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But they're still evil to the bone, because screw "beauty equals goodness", amirite?

You may have put a finger on one source of the tension here. Different people are reading "orc" from different perspectives. If we come across a depiction of orcs in the classic "purpose-bred by evil creators to wage war and violence" mode, from a historical-political perspective, we might find...

Allow me to rearrange my last sentence in a way that will perhaps make my point clearer: When orcs aren't the invaders, PCs aren't fighting them.

Isn't this the default setting for orcish adversaries, going back to Tolkien? This is one of the things that bugs me about allegations of colonialist themes in fantasy orcs. Like, in D&D, we all joke about PCs being "murderhobos", but how often does it really happen that the orcs are just...

A design obstacle that D&D 5E in particular faces is that it's trying very hard not to be the sort of RPG where you can get lost in customization options. Wherever possible, it presents players with simple, concrete choices: pick a race, pick a background, pick a class, pick a subclass a couple...

The letter Z represents the /t͡s/ affricate in Italian, German, and probably several other languages. Why some of these names should use those languages' value and others not remains mysterious, however. (Mezzoloth is the only one that looks plausibly Italian.)

Ask a question, command "answer". You only get a six-second answer, but that can be a lot of information if you choose the question right, it's a hell of a lot quicker and less morally objectionable than torture, and it works on creatures who may be inured to pain (I generally rule torture is...

You don't need torture, you just need command, which is conveniently also on the cleric spell list.

I'd agree that Law isn't the same thing as the local legal code. But if it isn't, then the fact that a character follows the local legal code doesn't tell us whether or not they're opposing Law. And it presents us with the further problem that characters probably know what the local legal code...

By what measuring stick do we evaluate a standard as too low, too high, or just right? What works worse when the definition is not optimized as you recommend?

There are any number of ways to be chaotic without actively opposing the establishment. Salvador Dalí was bizarre and eccentric and never once met a rule that he felt applied to him, but I'm not aware that he tried to bring down the Spanish government at all. (Which, given the Spanish government...

Are characters chaotic only if they oppose the establishment itself? That seems kind of limiting. And it has the odd implication that they cease to be chaotic if they ever actually win. Are chaotic characters obliged to break laws even if the laws are good? That seems pretty limiting too. If...

Even in modernity there's a split. You're describing the Kevin Costner or Russell Crowe take on the character pretty well. When you get to something like the Errol Flynn or Disney version, though, he may still be loyal to the King and breaking John's laws because they're illegitimate, but he...

Sure. It goes back to my point that Robin Hood's character and motives are wildly dependent on the adaptation. I'm not aware of Saxon-Norman tensions featuring in the story prior to Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. The chronology doesn't really line up -- these are 14th- and 15th-Century ballads, by...

The interesting thing is that in the early ballads, he kind of does oppose feudalism. Not in the systematic, ideological way we might expect of, say, a 20th-Century communist revolutionary, to be sure. But the story hadn't yet been fixed in a specific historical context: he isn't opposing Prince...

Or, y'know, the actual scout class in Complete Adventurer. But the problem with both, in the 3E paradigm, is that they don't have full BAB, meaning our wannabe Robin Hood can be outshot fairly easily by any fighter.

Or, especially in Robin Hood's case, rogue (scout). Robin Hood on paper is as much roguish as rangerish anyway -- he's a thief, a trickster, and a master of disguise, just as much as he's a guy who dresses in green and lives in the woods.

Yeah, that's what I was getting at. It's not just "discipline" in the modern sense of the term -- if it were, fighters would be lawful too, and that's never been the case. It's adherence to a specific set of religious or quasi-religious rules.

Eh, there's plenty of traditions like that in the West, too, reflected in D&D in the paladin class. Having a monk but no martial artist is kind of like having a paladin but no fighter. It definitely misses out on some character concepts, but it doesn't alter what the monk class is or is supposed...

Yeah, Robin's alignment, like any other character's, depends on the particulars of his characterization more than general observations about "the system". The "default" Robin is certainly chaotic: a merry outlaw outfoxing a pack of authority figures while living a life of freedom in idyllic...