by listing a good example of you being wrong. So you either miswrote your original post or are trying to revise your original statement and move the goalposts of the discussion.
And, as shown in Eberron, "purely evil races" are absolutely not a "critical function of the premise of the game". You might like them, but they are absolutely 100% not necessary for the game. The game can exist without them and some (including myself) would argue that settings without these races are superior to those with them.
Consider this. You come into my game and we are going to play in Forgotten Realms. You run up on an Orc in a Dungeon. What is your assumption? Are you suggesting that players must now assume every monster in a dungeon may or may not be evil? That we now must make moral judgments and ethical decisions about race at every encounter because we can't make any assumptions about their intent?
You clearly don't know much about the Forgotten Realms, because there have been non-evil orcs in the setting for longer than I have been alive. If you were running the Forgotten Realms and I for some reason had the strange urge to play in that setting with you, I would be correct to assume that you knew that there are orcs that aren't evil and that their inclusion in the adventure doesn't automatically mean that we should kill them.
The collective fantasy is that Orcs are evil monsters, they live in Dungeons and when you run into them you are going to have a battle and killing them is ok, because you are the good guy in this story. There is no room for real-world judgments here, it's not racist to make that assumption because Orcs aren't a representation of real people, it's a fantasy adventure game, the players are the hero's, the monsters are the bad guys and even if the PC's murder the majority of the creatures in the world they run into, that remains true.
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Also, you're making a lot of assumptions about the game that haven't been true for decades and are niche to your own table. The player characters aren't always the heroes, them being villain protagonists is a pretty common playstyle in D&D and other RPGs. The "monsters"/creatures they encounter and/or fight in the adventure also aren't necessarily evil. Golems are common antagonistic forces in adventures, but they're not evil, they're just magic robots programmed in such a way that often leads to conflict with the PCs. The same applies to almost all Beasts, Constructs, Oozes, Monstrosities, and quite a few other "monsters" that you can encounter in the game. And it's been a common playstyle for decades to find other ways of dealing with the adventure's "antagonists" than just straight up murder every time they appear. Not everyone plays apparently good-aligned murderhobos in D&D, especially not in the 2020s.
Wow, this is such an awful take on this. How is "we want to portray all people as fully formed and self willed" a political take? I reject that notion entirely. And the idea that because some people will deliberately be racist out of sheer stubbornness means that what ... we should stop telling the truth? That we should cater to deplorable notions so as not to arouse the ire of the ignorant? Yeah, I reject that, too.
Orcs and Tieflings are not people, that is the point, they are fantasy monsters created for the sole purpose so that our fantasy alter ego's can murder them mercilessly and take their stuff while remaining morally justified to do so. You're trying to give names to the bacon in my sandwich so I feel bad about eating it.
Orcs and Tieflings have been depicted as sentient, free-willed people in D&D for decades. Were Tieflings ever an always-evil kill-on-sight monster race? Because I was under the impression that they were playable back in 2e's Planescape and weren't always evil or even inclined to evil.
Also, I'd argue that advocating for the extermination of sentient races in a D&D world is the evil act, not the "act" of the races existing in the world.
Untrue, there are entire franchises, even in D&D, where villainy is unrelated to race. The evils in Eberron, for example, are evil because of corruption or choice. It is completely orthogonal to race. It is not a necessary or inherent element of stories or settings.
Sighting one exception does not change the reality that purely evil racists do exist and are part of the collective fantasy of D&D and this is a critical function of the premise of the game.
Consider this. You come into my game and we are going to play in Forgotten Realms. You run up on an Orc in a Dungeon. What is your assumption? Are you suggesting that players must now assume every monster in a dungeon may or may not be evil? That we now must make moral judgments and ethical decisions about race at every encounter because we can't make any assumptions about their intent?
The collective fantasy is that Orcs are evil monsters, they live in Dungeons and when you run into them you are going to have a battle and killing them is ok, because you are the good guy in this story. There is no room for real-world judgments here, it's not racist to make that assumption because Orcs aren't a representation of real people, it's a fantasy adventure game, the players are the hero's, the monsters are the bad guys and even if the PC's murder the majority of the creatures in the world they run into, that remains true.
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Who are you to speak of collective fantasy? Orcs in Eberron and Exandria are not inherently evil. Neither are orcs in Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, Lineage, HoMM, and many other settings. If a thing has a brain, it can make decisions. Think for itself. Sure, in your setting, all orcs might be dumb evil because evil god made them this way. If that's interesting to you. I prefer having an additional culture with a main theme of entering an era of painful reformation. Someone always plays an orc in my company of friends, we just like the crude humor and savage badassery that this race is associated with. Sure, your games might be about murderfest - but mine have more nuance and moral dilemmas, and no one called DnD police on me yet.
Untrue, there are entire franchises, even in D&D, where villainy is unrelated to race. The evils in Eberron, for example, are evil because of corruption or choice. It is completely orthogonal to race. It is not a necessary or inherent element of stories or settings.
Sighting one exception does not change the reality that purely evil racists do exist and are part of the collective fantasy of D&D and this is a critical function of the premise of the game.
Consider this. You come into my game and we are going to play in Forgotten Realms. You run up on an Orc in a Dungeon. What is your assumption? Are you suggesting that players must now assume every monster in a dungeon may or may not be evil? That we now must make moral judgments and ethical decisions about race at every encounter because we can't make any assumptions about their intent?
The collective fantasy is that Orcs are evil monsters, they live in Dungeons and when you run into them you are going to have a battle and killing them is ok, because you are the good guy in this story. There is no room for real-world judgments here, it's not racist to make that assumption because Orcs aren't a representation of real people, it's a fantasy adventure game, the players are the hero's, the monsters are the bad guys and even if the PC's murder the majority of the creatures in the world they run into, that remains true.
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Considering there are no less than six different varieties of orcs, at least one of which is explicitly pacifist, and another that is organized into a full-fledged kingdom in the Spine of the World?
Yeah, orcs aren't inherently evil. And how they've been treated in D&D has had parallels to how real life peoples have been treated. Even if you want to buy into the idea that all orcs are evil, because of Gruumsh or whatnot, that isn't their fault. They were made that way. Their patron deity is an abusive parent, and they're victims.
There is room for simplistic morality. Sometimes, simple and easy to identify heroes and villains work. They also work best when other, big ideas are being explored. The orcs in Lord of the Rings may be inherently evil, but they work in service to a larger story with rather deep themes and broad applicability.
If you just want them to be evil so your players can slay them, guilt-free, that's bad.
WOTC could have avoided this entire headache by simply removing alignment from the game entirely as this in itself is a completely unrealistic premise, a gameist idea that does not actually depict anything from the real world. They didn't because they are trying to prove a political point, rather than just making the game better. What purpose does alignment actually serve (or has ever served) in the game other than creating hostility at the table. It always has been and always be a pointlessly stupid concept.
How good or evil you are is a matter of opinion about a person's actions, an opinion no two people will ever agree upon and no one is ever objectively right about. Even if you could objectively determine if something is good or evil, surely anyone who murders for a living must be evil and as such every D&D character ever made is objectively pure evil, after all murdering things is 90% of what a character does in a typical D&D game.
That depends. Do you think we can have benevolent (and I mean, truly benevolent) fiends? Those tend to be the creatures that seem to be consistently "evil", no matter the setting. Usually because they're supernatural entities who literally embody aspects of what we typically consider "evil". The overlords in Eberron, for example, embody mortal fears and use whatever methods they can to boost those fears, and in turn boost themselves.
The interesting thing about tieflings as a race/species/whatever is that they originated in the Planescape setting, a setting that used alignment as a metaphysical force that defined how things worked rather than just an arbitrary marker for how a character should behave. Supernatural beings with very defined and almost (emphasis on "almost") immutable personas like deities, celestials, and fiends are actually more fitting for the alignment mechanic than actual mortals with more complex personalities.
I mean well of course everyone has different styles of play that suit different people differently, but that's not the same thing as saying "there's no more epic tales of good and evil anymore!"
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!
If I may.
One of Tolkien's possible stories for how the orcs came to be is they were once elves; corrupted by Morgoth. Orcs are thus associated with evil in a cosmological sense, but they're also victims. They didn't choose to be evil because they were made that way. And that's how D&D treated them for the longest time. They're evil because someone else made them to be evil. Killing them is only "good" in the sense that it's ridding the world of evil. And early D&D tried to strip this of any and all nuance. Gygax himself once wrote that even if an orc swore to reject evil and embrace lawful goodness, a paladin would be right to slay the orc before it could recant. And I shouldn't have to say how messed up this is.
Some of it might come from embracing the writings of Moorcock. He's where we got the earliest alignments from. Law stood in as much for organized "civilization" as it did for the status quo of its inhabitants being the dominant powers in the world. Chaos wasn't just the wilds, but also change. It's rudimentary, but an oversimplification of the politics would be lawful = conservative/regressive and chaos = liberal/progressive. The thing is change is the only constant, so Law, almost by definition, became a reaction to Chaos. I think the additions of the Good-to-Evil axis became necessary to justify Law and Chaos was because the writing was on the wall.
So what we now have is a more nuanced view. Orcs might have initially been created by chaotic evil, however you wish to define that, but it doesn't have to define them. They're still sentient, sapient, intelligent life. Orcs can reason, and they can choose for themselves. So, naturally, they don't all choose to follow a deity who is something of an abusive parent. And every other "evil" people should be given the same treatment.
Maybe that's gray. Maybe it's just not simplistic storytelling. I don't know. I just know what I like. And I like the evolution.
I don't think modern stories or games are any less mythical, I think we just expanded our repertoire of myths. We have a lot of characters that are symbols, they just don't have to wear the same faces as they have worn since Grampa Tolkien's day. Characters can very much be symbols using a different parlance than the ones you're used to. And we also don't have to rely on entire groups of people being the same symbol.
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!
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a book. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
I don't think there's really a "new way" of gaming, to be honest.
-If anything has been lost it's that people have less patience because we're kind of in the internet dating age, where a new group can be found with a swipe.
-I'm also not fond of how memey everything has gotten, but that's just a personal gripe, I don't think anything's actually wrong with it.
-Kind of along those lines I also don't like how much mmo's have affected the hobby, they are different mediums and deserve different ways of thought.
I don't really think we've actually lost anything of the old ways, they're still there. We just learned that some of the traditional tropes we used weren't the most sensitive and just learned new ways to bring the epic and the mythic. We don't need an entire race of people to represent evil when we can evoke the myth and symbols of evil in different ways.
Like, here's an example from the discussion on D&D and disability with Todd Kenreck and Jen Kretchmer: traditionally we've represented evil characters with some kind of "deformity" whether that be facial scars or limb differences, but that sucks for people with scars and limb differences who are only able to see themselves depicted as villains in media. So we do reserving that as something only for villains. I've been seeing sympathetic characters with limb differences lately, I think the latest was in Seis Manos, on Netflix. It's been nice.
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!
Slice of Life is the anime you are thinking of.
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I kind of question that as things like 'scarred badass' tend to be common among the heroic side as well. But I do certainly agree that there is a bunch of lazy set-up in which the pretty people are all either actually good by the end of the story and/or the sort of evil person who uses their good looks for evil ends (like a seductress). I'm thinking of games like Triangle Strategy where you can tell who is actually good/redeemable and evil just by looking at their character art or Fire Emblem where you can pretty much tell who is actually recruitable based on how good they look.
I quite preferred when Tieflings we’re more “exotic” and primarily a Planescape race. It made them feel more special.
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Ascension of a bookworm really is in a setting where if a peasant so much as inconveniences a noble it can be "off with their head!" Literally a crime for a peasant to hurt a noble in anyway, even in self-defense.
Anyways, races have many appeals, it's foolish to think there is only one answer that question, the fact is some appealing factors will catch people and others won't. So one of the appealing factors for you with Tiefling was the whole "outcast" angle, it maybe for some others too but others might like the connections to the lower realms themselves, the lore of the race in other areas or even just the aesthetic of how the race generally looks. Prior to 4E I believe the race also was one of the most customizable with various skin colours and mixture of subtle and not subtle features to choose from.
Yea. That's... kind of my point. It's a show about a girl who just wants to make a book and it's setting is DEFINATELY not one where everything turns out happy and everyone gets along and the such. Rising of the Shield Hero, Goblin Slayer, Overlord, and plenty of other anime don't fill the 'where everybody is happy and character inclusivity is the name of the game. There’s no real good or evil, or rather the edges have been dulled.' description provided.
Heh. All this reminds me of a story my old DM told me. He was in a Star Wars game and one of his fellow players insisted, up and down, that only good Jedi wore brown robes and could use blue or green lightsabers. The DM then proceeded to make a Sith that looked like Obi Wan, blue lightsaber and brown robe included. Apparently that guy, years later, was still convinced the obviously evil Sith was a good guy.
Might have been my DM pulling my leg, but its kinda funny story.
Completely agree. In our company of friends, we never bother with the difference between half-orcs and orcs, we just call them orcs and there's almost always someone who's playing one. We grew up on Warcraft and Elder scrolls and would rather see orcs as a race with savage roots and troubled past, perhaps problematic reputation, but still, free people with their own identity, philospohy, and sense of humor, rather than faceless mob in the service of evil god of random violence. Same with tieflngs. Of course, there is a smell of wokeism behind it - but no one bans you from making evil violent classic orcs, perverted sadistic drukhari, communist dwarves (it is a strange recurring theme I always run in my games btw, can't help but associate dwarves with Marx and laborer's revolution), nazi Imperium of Man and whatnot.
I find the argument that being inclusive prevents DMs from having “Good vs Evil” plots, or from using Truly Villainous Villains, very narrow minded. The game has plenty of solidly evil monsters (aberrations, fiends, undead) without needing to also make entire sentient species (which will probably forever unfortunately be called “races” in d&d) also be evil. Racism is a very sensitive topic, and the game as a whole is improved if this becomes something unique to home tables, rather than baked in.
My last campaign was very “shades of gray” in terms of morality. From elves to orcs, members of all the species could be good or evil, just like people on Earth. And just like on Earth, most “bad guys” are bad because of their unfortunate upbringing, or because of differences in opinion. Of course, there are also sociopaths, so true villains can be made from any species. But the idea of having carte blanche to kill people just because they have a certain color skin, and not because of their actions, doesn’t belong in the base game.
I also made heavy use of aberrations, fiends, and undead. One of the main villains was a rakshasa, and it was hard core villainous. There was no gray, no “I’m just misunderstood”, no “I had a rough childhood and I just need to be loved.” It was Evil, and needed to be put down.
I think I'm somewhere in the middle in this - absolutely there should be suspicion and in-game racism against tieflings - but for absolutely no good reason. As a d&d race they should be no more innately good nor evil than any other. No D&D sentient races should be innately good or evil IMO, certainly not any playable ones; but even some monsters are dubious; why exactly is that perfectly sentient eg. manticore innately evil?
Back to Tieflings - they can serve as a great metaphor for real world discrimination - they should be d&d's version of mutants from Marvel comics; feared and even hated, but generally just a wide range of perfectly normal attitudes - some good or heroic, some bad and even evil etc. but all wrongly judged just because of their genetics. It makes for great storytelling and can hold a mirror up to real world bigotry.
Untrue, there are entire franchises, even in D&D, where villainy is unrelated to race. The evils in Eberron, for example, are evil because of corruption or choice. It is completely orthogonal to race. It is not a necessary or inherent element of stories or settings.
I don't read it that way at all. They are just making it so that it's not a default. I mean look at their take on canon, where they say "Your version of the Forgotten Realms has its own canon, which doesn’t make it any less valid than anyone else’s version."
Wow, this is such an awful take on this. How is "we want to portray all people as fully formed and self willed" a political take? I reject that notion entirely. And the idea that because some people will deliberately be racist out of sheer stubbornness means that what ... we should stop telling the truth? That we should cater to deplorable notions so as not to arouse the ire of the ignorant? Yeah, I reject that, too.
I agree alignment should be removed, but I've never thought for one second that they included alignment in the PHB in 2014 in anticipation of things like the BLM movement in 2020 in order to just make a point later on, that's an extremely convoluted plot and a silly idea. No, they included alignment because 5E was a nostalgia game meant to recapture people who left the game in the wake of 4E.
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 love tiffles. They're far and away my favorite PC species. I could be a sexy, sexy devil girl in every D&D game I play from now until I quit and probably not get bored with it.
I can take or leave the default lore of them being considered "devil-tainted evil monstrosities". I mean it - I can easily play into the Shunned From Society angle, play up their role as marginalized fringe folk, and enjoy that tale. I can also enjoy them simply being accepted as part of society - perhaps with ominous looks, but also
total panty soakersalluring and charismatic. I could, for that matter, play up a tiffle who loudly, obnoxiously believes her kind are Discriminated Against despite there being little evidence of it, and despite the other characters rolling their eyes at the display. That last one would be touchy, it's a very annoying quirk to give a character, but I could imagine scenarios where it might be part of a flawed personality that learns over time whilst having other redeeming qualities in the interim.Mostly? I just love the Devil Person aesthetic and enjoy the touch/hint of darkness that comes from Infernal heritage. Is it edgy? Yeah, sure. Doesn't make it bad. Edgy works fine in moderate doses, it's only when somebody goes hog wild bananas with it that it gets truly cringy. Elsewise a little grit never hurt anybody and often tends to improve the experience.
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. . . Did you not read your own post? Because you said "No matter what world or setting you look at there are races depicted as inherently and purely evil with legitimate stories for such creations." Ophidimancer proved this absolute claim untrue by listing a good example of you being wrong. So you either miswrote your original post or are trying to revise your original statement and move the goalposts of the discussion.
And, as shown in Eberron, "purely evil races" are absolutely not a "critical function of the premise of the game". You might like them, but they are absolutely 100% not necessary for the game. The game can exist without them and some (including myself) would argue that settings without these races are superior to those with them.
You clearly don't know much about the Forgotten Realms, because there have been non-evil orcs in the setting for longer than I have been alive. If you were running the Forgotten Realms and I for some reason had the strange urge to play in that setting with you, I would be correct to assume that you knew that there are orcs that aren't evil and that their inclusion in the adventure doesn't automatically mean that we should kill them.
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Also, you're making a lot of assumptions about the game that haven't been true for decades and are niche to your own table. The player characters aren't always the heroes, them being villain protagonists is a pretty common playstyle in D&D and other RPGs. The "monsters"/creatures they encounter and/or fight in the adventure also aren't necessarily evil. Golems are common antagonistic forces in adventures, but they're not evil, they're just magic robots programmed in such a way that often leads to conflict with the PCs. The same applies to almost all Beasts, Constructs, Oozes, Monstrosities, and quite a few other "monsters" that you can encounter in the game. And it's been a common playstyle for decades to find other ways of dealing with the adventure's "antagonists" than just straight up murder every time they appear. Not everyone plays apparently good-aligned murderhobos in D&D, especially not in the 2020s.
Orcs and Tieflings have been depicted as sentient, free-willed people in D&D for decades. Were Tieflings ever an always-evil kill-on-sight monster race? Because I was under the impression that they were playable back in 2e's Planescape and weren't always evil or even inclined to evil.
Also, I'd argue that advocating for the extermination of sentient races in a D&D world is the evil act, not the "act" of the races existing in the world.
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Who are you to speak of collective fantasy? Orcs in Eberron and Exandria are not inherently evil. Neither are orcs in Warcraft, Elder Scrolls, Lineage, HoMM, and many other settings. If a thing has a brain, it can make decisions. Think for itself. Sure, in your setting, all orcs might be dumb evil because evil god made them this way. If that's interesting to you. I prefer having an additional culture with a main theme of entering an era of painful reformation. Someone always plays an orc in my company of friends, we just like the crude humor and savage badassery that this race is associated with. Sure, your games might be about murderfest - but mine have more nuance and moral dilemmas, and no one called DnD police on me yet.
Considering there are no less than six different varieties of orcs, at least one of which is explicitly pacifist, and another that is organized into a full-fledged kingdom in the Spine of the World?
Yeah, orcs aren't inherently evil. And how they've been treated in D&D has had parallels to how real life peoples have been treated. Even if you want to buy into the idea that all orcs are evil, because of Gruumsh or whatnot, that isn't their fault. They were made that way. Their patron deity is an abusive parent, and they're victims.
There is room for simplistic morality. Sometimes, simple and easy to identify heroes and villains work. They also work best when other, big ideas are being explored. The orcs in Lord of the Rings may be inherently evil, but they work in service to a larger story with rather deep themes and broad applicability.
If you just want them to be evil so your players can slay them, guilt-free, that's bad.
That depends. Do you think we can have benevolent (and I mean, truly benevolent) fiends? Those tend to be the creatures that seem to be consistently "evil", no matter the setting. Usually because they're supernatural entities who literally embody aspects of what we typically consider "evil". The overlords in Eberron, for example, embody mortal fears and use whatever methods they can to boost those fears, and in turn boost themselves.
The interesting thing about tieflings as a race/species/whatever is that they originated in the Planescape setting, a setting that used alignment as a metaphysical force that defined how things worked rather than just an arbitrary marker for how a character should behave. Supernatural beings with very defined and almost (emphasis on "almost") immutable personas like deities, celestials, and fiends are actually more fitting for the alignment mechanic than actual mortals with more complex personalities.