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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6920996" data-attributes="member: 4937">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.  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.Doesn't matter.  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.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.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.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.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.Depends on the book.  I've already addressed this, and I hate going in circles.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.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".</blockquote>

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