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

[Desdichado]

A lot of people find the consequences of that too uncomfortable to acknowledge.

Indeed, and given the crowd here specifically, there's no reasonable discussion to be had on the issue. Few people anywhere are conversant in the last twenty years of scientific literature on the subject, nor are they motivated to become so—although they are certainly opinionated on the subject anyway.

But more on topic, like I said; yes, I absolutely have bad guy races in my settings. The main bad guy race currently are called thurses, based on the old Germanic word that gives us Old Norse þurs and Old English þyrs which is the second of half of the kenning that Tolkien referred to when he coined orc from Old English orc-þyrs. They're basically equivalent to Warhammer beastmen. Other than that, bad guys in my setting are bad guys because they're bad, not because they're race X or whatever. But I eschew the majority of D&D races.

That said, I think Charlequin is entirely right in suggesting that in modern printed RPG material and in certain circles of online RPG groups, and probably this is somewhat mainstream, at least at the moment, there's a tendency to move away from calling anyone evil for any reason whatsoever.

 

[Scott Christian]

.. 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.

The answer in the modern campaign is no. Many won't even be scared of the illithid, thinking them as more like Zoidberg from Futurama.

 

[Tinker Gnome]

The answer in the modern campaign is no. Many won't even be scared of the illithid, thinking them as more like Zoidberg from Futurama.

Until he eats their brians.

 

[The Sigil]

The answer in the modern campaign is no. Many won't even be scared of the illithid, thinking them as more like Zoidberg from Futurama.

This grognard found the idea of romancing a mind flayer even existing as a supported option in BG3 weird. “Who tries to find common ground with a member of an alien species traditionally associated with attempted enslavement and genocide of humanity?”

Too many kids growing up having absorbed Ender’s Game and its depiction of the relationship between Ender and the Hive Queen, I suppose.

 

[The Firebird]

In this scene, maybe. For now. In behavioral biology it's becoming much more popular. ~80% of our behavior is genetic. As anyone who breeds dogs, cats, horses, etc. already knew before it was repeatedly confirmed for people too.

In any case, trends are often assumed to be ongoing into perpetuity. In reality, that doesn't happen very often. Just because there's been a change in tastes for what people want their gaming to reflect doesn't mean that there will continue to be. The Overton Window for all kinds of questions like this has been all over the place in all kinds of entertainment media. RPGs are actually lagging behind movies, TV and video games in some ways, which are in turn lagging way behind the cultural zeitgeist overall.

Even if we grant this, and there is ample reason to find it simplistic, it is a far cry from always evil species. Humans have free will and can act against their inclinations.

Now I like having some always evil species, but I think it is really really important to emphasize that they are different species and play by different rules; if they are always evil they must lack free will in a meaningful way. If we can't make that distinction clear then these kinds of species will (and should) be removed from the game.

 

[Staffan]

I think the fatal flaw with a humanocentric world building is the fact that you world has to strictly limit what else is in the world. The classic AD&D model is that humanity is in ascendency, demi humans (elves, dwarves, etc) are in decline and withdrawn from the greater world (gnomes and halflings), by humanoids (goblins and orcs) live in the fringes but form no society larger than roving tribes, and most everything else is either a monster hiding in a dungeon, a creature of the planes/underdark, or a rare one-off (planetouched or the like). That design though creates only one style of world, a pseudo "the of the third age" Tolkien vibe where as humanity gains ascendancy, the fanatical world recedes into myth. The kind of world where dragons are rare, elves are dying out, and most fantasy races can only exist on the fringes of humanity.

I'm not sure I'd call humanity "ascendant" in the Third Age of Middle-Earth, primarily due to machinations of Sauron and his servants. Arnor had gotten split into three different kingdoms and then eaten piecemeal by the forces of Angmar, and Gondor had steadily lost both land and power. Fourth age, sure, but not third.

So for my own part:

1) I don’t have an issue with this in theory, but I prefer to have distinct monsters that have reasons in game for that behavior. The purpose is that I do typically want a creature type akin to Imperial Stormtroopers who function as recognizable villains who my PCs can reasonably expect to act evilly and not worry about whether they can fight them.

The thing about Imperial Stormtroopers is that they are human. Brainwashed and super indoctrinated humans, but humans. So it's eminently possible to have organizations that are virtually always evil without having monsters that are. I believe that's the whole Doylist purpose of the Emerald Claw in Eberron, for example.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Since my early 20s I've always considered the idea of evil as an objectively true concept horrifying. Labeling something as evil is always an excuse to abuse that being. I'm a moral relativist, I think morals are arrived to out of a societal conversation. There is a biological basis for some moral thought, empathy and social cohesion is needed for stable societies and continued evolution, but morals should not be limited to such base reasons. You base morality on lessening suffering and extrapolate from there. With every generation, every technological leap, and every new concept of personhood, you broaden the scope of what being moral is, and what beings are covered by those morals.

It's not like evil as a concept is actually needed for action/adventure stories. If someone attacks you, I think you are justified with responding with lethal force (most of the time. For example, if you have a party of demigod level PCs and get jumped by common thugs you should probably not outright kill them). All an antagonist needs is to be driven by pride, greed, or zealotry to be a threat worthy of attacking.

Monsters can also exist, being uncommon things corrupted by magic to be inherently dangerous and impossible to reason with, but monsters do not create societies. If you have a stable society of a creature, they are not monsters or evil, just alien in thought. Meaning that they can be reasoned with, it's just difficult because they have a fundamentally different way of thinking. At the very extreme end, you have things from another reality that are so completely alien that their existence in the common reality is inherently dangerous. Such beings from untold realms corrupt the local reality in order to exist properly. Such things can't live peacefully together, at best they can just realize that they need to stay separate from each other, but if they thought that they wouldn't be invading the other reality in the first place.

Yes, this! It is so simple. I am always flabbergasted how people feel they need to have always evil things to have conflict in their stories. We don't have those here on Earth, but there hasn't exactly been scarcity of conflict!

 

[Burnside]

This grognard found the idea of romancing a mind flayer even existing as a supported option in BG3 weird. “Who tries to find common ground with a member of an alien species traditionally associated with attempted enslavement and genocide of humanity?”

Too many kids growing up having absorbed Ender’s Game and its depiction of the relationship between Ender and the Hive Queen, I suppose.

Did you play it? The mind flayer in question is amoral and trying to emotionally manipulate the protagonist in any way it can, in this case by faking emotional attraction and bonds. The protagonist doesn't start off equipped with exhaustive knowledge of how mind flayers work.

BG3 is being held up a lot in this thread as an example of the new, progressive treatment of uncommon species in D&D (I suspect mostly by people who haven't played it). In fact, BG3's portrayal of such issues, to the extent that they are present in the game, is actually fairly traditional and in some cases regressive when compared to the official D&D content of the past 5-6 years.

EDIT: Sorry, I see you weren't actually describing your OWN take there.

 

[Umbran]

Indeed, and given the crowd here specifically, there's no reasonable discussion to be had on the issue. Few people anywhere are conversant in the last twenty years of scientific literature on the subject, nor are they motivated to become so—although they are certainly opinionated on the subject anyway.

More importantly though, it would be moot in our gaming context.

Why?

1) That's the real world - we are speaking about fantasies. We don't know that orcs have "genetic material" of any sort, much less specifically have DNA and genetic patterns that precisely match real-Earth's.

2) Saying "80% of or behavior is genetic" is right up there with saying, "We share 98.8% of our DNA with chimpanzees." The devil is not in the amount, but in the details of which behaviors are not genetically determined.

3) When "behaviors" are considered, they are usually in terms of tendencies rather than detailed, predetermined acts. The actual resulting behavior is the result of a complex interplay of tendencies, in addition to that 20% that isn't genetic, such that the result is only predictable in a statistical, broad sense - like that you can guess junk food will get eaten before the healthy snacks will.

 

[The Sigil]

Did you play it? The mind flayer in question is amoral and trying to emotionally manipulate the protagonist in any way it can, in this case by faking emotional attraction and bonds. The protagonist doesn't start off equipped with exhaustive knowledge of how mind flayers work.

BG3 is being held up a lot in this thread as an example of the new, progressive treatment of uncommon species in D&D (I suspect mostly by people who haven't played it). In fact, BG3's portrayal of such issues, to the extent that they are present in the game, is actually fairly traditional and in some cases regressive when compared to the official D&D content of the past 5-6 years.

EDIT: Sorry, I see you weren't actually describing your OWN take there.

No, it’s a fair point. I would not have thought to include the mind flayer romance option in the game because it would not have occurred to me that anyone would actually try it. That probably speaks to what I bring to the table and reveals that I would assume as a designer a range of actions in the game narrower than those actually included.