D&D General Old School DND talks if DND is racist.

[Oofta]

that is the point he wants simple evil bad guys but can't define it in a meaningful way thus it is not a real option.

What does that even mean?

 

[CleverNickName]

Interesting idea but on first thought I can't see a viable way to make that work without it being wide open to abuse.

Also, how do you handle things like Elves, who live for centuries and may have already had several Human-length careers before ever becoming adventurers?

I'm sure I can invent a reason that makes sense. Perhaps the length of time you spend learning your Background is a percentage of your lifespan, instead of a fixed range of years. Perhaps elves require elf-length careers to gain the benefits of a Background. Perhaps all characters have been exposed to several experiences that would qualify them for several backgrounds, but one in particular is meaningful for that character at the time the story begins. And so on.

I probably wouldn't worry much about it. No matter what the reason, all characters start with a Background, per the PHB. If you want to customize a background, say you want to combine Soldier and Sailor together to get a "Naval Officer" background, the PHB already has guidelines for doing that.

 

[Scribe]

that is the point he wants simple evil bad guys but can't define it in a meaningful way thus it is not a real option.

Simple Bad Guys (tm) can be defined easily. That is not the issue. The question is one of Evil. Now @Ruin Explorer has laid out a post outlining the issue that especially (is it more than?) Volo's presented in the characterization of Orcs. That is not about 'Being the Bad Guys.' and its not really about 'Being Evil.'

Its about the flaws in the presentation of Orcs, in the current material, or so I read it.

 

[HJFudge]

What kind of suffering, I think is the question? Like I think most people have a pretty keen innate sense for what's legitimate and what's cruelty, and it's the latter that's going to get you with a by red E for evil on your character sheet.

If you're torturing people for the sake of scaring the enemy, yeah, sorry mate, you probably got E stamped on your sheet. That's how D&D works. It's objective not relative morality.

If you're just ensuring a situation where they have no safe water to drink, no safe food to eat, well, it's unlikely a Good person would do that, but it's probably N on your sheet at worst.

Also, if they're just trying to cause pointless suffering, that's almost certainly Evil with a capital E. For it not to be, there needs to be some kind of legitimate and proportional aim.

Here is where it becomes tough. Because there is an argument that can be made, as distasteful as it may be, that if you can end a war sooner by doing something HORRIBLY VICIOUS...well, consequentialism right? If the consequences of your heinous act is that a war ends a year sooner than it would, saving untold lives, is that not the only right course of action to take?

And this is D&D. You can use a foretelling spell or see the future or even TRAVEL THROUGH TIME. In one game I ran a looong time ago, the enemies ended up being the PCs from the distant future that knew that the party was gonna balk at doing a Terrible Thing, but that by not doing this Terrible Thing they were going to end up costing far more lives and doing far more damage. So they went back and tried to get it done.

It could be argued that NOT doing it, that putting your pride and morals ahead of actual lives, would earn you the E.

The trolley problem is a problem for a reason, because there really isn't a correct ANSWER to it.

PS: Can you tell I really, REALLY don't like alignment?

 

[Charlaquin]

What part of the question? I mean, I'm tired. I'm not trying to ignore or be rude. But there are a lot of monsters in the book. There are what, 20 plus humanoids, not even counting variants. Because there are so many to keep them unique I think it makes sense that they have a niche.

Water down that niche, add enough variety and I'm not sure what you're left with. On the other hand, I want some humanoid monster that's familiar but dangerous to the standard commoner. Creatures I can throw in that I don't need to think about too much, that I don't need to justify. Yes, they're bandits and raiders but they're also more than that.

Something I learned when playing in AL was that it didn't really matter if my player had an in-depth story in my head canon. If I wanted them to stand out I needed some kind of hook. The overweight dragonborn cleric who wanted to start a fried chicken franchise, the happy-go-lucky halfling sorcerer who was a little too quick to want to blow things up, the dwarven brewer. They all had simple hooks that were iconic.

Orcs, to me have a simple hook. They're the ravaging horde seeking destruction of the civilized races which they think are weak. I don't need or want much more than that. They're a genetically engineered race made (and controlled) by a vengeful god; if they were real I'd actually feel sorry for them.

That’s all fine. Like I sad, I don’t particularly care what orcs look like in your games. If you prefer for each humanoid race to have a very clearly defined role and for none of them to overlap, that’s fine for your games. It even makes sense to me why you might prefer that, even if it isn’t what I would prefer. We don’t have to play the same way.

Meanwhile all I get from you (no offense meant) is that why can't they be something else? You think orcs are cool ... with no explanation why. You make the assertion that changing them is good but I can't really get much detail other than that.

So I don't mean to come off as cranky but after 1400 posts this discussion has had some interesting topics. But it keeps coming back to: I can explain what niche they fit for me. They have a "hook". They fill a specific role in the fiction. They don't need to be anything else. The rest? You're asking me to justify your point of view I guess? I'm not even sure any more. Then again, it's been a long week.

I’m sorry if what I want out of orcs is unclear, I just don’t think it’s particularly relevant to the discussion. Because my goal isn’t to make other people use orcs the same way I do. I have my preferences, which I talked very briefly about in the “what have you done with orcs?” thread, but I’m trying to get away from specifics, which I think only serve to distract from the underlying points. What I’m trying to understand - and thank you for trying to explain, despite being tired, I do appreciate it - is why the various humanoids having more diverse roles, (which may lead to some overlap) translates to “humans with masks” to you and many others.

It’s fine if you don’t like for there to be much (any?) overlap between the roles filled by various humanoid races. But why is it that you consider the existence of overlap to make orcs “just humans with masks?” Why does a race having more than a single monolithic ethnoculture make them fundamentally human in your eyes?

P.S. as always the books aren't perfect, some of it I personally find offensive (particularly in VGtM), alignment and culture is spelled out as just being the default but it should be more explicit.

For sure. I think we’re fundamentally in agreement about that basic point, and disagree about what the default should look like, but I’m tired too and it’s clear we aren’t likely to come to an agreement on that point. Right now I’m just trying to understand a perspective I see expressed frequently in these discussions, and have never had explained to me in a way that has made sense to me. It came up earlier in this thread with the whole humans/ogres/centaurs thing, and the person I was talking to about it started getting really hostile and accusing me of using arguments that supported segregation (???) so I disengaged because I didn’t see that leading anywhere positive. But I really can’t understand how anyone could see these various creatures as fundamentally the same except for cultural differences.

If orcs overlapped narratively and culturally with humans, I understand that you wouldn’t like that, and I even kind of understand why. But I don’t understand how that makes them fundamentally the same race in your view.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Or how "Bloodthirsty Barbarians" =! "Bloodthirsty Human Barbarians".

Bloodthirsty Human Barbarians means that they can stop to be bloodthirsty barbarians. Some examples of human bloodthirsty barbarians:
a) people raised in an improper environment (real life problem: children soldiers in Al-qaeda controlled territory)
b) people lacking the oppportunity to be rehabilitated after deviating from the correct behaviour (real life problem: various criminals after a prison sentence)
c) people who were fed propaganda and followed a leader without actually being barbaric themselves (real life problem: Germans after the fall of the Nazi regime).
d) people with no way of surviving than killing and plundering (real life problem: mercenary soldiers after the end of a war, various barbarian nations at the end of the roman empire who were themselves displaced from their lands by other tribes)
e) people who are just defending their homeland and suffering propaganda from the other side (real life problem: Native Americans)

The correct way to deal with all this cases is resolving the underlying issue, not killing them. If you remove free will from orcs, you can assume a default "killing them is the only way to deal wit them". Of course, it will be reminiscent of "the only good Indian is a dead Indian" but the sentence is offensive only because it applies to humans. "the only good coronavirus is a dead coronavirus" is perfectly fine. If your orcs are like demons, illithids and coronavirus, the pludering orc can be killed. If your orc is free-willed and intelligent, like a human, he's doing the exact same plundering as a human, and the correct answer isn't to kill them, it's to solve the problem that made them bloodthirsty barbarian in the first place. Which is probably more challenging and complex that puting a sword through their brains.

Having inherently evil species allows for simple situations and simple fun for when you don't want to deal with the complexities of dealing with human and human-like barbarians, most of which will just be regular people like you and me put in unfortunate circumstances.

I think you're coming at this like, could you have a race which was just genetically-engineered killing machines who are sort of the "dead hand" of a vengeful god and it not be problematic? Yes. But you'd want to do stuff like have them coming out of sludge pits like LotR, or be manufactured by some ghastly machine (surprised Tolkien didn't come up with that actually, seems like he'd have been into it), not be flesh and blood creatures with opinions and free will, which they explicitly are, even, unfortunately, in the "Grummsh's GEKMs" scenario. They should have NOT had free will. They should have been made in pits. They shouldn't have been extremely well-aligned with ultra-racist tropes.

It has to be fixed now. And the fix means de-aligning them from ultra-racist tropes.

By all means create something that fills the same role as you're proposing, or even use Orcs - but I hope you can understand why they're no longer suitable for this role. TSR and WotC screwed up. They created this situation.

If I understand you point correctly, the problem with what is ascribed to orcs currently (and giving them free will was the beginning of the end) is that they are no longer fit for the role of brainless enemies you can kill. But I disagree that the only way forward is to continue going this way because I don't see what niche they'd fit. Sure, the proposal you recommand would make them "like humans, halfings, tieflings, elves, aaracroka, turtles, dwarves..." but we're already suffering from too many human-with-masks-and-infravision. Having so many race was understandable when having a racial monoculture was fashionable: "all X were Y". So if you wanted to create a society of crazy inventors obsessed with clockworks, you made them gnomes, instead of "just humans with a strange cultural focus on invention and blatant disregard for safety." But as we have moved away from monoculture because depicting a race as a monoculture is racist, we no longer need this many races. Some still liked them for ability bonus, but with tasha, you can have your floating ASIs.

If the problem with orcs is that they can no longer be depicted as lacking free-will so they can fit the niche of brainless opponent at the appropriate CR (after you are finished dealing with zombies and before moving to gnolls), are evocative of real-life racist tropes, the best solution would be to remove them altogether, as is the case with many of the races in the game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Simple Bad Guys (tm) can be defined easily. That is not the issue. The question is one of Evil. Now @Ruin Explorer has laid out a post outlining the issue that especially (is it more than?) Volo's presented in the characterization of Orcs. That is not about 'Being the Bad Guys.' and its not really about 'Being Evil.'

Its about the flaws in the presentation of Orcs, in the current material, or so I read it.

In 5E I think Volo's may be the only one that really pushes those tropes, but unfortunately it does kind of hit them square on.

Previous editions have also hit them plenty of times. I think @Oofta was alluding to the Volo's stuff when he said he really didn't like some of what was in Volos.

And yeah it's not "just being the bad guys" or "just being evil", it's that they hit every nasty-as-hell racist trope branch on the way down the tree.

Here is where it becomes tough. Because there is an argument that can be made, as distasteful as it may be, that if you can end a war sooner by doing something HORRIBLY VICIOUS...well, consequentialism right? If the consequences of your heinous act is that a war ends a year sooner than it would, saving untold lives, is that not the only right course of action to take?

And this is D&D. You can use a foretelling spell or see the future or even TRAVEL THROUGH TIME. In one game I ran a looong time ago, the enemies ended up being the PCs from the distant future that knew that the party was gonna balk at doing a Terrible Thing, but that by not doing this Terrible Thing they were going to end up costing far more lives and doing far more damage. So they went back and tried to get it done.

It could be argued that NOT doing it, that putting your pride and morals ahead of actual lives, would earn you the E.

The trolley problem is a problem for a reason, because there really isn't a correct ANSWER to it.

D&D doesn't really do consequentialism. Least not in any reasonable reading of the alignments in any edition I can think of. In D&D no-one is going to buy that you brutally murdering the king's son because it averts a war that causes 10000 deaths down the line, according to your predictions, is "Good" in the alignment sense. In D&D, people are going to wondering why you didn't find a better solution, with all that magic, and why you trusted divination, when absolutely no divination at all, in D&D is, 100% reliable (so throw out the time-travel example - D&D doesn't conventionally feature that kind of foresight - nor time travel, contrary to your bizarre claim that it does).

The sort of total amorality you're describing is typically E in D&D. Probably LE, but E, because it requires you to be utterly and totally ruthless and both inhuman and inhumane. D&D alignment is a measure of personal morality, not how much you "helped the world". That's what the objective part relates to - your objective personal morality, as compared to some eternal compass. It's not a points score. This isn't The Good Place.

What you're describing is someone who make an excellent villain, rather than a PC.

 

[HJFudge]

D&D doesn't really do consequentialism. Least not in any reasonable reading of the alignments in any edition I can think of. In D&D no-one is going to buy that you brutally murdering the king's son because it averts a war that causes 10000 deaths down the line, according to your predictions, is "Good". In D&D, people are going to wondering why you didn't find a better solution, with all that magic, and why you trusted divination, when absolutely no divination at all, in D&D is, 100% reliable (so throw out the time-travel example - D&D doesn't feature that kind of foresight - not time travel).

The sort of amorality you're describing is typically E in D&D. Probably LE, but E. Alignment is a measure of personal morality, not how much you "helped the world".

What you're describing is someone who make an excellent villain, rather than a PC.

D&D does if I want it to?

If I add time travel as an actual thing in my D&D world, does it then cease to be D&D? I wouldn't think so.

But then the question: When does it cease to be D&D? This is very ship of theseus I guess.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

D&D does if I want it to?

If I add time travel as an actual thing in my D&D world, does it then cease to be D&D? I wouldn't think so.

But then the question: When does it cease to be D&D? This is very ship of theseus I guess.

We're talking about what's in the D&D books. You claimed time travel was. It isn't. You claimed accurate divination spells for the future were. They aren't.

You can add to D&D, and sure, you can decide when it's "not D&D", but obviously, if you're going as far in the direction you want to, you're basically ignoring everything that is relevant to this discussion, which is about a more "core" vision of D&D, not some wacky-ass homebrew full of time-travel and perfect foresight, where alignment is replaced by a "goodness score" which fluctuates up-and-down Good Place style, and so on.

I mean, I loved Travellers too dude, it was a great show. It wasn't a great D&D show though.

 

[MGibster]

That’s a valid way to look at it, depending on what “humans with a mask” means to you.

Let's take Star Trek. It's a television show with a vast array of alien creatures including Klingons, Romulans, Bajorans, Kardashians Cardassians, Vulcans, and many, many more. You could, in theory, replace any one of those species with humans and tell the same story because Star Trek is deliberately telling human stories. Humans with masks don't have to be one trick ponies. The Vulcans have their logic but are all of them alike? No. Even in the original series the bad guy Romulans weren't all the same.

One of my favorite original series episodes is "Balance of Terror" where a Romulan warbird encroaches into Federation space, destroys some outposts near the neutral zone, and the Enterprise is dispatched to see what the hell is going on. The Romulan commander is a lot like Kirk. He has a strong sense of duty, a close friendship with the ship's doctor that mirrors Kirk's friendship with McCoy, and cares about the men and women under his command. The fact that this "bad guy" is so much like our protagonist is one of the things that makes this episode so great. You would have a really difficult time making a similar story with an alien we couldn't relate to.

Star Trek also has some fairly alien aliens. In those stories, such as TNG's "The Ensigns of Command," the aliens are more of a plot point that the crew has to deal with in some way rather than the focus of the story. In "The Ensigns of Command," some Federation citizens have colonized a planet that belongs to the Sheliaks a non-humanoid species with no love of humanoids and no compunction about eradicating any who are in their way. Plot B of the story involves Picard trying to find a loophole to give Data more time to evacuate a colony before the Sheliak arrive to destroy it. There's not a lot of interaction between the Sheliak and the humans beyond some brief communication.