D&D General Wildly Diverse "Circus Troupe" Adventuring Parties

[W'rkncacnter]

Dehumanising is applied to any group identified as "not one of us".

but a human-like creature...literally isn't human. it is, by its very nature, dehumanized in some way or form. that's the point (in fiction) - to create something human-like but with inhuman (as in literally not human, not necessarily inhumane) qualities and explore that. in that sense i don't see "inherent morality (whether by divine fiat, different thought processes, biological necessity, etc.)" to be any different from "lives for hundreds if not thousands of years" or "has a devil ancestor" or "reincarnates upon death with only vague remembrances of past lives" or "treats poison like salt".

i mean...i'm sorry, but an orc (as an example) is not a human. an orc should not be a human. an orc can have many similarities to a human, but at the end of the day, they are different things. if you think they're too close to be comfortable with considering giving the orc inherent morality, then you do you, i guess. but i don't, and i don't need some moral lecture about it.

Inherently good or evil? Naw that’s saturday morning cartoons. Actual evil is far more insidious and tragic than that.

done well i think inherent good or evil can be plenty insidious or tragic. and while i wouldn't exactly call skyrim's writing good, i'd hardly say paarthurnax is a saturday morning cartoon character, as an example.

The bigger problem is that in the race to the darkest-and-edgiest, it's almost always black-and-black morality, every side is villainous, one just gets to be the designated hero.

THAT'S the term i was trying to think of. thank you.

Full-on black-and-white morality is boring and usually pretty propagandist.

it definitely can be, especially if done poorly.

It can be, but I find "nobledark" has to make the world SO dark that it's a bit outside of what I'm aiming at. In most nobledark contexts, the world actually does suck, but it is possible for heroes to be part of what puts things on a path to success. I generally prefer ones where the world is actually pretty good, it just has real and serious threats, and the risk of people choosing to do some wicked things because the world is already so good nobody will really notice.

It's definitely too dark for anything but a very grounded reconstruction of noblebright, but too bright for most things I have seen as nobledark. Instead, it's sort of like "what if you added just some darkness to a noblebright setting?" or "what if you were fairly restrained about the 'dark' part of nobledark?" It sits in a vague space between them, having elements of both and thus not able to fit into either.

But it's definitely MOST opposed to grimdark. Because I am so, so, so tired of grimdark.

okay, so like...noble. just noble.

Depends. As noted, doing this with orcs is fundamentally rooted in very very crappy Orientalist racism.

if you're referring to tolkien's letter, isn't that mainly appearance linking orcs to the east (and even then mainly to the mongols)? it seems to me an intentional attempt to metaphorically link orcs to the mongol raids of europe not in a racist sort of way but as a cultural landmark, essentially - "the orcs look and fight like mongols and are as big a threat to middle earth as the mongols were to europe)" sort of thing. to then say that "orcs being inherently evil is fundamentally orientalist racism" because of a storytelling device tolkien used seems to me like a particular large stretch, especially when dnd orcs...don't really look like stereotypical mongols? like, i dunno, this seems like it's stretching a relatively minor aspect of the inspiring work and saying it MUST apply to EVERY derivative thereof even if it clearly doesn't. am i missing something here?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

but a human-like creature...literally isn't human

But metaphorically, if it’s a PC species, it is.

“Human” in this context, denotes personhood, not Homo sapiens sapiens.

 

[Scott Christian]

Of course! Succinctly touch upon 3-5 details of a scene that the adventurers can interact with - do not be long winded. And while my particular goal as DM is to have players grok the scene I’ve laid out and just tell me what their PCs would like to do next, I’d certainly rather have engagement in the form of questions than the alternative.

This is such an interesting one to me. I have had DMs who are clear and concise and brief. Sometimes they get asked a lot of questions afterwards, sometimes not. I have had DMs that are a bit superfluous, yet very detailed. Sometimes they lose players and get asked a lot of questions afterwards, sometimes they keep the players engaged and get no questions.

The scene dictates the amount of description. The DM dictates how it is described.

 

[Scott Christian]

The bigger problem is that in the race to the darkest-and-edgiest, it's almost always black-and-black morality, every side is villainous, one just gets to be the designated hero.

Agreed.

Full-on black-and-white morality is boring and usually pretty propagandist.

Disagree. There are many settings and games, including modern ones, that utilize black-and-white morality effectively. I mean, can Thanos have a good "logical" reason for wanting to rid the universe of half its populace? Sure. But that doesn't make him gray. I think people confuse this at times. Heck, Lord of the Rings, Evil Dead - Army of Darkness, Big Trouble in Little China, Dragonlance, Elfquest, etc. all made a good story using black-and-white morality. Simply because the protagonist and antagonist have "reasons" for their actions that don't specifically align to good-evil, doesn't mean the hero-villain contrast isn't clear and the known supported outcomes aren't clear to each.

 

[Bae'zel]

done well i think inherent good or evil can be plenty insidious or tragic. and while i wouldn't exactly call skyrim's writing good, i'd hardly say paarthurnax is a saturday morning cartoon character, as an example.

My exception is devils, demons, daemons, infernals etc... By their very being, they're evil and loving it.

Chaos forces, lords of decay, misery, pain etc... I'm okay with supernatural evils of course.

I see why they changed Gnolls from "just another race" to "literal demon creatures".

 

[Remathilis]

I shall leave it to you to find your own list.

Aka "I have a bunch of examples, but I'm afraid giving them would reveal my biases, so I'll just allude to them and let you try to figure out what they are." Provide examples or we can assume the answer is "none, except for the ones I made up in my head."