Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8035171" data-attributes="member: 6801228">I'm chopping a lot of your post, because while it was all well-written it seemed to be approaching things in a specific manner. See, if the solution to killing a mind flayer is going to be to just kill it, then the DM should not (in my opinion) ever have them surrender. You are correct, people will try to preserve their own lives in reality, but if getting captured just means dying anyways, then surrendering makes no sense. And if I fully expect my players to kill them anyways, then I won't bother having them surrender. Or, in the example of your Village Elder asking for a cult to be cleared out, what is the punishment for the worship of a demon that literally wants to kill everything, and the bloody sacrifice of people in obscene rituals for personal power, and the premediated murder of dozens by poisoning the water supply? Well, I imagine... it is the death penalty. Putting them to hard labor for their crimes? They just need a shiv and an hour, and your prison yard now has demons or undead running amok. So, since the likely penalty is death anyways... why have them surrender? Run sure, fight to kill the party and maybe survive, definitely. But surrender? That would be a terrible option. And there is a second bit here. I never have something surrender, if it is planning on betraying the party with no chance of them convincing it otherwise. Because if surrendering targets become traitors... then the party is going to per-emptively kill them and then instead of a cultist I'm hoping to see redeemed and act as an information source for the PCs, I've just got another cooling corpse. Now, I get people have different styles of games, and that might play into this, but I've never once had an issue with my players on this respect. Because it is just generally assumed I don't try and pull a fast one on them, and they know when the moral questions are being asked.See, but there are always evil creatures. Mind Flayers, Aboleths, Demons, Undead, Devils, Hags. All of those are fine. The issue is having humanoids like Orcs and Goblins, and then declaring they are the same as Demons and Devils, evil at birth. And it really is the being born thing that gets me. Gnolls being evil is fine for me, if we use the Gnolls that come into being from a hyena eating a corpse killed by a gnoll. They are never children, they are monsters created by murder. I can be okay with that. But, when I have a creature that starts as a baby, and I have to declare that that baby is evil, because those creatures are always evil, despite them being intelligent and capable of choice... I don't follow that. I can't say babies are evil.I'd say this misses two things (symmetry) 1) Your idea that they don't bring much to the table misses the fact that orcs are incredibly iconic. Unlike Goliaths which are pretty much limited to DnD, Orcs are in essentially every fantasy game there is. From Tolkien, to Warhammer, to Shadowrun. to League of Legends if an image search is anything to go by. Oh, and Warcraft, Hearthstone and Magic the Gathering. Dragonborn also bring this Cache, because, well, Dragons. Half-Orcs are really so deeply tied to Orcs though that you can't really say "Orc PCs aren't needed thematically, because we have half-orcs" because the very existence of half-orcs requires orcs.  2) Not everyone wants to be a anti-hero going against the established lore. In fact, if they are pulling on one of those other sources, like maybe Warcraft? Then playing a good orc is no different that playing anything else. And, in a society where you some orcs can be evil, you can still be rebelling against your clan. Heck, I've seen plenty of human rogues who are trying to turn over a new leaf after being raised by an assassin's guild. There are plenty of ways to get your edge, and assuming people want to play a very specific story might bot be true.</blockquote>

Verification