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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AaronOfBarbaria" data-source="post: 6920980" data-attributes="member: 6701872">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.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".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.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.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.  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.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."I think we may be reading different books, because that's not quite in line with the impression I get from reading about orcs... well, at least not any more true about orcs than it is true about vikings in some things I've read.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? 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.Yes, that is a fact. So is that accompanying that treatment are entities with Good alignments and a preference that genocide be successfully enacted upon orcs.Um.. that's making my point for me, so I think you may be misunderstanding exactly what it is that I am pointing out.D&D historically presents killing orcs on sight (racism and murder) as being explicitly okay for Good characters to do. Then D&D presents explicitly that, other than in the case of a specific list of creatures that doesn't include orcs, alignment is a choice. Because the reason given for why the former statement is true is "because orcs are evil.", D&D does just as I've said it does and presents arbitrarily drawn lines where some creatures that can choose their alignment can't be killed on sight without it being an evil act, and some creatures that can choose their alignment can be killed on sight without it being an evil act.That's not a "fuzzy gray area" - it makes there no areas but the fuzzy gray ones, because it doesn't ever present anything as definitely white or definitely black.</blockquote>

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