D&D General In 2025 FR D&D should PCs any longer be wary of the 'evil' humanoids?

[Lord Irongron]

.. or were they ever?

Specifically I mean creatures like the tieflings, gith, drow and kobolds.

I come from a community formed in days of 3e, where there were pretty strict expectations on what was an appropriate response to such creatures, but nowadays people find their way to us from D&D podcasts and cartoons, from 5e TTRPG and especially from Baldur's Gate 3. They often have an 'anything goes' mentality and are less likely to reach for the pitchfork, and more for parasol for a romantic evening stroll with the creature.

The veterans decry the lack of boundaries while fresh players want to play ever more exotic concepts. To side with the former sometimes feels like I'm tilting at windmills, and that all one can really do is embrace the change.

This community feels like the right place to get a little insight into how the broader D&D community feels about the topic.

 

[Burnside]

I think it entirely varies based on your particular campaign.

The upcoming two Forgotten Realms sourcebooks should give us an idea of how these species are viewed "canonically" by the general public in Faerun these days.

WotC had input into how these species were portrayed in Baldur's Gate 3. In that game, drow, goblins, tieflings, and hobgoblins are clearly viewed with varying degrees of suspicion by many NPCs, but they are not greeted with a "kill on sight" reaction.

Tieflings have been exiled en masse from Elturel as a result of racial prejudice following the events of Descent into Avernus, but they don't seem to be having much trouble in Baldur's Gate itself (though they also don't seem to occupy any high status positions in the city; we don't see any tiefling patriars, for example, although there are a few tieflings in the Flaming Fist).

We don't see any goblins living in the general population, even in Baldur's Gate. There is one hobgoblin refugee from Elturel whose admission to Baldur's Gate is being stalled due to his race.

There are a few drow NPCs in Baldur's Gate, who seem to be tolerated. Again, we don't encounter any of them in high status positions. The most negative reactions to drow characters tend to come from Deep Gnomes.

Kobolds are rare in the game, encountered in one remote area as hostile scavengers, and there is one peaceful merchant kobold who is part of a circus whose membership includes many unusual beings. The general public seems more or less unfamiliar with the existence of gith.

 

[DEFCON 1]

For my money, all of this comes down to a simple change in philosophy...

Be pissed at what a person does, not at who they are.

There's nothing wrong with playing a game with "evil humanoids"... but just take a few moments to decide what those specific humanoids did to make everyone else decry those specific humanoids as evil. Don't just arbitrarily declare ALL of them as "evil" because "that's just what they are". To me, that's not only silly but also reduces interesting story.

If (general) you as a DM want the kobolds in the area to be seen as a threat to the farmers and villagefolk in the area... then have that band of kobolds do something untoward to those people. Give the PCs an actual reason to go after them. Flesh out the story of the adventure. Which is really something that I think most DMs do already... but by making sure to do this, it avoids players just sort of deciding to go after kobolds for no other reason than just "eh, they're kobolds, they're evil, let's go kill them." It's a design decision for the game to be a little introspective and circumspective towards other beings, rather than being reflexive towards them... something that we in the "real world" would benefit from more often.

 

[Thommy H-H]

I don't really believe there was ever a time when the canonical expectation was that all members of a given species (excepting various Outsiders) would be fair game for merciless slaughter. I cut my teeth on the little-remembered (revised) Basic D&D introductory game Dragon Quest in the mid-90s, and even that had an orc in one adventure whom you could free from imprisonment and would join the party for a bit.

I think the main change in the last decade has been to move away from proscriptive alignments and uncomfortable bioessentialist implications - all orcs being violent and "savage" raiders, etc. - but even back in the day there weren't whole cultures considered irredeemably evil, if only because of the occasional heroic exception. I mean, that's what Drizzt was, right? Proof that the drow weren't "biologically evil". It was only ever players and DMs that treated an evil alignment in a stat block as a license to murder.

 

[Remathilis]

So this is D&D's take on it in 2024, using the Realms as the example.

• Humanoid's have no defined alignment tendencies. They can be as good or as evil as their society and morals allow. A drow from Mezzobaranzan has the same odds of being evil as a human from Thay has. But they also have the same odds of being good if they were both raised in Cormyr instead.
• Some creatures that were previously humanoids aren't. They are monsters, and monsters have alignment tendencies written in pencil, not ink. Goblins are fey and as such embodies the fey penchant for mischief, trickery and cruelty. Kobolds are dragon and embodies dragon pride and greed. Gnolls are fiends and embodies fiendish bloodlust and hunger. Exceptions can exist, but they do trend certain ways because they are "monsters"
• Some groups of monsters live close enough to other humanoids to lose their monstrous traits and actually become humanoids. Goblins living in Waterdeep for generations lost their fey connections and became humanoids, capable of moral choice and unbound by their innate heritages alignment. Hence a goblin baker in Waterdeep is as complex as a human or halfling baker and no longer bound to the mischievous cruelty of the fey goblins. (They also coincidentally become balanced for pc play, but I digress)
• Large cultural diverse areas like Waterdeep and Neverwinter would be full of various species living in relative peace with no larger societal prejudice against humanoids (or near humanoids) but not necessarily against evil monsters. A dwarf barkeep may harbor personal grudges against the drow, but that's not going to reflect a wider societal prejudice in the whole of Neverwinter. They same may not be true if a mind flayer walked though the streets of Neverwinter.

What this does is afford both styles of play some opportunities without fully committing to either. You want slay on sight goblins? The fey type in the MM work like this always have. Want a more nuanced goblin type? Humanoid goblins (using MotM PC stats and NPC stat blocks) fill the role. It's not perfect (especially with the idea of creatures evolving into humanoids if spending enough time away from their monstrous origins) but it's the best compromise we're going to get between "all orcs are evil (some exceptions apply)" and "everything in the MM is protected under the Geneva convention"

Ymmv, of course

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I come from a community formed in days of 3e, where there were pretty strict expectations on what was an appropriate response to such creatures,

I played a chaotic good half ogre back in 1st edition.

I've always seen PCs as a band off misfits who would be treated with suspicion even if they were all human. But how others react to a PC's species is a matter for the world builder, not the rules.

And that's not really changed. What has changed is people are now more aware that other people play it differently to them.

 

[DEFCON 1]

It's not perfect (especially with the idea of creatures evolving into humanoids if spending enough time away from their monstrous origins)

To me this specific part of your very good post isn't even that big a deal, because those 'tags' aren't even used "in-world"... they are purely tag words the game uses to distinguish creatures merely for game effects. Nobody "in-world" on Faerun could or would point to two different goblins and say "That one's a fey, and that's one's a humanoid" because the distinction to them is meaningless. They are both goblins in Faerun... and who knows how long either one has been here or even if one actually arrived here from the Feywild at all... plus there's no "scientific methodology" set up in the world to determine when one might switch (or "evolve" as you put it) from one to the other. Goblins are just goblins. We players only care if specific ones are classified as "fey" or "humanoid" to determine whether Charm Person works on them or not.

 

[Emerikol]

I always considered racial alignment as a broad indicator and not an absolute. Perhaps that is based on a combination of culture and biology. So my players absolutely would consider an Orc or Hobgoblin an enemy on site if they were out "in the wild" but if they encountered one in a big city they'd be wary but not go on the attack immediately. I have wanted to move towards races that are within sufficient bounds to not always be attack on site type creatures. On the other hand, I do not really want to eliminate racial tendencies. Non-Drow Elves for example are the only truly good race in my world. Humans and Dwarves are nuetral. Goblinoids and Orcs tend evil. I'd probably put a Drow one step beyond even that.

 

[TigerDude]

My opinion is if you don't want a world IRL where people are judged by what they look like then don't run a game where they are. I would expect the world to give drow a side-eye, but no different from any foreigner, and probably not in a big city.

 

[Emerikol]

My opinion is if you don't want a world IRL where people are judged by what they look like then don't run a game where they are. I would expect the world to give drow a side-eye, but no different from any foreigner, and probably not in a big city.

In the real world there are only humans and they lean slightly evil. I don't equate fantasy "races" with real world ethnicities. There is only one race in this world. It's human.

So why is a fantasy world with good, evil, and neutral bents all that troublesome. It is the default assumption of Tolkien a beloved fantasy author and world builder.