I’ve been enjoying reading everyone’s experiences with D&D, and moving away from some of those traditional tropes about orcs and other “monstrous” races.
I, too, started playing with first edition AD&D, in the early '80s, when orcs were two-dimensional, “always evil” bags of XP to be harvested, and while we didn’t specifically kill orcs just because they were orcs, we also weren’t playing in games in which there was any chance in which orcs would represent anything other than nameless masses of evil troops.
And, even back then, as a teenaged boy, I thought it was unfair that female player characters couldn’t be as strong as their male counterparts.
I’m happy to see that D&D is now more inclusive, and less assumptive about the moral/alignment leanings of the various fantasy races. As I’ve gotten older, my leanings have gone more towards creating interesting characters with interesting backstories and personalities, and less about the munchkin min-maxing that, I admit, I was good at back in the day.
I’ve also become more interested in game systems that are more oriented towards the role-playing and collaborative storytelling end of the hobby – games like Fate and 13th Age. Not that you can’t do deep role-playing in D&D, but the system isn’t built to necessarily easily facilitate it.
I’m in several groups, and we do this from time to time. The last time I got together for a face-to-face gathering with my original D&D group (over a long weekend in late 2019), we went out to dinner on the last night of our gathering, and spent an hour, sitting around the table in the restaurant, all talking in-character. It was a blast.
it’s funny when we played ad&d the bad guys have not much personality cause there just fodder …but if you want to see a game where race and alignment mattered … EverQuest 1… if your one of the evil/dark races/classes life could get pretty miserable real quick depending on the area …
“Always evil” doesn’t mean two-dimensional though. Orcs or hobgoblins or drow or whoever still have reasons for doing what they do and some sort of culture and society that sustains itself so they’re obviously not just murderhoboing one another 24/7. You can still give them religion and rituals, taboos and alliances and rivalries and all sorts of other aspects to make them rounded. You usually don’t on an individual basis because, frankly, it’s not worth it since their purpose of being in the encounter isn’t to find out their views on things but to create an entertaining combat encounter. If the party needs to meaningfully interact with the goblin shaman or the bugbear princess or captured gnoll scout then there’s nothing stopping them from being an interesting evil character aside from a lack of imagination on the DM’s part.
From a DM perspective, I find planning out how an “always evil” society plausibly functions (and it’ll vary widely depending on intelligence, place on the lawful-chaotic spectrum, religion, etc) is far more interesting than if you fall back to the Easy Mode “Humans in Hats” position where every sentient humanoid monster is, at its core, just like you and me.
You keep saying stuff like this, and I find it awfully reductive. You and I are pretty different, and we’re from essentially the same culture. Humans who grow up in Atlanta suburbs are already vastly different from humans who grow up on Tibetan farms in terms of cultural norms, language, mannerisms, religion, attitudes toward violence, etc.
There are definitely reasons to posit some critters have different psychologies, of course; but if your orcs are “humans in hats,” it may be a failure to imagine any variety among your humans.
What do you mean by an “always evil” society? Would Nazi Germany qualify? If so, how does this intersect with your “humans in hats” complaint?
More an ability to recognize that non-human races should have decidedly different ways of thinking. Granted, since we’re all humans in the real world and our thinking is thus locked into human thinking, this is traditionally done by playing up aspects of their culture to a degree not found in human cultures just as it’s been done a million times before in science fiction and fantasy film/literature. Besides the thematic fluff, this comes through in the mechanics where you no longer say “Well, halflings are more dexterous than the average” (and people ignore the fact that you can still put your 8 in Dex and have a non-especially nimble halfling) but rather any race can pick whatever stats make them happy. Hrm, there’s already a race where that’s the standard… wonder what it was called…
One that reflects the typical alignment of the critter. Nazi Germany would not apply since I don’t think people usually say that the rank and file German people were innately evil in a same sense that Kuo-Toa or Drow society is evil. Lawful Evil leaders and facilitators are sadly common enough but we still hold that the average person is just trying to make due, pay the bills, find a little comfort and get the kids to school. Not so different from you and I. When dealing with fantasy evil races, the challenge is to make it different from you and I and still make it plausible. The average hobgoblin shouldn’t just be the average human tryin’ to make it in this crazy world but rather something that reflects hobgoblins as an alien race with different non-human genesis and goals.
I’ll make a late edit to this and say that, for stock PC races, “Humans with Hats” works fine from a cultural/social perspective. You have dwarf cities where some dwarves and good and some are evil and some are generous and some are greedy and you have your whole “Dwarf honor” thing but even that’s not universal. Dwarves are effectively Humans with Hats from a social perspective. And that’s fine because it makes dwarves easy to play since there’s no “wrong” way and your lazy liar jerk dwarf is just as valid as the honor-bound hardworking hero dwarf. So, to make them different, you give them a few racial bonuses or penalties or special abilities to say “this here is a dwarf, not just a small person even though, at their core, they’re basically small people”. Which is why I find it eye-rolly that some people object to even that and claim that it’s problematic for dwarves to have an innate Constitution bonus because… subtextual blah blahs
For that matter, there’s far too many races to develop some unique or alien point of view for each of them so I wouldn’t expect each one to be fully developed that way. On the other hand, there’s something challenging about creating a race that isn’t just “Bad guys on top but your average guy can still laugh and learn and love” but rather “Nazis all the way down” and still have it function. A drow society where Drizzt isn’t reflective of each of your abilities to care and find peace but rather more like being born with three arms – it happened, it can happen again for your character but it’s not a sign that the average drow is just like you and me at the core.
D&D was never designed to emulate our reality so I’ve never understood the desire to attempt to apply the game’s mechanics to real people or situations. It’s a fun little exercise, kind of like trying to figure out what alignment Batman is, but a definitive and satisfactory answer is unlikely to be reached. In some editions of D&D, you could find descriptions of societies based on alignment in the DMG I think. But I don’t think such a thing exists for 5th edition since alignment is of little consequence these days.
I don’t believe the rules or the settings for D&D were designed to create a believable world. They were designed with the specific purpose of making a fun game. I’ve never looked to D&D for a serious gaming experience. For me, it’s always been about good versus evil heroic fantasy with little in the way of shades of grey. (No baby goblin dilemmas in my games!) That’s why I don’t really care if orcs or drow are overwhelmingly evil. They exist for the sole purpose of giving the PCs some opponents to defeat. But if you look at Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk as some sort of reflection of real life, yeah, I could see why the always evil orcs would bother you.
You’re right, it doesn’t have to mean two-dimensional – but, in practice, back in the 1E days, it usually did. Dungeons and adventures were usually not any sort of attempt to depict a society or culture – more often than not, it was just a series of rooms in which monsters were, improbably, living in close proximity to each other. You might have a room full of the members of a small orc tribe, and down the hallway there was a room with a rust monster, or a demon, or whatever.
While there were certainly some DMs who wrote more coherent adventures back then, and while there were some of TSR’s published adventures which were more than just “a series of rooms containing XP-bearing monsters and treasure” (e.g., Ravenloft), by and large, back then, there just wasn’t that level of thought being put in. At its core, D&D was originally, “explore the dungeon, kill monsters, get loot, and try to not die,” and the monsters (and, if we’re honest, many of the PCs) were about as three-dimensional as a pawn in a wargame.
Man, I’m waiting for the day that tic-tac-toe or rock-paper-scissors or hide-and-seek are discovered to be racist.
Although I haven’t played more than three times in the last decade (and still, basically, 2ndEd) I won’t just continue playing the way I want, I won’t apologise or even give a nod to “maybe it’s racist” or whatever is the “correct way” of seeing the game.
I was a nerd in the late 80s, playing with other nerds, with half the books photocopied beause you just didn’t get them here in South America, then, while our classmates were playing sports. Pure escapism and bonding with friends. No complex social issues, not trying to decide on inclusivity in the Fire Giant’s organic co-op.
“Misterious guy gives you quest to retireve item” or “while in the library, you find an old map …” is all I need.
Both true and, frankly, in a beer & pretzels game I don’t think it matters much. You’re not there to reflect on the meaning of self-determination and moral redemption as viewed through grimlock raiding parties, you’re there to have fun rolling dice and pushing little toys around a battle mat. Saying that grimlocks are evil facilitates that just fine and, if someone needs to take that and run it into the ground with “But some people say [real world class] is evil, too!” then that’s more on them than it is the game.
I think D&D is much more interesting when you explore the different societies that different creatures form.
So, why are Beholders evil? Well, according to the lore, it is because they have an overwhelming superiority complex where each beholder feels that they are the supreme and perfect creature; other beholders fall short of their perfection (which is why beholders don’t really form societies) and any non-beholder creature is a disgusting aberration. Beholders are extremely alien creatures (that’s why they have the Aberration type) and this is just how they evolved (perhaps with some meddling from their god) - the same way humans are social creatures by nature and our psyche depends on social interaction, beholders are inherently anti-social creatures. Sentient, but with a psyche utterly alien to ours.
Why are gnolls evil? I hate the new “gnolls are fiends” idea (and gnolls were always one of my favorite creatures because Hyenas are cool) so here I tend to depart from the lore. Instead I based gnoll society on hyenas. Gnolls are predatory creatures who live in clans dominated by the largest and strongest female. As predators, they look at other creatures - even sentient humanoids - as food. That doesn’t mean they are unnecessarily cruel, though. Within the clan, they are intensely loyal to one another, except for when they fight each other for status within the clan. Gnolls are much less alien than beholders. They have a mammalian social psyche, like we do. That means a gnoll cub raised by humans may view his family as his pack and would be loyal to them. Their tendency to fight for status is more cultural than ingrained, so gnolls occasssionally live in civilization.
Why are Drow evil? Their entire society was artificially created by an evil goddess bitter about her place in the world. It was specifically designed to embitter its members against one another, against the surface elves, and so on. A baby drow raised among elves would not be any more attuned to evil than any other elf (although she would likely face discrimination from the surface elves) because a drow’s inherent psyche is essentially identical to an elf’s- drow are evil because they grow up in an evil society.
And one more thing - D&D is a setting in which beings of pure Law and Good can fall to Evil, and beings of pure Evil and Chaos can redeem themselves and become Paladins (there is a Canon Succubus Paladin). So the idea of a biological race like Orcs being 100% irredeemable is more than a little silly.
…anything at can happen and “always evil orcs”, if that’s what the DM wants for their milieu, isn’t any sillier than a bajillion other fantasy RPG tropes or mechanics.
Exactly. If you can make flying beachballs interesting, a dedicated person can make “always evil orcs” interesting. Or make them interesting by making them not always evil. Whatever. The sky is the limit and to resort to “But this would be too silly” reflects more a lack of imagination or creativity to make it not-silly than an actual barrier in game design.
I am sure you COULD create a creature that’s Always Evil but isn’t a demon formed of emotion rather than flesh or an unintelligent undead or similar. I’ve probably used creatures like that when DMing at one point or another, though I wouldn’t use orcs in that role. But I’d want some kind of explanation as to why these creatures are inherently evil, and this explanation would influence how I use them in the world.
