D&D 5E Orcs and Drow in YOUR game (poll */comments +)

[BookTenTiger]

I handle orcs and drow the same way I handle all races. Any race can be any alignment. Lawful good orcs. Lawful good drow. Chaotic evil drow. Lawful evil orcs. Doesn’t matter. I tend to have lots of factions so there’s plenty of examples of different races from most every alignment.

I've always made homebrew settings and I've always been this way too. Different factions or communities may trend towards certain alignments (though I rarely use alignments at all these days), but no race is typically any alignment.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don't have Drow in my homebrew. No one has asked to play one, and I don't care about them personally.

My orcs can be any alignment, and different groups lean different ways. Most of the ones my PCs have encountered are neutral.

I will keep them as is moving forward, and while I welcome new perspectives and inspiration from 3rd party publishers, I have no interest in what WotC is doing right now.

 

[jmartkdr2]

To add a little nuance to my answers:

In both cases, there are good and evil cultures for both orcs and drow. Elistraee (or however it's spelled) has been a figure in the setting for a while, and non--Gruumsh orcs are a thing, although they're just vaguely druidic in religion.

 

[Jacob Lewis]

My players see them as they always did: as walking bags of hit points, XP, and loot.

Come to think of it, that's how they see most creatures.

 

[Blue]

In my current game, there have not been any mention of orc at all. They likely don't exist. Drow are, at player request during Session 0, a created race to fill the home and mines of the Dwarves after they had been genocided (also at player request) to mine the literal Bones of the Earth. They are not cruel, nor spider-related, nor Lolth-worshipers. They are a bit hedonistic, and take their off-time very seriously.

So rather different then "traditional" orcs and drow.

 

[Baron Opal II]

I don't have orcs or drow in my campaign.

 

[Stormonu]

Always Evil.

Except PCs and certain NPCs as the DM decides. That's not the same to me as "Typically".

 

[Minigiant]

As a DM I like options

• Evil Humans
• Evil Dwarves/duergar
• Evil Elves/drow
• Evil Halflings
• Evil Gnomes
• Evil Orcs
• Evil Dragonborns
• Evil Goblins

This lets me throw different challenges at the party. I can use STR orcs with Str based tactics. Or Dex halflings with DEX based small tactics. or DEX based elf/drow with DEX based magicky tactics..

And having good orcs allows me to give the party all kinds of enemies. Orc allies = High damage frontline. Elf allies = Strong Range. Dragonborn Allies = No problem with minions. Drow Allies= Enemies can be taken alive.

 

[Maxperson]

The results make sense in the context of the wording of the poll, however, I would wonder if there's really a big difference between "any Alignment" and "typically Evil", and indeed, what people meant by that. It also excludes "always Evil". My experience is that some people will say "any Alignment" when 90% of a race in their game is one moral alignment, and others will say "typically Evil" when actually a large faction of the beings who are non-Evil play a huge role in the campaign.

Personally I barely use Orcs, because they've always had issues in D&D and aren't interesting to me, but I've always made heavy use of Drow and they've pretty much always been of all alignments. Even if the bulk of the society was "Evil" I wouldn't think of the race as "typically Evil".

So I think any awful lot of this is perspective.

To me the difference is that "any alignment" means that the race is not predisposed either through race(demons/devils) or society(drow/orcs) towards any particular alignment or alignments. Humans are like that. "Typically evil" would be orcs, drow, and other races that either through genetics or society, are mostly evil.

 

[DarkMantle]

To me the difference is that "any alignment" means that the race is not predisposed either through race(demons/devils) or society(drow/orcs) towards any particular alignment or alignments. Humans are like that. "Typically evil" would be orcs, drow, and other races that either through genetics or society, are mostly evil.

Emphasis mine
Yes, this is what the survey presupposes, that "Any Alignment" means no predisposition and "Typically Evil" does mean a predisposition, for whatever reason in your own game, similar to 5E monster manual terminology