Consequences of playing "EVIL" races

[Lanefan]

Right. But half-cows, half-swans and half-trees aren't hardwired into the game.

Half-trees are, in a way: they're called Dryads. There's also half-cats (Tabaxi), and doubtless some others I'm forgetting right now.

Yuan-Ti are more or less half-snakes and while individuals might only be able to interbreed with Humans or with Snakes (as well as with other Yuan-Ti, of course), as a species they represent a pretty strong Human-Snake link.

Half-demons and half-dragons are marginal, at best.

Which means Tieflings and Dragonborn are...what, exactly?

Like it or not, they do seem to have become hardwired into the more recent versions of the game; which also rather hardwires in the notion that Demons and Dragons can interbreed with Humans, in order to produce those species. (having Tieflings and Dragonborn be viable reproducing species in their own right avoids a lot of this headache in that it means the actual Human-Dragon/Demon interbreeding only needed to occur enough times to produce enough variance in offspring to make the new species viable; and nature took over from there)

The point is that it is another point of connection with humans. Orcs don't appear to require any supernatural power or shapeshifting to procreate with humans.

Nor do Elves, it seems; nor Dryads, nor a boatload of other mythical creatures.

In my own workings-out of what can breed with what (which I did many years ago in rather great detail), I have Orcs being more or less the genetic melting pot: an Orc can breed with almost anything humanoid that's willing to breed with it.

 

[Michael Silverbane]

I'd like to address a double-standard that seems to occur on a lot of threads like this:

How come people have a problem with Orcs being predisposed to evil, but they don't have a problem with Beholders, Demons, Mind-Flayers, Red Dragons, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, Vampires, Hell Hounds, etc. etc. etc?

There are a couple of common threads among some of these creatures.

The first is between Mind Flayers, Vargouilles, Ghouls, Shadows, and Vampires. These are creatures whose existence requires them or compels them to eat other sapient beings.
We (people in the real world) have a very strong aversion to being eaten, and a very strong taboo against eating people. So, people who eat other people are deemed evil. This carries over into our fantasies.

Beholders, Mind Flayers, and Vampires are creatures who have the innate ability to override someone else's will. This hits on another of our real-life fears and taboos. That being loss of control of the self, and the deprivation of someone else's agency.

A third common thread among creatures that are typically portrayed as intelligent evils are those creatures that have filled that role through tradition and symbolism. Dragons are traditionally described as being creatures of pride, wrath, and avarice. That is, they were designed to symbolize those evils, which we see in ourselves. To an extent, orcs have historically fit into this category of evils. They have been used in fiction to represent our own tendency towards rash action, overconsumption, or whatever.
It seems to me that this type of creature is the most likely to be de-evil-ed, that is, we see that dragons are prideful, but also know that pride can be overcome, because we experience pride and (sometimes) overcome it ourselves.

Demons and Hell Hounds are, of course, made of evil. You can't very well build a house out of matches and be surprised when it burns down, no matter how smart it is.

 

[Maxperson]

Half-trees are, in a way: they're called Dryads. There's also half-cats (Tabaxi), and doubtless some others I'm forgetting right now.

Yuan-Ti are more or less half-snakes and while individuals might only be able to interbreed with Humans or with Snakes (as well as with other Yuan-Ti, of course), as a species they represent a pretty strong Human-Snake link.

If you're going to count Dryads as half-tree, then I suppose minotaurs would be half-cow.

 

[Celebrim]

If you're going to count Dryads as half-tree, then I suppose minotaurs would be half-cow.

I advise anyone who thinks I was just being flippant to read the ancient Greek myth on the origin of the minotaur. The details are not appropriate to the board.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Umbran]

But in the setting, people are potentially interfertile with cows, swans, dragons, demons and trees.

Dragons and demons, sure. Livestock and the arboretum... not so much. D&D has largely avoided the bestiality.

In myth and fantasy, pretty much anything crosses with anything else.

He's not talking about myth and legend. He's talking about how real-world people think - why to THE PLAYERS AND GMs have a thing about orc morality, and not dragon or demon morality?

It's a weak argument and it's a racist argument.

But, Celebrim... we invented racism*. So, arguments based on how humans are kinda racist should not be dismissed out of hand.




*Insofar as no practitioner of racism before humans could put a name to it, and choose to not do it.

 

[lowkey13]

*Deleted by user*

 

[Celebrim]

@Celebrim, please try to read my words without ascribing motives to me.

If you didn't want to be perceived as equating orcs with black people, perhaps you shouldn't have brought up "the curse of Ham". So what is this, the clown nose off, clown nose on defense? You decided that a religious reference used in defense of enslaving African people was so relevant to this discussion that it could be introduced in a defensible manner. Now you are trying to pretend you didn't do that?

Right. But half-cows, half-swans and half-trees aren't hardwired into the game. Half-demons and half-dragons are marginal, at best.

Tieflings, dragonborn, etc. To a certain extent, nothing is "hardwired into the game". Orcs haven't existed at my table since 1989, when I made the decision to drop orcs from the game entirely because they were redundant with the more interesting goblin-kind (the three caste species of goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears) and I didn't need to type of monstrous humanoids that were predisposed to evil in one game world. How much something is a part of a particular game is up to the DM.

Orcs are not real. They are a function of our imagination.

Yes, you should keep that in mind. The fact that orcs are not real means it is very difficult to assert anything about them as a factual statement. So much of what you are claiming about orcs is not based on lore, but based on your choices about how to see orcs. So yes, it is a valid statement to say that if you make orcs basically human but with a different appearance, then they probably are basically human in violition, rights, and dignity. But this conception of orcs is just one of many, and it tends to be a recent one - I'd say one that was mostly post World of Warcraft when Orcs were made an equal playable race to humans, and thus needed very much to have a backstory with equal violition, rights, and dignity. But because orcs are not real, you can't say that that is the one right and true way to imagine orcs.

(Moreover, that tendency to see orcs as a metaphor for human tribal people groups is I think an incidental and somewhat unfortunate side effect of the World of Warcraft presentation as well.)

Where have I evinced any opinion about alignment?

By saying that "There is nothing in any version of the rules to suggest that they are automata, incapable of choice." you are evincing an opinion about alignment. If something is always a particular alignment, then at least with respect to moral choice, they have no real volition. It's only recently that we're seeing orcs presented in a way that suggests that they might only be usually evil, and so have some choice in the matter. But the classic "are orc babies evil?" argument predates the "usually" and "often" categorization, nor does even the "often" categorization preclude concluding that orcs are divided in alignment among LE, NE, and CE as a way to make later editions backwards compatible with different tables answers to that question.

The mythic particulars describing the aetiology of orcs are unimportant.

The particulars of the aetiology of any living thing are absolutely important to determining its rights. How and why something came into being is probably the most important determination of how to classify something and determine its rights and dignities. Between aetiology and sentience, there aren't a lot of obvious things that determine personhood, or the nature of personhood. (If you'd like to claim aetiology doesn't matter, only sentience, then I have some hard science fiction examples for you.)

The fact that their status is rooted in some mythic event, or has an irremediable divine cause, is the point.

What point? Even in the real world, it's not unusual to see the whole of humanity has having an "irremediable divine cause". For example, the Declaration of Independence famously declares, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights". So yes, the creation of something matters, or at least is widely perceived to matter.

 

[Celebrim]

Dragons and demons, sure. Livestock and the arboretum... not so much.

Half-dryad is a thing. In fact "half-X", where X is pretty much anything in the game is a thing.

D&D has largely avoided the bestiality.

For obvious reasons, but it hasn't avoided importing every single monstrous or potentially monstrous being of myth, often without explanation, leaving DMs to try to grapple with the origins of all those myths. Moreover, while obviously D&D has avoided certain "adult subjects", the mythic and magical setting implies that things work pretty much like you'd expect in myth and not biology. And this is reinforced by the existence of a half-X just about everything.

He's not talking about myth and legend. He's talking about how real-world people think - why to THE PLAYERS AND GMs have a thing about orc morality, and not dragon or demon morality?

This is a change in topic, but I don't see how it relevant. As he admits himself, orcs are not real, so what the players and GMs think about orc morality at any particular table, is in some real sense true for that table.

But, Celebrim... we invented racism*. So, arguments based on how humans are kinda racist should not be dismissed out of hand.

Ok, where in this thread have I ever implied humans aren't racist? Heck, I even implied my fantasy humans were in some senses more racist than the other people groups in my world. The fact that humans are racist doesn't make his argument less weak. It certainly doesn't make it less racist.

 

[Celebrim]

Wisely so, I'd say. I mean, that's not exactly something that I think large segments of the market are clamoring for. "D&D Sixth Edition: Now, with MORE Bestiality."

Then again, it would have made the Satanic Panic in the 80s more fun! "Hey, think the Satanism is bad? Wait until you check out the deviant sexuality!"

Agreed. But I'm not the one that tried to ascribe the ability to breed with humans as being some particularly important and salient point. Yes, I do recognize that it would be an important and salient point if biology mattered and genetics and DNA could be assumed to be part of the setting. But it is absolutely relevant to point out that this attribute is cherry-picked to support one particular (highly distasteful) view of what an orc is, and isn't in any way an attribute particular to orcs.

What are orcs? Ultimately they are something D&D ended up with, through a couple of steps in the imagination from the root inspiration of evil fairies, in the same way elves are a couple steps of imagination removed from good fairies.