The only naive mistake on any players' part would be playing with this guy in the first place
Pinging @UlyssesT@hexbear.net because I know you hate this stuff too
For a palate cleanser, here's what Rich Burlew (author of Order of the Stick) has to say on the subject:
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Rich can be an abrasive dick at times, but he's always been vocally opposed to the "genocide good" section of TTRPG players (and has gone on record saying that alignment shouldn't be listed in racial stat blocks).
Alignment is kinda dated. I'm glad people are moving on from it. My game I'm in now we basically ignore it.
Pathfinder 2e has gotten rid of alignment entirely as a tangible concept
Everything is based around edicts (things a character, culture or organization approve of and strive towards) and anathema (things that piss off said characters, cultures and organizations)
It's another good move forward
Alignment is for Outsiders in my group.
Yes, that demon is literally a concept of Evil given physical form. No, that orc is not, stop being racist.
I actually really like this use for alignment, as the thembo that has been laughed away from several online games because I like the concept of Drow trying to leave the surface world in a better state for the next one to escape the Underdark. The slow death of racial alignments has been so fucking vindicating.
I remember playing DnD with my bf's parents and family friend, all old school players, and they were all baffled that I wanted to play as a kindly full orc druid. The dm was so unprepared for me to try and talk to the bugbears we encountered that they genuinely didn't have any story planned for them.
a kindly full orc druid
I imagine this has a lot of the same potential intersections that my tiefling druid concept had and I adore this concept if you were really gonna lean into how prejudiced most druidic groves tend to be presented where goblinoid and orc-adjacent races are concerned; and how this prejudice isn't borne of Silvanus at all-- but man, if a DM admitted to me that they had nothing for an action a non-murderhobo would take, maybe it's just my being used to Fallout-style DM'ing; I think I'd lose a degree of respect for their pen. Like fuck, at least improv something.
To his credit he did improv stuff, I even ended getting the bugbears to team up with our party, he just admitted that he really hadn't planned for any of us to do anything like that.
At least there's a silver lining then; I kinda hope this DM kinda took that as a learning moment.
Yes, that demon is literally a concept of Evil given physical form
Even then, in my worlds I still occasionally like to include the edge cases of outsiders rejecting the evil of their archfiends (or overlords, what have you) and, if not redeeming themselves, sometimes being a little bit more chill (sometimes still morally dubious but in a more fun way).
I think my tendency towards a historical materialist lens has really affected my worldbuilding lol. I always like to logic out how outsider societies would work in my settings given such concepts as soul-corruption, damnation, souls as currency, immortality, and on and on. I find it much more interesting that way.
Yeah a fiend society and most fiends are "evil" in a similar way to any of the truly evil empires in our world and their supporting people are - with the added fun factors that a large percent of the population may literally be harvesting damned souls, or be born from the greed/hate/lust/jealousy of former mortal souls. I like a demon not having to be 110% inevitably bound by their origin
I remember someone talking about how they had changed spells like "Detect good & evil" to instead detect wether they've got qualities that are considered "good" in the culture of the caster.
Like if your culture values bravery or strength or guile or whatever and the being you cast it on exhibits those values, then it's "good"
It really feels like older DnD players can either be super chill, or super fucked up.
"If my players aren't genocidal freaks like me, my thinly veiled racist caricatures will try to convince them"
To be fair, chuds hate the thermian argument too; if you have a fantasy or sci-fi setting with an advanced race of humans who aren't white, they get upset.
(I was kidding; I was implying chuds only hate the thermian argument when it's an opportunity to be bigoted)
It's like when they claim to be "for small government": they only like it until it's not working in their favor.
Small government but large police force; also government bans on what or who they hate. Pro-freezepeach until it's someone suggesting that maybe it's not minorities destroying America.
Smh, fake D&D fans getting their morality from Goblin Slayer. Real D&D Racists get their morality from Gary "I am Adolf Hitler" Gygax.
CW: 19th century racism
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I saw some DND guy say that the way WOTC is handling the game is making Gygax spin in his grave, which as much as I'd hate to praise WOTC, they are doing a very good thing by making him spin in his grave.
Smh, Hasbro is disrespecting the guy who saw fit to include a Random Harlot Table in the AD&D DMG. Has Big Woke gone too far!?
Random Harlot Table
That straight-up sounds like something you'd see in FATAL
You're underselling it. Fantasy Adventure To Adult Lechery aka F.A.T.A.L. has [Sex Worker] as a playable class! They gain
XPAP for getting people off.No, really.
i pirated a copy of that game as part of a big package years ago. flipped through it out of curiosity because i had always heard the rumors
and it was just so fucking lame. i say this as a very sex positive person. just absolute incel levels of sexuality.
wouldn't surprise me if it was cobbled together as a group effort on 4chan.
i've seen far better fan made hornystuff modules for D20 (and even they are just too much)
wouldn't surprise me if it was cobbled together as a group effort on 4chan.
FATAL actually predates 4chan (released in 2002, 4chan was founded in 2003).
They are only really trying to get rid of the baggage for profit reasons (and pressure from within the company), but it is definitely not a bad thing to alienate chuds from table top games.
DnD was conceived broken and has (mostly) been improved over time cmv.
Eberron does it well too; the goblins in the city of (can't remember) were once majorly advanced, but then
whitebarbarian people happened, now they live poverty stricken in slums.I'm kind of reminded of a game from childhood, Radiata Stories, where they handle goblin as sentient people with their own culture and agency. Unfortunately the plot forces a zero sum game upon the human and humanoid (non-human in the game) people for their survival.
Speaking of, Runescape does the goblin thing quite well with the variety of tribes from what I remember of the quests.
You beat me to RuneScape. For the most part RuneScape does it really well.
One of the best written characters in the game is a cave goblin named Zanik, and her group of goblins are largely pacifists. Even some of the “regular” goblins get their characterization explained by the propaganda of Bandos, who is a textbook fascist. I believe the text is called goblin book or something, but even that book tells Bandos followers not to think, and that loyalty should never be questioned.
The catch is that if you're ruthless towards goblins, their natural enemy (kobolds) will spiral out of control and turn the entire world into a murderhole
FREE KURTULMAK! DOWN WITH GLITTERGOLD AND THE GNOME OPPRESSORS!
I dont understand any appeal to make a race "inherently evil" like if you want something players can kill without remorse just add bandits or asshole knights.
evil hot people have been a thing since like literally satan
A good DM won't let you massacre the demon children. A great DM will ensure you don't forget about the moral implications of killing demon children. I remember my party thought the best tactic to stop a fascist invasion would be scorched earth tactics on a critical town. However, they scorched the earth with people in it and ended up massacring the townspeople. I tried to have an arc about trying to atone for that and dealing with the fallout but I wasn't quite good enough to pull it off.
Your innately evil force in your game that exisrts for people to have something to stab shouldn't create circumstances wherein the players have the opportunity to commit crimes against humanity.
I have been kicking around a campaign idea where the BBEG is an evil wizard that has sucked all the evil out of the world to use for himself, so anything evil is instantly vaporized. Of course, the Wizard is evil and controlling, but it also upsets the natural order, so he must be stopped. Goblins are aligned neutral evil (As they often are) but along the way, the adventurers find a village of goblins who have learned to be good, but are under constant temptation do to bad things. So as the adventurers walk around the town, if they don't stop a goblin from biting them or pick pocketing them, POOF, goblin gone.
Of course this leads to a meditation on good and evil, and what that really means. Also all of the goblins are named after military contractors.
It's be funnier if the goblins being good was disturbing the natural order of the universe so the adventurers have to turn them back to evil to save the world from disharmony.
Villains by Necessity has a story with that premise. Not-Gandalf walls off the elemental force of evil, but too much goodness is now running the risk of making the universe go poof.
It helps the reading that the 'evil' characters are largely just edgelords, with the good guys being pretentious.
i'd be concerned if my DM's worldbuilding was driven by hentai like that
you know besides the genocide apologia
I mean they’re monsters. They’re not originally intended to be people, they’re meant to be like the troll from Three Billy Goats Gruff or the witch from Hansel and Gretel or the dragon from the paper bag princess. You know, antagonists.
If the logic of a work of fiction leads to a situation where total systemic extermination of a sapient race including the babies is justified, then that work of fiction is at best creepy and gross.
race
The use of this word in DnD is extremely sus and always has been. If you want something to be fundamentally different from humans, that's a different species. I've always found the DnD "races" as social stand-ins for IRL races suspect because uhh black people are human beings
I've always used "species" or "people". Pathfinder using "ancestry" for species and "heritage" for the subspecies/ethnicity is cool too.
I always found it weird when I'd get online comments about how using "species" is supposedly too scifi and I honestly don't get it.
That's not even getting into the extremely tired rhetoric of "if you think the orcs/goblins/kobolds/etc are stand-ins for black/indigenous/etc people I think that makes you the real racist huh"
"if you think the orcs/goblins/kobolds/etc are stand-ins for black/indigenous/etc people I think that makes you the real racist huh"
This is true but in a different way. I side-eye at using things that are definitely physiologically and anatomically different from human beings as a stand in for marginalized humans.
That too - same reason why racism allegories like
don't work so well. When you try to write a story as 1:1 parallel to real life using species with vast inherent physical disparities, things tend to get messy.That's not to say you can't draw upon the history of racism, colonialism, etc., for your scifi or fantasy ofc, but it requires a little more effort and consideration than that to make a compelling story
yeh but murdering babies of a race of """monsters""" that can talk because theyre evil has real world implications in how people view others, see every liberal calling russian's "orcs", and especially with israel and its ongoing genocide of the palestianians, where they frequently call palestianian children and civilians vermin that need to be wiped out before they become a problem
fiction is a mirror for reality, when a writer writes something like this, it indicates their biases in the real world. When a writer writes in a demi human race who you need to kill the babies of, thats because the writer wants that race to exist
here's the thing though, remember that part of the story where hansel and gretel brutally murdered the witch's baby
whoever introduced that (the DM) chose to humanize the monsters. if they expect you to kill the babies nonetheless, then they are fucked up.
oh noes a bunch of things i like
