D&D 5E 50th Anniversary and beyond

[Oofta]

I believe I found it.

This is the inciting question, with his first response immediately after. Here is his first follow-up I think is actually relevant, and contains the first reference to the offensive idiom, with the next 8 to 10 or so posts following that up with more detailed answers.

If that's what you're referencing, I entirely disagree with your reading. I think Gary is very explicitly talking about the alignment system in the game and what a paladin would believe would be Lawful Good. It reads very much as, "this is how I would run the scenario," and not remotely like, "this is how the real world works." I have great difficulty taking what is said there and and calling it Gygax's personal philosophy and not just how the game is set up.

There are plenty of other examples that show Gary as clearly a man of his own generation at best, but I just don't see it here unless you're reaching for that conclusion from the start. Even then, I don't really think it's all that useful to take everything we don't like about the game and sweep it under the rug of, "Gary Gygax wasn't a very progressive individual." It feels like trying to exonerate it. I'd rather just take the game as it is or was, with blame falling on players who missed the problems as much as on any misguidance of the creators. That's kind of what that platitude about "it was wrong then as it is wrong now" means when you take it to heart.

At a certain point you run into trolley car philosophical moral dilemmas though. I'm not saying Gygax was right (I disagree with a lot of his ideas and I don't think I would have ever wanted him as a DM), but it is just a game where impossible things may be possible. Things that have no relationship to the real world.

I don't think there is any real answer. It's like the question of going back in time to kill baby Hitler*. If you know that X is wrong but if you do not do X, then greater evil Y or Z is absolutely guaranteed happen, there is no good answer. Of course you can always change the game, say that Y or Z is not absolutely guaranteed but then you're changing the rules. You've decided to add a 3rd track for that trolley to travel down.

If you want to add that 3rd track for the trolley car problem so that there's a "better" option, that's fine. Personally I just never put the trolley car problem in my games because this is a philosophical debate that never, ever, ends. Unless, of course, there's a 3rd option like taking a great risk and derailing the trolley car with the PCs on board.

*The real answer to the baby Hitler dilemma to me is that if you can time travel just go back 10 months before Hitler was born and slip his mom some long term birth control.

 

[ART!]

Changing monster and NPC spells to Actions would be incredibly helpful. They'd have to rejigger things like Counterspell, but it seems worth it. I do something sort of like this already anyway; when facing the task of running a monster with more than a couple spells, I will find a statblock of a completely different monsters that approximates what the first monster does and doesn't have spells, and I'll use that! I used a Beholder once in place of an NPC wizard, and it worked just fine.

 

[Haffrung]

It's still two years away and we've only seen a few hints of some of the proposed changes. Most of these, by the way, are responses to cultural and social feedback from the community.

Yes. But I hope WotC doesn’t fall into the trap of regarding people who are highly engaged on social media as representative of the player base as a whole. Few of the people I’ve gamed with over the years are active on forums, twitter, etc. And they’re largely oblivious to the controversies that seem to preoccupy WotC (and RPG social media).

So while I don’t think significant numbers of people will stop playing D&D if the proposed changes are made, I doubt those changes will be responsible for significant numbers of new players either.

 

[Bolares]

But I hope WotC doesn’t fall into the trap of regarding people who are highly engaged on social media as representative of the player base as a whole.

WotC has a pretty good grasp on who is representative of the player base as a whole. They are producing best seller after best seller for over half a decade now. And they do A LOT of surveys and market research to know who is buying and who would buy their books.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Since there is a lot of fuss about my first comment:
No. Nit everyone does murder children. But whatever you do. Painting a complete humanoid race as evil is a convenient way of not having moral dilemmas whatever they are.
That was and is a common thing in the real world. Dehumanize the enemy so that you can not treat them as humans.
And that is not a thing I want to encourage even in a fantasy setting.

 

[Mannahnin]

I guess the thing thing with orcs is their history in Middle Earth which obviously influenced D&D. Orcs were an unnatural species made by the Dark Lord Melkor from tortured Elves. In Middle Earth it is clear cut that they are irredeemable evil creatures. D&D orcs in the Forgotten Realms are influenced by Grumsh which corrupts their nature although this is certainly more of a grey area compared to Middle Earth

This is incorrect. If we look at the issue "RAW", Tolkien did not write in LotR that they were irredeemable, and in fact we see examples of Orcs acting like intelligent people with personal agendas and free will; albeit nasty people. The implication is that they are not necessarily so.

If we look it it "RAI", Tolkien wrote explicitly in his letters that they were not irredeemable. Quoting Umbran from a prior discussion that I was looking at recently:

Tolkien himself specifically and explicitly avoided calling orcs irredeemable. In The Letters of JRR Tolkien, Letter 153, he says of orcs:

"They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making — necessary to their actual existence — even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.)"

(Emphasis mine)

The irredeemability of orcs is thus a D&Dism, tied to simplified and absolute alignment, which is not a Tolkien thing.

Tolkien hated war, but was not impractical about things. Whether they are technically redeemable or not just isn't the issue - they are on the other side of a war.

As others have observed, the idea that Orcs are always and inherently evil was not canon in D&D at least by the time of 2nd Ed AD&D.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

I believe I found it.

This is the inciting question, with his first response immediately after. Here is his first follow-up I think is actually relevant, and contains the first reference to the offensive idiom, with the next 8 to 10 or so posts following that up with more detailed answers.

Actually that was always how our lawful good paladins reasoned... And that is why I did not touch lawful good with a 10 foot pole and always went for neutral good.

To me lawful good was always (borderline) evil, as they did not treat tgeir enemies any better than the evil guys.

 

[Mannahnin]

(duplicate)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Since there is a lot of fuss about my first comment:
No. Nit everyone does murder children. But whatever you do. Painting a complete humanoid race as evil is a convenient way of not having moral dilemmas whatever they are.
That was and is a common thing in the real world. Dehumanize the enemy so that you can not treat them as humans.
And that is not a thing I want to encourage even in a fantasy setting.

Insisting on nuance and shades of gray for one's fantasy time makes the game less fun for some people. And those people aren't monsters for feeling that way. So we need to find a way that allows for good guy/bad guy situations that doesnt offend your players.

 

[Mannahnin]

(duplicate)