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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Var" data-source="post: 7964039" data-attributes="member: 7022819">Morals are a construct of the society that births them to begin with.Civilizations and time periods have very different ideas of what i.e. a person is.Slavery would be a okay for almost everywhere of the Roman times. A good horse could easily beat the value of several peasant lives during medieval times.Compared to that all of us (I assume?) got raised with a different standard for human life, so it's quite difficult for us to comprehend what it must be like to not even think of a social group or caste of other human beings as a person.Stark differences in physical appearance make it a lot easier on the mind, hence racism is easy maintenance as far as mental constructs go. Dehumanizing your enemies/hated opponents by targeting the differences in between them and you has been a go to tool since forever.This exists on all levels on the social scale. We're pretty good at applying the same arguments to tell people about that neighbor/town district/city/county/country etc we oh so hate.Applies nicely to "all Orcs are CE period", no they're not. That's statistically speaking nigh impossible.Religion is another big pillar of socially accepted values. Classic human "we" against "them" is ingrained in our genes, probably since we have a lizard brain. Even birds and fish are capable of shunning their own or resorting to murder their "family" (outside of for food).Translating that to D&D it translates to all sapient creatures.Stamping all Orcs as CE is forgetting that they tend to be raised in a CE environment. Sure that's where 99% of them get raised and survival of the fittest leads to the vast majority to be just that, a fit for their given environment.Give Orcs a couple hundred years of isolation, peace and quiet in fertile lands in your setting and they're possibly going to change a heck of a naughty word lot. Nothing to war on and subjugate, with a much easier path of less resistance available.Or go for a tribe of Orcs turning their back on pillaging and raiding because they turned out to be formidable herders and could live much more comfortable focusing on that for the last few generations. They're not realistically going to be violence free or all Lawful Good. But they might worship a Neutral god of nature and the wild, gravitating around True Neutral alignment on average.Branding everything with an alignment and never looking back is at best boring.There's evil angels for heck's sake. The stories may claim someone Zariel got "corrupted" which suggests she didn't get a say in the matter. As long as some sort of free will is involved there is nothing but potential as the starting point for a intelligent creature. The chances for a Chaotic Evil cannibal unicorn (by choice and circumstance) might be abysmally small, but it might still exist. The same way there might be a Lich too bored to plot machiavellian plans towards world domination. And instead found joy (or at least could kill some time) creating a thriving economy based on undead labor for the village he fondly remembers from his meatbag days. Much like a regular human would start an ant farm (or in modern times PC sim game) and then gets oddly attached to the little buggers.D&D is a game and tends to pretend its multiverse is a lot more ordered and binary that it should be. Think for 5 minutes about all the nuanced wack naughty word we can see happening every day across the world, good, bad and merely worth musing about. Why should the D&D worlds not have the equivalent of tigers adopting goats or humans trying to save sharks from extinction?Everything has a natural tendency towards Neutral in my book - Neutral being the pure potential to unfold into literally anything you can imagine given the right circumstances and opportunity.</blockquote>

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