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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 9544633" data-attributes="member: 7030755">If orcs etc in one's setting are demon-spawn monsters with no will or subjectivity, then posing them as inherently evil is consistent worldbuilding.  However, as soon as your orcs (or goblins, kobolds, etc) have children, families, cultures, society, free will, and the like, questions about their supposed inherent morality come up.  Some of you probably agree with Gygax's infamous <a href="https://www.dragonsfoot.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=11762&start=77" target="_blank">"nits make lice"</a> post.  And yes, this has come up in games I've been in.  Not so much as a kid, where we just wandered into the dungeon and rolled dice (and sure, there's still room for that kind of game).  But getting back into dnd as an adult, with other adults, we found that we took world building and setting construction more seriously, teasing out the implications of what it would mean to have Orc societies, whether it makes sense to have those societies be inherently evil and treated as fodder for combat/murder, and, yes, the real world parallels of treating foreign cultures as barbaric and evil.The upshot is that once something like an Orc society stops being inherently evil, your game becomes more interesting, because now they are a faction with specific wants and needs, not monolithically evil (or simplistically good).  And they can be put into a dynamic setting with other factions, each with wants and needs that go beyond one-dimensional morality.</blockquote>

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