A forum for discussing and organizing recreational softball and baseball games and leagues in the greater Halifax area.
Am I the only person who likes removal of evil races?
-
I choose to play demons as though they can have empathy, but it's always calculated empathy. They are intentionally and willfully choosing to act with empathy because it meets some other goal, so even though all demons are fundamentally evil, they are not all fundamentally despicable. I say it like it's some high holy road concept thing, but it's just more of a general guideline. Demons will do anything they want to do as long as it meets their current objective. Assuming we're talking about humanoid demon creatures and not some sort of like ethereal "presence of evil" demon.I did have idea for a high ranking demon lord or whatever that sees overcoming his nature as a way of becoming more powerful in that to be able to act and think truly selflessly would be alien enough to his peers that it could give him an advantage so he's taken on the form of a traveling hero but has laspes into cruelty and his true power level if he gets too annoyed by his foes
-
One of the frustrating things about humans and mass communication is the "for me it's Tuesday" effect. For someone, this is the first time they've encountered "maybe orcs being innately evil isn't a good idea". They want to explore it and go through their feelings and blah blah blah. It's a day that might change their life. For someone else, it's Tuesday. We've had this conversation a thousand times before. It's old hat. It's hard to be patient to faceless newcomer #3742 when you've already done this conversation so many times. They feel stupid and slow because they blend in with all the other people who brought this up. They're bringing up points they feel are fresh and clever but have been discussed and settled already. But they're a person seeing it for the first time. Somehow. It feels like "are you stupid? We just went over this", but that's an illusion. It's new to them . (This doesn't account for bad faith actors, who are trash and should go away)Adding on to everything you’ve said, the people most likely encountering these topics for the first time usually are adolescents. I feel it helps my patience trying to keep that in mind when talking with them, since it makes sense that they may not have encountered the topic before.
-
I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to "I'm an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race". And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don't know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
-
Just look for better settings. You can even keep the DnD rules if you're feeling kinda lazy and just swap some names.
-
I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to "I'm an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race". And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don't know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.I think that it's highly setting dependant, and also dependant on the kind of game your DM is running. I've exclusively run things in my own setting, so any particular race's natural alignment was more of a suggestion than a requirement. Now what really threw me for a loop was orks loosing the 'powerful build' feature. Orks can be twinks now and I love it.
-
I can see the arguments against the concept of evil races. It's intimately linked with real-world racism about "wrong" groups that "deserve" to be colonized or genocided. Writing the fictional world as being populated by distinct groups that have conflicting cultural motivations is more interesting than "this group is bad because they are bad." But... what about demons/devils?
-
I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to "I'm an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race". And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don't know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
-
I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to "I'm an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race". And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don't know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.Yes. Simply put, yes, this was 1000% the right choice for WotC to make, and fuck them for not making it 30 years earlier. Zero questions here, the only tables I stayed at long term were the ones where orcs and elves and humans had a precisely equal chance of being good or evil. The ones I left? The DMs and players who wanted an instant, easy 'kill this' marker were invariably super bigoted in the real world too.
-
For demons and devils, that usually goes straight into supernatural, as they're not really a race, but physical manifestations of evil energies.At tables I've played and run in the past, 'Outsiders' (fiends, fey, celestials, etc.) embody the epitome of an ideal or motive taken to its logical extreme, for better or worse. Take Zariel for example.
-
I can see the arguments against the concept of evil races. It's intimately linked with real-world racism about "wrong" groups that "deserve" to be colonized or genocided. Writing the fictional world as being populated by distinct groups that have conflicting cultural motivations is more interesting than "this group is bad because they are bad." But... what about demons/devils?>But... what about demons/devils? That's actually why orcs in D&D were an evil race in the first place. At its core, D&D is derived from Lord of the Rings. Orcs in Tolkien's world were created from elves by an evil god/demigod to be his evil army. They had no choice to be good or evil in LotR so that property was inherited into D&D. I'm okay with this change. Orcs in D&D lore have a different origin than in LotR and I don't see why they should always be evil. I consider this just one more reasonable change from the original game which had odd rules like dwarves can't be wizards and only humans could be clerics.
-
R RPGMemes shared this topic
