Tolkien himself kind of famously didn't like the "All Orcs are always evil" thing but he never got around to cooking up a way to handle them that he was satisfied with.
“All Orcs are always evil” thing but he never got around to cooking up a way to handle them that he was satisfied with.
I did kind of appreciate how Tolkien tried to mention Orcs as having villages and such in the ROTK when Sam and Frodo were traipsing around, but there was very little detail outside of it being mentioned in passing. I do wish more had been done with that, it would (maybe) have made those takes harder to have
From what I understand Gygax didn't like Tolkien that much and only included a bunch of Tolkien elements due to popular pressure. Old school D&D Alignment was a mess, I'm glad it's more or less been thrown in to the dust bin.
You mean the time when Gary Gygax labelled John Chivington's actions (responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre) as "Lawful Good" because Chivington believed native Americans were inherently "evil"? Yeah...
Even with the context, it's still ideologically bankrupt. Gygax was trying to make a point that someone being labelled LG doesn't necessarily translate as "good" to us, just to the contemporary society. But even if you think within his own logic, and the actual events in 1864, it still just falls apart and shows that the ideology system is poorly thought out and betrays Gygax's own subconscious.
Tolkien himself kind of famously didn't like the "All Orcs are always evil" thing but he never got around to cooking up a way to handle them that he was satisfied with.
I did kind of appreciate how Tolkien tried to mention Orcs as having villages and such in the ROTK when Sam and Frodo were traipsing around, but there was very little detail outside of it being mentioned in passing. I do wish more had been done with that, it would (maybe) have made those takes harder to have
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From what I understand Gygax didn't like Tolkien that much and only included a bunch of Tolkien elements due to popular pressure. Old school D&D Alignment was a mess, I'm glad it's more or less been thrown in to the dust bin.
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You mean the time when Gary Gygax labelled John Chivington's actions (responsible for the Sand Creek Massacre) as "Lawful Good" because Chivington believed native Americans were inherently "evil"? Yeah...
Even with the context, it's still ideologically bankrupt. Gygax was trying to make a point that someone being labelled LG doesn't necessarily translate as "good" to us, just to the contemporary society. But even if you think within his own logic, and the actual events in 1864, it still just falls apart and shows that the ideology system is poorly thought out and betrays Gygax's own subconscious.