Sure, that’s what I was saying. I’d find the idea of a race that’s “always evil” and manages to run a sustaining culture interesting to explore. Honestly, more interesting than a race that’s sorta-usually evil but they’re actually okay if you understand them as individuals and if you take a baby and hug it enough then it’s just like you and me. Because those are just people in different suits. And you can do a lot with people in suits just like you could do a lot with a game where Humans are the only sentient race but it also makes them a lot less alien or different when every drow, orc, demon, devil, vampire, lich and Goddess of Painful Torture actually has the ability to redeem love in their heart just like you and me if only the right person understood them.
I mean, the idea of a succubus paladin might be individually interesting but, in a real life world where I could find a dozen works without trying about Satan being a swell guy once you give him a chance, it’s not really breaking any new ground or innately more creative or interesting than “These guys actually aren’t your buddy if you just get inside their heads and understand them and they never will be.”
That’s why I gave 3 examples of evil creatures and discussed why (in my campaign world) they are evil. None of them are people in suits, so I really have no idea what you are objecting to, other than a knee-jerk reaction to whatever you preemptively decided is “sjw nonsense”.
Drow are explicitly just People in Hats based on your description: A baby drow raised among elves would not be any more attuned to evil than any other elf […]because a drow’s inherent psyche is essentially identical to an elf’s
There’s nothing inherently different about Drow that makes them evil; they’re just raised that way. They’re just people wearing Drow hats.
No, they are elves in suits. Because they are explicitly a subtype of elf with an evil culture created by Lollth. If your elves are just humans with pointy ears, you’re doing elves wrong in the first place, so no wonder your drow are lame. Elves live so long that their psyche must be very different than a human’s.
While I don’t disagree that non-human species in fiction (including RPGs) should have substantially different outlooks and psyches than humans do, the reality is that very few gamers (a) have strong enough role-playing and storytelling skills to really pull that off, and (b) care enough about it to actually play an elf (or an orc, or a halfling, etc.) as anything other than a human with a couple of broad, stereotypical personality traits (e.g., the snooty elf, the barbaric orc, etc.)
You are right, and I don’t bust my players for playing their dwarf as a short hairy Scotsman who likes beer and axes. But if they run into dwarfs in the world, that’s not how they act, and sometimes (rarely) players will even ask about what dwarf society is like when creating their characters and role play accordingly.
Kind of a side note, but even if a species is quite alien to us in its way of thinking, I still think of sentient beings as “people”. So an Always Evil Orc, if it is sentient and not an animal, still qualifies as People, even if it couldn’t be part of our society. Same with a Beholder as described in D&D Canon.
Not something our language has had to evolve to include considering the extinction of all other hominids long before we started thinking about that sort of thing, but still.
They’re not 100% evil. The Monster Manual says that the alignments listed for monsters represent what is typical rather than what is absolute. If you want your green dragon or orcs to be good there’s nothing preventing that. It’s just that in most settings both of those are typically evil.
Now I have an image of a large figure with wings, scales, and a tail berating people for not sorting their recyclables. The image is captioned ‘Green Dragon’
Right, so how are your drow innately different from humans in their thinking? Is it just mechanics (they see in the dark, get a cantrip, etc) or are they actually fundamentally different in the brain?
That’s true of creatures with an alignment of Always Evil, but not of Outsiders with an Aligned subtype. So yeah, when a Green Dragon is Always Evil, that just means the vast majority of Green Dragons are Evil; but when a Demon, an amalgamation of hate and rage made solid, is Always Evil, they really do mean Always.
Except, of course, for the handful of exceptions
One of my favorite archetypes in 3.5 is the Malconvoker - a spellcaster who summons fiends but then tricks them into doing his bidding to do Good. So summon some demons and trick them (or just overpower their will) into saving orphans from a burning orphanage - their fire resistance sure comes in handy!
But if we were visited by aliens tomorrow, it would be very possible, if not extremely likely, that their thinking, psyches, cultures, values, etc would be fundamentally different from our own. There’s no reason to assume that they’d be, at the core, just like we are and your average alien wants to raise its family and care for its home or whatever. They’re aliens, even if they’re sentient things that in a D&D world might be “people” and that could include things such as a base amoral nature.
So why not orcs? Or goblins or drow or whatever? Why keep going to back “But they’re ‘people’ and they have the same complex cultural and moral thinking that we have and…”? You don’t have to reserve that thinking for mind flayers and beholders; there’s nothing that says your standard humanoid races can’t have completely separate thinking as well or facets of their psyches that just aren’t how we act but are hardwired into their own brains.
OTTOMH And I don’t know if this is still the case, Cloakers used to have an INT of “Unratable” and were said to have minds completely alien to our own.
Elves would be fundamentally different from humans, yes. They don’t die of old age, for one, or if they do it happens after such a long time that it may as well not happen - so their entire concept of time is different than a human’s.
Now, they definitely have a mind that’s much more familiar and much less alien than, say, an Aboleth. Or even a Gnoll.
In your standard D&D setting, I’d say Halflings are closest to humans (and in worlds where you have both gods creating things and natural evolution, as the standard D&D world is usually implied to be, are either closely related or created by the same/a similar god). Dwarves and gnomes are more similar to each other than to humans, but still relatively close to halflings and humans. You could be forgiven for making any of those races basically “funny human cousins” - after all, there isn’t much of a practical difference between a halfling and Homo floresiensis, and I doubt HF who survived to the modern day would be all that different from us.
Elves are typically related to fey, and fey beings are TRULY alien despite their often humanlike appearance, coming from an entirely different plane of existance; but elves themselves are of this world, and more grounded as such (their eternal lives being the main practical difference). Drow are biologically the same as elves, just different culturally.
Orcs, goblinoids, lizardfolk, gnolls, ogres… all these creatures are vastly different from humans and are highly alien in their way of thinking. As alien as nonhuman animals would be - if you made a hyena highly intelligent, it wouldn’t think like an intelligent human. If you made a gorilla highly intelligent, it would be different, but not THAT different.
Something like an Aboleth or Mind Flayer is even more alien - like “from another planet with no shared evolutionary history” alien.
I posted my next post while you were typing this one, so I kinda touch on this.
It isn’t just about the way they look. Mind Flayers in my games would be exactly what you describe: completely alien, despite their humanoid form. But orcs and goblins, in most D&D settings I’ve seen, either share an evolutionary history with the more common PC humanoids, or were created by the same pantheon of gods. Gruumsh may be an angry bastard, but he’s still pretty relatable, compared to the Great Mother of the Beholders or Ilsensine of the Mind Flayers.
Eta: and for that reason I wouldn’t have a “Good” mind flayer, unless it was something like The Adversary: a mind flayer tadpole that transformed its host but failed to fully convert its mind, resulting in the host’s consciousness surviving in the mind flayer’s body.
I just don’t see orcs as nearly as alien as illithids.
No, they aren’t. Arguing against the concept of a race of intelligent beings that’s always evil in no way suggest that they’re just funny looking humans. You can do, “distinct psychology from humans,” and, “Contains a range of moral and ideological viewpoints” at the same time. If having races where every single member is inherently, genetically villainous works for your narrative, that’s fine - but people who don’t find the concept of a race that’s “inherently, genetically villainous” interesting are not automatically treating every race as “humans with hats.”
Of course you CAN have completely alien Orcs, like the Greenskins in Warhammer, who aren’t really a species of true breeding creatures but rather the ambulatory stage of a spore-breeding fungus, who fight for the pure joy of fighting rather than because they hate their enemy. In fact it is arguable whether the orcs even feel hatred (though the goblins are much more malevolent, for “reasons”).
I generally prefer my D&D a bit more serious and internally consistent than that, so while I’m totally down with that concept, it probably wouldn’t take the form of walking talking speaking humanoids, but maybe something more similar to the Yellow Musk Creeper.
But how are YOUR elves different? When you’re playing an elf as a player or DM, what explicitly makes it different from a Human in a Hat yet innately the same as other elves? What about it would make someone say “Yeah, that’s totally elf” and not “Lemme see your character sheet and what race you picked”?
Living a long time is one thing: what do they do with it? In my world, Drow use their lifespans as a way to maintain a society while manipulating and backstabbing (often literally) in every layer of society. They can afford to have a large number of children over a lifetime because their gestation isn’t all that much longer than a human’s but their overall lifespan is. They then have a fairly amoral attitude towards those children and see them as resources and markers of power and, if one dies, that’s just how the game is played. But their long lifespans also mean that they don’t need to get revenge this week or this year or even this century and the constant fighting and manipulation and murder can continue at a low simmer for century after century. They can keep a society going because the heat that drives it doesn’t consume it and their lifespans are a big part of that.
Humans can be amoral or immoral and evil and be driven by revenge, etc but they can’t do it on a society-wide level like Drow can. And this is part of who they ARE, twisted however many years ago and it’s more like a cursed part of their DNA than just being raised wrong. A Drow baby raised elsewhere will grow up to be an manipulative jerk (though perhaps less adept at it without the benefit of Drow society sharpening it). A non-evil Drow is “possible” but it’s more akin to a chromosomal aberration than being raised the right way.
Hence me asking for examples of how they are different. Because this whole thing started with a weary “Evil races are boring!” and hasn’t really illustrated how this is so or done much to suggest that a race is more interesting for NOT being evil.
When the goblin nurses are stabbing you with spears it is hard to say, “Hey, these goblins are the nurses, let’s just knock them out and let them live”. They wont be wear starched white uniforms.
