Emerald wrote:
Pretending that "Evil is a tangible force and the Lower Planes are made of evil-ons" is uniquely mind-bending and campaign-ruining compared to all the others, when the lore-obsessed find it just as easy to comprehend and incorporate as any other impossible bits of setting flavor and the beer-and-pretzels groups find questions like "Does a greedy merchant detect as Evil on the party paladin's evil-dar?" no more game-stopping than ones like "What effect does the party wizard shooting a lightning bolt into the ocean have?", is highly disingenuous.
Well, except there's the issue with how alignment interacts with typical D&D gameplay structures and the operational needs of escapism.
At it's heart D&D is about assembling a party of adventures, going to some location, killing pretty much everyone and everything at said location, and then walking out with everything even remotely valuable that you can cram into bags. At the same time, it's a deeply escapist hobby where the overwhelming majority of the players want to imagine their characters are taking actions that are morally justified and they just don't want to think about any ethical complications.
Now, the problem is that in our modern, real-world, liberal Western moral philosophical framework, pretty much everything D&D adventurers do is horrible if the people they're doing it too aren't already beyond the moral event horizon, and this is particularly tricky when the party travels outside of the lands that belong to their culture and into lands that belong to someone else's culture.
Alignment is, largely, the method D&D uses to cut through this particular ethical Gordian knot. And for some types of enemies it works just fine: saying that beings like demons, devils, undead, and various 'abominations of magic' are irredeemably evil works just fine because they really aren't biological organisms at all and can be clearly slotted into the 'not people' category and therefore defining them as 'evil' is not particularly fraught. It gets much more difficult when dealing with actual flesh and blood entities that have normal lives and families and homes or their own, and it gets really troubling when dealing with representatives of such groups that are not only not actively attacking you, but couldn't possibly attack you at all, like infants.
Now, generally, a smart GM can just elide this problem by not having troublesome non-combatants around. D&D video games have long taken this approach. You fight plenty of goblins, hobgoblins, and orcs in BG and BGII, but all of them are part of active warbands trying to murder you, and even when you go to the home turf of such groups, like the gnoll stronghold in BG, there just aren't any infants there. This is generally the best approach because even if you can somehow manage to write a convincing justification for why its ethically acceptable to murder the infants of some fantasy species, having to give that explanation in the first place has already ruined the escapism.
In terms of overall design it is probably the best approach to make it quite clear that you should only be placing the 'irredeemably evil' label no something in a game that you can successfully define as 'not-people,' and accept that anything that does potentially qualify as people comes with all the same ethical baggage as any other species. Note that it's perfectly possible to have orcs on the 'not-people' side of things, you just make them the spawn of some arcane alchemy like the Uruk-Hai.
For D&D this is something of a legacy problem. It has a lot of humanoid races/species that have been floating around since the 70s that were primarily designed for PCs to murder but at the same time are clearly people and there's no good way to reconcile the issue without opening the grimdark floodgates. Saying something like 'all orcs are evil because something, something, influence of Gruumush, something' is a dodge, but I can see why you would do that.
