Charlaquin
Goblin Queen (She/Her/Hers)
It’ll vary from table to table, setting to setting, campaign to campaign. Point is though, whatever role they may have in a given game, not having a single monolithic ethnoculture doesn’t make them “humans with funny skin color and bad dental work.” Orcs can be made to feel meaningfully different than humans without being culturally monolithic, let alone being always evil. So, “I don’t want my orcs to be humans with funny colored skin and bad dental work” is not a logically valid reason for insisting they be always evil.At a high level the various races in the PHB represent different tropes. Elves are back-to-nature free love types, dwarves are nose-to-the-grindstone rigid rule types, halflings are happy-go-lucky idealized country folk and so on. What do orcs represent if they don't represent the barbarian at the gate? The evil forces that want to destroy civilization, use their ferocity, might and numbers to cause fear and chaos by destroying everyone else? What trope, what role do they represent if that's not their niche?
Now, there may be other reasons to have always-evil orcs in your campaign, not the lest of which is “I want orcs to always be evil in my campaign.”
Case in point. That’s a logically valid reason to make orcs always evil in your campaign. I don’t think it’s a good reason to make orcs always evil by default in the official WotC published books.If the majority do represent that trope of evil barbaric hordes, then I think logically people should be biased against and fear any orc that walks into town. I don't want prejudice to be a big part of my game.
Well, you did make an argument that “not all Nazis were evil.” I got what you meant, and I don’t think you were intending to argue Nazi apologia, but it’s not like that critique is coming out of nowhere. I haven’t seen anyone calling you a racist, but if you are seeing that, I would recommend reporting their posts.Funny. Over just the past few pages it's been implied that I'm a racist and a Nazi apologist.