D&D 5E Next session a character might die. Am I being a jerk?

[Lanefan]

Not all Goblins and Orcs are evil. You can literally play one as a PC and be LG.

Not in my game, you can't - even though I have some variance in the alignments of pretty much anything with intelligence (with the listed alignment being the cultural average), that doesn't make them PC-playable.

Any LG Orcs would be severe exceptions within the Orcish culture (and thus probably killed by all the CE/NE Orcs before reaching adulthood if raised in an Orcish culture). LG Goblins would be even rarer.

 

[Lanefan]

I don't think it would be an improvement as you'd have to use your first action to attempt to negotiate every single encounter to see if you've run into the unusual neutral or good armed orc or goblin only to find you're getting smacked with a sword or struck by a arrow most of the time. You'd be adding an element of philosophy to the game which I think is much more interesting if done outside of a game rather than in it.

I ran this game once. It soon became hilarious.

Very low-level party gets near an adventure site and starts meeting far more Orcs than they'd been led to believe would be around. They capture and question a few and find out there's two competing groups of Orcs here, each group following a different deity. One group of Orcs holds the dungeon (actually a temple) and the other is trying to invade, and the party throws in with the invaders.

Problem is, whenever the party met a roaming band of Orcs they'd have no way of knowing which group those Orcs are with, as there's no clear identifying marks or dress. So, it soon became SOP that whenever the party saw some Orcs they'd charge, all the while screaming out "Who's your deity?!" in Orcish; and if they got the "good guy" answer the PCs would screech to a halt and drop their weapons!

Needless to say, this tactic sometimes led to some very confused Orcs!

This was 25 years ago, and the line "Who's your deity?!" still gets laughs around here.

 

[Mistwell]

Rubbish. Read the rules bro.

Literally any response on this forum, about any topic, which includes the sentence you just responded with is not worth responding to because it's being offered in bad faith.

You have fun with your game.

 

[Oofta]

Again with "the rules say orcs are sometimes good" or "are usually evil". Where? Barring specific campaigns?

If you decide that orcs are just ugly humans more power to you. But the MM says they're CE monsters created by a vengeful god as tools to destroy the other races. They "wage an endless war on humans, elves, dwarves, and other folk." So if you see an orc, you are (by default) seeing an enemy combatant out to kill you.

I get that this is a whole other topic and I don't want to get yet another thread shut down, but I've never understood why it's okay that some intelligent, sentient beings get a free will to be whatever they want to be but other do not.

Maybe we need another word than racist. Formists? Look-like-human-ist? Source-ist? WarCraft-itis?

 

[Fenris-77]

It provides the black and white, good versus evil, setting that a lot of fantasy thrives in. None of the characters in LotR were worried about killing orcs because the orcs were evil. Undead fall into the same boat although people tend not to have a problem with that because the undead generally don't resemble free-willed sentient beings so much. Knowing that a being is evil, knowing that you're on the side of good, knowing that your cause is righteous is a big part of the appeal to fantasy as it involves a certainty that we never get in real life.

I'm not super interested in some half-baked moral relativism suggesting that this isn't the case when it clearly is. Obviously a given table can choose to play things differently, but I draw the line at retconning the history of the game. No one is a better person because they are concerned about the ethical dilemma presented by a scattered selection of non-CE Orcs.

 

[Hoffmand]

I like to write alot of encounters that a player or the group will have tpk if they initiate combat, because they are specifically designed to be solved through diplomacy and some other form of problem solving. So I don’t think you are being a jerk for letting a player die. I think the threat should always be there so that when a player makes a mistake that he will die. Even if that mistake was 2 encounters back or 2 sessions back.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I get that this is a whole other topic and I don't want to get yet another thread shut down, but I've never understood why it's okay that some intelligent, sentient beings get a free will to be whatever they want to be but other do not.

Maybe we need another word than racist. Formists? Look-like-human-ist? Source-ist? WarCraft-itis?

The best word we have is "pagan," I suppose. It's really not that uncommon to find religions that explain other tribes as the creations of different gods, or being corrupted by an evil god, or spawned when like a god's jealous wife hit him in the face with a cursed papaya or something.

The "problem" with the typical D&D setting is it is based on a polytheistic, mythic cosmos being actually real. The races of D&D are not actually all evolved from the same subspecies of extinct great ape, and the people's belief that the world was formed by gods in conflict, with each race being a reflection of the god that created it, is not actually an attempt of a prescientific people to explain the world around them.

It's actually the way the world works. And, if you really work with it, it does have moral implications that diverge from the liberal humanism we largely take for granted in the Anglophone world.

But honestly, I wouldn't overthink it, because D&D is a very silly game. Smash door, kill orc, get pie.

 

[Flamestrike]

Literally any response on this forum, about any topic, which includes the sentence you just responded with is not worth responding to because it's being offered in bad faith.

You have fun with your game.

You too.

Next time dont make sweeping statements like 'This is how the game is played' like its some sort of objective truth. It may be how your game is played (your Good aligned PCs are totes down with some light genocide) but it isnt the way I play it.

 

[Flamestrike]

Not in my game, you can't be a LG Orc

Wut?

Any Orc raised in a good aligned society would have just as much inclination to be good aligned as any other species.

Are your Good aligned religions not at all interested in redemption and salvation and mercy?

 

[fearsomepirate]

Wut?

Any Orc raised in a good aligned society would have just as much inclination to be good aligned as any other species.

Are your Good aligned religions not at all interested in redemption and salvation and mercy?

Yes. For humans. When it comes to the abominations wrought by Hextor, Yeenoghu, Erythnul, Gruumsh, etc, my good aligned religions are interested largely in smiting.