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

[MGibster]

Folks, the biggest problem with alignment is that too many people take it way too seriously. It was never meant to be superimposed on the real world as a moral or ethical guide. Alignment works fine in a heroic fantasy setting where good and evil are palpable forces and your barbarian with mighty thews is hacking through the zombie hoard to rescue the merchant's daughter from the sinister necromancer. (Not that you need alignment for a heroic fantasy setting of course.)

 

[Thomas Shey]

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

It doesn't really matter; even if the current version of the used it directly in the definition it'd be irrelevant to my point.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

I wonder if illithids have a taboo against eating the brains of other illithids.

 

[Thomas Shey]

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

Of course it can. All kinds of games don't use alignment, but if they had mind flayers in them working under the apparent limitations they have, I'd still call them evil.

 

[Vaalingrade]

If a mind-flayer is not evil for being an obligate sapient carnivore, then it should reason there would be no objections to a group of mind-flayers opening a farm where they breed and raise thier own sapient beings in pens until subtlety intelligent and then turning into food to sustain themselves on. If all they require is the brain, perhaps they could even sell of the excess meat to other carnivores like ogres. Waste not!

Surely no one finds such a farm objectionable, right?

Again, 'objectionable' is not the issue. Ascribing evil is.

Just because it isn't evil doesn't make it not a threat or inherently antagonistic.

Conflict can exist without worthless moral labels that are apparently inherently unfair if they demand sapient beings to die for their biology.

 

[Doctor Futurity]

Again, 'objectionable' is not the issue. Ascribing evil is.

Just because it isn't evil doesn't make it not a threat or inherently antagonistic.

Conflict can exist without worthless moral labels that are apparently inherently unfair if they demand sapient beings to die for their biology.

If only we had a word for that that was a convenient shorthand. Wait.....

(Edit: okay to be fair there's a lot of baggage with such labels, but such words are defined by the implicit directive of the social contract. If the social contract for a fantasy world which holds deities who impose objective morality on the world and its denizens, then it's hard not to use the terms evil and good when there's a divine power which actually sets such rules; the thing about D&D is that you can design worlds that have subjective morality as well as objective morality....and alignment serves one environment but not the other.)

 

[Remathilis]

Again, 'objectionable' is not the issue. Ascribing evil is.

Just because it isn't evil doesn't make it not a threat or inherently antagonistic.

Conflict can exist without worthless moral labels that are apparently inherently unfair if they demand sapient beings to die for their biology.

And we reach the moral endpoint where we can claim slavery and forced breeding is not Evil, just a conflict of interest between alien brain eaters and sapient brain havers.

 

[Maxperson]

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?

No. That was Gygax's opinion that he used for his personal game and in advice given, but the books do not say that it is good to torture a creature into becoming good.

 

[Maxperson]

Do you think pigs want to be killed? Do you actually have reasonable doubt about this? You simply have arbitrarily demanded that they communicate this desire via means you know them to be incapable of. Similarly mind flayers can deem any communication not done via telephatic hive-mind pointless mooing.

They don't, though. We've seen from some official products over the years that they communicate with other races, which shows acknowledgement of their sentience, even if they still view them as food. Further, the 2e lore says this about Mind Flayers, which shows that they are indeed evil.

"For amusement, they inflict pain on their captives and force slaves to fight in gladiatorial games."

Even if you do take the position that the view us as animals, there is a reason that we prosecute cruelty to animals so strenuously and decry dog fighting and cock fighting.

 

[Gradine]

They don't, though. We've seen from some official products over the years that they communicate with other races, which shows acknowledgement of their sentience, even if they still view them as food. Further, the 2e lore says this about Mind Flayers, which shows that they are indeed evil.

"For amusement, they inflict pain on their captives and force slaves to fight in gladiatorial games."

Even if you do take the position that the view us as animals, there is a reason that we prosecute cruelty to animals so strenuously and decry dog fighting and cock fighting.

The point is that this does not (or need not, or should not) reflect every individual mind flayer