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<blockquote data-quote="Charles Rampant" data-source="post: 6951736" data-attributes="member: 32659">It is entirely possible that this is a deliberate focus by the team, in order to give novice DMs a way around the 'killing Orc children/ Orcs are racist' problem that sometimes plagues D&amp;D. In other words, when a player asks the hypothetical novice DM, &quot;Why is it okay for us to massacre Orcs?&quot;, the DM can confidently and easily reply, &quot;Well, because their gods created them for the express purpose of murdering good people.&quot; It may be a bit black and white, but ultimately D&amp;D's core game assumptions (Good heroes delve into the darkness, kill monsters, take their stuff) work best with a black and white morality underlying them. You can certainly go down the path of making Orcs essentially the same as humans, shades of gray sort of stuff, but I think that then will lead towards an essentially amoral message to the game - might makes right, you are right to take their stuff because you can. I've done this with the Hobgoblins a little in my setting - the players met members of an ancient civilization of them - time travel - and are keen to find them in the Astral to help out the currently debased Hobgoblins return to civilized status. But they have also plundered Hobgoblin tombs and killed a fair few of them as well; I'm dealing with the disconnect there (which the players have picked up on) by stipulating that the Ancient guys that they met were followers of the Aesir, while the modern debased lot are followers of Maglubiyetetetetstst (spelling not guaranteed to be correct). So I get to have my black and white morality cake, and eat it with a side order of cool-former-bad-guy-allies. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

[QUOTE="Charles Rampant, post: 6951736, member: 32659"] It is entirely possible that this is a deliberate focus by the team, in order to give novice DMs a way around the 'killing Orc children/ Orcs are racist' problem that sometimes plagues D&D. In other words, when a player asks the hypothetical novice DM, "Why is it okay for us to massacre Orcs?", the DM can confidently and easily reply, "Well, because their gods created them for the express purpose of murdering good people." It may be a bit black and white, but ultimately D&D's core game assumptions (Good heroes delve into the darkness, kill monsters, take their stuff) work best with a black and white morality underlying them. You can certainly go down the path of making Orcs essentially the same as humans, shades of gray sort of stuff, but I think that then will lead towards an essentially amoral message to the game - might makes right, you are right to take their stuff because you [b]can[/b]. I've done this with the Hobgoblins a little in my setting - the players met members of an ancient civilization of them - time travel - and are keen to find them in the Astral to help out the currently debased Hobgoblins return to civilized status. But they have also plundered Hobgoblin tombs and killed a fair few of them as well; I'm dealing with the disconnect there (which the players have picked up on) by stipulating that the Ancient guys that they met were followers of the Aesir, while the modern debased lot are followers of Maglubiyetetetetstst (spelling not guaranteed to be correct). So I get to have my black and white morality cake, and eat it with a side order of cool-former-bad-guy-allies. :) [/QUOTE]

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