D&D General Drow & Orcs Removed from the Monster Manual

[gban007]

Because there is no play* piece now, for the Orc. The stat blocks are gone. Contrasting with Shadowdark, which has one. And again, there is an Elf in Shadowdark, and Drow (no Dwarf though?!) so...there's that.

Ultimately I blame myself for all this. I fought against the description of Tiefling in the UA, and that was fixed. I should have applied my righteous efforts to the Orc as well.

Ah yep, that is a bit clearer, that play piece hasn't changed so much as disappeared. If they had a statblock even if alignment now good (since alignment isn't for 100% of species as such) would have at least left options on table as such.
I'm one who feels that doesn't need statblocks as such, but that there should have been table giving modifiers to the NPCs for various species, I do feel like that would have been good for new DMs. That way easy to have play pieces for orcs, elves etc.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Skaven.

Gesundheit.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Exactly, nothing about this is 'Evil'.

What about this:
« They act with arbitrary violence, spurred by their hatred or bloodlust. »

 

[Scribe]

What about this:
« They act with arbitrary violence, spurred by their hatred or bloodlust. »

Getting there. Arbitrary, and hatred, start to do some work in shifting perspective.

 

[Gradine]

Survival of the fittest is not evil.

"Since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" - the Melean Dialogue, a dramatization of an incredibly evil event

Survival of the fittest is, from a social standpoint, pretty damn evil. At its worst, you end up with Social Darwinism; from an individual standpoint, it is at best a dismissal of what it is we owe each other; it's the "and I did not speak up"; it's the literal banality of evil. Somewhere in-between you have the above quote; the strong doing what they want and the weak suffering what they must.

 

[HaroldTheHobbit]

What about this:
« They act with arbitrary violence, spurred by their hatred or bloodlust. »

Seems like a desciption of my players party of Good adventurers in action

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Ah yep, that is a bit clearer, that play piece hasn't changed so much as disappeared. If they had a statblock even if alignment now good (since alignment isn't for 100% of species as such) would have at least left options on table as such.
I'm one who feels that doesn't need statblocks as such, but that there should have been table giving modifiers to the NPCs for various species, I do feel like that would have been good for new DMs. That way easy to have play pieces for orcs, elves etc.

No, no, it's all good. New players can just use the orc statblock from the Monster Manual that was printed 10 years ago and has been superseded and will shortly disappear from all storefronts.

 

[Scribe]

"Since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must" - the Melean Dialogue

An interesting read, as a Canadian.

 

[Hussar]

And I am back (again) to the fact violent does not equate to evil, savage does not equate to evil; that sort of thinking is what created many of the horrors in our own past. When one culture viewed another as "savage" or "violent" and assumed (wrongly) it must be evil.

One does not necessitate the other. Let's break out of that cycle.

The way out of that cycle isn’t trying to redeem words like violent to be some sort of neutral word but to stop using those words to describe people.

How is this hard to understand?

 

[Hussar]

I answered that much earlier in the thread. Humans by nature look for patterns and associations. That often leads to us "finding" patterns and associations that aren't really there. We make such connections, ignoring that correlation does not equal causation, all the time.

If literally anything negative is said about a group in the game, we can if we look find a real life group that has had that negative thing said about it. That doesn't make the game group about or connected to the real life group.

This is blatantly false.

The connections to orcs have been cited repeatedly. Yet despite your claims, no one is connecting, say, the descriptions of gnomes to any real world groups. Or mind flayers or beholders.

Either start to show your work or stop repeating this.