NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mercule" data-source="post: 8022673" data-attributes="member: 5100">I snipped a lot, but I left what I think are the major turning points.What does it get us? Moral plot immunity. Orcs (or whatever) are bad because they are. We don't have to wring hands about whether we should parley or just kill them. Orcs are bad because those are the metaphysical laws of that universe. Orcs raised in a human society may learn to pretend better than other orcs, but they're still inherently evil in a way that can't be changed. And, there aren't immutably good races because they would serve no story value.That doesn't mean that orcs must be irredeemably evil in every D&D setting. If you want a lot of gray and moral quandary, where every time you raid an orc lair, you need to wring hands about whether you should have negotiated or tried to "redeem" the orc brutes, then you should, by all means, do so. There is nothing wrong with that. But, it's also not BadWrongFun to have orcs be low-level toons that don't provoke any soul searching when you kill them. They aren't a real-world race and, really, they don't have any particular similarities to any real-world race. They're nothing more than an embodiment of all the brutish nastiness that exists. The real world concept of racism is literally impossible to apply to them, in this form, and it would be nonsensical to try.I enjoy Greyhawk and play it as irredeemable orcs. I love Eberron and the nuanced orcs. My preference is probably the morally gray because I'm really not into the whole murder-hobo schtick. But, D&D really is geared towards murder-hobos, so having a race that was made up just to be mooks makes a heck of a lot of sense, especially when you talk about defaults.I'm really curious who is not feeling "included" by a made up, non-human species being imagined as being hardwired for traits that are considered evil. The whole conversation just seems... strange. Why is it more than a shoulder shrug?</blockquote>

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