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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8530145" data-attributes="member: 7030755">What happens when you humanize orcs and hobgoblins and the like?  For example, maybe the hobgoblin leader is a war mongerer, and the hobgoblin army violent towards civilians in general; but there are also hobgoblin towns with ordinary people, individuals who are uninvolved with the war, or against it, and hobgoblin soldiers who are "just following orders."  Similarly, maybe not all orcs but this particular group of orcs are indeed bandits who are harassing the local settlement and disrupting merchants; and maybe there is another group of orcs that steps in to protect the merchants, or maybe the town is built on a site of importance to the orcs who have been displaced.For the DM, the above requires worldbuilding.  Creating complex factions in your world that are anchored into the setting with established relationships to each other.  What does this faction want?  What does it not want?  What are its methods?  Are there internal disagreements?For the players, doing this prompts roleplaying.  Now the orc or hobgoblin threat is a problem to be solved, with combat being one of many options on the table.I understand that the tactical combat aspects of dnd are appealing, and an overly nuanced narrative can get in the way of that.   But I find the more the players are invested in their characters and in seeing the world through that lens, the less likely they are to default to combat, and the more that fantasy-massacre will feel inappropriate.  Not necessarily because of the real-world analogy, though that's there too, but because they don't want to play characters who massacre sapient beings.  Killing everyone in the hypothetical goblin village is not escapism, because now they feel bad that they didn't come up with a better solution to the problem (and if the DM is doing their job, perhaps the goblin-massacre leads to more problems for the PCs).The 5e monster manual lore and dmg advice, extensive and verbose as it is, doesn't really do much to afford this style of play.  It defines PCs being "heroic" as using their superpower, high magic abilities to progress through a series of balanced encounters culminating in a "boss fight."  My personal opinion is that this is really shallow worldbuilding and unsatisfying for roleplaying.</blockquote>

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