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

[aco175]

Video games seems to spill over into table-top games. People get bored with video games faster and then want to try other things out and new/younger players want more options for their PC. Combine this with new designers who grew up with this video game play wanting to make more options for players and now we have lots of options, but most being just meh. There is no longer just 6 races and 6 classes to choose from. There is now many, many and then throw in sub-classes and feat to customize the PC.

 

[roger semerad]

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.

 

[Voadam]

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

I don't own the 2024 MM or anything written by WotC after it, but my understanding is that while 2024 MM humanoid NPC stat blocks are written to be explicitly of any alignment and non humanoid type monster stat blocks have default alignments specified in the MM entry the difference between humanoids and nonhumanoids on alignment is not explicit for the difference in type, just in practice from what's been put out in the MM.

Is there an explicit discussion about the nonhumanoids turning into humanoids or explicitly laying out the alignment issue for nonhumanoids being different than for humanoids?

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

The PCs shouldn't, but the NPCs should.

The PCs are adventurers by trade or circumstance; they are exceptional individuals. They stick out from what is "normal" for their race or society; most people do not go out and live a life of violence. So PCs should be aware that they themselves are outliers; psychologically, sociologically and economically; so they should also be willing to give "evil humanoids" the benefit of the doubt and assume that, well, they may be outliers from their society as well.

By contrast, NPCs can represent the nameless, uninformed masses; the equivalent to 21st century humans who still use words like "oriental adventures."

 

[bedir than]

Talk with the people you play with and then play the type of game they enjoy.
If you want every member of a certain species or creature type to be evil so you can kill them on sight play with others who prefer that.
If you want to romance tieflings regularly, play with people who want that.

The game's current default is that thinking human-ish creatures don't deserve to die for the sin of being born.

 

[Voadam]

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.

I see it completely the other way. It is completely in world whether a ward placed on a church from a hallow spell that keeps out all fey keeps out an individual goblin or not. Even casting hallow the caster must affirmatively choose the type for the effect. I completely expect casters with the appropriate knowledge skills to know things in world like that hold person does not work on dragons but does work on humanoids and that there are some things that might individually be in either category such as humanoid and dragon kobolds if both types exist.

The magical effects based on type seem the things easiest to check on a scientific methodology basis as they are sharply defined in a way that can be tested and are not a narrative abstraction.

 

[Alzrius]

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

It's worth recalling that 3E explicitly added always/often/usually qualifiers to alignments, in addition to continuing a decades-long tradition of stating in the introduction to its primary monster book that creature alignments weren't absolute.