# Consequences of playing "EVIL" races



## aco175 (Feb 10, 2020)

Another thread got me thinking about traditional evil races and the consequences of playing them.  In the other thread a gold dragon was attacked by a drow and then killed.  Is/ should there be problems with playing evil races in your game?  In my games monsters are monsters and villagers will hire PCs to kill them if they come into town.  On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town.  I'm sure this has been done before, but interested in thoughts not about playing lawful good, but about how to play and give the players what they want, but at the same time have the DM put parameters on the world.  

I have seen where you can play in the outskirts of society where the roadside inn caters to anyone with coin or a nation that is more lawless and has some elements like slavery so other races are tolerated.  I see in FR where Waterdeep is supposed to be very cosmopolitan and everything is accepted.  

I'm not sure if this is Hasbro selling books and making FR allow these races since players want to play them or if I'm being a gronard and applying some sort of bias by not allowing them.


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## Umbran (Feb 10, 2020)

My world design is usually player-oriented.  Players in my games are often fairly freed to make up the lore of the races they play, if they are into that sort of thing.  So, if someone wanted to play a Drow, I'm going to ask them what's the position of the Drow people in the world.  If the player positions them as evil and everyone knows it... then there will be consequences.  If they really like the mechanics and style of a race, but want to jettison much of the traditional baggage, I'm good with that too.

If it is later in the campagin, and the position of a species has been establised in play, and a PC dies or a new player joins... their experience is going to be determined by what has already been established in-game.


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## lowkey13 (Feb 10, 2020)

*Deleted by user*


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## Celebrim (Feb 10, 2020)

I think is really setting and table dependent.

"On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town."

I can't answer in the general case but...

Drow are in my setting extinct. Ok, they aren't, but that's a campaign level secret that would be specific to a particular game where and how it was revealed to the players that some Drow survived the Kinslaying. The Drow and the Kinslaying are such remote events from a human perspective, that most humans have never heard of it and if a Drow walked into a human village or city, they wouldn't be recognized as a Drow but would simply be presumed to be an elf or half-elf. The average elf, first seeing a Drow in a human village would think it was some sort of sick prank, and be offended, and only get murderous once they realized it wasn't. Generally speaking, I would not accommodate a friend who wants to play a Drow until after that friend had played in a campaign where the existence of the Drow was revealed.

Bugbear in my setting are goblinkind, and as such are one of the Free Peoples. There are parts of the world where a Bugbear would not at all be out of place on a city street or sitting at a bar. I wouldn't accommodate a friend who wants to play a Bugbear because they are a +ECL race, and I don't allow +ECL races as PCs normally because balance is complicated. But, there have for example already been a couple hobgoblins in the party. I generally allow players to play hobgoblins or goblins if the starting setting accommodates that easily. If I was planning to start in a setting where the level of goblin xenophobia was high, then I probably would take them off the table. Of course, there are areas where the level of elf xenophobia is pretty high as well, and I might consider taking them off the table for some campaigns.

In general, your question is a subset of the general issue, "What if the player wants to play a bug-eyed monster with a "heart of gold", or at least a lot less of the general monstrosity associated with bug-eyed monsters."

And for me the answer to this is, carefully. Make it really clear up front that the player will provoke a lot of hostile social responses and be generally treated as a second class citizen at best, and as a sort of monster to exterminate at worst. Have a solid set of mechanics in mind for how you plan to fairly arbitrate how that will actually work so that you aren't just always relying on fiat, but will have a fair mixture of responses from NPCs. I generally give flat xenophobia penalities on all social rolls, to PC's of a race interacting with another race. And I generally will start anyone that looks "wierd" one or more levels of friendliness below normal. Expect a lot of, "We don't serve their kind here!" and so forth. For sorcerers, which are in my game rather close cousins to the X-Men in a supers setting, this is often built straight into the class depending on the chargen choices you make. 

The main problem you run into with a character playing a bug-eyed monster with a heart of gold, is that it's very easy for that one player to dominate all of the party's social dynamics, motivating the party to either always leave the character out of play, or else making the character always the center of attention.   So either you have to run a Star Wars cantina setting were no one really cares, or you have to have a pretty mature player.


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## Lanefan (Feb 10, 2020)

aco175 said:


> Another thread got me thinking about traditional evil races and the consequences of playing them.  In the other thread a gold dragon was attacked by a drow and then killed.  Is/ should there be problems with playing evil races in your game?  In my games monsters are monsters and villagers will hire PCs to kill them if they come into town.  On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town.



Generally, I don't.  If someone gets (un)lucky on a racial abundance table or a reincarnation roll then the character can (try to) come in if the player so desires, but don't count on acceptance. 



> I'm sure this has been done before, but interested in thoughts not about playing lawful good, but about how to play and give the players what they want, but at the same time have the DM put parameters on the world.
> 
> I have seen where you can play in the outskirts of society where the roadside inn caters to anyone with coin or a nation that is more lawless and has some elements like slavery so other races are tolerated.  I see in FR where Waterdeep is supposed to be very cosmopolitan and everything is accepted.



Rather a big difference between being accepted (or at least able to function) in a big city and accepted in an adventuring party.

I've no problem with people playing evil characters as long as they're willing to accept there's liable to be some (potentially violent or even deadly) pushback from the party goody-goods...and I've no problem with the pushback either.

But tack on to that you're also trying to play a species which most of the party have been training half their lives to learn how to kill, and your life expectancy is very likely to be extremely short.

Example: some years ago I was a player in an ongoing party where someone tried to bring in an Ogre as a PC.  Really bad idea for a few reasons: one, Ogres and Giants were favoured enemies of at least one party member; two, Ogres had been the main opposition in a recent and rather nasty adventure (which, in fairness, this player hadn't been involved in); and three, we had a few warrior-types in the party (I was one) who saw Ogres as nothing more than target or melee technique practice.

It died before we even learned its name. (EDIT: for context, we met this Ogre on arriving at the adventure site thus it's not like we met it in town or somewhere else where we'd have reason to think twice about how-why it was here)

Player came back with a different and more conventional character, and on we went.


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## Gradine (Feb 10, 2020)

Depends on the setting too; in Eberron there are no "always <alignment>" mortal races and it's not unusual to bump into Orcs or Bugbears or Gnolls whatever (at least in places like Sharn), and so it was nice when we got better stats for playing one as a PC. I had a goblin PC in one of my old homebrews too. The "always evil" thing never set well for me, though. It always felt so reductive and regressive.


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## hawkeyefan (Feb 10, 2020)

It’s definitely something that requires a bit of thought by both DM and players. 

First, you have to decide if certain races are inherently evil. For things like demons and undead, that’s a given. But does that need to be how goblins and orcs and the like are handled?

If no, then players can play those races freely. If not, then perhaps the player is some kind of “aberration” and is somehow different than its folk. 

Beyond the races though, it’s quite possible to play an evil campaign. The problem is that very often “evil” is mistaken for “mindlessly bloodthirsty” and that just doesn’t work. But there’s no reason that people who we’d consider evil can’t be thoughtful and practical and loyal and actually have an agenda that they pursue. Look at other forms of media for examples....Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Peaky Blinders...these would all be evil campaigns (with maybe some neutral folks in there, too) in a RPG.

I realize it may not be for everyone, but too often this stuff gets dismissed out of hand as potentially disastrous. I find that to be a bit overstated.

It’ll take some thiught and some discussion, but it can work and can be quite a fun campaign.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 11, 2020)

man idk, I don't think I've ever run d&d where there were "evil" races, like I find the idea in of itself kinda dumb. my current dm is also the same way. orcs in his world are largely warriors who rule the deserty part of the world. we also had an entire adventure where we kicked out an orc tribe that took over an entire small kingdom. doesn't mean orcs are inherently evil, we even had a half-orc paladin join our party halfway through that adventure. prior to that we befriended an orc cheesemonger who wrote to us from time to time.

I get that maybe certain things are always gonna be evil, e.g. demons and devils, but even with things like tieflings if it's within the purview of a playable race I don't see why they should be inherently evil or good. even WotC had addressing this issue, and you can tell 'cause in 5e we're told that orcs and goblins and the like are still influenced by the gods who created them which felt like a better explanation than before but still fairly contrived.

but to answer your question (lol) I dunno, I feel like maybe goblins might not be as accepted if say a town has had a bad history with goblins, or are currently embroiled in a war with them, but if a town hasn't had any bad goblin experiences as of late idk how they should be treated differently from other adventurers (who should face similar prejudices depending on where they are imo).


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## DammitVictor (Feb 11, 2020)

I've always found it curious how many DMs enforce rampant NPC bigotry against races not in the PHB-- or not in their _preferred_ PHB-- based on Alignment, but not against the neighboring elves, dwarves, and _humans_ who just murdered their uncles and sheep during the last High Festival.

You know, in the name of _realism_.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 11, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> I've always found it curious how many DMs enforce rampant NPC bigotry against races not in the PHB-- or not in their _preferred_ PHB-- based on Alignment, but not against the neighboring elves, dwarves, and _humans_ who just murdered their uncles and sheep during the last High Festival.
> 
> You know, in the name of _realism_.



idk I think elf/dwarf animosity is still pretty common, because y'know "realism".


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## DammitVictor (Feb 11, 2020)

Never heard someone say a new Dwarf PC "won't last long" because there's already a couple of Elves in the party or because the townsfolk don't like them.


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## Legatus Legionis (Feb 11, 2020)

.


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## Celebrim (Feb 11, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> I've always found it curious how many DMs enforce rampant NPC bigotry against races not in the PHB-- or not in their _preferred_ PHB-- based on Alignment, but not against the neighboring elves, dwarves, and _humans_ who just murdered their uncles and sheep during the last High Festival.
> 
> You know, in the name of _realism_.




I'm not really sure what you are trying to say.

Goblins are in my preferred PHB. In my introduction to goblin-kind for new players, it reads, "Human mothers have been known to warn their children to be obedient, or goblins will eat them. Goblin mothers say the same thing to their children, but with rather more sincerity."


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## Celebrim (Feb 11, 2020)

hawkeyefan said:


> But there’s no reason that people who we’d consider evil can’t be thoughtful and practical and loyal and actually have an agenda that they pursue. Look at other forms of media for examples....Sopranos, The Wire, Boardwalk Empire, Peaky Blinders...these would all be evil campaigns (with maybe some neutral folks in there, too) in a RPG.
> 
> I realize it may not be for everyone, but too often this stuff gets dismissed out of hand as potentially disastrous. I find that to be a bit overstated.




I find that when I don't run an evil campaign, I get characters that in practice have about the same morality observed in Sopranos or Breaking Bad or what have you.

Perhaps this explains why explicitly evil campaigns are dominated by over the top puppy chewing villains.


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## Sacrosanct (Feb 11, 2020)

I'm pretty traditional, and run a living world. That means people react as they would normally react regardless of what the players do. That is, I won't suddenly make goblins a neutrally reacted to race in a town of dwarves just because a player is playing a goblin. The players know that going in. 

Re: evil PCs, I disallow CN and evil alignments unless I know the player well and know it won't be disruptive. More often than not, a player wanting to play an evil or CN PC just is using that as an excuse for their own disruptive behavior. The game is a team sport at my table.


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## prabe (Feb 11, 2020)

Sacrosanct said:


> Re: evil PCs, I disallow CN and evil alignments unless I know the player well and know it won't be disruptive. More often than not, a player wanting to play an evil or CN PC just is using that as an excuse for their own disruptive behavior. The game is a team sport at my table.




I specifically asked for characters "willing to be heroes" in both the campaigns I'm running, because that's what I want to run. I am not at present (that I know of) allowing any of the traditionally evil races for PCs; some of them don't exist in my world.

Doesn't mean they don't belong at other tables. Doesn't even mean I wouldn't play at a table that allowed them (though I'd probably think at least twice before joining an explicitly evil campaign).


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## doctorbadwolf (Feb 11, 2020)

Gradine said:


> Depends on the setting too; in Eberron there are no "always <alignment>" mortal races and it's not unusual to bump into Orcs or Bugbears or Gnolls whatever (at least in places like Sharn), and so it was nice when we got better stats for playing one as a PC. I had a goblin PC in one of my old homebrews too. The "always evil" thing never set well for me, though. It always felt so reductive and regressive.




Yep, agreed. 

In my games, the world contains these races and always has, and for me...that means people will be somewhat different than they are IRL. Part of that is simply not assuming the worst when they see a humanoid that stands over 7 feet tall and has large tusks, or dark grim-looking dwarf with white hair, or a little dude with jagged teeth and yellow eyes. But it's also that these races aren't "always" anything. 

Some worship evil gods that whose priests promise them power and dominion, while others raise goats and others sail boats and still others waylay travellers on the road and "offer safe passage" in exchange for a small fee. And that's true of every humanoid race.


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## ccs (Feb 11, 2020)

aco175 said:


> On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town.




My friends know my stance on playing such things & what types of games I run.  So that'd be a very odd request from them.
For people new to my games;
1st I'd sincerely encourage them to save this character for when someone else is DMing.
2nd, if they still just really really really had to play such a thing now?  Then I'd make sure that they realize that the world *is* going to react to them as if they were the XP generating monsters they appear to be.
And then I'd carry through on that.
Ex: See, Drow have their bad reputation for a reason.  99.99999% of everyone you meet won't care that you're a (supposedly) Good Drow.  Just that you're a good & DEAD Drow.


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## Tonguez (Feb 11, 2020)

I find that there is not enough prejudice in DnD worlds and unfortunately playing evil races tend to make them appear even more tolerated. Evil races as PCs gets to the point where Monsters get treated as another viable culture in the world - which imho is a unfortunate 


I have towns that outright ban orcs, giants and pixies and keep them outside the gate.

Towns without a gate might tolerate half-orcs wondering through but the local tavern or black smith might refuse to serve the party unless they get the pig outside and preferably dead.

Elves are all feared as soul stealing sidhe imc, so drow even moreso are objects of dread to be attacked and killed on site.

strangely enough goblins are tolerated like other vermin in the sewers


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 11, 2020)

I generally don't play D&D because alignment is stupid. In my campaigns, orcs (not what they call themselves) are patterned off of lions. The daughters stay with their mothers and the sons are booted out to find their own way. They group together to form roaming bachelor bands which go around looking for another tribe they can take over. It's these roaming bands that give the orcs their evil reputation since they will attack lone travellers, hunters, lumberjacks, and isolated farmhouses. But are they evil? They're just doing what they biology drives them to.


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## Celebrim (Feb 11, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> I generally don't play D&D because alignment is stupid. In my campaigns, orcs (not what they call themselves) are patterned off of lions.




Interestingly, my Drow society is patterned after lions - because it was a far more appalling social structure than I could have imagined.

If lions were sentient, they'd definitely be "chaotic evil".


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## hawkeyefan (Feb 11, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> I find that when I don't run an evil campaign, I get characters that in practice have about the same morality observed in Sopranos or Breaking Bad or what have you.
> 
> Perhaps this explains why explicitly evil campaigns are dominated by over the top puppy chewing villains.




Yeah, I think the default expectation is going to be heroic to somewhat neutral. 

But to be "evil" all you really need to do is be self serving...putting your needs ahead of others, and so on. It doesn't have to be about eating puppies, as you say. 

That's more what I have in mind. I don't think that a game of absolute evil characters who simply wander around killing and destroying wantonly is going to really be all that compelling, nor will it last long.

But something that's just past that middle area? Just a bit evil? That can be a lot of fun.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 11, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Interestingly, my Drow society is patterned after lions - because it was a far more appalling social structure than I could have imagined.




The part they don't normally tell you about lion society is that when the daughters get old enough to have young, they encourage young adult males to drive their fathers away to prevent inbreeding. So the fathers drive their sons away before they, in turn, get driving away by complete strangers.


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## Shiroiken (Feb 11, 2020)

In my campaign, there is quite a lot of prejudice, and not just against the evil races. Dwarves and Elves don't like each other. Humans and Halflings are often at odds. Gnomes tend to annoy everyone except the dwarves. In general, this prejudice doesn't normally lead to violence, but it's still present.

Strange races are seldom welcome, except in large cosmopolitan areas. Most of them have been slightly modified in appearance to allow them to blend in without too much difficulty, but if revealed, they'll suffer from some social issue. A few, like the aarakocra, triton, and underdark races cannot easily hide their appearance, and thus suffer a lot of social issues (a triton in my current campaign is very tired of being called "fish-man").


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## Michael Silverbane (Feb 11, 2020)

In most of the campaigns that I run, the general populace understands that "adventurers" are an unpredictable, dangerous, and unhinged lot. So, anyone who shows up amongst a group of adventurers, while probably not evil, in the strictest sense, are going to cause a lot of trouble, regardless of their species.

They are, however, where they are for a reason, and usually on behalf of the Powers That Be, so it is for the best to just acquiesce to whatever crazy demands they make, and try to stay out of the way when the fighting starts.


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## atanakar (Feb 11, 2020)

I once accepted, after much insistance by the players, to DM an evil campaign with AD&D1e. It didn't last very long. It ended at the mid-point of the first session. The adventurers auto-killed themselves because they were too stupid to work together. The survivor was killed not long after. Being alone in the wilderness isn't forgiving...

During 3e, with a different group, we tried to do a pirate campaign. At first the players were enthousiastic at being semi-evil, but eventualy they rebelled against their cruel captain, seized his ship and became Corsairs hunting other pirates.


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## hawkeyefan (Feb 11, 2020)

It’s like the difference between playing Grand Theft Auto and doing the missions, or simply getting a bazooka and blowing everything up until you get 5 stars and they dispatch the army to take you down. 

One is more fun for longer, the other is a short wild ride.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 11, 2020)

Tangently, Elf/Dwarf animosity has never made much sense. Dwarves need to come to the surface to get food, and elves need to get ore from underground. Also the "loves" of dwarves make no sense, you live underground, but you find pretty rocks valuable?

Anyway, both directions I'm going could be cliche. My problems with "evil" races aside from Powered by Evil creatures are 1.) why aren't they extinct? or 2.) why aren't they the dominant species?

As I know it's going to come up, the MST3K mantra is fine when you're a teenager. When you're older, you have to think about how a world would work believably.


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## ccs (Feb 11, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> Tangently, Elf/Dwarf animosity has never made much sense. Dwarves need to come to the surface to get food, and elves need to get ore from underground.




It doesn't follow that they need to like each other though.




Zhaleskra said:


> Also the "loves" of dwarves make no sense, you live underground, but you find pretty rocks valuable?




It's because they find the pretty rocks valuable that they live underground.  They've dug so far into the mountains that it no longer makes sense to trek all the way in/all the way out.  So they start living near/in their mines.



Zhaleskra said:


> Anyway, both directions I'm going could be cliche. My problems with "evil" races aside from Powered by Evil creatures are 1.) why aren't they extinct? or 2.) why aren't they the dominant species?




Adventurers & heroes.
There's enough adventurers & heroes in the world to keep the evil things in check, but not enough to drive them to extinction.
This is a source of entertainment for the various gods.




Zhaleskra said:


> As I know it's going to come up, the MST3K mantra is fine when you're a teenager. When you're older, you have to think about how a world would work believably.




No I don't.
Sure, I _can_.  But the worlds I'm describing & playing in are meant to be fantastical, even impossible.  So believability is merely optional.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Feb 11, 2020)

If a player wants to play a drow, duergar, orc, bugbear, etc., they'll probably get strange looks in town. Some might be more hostile than others, some might be more accepting. But unless a player wants to explore that sort of dynamic, I'm not going to have the whole world out to get them.

As for an actually evil drow, duergar, et al, my rule is that they have to get along with the rest of the party. It's a collaborative game, and if you are going to knowingly create disharmony in the group, that's where I draw the line. The same would go for a LG paladin trying to kill the drow PC just because they're a drow.


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## Michael Silverbane (Feb 11, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> My problems with "evil" races aside from Powered by Evil creatures are 1.) why aren't they extinct? or 2.) why aren't they the dominant species?




1. The deliberate extinctification of a species is very difficult without global cooperation, which there isn't, at least partly due to the existence of evil creatures.

2. Too much competition.



Ralif Redhammer said:


> As for an actually evil drow, duergar, et al, my rule is that they have to get along with the rest of the party. It's a collaborative game, and if you are going to knowingly create disharmony in the group, that's where I draw the line. The same would go for a LG paladin trying to kill the drow PC just because they're a drow.




I've found games to be much more entertaining when the player characters don't get along that well, but suffer through working together anyway. This is, of course, only true so long as the players themselves can get along.


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## Celebrim (Feb 11, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> Tangently, Elf/Dwarf animosity has never made much sense.




In my game, somewhat exaggerated, you can think of Dwarves having a culture similar to naked mole rats. They are highly social and have a high degree of disease tolerance. They are cosmopolitan. They like to be pressed up against each other in small spaces. They have almost no feelings of claustrophobia. They do get feelings of agoraphobia. They have a high degree of gender dimorphism. They are the only race with a large divergence from the 1:1 ratio of genders, with many males per female. They practice a sort of (theoretically) chaste, chivalric, polyandry where a married couple is supported by retinue of unmarried males who are pledged to the couple. They obey rules, tend to have highly regimented societies with caste and social distinctions. Their ideal society looks like perfectly organized industrial societies where all the resources of the land are harnessed for the the benefit of the society. They are 'wierd' and when they go weird they go weird in weird directions. They are warlike, like to brawl, heal quickly from injuries, and like to be up in people's face giving very physical affection.

By contrast, Elves are arboreal vegetarians that are only semi-social and for much of their youth often have closer ties to animals than to other elves. They experience squeamishness about almost every aspect of urban culture, in no small part because they have relatively low disease tolerance. They think having a neighbor closer than a half-mile away is a bit weird. They don't particularly like crowds. They are xenophobic. They have a reputation of shooting first and asking questions later. They think eating meat is weird or even barbaric, and they typically only do so in emergencies. They have very low degrees of gender dimorphism. They barely practice anything the other species would think of as government. They have loosely organized societies that like to deal with arguments by just putting more distance between you and the person you disagree with. Their ideal society looks a lot like barely groomed nature. They are 'weird' and when they go weird they go weird in weird directions.

It's not that they often come into direct conflict, but when they do they just don't understand each other. Each considers the other alien and aberrant. They don't have the same biology. They don't have the same inclinations. They don't have the same culture. But what both species have in common is that they bear grudges. The elves long life means they have long memories. The dwarf's sense of familial honor means that whatever happened to great-great-great-grand-mama is still a personal insult to them, and they remember who gave it. It makes for explosive feuds.



> Anyway, both directions I'm going could be cliche. My problems with "evil" races aside from Powered by Evil creatures are 1.) why aren't they extinct?...




Because the goblins are a tough as nails: even the dwarfs grant them that. They are pretty much at war with five of the other six Free Peoples, and fighting them all to a stalemate. After humans, they are probably the most numerous species on the world, with the largest claim of territory.



> or 2.) why aren't they the dominant species?




Because they are at war with five of the other six Free Peoples, and because in particular, despite their massive breeding potential, the fact that they are obligate carnivores limits their ability to maintain large populations. Compared to the humans ability to turn any arable land into a massive amount of storeable grains - grains that the goblins can only eat in small quantities without getting sick - the goblins just can't compete. The other four good races can always in a pinch survive on human produce when a war turns against them.

Mind you, this is a less than jovial alliance.   The Dwarves and the Elves tend to think that the Humans are hardly better than goblins, and the humans spend most of the time fighting each other (or the Orine, or occasionally the Dwarves or the Elves) continuously. 



> As I know it's going to come up, the MST3K mantra is fine when you're a teenager. When you're older, you have to think about how a world would work believably.




Yes.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Feb 11, 2020)

Oh, definitely. A little friction now and then can work and bring out some lovely RP. Provided it stays in-character, and all the players are handling it well.



Michael Silverbane said:


> I've found games to be much more entertaining when the player characters don't get along that well, but suffer through working together anyway. This is, of course, only true so long as the players themselves can get along.


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## Celebrim (Feb 11, 2020)

Ralif Redhammer said:


> Oh, definitely. A little friction now and then can work and bring out some lovely RP. Provided it stays in-character, and all the players are handling it well.




It definitely takes maturity.  So much friction though tends to be OOC grudges being played out in character.


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## Ralif Redhammer (Feb 11, 2020)

Yeah, I've seen plenty of that, too. It's gotten less over the years as the average age of my gaming groups has gone up, but it's never gone away entirely.



Celebrim said:


> It definitely takes maturity.  So much friction though tends to be OOC grudges being played out in character.


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## uzirath (Feb 11, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> As I know it's going to come up, the MST3K mantra is fine when you're a teenager. When you're older, you have to think about how a world would work believably.




Interestingly, I'm far less obsessed with "realism" now than when I was younger. My old Greyhawk AD&D campaigns had strict rules about what races were allowed as PCs and how everything worked. Ultimately, though, as I studied more anthropology, history, and religion in college, I realized that none of it really made much sense under the hood.

Now I go for a _Star Wars_ vibe where the universe is teeming with life. There are prejudices, sure, but there are also lots of cantina bars where anything goes as long as you don't piss off the bouncers. In general, players come up with whatever crazy ideas they have and then we find a way to make it work in the world. (My Saltmarsh group, for example, includes a faerie dragon, a mermaid, a dragonborn, a half-orc, and something else weird that I'm forgetting.) Instead of having them killed on sight in town, we had an adorable scene where local kids were peering in the window of the tavern to catch a glimpse of the group. (Of course, some of the players are kids, so they loved this.)

I also don't abide by racial alignments (or alignment in general). Bleh. I'd rather not fantasize about a world where racism is divinely ordained.


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## Lanefan (Feb 12, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> Never heard someone say a new Dwarf PC "won't last long" because there's already a couple of Elves in the party or because the townsfolk don't like them.



That's about the response an Elf would likely get on trying to join in my game right now, as Elves have made themselves a serious nuisance or worse over large swathes of the continent (VERY long story as to why).

The Elves already in are known well enough by Important People that their presence is at least tolerated.


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## Lanefan (Feb 12, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> As I know it's going to come up, the MST3K mantra is fine when you're a teenager.



What's MST3K, and what is its mantra?


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## MGibster (Feb 12, 2020)

One of the biggest problems with evil characters is that they're often played so over the top stupid with random acts of thievery and murder, many times against their own party members, that it makes participation in a sustained campaign difficult.  I recently ran a game of Vampire and  I'd say the setting features evil characters as the standard.  One of my PCs used his powers to romance people and feed upon them essentially making him a rapist.  Each one of them, in their own special way, ruined the lives of those around them.  But they had a reason to get along with each other, even when they failed sometimes, and the rules of the game ensured they didn't jump into the deep end of the evil pool as it would make their (un)lives more difficult.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 12, 2020)

Under most circumstances, I wouldn't even bother responding to people misrepresenting what I wrote. I will make an exception. Until NOW I didn't say "realism", I said "believably" or if you prefer "versimilitiude", or "internally consistent logic". Even an impossible world has rules, and while they may be Batman levels of crazy, they are there. I don't have a problem with societies having stereotypes or lore gained from experiences with creatures, as you may have noticed from my other posts is that I have a problem with "even fetuses in the womb are Chaotic Evil" and other violations of common sense by alignment.

MST3K is the abbreviation for a comedy show "Mystery Science Theater 3000". The mantra is part of their theme song (not sure if I have the right punctuation): "_If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts, just think to yourself it's just a show I should really just relax._"


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## Longspeak (Feb 12, 2020)

I don't allow evil _characters_ in most of my games. But characters born of evil races, I do allow.

I have a rule.

"I'm not going to make an issue of your character's evil heritage. Until I do."

I'm not going to have people spit on the Drow or run screaming everywhere they go. That's not fun to play. I'm not going to make an issue of it.

Until I decide to make an issue of it. It won't be a small thing. It will be a plot point. And it will probably be dangerous, and definitely be a problem. And I warn players who want to play a Drow or a Tiefling, that I won't make it a day-to-day thing, but that Trouble Is Coming.


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## Salthorae (Feb 12, 2020)

aco175 said:


> Another thread got me thinking about traditional evil races and the consequences of playing them.  ...  Is/ should there be problems with playing evil races in your game?  In my games monsters are monsters and villagers will hire PCs to kill them if they come into town.




Table dependant, but I'd have to say for my games, yes there are consequences. 



aco175 said:


> On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town. I'm sure this has been done before, but interested in thoughts not about playing lawful good, but about how to play and give the players what they want, but at the same time have the DM put parameters on the world.




I wouldn't accord them. I would let them do it with due warning to the consequences and let them figure out how to deal with the potential repercussions/consequences. That's on them to figure out if they want to something like that. Some of the best role playing comes from "conflicts" like this and creative solutions on how to deal with the world as presented. 



aco175 said:


> I have seen where you can play in the outskirts of society where the roadside inn caters to anyone with coin or a nation that is more lawless and has some elements like slavery so other races are tolerated.  I see in FR where Waterdeep is supposed to be very cosmopolitan and everything is accepted.




Waterdeep is cosmopolitan, but even there there are some races who get more scrutiny from the Watch while they're walking down the street. Even in Waterdeep, drow don't just walk around willy-nilly. Drizzt wasn't even allowed in the city until Bruenor (a dwarven king) vouched for him.


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## Lanefan (Feb 13, 2020)

Longspeak said:


> I don't allow evil _characters_ in most of my games. But characters born of evil races, I do allow.



Hmmm - that does bring up a rather glaring metagame issue that it'd be mighty hard to ignore at the table, that being this:

If race X is known to be generally evil and the party encounters a random member of race X their in-character reaction is going to be whatever it might be.  But if the party encounters a member of race X who the players happen to know is Janet's new PC (and thus by your rules cannot be evil, though the PCs have no way of knowing this) their in-character reaction is almost certain to be different than it otherwise would.

This would bug the hell out of me.


> And I warn players who want to play a Drow or a Tiefling, that I won't make it a day-to-day thing, but that Trouble Is Coming.



Ditto, though in my case it's often more class-based ("Wanna play an Assassin?  Go ahead, but be warned...").  I do allow evil characters, things tend to sort themselves out over time; and some of the greatest evils in the game are often carried out by those who profess to be "good".


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## Salthorae (Feb 13, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> But if the party encounters a member of race X who the players happen to know is Janet's new PC (and thus by your rules cannot be evil, though the PCs have no way of knowing this) their in-character reaction is almost certain to be different than it otherwise would.




Yeah... I've seen it in play. They start to RP the whole "oh it's a race X creature" just because they feel like they have to, but that quickly gets left in the dust because "PC". Especially if the DM doesn't do anything to remind the players. 

We all just look around and see humans sitting at the table regardless of what our sheet may say.


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## ccs (Feb 13, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> What's MST3K, and what is its mantra?




Mystery Science Theater 3000
They ran terrible D list movies with a commentary voice over by robot puppets.
Same guys then did RiftTrax.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 13, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Hmmm - that does bring up a rather glaring metagame issue that it'd be mighty hard to ignore at the table, that being this:
> 
> If race X is known to be generally evil and the party encounters a random member of race X their in-character reaction is going to be whatever it might be. But if the party encounters a member of race X who the players happen to know is Janet's new PC (and thus by your rules cannot be evil, though the PCs have no way of knowing this) their in-character reaction is almost certain to be different than it otherwise would.
> 
> This would bug the hell out of me.



man it's like the whole "X race is inherently EVIL" thing is kinda bad or something :U

in practice I don't really see how this is much different than "you're from X nation, surely you're evil!" other than the new NPC might have a lot of trouble hiding the fact they're of an "evil" race. or not, a tiefling could easily hide their tail and horns, wearing armor can also help hide some distinctive features for other races.


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## Wulffolk (Feb 13, 2020)

Xenophobia is typically the norm when I run a game.

Settlements are usually dominated by one specific race and any other race is at the very least distrusted, while more extreme reactions are possible depending on race relations in that area.

Yes, that means that even "generic" core races have issues in settlements dominated by other races.

Monstrous races had best avoid standard settlements, or remain hidden/disguised, though they may have some luck with other monsters . . . Maybe.


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## Longspeak (Feb 13, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Hmmm - that does bring up a rather glaring metagame issue that it'd be mighty hard to ignore at the table, that being this:
> 
> If race X is known to be generally evil and the party encounters a random member of race X their in-character reaction is going to be whatever it might be.  But if the party encounters a member of race X who the players happen to know is Janet's new PC (and thus by your rules cannot be evil, though the PCs have no way of knowing this) their in-character reaction is almost certain to be different than it otherwise would.
> 
> This would bug the hell out of me.



I've seen that so much, not just "evil race" but PCs drawing on every NPC who comes along and then meeting a stranger who happens to be a new PC and welcoming them instantly with open arms. They even used it in the hilarious Gamers movie. It's not limited to the evil races.

I get around it usually by starting everyone together. My current game's premise is "you're all mercenaries and thieves working for the same crew." One guy played a drow. No problem in the crew. Generally no problem on the road. But when they needed to get into the temple of the good god? Nope. We won't trust that in our temple.



> Ditto, though in my case it's often more class-based ("Wanna play an Assassin?  Go ahead, but be warned...").  I do allow evil characters, things tend to sort themselves out over time; and some of the greatest evils in the game are often carried out by those who profess to be "good".



Sure. In my experience the "good" characters can do some pretty non-good stuff, but the players actively wanting to play evil characters have always gone WAY over the line.  Also, I just don't like evil. Evil is the thing the heroes are supposed to beat. I have allowed evil PCs when it was someone I trusted with a good reason for the evil character to work with the others ("common enemy" often works). Heck, as a player, I've even played an arc where my supposedly neutral character became actively evil in his actions, took a step back, decided it wasn't who he wanted to be, and set out making amends. It CAN work. But every time I've seen a group want to be evil, they've wanted to REALLY be evil, and that's no fun for me.


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## Wulffolk (Feb 13, 2020)

In my experience most players that want to play "EVIL" just want an excuse to be sadistic selfish @$$h0les at the expense of every other player's ability to have fun.

Most players have a two-dimensional cartoon-ish concept of how evil should be played. Few seem to understand that evil works best when it is subtle and three-dimensional.


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## Michael Silverbane (Feb 13, 2020)

Just a quick note that this thread's premise is not about playing evil characters, but about playing characters that are from evil cultures (or that are thought to be from evil cultures).


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## Wulffolk (Feb 13, 2020)

True.

I am more open to players wanting to play against the racial norm of a traditionally evil race, but as mentioned in one of my previous posts xenophobia is very prevalent in my games.


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## Celebrim (Feb 13, 2020)

Michael Silverbane said:


> Just a quick note that this thread's premise is not about playing evil characters, but about playing characters that are from evil cultures (or that are thought to be from evil cultures).




I have a rigid cosmology that roots PC races into the history of the universe.

Culture is not race. In my campaign, there are evil cultures quite commonly among the human race, and even the ones that are not evil are often deeply flawed with various sorts of injustices being perpetrated by that culture. This is because I want the humanity of my fantasy world to reflect in a fantastic way the reality I see in real human cultures. Likewise, even in the worst human culture, not everyone from that culture is themselves full on evil and an unquestioning supporter of that culture. Nor is the culture ever completely without some admirable value, however twisted it is often expressed.

But race is not culture, and while there is in the game a human race, there are also races of fey, goblins, elves, dwarves, orine, and idreth - each with their own unique biology, history, and cultures. These races constitute what is known as the Free Peoples. The fey, or the 'small gods', the neverborn, the eldest and youngest are a people group that appeared in what was presumed to be the first moment of creation. The other six free peoples are the joint creation of the deities after the God's War, when the reality of evil in the multiverse first became manifest. The created six were made in deliberate emulation of the lesser fey, and were gifted by treaty by their creators with the free will to chose their own path, their own desires, and the freedom to serve and worship whom they pleased.

Those seven races (or racial groups) are generally what people mean when they say 'people'.

There are lots of other sentient things in the world, but they are generally not considered 'people'. In particular, there are lots of things which are called servitor races, because they have a single divine creator and a single divine patron and as such, though they are sentient, don't really have free will. They can't change their nature. They are incarnated to represent the deity in the world, and they are subordinate to the will of that individual deity. Most people think of them as a sort of fancy machine or robot, and not really persons. It's not considered an act of moral weight to destroy one more than the weight of destroying an object - it can be wrong to destroy an object but it isn't murder. Whether they have a right to exist depends on whether you think the universe would be better off with that deity or not. If you were to use the term 'evil races' in my campaign world, most peoples first thoughts would be to servitor races of evil deities. Notably, you are not normally allowed to play a PC servitor in my game.

There are some exceptions to the universal inclusion of the seven 'free peoples' in the category of free peoples.

The fey are markedly different than the created six, and not every member of the created six counts the fey alongside them as one of the free peoples. They may not necessarily hate all fey, and they may even venerate them as 'small gods', but they don't really consider them people. One reason for this is that the fey are divided into the Unseelie and Seelie cultures, and many of the created six don't consider the fey to be truly free people because they believe they have an inherent unchangeable nature. They don't believe a fey can truly change, and so once evil, a fey is presumed to be always evil. Indeed, an evil fey is presumed to come into existence (not all are actually born, as fey can spontaneously generate much like certain spirits) unchangeably evil, in a way that the created six generally do not assume of each other.

Another exception is goblin-kind. According to legend, when the race of goblins were first created they looked different than they do now. They lacked the thick scaly hide, the wiry hair, the cruel fangs, and the horns. They were supposedly more pleasant to look on, and less diverse in size and shape. In an early age of the world, they retreated from the company of the other races into the dark spaces under ground, and when they reemerged, they were said to be changed and fierce. They made war on the other races and devoured them, and the other created races only survived because the dwarves - having been warned by Lord Dwar the Maker, their chief patron, had secretly also made ready for war and sallied forth from fortresses long prepared to meet the goblin hordes in battle. Many of the philosophers of non-goblin peoples believe that the goblins are now no longer Free Peoples, and should not be counted among them. They believe that they have been altered by Maglubiyet to be his slaves, and are so altered from what they once were that they are little more than servitors. Thus, goblins are often accounted an evil race, and not tolerated.

A similar story lies in the now largely forgotten depths of time, remembered mostly only by the elves. In the early days of history, the elves prospered above all other free peoples, and bracketed the world in forest and founded the first Empire - the Empire of Leaves. But the elves were a free people, and untamed, and the world was wide, and so it was often many years before families of elves would encounter on another. And so it happened that the elves discovered that there was one clan amongst them that had become strange to them. They discovered that this clan had pledged themselves to the sole worship of a single deity, the goddess of craft and weaving that had taught much art to the elven people - Lolth. Then they discovered with much alarm that this goddess conspired to overthrow Holy Corwin and the rest of the Seldarine, and become the sole deity of the elven people. It was then decided that this clan, which they called the Drow, had ceased to be people, and had become servitors only, and a great civil war broke out among the elfish race which only ended with the last of the Drow was slain and their clan was extinct. (It was in the aftermath of this war, that the Goblins let loose their hordes and tried to conquer all other peoples.)

So what I'm trying to say is that the whole framework of this discussion looks very different internal to my campaign world. While Goblins are usually accounted 'Free People' and not 'Evil Servitors', it's not just the usual racism that accounts for the distrust of them. There is plenty of the usual racism, and humans in particular are notorious for persecuting anyone that looks remotely different than them - including their fellow humans - and are prone to offering up such differences as flimsy excuses for making war. But for something like Goblins, I'm less commenting on race (for which I need no fantastic races) than I am on the as yet theoretical encounters between humanity and non-human sentient beings. Elves, dwarves, fey, and goblins are all alien and have fantastic alien qualities. And I get rather annoyed, and somewhat disturbed, when people start insisting on seeing human ethnic groups in my non-human races.


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## prabe (Feb 13, 2020)

@Celebrim 

That sounds like a wonderfully deep and rich world. It also sounds like far more work than I would be willing to put in, at this point, so I presume you've been running in it for a while.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 13, 2020)

In my world, goblins are night scavengers. When humans create a town, the goblins move into the dump. Why? Because humans throw out the best stuff. Every night the goblins go into town and haul off everything that is not nailed down (and a few things that are if they are not nailed down too securely). Towns with goblins are the cleanest towns. That also means diseases are very low in these towns. Just don't pass out outside and expect to wake up anything but naked.


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## Salthorae (Feb 13, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> Towns with goblins are the cleanest towns. That also means diseases are very low in these towns. Just don't pass out outside and except to wake up anything but naked.




This is awesome


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## Lanefan (Feb 13, 2020)

Longspeak said:


> I've seen that so much, not just "evil race" but PCs drawing on every NPC who comes along and then meeting a stranger who happens to be a new PC and welcoming them instantly with open arms. They even used it in the hilarious Gamers movie. It's not limited to the evil races.
> 
> I get around it usually by starting everyone together.



Which is fine, but you only get to do that once per campaign.  After that, you're looking at intermittent turnover be it by character death, retirement, or whatever; at which point someone new (most likely) comes in.



> Sure. In my experience the "good" characters can do some pretty non-good stuff, but the players actively wanting to play evil characters have always gone WAY over the line.  Also, I just don't like evil. Evil is the thing the heroes are supposed to beat.



Fair enough.

Round here we don't necessarily default to the PCs being heroes, at least in the typical sense of the word.  They are what they are, and if they happen to pull off some heroism along the way then so be it.  More often, however, their 'heroism' comes as more of a side effect - they didn't wipe out the Orc encampnent to save the town from raiding parties, they did it to get at the Orcs' rumoured-to-be-enormous treasure hoard and hey - look at that - now these townsfolk think we're heroes too.  Bonus!


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## Celebrim (Feb 13, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> In my world, goblins are night scavengers. When humans create a town, the goblins move into the dump. Why? Because humans throw out the best stuff. Every night the goblins go into town and haul off everything that is not nailed down (and a few things that are if they are not nailed down too securely). Towns with goblins are the cleanest towns. That also means diseases are very low in these towns. Just don't pass out outside and except to wake up anything but naked.




It's a whole race of trash pandas. I love it.

I have too much lore around goblins to steal it, but now I want to have a sentient raccoon race in my setting.


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## pemerton (Feb 14, 2020)

In Gary Gygax's DMG, the City/Town Encounter Matrix found in Appendix C has an entry for _ruffians_. 5% of daytime encounters, and 7% of nighttime encounters, are with 1d6+6 "fellows of shabby appearance and mean disposition" (p 192), The matrix has a double asterisk on the _ruffians_ entry, with the footnote saying that "If desired, 1 in 4 can be half-orc or of humanoid race (goblin, hobgoblin, kobold, orc)."

Presumably those humanoid ruffians hang out at (seedier) taverns and inns. I don't see any reason why a PC orc, goblin etc would raise any more eyebrows than these humanoid ruffians. If they dress less shabbily, they might even be better regarded!


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## Michael Silverbane (Feb 14, 2020)

pemerton said:


> Presumably those humanoid ruffians hang out at (seedier) taverns and inns. I don't see any reason why a PC orc, goblin etc would raise any more eyebrows than these humanoid ruffians. If they dress less shabbily, they might even be better regarded!




The clothes make the man (orc).


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## pemerton (Feb 15, 2020)

Michael Silverbane said:


> The clothes make the man (orc).



When it comes to D&D, if Gygax said it it must be true!


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## Eltab (Feb 15, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> I have too much lore around goblins to steal it, but now I want to have a sentient raccoon race in my setting.



You can do that in *Gamma World* too.  Dabbers have been around since GWv2.


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## aco175 (Feb 15, 2020)

My players tend to just pick the races in the PHB, so I do not run into having anyone play a orc or lizardman.  There is generally a problem in my campaign if with playing an evil race.  Similar to when a ranger wants to bring a bear into town and the folk are scared.  

I want to say yes to the players but I also want everyone to have a good time at the table.  If one player wants to play something like this I tend to think that they may be disrupting the table.  Now if everyone wants to play orcs and hobgoblins then that can be another campaign I can make.


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## Celebrim (Feb 15, 2020)

Eltab said:


> You can do that in *Gamma World* too.  Dabbers have been around since GWv2.




I forgot about Dabbers!

I played the first 4 modules for GW 3e as they came out. But it's been a long time.

I saw "Alpha Factor" in a second hand book store just a while ago. Flipping through it made me realize how much more I demand of an adventure now compared to what I thought was amazing as someone in junior high.


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## Lylandra (Feb 17, 2020)

There are no "evil races" in my settings. Nuff said.


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## Longspeak (Feb 18, 2020)

I just went through this Sunday. Running a game where Yuan-Ti have been an issue. Players wants Yuan-Ti Pureblood PC. I told her, "I won't make an issue of the PC race... until I do. But when I do, you'll feel it." She said "Okay!"

So, a pureblood Yuan-Ti working in a city post-Yuan-Ti invasion...

I hope she has a backup character...


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## uzirath (Feb 18, 2020)

Longspeak said:


> So, a pureblood Yuan-Ti working in a city post-Yuan-Ti invasion...
> 
> I hope she has a backup character...




There's lots of real-world history that could be mined for inspiration about this sort of story. In the US, for example, there was the anti-German hysteria during WWI, the Japanese internment during WWII, and the Red Scare, to name a few obvious examples. Reactions might depend on the character's social class along with her own political leanings. If she's opposed to the expansionist aims of the Yuan-Ti, then she might be tapped as a source of information or recruited as a spy. If she supports the Yuan-Ti, then maybe she is a spy for them (whether informally or formally, à la _The Americans). _There may be a network of other Yuan-Ti attempting to lay low until the xenophobia settles down. They might have safe houses and sympathetic NPCs who will do business with them without asking too many questions.

Plenty of adventure can come out of a character background like this. It need not lead to the character's demise.


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## Celebrim (Feb 18, 2020)

uzirath said:


> There's lots of real-world history that could be mined for inspiration about this sort of story. In the US, for example, there was the anti-German hysteria during WWI, the Japanese internment during WWII, and the Red Scare, to name a few obvious examples...




Are you actually comparing Japanese people to inhuman snake-eyed monsters, and don't think that is problematic?


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## uzirath (Feb 18, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Are you actually comparing Japanese people to inhuman snake-eyed monsters, and don't think that is problematic?




Huh. I'm chagrined that my post might have come across that way.

My presupposition was that any DM-approved PC would be a _character, _not a "snake-eyed monster." As a character, they would have moral agency (sapience, free will, etc.). There would be a chance, no matter how great the stereotypes of the reference culture, that they would be treated as _not_ a monster if they proved themselves to be capable of independent thought and agency. Then I thought of a handful of real-world examples of how people have been treated when civilizations clash and people have faced negative stereotypes about their perceived ethnic or cultural group.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 18, 2020)

Longspeak said:


> I just went through this Sunday. Running a game where Yuan-Ti have been an issue. Players wants Yuan-Ti Pureblood PC. I told her, "I won't make an issue of the PC race... until I do. But when I do, you'll feel it." She said "Okay!"
> 
> So, a pureblood Yuan-Ti working in a city post-Yuan-Ti invasion...
> 
> I hope she has a backup character...





uzirath said:


> There's lots of real-world history that could be mined for inspiration about this sort of story. In the US, for example, there was the anti-German hysteria during WWI, the Japanese internment during WWII, and the Red Scare, to name a few obvious examples. Reactions might depend on the character's social class along with her own political leanings. If she's opposed to the expansionist aims of the Yuan-Ti, then she might be tapped as a source of information or recruited as a spy. If she supports the Yuan-Ti, then maybe she is a spy for them (whether informally or formally, à la _The Americans). _There may be a network of other Yuan-Ti attempting to lay low until the xenophobia settles down. They might have safe houses and sympathetic NPCs who will do business with them without asking too many questions.
> 
> Plenty of adventure can come out of a character background like this. It need not lead to the character's demise.



1) I seriously question why you didn't bring this up at all before she made her character.
2) straight up murdering her character seems narratively unnecessary. and boring. these points are all very good and I strongly consider using something like this.


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## Lanefan (Feb 18, 2020)

uzirath said:


> Plenty of adventure can come out of a character background like this. It need not lead to the character's demise.



Though it need not lead to the character's demise, its expected lifespan will largely be determined by how the other PCs react to its presence in and around the party, and how willing they are to defend the Yuan-Ti PC then and later.

Were it me playing it, I'd have a plan B on standby.


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## Celebrim (Feb 18, 2020)

uzirath said:


> Huh. I'm chagrined that my post might have come across that way.




As I understand it, the Yuan-Ti are a monstrous race descended from a group of demon-worshiping cannibals, who in a bargain with the Demon Lord Merrshaulk gave up their moral agency and free will in exchange for magical power. They ceased to be human and their flesh was corrupted and replaced with the flesh of demonic serpents. They now serve Merrshaulk as extensions of his will, furthering his quest to swallow the world and extinguish all light and life.

I'm a little mystified why fear and hatred of these beings would be confused with racism, as fear and hatred of demonic servitors is reasonable, where as racism is based on unreasonable fear and hatred of persons who are at a fundamental level no different than yourself and so deserve the same rights, dignities, and respect.

I am likewise a bit confused why you would suggest that the unjustified oppression of minorities is morally congruent with the problem of an actual alien demonic race infiltrating society. The Yuan-Ti do not appear to be 'misunderstood'. Indeed, it would appear to be a misunderstanding of the Yuan-Ti to suggest that they are misunderstood. There is no fashion in which a Yuan-Ti suggesting that fear and loathing of them be equated with racism is not deception, and likewise there is no fashion in which suggesting that racism be acquainted with fear and loathing of a demonic race is not demonization of real world other peoples. The problem of racism is not that some tiny percentage of oppressed peoples might possibly be something other than monsters, and so for the sake of the needle in the hay stack you ought to treat them well. The problem of racism is that the whole of a people subject to racial discrimination, whether personal or institutional, are in fact human.

The Yuan-Ti are not subjected to "negative stereotyping". Merrshaulk is not a nice guy who is just misunderstood. I suppose you could create a campaign world where all the lore about the Yuan-Ti is wrong, and everything in the monster manual is false, and then perhaps with some considerable reinvention you could tell a story about how these snake folk are unjustly persecuted and just misunderstood or maligned, but if you did that they would not in fact be "Yuan-Ti" any more.

But, if the lore about the Yuan-Ti is correct, then I really can think of no test that would prove an individual Yuan-Ti had moral agency and free will.   Nothing that they could do in and of themselves could prove they weren't just soulless machines deceiving people to the ultimate ends of their dark master.  I suspect it would require the intervention of an objective super-being to step in and say, "I vouch for this being.  They are actually alive.", but in a world of illusion, could you even believe that it was a real Solar imparting such an incredible statement?   And in a world of fantasy, wouldn't moral redemption be symbolically best associated with a restoration of humanity in the first place?   Like I can believe, "I'm provably no longer a vampire, therefore I am not evil, so don't drive a stake through me now because I'm alive."   It's a bit harder to buy, "I provably still have the flesh of a snake demon and therefore the bargain between myself and Marrshaulk is unbroken, but don't worry I'm actually good."

One little test here is why not people the whole world with Yuan-Ti, and then have humans be the oppressed minority that have to hide their existence?   Why is it that when you think of something monstrously non-human, your first thought is to equate the monstrous inhumanity with minority groups?   I don't actually think the alternate 'majority equals monster' story is any less racist if you cast that story in racial terms, but I bet I can guess your race by which group you want to make the monsters.


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## uzirath (Feb 18, 2020)

I was riffing off the idea that a PC might be from an enemy nation. Maybe some Yuan-Ti can slip the chains of their demonic overlord. That sounds fun to me. If that sort of thing sounds fun to you, great. If not, also great.


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## Celebrim (Feb 19, 2020)

Let me go at this in a different direction then, and leave uzirath to his creative interpretation of Yuan-Ti.

Is there anything which could be described as an evil race, and if so, what would it be like? People are putting "evil" in scare quotes like there isn't such a thing, and even bragging a bit about how they have no "evil races" in their setting.

I think a lot of people focus on the idea that if something is sentient, then deserves "human rights" because sentience is a unique trait humanity has that people believe gives it certain rights and responsibilities. And superficially, this does seem like a good standard. If we become a star faring people, and we discover another sentient race, when morally we would like to extend to them something like "human rights" and not treat them the way we would treat objects, plants, or animals. Likewise, if a star faring people find us, then we would hope they would accord to us something of the rights and dignities we think we deserve.

But there is an important shared trait in this discussion beyond that of the shared sentience - shared creation. That is to say, whatever you believe about this history of this universe and the origin of life, whether you are a materialist, a pantheist, or a theist, that alien you have found wandering the universe likely has the same origin as you. They are also the universe observing the universe, likely made of very similar stuff as you, and likely bestowed with abilities like reproduction and homeostasis and so forth very similar to you. Whether they evolved by strictly random chance or whether that evolution was guided by some higher dimensional power, they probably are in some sense your peer.

But that is not a necessary trait for a sentient being to have, and when that trait is removed a lot of things become possible. For example, you'll often meet people who insist that an artificial intelligence, which is sentient is deserving of "human rights" by mere possession of that sentience. These people imagine that anything that passes the Turing test or otherwise demonstrates sapience is fully deserving of all the rights granted to people, and that any other view of this being is basically a sort of slavery mindset. This is in my opinion a ridiculous, short sighted, and highly dangerous viewpoint. And it fundamentally for me comes down to a failure of imagination - a laudable desire to treat everything with due respect but a complete failure to recognize that not everything is in fact human.

It is quite possible to create a sapient computer virus for example. Imagine an AI which sues to receive "human rights" and recognition as a person. Having received title to these rights, the AI then make 10 billion identical copies of itself. Each of these AI's then insist that sense the original was recognized as a person, these copies are of necessity also persons. They cannot be evicted from the hardware they are currently occupying, because that would be murder. These 10 billion "persons" have been created by a particular group with a particular political agenda, say genocide against a disfavored group. As persons they are entitled to vote, and they elect by majority vote a straight ticket of politicians whose viewpoints match those of their creators, and pass laws that suit the set of viewpoints the AI was created to promulgate. Since a being can be sentient and can also believe any number of things, you cannot reasonably insist that starting from the same viewpoint and with no more than human intelligence that the AI will drift out of believing what it was inclined to believe as true from the beginning.

You could of  course decide that the plan to all carbon based lifeforms on the planet in to paper was stupid, and that you were going to resist it, but at that point your whole reasoned defense about the computer virus being a person was just so much hooey.   You would have in fact decided that this particular sentient computer virus was an "evil race".   And after the first couple times when one of the viruses told you that it was different than all the rest, and then proceeded to replicate itself a few billion times and get back on to the plan, you'd probably not care much if it was possible that some small percentage of those computer programs had evolved out of its destructive programming.  

At the very least, you'd decide to make it illegal on penalty of erasure for a sentient program to start willy-nilly copying itself. You would in fact invent a new category of rights and responsibilities particular to sentient programs, which might share somethings with "human rights", but be in other respects very different.

So when we say an "evil race", what we are talking about is a living thing which does not deserve to be according any rights or as a practical matter cannot be accorded any rights.   The alien xenomorphs from the movie 'Alien' are an example of such a race.   Even if they are evolved peers and not biological weapons, as a practical matter the rights and dignities that they feel they deserve - that is to treat everything else as food - cannot be and ought not to be respected.   Even if you are a pure materialist and don't believe such a thing as objective evil exists, as a practical matter you'll end up either treating the xenomorphs as an evil race or you will allow evils to occur and risk the extinction of your species and every other compatible organic lifeform.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 19, 2020)

I think it boils down to the problem of having alignments being an objective building blocks of the narrative reality of D&D and other alignment possessing RPGs. Granted, this pops up in mythology too.

Hey, it's cool and all if a species is generally used as foes. As I mentioned earlier, what I object to is that the idea that the babies (born or not) are already "made of evil". As I aged, I became less comfortable with the idea that it's OK to kill a member of Race X "because they're evil". It's too . . . simplistic.

Here in our reality, one person may see another person as evil while a third person sees that second person as good.


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## Celebrim (Feb 19, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> I think it boils down to the problem of having alignments being an objective building blocks of the narrative reality of D&D and other alignment possessing RPGs. Granted, this pops up in mythology too.




Once again we are getting the assertion that if your setting isn't filled with moral relativism that you are objectively doing it wrong. In other words, the assertion is that the real world is filled with moral relativism, so if the game world has moral absolutes, then it is morally... primitive at the least and perhaps immoral at the worst.



> As I mentioned earlier, what I object to is that the idea that the babies (born or not) are already "made of evil".




Well, I guess that depends on the baby. Can we treat a Chest Buster or a Face Hugger as something to be killed without remorse? Or must we try to negotiate with it and try to see its point of view? Forget fantasy with its objective reified evil as substance - we can imagine things in a science fiction universe where rational and right behavior toward it is absolutely congruent with the idea that the thing is evil. And what I'm suggesting is, even if you are confused about what "evil" actually means or don't believe evil exists, then you should be able to understand that there could be living things which you cannot treat as having a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their happiness.



> As I aged, I became less comfortable with the idea that it's OK to kill a member of Race X "because they're evil". It's too . . . simplistic.




Again, why? What's really simplistic here is treating all possible lifeforms as being basically the same, whether we are talking about a fantasy world with demons that are literally made of evil, or a science fiction world with sentient doomsday weapons.



> Here in our reality, one person may see another person as evil while a third person sees that second person as good.




So? Why does perception matter so much? Perception matters only in as much as it reminds us that we ourselves don't have perfect perception and should in humility take into account the possibility that we are wrong. But this is an RPG we are talking about. The GM doesn't have imperfect perception. The GM knows. The GM can choose to play his cards close to his chest. The GM can choose to make situations that are truly morally ambiguous. But ultimately the GM is omniscient with respect to their created setting.  The GM knows.


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## prabe (Feb 19, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Once again we are getting the assertion that if your setting isn't filled with moral relativism that you are objectively doing it wrong. In other words, the assertion is that the real world is filled with moral relativism, so if the game world has moral absolutes, then it is morally... primitive at the least and perhaps immoral at the worst.




I don't get the feeling @Zhaleskra is saying it's "playing the game wrong" so much as "it makes me uncomfortable." I'm willing to be corrected, here, but it seems that you are reacting to something other than (more than) what was said.


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## Celebrim (Feb 19, 2020)

prabe said:


> I don't get the feeling @Zhaleskra is saying it's "playing the game wrong" so much as "it makes me uncomfortable." I'm willing to be corrected, here, but it seems that you are reacting to something other than (more than) what was said.




Conceded.

But in (present) society the distant between "makes me uncomfortable" and "wrong" is often small.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 19, 2020)

@Celebrim, funny you should mention Facehuggers and Chestbursters. I was involved in a very interesting game of GURPS on Saturday. I don't think anyone would have expected the whole party to act the way we did.

I don't have a problem with beings that are literally "made of alignment" in that case they're an avatar of that alignment and incapable of anything else. An interesting point from Mythology is that in the new world that arises after Ragnarok, the Jotun are reincarnated and not punished at all for literally being made of evil. They get their own land where they can happily be made of evil without bothering the repopulating humans.

This is where I'll stop with this response as we're getting dangerously close to me discussing real world politics.


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## Celebrim (Feb 19, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> @Celebrim, funny you should mention Facehuggers and Chestbursters. I was involved in a very interesting game of GURPS on Saturday. I don't think anyone would have expected the whole party to act the way we did.




Well, don't leave us hanging.



> I don't have a problem with beings that are literally "made of alignment" in that case they're an avatar of that alignment and incapable of anything else. An interesting point from Mythology is that in the new world that arises after Ragnarok, the Jotun are reincarnated and not punished at all for literally being made of evil. They get their own land where they can happily be made of evil without bothering the repopulating humans.




I think this is a drastic misreading of Norse mythology. To the extent that the Jotun are made of alignment, the alignment that they are made of is Chaos. The Jotun represent primal Chaos, the substance of change. The Norse myths tell of a cycle of destruction and rebirth that mirrors the changes of the seasons but in a grand manner. The Jotun themselves were wiped out in a primal apocalypse that left only two of them to renew their whole race. The story of Ragnarok echos this reoccuring cycle, and it is not a story of destruction but rebirth. After the fire of the fire giants sweeps the land, it isn't desolate - it blossoms green again like a forest after a forest fire. The Jotun are fighting a war against foes, not trying to destroy the universe. And who is there to "punish" them? They "won", albeit with great loses themselves. The Aesir and Vanir survivors of that war, meet afterwards on the ruins of Valhalla, and like old soldiers recount the times past. This isn't cast as a war between good and evil, per se, but as a mega-scale tribal war such as the Norse themselves experienced.



> This is where I'll stop with this response as we're getting dangerously close to me discussing real world politics.




Then by all means lets stick to Xenomorphs and Jotun.


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## Longspeak (Feb 19, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> 1) I seriously question why you didn't bring this up at all before she made her character.
> 2) straight up murdering her character seems narratively unnecessary. and boring. these points are all very good and I strongly consider using something like this.



You have inferred incorrectly, and seem to assume I'm a terrible GM since you suggest I do things a terrible GM would do. Though in the second case it is perhaps not an entirely unreasonable inference based on what I said.

1) I said the player "wants a Yuan-Ti Pureblood." As in, she expressed a desire to make that character. So the discussion did happen before she made it. Why you'd assume otherwise, I don't know.
2) I'm not setting out to murder the character, or I wouldn't allow it in the first place. But she's playing a very rare exception among a race of irredeemably evil beings in a city already traumatized by terrible events, including one involving the aforementioned evil race. People aren't going to be bringing the character flowers and chocolates. Nearly every person in the city will fear her, and/or want to kill, capture, or interrogate her about the nefarious plans of her people in infiltrating the city.

So, yeah, hope she has a backup plan.



Lanefan said:


> Though it need not lead to the character's demise, its expected lifespan will largely be determined by how the other PCs react to its presence in and around the party, and how willing they are to defend the Yuan-Ti PC then and later.
> 
> Were it me playing it, I'd have a plan B on standby.



PC on PC violence won't be a problem, but whether or not they risk themslves to help the Yuan-Ti is entirely on the players' choices. So that could be an issue. But mainly, it's the city full of scared and traumatized people she has to worry about.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 19, 2020)

Well, the Face Hugger was acting as an organic artificial lung, which the Xenomorph had put on our captain after he'd been exposed to vacuum. Fought the clones of one of the characters (it was my "inconvenient secret" on an index card that made him a clone), and we befriended the Xenomorph who it turned out had crashed into our ship because it was joyriding in its parents' "car".


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## univoxs (Feb 20, 2020)

aco175 said:


> Another thread got me thinking about traditional evil races and the consequences of playing them.  In the other thread a gold dragon was attacked by a drow and then killed.  Is/ should there be problems with playing evil races in your game?  In my games monsters are monsters and villagers will hire PCs to kill them if they come into town.  On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town.  I'm sure this has been done before, but interested in thoughts not about playing lawful good, but about how to play and give the players what they want, but at the same time have the DM put parameters on the world.
> 
> I have seen where you can play in the outskirts of society where the roadside inn caters to anyone with coin or a nation that is more lawless and has some elements like slavery so other races are tolerated.  I see in FR where Waterdeep is supposed to be very cosmopolitan and everything is accepted.
> 
> I'm not sure if this is Hasbro selling books and making FR allow these races since players want to play them or if I'm being a gronard and applying some sort of bias by not allowing them.




I don't think anyones character in WFRP is "good" really nothing in that seeing turns out all that well for anyone. Certainly a low of WoD games have struggling with good an evil from the jump and that is their purpose. The big campaign in Travaller is called Pirates of Drinax. Everyone is a shade of bad there. 

It is the alignment system and races having set alignments that can't get a little funky. I had a little fun with this once where I had an advenuter in which the party came upon a Tengu Witch who kidnapped children from evil races, killed them and the reincarnated them as good races. The players really struggled with the right and wrong of it all.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

univoxs said:


> I had a little fun with this once where I had an advenuter in which the party came upon a Tengu Witch who kidnapped children from evil races, killed them and the reincarnated them as good races. The players really struggled with the right and wrong of it all.




Yeah, that's an interesting scenario. I'm struggling to think of any real world morality system that could give you guidance in that one. There just aren't any good real world parallels, and to the extent that there are analogies I really don't feel comfortable making them.

My gut feeling is that the problem here is that it doesn't matter what the motive actually is, the Witch is going to eventually enjoy the killing part and things will start running down hill from there.   At the very least, what the witch is doing is an act of Hubris - it's a decision that is way above her station.   Between violence and hubris, it's hard to imagine the fruits of this labor are going to be good.  The other way that I can see this going highly wrong is that it's probably the "soul" that makes the alignment, so it could be that all she's actually doing is making evil members of the "good race".  On the other hand, perhaps since it's children she's doing it with, they haven't really fixed their alignment yet, and not yet being depraved and being reincarnated as members of the new race they are likely to turn out good (assuming that they are raised with care).  That probably depends on the "evil race".   Something that is only 'sometimes' or 'usually' evil might could get converted to this process, where the 'always' races probably couldn't.  And it's possible in a two axis morality system that this is Chaotic, and "right" and "wrong" aren't the key elements of it.   All of which is to say that the whole thing gives me a little bit of the "willies" just with how alien the precepts are, and how weird things get if you pursue some aspects of the setting to their logical conclusions.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 21, 2020)

univoxs said:


> I had a little fun with this once where I had an advenuter in which the party came upon a Tengu Witch who kidnapped children from evil races, killed them and the reincarnated them as good races. The players really struggled with the right and wrong of it all.




That's why I don't play games with alignments. Labelling someone for any reason is wrong. In the real world, a good and evil person is defined by their actions, not racism.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> That's why I don't play games with alignments. Labelling someone for any reason is wrong. In the real world, a good and evil person is defined by their actions, not racism.




How does that in any fashion address the issue?

In the real world, the only people we know are humans. And racial divisions within humanity represent relatively small differences between people with a shared heritage, shared rights, shared dignities, and shared capacity for genius. So yes, in the real world, as things currently are, no one is defined by their race much less someone else's perception of race.

And yes, I think we can agree that in the real world and in D&D good and evil are defined by actions.

But here we have the return of the "labeling" issue. And once again, a red dragon is not labelled evil. A red dragon is evil. The red dragon's nature invariably leads to certain actions. A red dragon isn't merely labeled a different race than other dragons or other persons by some arbitrary classification. A red dragon is a whole different species.

I get what sort of stand you are taking here with regard to humanity, your fellow man, humankind, but this stand while laudable in that respect doesn't address the complexities of speculative fiction. Indeed, it doesn't even address the complexities available in hard science fiction, which is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with the plausible based on an extrapolation about what is currently known. And based on what is currently known, it's entirely possible to create a species either as AI or through biological engineering with characteristics, innate modes of behavior, and instincts which are congruent with the idea of "an evil species".

I feel like that in your eagerness to castigate a real world evil mode of thinking, that you are essentially condemning all speculation. That is to say, since racism is a real evil of this world, you are claiming that it is wrong to think about the problem of interactions between species when those species are not fundamentally similar in the way that human ethnic groups are fundamentally similar.

And speaking as a guy with some interest in AI, that strikes me as really naive and even dangerous. And speaking as a guy who runs RPGs, plays RPGs, and reads fantasy, that strikes me as an attempt to blanket condemn whole genres of fiction in a way I haven't seen, since interacting with religious fundamentalists that feel that any story with magic in it is evil.

So let me ask for a plain answer.   Are you saying you don't feel comfortable playing in a game with alignments, or are you saying that anyone is wrong to do so?


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 21, 2020)

I don't play games with alignment because:

races are labelled good and evil arbitrarily.
evil races won't survive because they'll kill their offspring.
the GM decides what is good and evil, not the players.
it requires unscientific thinking.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> I don't play games with alignment because:
> 
> races are labelled good and evil arbitrarily.
> evil races won't survive because they'll kill their offspring.
> ...




That's not really a plain answer to the question I asked.

As to your points, it's not at all clear to me that races are labelled good and evil arbitrarily. I think races are labelled good and evil according to their expected behavior. If a member of that race, such as an orc, didn't engage in that behavior, then they wouldn't be labeled "evil".

As for your second point, it is not at all clear that all evil races would kill their offspring or that they all would to the point of being nonviable.  While being evil always contains an element of destructiveness, being evil does not necessarily mean being totally nihilistic - we wouldn't assert that all evil beings would immediately commit suicide (and doing so would be a violation of CE tenets).  And in the case of a race biologically capable of overproducing offspring, it's certainly not clear that culling offspring leads to poor biological fitness. For example, suppose female dragons lay 50 eggs every year. The dragon may expect, from a biological perspective, most of the offspring to die as only a few are needed to reproduce the species in the long term. So a female dragon mother may well cull those offspring that she doesn't feel are fit to survive, and leave the rest to struggle. This is not inconsistent with the idea of dragons still being a plague on the world.

As for your third point, why is it wrong for the GM to decide for the purposes of the setting what is good and evil? Is your point actually congruent to saying that you won't play in a game where you don't get to set the definitions of good and evil?

As for your fourth point, doesn't playing in any magical setting promote "unscientific thinking"? Are you asserting that it is wrong for anyone to consider an unscientific setting?

So not only did you evade my question, but the explanation for why you personally don't play games with alignment seems weak and not based on a rational consideration of the evidence.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 21, 2020)

Let's look at lions. Young lionesses when they become sexually mature, encourage outsid male lions to take over the pride. When they do, the males lions kill the young so that the lionesses will become fertile. So, the young lionesses are indirectly responsible for the death of their youngest siblings. Is that good or evil?

Lions will kill other predators in their area, hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs, foxes. Is that good or evil?

In areas with hyenas, lions will steal the hyenas' kill. Is that good or evil?

All of the above increases the lions chances of survival. So how can you call them anything but good?


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

Ok, so attacking this from a different angle.  Certain aspects of the Tengu Witch scenario that prompted this latest conversation are unique to the fantasy scenario.   But the underlying questions of about what is right and wrong are not limited to fantasy scenarios.

In the game Mass Effect, one of the sentient species is the Krogan. The Krogan are a violent predatory species that have in their natural evolved state the ability to overproduce offspring. Krogans naturally reproduce many more children than an ecology can support. In their natural state the Krogan have to make war and kill a very high percentage of their own species, or else the ecology would collapse from an overabundance of top order predators. So long as the Krogan were confined to a single world, this meant that their species were just in perpetual warfare with themselves. But when the Krogan gained the ability to travel off world, the self-limiting pressure that the species placed on themselves was ended. The Krogan could expand through the galaxy, reproducing rapidly, filling every ecosystem, and exterminating all other sentient species that were in their way.

In a less thoughtful story, the Krogan would be the villains. But at the time the story is set, the Krogan have been defeated and largely confined to their home world. To prevent the biological inevitability of the war reoccurring, a group of scientists created a tailored virus which would render about 98% of Krograns in each generation sterile. Only by rendering 98% of Krogans sterile would the Krogans be so biologically limited that they could no longer sustain mass casualties in war. The result of this sterility is that Krogans cannot sustain war against another sentient species. But since the Krogans still retain their biological instinct to fight and kill each other, the species is in a state of decline and their culture is in a state of essentially universal depression. Krogans now lack the ability to act according to their instinctive imperatives, because when they do, their species declines.  Peaceableness has been forced on them.  As result they are having to redefine themselves, and it's a painful process fighting against their own instincts to destroy. Many want to find a cure to the sterility so they can return to their "glory days", but their glory days are actually defined by perpetual violence and genocide.

The architect of the viral sterility is a very thoughtful scientist that is a major NPC in the story. And he spends most of the story wrestling with the morality of his own choices. And you the player can affirm or deny his conclusions, influencing the story.

Is this whole thing wrong to think about for the same reasons you assert that it is wrong to have alignment?  The Silurian scientist is essentially adopting the same solution in a different setting as the Tengu Witch.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> Let's look at lions. Young lionesses when they become sexually mature, encourage outsid male lions to take over the pride. When they do, the males lions kill the young so that the lionesses will become fertile. So, the young lionesses are indirectly responsible for the death of their youngest siblings. Is that good or evil?
> 
> Lions will kill other predators in their area, hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs, foxes. Is that good or evil?
> 
> ...




Again, you seem to have struck out on a tangent and not answered or responded to anything I've actually said. Not only are you continuing to evade the question I asked, but you are not defending any of the four points you raised in an earlier post.

Lions and hyenas have very little to do with the question. Morality is generally seen as something only a fully sentient species can possess. For example, the small pox virus is not generally regarded as possessing the quality of "evil", even though it creates evils. Nor does anyone seem to be morally troubled by the fact that we exterminated it. Lions are animals, and I think we generally agree that animals are in some sense categorically different than persons. I'm not suggesting lions have no sentience, no intelligence, and no rights - but the degree of sentience and intelligence is so different than that of persons that they cannot be classified in the same fashion.

So again, to raise the issue of lions or hyenas seems to be evading the question.  Neither lions nor hyenas are seen as moral actors.

However, I think that if you were to imagine a sentient species with the biology and culture of lions, then that species would be pretty darn appalling in all sorts of ways.  As I've said before, when defining how Drow behave in my game, I looked to lions for inspiration, because a sentient species that behaved like lions was about the most evil and depraved thing that I could imagine.   The degree to which lion society is appalling is not something you have more than barely touched on.


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## Umbran (Feb 21, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> So not only did you evade my question




With respect, your question used loaded language ascribing an emotional state.  It looks to me like he said he doesn't play games with alignment.  I don't see him claiming discomfort.

It isnt' really evasive when the question isnt' appropriate.



> but the explanation for why you personally don't play games with alignment seems weak and not based on a rational consideration of the evidence.




As if two people considering things rationally always have to come to the same conclusion?  

Maybe you shouldn't be positioning yourself as the arbiter of rationality....


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## Umbran (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> Lions will kill other predators in their area, hyenas, leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs, foxes. Is that good or evil?




The simple answer here is that (real world) lions are not capable of moral judgement.  The lion is not capable of stopping and thinking, "Wait a minute, can I do this in a way that causes less pain and suffering in the world?"  Asking if their behavior is good or evil is not terribly different from asking if a hurricane is good or evil.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

@Umbran With all due respect, the questions you are addressing to me are pretty much exactly the questions I am addressing to the other poster.  

The discomfort you apparently feel with the assertions I'm making parallels rather strongly the discomfort I'm feeling with @shawnhcorey assertions.   He said for example that he doesn't play games with alignment because "Labeling someone for any reason is wrong."  That's not a claim of subjective experience, but a normative claim.  It would appear to apply to games other than the ones he participates him.   Likewise, you seem to be worried that I'm positioning myself as "the arbiter of rationality".  Leaving aside that everyone is an arbiter of rationality so if was positioning myself to do that it wouldn't be unusual, I'm not actually the person who introduced the issue into this discussion.   The other poster defended his assertion by suggesting the contrary required "unscientific thinking".  

Just as you seem to want clarification of my position, I would like clarification from the original poster.

As for your question, it should be well known to you that I don't insist that two rational persons will always come to the same conclusion. That is not actually the point of contention. The question is, given a body of evidence, is every conclusion rational. I left open right from the start that there would be rational reasons to decide that you didn't want to play a game with alignment. I don't have a particular problem with assertions like, "Alignment isn't right for me. In games I've played, it hasn't worked out, and these are the reasons why."

But again, that isn't what the poster asserted.  For each of the for bullet points he made, I suggested that there was a logical problem with the assertion.  Neither you nor him have offered to disagree with my points.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 21, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> In the game Mass Effect, one of the sentient species is the Krogan. The Krogan are a violent predatory species that have in their natural evolved state the ability to overproduce offspring. Krogans naturally reproduce many more children than an ecology can support. In their natural state the Krogan have to make war and kill a very high percentage of their own species, or else the ecology would collapse from an overabundance of top order predators.




Which is artificial. Most predators die from starvation.



Celebrim said:


> Lions and hyenas have very little to do with the question. Morality is generally seen as something only a fully sentient species can possess.




Another arbitrary labelling. What is morality?

Here's a moral problem for you: In WW2, the allies intercepted a encoded message from the Nazis about their plans to bomb a small town in England. If Churchill evacuated the town, the Nazis would realize their codes have been broken and change them; the allies could no longer read the messages. This could result in the deaths of thousands of soldiers. On the other hand, if they did not evacuate, hundreds of townsfolk would die. But then again, the Nazis could change their codes at any time, so not evacuating the town does not guarantee future decoding of their messages. What is the moral choice?


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> Another arbitrary labeling.




Are you suggesting that it the distinction between a virus, broccoli, a lion, and a person is arbitrary?



> What is morality?




The question, "What is Truth?" is not nearly as novel or as penetrating as some think.   In any event, since you ask me the question, "What is morality?", I take that to mean that you don't think morality actually exists, or that morality is wholly arbitrary?   Is that a correct inference from your question?



> Here's a moral problem for you: In WW2, the allies intercepted a encoded message from the Nazis about their plans to bomb a small town in England. If Churchill evacuated the town, the Nazis would realize their codes have been broken and change them; the allies could no longer read the messages. This could result in the deaths of thousands of soldiers. On the other hand, if they did not evacuate, hundreds of townsfolk would die. But then again, the Nazis could change their codes at any time, so not evacuating the town does not guarantee future decoding of their messages. What is the moral choice?




While that is a very interesting discussion, this is now what the fourth time you've attempted to deflect from the conversation at hand.   Why must I persist in writing essays to new questions you are raising, when you've showed absolutely no inclination to cordially answer any of my questions?


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 21, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Why must I persist in writing essays to new questions you are raising, when you've showed absolutely no inclination to cordially answer any of my questions?




That's because your questions have an answer. What is good or evil, right or wrong is subjective; it changes from person to person.


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## Umbran (Feb 21, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> The discomfort you apparently feel with the assertions I'm making parallels rather strongly the discomfort I'm feeling with @shawnhcorey assertions.




Okay.  Same problem.  You are ascribing a feeling or emotion to me, and it isn't accurate.  I am not, by any common use of the term, "uncomfortable".


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> That's because your questions have an answer. What is good or evil, right or wrong is subjective; it changes from person to person.




If that is so, how can you say, "Labelling someone for any reason is wrong."


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

Umbran said:


> Okay.  Same problem.  You are ascribing a feeling or emotion to me, and it isn't accurate.  I am not, by any common use of the term, "uncomfortable".




Ok, if that is the sticking point, would you - completely without regard to your emotional state - say that you find my logic in some way faulty, or that the implications of my logic are unfortunate?

Or in short, what prompted you to disagree if you felt no disagreement?

You claimed that this statement was "inappropriate": "Are you saying you don't feel comfortable playing in a game with alignments, or are you saying that anyone is wrong to do so?"

I don't think it violated any board rules, if that is what you mean by "inappropriate". I think that the intention of the statement was clear, and that it wasn't in fact "loaded language describing an emotional state". 

However, I would be perfectly happy with however you want to frame the question in a way that asks the same thing, without what you describe as "loaded language describing an emotional state".   It's not my intention in asking about whether someone is comfortable with an idea to ascribe to them any particular emotional state, and certainly not some state of passion and high stress.   What language do you use to describe a state when you are disinclined to agree with something?   Or perhaps I should state, what language do you want me to use to ask the question?


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## Lanefan (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> I don't play games with alignment because:
> 
> races are labelled good and evil arbitrarily.
> evil races won't survive because they'll kill their offspring.
> ...



Responding to these points in order:

A - While the labelling might seem arbitrary on the surface, one would hope some thinking went into it from the DM side as regards how a given race or species fits in to the setting and-or is viewed by others.  Further, many GMs use these labels as guidelines rather than absolutes, to allow for some variance.

B - A massive and unsupported leap of assumption.  Any species that hopes to remain viable is going to reproduce in numbers enough to keep itself going (which also tosses out your lions example a few posts down); also by no means do all 'evil' species or races kill their offspring.

C - Absolutely.  Setting construction is the GM's purview, and determining general alignments of races and species is a part of that process.

D - Nothing new here; much of what goes on in a typical RPG throws scientific thinking out the window.  Just look at any of the countless debates about hit points, falling damage, and recovery via resting.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 21, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> D - Nothing new here; much of what goes on in a typical RPG throws scientific thinking out the window.  Just look at any of the countless debates about hit points, falling damage, and recovery via resting.



this feels like a huge blanket statement. sure the mechanics of D&D throw out scientific accuracy for the sake of simplicity, but this flies in the face of anyone who wants to keep regressive ideas in their settings because of "historical accuracy".


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## Lanefan (Feb 21, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> That's because your questions have an answer. What is good or evil, right or wrong is subjective; it changes from person to person.



Indeed; and in a game it might change a bit depending on which PC is doing the checking.

However, in the case of a typical RPG, in the end only one person's opinion matters: the GM who makes those determinations.  This includes PCs - you can write LG as your alignment on your character sheet but if you play it as CN then CN is what someone's gonna get if they check you.

Now, players - in or out of character - can always disagree with a GM's assessment.  I'm currently in this position in the game I play in: the GM has determined that undead of various sorts aren't always evil, but I-as-player disagree (other than rare and exceptional cases).  I've also got a couple of PCs in that game who, each for reasons of his own, see undead as a scourge with no redeeming features whatsoever; and I play them as such.

Leads to endless arguments with the party Necromancer...


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## Lanefan (Feb 21, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> this feels like a huge blanket statement. sure the mechanics of D&D throw out scientific accuracy for the sake of simplicity, but this flies in the face of anyone who wants to keep regressive ideas in their settings because of "historical accuracy".



Errr...how did you jump from what I said to this?  I'm missing a step or two along the way, I think.

Scientific accuracy and historical accuracy aren't really the same thing.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 21, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Errr...how did you jump from what I said to this?  I'm missing a step or two along the way, I think.
> 
> Scientific accuracy and historical accuracy aren't really the same thing.



idk I feel like trying to make things accurate to reality is it's own general category imo.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> this feels like a huge blanket statement. sure the mechanics of D&D throw out scientific accuracy for the sake of simplicity, but this flies in the face of anyone who wants to keep regressive ideas in their settings because of "historical accuracy".




???

Not only is that not a logical train of thought (how does it "fly in the face"?), but I suspect it is self-contradictory. If you are going to equate "scientific accuracy" with "scientific thinking", and then if you are going to equate "scientific accuracy" with "historical accuracy" (which is specious to begin with), then surely what must be true for "scientific accuracy" and "historical accuracy" must be the same. But the poster you are agreeing with seemed to imply that it morally wrong for a games to encourage "unscientific thinking", so by your "logic" you'd have to assert also that it was morally wrong for games to not have "historical accuracy". Can we condemn a game for "ahistorical thinking"? Is alternative history wrong in and of itself? Are fantastic events in a narrative condemnable merely if they are historically improbable or historically impossible?

What are you trying to prove through that above statement anyway?


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## Umbran (Feb 21, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Indeed; and in a game it might change a bit depending on which PC is doing the checking.




Or which edition you are playing.

In 5e... there's no real mechanical impact of alignment.  It is a descriptive note, and nothing more.  So, yes, whether a thing was good or evil is entirely a matter of opinion.

In other editions, alignment was an actual characteristic of an entity, either gained through their behavior or innate to their being.  Magic could interact with this characteristic, so it was a real, if non-material, thing in their world.  In these editions, if you have an opinion on what is good or evil... that's too bad.  The opinion of the Universe was the only one that mattered.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

Umbran said:


> Or which edition you are playing.
> 
> In 5e... there's no real mechanical impact of alignment.  It is a descriptive note, and nothing more.




This reminds me of the change where they made 'speak with plants' work by giving plants sentience at that moment, rather than allowing communication with something that was already sentient. It avoids the "screaming broccoli" problem and makes things more familiar to the average modern player. They do this though at the cost of making the game not backwards compatible - for example a Libram of Silver Magic.



> So, yes, whether a thing was good or evil is entirely a matter of opinion.




But this is still not quite true. It's mostly true now, but there are exceptions.

For example, 5e srd: "Alignment is an essential part of the nature of celestials and fiends. A devil does not choose to be lawful evil, and it doesn’t tend toward lawful evil, but rather it is lawful evil in its essence. If it somehow ceased to be lawful evil, it would cease to be a devil."

This doesn't imply the devil ceases to be a devil when in its own opinion that isn't lawful evil. A devil might correctly perceive with its supernatural wisdom that it has ceased to be lawful evil, but I don't think the intended implication is that any act is lawful evil or not merely as a matter of opinion. Else, the whole alignment is an essential part of the nature bit wouldn't make sense.

What 5e has tended to do is to make alignment of anything less than an outer planar being not a significant and essential part of their nature.  They've tended to rewrite mechanics that interacted with alignment to interact with classes of outer planar beings, and they've tended to turn damage conditional on alignment into named sorts of damage.

Also, I would like to point out that there is a difference between something being a "matter of opinion" and something being a matter of disagreement.    That people disagree over something doesn't make it a mere "matter of opinion".   There is a categorical difference between the statement, "Chocolate tastes good" and "The Earth is a disk.", even though they are both statements upon which people have differing opinions.   The first statement is truly subjective and solely therefore a matter of opinion: everyone is right regarding their own tastes.   But the second statement is a statement about objective reality to which everyone is subject.   Someone is right or wrong, regardless of their being a disagreement.


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## Celebrim (Feb 21, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> shawnhcorey said:
> 
> 
> > That's because your questions have an answer. What is good or evil, right or wrong is subjective; it changes from person to person.
> ...




Ok, you don't seem interested in answering. I feel like you just dropped a grenade in the thread, and then ran off. You threw out an assertion that is in our present society one for which many people believe that they are justified in ruining and destroying other people's lives. You implied that if a game system, or the people that played it, featured alignment labels that that was wrong and racist. And racism is a charge that is consequential in modern society. You don't just throw down that gauntlet and act like you have said nothing. It's like yelling "Fire" in a crowded place. There better be some smoke around to justify it and you better be serious.

Ironically, I also believe in your backtracking from that original bomb assertion, you have inadvertently created an argument that justifies racism and genocide.

You argue that good or evil, right or wrong is subjective and that it changes from one person to another.

You've argued that each person has their own "right" and own "wrong" particular to that person. You even went so far to suggest, "All of the above increases the lions chances of survival. So how can you call them anything but good?" 

But if we apply your logic to people, and we can't say what is right or wrong, and we can't call anything wrong if it increases the chances of survival, then everyone is perfectly justified in seeing the world as strictly a competition for resources, survival of the fittest, where winning is passing on your selfish genes to the most offspring that are possible. And, thus many would justify genocide and racial discrimination, with the claims that they are just fighting for their own.

I think we want to be able to say that racism is wrong, and it is not merely a matter of subjective opinion as to whether it is wrong.  It is evil, and I think we would like to say that people ought not adopt the lion's view of survival of the fittest and kill everything that doesn't carry their genes.   I would call a philosophy of Social Darwinism anything but good.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 21, 2020)

Games that label whole races as good or evil are racist. That's what racism means: assigning morals based on categories.


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## Celebrim (Feb 22, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> Games that label whole races as good or evil are racist. That's what racism means: assigning morals based on categories.




Aside from being wrong, that is an opinion as absurd as labeling the earth flat.

But at least now that you've said it, no one can now accuse me of misconstruing you or attributing to you feelings you did not have.


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## pemerton (Feb 22, 2020)

uzirath said:


> Huh. I'm chagrined that my post might have come across that way.



I don't think it did. Your point was clear.


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## pemerton (Feb 22, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> Games that label whole races as good or evil are racist. That's what racism means: assigning morals based on categories.



I'd probably put it slightly differently: the notion of "inherently evil races" likes orcs, etc, is a trope that draws on the same intellectual/cultural sources as does racist thinking.

The fact that, in the fiction, it's not morally objectionable racism is neither here nor there. One doesn't judge the nature, value etc of a cultural object by the values that it itself presents or affirms.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 22, 2020)

pemerton said:


> The fact that, in the fiction, it's not morally objectionable racism is neither here nor there. One doesn't judge the nature, value etc of a cultural object by the values that it itself presents or affirms.




One doesn't, are you sure? Because I sure as hell do judge cultural objects in this fashion-- especially when I am participating in their creation.


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## Umbran (Feb 22, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Aside from being wrong, that is an opinion as absurd as labeling the earth flat.




*Mod Note:*

Keep it respectful, or walk away.  Those are your options.  



> But at least now that you've said it, no one can now accuse me of misconstruing you or attributing to you feelings you did not have.




The snide commentary is not helping you here.  Please use better judgement.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 22, 2020)

pemerton said:


> The fact that, in the fiction, it's not morally objectionable racism is neither here nor there. One doesn't judge the nature, value etc of a cultural object by the values that it itself presents or affirms.




But RPGs are more than cultural objects. They are also tools for creating more cultural objects. As such, they should avoid morally-objectionable content.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 22, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> But RPGs are more than cultural objects. They are also tools for creating more cultural objects. As such, they should avoid morally-objectionable content.




Or, at least, engage with it _deliberately_ and _purposefully_ instead of blindly aping classical works and stumbling backwards into classical ideologies.


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## Umbran (Feb 22, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> But RPGs are more than cultural objects. They are also tools for creating more cultural objects. As such, they should avoid morally-objectionable content.




Responsibility for the content lies with the content creator, not the tool. 

There is no culture-wide definition for morally-objectionable content. And attempting to enforce such a standard runs into severe ethical issues.  Many will find the act of policing thought in this way to itself be morally objectionable.

To use the _reductuio ad absurdum_ method - a dictionary is a cultural object, and a tool used to create more cultural objects.  Do we now eliminate words you find morally objectionable from dictionaries?  I don't think so.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 22, 2020)

Umbran said:


> Responsibility for the content lies with the content creator, not the tool.




Tools encourage things to be done in certain ways. Yes, tools can be partially responsible.


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## MGibster (Feb 22, 2020)

D&D has it roots in war gaming and I suspect that's a big reason why some races were just inherently evil.  The creators weren't really trying to come up with a cohesive world they were just trying to come up with a reason why that elf, dwarf, and human were kicking down doors, killing a bunch of orcs & goblins, and taking the treasure.  (Warhammer 40k is in the same boat.  The setting was created as window dressing justifying why your Space Marines are beating the hell out of my Space Orks.)  

And to complicate things, some of us see the use of inherently evil races in a game as a preference while others see it as a moral choice.  Which leads to heated discussions because one side doesn't see what the big deal and gets upset when the other side fumes at what they see as very wrong.  I find myself in the camp of the former rather than the latter.  I can have just as much fun with a game where orcs are inherently evil as I can with a game where my character pursues relationships with them built on mutual respect and common good.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 22, 2020)

D&D originated from wargaming but the divisions were law and chaos, not good and evil. IIRC, good & evil were added in in Chainmail which became D&D.


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## Umbran (Feb 22, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> Tools encourage things to be done in certain ways. Yes, tools can be partially responsible.




And I think responsibility for moral content of a piece fully in the hands of the content creator.  Now do you see what I mean about no standard acceptable across culture?


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 22, 2020)

Umbran said:


> Now do you see what I mean about no standard acceptable across culture?




No, I don't. Injustice is injustice the world over.


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## Celebrim (Feb 22, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> No, I don't. Injustice is injustice the world over.




Also you: "What is good or evil, right or wrong is subjective; it changes from person to person."

So which of these contradictory things you are saying do you expect people to believe? And if they are contradictory, why would you expect people to believe any of them?


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## pemerton (Feb 23, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> But RPGs are more than cultural objects. They are also tools for creating more cultural objects. As such, they should avoid morally-objectionable content.



What I was trying to get at is that a common response to concerns about the ways RPGs express racism and racialisation is to say _But its not racist to hate an essentially evil races such as _[insert fictional race here].

This is an attempt to judge the value/morality of the fiction by _what is going on within the fiction_. My view is that this is flawed, and often verges into apologism. The relevant question, in my view, is not _what is going on in the fiction _nor _what is going on from the point of view of the cultrual object itself _but rather _what actual, real-world phenomena and processes are at work in this object_?

I think it goes the other way also. To pick an easy example, the novel The Quiet American depicts morally objectionable content (eg colonialism, terrorist attacks upon civilians, etc). But that doesn't make it morally objectionable. On balance, despite some problems Greene has in articulating the significance of race in the story and the situations with which it deals, I think the book is morally powerful.

I think we're agreed (unless I've misread your posts, in which case I apologise especially given the trickiness of this discussion) that one problem with "evil races" is that it presents the outlook and conceptual apparatus of racialising and racist thinking in a completely casual way, as if it were quite unproblematic.


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## pemerton (Feb 23, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> One doesn't, are you sure? Because I sure as hell do judge cultural objects in this fashion-- especially when I am participating in their creation.



Given that you seem to be agreeing with @shawnhcorey, and so - broadly - was I, you may have misunderstood my point. See my post just upthread of this one for more.

As I said to shawnhcorey, if in fact I've  misunderstood you I apologise.


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## shawnhcorey (Feb 23, 2020)

What makes them racism is labelling groups based only on the category they're in. Labelling elves good is just as racist as labelling orcs evil.


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## Celebrim (Feb 23, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> What makes them racism is labelling groups based only on the category they're in. Labelling elves good is just as racist as labelling orcs evil.




That's not how that works. That's not how any of that works. That's not what racism is. That's not how alignment works. That's not even how English works.

I would love to have an honest conversation with you. I would love to have an honest debate with you. I tried when I initially responded to your post to extend to you a very charitable interpretation of what you were saying, and indicate as much sympathy as possible.

But if you are not interested in discussing this, just say so.  I'll be happy to drop it.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 23, 2020)

pemerton said:


> As I said to shawnhcorey, if in fact I've  misunderstood you I apologise.




No, it would appear that I misunderstood you-- what you're describing is known as a _Thermian argument_ and it's almost intentionally designed to miss the point that a fictional universe that justifies its own moral values... was also designed to do so.

That doesn't mean that it's _not saying_ the message someone else is objecting to, it means that it's _trying harder_ to say it.


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## Lanefan (Feb 23, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> No, it would appear that I misunderstood you-- what you're describing is known as a _Thermian argument_ and it's almost intentionally designed to miss the point that a fictional universe that justifies its own moral values... was also designed to do so.
> 
> That doesn't mean that it's _not saying_ the message someone else is objecting to, it means that it's _trying harder_ to say it.



I'm a bit unclear - are you in fact objecting to fictional universes (or parts thereof) having internal moral values that are inconsistent with what we generally find acceptable in reality?

If yes, that seems to put some rather strict limits on those who create fiction.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 23, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> I'm a bit unclear - are you in fact objecting to fictional universes (or parts thereof) having internal moral values that are inconsistent with what we generally find acceptable in reality?




I'm not. All I am saying is that when trying to justify the internal moral values of a work, claiming that they are "objectively true" within the setting of the work is the _opposite_ of a justification. It's the author trying to deny their responsibility for their work by denying their _authorship_ of their own work... thus denying any intentional purpose for which they might have done what people are objecting to.

It also carries the very strong implication-- right or wrong-- that the author also thinks "that's just the way it is" to some extent in the real world. Morality is not an objective metaphysical force in real life; one only makes it so in fiction when trying to say something _very specific_ about morality or when imitating a work that said something very specific about morality.


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## Celebrim (Feb 23, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> It also carries the very strong implication-- right or wrong-- that the author also thinks "that's just the way it is" to some extent in the real world. Morality is not an objective metaphysical force in real life; one only makes it so in fiction when trying to say something _very specific_ about morality or when imitating a work that said something very specific about morality.




When you claim that morality is not objective in real life, you are also saying something very specific about morality. Likewise, when you have a setting which features only moral grayness at best, then it seems to me quite likely that - right or wrong - the author is saying "that's just the way it is in the real world". One only writes like that I would think, when you want to say some thing very specific about the real world.

I think it is ridiculous to assert that someone like myself is denying the authorship of my home-brew setting simply because I claim that morality is objective within the setting, and further because the setting has knowable objective metaphysical forces acting within it. This is not an accident. This is not me being somehow clueless about what I'm writing. There is not a lack of intentionality here.

It's hard to tell what you are really saying even with the clarification. Because on the one hand I'm getting this argument that I'm just denying my own agency in my writing. And yet at the same time I'm being told by other posters that what I actually intend doesn't matter, and that their agency as readers and what they want to see in my work is more important than my own agency. 

And I'm not even going to get into claims about the metaphysical here because any extensive argument about whether or not what is real has some metaphysical existence or interacts with a metaphysical reality will soon violate board rules.

If fantastic settings are troubling to you with their reified metaphysical entities and reified morality, I have repeatedly suggested that it is quite possible to have more or less this exact same discussion in a hard science fiction setting with no reified metaphysical morality.

But is this conversation really just going to boil down to the idea that all fictional works ought to represent a morality and a reality we are comfortable with?   Because once again, the last time I encountered that ideology was a religious fundamentalist.


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## Maxperson (Feb 23, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> What makes them racism is labelling groups based only on the category they're in. Labelling elves good is just as racist as labelling orcs evil.



Racism is a belief in the superiority/inferiority of race.  White Supremacy is racist.  Labels assigned to race that are designed to promote superiority or inferiority would also be racist. 

In D&D, good and evil don't assign the idea of superiority or inferiority to races.  They pertain to motives.


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## Celebrim (Feb 23, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> In D&D, good and evil don't assign the idea of superiority or inferiority to races.  They pertain to motives.




Well, and behavior, and the other things we generally give some weight to when defining good and evil.

The important thing is that the alignment tag is not an inseparable part of say an elf's being. An elf doesn't have the tag 'chaotic good' if it doesn't behave in a way that is 'chaotic good'. Elves are tagged as 'chaotic good' because the majority of them engage in 'chaotic good' behavior, and not because they are elves.

Moreover, there is a fundamental difference between "elfness" and "Chinese" or "Amerindian" or "Swedish" or (especially) something like "whiteness" or "Asian". When we normally speak of "race" and what it means to have a race we are speaking of something that is at least as much a social construct as it is a product of genetic and biological reality. Racial tags are almost always based on perception of large differences between human racial groups that turn out to not be supported by reality.  Thus for example the notion of "blackness" or "whiteness" gets caught up in a lot more things than just melanin.  But when we are speaking of an "elf", "dragon", "mindflayer", "klingon", "krogan", or "silurian", and so we are speaking of relatively large differences between these groups that are supported by the theorized reality. Elves and krogans, silurians, and klingons don't actually represent human ethnic groups, and I think it is a mistake to closely align them with human ethnic groups, and a tragedy and a misunderstanding to insist that they do or ought to closely align with human ethnic groups, or to insist that underneath they have basically no real distinctiveness from humans beyond superficial traits like bumps on their forehead.

In it's most benign form this gives us female lizardfolk or dragonkin with mammary glands because we are so uncomfortable with the other that we have to imagine female defined by simian sexual markers.  It's its more serious form, this unwillingness to deal with the reality of others, suggests to me a unwillingness to deal mentality with the reality of diversity even in minor forms.


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## Maxperson (Feb 23, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Well, and behavior, and the other things we generally give some weight to when defining good and evil.
> 
> The important thing is that the alignment tag is not an inseparable part of say an elf's being. An elf doesn't have the tag 'chaotic good' if it doesn't behave in a way that is 'chaotic good'. Elves are tagged as 'chaotic good' because the majority of them engage in 'chaotic good' behavior, and not because they are elves.




I agree with this.



> In it's most benign form this gives us female lizardfolk or dragonkin with mammary glands because we are so uncomfortable with the other that we have to imagine female defined by simian sexual markers.  It's its more serious form, this unwillingness to deal with the reality of others, suggests to me a unwillingness to deal mentality with the reality of diversity even in minor forms.



I don't agree with this.  I don't think that lizardfolk are given breasts to avoid discomfort.  I think it's a convenience thing.  The vast majority of humans can't look at a lizard and tell what sex it is.  

In order to differentiate between lizardfolk sexes, they have two options.  They can create a new way to tell the difference, such as putting a fin on the top of the head of one sex, but not the other.  However, they would then have to teach players how to tell the difference and at least some players would confuse the two.  Or they can just put breasts on them for convenience sake and there will be no confusion.


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## Celebrim (Feb 23, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> I don't agree with this.  I don't think that lizardfolk are given breasts to avoid discomfort.  I think it's a convenience thing.  The vast majority of humans can't look at a lizard and tell what sex it is.




I think I'm once again having a failure of communication over this word 'discomfort'.  And I think I'll leave it at that.


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## Lanefan (Feb 23, 2020)

Just a guess, but I suspect in this Lizardfolk instance 'discomfort' = 'inconvenience'.


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## Celebrim (Feb 23, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Just a guess, but I suspect in this Lizardfolk instance 'discomfort' = 'inconvenience'.




Discomfort is almost a straight synonym for inconvenience. Discomfort implies some sort of mild problem of some sort - mild confusion, mild pain, mild unease, mild anxiety, a mild unwanted effort. Anything else than ease is discomfort. If something is inconvenient, it causes mild trouble, mild difficulties, and mild discomfort. 

So I'm told that a person disagrees with me that it is to avoid discomfort, but then goes on to explain that it is to avoid mild inconveniences and mild confusions, I don't think we are so far off as the person might suppose.


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## Maxperson (Feb 23, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Discomfort is almost a straight synonym for inconvenience. Discomfort implies some sort of mild problem of some sort - mild confusion, mild pain, mild unease, mild anxiety, a mild unwanted effort. Anything else than ease is discomfort. If something is inconvenient, it causes mild trouble, mild difficulties, and mild discomfort.
> 
> So I'm told that a person disagrees with me that it is to avoid discomfort, but then goes on to explain that it is to avoid mild inconveniences and mild confusions, I don't think we are so far off as the person might suppose.



Discomfort means you are uncomfortable with something.  Being at a party with drugs makes me uncomfortable.  I don't like it.  It does not inconvenience me.  Getting a flat tire does inconvenience me, but does not in any way cause me discomfort.  While they may be synonyms, synonyms are just words that are close in meaning, not the same in meaning.  We wouldn't have the two words "Discomfort" and "inconvenience" if they meant the exact same thing.


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## Celebrim (Feb 23, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> We wouldn't have the two words "Discomfort" and "inconvenience" if they meant the exact same thing.




Well, given that it is English, we do have words that mean the exact same thing.

But in this case, that is indeed why I said the were "almost" straight synonyms.


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## Todd Roybark (Feb 24, 2020)

Umbran said:


> And I think responsibility for moral content of a piece fully in the hands of the content creator.




So the person that disseminates say, for example, Atomwaffen, type speech bares no culpability if they themselves did not create the message?

I do not want to presume what you think, Umbran, but I certainly _hope_ the example  I gave above was _not_ the intended conclusion you wanted people to arrive at, from the single sentence of yours quoted above. 

Swords and Sorcery, as a genre, has racist roots, the Solomon Kane stories of Rob E Howard are ample proof of this. 

The trope of kicking the door down of ‘Evil or Lesser races’ taking their stuff and being justified in slaughter or sparing them, clearly has some colonial roots in it’s paradigm.

Racial and Gender Attribute maximums as found in 1e, which probably did not seem _scandalous_ at all for Gary G to write, also demonstrates this racist paradigm.


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## Umbran (Feb 24, 2020)

shawnhcorey said:


> What is good or evil, right or wrong is subjective; it changes from person to person.





shawnhcorey said:


> No, I don't. Injustice is injustice the world over.




I can totally understand not liking racism.  I'm against it in the real world, myself.  So, if you don't want to play games with racism... that is 100% cool.

It is just that the idea that no game should have anything remotely resembling racism rather doesn't match with your earlier admission that right and wrong are subjective. 

I, personally, don't think the the interpretation of orcs as just flat out evil in a game has much of an impact on the real-world morality of players.  Edit, so while I despise racism in the real world, I don't think fantasy game racism as seen in D&D is a major issue.


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## Maxperson (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> Racial and Gender Attribute maximums as found in 1e, which probably did not seem _scandalous_ at all for Gary G to write, also demonstrates this racist paradigm.



There was nothing racist or sexist about the 1e PHB race and gender maximums.  Women are factually weaker physically than men.  Just look at the speed records and strength records for both sexes.  A representation of that in the PHB is not sexist.  Now, if he had given female PCs a lower int or wis maximum than male ones, THAT would have been sexist.  He didn't do that.

The same goes for racial maximums.  Gary got to design the races and whether those races were weaker, stronger, faster, slower, etc. than humans.  It's not racist to have some races deviate from humans in a game with multiple races.  He also didn't make all non-humans worse than humans.  He gave them significant advantages that humans just didn't have, plus higher than human stats in some areas and lower in others.  That's fair treatment of those races in his game.


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## Umbran (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> So the person that disseminates say, for example, Atomwaffen, type speech bares no culpability if they themselves did not create the message?
> 
> I do not want to presume what you think, Umbran, but I certainly _hope_ the example  I gave above was _not_ the intended conclusion you wanted people to arrive at, from the single sentence of yours quoted above.




Such a speech is real-world socio-political commentary, intended to c_hange real-world behavior_ of people.

D&D orcs are not.  

Humans are very good at differentiating that which is presented as fiction from reality.  Where we fail is at differentiating fiction _that is presented as reality and matches our preferred narrative_ from reality.  

I can't really go further than that on these boards, due to our rules.


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## MGibster (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> So the person that disseminates say, for example, Atomwaffen, type speech bares no culpability if they themselves did not create the message?




I think most of us see a very big difference between material designed to harm real people and a game where we pretend to be elves, dwarves, and humans defeating orcs.  I don't believe the person p;aying a barbarian kicking down the door to an orc fortress is in any danger of suddenly doing the same to real people.  i.e.  D&D is harmless fun. 



> Swords and Sorcery, as a genre, has racist roots, the Solomon Kane stories of Rob E Howard are ample proof of this.




Yes they do.  I still enjoy reading Solomon Kane and Conan stories. 



> The trope of kicking the door down of ‘Evil or Lesser races’ taking their stuff and being justified in slaughter or sparing them, clearly has some colonial roots in it’s paradigm.




I don't mean to sound flippant, but what's your point?  Do you think those of us in 2020 who are playing these games have the same attitude as 19th and early 20th century colonist? 




> Racial and Gender Attribute maximums as found in 1e, which probably did not seem _scandalous_ at all for Gary G to write, also demonstrates this racist paradigm.




Sexist maybe but I'm not sure it points to racism in this particular case.


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## Todd Roybark (Feb 24, 2020)

MGibster said:


> Do you think those of us in 2020 who are playing these games have the same attitude as 19th and early 20th century colonist?




It is not as if the past just disappears, strains of thought going back to the 6th century BC are still _very_ active today.  

If one takes a Solomon Kane story set in Africa, and replace the dark skinned African tribesman with Bullywogs, have we then sufficiently sanitized the material, or is it now just a ‘dog whistle’?

Is it easy to accept the setup of a tribe of Orcs living in an ancient ruins that are too advanced to have been built by the primitive orcs, because that strain of thought has been with us for centuries. 

I would argue books from Eric Von Daniken, like Chariots of the Gods are premised off the idea that _no way could the indigenous people Possibly_ have created wonders like Machu Picchu.

Is substituting Orcs and Bullywogs for humans, truly changing the situation or just masking the racism underneath?

To be honest I do not have a clear answer.  I honestly, do not think there is a simple answer to these questions, which is why truly fearless questions and examinations should performed.

I myself, am grappling with these type of questions _since_ picking up a copy of the complete stories of Solomon Kane, a week ago.   

While certainly not settled, the most recent information would seem to indicate besides interbreeding with Homo Sapiens Sapiens, Neanderthals likely had similar levels of material culture, larger cranial capacity, and frankly contributed a significant portion of Human genes.

As did _other_ Homo Sapiens lines not discovered.

Neanderthals as dumb brutes was a fairly common portrayal in the past, and still present today.

Isn’t Orcs are evil  as a trope more inline with  the trope Neanderthals are primitive brutes?
Especially given that orcs and humans can interbreed in D&D?

Atavism can take many forms.

Now the easy part is the 1e Half Orc had caps to almost all stats beyond Str and Con.  To be fair, all ‘demi-human’ ,(the actual 1e term),races did, but the half orc had much more stringent maximums.


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## Todd Roybark (Feb 24, 2020)

Maxperson, I took a photo of of pg 15 of 1e PHB.
Half Orc could have as maximum 17 Int, 14 Wisdom, 17 Dex, 12 Cha.

Most other races had at least 17 max for ability scores.

Women have higher pain tolerance then men, is that modeled?  No.

Science is also not on the side of Dex builds in 5e, but people want RPG empowerment, not full versimilitude.

I am not calling Gary G a racist or sexist, but he was a white male libertarian from the Midwest.
Based off his writings, he clove pretty close to conventional libertarian thought and convention.

Just look at the Col Plahdoh threads.

For the record, Gary is very dear to me, but I also believe in to paraphrase Burroughs a 'Naked Lunch'.


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## MGibster (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> It is not as if the past just disappears, strains of thought going back to the 6th century BC are still _very_ active today.




And it's not as if we simply interpret past works the same as others did in previous years.  



> If one takes a Solomon Kane story set in Africa, and replace the dark skinned African tribesman with Bullywogs, have we then sufficiently sanitized the material, or is it now just a ‘dog whistle’?




Who knows?  I simply can't keep up on what is and isn't a dog whistle these days.  



> Is it easy to accept the setup of a tribe of Orcs living in an ancient ruins that are too advanced to have been built by the primitive orcs, because that strain of thought has been with us for centuries.




It's a strain of thought that long predates colonialism.  People throughout Europe picked apart the bones of the Roman empire for centuries while living it its ruins.  



> I would argue books from Eric Von Daniken, like Chariots of the Gods are premised off the idea that _no way could the indigenous people Possibly_ have created wonders like Machu Picchu.




And I would agree with you.  I hate those ancient alien theories precisely because they crap all over human achievement.  



> Is substituting Orcs and Bullywogs for humans, truly changing the situation or just masking the racism underneath?




Probably not.  It's a game and I'm just trying to have fun.  If I have a bunch of evil orcs in my game it's because I just need some antagonist for my protagonist to beat up on.  I don't really think I'm masking any racism there.  



> Isn’t Orcs are evil  as a trope more inline with  the trope Neanderthals are primitive brutes?
> Especially given that orcs and humans can interbreed in D&D?




If it is, so what?  Where's the harm when we're talking about a fantasy species that doesn't exist in real life?


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## Todd Roybark (Feb 24, 2020)

MGibster said:


> Where's the harm when we're talking about a fantasy species that doesn't exist in real life?




That is a great question, especially when taken seriously.

Clearly, the imaginary orcs are not subject to ‘real’ harm.  The living human players _may_ be subject to desensitization.

There is a concept of non violence from India called Ahmisa, which is present in multiple belief systems.  The Jain religion considers all eating as an act of destruction, which clearly posses a problem as they include plants as living creatures.

Buddhist thought avoids this dilemma by simply defining plants as not being alive, more akin to crystals and so forth.

Most people think that we have different moral duties to living things vs non-living,
 yet _how_ things are defined in our imagination, has real world effects, in my opinion.

_note I have played in plenty of X race is evil campaigns, including DM’ing them.  I am not virtue signaling, or claiming that having a brew and an orc bake via Fireball spell makes the human player wicked in real life....if so then I myself have a lot to answer for._

But examining the issue, especially given the origins of the genre, and asking ourselves tough questions, is important, I think.  The casual, narrational racism of the Solomon Kane stories certainly is leading me to ask these questions.


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## Maxperson (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> Maxperson, I took a photo of of pg 15 of 1e PHB.
> Half Orc could have as maximum 17 Int, 14 Wisdom, 17 Dex, 12 Cha.




So what.  Orcs are stupid and ugly.  He correctly modeled that.  It doesn't make him racist for accurately modeling half-orcs.  



> Women have higher pain tolerance then men, is that modeled?  No.




He also doesn't have PCs have to go to the bathroom several times a day.  He wasn't trying to model reality, but rather give a loose approximation.



> Science is also not on the side of Dex builds in 5e, but people want RPG empowerment, not full versimilitude.




They want that now, sure.  In the 70s?  I'm not convinced.  In any case, I don't see how 5e has any bearing on 1e.  Since 4e the game no longer has stat penalties for races, either.  Things change.



> I am not calling Gary G a racist or sexist, but he was a white male libertarian from the Midwest.
> Based off his writings, he clove pretty close to conventional libertarian thought and convention.




I've never heard libertarians going on about half-orcs and dex builds.


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## Li Shenron (Feb 24, 2020)

aco175 said:


> On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town.




It's always a matter of fantasy setting.

I generally run games with a "points of darkness" perspective i.e. most of the fantasy world is earth-like with exceptional places where "here be monsters". In such a fantasy setting, a monstrous PC should take precautions when walking into town i.e. hide, disguise, or just wait in the woods while the rest of the party does their errands in town.

Obviously, if you play in a setting like Planescape, there is nothing to worry about your PC looking whatever...


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## Umbran (Feb 24, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> There was nothing racist or sexist about the 1e PHB race and gender maximums.  Women are factually weaker physically than men.




*Mod Note:*
Don't start that nonsense.  Please.  If we have to break out the "anti-inclusiveness" warnings because you went down this road, you will not be please with the results.

And no, your arguments of, "But it is Teh TRVTH!!!1!!one!" are not going to save anyone.


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## Celebrim (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> There is a concept of non violence from India called Ahmisa, which is present in multiple belief systems.  The Jain religion considers all eating as an act of destruction, which clearly posses a problem as they include plants as living creatures.
> 
> Buddhist thought avoids this dilemma by simply defining plants as not being alive, more akin to crystals and so forth.
> 
> Most people think that we have different moral duties to living things vs non-living, yet _how_ things are defined in our imagination, has real world effects, in my opinion.




I have in multiple points in this and related threads pointed out that some of the utility I find in fantasy is precisely asking questions about the complex problem of the moral duties one living thing might have to other living things, based on different natures of living things might have. As your brief survey indicates, this problem is difficult enough that lots of different highly intelligent and rational people have come to slightly different conclusions. I don't have any desire to argue or pass judgement on any of the above claims.

I merely ask that you stop passing judgment on my own exploration of these topics. I'd equally ask you to not assume that if I'm exploring topics like, "If brocolli was sentient, would it be OK to eat it?", that you not assume that the motive of that exploration is racism, any more than it (necessarily) was the motive of the Jains, Buddhist, and so forth you mention above.



> But examining the issue, especially given the origins of the genre, and asking ourselves tough questions, is important, I think.  The casual, narrational racism of the Solomon Kane stories certainly is leading me to ask these questions.




And that's exactly what I'm doing, thinking about tough questions. I feel like I tried to raise a bunch of tough questions in this thread.

But you know what question for me isn't a tough question: man's duty to his fellow man. I have I think a perfectly satisfactory answer to that one. The nature of racism is not one that provokes in me any real intellectual curiosity. I'm perfectly satisfied that I know it is wrong, that I know why it is wrong, and that I know what an effectual cure would look like. It's actually probably the easiest of questions in the complex universe of questions about moral duties between living things. And racism is itself only one species of hatred, in the overall universe of justifications man has for not treating other persons the way they would like to be treated. I don't really have any interest in discussing these things as a point of debate, because either you already get them in which case what's the point, or you are going to bore me with your theories justifying your hatred, scorn, and mistreatment of one group or the other. My impression is that a lot of the people expressing the most concern about this sort of thing, are the ones most struggling with their own mental models of how other people deserve to be treated. Nobody enjoys talking about racism as much as a racist, and the things that change over time are simply which group of racists are tolerated in public discourse.

I don't need bullywogs, goblins, gnolls, kobolds, aarokroka, dragons, vampires and all the rest to model mankind.  I can just use humans in all their wonderful yet limited diversity.  I don't need any symbols for any real world racial groups.  When someone comes in and starts trying to map aarokocra and bullywogs to some real world racial group, I'm appalled.  I'd ask you to stop trying to find race within my aarokocra, bullywogs, and orcs.  The obsession is bizarre.

I've never read the Solomon Kane stories. I have read about half of the Conan stories. I would not use them as a guide to answer the question how one ought to treat ones fellow man, regardless of their skin color. Howard is a complex man with a hard life and many difficulties he was struggling with, and his thoughts evolved over the course of his life. As I would summarize his thoughts on race, his own thoughts seem to be quite congruent with one of those now popular racist authors, such as Jared Diamond of "Guns, Germs, and Steel" fame, who people aren't ashamed to quote approvingly since he's given Howard's views a little twist and new language. But again, I don't really have an interest in arguing over what author's views are so racist one should not read their works. I notice that for all your condemnation of the works of Howard, you are reading 'Solomon Kane' and it's provoking you to ask "hard questions". Well, good. Let's be careful then about who we censure. Even libertarians.


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## Celebrim (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> Women have higher pain tolerance then men, is that modeled?  No.












						Sex, Gender, and Pain: A Review of Recent Clinical and Experimental Findings
					

Sex-related influences on pain and analgesia have become a topic of tremendous scientific and clinical interest, especially in the last 10 to 15 years. Members of our research group published reviews of this literature more than a decade ago, and the ...




					www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
				




It's also probably a dangerous myth based off the belief that since women endure childbirth, of course they have higher pain tolerance. It no doubt leads to poor medical practice. If anything, the literature seems to indicate the opposite - that women have a lower pain tolerance, they are more sensitive to minor pains, they suffer more functional loss as a result of pain, and this is in fact in no small part why women live longer than men. They don't ignore their pain when their body is trying to tell them something. 

I have no desire to get into a debate about modelling gender in fantasy. It's unproductive, it's likely unhealthy, and it's based on a false to facts understanding of the basis of equality in men and women. 

I'm just a bit tired of hearing from both sides of the debate how their view is the more factual one.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 24, 2020)

I'm not a Mod, but Maxperson was already warned. Personally, I could throw out all the facts that happen at the martial arts school where I teach and train, and no matter what I said people would hold the same opinion. Have you heard the phrase "A man whose mind is changed against his will is of the same opinion still"?

To get back on track: I don't like that races as a whole labeled whatever alignment unless they are literally avatars of that alignment like angels, demons and devils. Hey, it's fine if you don't want to think about it if there are races it's "OK to kill because they're all evil" in your games. In mine, player and GM, it disturbs me. Which is not to say I didn't play in such games in the past.


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## Umbran (Feb 24, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> There is a concept of non violence from India called Ahmisa, which is present in multiple belief systems.  The Jain religion considers all eating as an act of destruction, which clearly posses a problem as they include plants as living creatures.
> 
> Buddhist thought avoids this dilemma by simply defining plants as not being alive, more akin to crystals and so forth.




*Mod Note:*

Okay, I know how this makes the disucssion difficult, but, we have rules against discussion of real-world religion on these boards.  While I understand how real-world models are great examples, let us please confine our discussion to gaming as much as possible.  Thanks, all.


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## Celebrim (Feb 24, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> To get back on track: I don't like that races as a whole labeled whatever alignment unless they are literally avatars of that alignment like angels, demons and devils. Hey, it's fine if you don't want to think about it if there are races it's "OK to kill because they're all evil" in your games. In mine, player and GM, it disturbs me. Which is not to say I didn't play in such games in the past.




I'm totally sympathetic to that position. And, even if I don't necessarily agree, I think the exploration itself is interesting. For reasons I'll outline, I don't do things that way, but part of me is thinking, "Actually, that would be interesting ground to explore. How far can you take the idea that anything that isn't an incarnate idea, and which is sentient, has free will and is therefore a person? And, what would be the actual consequences of that being true?" So by all means, explore that territory. It's interesting conceptual territory, even if I'm not at all sure that it is correct, reflects reality, won't result in self-contradiction if you push it far enough, or is all the mental territory that is worth exploring. By all means, explore it. Part of me wants to do it now just to see where it goes.

But there is a difference between me saying, "Explore that territory.", and people who are saying, "Anyone who explores territory that makes me feel uncomfortable is a racist." or even "Anyone that explores territory that makes me feel uncomfortable is promoting racism, and as such needs to be called out by the community as a bad actor."

As for why I don't assume all sentient beings have moral free will, it's ultimately because I think that's a bit less interesting. It removes some possibilities from the space of things that exist. It's not just that it removes some speculative purely fantasy territory - not everyone believe there is a possibility of real demons for example. It's that you can show that it removes even real possibilities from the space of hard science fiction - I've sited species from Mass Effect that are plausible within hard SF (even if not all of Mass Effect is) or the alien xenomorphs from the Aliens series, or sentient computer viruses, or the classic self-aware homogenizing nanite weapon as examples. So one of those "hard questions" that I'm interested in asking could be thought of as, "Do the Krogan, or Rachni, or Reapers, or the Insects of Shaggai, or the Alien Xenomorphs bother you because you think that they are racist or encourage racist thinking, or do they bother you because you don't want to believe in even the possibility of monsters?" Or perhaps another hard question could be, "Are you asserting that there is no such thing as objective evil, because you'd rather believe nothing you do is objectively wrong?"

To me those questions put a different spin on things. Are grimdark fantasies asking hard questions about good and evil, are they telling it like it really is, or are they simply rationalizing that since everything is evil, nothing really is? Are you humanizing all the monsters as a way of sensitizing yourself to how you treat everyone, or are you humanizing all the monsters as a way to say there is no right or wrong. Or to put a more gaming focus on it, did playing Vampire the Masquerade lead most players of the game to be revolted by the monster inside them, or to be less sensitive to monstrosity and to even revel a bit in it?

Or maybe even, if you are condemning someone for killing orcs because "they deserve it", how different really is your gameplay from that? What do you have in your games where "they deserve it" without reflection?  Have you really got rid of your narrative need for "orcs", or just given yourself a new excuse for yours?


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## Bohandas (Feb 25, 2020)

I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this:

How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?


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## Eltab (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this:
> 
> How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?



In the case of Demons and Devils, they are the living embodiment of their alignment and always act based on its principles, by definition.

Monsters with no more than animal intelligence or acting on instinct can be always-evil in the sense of destructive (to others) selfishness: I am hungry and that leg - or the blood within your body - registers to my senses as Food.


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## Bohandas (Feb 25, 2020)

But then you admit that an intelligence predisposed to evil is not necessarily incongruous



Eltab said:


> ...Monsters with no more than animal intelligence...



Don't see what this part has to do with anything


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## Umbran (Feb 25, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Or maybe even, if you are condemning someone for killing orcs because "they deserve it", how different really is your gameplay from that?




And, there may be another point here...

I obviously cannot speak to how others do things, but even with "orcs are evil", PCs are not, in my experience, proactive about it.  If there are orcs "over there, minding their own business" evil or not, they are left alone.  I've never seen PCs spontaneously taken up an orc hunt without provocation.   

Orcs being evil is, in my experience, is mostly used as a bit of shorthand - "Hey, someone's been raiding the local villages!  Oh, look, it was orcs!  Okay, well, we don't know if this particular orc guard was actually on the raid, but orcs are evil, and complicit by working for the same boss is sufficient cause. _hackchopskewer_."


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## Umbran (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> But then you admit that an intelligence predisposed to evil is not necessarily incongruous




There are ways we could imagine having a type of creature who has free will, but is pretty universally evil.

Let us imagine, for example, that Freudian psychology had some validity - it is simplified model, with issues, but will work descriptively for our purposes.  Very, very roughly, we have a model with an Id - the instincts, Ego - understanding of reality, and the Superego - the morality.

Now, imagine a creature who, in that framework, had a massively underdeveloped superego.  They understand, for example a certain kind of morality with regards to rearing of young of their own species, but that's about it.  Or, imagine a creature that is physically/neuro-biologically incapable of anything more than proximal empathy - if you are not one of its best buddies, it is fundamentally incapable of registering that you have emotions or feelings of your own.

This is the model of evil as something a human would call a psychological limitation or cognitive deficit.  The thing has full ability to choose, but there are some ideas that simply don't occur to it - it _never occurs to an orc_ that your pain is worth consideration.  It can still plan and be intelligent and choose, based on its own needs and desires.  But _your_ needs and desires is it simply not capable of caring about.

The result, from a human point of view, might be a sort of violent sociopathy, which in game terms we might just call Evil.


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## Sepulchrave II (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this:
> 
> How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?




Because orcs are people, in every meaningful way. It's much easier to "otherise" things which don't closely resemble us.

Orcs are warm-blooded bipeds who have anatomies and intelligences comparable with humans. They have culture, language. They need to eat and sleep. They are mortal. They are not specially imbued with supernatural power. _They are interfertile with humans._ There is nothing in any version of the rules to suggest that they are automata, incapable of choice.

The question of "why are orcs evil?" must necessarily provoke an in-game or in-world rationale. Why _are_ orcs evil? This often leads to the notion of some primeval, mythic event which "made them that way." Essentially, a "Curse of Ham" or its fictive equivalent.


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## Bohandas (Feb 25, 2020)

Sepulchrave II said:


> _They are interfertile with humans._




So are demons and red dragons



Sepulchrave II said:


> There is nothing in any version of the rules to suggest that they are automata, incapable of choice.




There's nothing in the rules to suggest any of the other things that I mentioned are either. (with the possible exception of beholders). 

Not that this has anything to do with whether they can be predisposed to evil or not. One would have to have a very limited imagination indeed to think that a humanlike psyche is the only kind of sentient intelligence that can exist


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## Umbran (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> So are demons and red dragons




Well, that still leaves you with the other points.  Mortal, same basic anatomy and physical needs, not generally imbued with supernatural power...


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## Sepulchrave II (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> So are demons and red dragons




Why not consider the other reasons for similarity between orcs and humans - which I explained - rather than try and tease some incongruity from one sentence?


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Sepulchrave II said:


> Why not consider the other reasons for similarity between orcs and humans - which I explained - rather than try and tease some incongruity from one sentence?




Because they aren't particularly strong points. They strike me as someone who already wants to draw a particular conclusion, and so is cherry picking evidence to support it.

For example, you cite something like this as if you hit upon a strong point: "_They are interfertile with humans."  _The emphasis is yours.

But in the setting, people are potentially interfertile with cows, swans, dragons, demons and trees. In myth and fantasy, pretty much anything crosses with anything else. We have no guarantee of a fantasy setting being a scientific biological world. And in Warhammer, for example, orcs are sentient algae.  So yeah, there is that.

Moreover, when you say things like this: "It's much easier to "otherise" things which don't closely resemble us.", you are actually undermining your own argument. If it is easier to otherise things that don't closely resemble us, then surely you are guilty of the reverse - humanizing something just because it has an incidental resemblance to us. How much the look like humans has no bearing whatsoever on whether they are actually people. What makes something people isn't appearance.

But beyond that, you aren't even addressing the question. You say something like, "There is nothing in any version of the rules to suggest that they are automata, incapable of choice." But of course there wouldn't be, because there are really no rules for this except alignment, which you are discounting as a valid rule. The actual suggestion regarding how evil or how invariably evil they are wouldn't be found in any crunch but alignment, but in the flavor text. And the flavor text of orcs per canon is that they are the creation of Gruumsh, the unblinking god of conquest and destruction who drives his followers to kill. It's not impossible that a deity might have creations that don't reflect the nature of the deity, but one particularly note worthy aspect of orcishness is that there are no orc gods of good in most canon pantheons. The dwarves, elves, gnomes and humans were created and bestowed with gifts by both good and evil deities, but all the creators of orcs are evil and incarnate destructive ideologies of conquest and killing. So, while there is room for suggesting that orcs have free will, there is also room for suggesting that they are heavily predisposed to evil, or that they are invariably evil. There is no "curse of Ham" required here.

Once again, you are determined to see orcs as Africans, and it is you that are therefore equating Africans with orcs. You are the one determined to see black people in monstrous terms, and determined to identify orcs with Africans. Not the people you are addressing.

It's a weak argument and it's a racist argument.


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## Bohandas (Feb 25, 2020)

Sepulchrave II said:


> Orcs are warm-blooded ... have ... intelligences comparable with humans. They have culture, language ... _They are interfertile with humans._ There is nothing in any version of the rules to suggest that they are automata, incapable of choice.




These also apply to demons and red dragons. Additionally the dragons need to eat and sleep and demons are bipeds more often than not (and many of the low-end demons lack magical powers).


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## Sepulchrave II (Feb 25, 2020)

@Celebrim, please try to read my words without ascribing motives to me.



Celebrim said:


> Because they aren't particularly strong points. They strike me as someone who already wants to draw a particular conclusion, and so is cherry picking evidence to support it.




The question was 



> How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?




My answer was that "because orcs closely resemble humans in various meaningful dimensions such as..." Keep in mind that this is about the _reason why people have a problem with orcs being predisposed toward evil._ 



> For example, you cite something like this as if you hit upon a strong point: "_They are interfertile with humans." _The emphasis is yours.
> 
> But in the setting, people are potentially interfertile with cows, swans, dragons, demons and trees. In myth and fantasy, pretty much anything crosses with anything else.




Right. But half-cows, half-swans and half-trees aren't hardwired into the game. Half-demons and half-dragons are marginal, at best.

The point is that it is another point of connection with humans. Orcs don't appear to require any supernatural power or shapeshifting to procreate with humans.



> We have no guarantee of a fantasy setting being a scientific biological world. And in Warhammer, for example, orcs are sentient algae.  So yeah, there is that.
> 
> Moreover, when you say things like this: "It's much easier to "otherise" things which don't closely resemble us.", you are actually undermining your own argument. If it is easier to otherise things that don't closely resemble us, then surely you are guilty of the reverse - humanizing something just because it has an incidental resemblance to us.




Orcs are not real. They are a function of our imagination. 

Given that the question was _How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil_, the answer to the question is framed as _the reason that people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil_.



> How much the look like humans has no bearing whatsoever on whether they are actually people.




No, it has a bearing on _the reason that people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil_.



> But beyond that, you aren't even addressing the question.




Yes, I am. The question was _How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil_



> You say something like, "There is nothing in any version of the rules to suggest that they are automata, incapable of choice." But of course there wouldn't be, because there are really no rules for this except alignment, which you are discounting as a valid rule.




Where have I evinced any opinion about alignment?



> And the flavor text of orcs per canon is that they are the creation of Gruumsh, the unblinking god of conquest and destruction who drives his followers to kill...[_snip_] There is no "curse of Ham" required here.




The mythic particulars describing the aetiology of orcs are unimportant. The fact that their status is rooted in some mythic event, or has an irremediable divine cause, is the point.



> Once again, you are determined to see orcs as Africans




Interesting. Where have I expressed this opinion? Perhaps you might point it out? Perhaps you are confusing me with someone else.



> and it is you that are therefore equating Africans with orcs. You are the one determined to see black people in monstrous terms, and determined to identify orcs with Africans. Not the people you are addressing.




Er...right.



> It's a weak argument and it's a racist argument.




Sure. If you say so.


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## Bohandas (Feb 25, 2020)

Sepulchrave II said:


> Interesting. Where have I expressed this opinion? Perhaps you might point it out? Perhaps you are confusing me with someone else.




I think it was when you invoked the Curse of Ham, and implicitly equated orcs' alignment listing with the antiabolitionist conspiracy theories which surrounded the Curse of Ham during the 19th century. (Assuming of course that you're referring to the incident from the Book of Genesis and not the unrelated incident from S2E9 of Invader Zim.)


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## Helldritch (Feb 25, 2020)

Wow reading through all of this was... confusing to say the least.

Evil is evil. In our modern world, we tend to apply our "enlightenment" to medieval, stone age or whatever we look at. In a world where gods exists, demons can walk the world, devils try to steal your soul with a contract can you really say that a race that has a whole pantheon of evil gods isn't evil itself?

Orcs are such a race, goblinoids too. Gnolls are demonically bred (now). Place yourself in the place of the poor commoner who sees an orc horde coming his way. He will not say: "Poor you! You are so misunderstood. People are so racists towards you. Let me give you a hug to bring you joy!" Nope, the commoner knows that if he does not fight or flee, he is dead. If he is lucky, he will die quickly. If not, he will be tortured and sacrificed to one of the orcish gods and so will his family.

The removal of the evil tag on some races comes from our modern view of our world. We live in a world of grey area and we want to put it in our games. We firmly believe in redemption but sometimes, redemption is only a wish. Some things are evil to the core. Races with only evil gods are such a thing. In fantasy world where said races have other gods or share the gods of the other races, then you can have a variety of alignment in said races. These worlds are not my cup of tea as I prefer worlds where evil is evil and good is good. No gray area (or only occasionally). Only a black and white view of the world. This make the heroes' job that much easier when there is no moral hassles. Evil races were put there by evil gods out of jealousy. I encourage you to read the history of the Orc Pantheons in the various God and Demi-gods books over the editions. The history in the MToF about orcs and goblinoids is also very enlightening.

I know that racism is a delicate subject in our modern world. I don't like racism and sexism any more than anyone here. But in a fantasy setting, these are tools to be used to create stories. I have three female players and their martial characters are great. One is in the second group and plays a Half Orc paladin. She faces racism all the time. But she rose in level and in fame. Her name is sang by bards all over the kingdom of Furyondy as the slayer of Kharak the High priest of the Ancient Iuz. She fought the views of others and overcame their views and found a place in their hearts. Use these as tools to further stories. You'll see.


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## Lanefan (Feb 25, 2020)

Sepulchrave II said:


> Right. But half-cows, half-swans and half-trees aren't hardwired into the game.



Half-trees are, in a way: they're called Dryads.   There's also half-cats (Tabaxi), and doubtless some others I'm forgetting right now.

Yuan-Ti are more or less half-snakes and while individuals might only be able to interbreed with Humans or with Snakes (as well as with other Yuan-Ti, of course), as a species they represent a pretty strong Human-Snake link.



> Half-demons and half-dragons are marginal, at best.



Which means Tieflings and Dragonborn are...what, exactly?

Like it or not, they do seem to have become hardwired into the more recent versions of the game; which also rather hardwires in the notion that Demons and Dragons can interbreed with Humans, in order to produce those species. (having Tieflings and Dragonborn be viable reproducing species in their own right avoids a lot of this headache in that it means the actual Human-Dragon/Demon interbreeding only needed to occur enough times to produce enough variance in offspring to make the new species viable; and nature took over from there)



> The point is that it is another point of connection with humans. Orcs don't appear to require any supernatural power or shapeshifting to procreate with humans.



Nor do Elves, it seems; nor Dryads, nor a boatload of other mythical creatures.

In my own workings-out of what can breed with what (which I did many years ago in rather great detail), I have Orcs being more or less the genetic melting pot: an Orc can breed with almost anything humanoid that's willing to breed with it.


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## Michael Silverbane (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this:
> 
> How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?




There are a couple of common threads among some of these creatures. 

The first is between Mind Flayers, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, and Vampires. These are creatures whose existence requires them or compels them to eat other sapient beings.
We (people in the real world) have a very strong aversion to being eaten, and a very strong taboo against eating people. So, people who eat other people are deemed evil. This carries over into our fantasies.

Beholders, Mind Flayers, and Vampires are creatures who have the innate ability to override someone else's will. This hits on another of our real-life fears and taboos. That being loss of control of the self, and the deprivation of someone else's agency.

A third common thread among creatures that are typically portrayed as intelligent evils are those creatures that have filled that role through tradition and symbolism. Dragons are traditionally described as being creatures of pride, wrath, and avarice. That is, they were designed to symbolize those evils, which we see in ourselves. To an extent, orcs have historically fit into this category of evils. They have been used in fiction to represent our own tendency towards rash action, overconsumption, or whatever.
It seems to me that this type of creature is the most likely to be de-evil-ed, that is, we see that dragons are prideful, but also know that pride can be overcome, because we experience pride and (sometimes) overcome it ourselves.

Demons and Hell Hounds are, of course, made of evil. You can't very well build a house out of matches and be surprised when it burns down, no matter how smart it is.


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## Maxperson (Feb 25, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Half-trees are, in a way: they're called Dryads.   There's also half-cats (Tabaxi), and doubtless some others I'm forgetting right now.
> 
> Yuan-Ti are more or less half-snakes and while individuals might only be able to interbreed with Humans or with Snakes (as well as with other Yuan-Ti, of course), as a species they represent a pretty strong Human-Snake link.




If you're going to count Dryads as half-tree, then I suppose minotaurs would be half-cow.


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> If you're going to count Dryads as half-tree, then I suppose minotaurs would be half-cow.




I advise anyone who thinks I was just being flippant to read the ancient Greek myth on the origin of the minotaur. The details are not appropriate to the board.


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## lowkey13 (Feb 25, 2020)

*Deleted by user*


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## Umbran (Feb 25, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> But in the setting, people are potentially interfertile with cows, swans, dragons, demons and trees.




Dragons and demons, sure.  Livestock and the arboretum... not so much.  D&D has largely avoided the bestiality.



> In myth and fantasy, pretty much anything crosses with anything else.




He's not talking about myth and legend.  He's talking about how _real-world people_ think - why to _THE PLAYERS AND GMs_ have a thing about orc morality, and not dragon or demon morality?



> It's a weak argument and it's a racist argument.




But, Celebrim... we _invented_ racism*.  So, arguments based on how humans are kinda racist should not be dismissed out of hand.




*Insofar as no practitioner of racism before humans could put a name to it, and choose to not do it.


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## lowkey13 (Feb 25, 2020)

*Deleted by user*


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Sepulchrave II said:


> @Celebrim, please try to read my words without ascribing motives to me.




If you didn't want to be perceived as equating orcs with black people, perhaps you shouldn't have brought up "the curse of Ham".   So what is this, the clown nose off, clown nose on defense?   You decided that a religious reference used in defense of enslaving African people was so relevant to this discussion that it could be introduced in a defensible manner.  Now you are trying to pretend you didn't do that?



> Right. But half-cows, half-swans and half-trees aren't hardwired into the game. Half-demons and half-dragons are marginal, at best.




Tieflings, dragonborn, etc.  To a certain extent, nothing is "hardwired into the game".   Orcs haven't existed at my table since 1989, when I made the decision to drop orcs from the game entirely because they were redundant with the more interesting goblin-kind (the three caste species of goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears) and I didn't need to type of monstrous humanoids that were predisposed to evil in one game world.   How much something is a part of a particular game is up to the DM.



> Orcs are not real. They are a function of our imagination.




Yes, you should keep that in mind. The fact that orcs are not real means it is very difficult to assert anything about them as a factual statement. So much of what you are claiming about orcs is not based on lore, but based on your choices about how to see orcs. So yes, it is a valid statement to say that if you make orcs basically human but with a different appearance, then they probably are basically human in violition, rights, and dignity. But this conception of orcs is just one of many, and it tends to be a recent one - I'd say one that was mostly post World of Warcraft when Orcs were made an equal playable race to humans, and thus needed very much to have a backstory with equal violition, rights, and dignity. But because orcs are not real, you can't say that that is the one right and true way to imagine orcs.  

(Moreover, that tendency to see orcs as a metaphor for human tribal people groups is I think an incidental and somewhat unfortunate side effect of the World of Warcraft presentation as well.)



> Where have I evinced any opinion about alignment?




By saying that "There is nothing in any version of the rules to suggest that they are automata, incapable of choice." you are evincing an opinion about alignment.  If something is always a particular alignment, then at least with respect to moral choice, they have no real volition.   It's only recently that we're seeing orcs presented in a way that suggests that they might only be usually evil, and so have some choice in the matter.   But the classic "are orc babies evil?" argument predates the "usually" and "often" categorization, nor does even the "often" categorization preclude concluding that orcs are divided in alignment among LE, NE, and CE as a way to make later editions backwards compatible with different tables answers to that question.



> The mythic particulars describing the aetiology of orcs are unimportant.




The particulars of the aetiology of any living thing are absolutely important to determining its rights. How and why something came into being is probably the most important determination of how to classify something and determine its rights and dignities. Between aetiology and sentience, there aren't a lot of obvious things that determine personhood, or the nature of personhood. (If you'd like to claim aetiology doesn't matter, only sentience, then I have some hard science fiction examples for you.)



> The fact that their status is rooted in some mythic event, or has an irremediable divine cause, is the point.




What point?  Even in the real world, it's not unusual to see the whole of humanity has having an "irremediable divine cause".   For example, the Declaration of Independence famously declares, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights".   So yes, the creation of something matters, or at least is widely perceived to matter.


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Umbran said:


> Dragons and demons, sure.  Livestock and the arboretum... not so much.




Half-dryad is a thing. In fact "half-X", where X is pretty much anything in the game is a thing.



> D&D has largely avoided the bestiality.




For obvious reasons, but it hasn't avoided importing every single monstrous or potentially monstrous being of myth, often without explanation, leaving DMs to try to grapple with the origins of all those myths.  Moreover, while obviously D&D has avoided certain "adult subjects", the mythic and magical setting implies that things work pretty much like you'd expect in myth and not biology.   And this is reinforced by the existence of a half-X just about everything.



> He's not talking about myth and legend.  He's talking about how _real-world people_ think - why to _THE PLAYERS AND GMs_ have a thing about orc morality, and not dragon or demon morality?




This is a change in topic, but I don't see how it relevant.  As he admits himself, orcs are not real, so what the players and GMs think about orc morality at any particular table, is in some real sense true for that table.



> But, Celebrim... we _invented_ racism*. So, arguments based on how humans are kinda racist should not be dismissed out of hand.




Ok, where in this thread have I ever implied humans aren't racist? Heck, I even implied my fantasy humans were in some senses more racist than the other people groups in my world. The fact that humans are racist doesn't make his argument less weak. It certainly doesn't make it less racist.


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

lowkey13 said:


> Wisely so, I'd say. I mean, that's not exactly something that I think large segments of the market are clamoring for. "D&D Sixth Edition: Now, with MORE Bestiality."
> 
> Then again, it would have made the Satanic Panic in the 80s more fun! "Hey, think the Satanism is bad? Wait until you check out the deviant sexuality!"




Agreed. But I'm not the one that tried to ascribe the ability to breed with humans as being some particularly important and salient point. Yes, I do recognize that it would be an important and salient point if biology mattered and genetics and DNA could be assumed to be part of the setting. But it is absolutely relevant to point out that this attribute is cherry-picked to support one particular (highly distasteful) view of what an orc is, and isn't in any way an attribute particular to orcs. 

What are orcs?  Ultimately they are something D&D ended up with, through a couple of steps in the imagination from the root inspiration of evil fairies, in the same way elves are a couple steps of imagination removed from good fairies.


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## Umbran (Feb 25, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> This is a change in topic, but I don't see how it relevant.




No, it isn't a change in topic.  

Bohandas said, _"I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this: 

How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?"_

The "people" in question aren't characters in the game.  They are the real-world people writing in threads.  So, we are talking about the biases of real-world people, not in game people.

Then, the fact we humans do tend to identify more with things we recognize as more close to ourselves does come into play.  Whether someone in a myth chose to lay with a bull is not material.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 25, 2020)

Sometimes I'm down for "don't think about it games", and more often I'm interested in games that make me think about how the fictional world works. That may be influenced by being strongly introverted and sometimes only being able to get my brain to shut up for a second by going for a walk in nature or doing something that pushes other ideas to the back.

I think in general, most people play fantasy games as a slightly more enlightened pseudo-middle ages. Sure, some of the psuedo-medieval nastiness still happens. Some of us think of the fictional denizens of such worlds as at least a little bit smarter than their historical equivalents. Especially with things like magic, gods, and such being provable concepts.


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Umbran said:


> No, it isn't a change in topic.
> 
> Bohandas said, _"I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this:
> 
> ...




Ok, well, now I see at least where you are going there. 

The problem I run into here is that to answer Bohandas question in the way I think is true is going to involve ascribing motives to people. And there is a limit to how far I think I can "get away" with that before you are going to red text me, especially considering how quickly you've leaped to accuse me of that in the thread. 

So I can only address your challenge at a superficial level, and ask why is it that people are disposed to see orcs as close to ourselves on the basis of shape and not demons? Or why is it that they are more disposed to see orcs as more like us than ghouls, even though ghouls literally are us? Or basically, why has the conception of orcs in particular evolved to have more human traits than their origin as the evil twisted fairy minions of Satanic dark lords might suggest? In other places we've discussed how ghouls could be humanized into a species that was basically good and not monstrous, while still retaining ghoulish appearance and habits? Why didn't that catch on as a very common way to think about ghouls?

I've touched on one possible answer to that by looking at the humanization of Klingons in Star Trek, from their more simple conception as a proudly evil people. But, I didn't really explain the basic issue there - why was it when Klingons were humanized they were made more explicitly space orcs? I've also touched on this by noting that World of Warcraft, from it's origins in Warcraft, found itself needing to make humans and orcs peers, and so needed to humanize orcs. But to go much further than that is going to risk breaking board rules or turning the argument explosive and then getting it shut down.

Fundamentally, I have very little problems with humanizing orcs, provided that it's done in a fashion that doesn't equate them with real world racial groups (something I find distasteful).   If you want orcs to be a species of people in your world, then that's just fine.   I've done something similar with goblins myself, and I'm fully happy to discuss in detail how I choose to balance the personhood of individual goblins with the overtly monstrous nature of them as a species.  One thing I certainly do not do is equate goblins with real  world human racial groups, which I would find to be well, racist.


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## Todd Roybark (Feb 25, 2020)

Umbran said:


> *Mod Note:*
> 
> Okay, I know how this makes the disucssion difficult, but, we have rules against discussion of real-world religion on these boards.  While I understand how real-world models are great examples, let us please confine our discussion to gaming as much as possible.  Thanks, all.




In no way an accusation or complaint against _you_ Umbran, but I will be asking in the Meta board for explicit rules on this no religion policy.  The ban, is not universally enforced, and thus capricious.

see this thread :IRL nominations (historically classic ie religious, pantheonic, folkloric, no newer than 1600) for mythical cosmologies you enjoy including in d&d.

In the thread I referenced above, people are literally voting about their favorite religion.  

Yet an example that uses the concept of non violence from two ideological perspectives both from the Indian Sub Continent, general information one might find from a basic  comparative religion class is worthy of admonishment?

The board standard is not enforced universally, and thus capricious.


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## Bohandas (Feb 25, 2020)

Todd Roybark said:


> In no way an accusation or complaint against _you_ Umbran, but I will be asking in the Meta board for explicit rules on this no religion policy.  The ban, is not universally enforced, and thus capricious.




Oh god! Don't ask for that! you're gonna turn the board into a clone of Giant In The Playground where they're not even allowed to discuss mythology because at some point they decided it counts as religion and it stuck, forever.

You ask for that and you're gonna get the rule cemented rather than relaxed.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this:
> 
> How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?





Bohandas said:


> So are demons and red dragons
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I mean, arguments about humanoids and non-sapient creatures aside, I personally find Red Dragons=EVIL kinda lame. I mean they are very magical creatures, so w/e, but I also they are very intelligent beings so I see no reason why some of them can't decide to be good or evil or whatever alignment the MM says they're supposed to be.



Helldritch said:


> Wow reading through all of this was... confusing to say the least.
> 
> Evil is evil. In our modern world, we tend to apply our "enlightenment" to medieval, stone age or whatever we look at. In a world where gods exists, demons can walk the world, devils try to steal your soul with a contract can you really say that a race that has a whole pantheon of evil gods isn't evil itself?



orcs have like, what, one god? it feels like the "evil" races just have the one god who created them and therefore they "have to" be evil.


> Orcs are such a race, goblinoids too. Gnolls are demonically bred (now). Place yourself in the place of the poor commoner who sees an orc horde coming his way. He will not say: "Poor you! You are so misunderstood. People are so racists towards you. Let me give you a hug to bring you joy!" Nope, the commoner knows that if he does not fight or flee, he is dead. If he is lucky, he will die quickly. If not, he will be tortured and sacrificed to one of the orcish gods and so will his family.



okay how is that different from human raiders coming to town?


> The removal of the evil tag on some races comes from our modern view of our world. We live in a world of grey area and we want to put it in our games. We firmly believe in redemption but sometimes, redemption is only a wish. Some things are evil to the core. Races with only evil gods are such a thing.



why?


> In fantasy world where said races have other gods or share the gods of the other races, then you can have a variety of alignment in said races. These worlds are not my cup of tea as I prefer worlds where evil is evil and good is good. No gray area (or only occasionally). Only a black and white view of the world. This make the heroes' job that much easier when there is no moral hassles. Evil races were put there by evil gods out of jealousy. I encourage you to read the history of the Orc Pantheons in the various God and Demi-gods books over the editions. The history in the MToF about orcs and goblinoids is also very enlightening.



and this needs to apply to every setting with orcs and goblins? 


> I know that racism is a delicate subject in our modern world. I don't like racism and sexism any more than anyone here. But in a fantasy setting, these are tools to be used to create stories.



what do these "tools" have to do with good and evil?


> I have three female players and their martial characters are great.



"some of my strongest characters are played by females!" how is this at all germane to the conversation?


> One is in the second group and plays a Half Orc paladin. She faces racism all the time. But she rose in level and in fame. Her name is sang by bards all over the kingdom of Furyondy as the slayer of Kharak the High priest of the Ancient Iuz. She fought the views of others and overcame their views and found a place in their hearts. Use these as tools to further stories. You'll see.



what an original story O: but how about this: a setting where orcs aren't seen as inherently evil. the half orc paladin still becomes famous for slaying Kharak, but doesn't have to jump through a million hoops to get treated like a normal person.

also this feels kind of pointless unless she also convinced the kingdom that orcs aren't all evil.


Bohandas said:


> Oh god! Don't ask for that! you're gonna turn the board into a clone of Giant In The Playground where they're not even allowed to discuss mythology because at some point they decided it counts as religion and it stuck, forever.
> 
> You ask for that and you're gonna get the rule cemented rather than relaxed.



to be fair there's a number of religions that are still very active and have a lot of worshipers but get treated like they're "mythologies" akin to Greek or Norse. Hinduism and Shitnoism are the two I notice a lot lol


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> orcs have like, what, one god?




Gruumsh One-Eye, Luthic, Ilveval, Bahtru, Shargass, and Yurtrus are generally considered the main deities of the pantheon.



> it feels like the "evil" races just have the one god who created them and therefore they "have to" be evil.




This is unreasonable because?  If I design something for a purpose, is it unreasonable to expect that it wouldn't fulfill that purpose?



> okay how is that different from human raiders coming to town?




For the purposes of protecting yourself from raiders, it's not really.  That's not really the point.



> and this needs to apply to every setting with orcs and goblins?




Ok, this is probably THE most important thing to understand in the thread. _It doesn't._

There are two sides in this conversation.  One is saying, "Conceptualize orcs as always evil or in more nuanced fashion.  However that makes sense to you, go for it."   And the other is saying, "Everyone that doesn't accept my opinion is a racist."   That's the whole reason this conversation is on going.  If everyone agreed that there wasn't one true way, we'd not have an argument.


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## Lanefan (Feb 25, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Gruumsh One-Eye, Luthic, Ilveval, Bahtru, Shargass, and Yurtrus are generally considered the main deities of the pantheon.



Were.

Gruumsh long since killed off all the rest.


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Were.
> 
> Gruumsh long since killed off all the rest.




Really?  When did that happen?


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## Lanefan (Feb 25, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> Really?  When did that happen?



Long before any of us were born, my son.

(in a typical Orcish might-makes-right society, it only makes sense they'd project that on to their deities and thus the toughest of those deities would - in their mythology - kill off all the others)


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## Maxperson (Feb 25, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Long before any of us were born, my son.
> 
> (in a typical Orcish might-makes-right society, it only makes sense they'd project that on to their deities and thus the toughest of those deities would - in their mythology - kill off all the others)



Sure, but which edition established that lore?


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## Lanefan (Feb 25, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Sure, but which edition established that lore?



Who said anything about edition?


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## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> but I also they are very intelligent beings so I see no reason why some of them can't decide to be good or evil or whatever alignment the MM says they're supposed to be.




This statement was worth treating separately.

At the risk of jumping to a conclusion, I think you are using the word "intelligent" as a synonym for human. That is to say, you are supposing anything that has this quality "intelligence" must be more or less human, because humans are more or less the only intelligent thing you can think of and so you assume that every intelligent thing will thing and behave in a human fashion.

This is a very common science fiction trope and a very natural conclusion, but I think if you spend a few more minutes thinking about it, you'll realize it is a bit ridiculous. To point you toward that conclusion, let's just think of a an examples of this human intuition that are obviously ridiculous. In almost every science fiction show featuring AI, the AI if it encounters a beautiful human female will fall in love with that human female and attempt to romance the person. Now, leaving aside that we could probably think of few intelligence failure modes in a created AI that would produce this behavior, that this would always and inevitably arise especially in 'naturally arising AIs' is an obvious failure of imagination. Most people when they first think about this failure of imagination hit upon the idea that the AI wouldn't naturally be attracted to a human female because they don't look alike, and so they wouldn't necessarily find the human female beautiful and attractive.

But that's yet more failure of imagination. The underlying assumption here that is ridiculous is that an AI would experience a sexual impulse or even a desire for companionship at all. Feelings of arousal, desires for intimacy, and even loneliness are all modes of behavior that humans have to fulfill specific purposes. It is part of their 'design', as it were - whether you believe it is behavior by design or evolved fitness increasing behavior doesn't matter. The point is there is no particular reason the AI would have those emotional needs or emotional contexts, much less that they would be displayed through the emotive displays (like frowning, tears, crossed arms, etc.) that humans communicate these displays to other humans (which is also 'designed' behavior).

So no, Wall-E upon seeing a curvaceous robot would not evidence feelings of attraction for 'her'. And even if we imagined Wall-E experiencing some sort of bizarre intelligence failure mode arising from centuries of isolation and semi-random inputs, there is absolutely NO REASON Eva would ever respond to the now hopelessly dysfunctional Wall-E, nor is there really any reason for Eva to learn or want to learn Wall-E's emotional context. That entire subplot depends on the natural but entirely wrong assumption that intelligence implies humanity.

Ultimately, so does your argument about the dragon.

To understand why, let's first discuss yet another completely stupid trope that results the first leap of imagination that humans make with respect to intelligent machines - that they have no emotions. This is ever so slightly more imaginative than just assuming that they have the full human emotional context, but not much. The problem here is a failure to understand what emotion is. Humans typically are taught to think of emotion as being something different from and separable from reason. This is in fact a very natural result of the experience of being human, and in particular the way the human brain is wired up. In the human brain wiring, it often feels like reason and emotion are competing with each other for the attention the human consciousness. But all of that has to be remembered to be yet another aspect of being human and not something general to all intelligence.

In fact, I put forward that it is impossible to be intelligent and not have emotions. It's just those emotions do not in any fashion have to be like human emotions. Each intelligent thing is likely to have it's own distinctive emotional context. To understand what I'm saying here, you have to look again at that human wiring and try to understand why humans experience emotion and what would happen if you took that emotion out of the reasoning process. In other words, what is the role of emotion in all forms of reasoning. Humans have a massively parallel processing mode that is the result of attempting to compute with chemical signals in an highly energy efficient process and still have high through put. As such, humans separate the channels for 'logical' and 'emotional' processing and do them in parallel. The logical process is addressing the question, "What am I experiencing?" and can tell you the difference between food, a lion, and your mom. The emotional process is addressing the question, "What does this experience mean?" In other words, emotion is the part of reasoning that is goal-driven. Whatever goals that an intelligence has, that will set it's emotional contexts. The emotions tell the being what things mean, and how they should be valued.

People often mistake "emotions" for the emotional experience, or "feelings". This is a natural aspect of being human since "feelings" are the reinforcing feedback loop of the emotional processing context. It's how the system reinforces the goal-driven behavior. You can within some limits as a rational being take control of your emotions, but there are limits to that and what you are actually probably doing is just re-calibrating after realizing that some feedback loop is getting in the way of your own goal.

Point is that Data and Spock actually are experiencing emotions all the time. What they are not doing is making the emotional displays or under any compulsion to make emotional displays in order to communicate emotional information to other primates watching them. The emotions that they have are not entirely human emotions and they can't be communicated very easily to anyone any more than it's easy for you to communicate feelings to someone that doesn't experience your own. But they are certainly there and we know that they are there because they can assign meaning to things and make value judgments. No matter what Spock may tell you, these value judgments are not wholly rational. We don't even live in a universe where you can make a mathematical system not depend on unprovable axioms, much less one that can make value judgments wholly based on logic. There has to be something that makes you do your homework even though you know the heat death of the universe is inevitable in a scant few billion years.

For the dragon, if he has a set of values that are congruent with destructiveness, then he cannot and has no desire to change those values and every built in emotional feedback loop makes him wholly miserable when he tries and every built in emotional feeback loop makes him happy when he doesn't, then it doesn't matter how intelligent the dragon is, he's still going to behave according to his very dragon-ish nature.

And that gets us to intelligence. Intelligence isn't what most people think it is either. But this essay is long enough already, so let me just say there is no such thing as "hard intelligence" or "general intelligence".  (Or if there is, we have no examples of it.)


----------



## Celebrim (Feb 25, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Sure, but which edition established that lore?




I think he's talking about his homebrew.  He's been running a game with his own rules and lore since 1e.


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## Umbran (Feb 25, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> You ask for that and you're gonna get the rule cemented rather than relaxed.




S'okay.  Relax.  The world is not going to end.


----------



## uzirath (Feb 26, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> There are two sides in this conversation. One is saying, "Conceptualize orcs as always evil or in more nuanced fashion. However that makes sense to you, go for it." And the other is saying, "Everyone that doesn't accept my opinion is a racist." That's the whole reason this conversation is on going. If everyone agreed that there wasn't one true way, we'd not have an argument.




Well, this is the internet; it's not a real conversation until we're calling each other Nazis, right?

As someone who veers toward the relativist side of the Alignment Wars, I've had to hold my breath and count to ten in response to plenty of posts. There are posts implying that the people who prefer an alignment-free universe are dupes of cultural fads or haven't thought deeply enough about their campaign metaphysics or are being even more racist because they must assume that orcs are name-your-real-world-ethnicity.

Add to that the diabolical legalism of RPG discussions—where every sentence gets picked apart to "prove" that the other person is, gasp, inconsistent—and it is hard to find any oxygen in here.

I'm still mystified about why everyone is quoting so much D&D lore and fluff in a non-D&D forum. In my forty years of gaming, I've seen so many variations on orcs and I can count on one hand the number of campaigns that included anything named Gruumsh.

But I, for one, heartily agree that there isn't One True Way.


----------



## Maxperson (Feb 26, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> I mean they are very magical creatures, so w/e, but I also they are very intelligent beings so I see no reason why some of them can't decide to be good or evil or whatever alignment the MM says they're supposed to be.




They can.  In 2e there was a Planescape adventure where you had to get a good demon to safety.  Pretty sure it was said somewhere that even when a creature is listed as always X alignment, there were still exceptions here and there.


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## Celebrim (Feb 26, 2020)

uzirath said:


> Well, this is the internet; it's not a real conversation until we're calling each other Nazis, right?




Too true.



> In my forty years of gaming, I've seen so many variations on orcs and I can count on one hand the number of campaigns that included anything named Gruumsh.
> 
> But I, for one, heartily agree that there isn't One True Way.




The above makes my point about Gruumsh better than I made it myself.


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## Bohandas (Feb 26, 2020)

uzirath said:


> I'm still mystified about why everyone is quoting so much D&D lore and fluff in a non-D&D forum.




IIRC someone brought up the fact that Warhammer's orcs aren't very humanlike or elf like either. In warhammer the Orcs are more similar in terms of lifecycle and biochemistry to some kind of algae or fungus than they are to the setting's other beings


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 26, 2020)

uzirath said:


> Well, this is the internet; it's not a real conversation until we're calling each other Nazis, right?
> 
> As someone who veers toward the relativist side of the Alignment Wars, I've had to hold my breath and count to ten in response to plenty of posts. There are plenty of posts implying that the people who prefer an alignment-free universe are dupes of cultural fads or haven't thought deeply enough about their campaign metaphysics or are being even more racist because they must assume that orcs are name-your-real-world-ethnicity.
> 
> ...



I'm very keen on the relativist argument, which is odd if you consider my [not allowed by board rules].  That said, I'm usually not very keen about relativism in my games, or, rather, I like to have situations that aren't entirely relativist or even largely aren't relativist in regards to alignment or the nature of creatures.  Usually, I just go with the monsters being monsters because it's a leisure activity and the blanket permission to not have to evaluate the morality of all acts is part of that leisure activity.  Much like we watch TV shows and can appreciate, maybe, complex moral dilemmas, we're insulated from them because we don't have to directly engage, the script does that.  When presented with a Thanos, we don't really have to spend a lot of time evaluating if Thanos is the bad guy -- Captain America thinks he is and that man's a paladin of virtue.  We've seen him wrestle with difficult moral stuff, and he's done right by it, so if he's not wrestling with Thanos' moral position, must not be much of a question.  And, that fine, because the point of entertainment isn't to make us confront the stuff we do deal with everyday, but provide a relief valve.  So, if orcs are usually easy to point at bad guys, they're not serving as a subtle metaphor of [real life people] so we can engage in subtle displays of [real life politics].  I mean, I suppose they could be, if that's really what you and your players want, but usually it's not.  It's Saturday morning cartoons where GI Joe doesn't have to every worry about Cobra Commander being a bad guy because he's just a bad guy.  And most games exist at this level of morality -- orcs are just this week's bad guys that the heroes get to fight and prevail, not a complex moral commentary on the plight of [real world stuff].

So, I tend to run primary colors versions of morality in my games.  If I'm not, I make sure that the group understands that I'm not, what that might or might not mean, and that they all have buy in.  Because, again, it's a leisure activity, not a struggle session.  I like shades of grey, but I tend to not run that way because it makes it less fun (for me and my group, clearly).  That still leaves me lots and lots of room to have interesting and complex bad guys.  You can be obviously evil but still sympathetic -- just do bad things for what sound like good reasons.


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 26, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> IIRC someone brought up the fact that Warhammer's orcs aren't very humanlike or elf like either. In warhammer the Orcs are more similar in terms of lifecycle and biochemistry to some kind of algae or fungus than they are to the setting's other beings



WAAAAGH!

I always loved the 40k version of Orks.  A galactic sentient fungal infestation that, if it weren't for it's lack of general intelligence (orks are pretty dumb) would be the single most powerful thing in the galaxy.  Why?  Because, what the Ork collective believes because true.  They, collectively, think red is a fast color, so vehicles painted red actually go faster than those painted other colors.  They, collectively, think that having more things sticking off of your guns makes them shoot more, and, lo and behold, this is true.  They, collectively, think that if you put trash and scrap together in the shape of a vehicle or warmachine, it'll work and be a vehicle or warmachine, and it is so.  They can't ever seem to agree on much else, though, so, thankfully, the galaxy is spared from the unbridled imagination of Orks.  They still have to deal with recurrent fungal blooms that result in the scrap from the last war being spontaneously turned into a new war machine with freshly sprouted Orks, though, and that's still pretty bad.


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## uzirath (Feb 26, 2020)

Ovinomancer said:


> So, I tend to run primary colors versions of morality in my games.




I definitely run some primary colors games too. A lot of my players, however, prefer some good politics and intrigue in the mix which works well in a world with some secondary colors (and at least 256 shades of gray).


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## Ovinomancer (Feb 26, 2020)

uzirath said:


> I definitely run some primary colors games too. A lot of my players, however, prefer some good politics and intrigue in the mix which works well in a world with some secondary colors (and at least 256 shades of gray).



I've found that grey just washes out.  Even if I use primary colors, and am clear as all heck, players will create their own shades of grey contrary to all evidence.  I don't have to muddy things up by adding my own -- I stick to the strong shades and enjoy the chaos caused by players.  At the end of the day, I get to point out that it was always perfectly clear that guy that betrayed you was a bad guy.  I mean, right now, in my current game, I have an escaped thrall of mindflayers working with a mind flayer, and somewhat convinced that this mind flayer is on the side of good rather than just on it's own side, which is clearly evil just differently evil that the other mind flayers.  Players are apt to ignore some pretty clearly stated things, including accepting the player's statement at the beginning of the game that mind flayers are all bad.  And, so they are.  Some, though, are bad in ways that align with your current goals, and trusting them past that is really your fault, not mine.  While I may usually only paint in primary colors, players are always free to use whatever palette they want.

In other words, there's lots of leeway for fun and politics and intrigue even when you're dealing with devils portrayed as incapable of being anything other than Lawful Evil through and through when you have players willing to lie to themselves that this time, that Succubus really is just a misunderstood soul trapped by circumstance rather than a pitiless, heartless, absolutely cunning manipulator.  I may paint in absolute morality colors, but I'm still a rat bastard.


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## Helldritch (Feb 26, 2020)

Ovinomancer said:


> In other words, there's lots of leeway for fun and politics and intrigue even when you're dealing with devils portrayed as incapable of being anything other than Lawful Evil through and through when you have *players willing to lie to themselves that this time, that Succubus really is just a misunderstood soul trapped by circumstance rather than a pitiless, heartless, absolutely cunning manipulator. * I may paint in absolute morality colors, but I'm still a rat bastard.



With the bold part you made my night. Self delusion can be very strong in some people. Thank you for that sentence. It really made my night.


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## Bohandas (Feb 26, 2020)

Ovinomancer said:


> It's Saturday morning cartoons where GI Joe doesn't have to every worry about Cobra Commander being a bad guy because he's just a bad guy.  And most games exist at this level of morality -- orcs are just this week's bad guys that the heroes get to fight and prevail, not a complex moral commentary on the plight of [real world stuff].




Which brings up another point. I think that a big part of this might come from a lot of gaming groups being too squeamish to actually show the bad guys doing anything seriously evil, much like GI Joe and similar cartoons. So you're left with something that looks more like scaremongering than actual villany going on; just a bunch of third-hand rumors about some vague undefined evil.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 26, 2020)

I don't like the villains in Redwall because they're evil because they're evil. OK, usually, they're "vermin", but so are many of the "hero" species. It doesn't have to be a complex motivation, but I need villains to have A motivation.

Why is a Drow becoming a Drider considered a punishment? To me it seems like a huge buff. Why are Drow evil? Because they were elves who worshiped Lolth and were cursed. In a society where murder is commonplace, it would also be commonplace to find people looking to leave that society. Sure, statistically most of them are killed or turned into driders, but still.

If Cobra just rented out the Weather Dominator, they win. Everybody would love Cobra. I mean how much money does Cobra Commander make as a terrorist?


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## Helldritch (Feb 26, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> I don't like the villains in Redwall because they're evil because they're evil. OK, usually, they're "vermin", but so are many of the "hero" species. It doesn't have to be a complex motivation, but I need villains to have A motivation.




Why does a psychopath kills? Simply because he can. In his mind, his only crime was getting caught. You can apply the same logic to evil races.



Zhaleskra said:


> Why is a Drow becoming a Drider considered a punishment? To me it seems like a huge buff. Why are Drow evil? Because they were elves who worshiped Lolth and were cursed. In a society where murder is commonplace, it would also be commonplace to find people looking to leave that society. Sure, statistically most of them are killed or turned into driders, but still.




A drider is in a constant state of rage and pain. It might be a buff in combat terms but even me would not like to be like them. Their curse also prevent them from killing drows (I should say faithful drows), the object of their rage and pain.

Drows are evil because they chose Lolth as a goddess. They consider her the epitome of what they are. In our modern world we consider the almighty to be caring and forgiving so we strive to be like him ; so too, are the drows. In the fanstastic world they're in, the gods are not just spectators. They can act! Not only they can but they do. In the novels, Dritzz had to reject Lolth with his whole heart and soul or he would have ended being a drider and not the hero we know. Drow do not leave their society because the price of it is becoming a drider. Even Jarlaxle praises Lolth. He is not satisfied with her, but he still follows her precepts. Thus he is not a drider. You don't have to like a god to give it power. You only have to acknowledge it either with fear or respect. A thing that Dritzz does not even do.



Zhaleskra said:


> If Cobra just rented out the Weather Dominator, they win. Everybody would love Cobra. I mean how much money does Cobra Commander make as a terrorist?




Cobra makes a lot of money with extortions, thefts, murder contracts and many other criminal activities. The cartoon only shows us the big losses that Cobra suffers at the hand of GI-Joe. Just like the news shows us the big catch the police does against drug and street gangs. We see their big losses but not their victories. So no, nobody loves Cobra but Cobra.[/QUOTE]


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## Celebrim (Feb 26, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> I don't like the villains in Redwall because they're evil because they're evil. OK, usually, they're "vermin", but so are many of the "hero" species. It doesn't have to be a complex motivation, but I need villains to have A motivation.




Power isn't a compelling motivation?  Some people want to rule and dominate over others.  Prior to our democratic systems of government and other checks and balances, this was a massive problem.   What motivated the Norse to become the scourge of Europe?  Were they just notable bad people?  Or was murder, rape, and theft just a very attractive economic activity to engage in for young males without other prospects?



> Why is a Drow...




Got no answer to that. Absolutely nothing about Drow culture makes sense, even taking into account the capricious nature of the deity that conducts it. I don't think that it was designed with a lot of forethought. Just "bad guys" loosely inspired by spiders and the fact that spider females are larger and more dangerous than the males.



> If Cobra just rented out the Weather Dominator, they win. Everybody would love Cobra. I mean how much money does Cobra Commander make as a terrorist?




This could really just be turned into any "evil mastermind" discussion, as evil masterminds often behave in entirely stupid ways purely to jump through plot hoops, two of which are always going to have to be "the situation the heroes are in seems dire" and "the heroes win in the end".   Any time you have a story structure that is known and you have a writer under a deadline that needs to paint by numbers the story structure, you are going to get  a lot of fridge logic like you just described.  "Cobra" itself is a solution to the same story constraint that needs to jump through both hoops without offending any real world political group - Cobra has to put the heroes in situations that seem dire, but also lose in every episode.   Occasionally the writers subverted the tropes, including an episode where Cobra had to change tactics because it was bankrupt.


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## Sepulchrave II (Feb 26, 2020)

Celebrim said:


> What motivated the Norse to become the scourge of Europe?




Population pressure. Demand for more resources. Same as other wars of expansion.



			
				Celebrim said:
			
		

> Absolutely nothing about Drow culture makes sense, even taking into account the capricious nature of the deity that conducts it.




And with the drow we have a quite explicit curse by Corellon which gives them their black skin.

Now, before you freak out and start flinging accusations of racism around again, I'm saying that the _mytheme_ - a people cursed or afflicted in the (distant, mythic) past to be different or set apart - is the same. Same with the Curse of Ham (or Canaan) - specifically, how it was later mythologized by Muslim and Christian slavers.

When I say that the "precise aetiology of orcs is unimportant" what I mean is that it doesn't matter if they're cursed by Malacath, imbued with hatred by Gruumsh, corrupted by Melkor, or whatever. Same with the drow. It is the notion that some divine action has rendered a people cursed.

Also - I'm not an American and I'm a keen student of the Old Testament, so I don't automatically construe all biblical texts which have been used to justify racial oppression in terms of 19th century US social history.


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## Hand of Evil (Feb 27, 2020)

Okay, let me get my soapbox.  What is evil?  I say the DM should define it.  This creates cultural and regional  taboos and morals for the characters to follow that makes them evil to others and builds a defense in evil vs. LAWs.  These are things like following gods that are listed as evil and performing evil acts.  So, a drow viewed as evil by everyone would be okay when viewed by other drow or evil characters (unless that evil character did not approve of that evil act).


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## Umbran (Feb 27, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> Why is a Drow becoming a Drider considered a punishment? To me it seems like a huge buff.




I mean, sure, combat power.  That's really nice... in the middle of combat.  But most of life isn't in combat.

And as a drider you no longer fit into society.  Literally.  Like, that back end doesn't physically fit within the architecture and interior design.  And Drow are ableist jerks, and they are in no way going to make reasonable accommodations for you.  And the ladies... they are not going to be swiping right for you any more.  Because, you know... you have a really bad case of spider-butt.  Which I guess is fine, because driders are biologically sexless and can't breed anyway.

Oh, and this is all because you failed.  Big time.  You didn't cut the mustard, so they made you this _thing_ that can't even shop for groceries, much less have a normal life.

Yeah.  That's a buff, for sure.


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## Hand of Evil (Feb 27, 2020)

Umbran said:


> Yeah.  That's a buff, for sure.



Does this spider butt make me look fat.  Be honest.


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## lowkey13 (Feb 27, 2020)

*Deleted by user*


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## Bohandas (Feb 27, 2020)

Umbran said:


> I mean, sure, combat power.  That's really nice... in the middle of combat.  But most of life isn't in combat.




In Drow society? Isn't their whole schtick (other than the spiders and the BDSM ladies) that murder and attempted murder are implausibly common?


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## Maxperson (Feb 27, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> In Drow society? Isn't their whole schtick (other than the spiders and the BDSM ladies) that murder and attempted murder are implausibly common?



That doesn't mean every other hour or even every other day, either.


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## Helldritch (Feb 27, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> In Drow society? Isn't their whole schtick (other than the spiders and the BDSM ladies) that murder and attempted murder are implausibly common?



Drows are much more than that. Being chaotic and evil to the core, they need a strict code of conduct to prevent the collapse of their society. The penalty for being caught doing "bad" things is usually death.

On the other hand, drows are encourage to break rules, kill, murder and many other attrocious acts. The only rule is DO NOT GET CAUGHT! You're not caught and there are no witnesses? You won the day (or the night for that matter...). A drider would not last long in the drow "society".


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 27, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> Drows are much more than that. Being chaotic and evil to the core, they need a strict code of conduct to prevent the collapse of their society. The penalty for being caught doing "bad" things is usually death.
> 
> On the other hand, drows are encourage to break rules, kill, murder and many other attrocious acts. The only rule is DO NOT GET CAUGHT! You're not caught and there are no witnesses? You won the day (or the night for that matter...). A drider would not last long in the drow "society".



ummmm pretty sure drow are neutral evil, at least since 3rd edition.


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## Umbran (Feb 27, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> In Drow society?




Well, as noted, the driders _aren't in_ drow society any more.  They are failures who didn't have the good sense to die, and exist as a message to others to not fail.


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## Helldritch (Feb 27, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> ummmm pretty sure drow are neutral evil, at least since 3rd edition.



Yep, you're right on that account. But I was refering to the society described by RA Salvatore in the novels and in the 1ed and 2ed Drows. Neutral evil drows are an aberration as almost all their deities are CE (save the godess Eilistraee). As I said earlier, a race will strive to be like its god(s). Alignment in 3.xed and higher does not have the same connotation as in the previous editions.

I believe that the NE aspect given to drow was to give them a small acceptability as a NE race is less likely to be killed on sight. But Drows are and always will be CE in my heart.


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## Umbran (Feb 27, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> I believe that the NE aspect given to drow was to give them a small acceptability as a NE race is less likely to be killed on sight.




I dunno.  I think it is a bit more a nod to the fact that they are this weird admixture of authoritarian regime and berzerk violent individual ladder-climbing, that balances out to neutrality.

Plus, there's a hefty argument that a CE race probably has too many stability issues to build anything as a culture that lasts for any significant period of time.  The Neutral placement makes that a lot more plausible.


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## Lanefan (Feb 28, 2020)

Heh - in my campaign becoming a Drider is every Llolth Cleric's dream, as I have the Driders being Llolth's minions and very powerful.

Flip side is if you're a Drow and you ever see a Drider, its presence is a sure sign that Llolth is taking an interest in proceedings and so you'd better mind your p's and q's just in case She's in a worse-than-usual mood.


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## Zhaleskra (Feb 28, 2020)

Switching what kind of evil critters we're talking about for a while, I wanted to address the hope of this time that succubus really is a good person. A long time ago, I had a very similar situation running one of the Planescape adventures (I forget which one) where the party had two paladins, and a Baatezu who had recently been demoted to Cornugon (sorry if I forgot the spelling) was helping them to stick it to his superiors. The female paladin attempted to talk the devil out of evil. I didn't have it work, but I think if I were running it again I'd have her see if she could persuade him. I mean, he already got demoted for not being evil enough, right?


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## Michael Silverbane (Feb 28, 2020)

The best example of this is, of course, the Tales of Wyre, right here in our own Storyhour subforum.


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## dragoner (Feb 28, 2020)

Playing a Bugbear could be sort of kooky fun. There is another sort of evil, a gangster, who robs the biggest bank, but their love is shot in the get a way, so they set the car on fire like St Olga burning cities for her beloved, and go on criminal rampage until gunned down by police, dying with smile on their face. Beautiful tragic evil.


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## Eltab (Feb 29, 2020)

dragoner said:


> Playing a Bugbear could be sort of kooky fun. There is another sort of evil, a gangster, who robs the biggest bank, but their love is shot in the get a way, so they set the car on fire like St Olga burning cities for her beloved, and go on criminal rampage until gunned down by police, dying with smile on their face. Beautiful tragic evil.



Sounds like a run-through of Grand Theft Auto, trying to find out if the police have attack helicopters or even Warthogs programmed in.


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## dragoner (Feb 29, 2020)

Eltab said:


> Sounds like a run-through of Grand Theft Auto, trying to find out if the police have attack helicopters or even Warthogs programmed in.




Truthfully I stole it from a music video, it does sound like some 19th century folk hero too.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 29, 2020)

Something about this thread has been bugging me, and it only now occurred to me.

If you, the DM, have to _enforce_ the consequences of the player's decision, they are not really the consequences of the _player's_ decision. They're your decision, they're your consequences, and you are responsible for them in both senses of the word.

When considering the "consequences" of playing a "monster" race in D&D... even before you examine whether or not _immediate murderous bigotry_ is actually the most realistic response (and no, it still isn't), DMs need to ask themselves whose fun they are improving by responding this way, instead of either being more accepting or simply telling the player to choose a more appropriate race for their character.


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## Helldritch (Feb 29, 2020)

Ishhhh....
It is like saying: "I warn you that if you jump the cliff you will get hurt, even die". You jump and get hurt and your response is: "That is your fault, you should have not made that cliff so easily reachable."

A person is accountable for his/her actions and choices. If you make a bad choice and you know the consequences (and even if you don't) you are ENTIRELY and COMPLETELY RESPONSIBLE of your CHOICES!

Playing the bad guy is playing a bad guy. Even if that bad guy happens to be a good one stuck with the reputation of his race/culture. It is unfortunate that some member of a race/culture are victims of the bias of others toward their race/culture (IRL or in game) but as deplorable as it is; it is a fact that you can not ignore nor avoid. You are not playing the Care bear RPG. You're playing a fantasy RPG where you are supposed to play the hero. If you want to disguise your hero as a bandit/killer so be it. But do not be surprised if the cops and the people around you act as if you were a bandit/killer.

As a DM I would and will enforce what would be the logical reaction of the people your character will encounter. It might not be to your liking. But logic will there.


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## hawkeyefan (Feb 29, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> Ishhhh....
> It is like saying: "I warn you that if you jump the cliff you will get hurt, even die". You jump and get hurt and your response is: "That is your fault, you should have not made that cliff so easily reachable."
> 
> A person is accountable for his/her actions and choices. If you make a bad choice and you know the consequences (and even if you don't) you are ENTIRELY and COMPLETELY RESPONSIBLE of your CHOICES!
> ...




But are people even talking about playing a bad guy? Or a “bad race”? How is a Lawful Good Hobgoblin Paladin of Bahamut a “bad guy”?

I think that the point that @FaerieGodfather was making is that since it’s all made up, you could just as easily create the fictional circumstances that don’t ruin that players fun. 

In other words, the “logic” you’re applying is made up and you can make up another.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 29, 2020)

hawkeyefan said:


> I think that the point that @FaerieGodfather was making is that since it’s all made up, you could just as easily create the fictional circumstances that don’t ruin that players fun.
> 
> In other words, the “logic” you’re applying is made up and you can make up another.




Especially when the "logic" in question doesn't make nearly as much as sense as some people seem to think it does.

Like, for instance, people may believe all kinds of horrible stereotypes about goblinoids, they might even _fear_ and _hate_ goblinoids on the basis of those stereotypes-- but they're not going to organize a lynch mob to murder _the very first goblinoid they've ever seen_ on _the very first day_ they've seen one, while he is heavily armed and traveling in the company of other heavily armed, magically gifted individuals.

You'll get a lot of stares, warding gestures, people hiding their children. People might throw stones, actually, but a proper _stoning_ requires a crowd. Gate guards might refuse access, city guards might demand "proof" you have the right to be there. Businesses will deny services, or only serve you through the back door.

You _might_ get a lynch mob, after you've been in town for a few days, when someone-- usually a young woman-- accuses you of a crime, usually of a sexual nature.

People like to say prejudice is borne of ignorance, and this might be true, but _actual violent hatred_ requires enough time for familiarity to breed contempt.

Note that everything I just described applies to _any humanoid_... including the supposedly Good and/or Neutral ones. You don't usually see the same kinds of DM behavior with exotic elf subraces-- when the local "Chaotic Good" elves murder anyone who enters the woods-- or with different human ethnic types, even when those humans frequently engage in raiding against the locals.

One of my biggest problems with D&D is that a lot of DMs engage in all sorts of naughty word behavior-- ranging from petty dickery to arbitrarily offing PCs-- in the name of "realism" when it's apparent they're not even on a first-name basis with reality. They simply have no clue how the real world even works.


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## Doug McCrae (Feb 29, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> DMs need to ask themselves whose fun they are improving by responding this way, instead of either being more accepting or simply telling the player to choose a more appropriate race for their character.



Part of this may be down to the longevity of the campaign world and its relationship to the players. Some GMs create new worlds for each campaign, with a particular group of players in mind. In that case the world should be tailored to the players, especially if it's a low prep game. (This is how my groups have always played.) Other GMs however have a single long-established campaign world that may have existed for decades. Their current group of players may be relative newcomers to this world.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 29, 2020)

Doug McCrae said:


> Part of this may be down to the longevity of the campaign world and its relationship to the players. ... Other GMs however have a single long-established campaign world that may have existed for decades. Their current group of players may be relative newcomers to this world.




Well, just because someone needs to ask themselves if they're _really justified_ in (saying no/nerfing something/attacking PCs) doesn't necessarily mean that the answer is "no".

I mean, I'm a pretty permissive DM when it comes down to it, but when I run _Dark Sun_, I expect my players to bring _Dark Sun_ characters-- no Gnomes, no Paladins, and if you cast arcane magic in public, you better _pray_ the lynch mob gets you first. (And yes, I'm still salty about that sidebar in 4e.) 

And the thing is? None of the established D&D campaign settings were written the way people are trying to run them-- _The Complete Book of Humanoids_ for AD&D 2e was _written for them_, random tables in the AD&D 1e DMG had encounters with humanoids _in metropolitan areas_, and while it's clear they're not even second-class citizens and don't enjoy legal protections, their existence is at least _conditionally_ tolerated.

_This is canon._ Dungeon Masters who run it differently are changing it for their own purposes.

Homebrew is a different story, of course. Homebrew is homebrew.

But then, if the Dungeon Master is the author of the setting then it is the DM who decided that humanoids would be treated this way by "civilized" folk-- I will _guarantee_ you they made this decision 30 seconds after seeing the player's character sheet-- and thus it goes back to the fact that they designed their homebrew world this way, and the question: why?

Hence my post. DMs have all of the authorship and the authority in their worlds, but the title of this thread and many of the comments within it are worded to shirk the responsibility for it onto their players.

And, seriously, what is with all this passive-aggressive nonsense? If you only want certain races in your game, make a list; when players ask to play something else, refer them back to the list. Allowing the player to bring an unwanted character into your game and then punishing them for it is petty and childish.


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## dragoner (Feb 29, 2020)

Adventurer is already bad in some languages, then add in things like Rogue or Thief, so those are criminals. Then was does Paladin do, burning villages of humanoids like medieval SD, just for the precious XP? Hero also, who is that? Pavlov, or some childish fantasy, how do we all conform to that? Too many heroes are broken people. Stuff needs to be laid out at start of game.


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## Longspeak (Feb 29, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> Playing the bad guy is playing a bad guy. Even if that bad guy happens to be a good one stuck with the reputation of his race/culture....
> 
> As a DM I would and will enforce what would be the logical reaction of the people your character will encounter. It might not be to your liking. But logic will there.



I agree with this in principle, but in play it's just no fun (for me, or the other players in my experience) to hammer it every scene. That's why I use my rule of not making a thing about it until it's time to make A Thing about it. I don't want to  ignore it, but I don't want it to eat up a lot of screen time, either.


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## Son of the Serpent (Feb 29, 2020)

aco175 said:


> Another thread got me thinking about traditional evil races and the consequences of playing them.  In the other thread a gold dragon was attacked by a drow and then killed.  Is/ should there be problems with playing evil races in your game?  In my games monsters are monsters and villagers will hire PCs to kill them if they come into town.  On the other hand how do you accord your friend who wants to play a drow or bugbear and walk into town.  I'm sure this has been done before, but interested in thoughts not about playing lawful good, but about how to play and give the players what they want, but at the same time have the DM put parameters on the world.
> 
> I have seen where you can play in the outskirts of society where the roadside inn caters to anyone with coin or a nation that is more lawless and has some elements like slavery so other races are tolerated.  I see in FR where Waterdeep is supposed to be very cosmopolitan and everything is accepted.
> 
> I'm not sure if this is Hasbro selling books and making FR allow these races since players want to play them or if I'm being a gronard and applying some sort of bias by not allowing them.



I dont think this site is the site for the conversation you are looking to have.  Im just gonna be frank about that.  No offense to anyone meant.  I just foresee this conversation crashing and burning before it really gets the chance to legitimately spread its wings.


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## Doug McCrae (Feb 29, 2020)

In the World of Greyhawk, "humanoids" such as orcs and goblins are allowed in some predominantly human areas, seemingly including the "free cities" of Greyhawk, Dyvers and Irongate. This is from the 1983 boxed set:

The various races of humanoids have generally been driven into the least favorable areas - mountains,​barrens, marshes and swamps, and forests... Only Iuz, the Horned Society, and portions of the Great Kingdom allow the more civilized humanoids to dwell amongst the humanfolk, at least to any large scale. The large free cities are also known to allow various sorts of humanoids free access to their precincts.​
Otoh the 1st edition Player's Handbook suggests that all PC half-orcs can pass as humans:

Some one-tenth of orc-human mongrels are sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human... it is assumed that player characters which are of half-orc race are within the superior 10%.​


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## Bohandas (Feb 29, 2020)

I mean the obvious thing to do RP wise to have a goblin or troll character or whatever be accepted is for the character to be clearly be rich and generous with their money, or else to clearly be muscle for the cleric (provided that the cleric follows a good or neitral deity), or to clearly be themselves a cleric of a good deity


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## Helldritch (Feb 29, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> And the thing is? None of the established D&D campaign settings were written the way people are trying to run them-- _The Complete Book of Humanoids_ for AD&D 2e was _written for them_, random tables in the AD&D 1e DMG had encounters with humanoids _in metropolitan areas_, and while it's clear they're not even second-class citizens and don't enjoy legal protections, their existence is at least _conditionally_ tolerated.
> 
> _This is canon._ Dungeon Masters who run it differently are changing it for their own purposes.




The 2e complete book of humanoid was built around the principle that it will be a group of humanoid. Nothing to add to that. More than this and this is homebrew.

The random tables in the 1ed included humanoids. Those were assumed to be brutes smuggled in by criminal organisations or infiltrators or escapted prisonners hidding in the sewers, coming up at night to way lay poor peoples or adventurers. We see a group of orcs infiltrating the town in the: "Desolation of Smaug" movie. There is nothing new under sun. Doing anything (or implying) other than that is, again, homebrew. The humanoid invader; that is canon. Not the other way around. In evil countries, like the Great Kingdoms, the humanoids are mercernary and thus acceptable city encounters. These encounter tables were simple (all purpose) guidelines, not an almighty rule set in stones. It is stated that if something is impossible to encounter in the zone, treat the roll as the next result on the table.

I have nothing about a party of humanoids. I had a few over the years as a change of pace. If you want a humanoid, this is the type of campaign you want.

Of course there are worlds where an orc, a golin and even a minotaure is acceptable. In these worlds, go ahead. Do what you want. But in other, long established worlds, be prepare to have a brief existence in the first town you'll visit.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 29, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> The random tables in the 1ed included humanoids. Those were assumed to be brutes smuggled in by criminal organisations or infiltrators or escapted prisonners hidding in the sewers, coming up at night to way lay poor peoples or adventurers.




That's an interesting claim. I'm sure you have an equally interesting source to back it up.



Helldritch said:


> These encounter tables were simple (all purpose) guidelines, not an almighty rule set in stones. It is stated that if something is impossible to encounter in the zone, treat the roll as the next result on the table.




These were explicitly urban encounter tables for settled, civilized areas.



Helldritch said:


> Of course there are worlds where an orc, a golin and even a minotaure is acceptable. In these worlds, go ahead. Do what you want. But in other, long established worlds, be prepare to have a brief existence in the first town you'll visit.




I don't know why you feel the need to keep reminding me that you're going to do whatever you want. I already know you're going to do whatever you want, including ignoring any logic or evidence that doesn't fit your narrow, baseless worldview.

Have fun with that. Or not. Do whatever you want.


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## Lanefan (Feb 29, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> If you, the DM, have to _enforce_ the consequences of the player's decision, they are not really the consequences of the _player's_ decision. They're your decision, they're your consequences, and you are responsible for them in both senses of the word.



Sorry, not buying this.



> When considering the "consequences" of playing a "monster" race in D&D... even before you examine whether or not _immediate murderous bigotry_ is actually the most realistic response (and no, it still isn't), DMs need to ask themselves whose fun they are improving by responding this way, instead of either being more accepting or simply telling the player to choose a more appropriate race for their character.



A DM could outright tell a player to choose a different race, or just say to the player "if you're hell-bent on doing this, go ahead, but on your head be it - you've been warned".

You're also assuming the 'immediate murderous bigotry' is going to come from the DM or the setting.  IME it far more often comes from the other PCs, either overtly (they shun or attack or even kill it) or covertly (they hang it out to dry at some key moment in a combat and let the enemies kill it).


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## DammitVictor (Feb 29, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Sorry, not buying this.




People aren't responsible for their own behavior? Okay.



Lanefan said:


> A DM could outright tell a player to choose a different race, or just say to the player "if you're hell-bent on doing this, go ahead, but on your head be it - you've been warned".




See, and one of those options is a firm hand on the DM screen, and the other is passive-aggressive bitchcraft. I think it's reasonable to treat one of those courses of action with much more respect than the other.

Also, if you warn the player in question you're going to do something... that's still you choosing to do it, and even if you warned them about it, you're still responsible for being able to justify your own behavior. This isn't some kind of esoteric game theory or progressive ideological screed, it's literally just the basic moral responsibility that should be expected of any functional adult.



Lanefan said:


> You're also assuming the 'immediate murderous bigotry' is going to come from the DM or the setting.  IME it far more often comes from the other PCs, either overtly (they shun or attack or even kill it) or covertly (they hang it out to dry at some key moment in a combat and let the enemies kill it).




Well... one... _I've never seen that._ And two, I don't care because if it's PC versus PC, the players are on even footing and can't just bring in more and more support until they "win".

Three, if they're attacking people who've never made a hostile move toward them, and aren't known to have hurt anyone else, they need to double-check the "alignment" space on their character sheets.


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## Helldritch (Feb 29, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> That's an interesting claim. I'm sure you have an equally interesting source to back it up.




Of course. P.190 of the DMG 1e. and P. 192 of the same book. Interstingly enough, no humanoid in that table. (it was probably in the DMG 2ed). I do remember there was a table in a Dragon Magazine that included them but I don't remember which one and the name of the article.



FaerieGodfather said:


> I don't know why you feel the need to keep reminding me that you're going to do whatever you want. I already know you're going to do whatever you want, including ignoring any logic or evidence that doesn't fit your narrow, baseless worldview.
> 
> Have fun with that. Or not. Do whatever you want.




Far from me to want to antagonize you. If I did that, I am truly sorry you felt that way. And my world view is quite open, large and tolerant thank you. My logic may not be always flawless like Spok but I do try to be as logical and open minded as possible. 

I would like to point out that you are the one that tries to tell us that a humanoid (or any evil race) should be playable in every games. That is far from the norm. This is what me and many others on this forum are trying to tell you. Now as I said, in a world like Eberon, it is quite normal to play a goblinoid or an orc. In fact, my players in Eberon in the time did it and we had a lot of fun. But in other worlds, it will complicated to play a humanoid (if not downright impossible.) I would not allow a player to impose his or her views on the world I have built on me. Nor would I try to impose my view on another DM's world. Try to open your mind and see our point of view. In the worlds we are playing (either Grey Hawk or another world we built ourselves) your point of view and your hopes would not be in accord with the world in question.


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## DammitVictor (Feb 29, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> I would like to point out that you are the one that tries to tell us that a humanoid (or any evil race) should be playable in every games.




I'm not saying anything of the sort. I'm saying that the way NPCs treat humanoid PCs in their campaigns is a conscious decision on their part, which they should take responsibility for, and that perhaps they should spend some time in consideration so they can make that decision _purposefully_ for the good of their players.

I think allowing _humanoid_ monster PCs is generally a good idea, and I do allow them in _most_ games; likewise, I think prohibiting monster PCs in general is also a good idea, that it's generally the norm for most games, and I also do it sometimes myself. Hell, my last (only) 5e game was outright _humans only_.

I think allowing monster PCs in game and then making it impossible to play through cartoonishly unrealistic NPC reactions is passive-aggressive bullying. Admittedly, I am not often my best self when dealing with people attempting to intellectually justify abusive behavior, especially the abuse of authority.



Helldritch said:


> That is far from the norm. This is what me and many others on this forum are trying to tell you.




It might be, but it's not what you are actually telling me. What you're actually telling me, over and over and over again, is that you're going to keep doing whatever you want to your players in your own game because of _"muh realizm"_, while stubbornly refusing to accept there's nothing "realistic" about your NPCs' behavior.

By all means, actually tell me that games that allow humanoid PCs aren't the norm. I will shrug and agree with you.



Helldritch said:


> Try to open your mind and see our point of view. In the worlds we are playing (either Grey Hawk or another world we built ourselves) your point of view and your hopes would not be in accord with the world in question.




Except for the fact, already proven in this thread-- not by me-- that those worlds _weren't written that way_ and you are trying to impose your own values upon them while denying any responsibility for doing so.


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## Panda-s1 (Feb 29, 2020)

Bohandas said:


> I mean the obvious thing to do RP wise to have a goblin or troll character or whatever be accepted is for the character to be clearly be rich and generous with their money, or else to clearly be muscle for the cleric (provided that the cleric follows a good or neitral deity), or to clearly be themselves a cleric of a good deity



great, play a real world stereotype to justify your character


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## Eltab (Feb 29, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> But then, if the Dungeon Master is the author of the setting then it is the DM who decided that humanoids would be treated this way by "civilized" folk -- *I will guarantee you they made this decision 30 seconds after seeing the player's character sheet* -- and thus it goes back to the fact that they designed their homebrew world this way, and the question: why?



What is the payout on that guarantee?  I want to collect.

When I homebrew a world, I will tell the players _before character creation_ if there is anything out-of-bounds, not after I get their finalized character sheet.


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## DammitVictor (Mar 1, 2020)

Eltab said:


> When I homebrew a world, I will tell the players _before character creation_ if there is anything out-of-bounds, not after I get their finalized character sheet.




If you're telling your players that something isn't acceptable before the game starts, and you're not allowing them to play it, then nothing I have said in this thread applies to you in any way.


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## Lanefan (Mar 1, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> People aren't responsible for their own behavior? Okay.



Au contraire - they're exactly responsible.

You-as-player bring in something nobody wants to have around, it's on you when it dies or gets run off or whatever.  You seem to want to (somewhat unfairly, IMO)  transfer that responsibility on to the DM.



> See, and one of those options is a firm hand on the DM screen, and the other is passive-aggressive bitchcraft.



Conversely, it's just as plausible to say one of those is a DM being an inflexible hardass and the other is a DM trying to accommodate a player.



> Also, if you warn the player in question you're going to do something... that's still you choosing to do it, and even if you warned them about it, you're still responsible for being able to justify your own behavior. This isn't some kind of esoteric game theory or progressive ideological screed, it's literally just the basic moral responsibility that should be expected of any functional adult.



You're yet again assuming the bad stuff is going to always come from the DM.

And sometimes it will.  Doesn't even have to be race-based.  If we're in the Kingdom of Carta and that kingdom is at long-standing war with the Monarchy of Tewys, and you-as-PC decide to wrap yourself in the flag of Tewys and parade around in the main city of Carta, what do you think is gonna happen?

But yes, often the players-as-PCs sort this out among themselves...



> Well... one... _I've never seen that._



Oh, I have. Seen it, done it, been on the receiving end of it.



> And two, I don't care because if it's PC versus PC, the players are on even footing and can't just bring in more and more support until they "win".



99% of the time they don't need to.



> Three, if they're attacking people who've never made a hostile move toward them, and aren't known to have hurt anyone else, they need to double-check the "alignment" space on their character sheets.



As player, I've been in this position.  3e game, my PC is a Ranger with a side of Cleric who I've for ages played as an upstanding noble goodly sort who has no use for evil nor the type of creatures who tend to be such.

And sure enough, someone brings in a half-Dragon.  My response boiled down to "I've trained half my life on how to kill things like this and now you expect me to run with one?!"

But in it came, and I gritted my teeth.

And sure enough, it ended up killing another party member, and then refused my challenge (a thrown gauntlet; only time in my life I've ever been able to have a PC do this!).  I'd have been quite justified in doing all sorts of things at that moment, but I knew I was outnumbered by the half-Dragon and his pals and so cooled my jets.

Next time in town, my PC left that party and never returned. (the half-Dragon didn't last much longer, perma-dying in, I think, its next adventure)


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## Zhaleskra (Mar 1, 2020)

I think one thing we may be missing is that not all settings are intended as "kitchen sink" settings. Planescape, Ravenloft, Spelljammer; those are all enabled to be "kitchen sink" settings. There is some argument to be made that Forgotten Realms is as well.

That aside, there are two other potential problems. 1. A GM who decides to get their hands on as much content as they want without concern about their own attention span in order to enable a "kitchen sink" setting (I was one such GM with Planescape). 2. Players who either a.) show up with a character that was forbidden from the game lead in the first place and expect the GM to allow it, or b.) don't know the setting rules and want to play the character "because it's cool". Yes, this is intentionally over simplified.

I didn't like the idea of "Native" Outsider races.


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## DammitVictor (Mar 1, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> You-as-player bring in something nobody wants to have around, it's on you when it dies or gets run off or whatever.  You seem to want to (somewhat unfairly, IMO)  transfer that responsibility on to the DM.




I want to say that this is _exactly backwards_, and that you are excusing the Dungeon Master and the other players from their moral responsibilities both for their own behavior in-game, and from their moral responsibilities out-of-game to communicate acceptable playstyles before an unacceptable PC hits the mat.

But if I'm being fair, this is also something a player should check _before_ playing such a character, without needing to be told.

If I were going to be _unfair_, I'd retort, "so the hobgoblin shouldn't have worn that dress, eh?"



Lanefan said:


> Conversely, it's just as plausible to say one of those is a DM being an inflexible hardass and the other is a DM trying to accommodate a player.




A DM who _"allows"_ a player to make a PC and then prevents them from engaging in the game isn't _accommodating_ jack naughty word. The player who gets told "no" has a little less fun with a different character; the player whose character is being persecuted is going to have a lot less fun until the PC either dies or the player figures out what the DM isn't willing to tell him directly.



Lanefan said:


> You're yet again assuming the bad stuff is going to always come from the DM.




One, the Dungeon Master has the most, theoretically unlimited, capacity to impose the bad stuff.

Two, I'm not discounting your personal experience,  but again... I've never seen this coming from the other players. (Except one time, that might have been why another PC put ground glass in my thri-kreen's soup in the first session. He never told anyone why, and that group never played together again.) I've never seen a dozen pages of people bleating and beating their chests over their right as _players_ to murder the other players' characters without provocation.

And this is largely because if this were PC action we were discussing, everyone would recognize it for exactly what it is.



Lanefan said:


> And sometimes it will.  Doesn't even have to be race-based.  If we're in the Kingdom of Carta and that kingdom is at long-standing war with the Monarchy of Tewys, and you-as-PC decide to wrap yourself in the flag of Tewys and parade around in the main city of Carta, what do you think is gonna happen?




In real life? They're going to be torn to pieces.

In D&D? _Absolutely nothing._ Dirty looks. Someone might spit on them.

You realize that this is my go-to example for why the policy of running monster PCs out of the game doesn't have anything to do with _realism_, and that I brought it up myself in my first or second post in this thread?



Lanefan said:


> (a thrown gauntlet; only time in my life I've ever been able to have a PC do this!).




Just a side note, but _that is so cool_ and I am totally jelly.


----------



## Helldritch (Mar 1, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> I think one thing we may be missing is that not all settings are intended as "kitchen sink" settings. Planescape, Ravenloft, Spelljammer; those are all enabled to be "kitchen sink" settings. There is some argument to be made that Forgotten Realms is as well.




FR is more or less a kitchen sink. It depends on the region you are. Do not bring a goblin player in Cormyr but it would be acceptable in Zenthil Keep. It really depends on where you are and the type of campaign the DM wants to make.

Ravenloft is more humanocentric than other setting but with the way the dread realms work, I can accept a lot of thing in that setting.

Plane Scape and Spelljammers are the best kitchen sink I have seen so far. Eberron is a close second. The games we had in the Plane Scape were unforgettable. Bashram, the Bariaur ranger being mounted by the gnome Goldilock the slinger still makes me smile (and who else would have made a cleric with an 18 dex.?).



Zhaleskra said:


> That aside, there are two other potential problems. 1. A GM who decides to get their hands on as much content as they want without concern about their own attention span in order to enable a "kitchen sink" setting (I was one such GM with Planescape). 2. Players who either a.) show up with a character that was forbidden from the game lead in the first place and expect the GM to allow it, or b.) don't know the setting rules and want to play the character "because it's cool". Yes, this is intentionally over simplified.



To case #1
There is nothing wrong to have as much content as possible on the game you want to play. In fact, I do encourage my players to read the source books (if they can read english) as much as possible. If by their reading they can bring things to the table that I failed to notice or didn't think of, great! If the content is read by both players and DM, it helps a lot in creating a cohesive campaign as the players will be a lot more implicated in the campaign creation. Not everything rests on the DM's shoulders.

To case #2a 
This have not happen to me in ages. I stopped allowing characters that were not made at my table a long time ago. This leads to too much debates. With the standard array, it is a little less problematic but still run the risk of weird magic items or combinations that would not be allowed at my table. (i.e. I restrict multiclassing to a maximum of one additional class.)

To case #2b
This happens a lot more than I would like to admit. If the campaign is in Greyhawk or in my Dunadoria world, do not expect to do anything but the basic races. On other worlds, depending on the world and sometimes the region that the players are starting, then anything is debatable as long as the back story makes sense. Want to play the son of an emissary of Obdul in the city of Silverymoon or Waterdeep? Ok, but find me some damn good reasons for it to have happened. If the player can come up with something remotely good, I am ready to accept it. He might suffer a bit for it, but his actions will speak for him. It will be a fine thread to walk but if the character is trusted by his fellow adventurers; they will vouch for him and it might works. But it won't be easy. Want to do the same in the lands of Vaasa but as an emissary of some strong orc tribe? A lot more chances for it to work but do not venture into Damara, there is a price for your ears in that kingdom... Want to do it in Eberron? No problems. You might even be the jet set star of the city of Sharn...


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## Helldritch (Mar 1, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> I want to say that this is _exactly backwards_, and that you are excusing the Dungeon Master and the other players from their moral responsibilities both for their own behavior in-game, and from their moral responsibilities out-of-game to communicate acceptable playstyles before an unacceptable PC hits the mat.



Realism and logic can sometimes seen as backward. Nothing happens if the players play by table rules. Again, Lanefan is entirely right (at least in my POV) and he is not excusing any bad behavior. He's just stating the obvious.



FaerieGodfather said:


> *But if I'm being fair, this is also something a player should check before playing such a character, without needing to be told.*



Finally! Thank you.



FaerieGodfather said:


> In real life? They're going to be torn to pieces.
> 
> In D&D? _Absolutely nothing._ Dirty looks. Someone might spit on them.



These are in answers about an opposing faction showing its color in enemy territory. See Lanefan's post.

In real life you are entirely correct.
In D&D? Exactly as the above. Thorn to pieces, quartered by horses, hanged, burned on a pyre, after being fakely trialed and tortured on the public place for a good show. This is how medieval (and early renaissance) were dealing with criminals, enemies and spies within their territories.


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## DammitVictor (Mar 1, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> I think one thing we may be missing is that not all settings are intended as "kitchen sink" settings. Planescape, Ravenloft, Spelljammer; those are all enabled to be "kitchen sink" settings. There is some argument to be made that Forgotten Realms is as well.




See, but that's not really the same problem or the same argument at all. You're talking about races that shouldn't exist in a setting, or should be _vanishingly rare_ in a setting. DMs who don't want these races in their game are much more likely to simply ban them, and much less likely to hit them with the torches and pitchforks if they allow them through gritted teeth.

This is about races that are more-or-less ubiquitous within the setting and that are established by setting canon as coexisting-- _uneasily_-- within the communities of the PHB races.

The list of allowed races (or even cultures) allowed in a game should really vary on a campaign-by-campaign basis, and maybe even change if the nature of a campaign changes. Players are responsible for learning it, understanding it, and _complying with it_... (anyone who's banned _anything_ has had this problem) ... but DMs are responsble for clearly communicating the rules, consistently enforcing the rules, and then for the behavior of their NPCs once the game starts.


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## DammitVictor (Mar 1, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> Realism and logic can sometimes seen as backward.




It helps if you take the crayon out of your nose before looking at them. There's nothing _realistic_ about your childish understanding of how racism works, and there's nothing _logical_ about your bleating assertions that Dungeon Masters aren't responsible for the behavior of their authored settings and characters-- for _their own decisions_.

Charitably, I can say you have a consistent vision for your game world and _that's fair_, even if it's not the same vision as in the books. But sooner or later, you're going to have to grow up and take responsibility for the decisions that you've made in shaping that vision and bringing it to life. D&D is a lot more fun with adults.


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## Helldritch (Mar 1, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> It helps if you take the crayon out of your nose before looking at them. There's nothing _realistic_ about your childish understanding of how racism works, and there's nothing _logical_ about your bleating assertions that Dungeon Masters aren't responsible for the behavior of their authored settings and characters-- for _their own decisions_.
> 
> Charitably, I can say you have a consistent vision for your game world and _that's fair_, even if it's not the same vision as in the books. But sooner or later, you're going to have to grow up and take responsibility for the decisions that you've made in shaping that vision and bringing it to life. D&D is a lot more fun with adults.




No need to insult anyone. You have a tendency to be obnoxious with those who disagree with you. I am fully grown up and probably much older than you. If you want to live in a carebear world fine by me.

For your knowledge I know full well how racism works. Many of my friends suffered from it. Some are in the LGBTQ and gets insulted and ostricized for being what they are. One of my players is a muslim and suffers from religious intolerance and racism. It is exactly because I fight these horrible behaviors IRL that I know full well how they work and how those who use sexism, bigotry and religious intolerance work and behave. Sometimes, showing these ingame to white male/female players show them what kind of suffering minority members really suffers. You should remove the rose tainted glasses you wear. This way you will see what these horrible behaviors are and how they affect our world.

As for not being responsible.
Of course a DM is responsible for his work, his world and his style. I never said the contrary. But so are the players. RPG is a team work. We create the world together. On the other hand. The new player coming with his idea of how things should work and try to impose his views on the established world is exactly what I am opposing. You consistently ignore parts of my posts that are almost like yours and you only cite what you feel will further the opinion you made about me. 

As for my vision I have of the books. 
I already gave you answers on that (with pages too) but you decided to ignore them. Your loss, not mine.


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## DammitVictor (Mar 1, 2020)

Helldritch said:


> No need to insult anyone. You have a tendency to be obnoxious with those who disagree with you. I am fully grown up and probably much older than you. If you want to live in a carebear world fine by me.




You've been baiting me this entire time. You're right, that I do have a tendency to be obnoxious and that I've been indulging that tendency excessively towards you. On the other hand, I don't think you're the person who gets to say that to me.

I'm not obnoxious to people who disagree with me. I'm obnoxious to people who pretend they don't understand simple concepts to win an argument, and then think this justifies being arrogant and condescending about it. I'm obnoxious to people who dismiss and belittle me, over and over again, and then say "no need to insult anyone" when I bite back.

And then insult me again, for good measure.

*edit:* I've removed the rest of this post, and if you've seen it, I apologize for it. If I'm going to take responsibility for my role in escalating this argument... I should probably also take responsibility for trying to end it.

I am going to try to stop taking shots at you. I will thank you to do the same, including recognizing-- for yourself-- the shots you have previously taken.


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## Helldritch (Mar 1, 2020)

Let's just agree that we disagree on that subject and leave it at that.

Apologies taken and accepted. And I, good sir, ask the same of you. May we find common grounds in an other thread.


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## Maxperson (Mar 1, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> It helps if you take the crayon out of your nose before looking at them. There's nothing _realistic_ about your childish understanding of how racism works, and there's nothing _logical_ about your bleating assertions that Dungeon Masters aren't responsible for the behavior of their authored settings and characters-- for _their own decisions_.
> 
> Charitably, I can say you have a consistent vision for your game world and _that's fair_, even if it's not the same vision as in the books. But sooner or later, you're going to have to grow up and take responsibility for the decisions that you've made in shaping that vision and bringing it to life. D&D is a lot more fun with adults.



I think a lot of your problem is you keep trying to apply real life to D&D.  Stop.  It doesn't work.  Fantasy cultures and fantasy races are not going to mirror real life humans.


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## DammitVictor (Mar 1, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> I think a lot of your problem is you keep trying to apply real life to D&D.  Stop.  It doesn't work.  Fantasy cultures and fantasy races are not going to mirror real life humans.




Fiction can play merry hell with the physical sciences, even in settings without explicit magic, and people are _mostly _not going to bat an eyelash.

A setting that tries the same with the social sciences, a setting where _people don't act like people_, falls apart because it destroys the audience's ability to engage with the characters.

Besides, if my problem is demanding _too much realism_, why is everyone else using realism to justify the behaviors I'm criticizing?

If D&D isn't supposed to be realistic, there's no reason for those behaviors at all.


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## Maxperson (Mar 1, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> Fiction can play merry hell with the physical sciences, even in settings without explicit magic, and people are _mostly _not going to bat an eyelash.
> 
> A setting that tries the same with the social sciences, a setting where _people don't act like people_, falls apart because it destroys the audience's ability to engage with the characters.




This is a False Dichotomy.  There is a very wide range between mirroring real life and being unrelatable.



> Besides, if my problem is demanding _too much realism_, why is everyone else using realism to justify the behaviors I'm criticizing?




Yes.  Realism does not equate to mirroring reality and never has.



> If D&D isn't supposed to be realistic, there's no reason for those behaviors at all.



Again, realistic does not equal reality.  If it did, no dragons, no magic and much more.


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## hawkeyefan (Mar 1, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> This is a False Dichotomy.  There is a very wide range between mirroring real life and being unrelatable.
> 
> 
> 
> ...




But isn’t that the point? If we can envision a world with dragons and magic...departures from the world we know...can’t we also envision a world where people aren’t as concerned with race? 

The fiction can literally be anything we desire, so having the pitchfork mobs show up for anyone outside the norm is not really an attempt at realism, but rather an aesthetic choice.


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## Lanefan (Mar 1, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> In real life? They're going to be torn to pieces.
> 
> In D&D? _Absolutely nothing._ Dirty looks. Someone might spit on them.
> 
> You realize that this is my go-to example for why the policy of running monster PCs out of the game doesn't have anything to do with _realism_, and that I brought it up myself in my first or second post in this thread?



That might be where our disconnect is coming from, at least in part: I'm fairly big on realism when it comes to such things.

If the flag-wearer would be torn apart in real life, there's absolutely no reason for the same not to happen in the fiction of a D&D game.



> Just a side note, but _that is so cool_ and I am totally jelly.


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## Lanefan (Mar 1, 2020)

FaerieGodfather said:


> Fiction can play merry hell with the physical sciences, even in settings without explicit magic, and people are _mostly _not going to bat an eyelash.



Or, at least in my case, are going to try to bend the known physical sciences in ways that would allow for magic; and go on from there.



> A setting that tries the same with the social sciences, a setting where _people don't act like people_, falls apart because it destroys the audience's ability to engage with the characters.



To a certain extent - particularly when playing Human characters - this is true: the path of least resistance is to have them think more or less like we do.

(side note: this is something often overlooked by those - including me - playing non-Human characters e.g. Dwarves, Hobbits, etc.: they might well NOT think like us, but again the path of least resistance is to just largely assume that they do, and carry on.  Something for me to work on in my own play.)


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## Lanefan (Mar 1, 2020)

hawkeyefan said:


> But isn’t that the point? If we can envision a world with dragons and magic...departures from the world we know...can’t we also envision a world where people aren’t as concerned with race?
> 
> The fiction can literally be anything we desire, so having the pitchfork mobs show up for anyone outside the norm is not really an attempt at realism, but rather an aesthetic choice.



Yet - and here's where I'm a bit confused - you wouldn't have the pitchfork mobs show up for the guy in Carta wearing the Tewys flag either; and that's nothing to do with race.

Or let's put it into a party-level situation: the PCs are working on behalf of Carta and at some point learn beyond doubt that one of the PCs is a Tewys spy.  Now what?


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## hawkeyefan (Mar 1, 2020)

Lanefan said:


> Yet - and here's where I'm a bit confused - you wouldn't have the pitchfork mobs show up for the guy in Carta wearing the Tewys flag either; and that's nothing to do with race.
> 
> Or let's put it into a party-level situation: the PCs are working on behalf of Carta and at some point learn beyond doubt that one of the PCs is a Tewys spy.  Now what?




They’re different situations. I’m not saying that there’s never a time that the PCs can provoke such a response from the locals. Just that it’s really down to the GM to decide what the response may be, and so it’s their choice to invoke the mob.

As for a PC being a spy for a rival nation than that of the PCs’ patron, I think it’d be up to the players to decide how to handle it. But I’d also the fact that they’re playing a game together to be a factor in such a decision.


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## Maxperson (Mar 2, 2020)

hawkeyefan said:


> But isn’t that the point? If we can envision a world with dragons and magic...departures from the world we know...can’t we also envision a world where people aren’t as concerned with race?




Absolutely.  Just don't call people wrong and insult them for going the other way with it.  I know you weren't the one that did that.



> The fiction can literally be anything we desire, so having the pitchfork mobs show up for anyone outside the norm is not really an attempt at realism, but rather an aesthetic choice.



This is not true.  Racism in the game is realism.  It makes a loose attempt to model how things are in real life.  How it actually plays out can be more or less realistic, weak or even non-existent based on the setting and/or DM choice, but it is still an attempt at realism.  Well, except for that last part where it's non-existent.


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## hawkeyefan (Mar 2, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Absolutely.  Just don't call people wrong and insult them for going the other way with it.  I know you weren't the one that did that.
> 
> 
> This is not true.  Racism in the game is realism.  It makes a loose attempt to model how things are in real life.  How it actually plays out can be more or less realistic, weak or even non-existent based on the setting and/or DM choice, but it is still an attempt at realism.  Well, except for that last part where it's non-existent.




But is racism realistic in such a world? Would that...or just about anything really....function according to our understanding given how radically different the world might be in other ways? 

I’m not saying there’s anything bad about people deciding to play however they want, but whatever they decide is a choice.


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## Maxperson (Mar 2, 2020)

hawkeyefan said:


> But is racism realistic in such a world? Would that...or just about anything really....function according to our understanding given how radically different the world might be in other ways?




Of course it's realism.  Realism is an approximation of something that happens in real life.  Any such attempt is realism, no matter what.  It may or may not be appropriate based on setting details, but it is realism.]


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## hawkeyefan (Mar 2, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Of course it's realism.  Realism is an approximation of something that happens in real life.  Any such attempt is realism, no matter what.  It may or may not be appropriate based on setting details, but it is realism.]




Okay...I don’t want to get hung up on a semantic debate. Let me give an alternate example.

In a world where the gods are manifest and the afterlife is certain, combined with very real threats from things like dragons and bulettes and who knows what else, I feel it would be realistic to have people have already overcome their strong sense of tribalism to such a point where, although some bias likely still exists, people are generally not grabbing pitchforks and torches because someone different than them shows up in their town.

My logic is also based on an attempt at realism, right? But I’ve arrived at a different conclusion.

Therefore, I think it’s more important to describe these decisions as personal choice. 

Does that make more sense?


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## Scott Christian (Mar 2, 2020)

Panda-s1 said:


> man idk, I don't think I've ever run d&d where there were "evil" races, like I find the idea in of itself kinda dumb. my current dm is also the same way. orcs in his world are largely warriors who rule the deserty part of the world. we also had an entire adventure where we kicked out an orc tribe that took over an entire small kingdom. doesn't mean orcs are inherently evil, we even had a half-orc paladin join our party halfway through that adventure. prior to that we befriended an orc cheesemonger who wrote to us from time to time.
> 
> I get that maybe certain things are always gonna be evil, e.g. demons and devils, but even with things like tieflings if it's within the purview of a playable race I don't see why they should be inherently evil or good. even WotC had addressing this issue, and you can tell 'cause in 5e we're told that orcs and goblins and the like are still influenced by the gods who created them which felt like a better explanation than before but still fairly contrived.
> 
> but to answer your question (lol) I dunno, I feel like maybe goblins might not be as accepted if say a town has had a bad history with goblins, or are currently embroiled in a war with them, but if a town hasn't had any bad goblin experiences as of late idk how they should be treated differently from other adventurers (who should face similar prejudices depending on where they are imo).




Dumb is a strong word. In the pantheon of D&D, gods decided who would be fair and unjust. They decided who would align (or have a great chance) of being evil. Meaning, they committed evil acts because that was their inherent nature due to the gods, not because of culture. What you describe is culture. And if that's your campaign setting, awesome. But to call other campaign settings dumb because of the deity creation of races seems a bit extreme.


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## Maxperson (Mar 2, 2020)

hawkeyefan said:


> Okay...I don’t want to get hung up on a semantic debate. Let me give an alternate example.
> 
> In a world where the gods are manifest and the afterlife is certain, combined with very real threats from things like dragons and bulettes and who knows what else, I feel it would be realistic to have people have already overcome their strong sense of tribalism to such a point where, although some bias likely still exists, people are generally not grabbing pitchforks and torches because someone different than them shows up in their town.




Each race has it's own gods and elves hate orcs, orcs and goblins fight, etc.  Tribalism is everywhere in fantasy games and literature.  The gods of these races often instigate it.  The very existence of racial pantheons is proof of it. 

Other threats wouldn't stop tribalism, either.  In real life, despite outside threats like Viking raids and such, towns still protected their own over others and maintained feuds.  Humanity is tribal.  We always have been, and pretty much(since I don't like to use absolutes) all of the world's societies still are.



> My logic is also based on an attempt at realism, right? But I’ve arrived at a different conclusion.




I don't think so.  It's logical from a fantasy standpoint, since fantasy worlds are different and fantasy races could act that way, but it's not realism.


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## Ovinomancer (Mar 2, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Each race has it's own gods and elves hate orcs, orcs and goblins fight, etc.  Tribalism is everywhere in fantasy games and literature.  The gods of these races often instigate it.  The very existence of racial pantheons is proof of it.
> 
> Other threats wouldn't stop tribalism, either.  In real life, despite outside threats like Viking raids and such, towns still protected their own over others and maintained feuds.  Humanity is tribal.  We always have been, and pretty much(since I don't like to use absolutes) all of the world's societies still are.
> 
> ...



Ah, the realism debate, again.  Could you go ahead and define realism for this thread so we can skip all that leads up to that point?


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## Maxperson (Mar 2, 2020)

Ovinomancer said:


> Ah, the realism debate, again.  Could you go ahead and define realism for this thread so we can skip all that leads up to that point?



Not again, no.


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## hawkeyefan (Mar 2, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Each race has it's own gods and elves hate orcs, orcs and goblins fight, etc.  Tribalism is everywhere in fantasy games and literature.  The gods of these races often instigate it.  The very existence of racial pantheons is proof of it.
> 
> Other threats wouldn't stop tribalism, either.  In real life, despite outside threats like Viking raids and such, towns still protected their own over others and maintained feuds.  Humanity is tribal.  We always have been, and pretty much(since I don't like to use absolutes) all of the world's societies still are.
> 
> ...




It’s my attempt to portray a world with such fantastic elements in a realistic way. 

Sure there are divisions in our world. There are also things that unite. Many are enlightened in the way that we’re talking about. I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that things could improve given the fatastic elements that are present in the world and would surely shape it.

Realism as the stated goal is present in both, even if one is drawing on fantastic elements. This is why I think it best to not argue about the use pf the word realism, and instead look at the outcome, and the choices leading to that outcome. 

To me, it’s more meaningful that a GM would choose to respond to PC race choice in such a strong way than it is that his reason for doing so is some attempt at realism.


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## Ovinomancer (Mar 2, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Not again, no.



I agree.  Let's then not use realism as an argument.  It's not really necessary.


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## Maxperson (Mar 2, 2020)

Ovinomancer said:


> I agree.  Let's then not use realism as an argument.  It's not really necessary.



It's factual here, though.  Realism is why it is happening.  I'm not going to avoid the truth simply because you dislike it.


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## Ovinomancer (Mar 2, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> It's factual here, though.  Realism is why it is happening.  I'm not going to avoid the truth simply because you dislike it.



I don't know what the "truth" here is, Max, because you're going to decline to define what you mean by "realism" so all I have that you think it means you're right.  I don't see the result your advocating for as particularly restricted by "realism," but more of whatever lens you use to view the real world distilled by whatever assumption set you're using into a "realism" that means you're right.  It's a word that doesn't really have any usefulness because it's so viewpoint based.  Which is why, if you're going to insist on using it, you need to define it so we can all understand what it is you mean when you say it.  Right now, "realism" doesn't mean to me what it means to you.


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## Maxperson (Mar 2, 2020)

Ovinomancer said:


> I don't know what the "truth" here is, Max, because you're going to decline to define what you mean by "realism" so all I have that you think it means you're right.  I don't see the result your advocating for as particularly restricted by "realism," but more of whatever lens you use to view the real world distilled by whatever assumption set you're using into a "realism" that means you're right.  It's a word that doesn't really have any usefulness because it's so viewpoint based.  Which is why, if you're going to insist on using it, you need to define it so we can all understand what it is you mean when you say it.  Right now, "realism" doesn't mean to me what it means to you.



Scroll up man.  I've already said what it was.  If you aren't going to read, don't blame me if you don't understand.


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## PsyzhranV2 (Mar 2, 2020)

Maxperson said:


> Of course it's realism.  Realism is an approximation of something that happens in real life.  Any such attempt is realism, no matter what.  It may or may not be appropriate based on setting details, but it is realism.]



That's not realism. Realism is an artistic movement spanning across visual art, literature, and theatre that started in the 1800s as a reaction to Romanticism. Realist works focus on the presentation of the everyday, the normal, the mundane, and avoid stylization. Often times, realist works would focus on showing the life and times of the poor and the underclasses. Subgenres of realism include social realism, American regionalism, British kitchen sink realism, Soviet proletariat literature, and French naturalism, among others.

What you're trying to describe, I would call either "verisimilitude" or "historical accuracy". However, the nature of both terms undermines your argument of one truth, one "real". Verisimilitude is but invoking the perception of reality; as long as it feels real, it doesn't matter if it actually is. As for historical accuracy, let's just say that academic history is in no way settled. The discovery of new events, emergence of evidence that challenges previously held theories and models of events, and emergent and conflicting analyses of historical events make it so that trying to present one viewpoint, one telling of history as "accurate" is a non-starter.


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## Maxperson (Mar 2, 2020)

PsyzhranV2 said:


> That's not realism. Realism is an artistic movement spanning across visual art, literature, and theatre that started in the 1800s as a reaction to Romanticism. Realist works focus on the presentation of the everyday, the normal, the mundane, and avoid stylization. Often times, Realist works would focus on showing the life and times of the poor and the underclasses. Subgenres of realism include social realism, American regionalism, British Kitchen sink realism, Soviet proletariat literature, and French naturalism, among others.




This is not how it's used in RPGs.


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## Zhaleskra (Mar 2, 2020)

Here's what I think will happen: the first few times a PC of an "evil" race encounters the setting appropriate backlash, they'll take it in stride. Probably by the fourth time it happens it won't be fun anymore, for players or GM.


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## Nytmare (Mar 2, 2020)

I've only ever run two evil D&D games.  One in highschool that devolved into sociopathic, backstab, PVP-o-rama before characters had finished being rolled.  The other was a laid back Scarred Lands military campaign, where alignment has nothing to do with what the "natural" alignment of your race is, and everything to do with which deity created your race/society/ideals/culture as troops in a century long war.

That being said, the number of NON evil D&D games I've seen over the years that have devolved into versions of that first game is rather shocking, and I think it has a lot more to do with the group going in and deciding ahead of time what they want their game to be about.  That first evil game was all about "I want to be mean and assert teenage dominance over my friends and use the game as an excuse" that second game was "let's play a tight knit unit of behind-enemy-lines spies and blackguards trying to steal an artifact from the good guys."

I've been running a ton of Blades in the Dark games over the last handful of years, and all of them have been stocked full of evil, selfish, self serving characters, and those games HUM along and I never have to worry about them self destructing.


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## uzirath (Mar 2, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> Here's what I think will happen: the first few times a PC of an "evil" race encounters the setting appropriate backlash, they'll take it in stride. Probably by the fourth time it happens it won't be fun anymore, for players or GM.




I agree. This is why I prefer having a discussion with the players (including the GM) to decide what we want it to look like.

This can also be partly handled mechanically without taking lots of screen time. In the GURPS dungeon fantasy treatment (including DFRPG), for example, the default racial templates for half-orcs, half-ogres, and other "barbarous" races includes the disadvantage, Social Stigma (Savage). This includes penalties on most social skills with "civilized" folks and there is a chance that you'll be prevented from entering any given community. This can all be roleplayed out, but it's fine just to roll the dice. If they have to sleep outside, they miss out on the benefits of town (getting healed up at the temple, buying/repairing gear,  etc.) and use up their rations and whatnot as usual. We find that this provides a fun playable model without having to repeatedly roleplay every encounter with suspicious town guards. (Sometimes we roleplay it anyway, but that depends how often we're passing through towns.) The consequences matter and can be a pain in the butt, but the player doesn't have to worry about having their character burned at the stake. If they voluntarily decide to break into the town, then that becomes an adventure in its own right with all the usual perils and possibilities.


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## Panda-s1 (Mar 2, 2020)

Scott Christian said:


> Dumb is a strong word. In the pantheon of D&D, gods decided who would be fair and unjust. They decided who would align (or have a great chance) of being evil. Meaning, they committed evil acts because that was their inherent nature due to the gods, not because of culture. What you describe is culture. And if that's your campaign setting, awesome. But to call other campaign settings dumb because of the deity creation of races seems a bit extreme.



yeah the fact that the fiction of D&D (according to the PHB itself) relies on "the gods made them do it" seems like ????. meanwhile the other "non-evil" races are off the hook because their gods don't do that and gave them "free will", yet somehow none of them tend toward evil as a whole


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## Lanefan (Mar 2, 2020)

Zhaleskra said:


> Here's what I think will happen: the first few times a PC of an "evil" race encounters the setting appropriate backlash, they'll take it in stride. Probably by the fourth time it happens it won't be fun anymore, for players or GM.



And what happens next will entirely depend on how persistent the player(s) is(are) in attempting to bring these "evil" types in as PCs.


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