D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Thomas Shey]

There is, of course, slightly more to mind flayers than simple diet though. Mind Flayers enslave other races, even those they don't eat. Now, while you can argue that they have to eat intelligent beings, the torture, slavery and various other ickiness is kinda a damning point. It's not like they absolutely have to enslave intelligent beings to do their bidding.

You can make the argument that the enslavement, unlike the consumption of intelligent beings, is a social thing and says more about mind flayer society than mind flayers, however; if you got a philosophical revolution, they could knock the slavery off.

 

[Zardnaar]

Hard to say about evil in a multi sentient world.
If something like a kind flayer applied the same standards to us that we applied to our food yeah we might be in trouble.

It's not the flesh of the kind flayer that sustains it at least by itself. Maybe they could live on a goodbrains spell but I imagine it would be like eating gruel all day every day.

A hive mind of sentient large ants might also have a very alien PoV.

I still think mind flayer are almost irredeemable due to their society and it would be almost impossible to conceal if an individual mind flayer thought differently. They literally could have thought police.

Eating sentients may or may not be evil by itself eg my ant example assuming they ate any source of protein nom nom.

A strictly neutral self aware hivemind might have no concept of ethics but still be sentient. Their morality might be eat now but are still capable of some amount of sentience.

 

[Vaalingrade]

So, be snarky and insincere in your reponses? Got that, too.

We are still talking about the moral alignment of made up mini-Cthulu's in a framework where torturing a creature until it's good is good, right?

Where we're imagining having our brains eaten and pigs talking and evil cats?

I'm being if anything too merciful to this subject.

 

[Thomas Shey]

We are still talking about the moral alignment of made up mini-Cthulu's in a framework where torturing a creature until it's good is good, right?

Maybe you are. I'm talking about what constitutes evil, not what alignment rules of some incarnation of the game says.

 

[Voadam]

Maybe you are. I'm talking about what constitutes evil, not what alignment rules of some incarnation of the game says.

What the author said once in a discussion of the alignment rules, not what the alignment rules themselves said.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Nothing about this subject can relate to what constitutes evil outside of the game.

In real life, even if objective evil existed, there's no such thing as an obligate intellectivore.

 

[Faolyn]

My understanding of Illithids is that they would consider our vocal languages to be nothing more than the braying of a herd animal. I rather think that at this point we humans give pigs more credit for their intelligence than a mind flayer would have for a human.

I would guess that they are fully aware that humans are intelligent. They probably think humans are pathetic excuses for intelligence, but intelligent nonetheless.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I would guess that they are fully aware that humans are intelligent. They probably think humans are pathetic excuses for intelligence, but intelligent nonetheless.

Like we know that pigs are intelligent, just pathetic compared to us?

 

[Alzrius]

Unfortunately no. There are a number where there is no OCR whatsoever so no search capability and a greater number where it is terrible so searching is fairly crippled by wrong characters.

That reminds me of how, when WotC started putting out those "premium reprints" of old AD&D books several years back, they actually introduced new errors into the books where the scans read things wrong.

 

[Mordhau]

I tend to feel that worrying about whether mind flayers are intrinsically evil as a race is basically just taking a metaphor overly literally.