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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6920905" data-attributes="member: 4937">No.  This implies that good and evil are relative things.  D&D's system asserts absolute morality.  So the Good aligned creatures aren't deciding what is Evil.  It's simply is evil.Granted, this system falls apart when the DM can't even manage a semblance of a morally consistent universe, or trivializes morality to just which hat color you are wearing.I didn't gloss over it.  But, if you want me to address it, then I suggest that that is not what happened.  Self-defense was explicitly not involved in the scenario introduced by the OP.  If you want to come up with something that excuses the killing, it can't be self-defense.  We didn't get very many details regarding the events that led to the scene, but we certainly got enough to rule out self-defense.If you want to bring in Catholic iconography, you shouldn't be surprised if mucking around with the cosmology without changing the iconography results in nonsense. Earlier in the thread I said that for each setting, you needed to define orc.  Tolkien, who basically gave us the fantasy orc, very much is also a good example of this.   Tolkien tried to blend Catholic theology with Norse theology.   The existence of orcs, trolls, and balrogs gave his Norse inspired heroes a foe which they could face without showing any mercy to and thus, allowed them to be gloriously violent without moral gray areas.  (Compare the very different treatment in his works to fights between 'free peoples', and the very different treatment Théoden and Aragorn give to defeated human enemies.)   However, after finishing Lord of the Rings, Tolkien became a bit disturbed that he'd inadvertently overly humanized the orcs, presenting them too much as independent beings with their own personalities and even the ability to imagine resisting the forces of evil.  This disturbed him so much, that he started rewriting his cosmology to ensure that orcs were firmly established by their creation as being incapable of good - essentially turning them all into puppets of Sauron and Morgoth.  If he could, he probably would have retconn'd his Lord of the Rings orcs to be less like people, or otherwise changed the presentation.How you define orc matters.Depending on who they define orc, they may well be right.  However, I know in my own game (which as I said, doesn't have orcs, but uses goblin-kind in all the same roles), goblins may be PCs, and are generally treated by players with the same consideration they'd give say a human or an elf encountered at random in the wild.   However, depending on how you define orc, some other table where they are killed on sight might not be wrong.   Neither is superior to the other.  What's wrong is not ever thinking this through, and as Tolkien noted in his own work, not thinking it through may end up producing minor flaws or unintended consequences.</blockquote>

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