Well, insofar as entire species of sentient creatures should not be considered monsters, yeah.
D&D General All Dead Generations: "Classic Vs. The Aesthetic"
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Well, insofar as entire species of sentient creatures should not be considered monsters, yeah.
Nefermandias
Hero
People shouldn't be resolving all of their conflicts by means of extreme violence too... That doesn't stop us from having a whole book describing in detail how to murder people including hundreds of spells like fireball and cloud kill (chlorine gas anyone?)
So yeah, I respectfully disagree with you since it's a game.
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pumasleeve
Explorer
orcs, goblins, and the like are inspired by folklore that essentially viewed such things as evil spirits that inhabited the wilds. Tolkiens middle earth was also influenced by his Anglican worldview that included moral absolutes as good and evil and that free thinking entities can be wholly devoted to one or the other. IE- angels are good and fallen angels or demons are wholly evil, elves are wholly good and orcs were corrupted elves, originally. D&D took these creatures largely from Tolkiens vision and kept this concept of moral dedication. Thus, here you have the origins of the "evil" monstrous humanoids, completely divorced from postmodern political views.
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Interestingly, we are told that Wild Beyond the Witchlight is written so that there's nonviolent paths through the various conflicts...
And just last night I played an entire session of a game set at a dinner party. Not a single physical conflict arose. It was Victorian society, so it was as tactical as any battlefield, just without people bleeding out in the dirt.
Do we have to repeat the discussion of how, "it is a game/fiction," doesn't excuse things any more than, "it is just a joke," does?
You don't need to justify that which you do at your own table, but WotC does have to consider what position they want to take in broader culture.
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Yora
Legend
The thing where it starts getting weird when being part of "the evil ones" is not because of ideology or allegiance, but simply because of birth.
The mob hitmen and imperial stormtroopers can easily be filed away as "evil" because they are assumed to have had a choice in becoming gangsters or soldiers. They have become part of this group because they are evil.
When you identify groups of faceless minions that get killed in droves, those circles should not be drawn as "humans" and "orcs" but as "raiders". It's not the fact that they are orcs that makes them villains, it's the fact that they are raiders. This makes them exactly the same kind of villainous as human raiders.
Being orcs is not the issues. Being raiders is.
But to make that work, you have to convincingly communicate that not all orcs are raiders. And that takes more than one Drizzt or Worf.
Nefermandias
Hero
Sure. I was just disagreeing with that. I really think that since it's constrained to fiction, some things that wouldn't be acceptable in real life can get a pass. Please don't ban me.
TheSword
Legend
Dragons, beholders, neogi, aboleth, grell, mind flayers, kraken, cloakers…
I can see no good reason why these things shouldn’t be categorized as monsters. Smart as you like but definitely monsters by any normal description of the word.
TwoSix
Dirty, realism-hating munchkin powergamer
Generally, it boils down to the simple question: "If I see it, do I need to double-check before I murderize it?"
If we want to move orcs to the "double-check" list, I'm cool with that. I don't think D&D should move mindflayers and beholders to the "double-check" list.
Vaalingrade
Legend
Aside from dragons, all of these are weird alien creatures at right angles with the world and dragons have this weird issue where D&D can't decide whether they're animals or supergeniuses so they're both instead.
Yes. It won't be better if we get a replacement of "evil race" by "evil cultures". The trope that is deemed unacceptable, "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" is not made better if you replace Indians by "the Brukenskull tribe" instead of "Orcs".
Actually, it's questionable that Stormtroopers are evil. They are being ingrained from birth and Order 66 proves that this kind of control was extreme. A point could be made that they are unaligned -- unable to make conscious choices because of their conditioning -- or that they are just victim of an oppressive regime that pressed them into service through no conscious and informed choice of theirs, much like children soldiers, who might or might no be responsible for their acts.
We do that all the time. We play Monopoly without endorsing the evil of wanton capitalism, we play Pokemon without endorsing unethical treatment of animals, we root for Danny Ocean's team without actually supporting robbing the Bellagio in real life. But WotC can choose to go another path and purge their content from questionable real-life ideas. They already did this for other ethical questions: most settings have very few gender-based discrimination, very few xenophobia and communities are much more diverse and tolerant than we see in real-life. In Eberron, the countries of Khorvaire had an international agreement were they rejected slavery and extended this rejection to some sentient artificial creature -- which is an ethical debate we have yet to have in real life.
I'd say that mindflayers are very, very much like you and me, but their diet consists of human brains. They see our brains as food as much as we see cows as barbecue. Yet there are vegans humans: as soon as there is a single "good mindflayer" that can live by eating, say, chimps brains, we'll have to put them on the double check list.
As a result, Dragons are clearly on the double-check for me, and yet were put on the monsters list by @TheSword.
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