D&D 5E I thought WotC was removing biological morals?

[Cadence]

I have no idea what mobiles, slimes, and cactaurs are like in Zelda. But I wasn't aware that you had the ability to negotiate with, outsmart, or sneak around such things in that game.

Even in aligned Moldvay (where one is instructed to play creatures by their alignment) you could sneak around and outsmart the "Chaotic" things, and I assume try and negotiate with them (just like one could with evil humans).

 

[Faolyn]

No, but D&D has alignment, I like Alignment conceptually, I like the Gods, and the Planes, which revolve around alignment as a system underpinning the cosmology. So I use it, in D&D.

No, because those settings do not have the same system and cosmology or mythology. Other games don't have alignment as a core component.

So, alignment is important in D&D because alignment is important in D&D.

Yeah, that doesn't work for me.

No, they also have different rules for character generation, and special rules to further differentiate between them. I want more of those things, not less.

So why aren't an orc's traits enough for you?

If I'm playing an Orc, I want it to be fundamentally different in experience, from playing a Gnome, which would again be different from an Aasimar, which again would be different from a Lizardman.

I want there to be hard, crunch differences, built into the game systems.

Again, I like systems, like Alignment.

Alignment isn't a system, it's a descriptor. There's no actual rules associated with it. Even the evil and good spells no longer detect evil and good.

If you believe me finding the belief that Fantasy is racist at its root to be a ridiculous position, to be racist, then I suppose you can just join the few others on the forum that have insinuated I'm a racist.

Because no, I do not believe having ASI or Alignment being generalized across most/many/'usually of x' a species racist, when the books outright tell you you can change it, and official settings are published to prove the opposite.

Y'know, if more than one person has insinuated that you're a racist, maybe you could benefit from taking a step back and examining your beliefs.

 

[Scribe]

So, alignment is important in D&D because alignment is important in D&D.

Note, I said "I" more than once. It's important to me.

So why aren't an orc's traits enough for you?

Note: I said I want more difference. So no. The traits are not enough.

Alignment isn't a system, it's a descriptor. There's no actual rules associated with it. Even the evil and good spells no longer detect evil and good

And that's a shame to me. Thankfully it's easy to add some crunch back into the rules if one chooses to. Removal of alignment would make that just more work for me to do, and I don't pay Wizards to do work for them.

Y'know, if more than one person has insinuated that you're a racist, maybe you could benefit from taking a step back and examining your beliefs

Or perhaps people too freely label others without considering what they are reading, as you did.

Me not believing that Fantasy is racist at its roots, is enough for you to come to the conclusion I'm possibly (and no I don't believe it's even in question to you) a racist.

 

[Cadence]

Because no, I do not believe having ASI or Alignment being generalized across most/many/'usually of x' a species racist, when the books outright tell you you can change it, and official settings are published to prove the opposite.

It always feels bizarre to me that someone would be upset that Goliaths are stronger than Halflings. Maybe that can just be a size thing though (S/M/L have different ranges of Str and Dex?). I do understand why having that for PC races can take away the fun for some people. But if there was a race of rock elementals, intelligent gorillas, or quicklings, it kind of feels like they should get a higher con, str, and dex, respectively, to me... Are there no differences in PC race choices that are far enough apart that they should have different physical stat ranges (what if we allow pixies and hill giants?).

The mental stat thing seems more subtle/problematic to me, both in having real life human beings play different characters well and in how insults/stereotypes about intelligence have been used against real people for everything from insults to eugenics. (So, if the orcs aren't evil, but are just less intelligent, should they be marginalized?... feels icky.) But it feels strange that there can't be any races that live for centuries that use that time to be smarter/wiser/something mental than a race that lives decades? How does that play out when they're both starting characters? Why has the "adolescent" elf only learned as much as the "adolescent" human in spite of being a lot older? Do elves learn slower? Why do they start learning the same speed when they hit adventuring age? Can we have some "humanoid" species that are chimpanzee level and others that are are human level intellect? I understand how having real world human groups derided by comparison with other primates makes this ... bad. How are actual chimpanzees and apes described in terms of intelligence? I think my favorite thing here is to just nuke Int & Wis and replace them with something like awareness/perception/whatnot1 and willpower/psyche/whatnot2.

As far as alignments, it seems like calling Redcaps evil (or giving them a paragraph of description that does the equivalent with more detail) is a strange thing for anyone to be upset about. Same for xenomorphs and liches and demons. It feels silly to me to need a sentence saying "but you never know, maybe there are a few <insert this type of demon> that are saintly". In some worlds I can see dragons being just fine as aligned going with color, but I can see others wanting more ambiguity. I think I'd like anything that's "a person" (in terms of hold person, charm person, playable as a PC) to have free-will and not have a pre-determined race-wide alignment. Good Western movies and shows seem to require that all of human ethnic groups X and Y and Z don't have obvious group-wide alignments. But if it's fantasy Western with undead... I don't particularly need good zombies. If Gnolls are literally created by demons and don't have free will in the usual sense, then is it bad to have them evil?

 

[Alzrius]

It always feels bizarre to me that someone would be upset that Goliaths are stronger than Halflings.

That one confuses me too. I mean, I get that one of the draws of a tabletop RPG is playing whatever you want, except it's not whatever you want; there are rules and limits, which means that certain things are going to be either sub-optimal or completely unavailable. You're not going to be able to have a halfling who can regularly beat goliath bodybuilders in contests of Strength because, presuming that the goliath bodybuilders have Strength 20, that's the best Strength score you're going to be able to get as well, which means (issues of proficiency and other salient modifiers notwithstanding) that you'll end up with 50/50 ties in terms of opposed Strength checks.

 

[Micah Sweet]

By today's standards.
Welcome to the privileges of time and philosophical development.

I'm pretty sure we're not allowed to look at things from a non-modern perspective anymore.

 

[Scott Christian]

Is your percentage of Neanderthal DNA relevant to deciding this?

True fact, according to my DNA test, I am in the top .1% of Neanderthal DNA. I never thought about it, except for the odd sleep study or hair on my back article that comes out every now and then. But now that I hear it, I guess Europe was stolen from me. So all you French, English and Portuguese, get out of there.

Oh wait... that's the other 99% of my DNA, literally by 1/3 each.

Huh, guess I can't win.

 

[Scott Christian]

Maybe they should be. Or maybe a future MM should be divided into "monsters," "humanoids," and "beasts" sections.

Say that monsters are unnatural intelligent beings that--due to being creations of gods, the result of ancient curses, being truly alien beings, or similar effects--are Mostly [Alignment] and mostly perform a specific role. There's monsters that are of different alignment and who choose different roles, but those are fairly rare. Some of those monsters may be of humanoid form, but they are not biologically or psychologically humanoid. That's more like a camouflage than anything else.

Humanoids are people. They likely will have biological tendencies towards a particular mindset but not towards good or evil. Orcs may be temperamental or prefer showing their emotions physically or by shouting them loudly, but are no more going to be murderous than anyone else is.

Beasts are animal-intelligent beings that are either natural (real world) or fantastic (griffons, etc.). Thus, some of them may be vicious predators or highly and violently territorial, but they're not evil.

Edit: There should probably be a different term than "humanoid" here, since not all people are necessarily humanoid.

This is a good idea @Faolyn . But I might like it because that is how my campaign world is set up.

 

[Remathilis]

The question is, why are the orcs your PCs encounter generally evil? Could it be because the book says that orcs are evil and you've decided that there's plenty of good orcs, but they're all off-screen where nobody will ever see them? If so, how is that any different than saying that all orcs are evil?

And there it is.

It was always going to get to this point. It wasn't enough to say "there are also good orcs" but also how many good orcs there are and where they are. There has to be villages of good orcs, goblin shopkeepers, gnoll city guards, hobgoblin farmers, etc. Expand that beyond humanoids and you suddenly have harpy postal delivery, minotaur dock laborers, medusa stonemasons, gargoyle priesthoods, vampire innkeepers and ogre teamsters. At best, you have Ravnica or Droaam from Eberron. At worst, you have made every race basically humans in outlook. Either way, you have put a stake in the heart of classic "Keep on the Borderlands" style play and will force every classic setting back to redesign.

It was never going to be about removing alignment from the stat block, it was always going to end with a massive rewrite of the game design and its settings.

 

[Charlaquin]

Why?

Please, be very, very specific. Can you point to exact texts and comparisons? Otherwise, it's all vague, "Well, it's kinda icky" stuff that never goes anywhere. The issues that we CAN deal with right now are very, very specific and have very clear cut evidence. If it's just, "Oh, well, biological morals mmmkay" stuff, I really, really don't care.

It is because of biological essentialism. I get that you don’t care about that, that’s fine. But kindly don’t tell people no one cares, when a lot of people, many of us participating in this very conversation, do. Deeply.