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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8481186" data-attributes="member: 6777737">I think that's going a little far.I definitely think people use "evil races" as a way to paint the bad guys with a broad brush. The thing is, I don't think anybody doing this thinks beyond that. Its literally just red team vs blue team. Whether they will begin the encounter as hostile or neutral/friendly. I don't think people are interested in the morality any more than they're interested in the morality of killing a moblin in Zelda or stomping on a goomba or koopa in Mario. They're red team, and you're blue team, and the game is to fight them. Playing D&D like it's a tabletop video game doesn't mean you're explicitly interested in glorifying immoral actions. Not every game of D&D is necessarily roleplaying at all. Lots of tables are still just running it as a dungeon adventure game.Don't get me wrong. There's absolutely a problem with portrayal of a races as always evil in the materials for the game, especially given the language used. It's a needed improvement to the game to correct that problem. Even so, if you're trying to simulate a real world, you're going to want to avoid all that probably to the extent that your game should not use alignment at all.And we largely still do "always evil" with things like undead -- even sapient undead -- or certain monsters like beholders or mind flayers, even when we've identified "always evil" races as bad. There are still NPCs that are pretty safely always kill-on-sight. In the case of mind flayers, it's probably a good idea to destroy that elder brain nursery pool, too. It's not like the rest of the game is completely without any dehumanizing elements of the monsters. D&D is a game with sapient monsters. That inherently has some odd side effects. Each table needs to draw that line, but the game itself should avoid dehumanizing whole peoples wherever it can.Edit: Clarity.</blockquote>

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