Apparently, the answer to that is that:
Doesn't apply to the intelligent, civilized, but not necessarily civil, species I am mentioning because orcs (to use that singular example of the multitude) aren't "'Evil' with a captial 'E'" as presented by D&D.
That only became absolutely definitively true with the arrival of 3e, which gave species alignments in a nuanced manner "Usually Chaotic Evil", rather than "Chaotic Evil". And in any event, this does not mean that in a particular campaign orcs are not evil with a capital "E".
For example, in my homebrew world, goblins and all their kin are explicitly people. But for example, gnolls and minotaurs are explicitly monsters. There is no such thing as a good gnoll. Gnolls aren't people. They are essentially small demons. They have no free will apart from their demonic creator. They are all always nothing more than lesser servitors of a dark god. Gnolls you not only may kill on sight, but you should kill on sight. They are evil with a capital "E". Goblins are only "usually evil". There are NPCs that believe goblins are evil with a capital "E" and no longer people, but again, at the risk of putting campaign level spoilers on things, they are wrong.
And yet you've effectively just told me the reason why it is acceptable for a Good-aligned character to kill an orc on sight is because "it is an orc".
For about the 20th time, define orc. If orcs are defined like gnolls are defined in my game world, then yes, it is perfectly acceptable to kill an orc on sight because it is an orc. But if orcs are people, then it would not be acceptable.
I don't find there to be a time-line presented in the OP that can be used to establish that this wasn't all - in-character - over in a matter of seconds, even though we are presented with that the DM, but not necessarily the player, was sure that all fight had truly left the bouncer and his plea for mercy was not a ploy to try and regain the upper hand after losing his sword.
Doesn't matter.
What's baffling to me is that you think anything is "obvious" about a situation when you know you've only heard minimal details from one side of it.
I've heard enough. All the red herring details people keep inventing don't overturn what we already know, and besides which are less pertinent (being invented) than the facts we already know.
Irrelevant to the discussion at hand. All celestial and fiends, even the ones that are unique to D&D rather than being vaguely based upon some real-world mythology, are said to behave in the same way where alignment is concerned - devil is just the one used to clarify the example.
I know, but in the source material it is possible to have a fallen angel, but a risen devil is impossible. This departs in to religion, but suffice to say that the symmetry here is a bit weird, and I'll leave it at that. Point being, devils are evil with a capital "E", even in and I would say especially in 5e, since the language you quoted to me seems to explicitly overturn certain weak and badly thought out ideas we saw in 2e/3e.
You are confused if you think I said it did. The purpose of me bringing up the alignment being part of the essence of celestials and fiends was to illustrate that, according to D&D 5th edition (at the very least), other creatures are not treated as though their alignment is assured to be what someone might assume it to be.
Sure. But you can't expect someone who has been playing for 20-30 years to have their setting and conception fully set by the fluff in 5e.
I.e. an orc isn't a fiend or a celestial so you can no more assume that it is evil than you could assume of a human, so it is jarringly strange that what many people agree is evil to do to a human (such as kill him with his own sword at the end of a bar fight) isn't considered evil to do to an orc, with the reason given being "because it's an orc."
Again, define "orc". Is it a person that is merely usually evil but capable of good? Or is it a monster incapable of any sort of noble or charitable thought? Yes, 5e may make this explicit, but earlier editions generally left that decision up to the DM.
I think we may be reading different books, because that's not quite in line with the impression I get from reading about orcs...
Tolkien is definitive here. In Tolkien, they are explicitly small demons, wholly ruined and wholly unredeemable. Whenever Tolkien wrote anything that might lead someone to conclude otherwise, he rued it as a mistake. However, there is really only one section of the LotR where the orcs show any sign of being people, and even that could be explained away with careful world building. Now, later, as people began to treat them more and more as people, you get conceptions like Blizzard Orcs, where the orcs are explicitly people. In between, you have orcs defined in different ways by the individual DMs, to different degrees.
Also, does it happen to say somewhere in all that stuff that you've read about orcs that I apparently haven't that the behavior you describe isn't just the result of exchanges of an eye for an eye for so long that nobody remembers who actually took the first eye, but both sides are blaming the other?
Depends on the book. I've already addressed this, and I hate going in circles.
I ask, because the 5th edition Monster Manual entry for orcs tells me that way back in the day, Gruumsh was just looking for a place for his creation (orcs) to live, and the other gods mocked him for not getting to a place before it was claimed by another god for that gods creation (specifically mentioning mountains/dwarves and forests/elves) - so he retaliated, and feud has continued since.
None of which necessarily proves that orcs aren't evil with a capital "E". All it proves is that at one time, Gruumsh might have had something like a legitimate grudge. Whether he or his creation is wholly ruined now is a different question. But again, we aren't addressing merely how 5e defines "orc", but how it is has been variously defined over the course of D&D's history in different campaign worlds.
D&D historically presents killing orcs on sight (racism and murder) as being explicitly okay for Good characters to do.
Again, define orc. For some definitions of orc, granted perhaps not the 5e one, killing orcs on sight is not racist or murderous. Indeed, orcs are almost certainly not the same race as humans in most D&D worlds, and thus even to compare it to racism is to be facile, even if orcs are "people". We don't have a word for being 'specist' because we don't have multiple sapient species in this world, but in this case we need such a word if we are to start talking about the wrong of discriminating against orcs if orcs are "people".
