Alignment in 5E still causes arguments

infected slut princess · Mon Jul 07, 2014 5:55 am

And so you can't have a Barbarian class because there is a racist stereotype that black people are barbaric and rage a lot.

darkmaster · Post by **darkmaster** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 6:00 am

No, you can't have a Barbarian class because Berzerker is a much better fit for the conceptual space. Bonus points for Berzerkers being an actual, super bad ass, thing. Seriously, depending on the source they either dressed up in animal skins or painted themselves black and ran into battle naked as an intimidation tactic, probably a little of both. They also got to be the fucking rock stars of Norse society.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 6:15 am

infected slut princess wrote:And so you can't have a Barbarian class

Yeah sure. I mean that must be the reason they almost never make a proper Anti-Paladin class. Because merely offering the option for any person of any race to take on an unrelentingly evil career is totally the same as blanket rules defining every person of that race to be evil by birth.

You ass.

Prak · Post by **Prak** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:14 am

Jesus fucking Christ people-who-are-saying-calling-orcs-black-is-racist.

It's really fucking simple.

Take the typical orc: "subintelligent, violent, inhuman beast that looks human and wants to despoil our society and women"

Now look look at what people in the nineteenth century said about black people:

wikipedia, stereotypes of African Americans wrote: Mandingo Negro

This stereotypical concept was invented by white slave owners who promoted the notion that male African slaves were animalistic and bestial in nature asserting, for example, that in "Negroes all the passions, emotions, and ambitions, are almost wholly subservient to the sexual instinct" and "this construction of the oversexed black male parlayed perfectly into notions of black bestiality and primitivism"

No one (here) is saying that orcs are black people. They are saying that the common characterization of orcs, including shit about being inherently evil because they were created by an evil god, is verbatim the shit that racists say about black people, and that it's not fucking acceptable to say that shit about a species, called a race, that is fucking humanoid in type and society.

It's not fucking hard, shit heads.

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:40 am

FrankTrollman wrote:Tussock, while I grant that making hostile beings into metaphysical concepts does take them away from being standins for real peoples, I don't see how that's a good idea. If Orcs are dangerous martial spirits, you get the ability to stab them in the face without feeling bad, but you lose half-Orcs, and player character Orcs, and Orc negotiations, and really every reason I can think of to use Orcs instead of golems or zombies or slimes.

There are half-Orcs, and Orogs, Uruks, all sorts. Sages suggest anyone in the cave when the Orcs pour out becomes twisted into one of them. Some join the Orcs to lead them and settle half-forgotten scores, others return home confused and estranged, depending how twisted they became. You can negotiate with the Orcs too, as long as you offer them war and raiding, looting and ruin, because it's literally all they understand, and many devious and Evil kinds have done just that to gain strength in lands ravaged by war.

But they're different to Necromantic plagues. They're smart, some of them very, they raid of their own volition, they argue tactics and support strong leaders without needing them to continue fighting, they learn and adapt, they scatter before stronger forces, they ... are rumoured to try and start wars among nations to draw forth more Orcs. Then they start to get old and go out in a spiral of internal vengeances.

If you want a peace treaty, try the Lizardfolk. Totally not an expy for Mesoamerica. Almost. May need work. Hmm. Problem is "noble primitive types from the poisonous wetlands" is just a thing where European colonial technology was able to drain the wetlands for grain production.

Laertes · Post by **Laertes** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:56 am

What Prak said.

MGuy · Post by **MGuy** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 10:46 am

I don't find the things said in this thread to be very surprising. I've read, talked to, and have had unfortunate run ins with many an apologist that would think themselves not racist but still spout sickening things whether it be about race, sexuality, religion, etc. In a game I'm currently running I've been subtly trying to get the my players out of the mindset that all race X is evil/stupid/etc. It helps that one of the newer players is playing a consistently drunken elf druid who has a fondness for bears (bucking the trend), another one of the players is playing a compulsively accepting and idealistic human, and still another player is playing a half orc (acting as somewhat of a "straight man" to the group's antics). I've so far got them invested in what is turning out to be a very uplifting "Everybody should get the chance to work together" themed campaign with tensions rising between the player's mostly human(oid) citizens and the rising amount of nonhumans they are integrating into society. There's been arguments among the the characters as to how accepting they can afford to be, how they should view other (weirder) races, and discussions surrounding acceptance versus the realities of facing their people's fears.

So I'm, unsurprisingly, on the side of any crowd that suggests that RPGs can and SHOULD do better about providing diversity and leaving behind things like inherently inferior races and the like. As has been pointed out in this thread there is no real reason to have inherently evil orcs. I'd actually go a step further to say no being (especially thinking ones) should be inherently evil. Demons, angels, illitihids, blah blah in my games are just extra-dimensional/alien beings with differing mindsets, outlooks, and realities they have to live with. You can still have your mindless undead, golems, gelatinous cubes or creatures that mean to do you harm 'cause that's how they roll' (illithids, demons, kuo toa, etc) but there's no real reason I can think of to justify a race that is essentially human but by the setting are justifiably mistreated because they are born to be so.

It's one thing to have a race of beings born under the rule of an evil God be essentially raised to fuck up your day (like the Kuotoa or Orcs raised under Gruumsh) but it's another to say they are born with it (as opposed to it being maybelline) but there's no real reason I can see to have that when the former does everything you need it to do without suggesting that going all genocidal the entire race would be justifiable. While use of the latter doesn't make any particular person racist (as it is just following the conceits of the setting) it certainly doesn't look good. Drizzt and Many Arrows were written years ago and teaches that very lesson. How is it that we still are stuck on this trend ESPECIALLY where DnD is concerned. The Eberron Setting was a thing and all and I don't believe any of the living sapient creatures that weren't demons or otherwise demonic or otherworldly in nature were inherently evil.

Mistborn · Post by **Mistborn** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 10:47 am

DSMatticus wrote:This thread is fucking excruciating. Apparently talking about racism instantly makes everyone stupid and illiterate, I don't fucking know. So instead of me trying to knock down an endless parade of non-sequiturs, strawmen, false dichotomies, and other bullshit, we're going to start over from square one.

Racism is one of those subjects that cause people to go into metal lockdown even more than usual, since they are afraid that being wrong about racism will lead to them being called racists. It's sort of coutnerprodcutive though since the huge investment some of the posters here have in some "races" being inherently evil is extremely telling and it never would have come to light if they hadn't doubled down on a losing argument.

Korwin · Post by **Korwin** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 11:14 am

D&D Alignment is stupid, nothing new here.
But someone bringing D&D Alignment to the real world to justify racism (as those Stormfront guy are doing?*) is really really dumb.

Not really surprising (them being dumb)...

* Not going to read the links, did they really do that?

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 1:34 pm

One thing that hasn't been touched on.

If your Orcs are just people with bumpy faces, and they're just like misguided people, in the same way some Humans in the setting are like misguided people, why have Orcs?

I mean, even if you take out all the pejorative parts of Orcish racial heritage, they're still a "race" that isn't "Human" (but is because half-Orcs, or just 1.8m bipedal tool-making body form) and they're going to remind folk of someone by virtue of whatever cultural trends or stat modifiers or size or nose shape or whatever they have, so ... why the ugly people with green skin at all?

Why not just have people who look just like the protagonists and are also Evil raiders? And no Orcs? What is the possible justification? We already have seven protagonist races, with trucks of subraces for each that aren't even wanted.

In a game about sparkly Vampires those need to be playable, but the spirit of date-rape can otherwise be stake fodder and the better for it.

It's part of how I got to monsters being proper monsters that live in your closet because you were bad. Don't go down dark alleys at night because those deeply shadowed places sometimes cross over to the underworld and fill up with Goblins, who might just steal you away. Even them some "horrible monsters" end up being a congenital deformity or chronic disease expy, like Elves are, that represent real people.

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 3:47 pm

It occurs to me that orcs also aren't that much different than people from Appalachia. Seriously, it's quite the fit.

But orcs in D&D actually come from Tolkien; and Tolkien actually got them from Norse mythology, not contemporary racism. Dwarves as well. Seriously, the Poetic Edda were a real thing, and has served pretty much as a foundation for many things fantasy for ... a really long time.

Yes, modern racism is a thing; and yes, that thing is horrible. And when racists wanna racist, they will flat-out invent excuses to be even more racist.
However, you can't go retroactively assigning the "inherently racist" tag to everything that happens to get co-opted by racists. That's just silly; and anyone who does this looks incredibly stupid.

Count Arioch the 28th · Mon Jul 07, 2014 5:07 pm

Source on orcs coming from norse mythology, please.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 5:39 pm

Orcs are not from Norse anything. They are derivative of an old English word meaning monster. Gygax didn't have to give up Orcs when he was forced to give up Hobbits and Ents because he could whip out a copy of Beowulf same as Tolkien did.

As to why you'd have Star Trek forehead aliens in your fantasy instead of just having a bunch of human cultures that do crazy shit, the answer is suspension of disbelief and conservation of narrative. It is simply much less work to explain that the Dwarves live underground, domesticate brown bears, and lust for gold and beer, 'because they are Dwarves' than it is to explain all that shit about some bullshit fantasy human culture you made up.

-Username17

ACOS · Post by **ACOS** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 6:02 pm

My bad - I must have been thinking about trolls or goblins or some shit. But orcs are all up in some Beowulf. And as for norse, they've got plenty of elves as well.
My point being, this shit is deeply rooted in ancient mythology from the Before Time, and has fuck all to do with modern-ish day racism.

The line of argument here (which is perfectly in line with SJW drivel) is that just because some racists are able to contort propaganda from something, then <that thing> must be inherently racist - which is bullshit on its face.
And in SJW fashion, we'll just take whatever piece of racist propaganda and rub it up against everything we encounter, and if there happens to be any perceived correlation (based on whatever contrived reasons), then we'll denounce it as racist.
It's very condescending and insulting to actual race issues.

D&D logic:
ugly monster = bad = evil = kill it.
That's the end of the thought exercise.
Feel free to play it a different way (I often do myself); but don't blame orcs and alignment on racism.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 6:37 pm

ACOS wrote:My bad - I must have been thinking about trolls or goblins or some shit. But orcs are all up in some Beowulf.

No, they are fucking not. 'Orc' is not a word used in the Beowulf poem. 'Orcneas' is, it occurs exactly once (on line 112), and that word is usually translated as 'evil spirit.' Even that is only as part of a list of examples of beings forsaken by God. No such creatures appear in the actual story.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:01 pm

ACOS wrote:The line of argument here (which is perfectly in line with SJW drivel) is that just because some racists are able to contort propaganda from something, then <that thing> must be inherently racist - which is bullshit on its face.

That is not the line of argument.

DSMatticus has done a good job of explaining how 'evil races' justify discrimination (they're inherently evil). Racists claim 'inherent evil' to justify discrimination.

If you have normal humanoids that are born and raised in the human fashion, but are 'inherently evil', then your world is justified in having racists.

You are actively encouraging a world where racial supremacists are right.

That's bad, m'kay.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:15 pm

ACOS wrote:The line of argument here (which is perfectly in line with SJW drivel) is that just because some racists are able to contort propaganda from something, then <that thing> must be inherently racist - which is bullshit on its face.

DSMatticus wrote:This thread is fucking excruciating. Apparently talking about racism instantly makes everyone stupid and illiterate, I don't fucking know. So instead of me trying to knock down an endless parade of non-sequiturs, strawmen, false dichotomies, and other bullshit, we're going to start over from square one.

Hi, my name is DSMatticus. I do not think orcs should be automagically blackhats who are justifiably kill on sight. There are a number of reasons I hold that to be the case, and literally all of them have come up in this thread, but here they are again:

1) WoW happened. Elder Scrolls happened. A bunch of other stories in which orcs are just green people and potential protagonists happened. And even without that, people have been wanting to play orcs since forever. People want to interact with orcs in a way that does not involve indiscriminate murder or attempting to delay indiscriminate murder. Orcs are just another funny human like elves and dwarves now. That's the direction the genre's gone. And that's fucking fine. This is not a clock that needs rolled back.

2) Related to above, orcs have been thoroughly and completely humanized. They live like humans. They breed like humans. They communicate like humans. They think like humans. And that means that when you declare that they are automagically blackhats, the correct "solution" to an orc tribe is to genocide a bunch of orc women and children. And if your response to that idea is "what kind of horrible DM drops a bunch of orc women and children in front of the PC's and forces them to tackle the moral quandary of whether or not to kill them, instead of just dropping armed and villainous orcs in front of them who clearly deserve a visit from some murderhobos," then no shit sherlock that's the point. If you're only going to drop orcs in front of the players that the players are already justified in killing, why are you inventing in setting justifications for killing all those orcs you aren't going to make them kill because it would be the biggest buzz kill ever?

3) The Stormfront worldview is that certain racists are different-colored beastmen of inferior intellect and incapable of moral decency. Declaring that orcs are different-colored beastmen of inferior intellect and incapable of moral decency is telling them that this is a fictional setting in which their worldview is 100% correct. As a general rule, if a neo-nazi is pleased with your setting's approach to race, that should give you pause.

Note how absolutely zero of the above arguments involve convincing you that orcs are any specific race. Even point 3 only involves the rather obvious claim that the setting's description of orcs ("beastmen of inferior intellect and incapable of moral decency") is equivalent to the Stormfront narrative about non-white races in the real world (all non-white races, usually), and not a comparison to any specific race. So if you find yourself saying, "but orcs obviously aren't black people," punch yourself in the fucking mouth.

At its core, the argument is that you add a racist subtext to your game and it gives you absolutely nothing in exchange and also cockblocks a bunch of potential stories. And if you wanted to respond to that argument, you would need to demonstrate that the in-setting description of orcs looks nothing like the real world narratives of racists (hint: you can't, because it does) or describe the benefits of having all orcs (including orc children) be justifiably stab on sight (very little success so far on this front, because color coding the baddies is pretty easy).

So, are we all on the same page yet about what the argument actually is? Because there is no reason for this to be this goddamn difficult.

I'm just going to quote myself in entirety everytime some stupid fuck tries to describe what the argument is and it is not in fact the argument.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:21 pm

deaddmwalking wrote:You are actively encouraging a world where racial supremacists are right.

1) The reason racial supremacists are offensive is that they're so out of touch with reality. In a hypothetical where they're right, they're... right.

2) Weird fantasy interbreeding aside, we're not talking about different subgroups of human beings, but different species.

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:23 pm

deaddmwalking wrote:If you have normal humanoids that are born and raised in the human fashion, but are 'inherently evil', then your world is justified in having racists.

Why limit it to humanoids? And why limit it to creatures raised in human fashion?
Don't all creatures capable of rational thought deserve the same treatment?

Stinktopus · Post by **Stinktopus** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:29 pm

Basically, having intelligent creatures listed in something called the "Monster Manual" reveals D&D to be Hitler's final plan to enshrine racism in the hearts and minds of nerds.

Jack Chick was right, for all the wrong reasons!

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:32 pm

ishy wrote:Why limit it to humanoids? And why limit it to creatures raised in human fashion?
Don't all creatures capable of rational thought deserve the same treatment?

If D&D were in reality, there'd probably be a Yuan-ti Anti-defamation League. Because even if they are infiltrating our societies in an effort to destroy all warm-bloods... it's racist to say so!

Meanwhile, think of the poor plight of the discriminated-against undead. People consider them 'evil', and form parties to hunt them down and exterminate them, merely because they hunger for the flesh, blood, and spirit of the living.

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:38 pm

ishy wrote:
deaddmwalking wrote:If you have normal humanoids that are born and raised in the human fashion, but are 'inherently evil', then your world is justified in having racists.
Why limit it to humanoids? And why limit it to creatures raised in human fashion?
Don't all creatures capable of rational thought deserve the same treatment?

Mostly. While alignments are stupid for all kinds of reason (such as Mialee being 'chaotic' because of her dedication to her art while Ember is 'lawful' because of her dedication to her art) there are going to be some creatures who choose to prey on sentients, and they're pretty clearly evil (like an illithid). Even if they're not 'evil', they represent a threat to the species, so you're pretty justified in an 'us or them' type of mentality.

And there certainly wouldn't be an objection to a race dealing with 'violent tendencies' to the same degree as 'evil tendencies'. I can accept that most ogres are 'evil' because they do evil things. I can even accept that most orcs are 'evil' because they do evil things. I object to orcs being 'inherently evil'. As others have pointed out - if a thing is inherently evil, it would be 'good' to destroy its spawn (and in D&D, killing evil is objectively and demonstrably good). In a world where killing baby orcs is not only encouraged, but good, that's bad, m'kay.

souran · Post by **souran** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:39 pm

Occluded Sun wrote:
ishy wrote:Why limit it to humanoids? And why limit it to creatures raised in human fashion?
Don't all creatures capable of rational thought deserve the same treatment?
If D&D were in reality, there'd probably be a Yuan-ti Anti-defamation League. Because even if they are infiltrating our societies in an effort to destroy all warm-bloods... it's racist to say so!

Meanwhile, think of the poor plight of the discriminated-against undead. People consider them 'evil', and form parties to hunt them down and exterminate them, merely because they hunger for the flesh, blood, and spirit of the living.

George Romero did say that he thought that humans and zombies could co-exist but zombies would need to find something else to eat....

deaddmwalking · Post by **deaddmwalking** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:42 pm

Occluded Sun wrote: If D&D were in reality, there'd probably be a Yuan-ti Anti-defamation League. Because even if they are infiltrating our societies in an effort to destroy all warm-bloods... it's racist to say so!

You posted while I was responding - but this deserves a response...

Recognizing that a creature is 'evil' because it is doing something wicked (like kicking a baby) is not the same as recognizing a creature is 'evil' because it is inherently evil.

A group of Yuan-ti inflitrating societies in an effort to destroy all warm-bloods are 'evil' (the same way that an eco-terrorist group planning to destroy all humans would be evil). The same yuan-ti hanging out in the jungle and chilling would not be 'evil'.

Calling a group evil without giving them ACTIONS that support it is not just racist - it's lazy. Give the heroes a reason to kill the bad guys by making them actually bad. It's not hard.

DragonChild · Post by **DragonChild** » Mon Jul 07, 2014 7:45 pm

Hint: If Occluded Sun, the guy who thinks that the slave-owning times of the US had more freedom than current times, agrees with you on what's racist or not, you may have a problem.