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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6921483" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ok, good.  I'm trying to explain why your way of looking at things doesn't make everyone else's way wrong, any more than their way makes your way wrong.Are you actually interested in that, or have you already made a decision?   I'm sure if we actually wanted to explain how they became wholly ruined, we could write the myth that would explain that.  It wouldn't be terribly hard to explain how someone with a grudge became evil if that is what we wanted to do.  After all, it's not unusual for people with a grudge to use that grudge to justify all manner of evils.  I'm saying no one knows what they are talking about until orc is defined for a particular campaign world.  You've defined what orc means at your table, which as best as I can tell is a definition that says orcs aren't actually evil but the victims of racist discrimination and elves, dwarves and the like are just like orcs with the only difference being they wear different hats.   And that's fine, and it tells us a lot about how to act morally and honorably toward an orc in your game world, but that definition is applicable only to your table.  At some other table, orcs might have a completely different definition, and operating under that completely different definition it might well be moral and honorable to kill them on sight.That's so ridiculous, I'm going to quote it again.Of course it wouldn't make sense!  Orcs aren't real, and aren't interchangeable with humanity (which is real).   In most fantasy settings, orcs aren't a race.  If one species is carved out of stone and animated by some deity, and another species is formed where some gods blood fell in the soil, and another species evolved from plains dwelling simians, and another species are the offspring when some god had too much wine and woke up next to a tiger, then those species are not divided by artificial divisions like race.  You can't take the differences between those races as being comparable as the difference between to racial groups of humanity, and it would be frankly insulting to try to make direct parallels between fantasy species and particular human racial groups.  When different species have different origins and different natures, then we can't say what the inherent worth or dignity or rights of a species are.  We can however say that humanity all have the same inherent rights and dignities owing to their common creation and universal relationship with each other as peers.  We can't say that about two different species, least of all two different species with wildly different origins.I don't think you can make it so clear cut.  Yes, we've come a long way from Tolkien orcs, to get to something like World of Warcraft.  Certainly, if your D&D game makes orcs parallels to humanity in most ways which it seems to, and makes them explicitly people, then I also agree that killing them for no other reason than they are orcs is 'speciesist'.  *puts head in hands*Are you aware that I've had people come up to me and say that because of my skin color, I wasn't really a person.  That I was in fact a fake person who had been cooked in an oven by Satan in mockery of real people, and as a consequence of my different creation I did not really have a soul?  In other words, they weren't saying that I merely was a different race of humanity, but that I was a whole other species ultimately incapable of inherent good because I was the construct of a dark and evil power - that is to say, an non-person, or an "orc".   This is my real life experience.  I'm not making that up.   So yes, I'm aware racism is a real thing, but I'm talking about imagined fantasy worlds which have all sorts of different things in them that aren't things in reality.</blockquote>

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