No they are not.
I'm Canadian. I grew up beside First Nation reserves. I grew up learning about First Nation's cultures. We shared classes. My great great grandmother is First Nations.
Good for you? Did you learn about forced re-education and state schools where kids were beaten for speaking their native languages, in Canada, within living memory? Most Canadians I know only learned of those things when the internet helped them see stories from First Nations folk who lived it.
You are taking the worst possible view, and saying thats the view still held, and that its somehow Orcs = Natives.
Its just flat out wrong.
No, that isn't what people are saying. I don't understand how it is possible to not understand that "the language used in this book is almost word for word the same langauge used to describe Indiginous people by the people trying to annihilate and/or enslave them, and thus makes people very uncomfortable, especially when the language is being used to describe a people that the author knows players want to play as a character" is not the same thing as "orcs=Natives".
It's genuinely hard for me to even fathom how a person could manage to not understand the difference.
It might be worth a moment to consider that as an RPG, the very essence of the game is to kill things and take thier stuff rather than negotiate peace treatise and cultural exchange with them. Maybe the whole premise of the game is inherently flawed and should be jettisoned?
This is absurd on it's face.
How about portraying tribal orcs as people who CAN be reasoned with?
That's literally what most of the people you're railing against are asking for.
Does that mean that no story from now on is allowed to have a villain? Because whatever group that villain belongs to will bring out the response, "How DARE you suggest that people of (villains group) are villains!"
You come across with these hyperbolic nonsensical queries as if you are intentionally just trolling the conversation.
Literally no one is suggesting anything remotely similar to "no groups can be villainous".
How about not portraying them as 'tribal'.
How about we as gamers and game designers rub two creativities together and give them a culture that isn't directly ripping off folks who have been traditionally brutalized by our culture?
Well, no. Not portraying them as exclusively tribal, yes. Not including tribal communities at all, no. We don't fix racism in a game by whitewashing it.
And like I said, Kingdom of Many-Arrows, they are already (how old is that arc now?) moving away from this.
They did, until 5e came along and the Kingdom fell apart because orcs are savages who can't build a proper society, apparently. Not at all an uncomfortably familiar thing to read for someone whose people have been described that way in texts books they were forced to read as children in schools where they were punished for speaking their native language.
I dont have issue with 'in game/universe' questions of racism, genocide (how many goblinoids have we killed in our lives folks as players?) I'm ONLY saying, that to equate in game monster races with actual people, is a bridge too far.
And yet, it is very very clear that Volos and other parts of 5e and older lore does so.
I'm saying that if we are going to advocate that the game is based around colonial tropes of using violence against inferior species to obtain thier riches, maybe the game should stop and we can all go onto something else?
But it isn't. I've literally never seen a single group play that way, I can't think of any actual play shows that do so, I've seen no traffic on social media that suggests that the wave of new players who are defining the game for themselves now play that way. DnD is becoming, year by year, a game about playing heroes.
Or maybe we should force penalties for resorting to violence (such as earning no xp for encounters that end in combat) and bulking up on nonviolent systems, classes and spells as an alternative.
I dunno. Like most of these threads, we argue about the problem and then shrug when solutions are called for...
Violence isn't the problem, the direction and nature of the violence is. 5e tried to go more old school than 3.5 and 4e with the depiction of "monster" races, resulting in the fall of Many Arrows in FR and a return to talking about orcs like Custer talked about Native Americans while trying to genocide them, and that is the problem. Not the fact that the game features combat a lot.
I'm willing to accept a lot of things, but when balors are just misunderstood, I'll settle on agreeing to disagree.
(Starts playing Sympathy for the Devil)
Balors are elementals. Even a djinn is a creature that has parents and can have children. Demons are spawned from the abyss fully formed. Devils are created by erasing the indivuality of a damned soul and then torturing it into a new form as a devil, I think? Something like that. The other fiends are dumb, and the game would be better without them.
That's legit part of the setting, and yes its ugly, and yes its brushed over.
The solution to which is fairly easy, as you yourself point out later, quoted below.
I dunno. But if we are to argue that the monsters aren't antagonists then they have a right to life same as anyone. Good luck.
Yes. That doesn't interfere with the game at all. If you replace every creature with a human in every 5e adventure (I haven't read any reprints, as I don't experience nostalgia and thus couldn't possibly care less about them), the adventure works fine. Evil person does evil thing, good guys stop them.
It could totally be done. You just dont have any kind of mono-cultures at all, you need a lot more world building, a lot more definition around how the world functions, and your adventures would become much more 'this villainy was performed by a being named Bob, go correct it.'.
I dont think thats an impossible scenario.
Absolutely. As the same people who have a problem with how orcs are written about have been saying, how dwarves are written is also not great. Dwarves and Elves are pretty....model minority, in depiction, for a start, and like with orcs the way to fix that is to
not define a race as having a defined personality and nature that they can't really change or deviate from.
A quick shorthand for this would simply be to treat Elves as "people who grow up speaking French" and treat them as having something like the number of cultures as French speakers do IRL.
Why? They are thinking, they have a system of rank. Yes they are magical, but where's the line in the sand for you?
They're not living creatures. Demons especially are literally elementals whose element is Destructive Evil That Seeks To Annihilate All Things.
But I also have no problem with a setting where fiends can be more complex than that. It would hardly be the first fantasy world wherein that is the case.
dnd.wizards.com
