Alignment in 5E still causes arguments

[Laertes]

The limit on the amount of detail you can put into your monsters is given by wordcount and design space. Both are independent of how broad your setting is. This means that if you have more types of monster in a game you'll have less detail for each one, and vice versa. It's a tradeoff between kitchen sink games and small focused ones.

There's clearly a difference in worldview between people who want a small, focused game with relatively few types of opponents but a lot of thought, maths and wordcount given to each; and people who want a game which lets them play anything they like and fight anything they like, but which sacrifices detail on each one. You might call this the Gary Gygax vs John Wick debate.

I don't think either side's right, I think it's a matter of taste and therefore de gustibus non disputandem. Voss clearly falls on one extreme. He's not wrong, and I actually share his views. But he's not right either. It's not a right and wrong thing, more of a pro-Skub vs anti-Skub thing.

Prak:
While wishing no disrespect to you, your religion or any of your co-religionists, I have to admit that I find it grating when people try to inject their real world beliefs into their games. It was annoying when CJ Carella did it in Witchcraft and it was annoying when Rob Boyle did it in Eclipse Phase, but those games were written to support those worldviews so they can be forgiven for it. Taking a game that's written to a different worldview and then rewriting sections which don't synch up with your own religious or political viewpoint is distasteful. I'm a New Atheist and a Popperian liberal but when I run Dark Heresy I put those things to sleep and run the setting like a fascist catholic wet dream, because that's what it's about and what my players signed up for when I pitched it to them.

[Username17]

The maternal/paternal line thing comes from a dumb attempt to retcon an explanation for why half-orc/half-ogres got written up so many times. The neo-orog happened because the name 'orog' accidentally got used twice. Which means of course that writing flavor for the orogs and ogrillons is modestly difficult - those subraces were literally created because of poor editorial control and redundant write-ups in the 80s.

But even that isn't impossible or even unreasonable to demand. You can write flavor for anything. Literally anything. For example:

Orogs, Ogrillons, and Neo-Orogs: Orcish tribes have traditionally granted leadership roles to the largest and strongest, while Ogre clans traditionally granted such to the smartest. This difference almost destroyed both cultures when they came in contact. The cleverest Ogres are called Ogre-Magi, but they are but one Ogre in twenty, with the rest being dangerous, violent, idiots. Orcs massively outnumber Ogres, and their rules for assigning leadership naturally dominate, which tragically elevated the very worst of Ogrekind to positions of authority in places where both species dwelt. This was the beginning of the Skullcrusher dynasty, which led to horrible misrule and many wars.

The Ogre kings took what they wanted, and by their Orcish concubines created clans of half-breeds. These half-breeds had the strength of Ogres and the cunning of Orcs and they were able to depose the Skullcrusher dynasty and establish noble lines of their own: the Ogrillon and the Orog. The Ogrillon dynasty created a series of tests where a prospective king must prove both strength and cunning, while the Orog have adopted simple hereditary rule and a strong reliance on advisors. Both have successfully kept the powerful but stupid Ogres away from real power.

But all is not peaceful in the lands of either dynasty. The life expectancy of an Ogrillon monarch is short, and succession conflicts are brutal. Cadet branches of the Orog dynasty chafe at their exclusion from the lines of hereditary ruler ship. Two Neo-Orog families are especially powerful, known as the 'black' and the 'red' for the colors of the eye on their respective house banners.

---

There. That seems like a way to include ogrillons, orogs, and neo-orogs without exceeding word count budgets or making them seem stupid and uninteresting. Races that aren't the result of accidentally writing the same thing twice are even easier to fluff up.

Tell you what, as soon as I get a real keyboard, we'll do a five hundred word challenge - any race at all, no matter how stupid, can be given an interesting writeup in five hundred words or less. Tasloi, Vril, Gifts, anything.

-Username17

[Prak]

Laertes: Where do demons in D&D come from then?

Also, I will point out that the Pact Primeval was literally the introduction to a WotC published book.

While my sympathy for the devil has affected the game, it hasn't really changed how demons are used, save that one player knows that when they kill a demon, at least sometimes, they're very much killing a nature spirit that was driven to desperation by the gods. Sure, the nature spirit is now a demon, who will tempt them to evil, but it was a nature spirit, and there's little to no reason to believe that "the cure" isn't a valid story to tell about demons, much like one might decide to try to end the zombie apocalypse by finding a cure.

Also, if you're not taking the piss of the fascist catholic wet dream that is the Empire in Dark Heresy... from my understanding, you might be playing the setting "wrong."

Edit: also, most of my "co-religionists" are dicks, so...

[Voss]

Tell you what, as soon as I get a real keyboard, we'll do a five hundred word challenge - any race at all, no matter how stupid, can be given an interesting writeup in five hundred words or less. Tasloi, Vril, Gifts, anything.

-Username17

Thats... great, Frank. But first, how about fewer words on why or how spamming out bullshit (500 words or not) for nonsense races is in any way helpful or useful? Is there a mandatory cantina scene where we have to endure a sweeping camera panoramic to establish the most obscure monster races in the setting? Seriously, what is the point? What benefit is there to have 50+ 'savage antagonist species' (or as the default assumption actually goes, red dots to kill) rather than 5? What does the extra 22,500 words get you? Other than a kick to believability for the setting, because there isn't room for all these critters.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I think the point would be to churn through enough stories until we got a handful that we liked the most. Then we copy-paste these stories onto races with a cool enough aesthetic or memetic history, tweaking features as necessary to make a better fit. If you really liked the write-up people did for, say, kuo-toa or bullywugs but you don't want stupid-looking frog people in your game then you could just slap it onto kobolds or minotaurs or whatever.

[Username17]

Tell you what, as soon as I get a real keyboard, we'll do a five hundred word challenge - any race at all, no matter how stupid, can be given an interesting writeup in five hundred words or less. Tasloi, Vril, Giffs, anything.

-Username17

Thats... great, Frank. But first, how about fewer words on why or how spamming out bullshit (500 words or not) for nonsense races is in any way helpful or useful? Is there a mandatory cantina scene where we have to endure a sweeping camera panoramic to establish the most obscure monster races in the setting? Seriously, what is the point? What benefit is there to have 50+ 'savage antagonist species' (or as the default assumption actually goes, red dots to kill) rather than 5? What does the extra 22,500 words get you? Other than a kick to believability for the setting, because there isn't room for all these critters.

Actually yes, there are mandatory cantina scenes. But more importantly, in Kitchen Sink Fantasy, there are an arbitrarily large number of races. If someone wants to add a new variety of Dwarf, they just do. So the Monster Manual's purpose is to provide as many variants in a plug and play manner as possible.

If you're playing Kitchen Sink Fantasy, you just have to accept that there are twelve kinds of Goblin, even if in your particular campaign you only face one of them. So the Bhuka might as well be interesting if they show up. Also, the players are going to dumpster dive like crazy, and if they decide that they want to play a Cold resistant Hobgoblin, they are going to find the Amitok. So the Amitok should have something vaguely interesting about them.

-Username17

[deaddmwalking]

If every race is commonly encountered and widespread, I think you can have just a few races. But having lots of races lets you bridge the gap between a small focused campaign setting and a much larger world.

If you have a very detailed region that has less than a dozen races, but you have another region that also has less than a dozen races (with minimal overlap) you're going to quickly end up having lots and lots of races.

[ishy]

Not all the creatures in the MM need to exist in the campaign setting.
That way new campaigns can feel fresher as well.

[Occluded Sun]

I agree with the sentiment, but you're wrong about the word. The most common definition of demon in English is “evil spirit" but the moment we're talking about a tangible creature, that definition is out the window. That leaves us with definitions that include troublesome beings, extremely driven beings, and simply powerful beings. Certainly, there is nothing incongruous about “Maxwell's Demon" or the “Pinball Demon" being non-evil.

Yes, yes, it's derived from a Greek word that refered to a particularly abstract sort of spirit entity, or maybe a concept, depending how how literally you think the ancient Greeks were.

But with semantic drift, a 'demon' is now an evil entity that may or may not manifest physically but is malevolent towards humanity and possible towards the entire reality humanity exists in.

[Occluded Sun]

What about demons and angels and similar entities? Are you also opposed to slaad and modrons?

What about them? Am I opposed to divine servitors that actually reflect the nature of their slavemaster? Not particularly. Am I opposed to <giant frog> and unthinking polyhedron-creatures? Yes.

I confess that I do not understand this. Modrons and slaads are slaves to their own natures. It's hard to imagine a species native to pure Order, or pure Chaos, that wasn't itself orderly or chaotic. If people want Order and Chaos to be in their games... and lots of them do, for whatever reason... it's going to come up.

Then they're dumb. You can totally have evil antagonists without descending into wholesale stupidity.

I agree... just as you can have good antagonists without descending into wholesale stupidity. But from the perspective of a neutral individual, both good- and evil-alignments are going to look stupid at times.

[Voss]

What about demons and angels and similar entities? Are you also opposed to slaad and modrons?

What about them? Am I opposed to divine servitors that actually reflect the nature of their slavemaster? Not particularly. Am I opposed to <giant frog> and unthinking polyhedron-creatures? Yes.

I confess that I do not understand this. Modrons and slaads are slaves to their own natures. It's hard to imagine a species native to pure Order, or pure Chaos, that wasn't itself orderly or chaotic. If people want Order and Chaos to be in their games... and lots of them do, for whatever reason... it's going to come up.

I can think of several dozen things that deal with 'order and chaos'* that don't resort to giant frog and polyhedron, and only one thing that did**. It isn't a given, or even reasonable or relevant.

Do not want because its asinine shouldn't be all that confusing.

*for a given value of 'order and chaos,' since D&D's alignment system notably doesn't tell order/chaos stories very well, since law goes off on all sorts of side jaunts (including traditions and individual personal beliefs, and inexplicably, sometimes, just being a wizard) and chaos is often just treated as the same thing as multiple personality disorder.
**notably, modrons didn't last long. Attempts to re-introduce them are usually met with giggles.

[Occluded Sun]

The Borg were pretty awesome while they lasted (don't get me started on the Queen thing).

They're pretty much Lawful all over. And a delightfully refreshing kind of Evil, too.

[deaddmwalking]

I confess that I do not understand this. Modrons and slaads are slaves to their own natures.

If a slaad is a 'slave to its own nature', does that make its behavior predictable? If so, that doesn't strike me as particularly 'chaotic'. If its nature is to be 'lol random', then that's pretty stupid also and hardly worthy of inclusion in the game...

For a 'chaos creature' to meaningfully add to the game, they have to be working to increase entropy and return the world to the void of chaos from which it sprang... But they need to do that in an 'organized way'. Champions of chaos who are themselves chaotic gets weird...

Of course, they could avoid that by having every Chaos champion unique. Instead of Slaadi, you just get Godzilla coming in and wrecking shit, and then when he gets defeated, chaos spawns Mothra, and so and so on.

[Occluded Sun]

If a slaad is a 'slave to its own nature', does that make its behavior predictable? If so, that doesn't strike me as particularly 'chaotic'.

There's a story somewhere in the Planescape fiction material about the slaad that was so predictable that her innkeeper kept a different-colored lamp handy so that her 'sudden unpredictable demand to have the lamp changed' could be met in a moment.

She was quite depressed about being a slaad that could be anticipated until someone pointed out that was the most unexpected thing they'd ever encountered in their experiences with chaos.

For a 'chaos creature' to meaningfully add to the game, they have to be working to increase entropy and return the world to the void of chaos from which it sprang... But they need to do that in an 'organized way'. Champions of chaos who are themselves chaotic gets weird...

And Champions of Order end up becoming unpredictably complex in their battles to preserve order.

Funny how things tend to work out that way, isn't it?=

[Prak]

Stupidly, and perhaps, impossibly, enough, I think WW actually managed to write a manifestation of chaos that's at least better than slaadi, if not actually good.

See, one of the villain types for Werewolf were the Fomori, people (and sometimes animals or splats) that had been possessed by a Wyrm spirit that reshaped their body and made them monster people to be mown down by werewolves because "THE WYRM MUST DIE! WHAT CURE!?"

The other triat members, the Weaver and the Wyld, could make their own possessed too, and while the Weaver had one specific type, Drones, the Wyld's gorgons were as varied as the Wyrm's Fomori. One type was the regrettably named Puddlefeet, who were basically heralds of the formless force of adhd creation that was the Wyld.

The in character piece about Puddlefeet talks about one standing at a claw machine, with a pile of stuffed animals beside it, as he continued to unload the machine in the slowest, most expensive way possible, then just walking off leaving its winnings, stopping in front of a car in the parking lot that turned out to have been stolen by escaped convicts, and the license plate just unhinging and flying off. The out of character sidebar talks about how they're essentially living Calvinball, act erratic, and never use the same means or method twice in a row. They all have an MTP power called Chaos Engine which basically means they can make small changes to their environment, like "convincing" a security camera to turn off. At the lower cost version, they can't control it, at the higher cost version, they can attempt to.

So, as usual, when it gets to mechanics, WW is suck, but they at least gave some sense of a being of chaos.

[Cyberzombie]

The Borg were pretty awesome while they lasted (don't get me started on the Queen thing).

Yeah, more evil races like this would be good for D&D, especially for outsiders.

[Omegonthesane]

The Borg were pretty awesome while they lasted (don't get me started on the Queen thing).

Yeah, more evil races like this would be good for D&D, especially for outsiders.

The Borg are more like Undead than a race in many ways - they assimilate biological races and convert them into more Borg. I don't know offhand if there is any evidence of them having a reproductive cycle other than converting captured prisoners.

[Voss]

The Borg were pretty awesome while they lasted (don't get me started on the Queen thing).

Yeah, more evil races like this would be good for D&D, especially for outsiders.

The Borg are more like Undead than a race in many ways - they assimilate biological races and convert them into more Borg. I don't know offhand if there is any evidence of them having a reproductive cycle other than converting captured prisoners.

There isn't any reason they couldn't, and they definitely have baby shelving* (as shown in the first episode in which they appear). They likely don't fuck, but harvesting some egg and sperm cells so they can grow more drones seems, at the very least, a reasonable backup for long travel times, emergencies** or whatever experimental reasons they care to come up with.

*I don't know what the hell was with that set, but it looked like they opened a damn IKEA cabinet drawer painted metal, and voila, babies
**given the number of times they get stranded, trapped under ice or whatever, this seems like a real need to me.

[Occluded Sun]

And then there are races like the Zerg and the Protoss... which have clear associations with Chaos and Law, as well as somewhat weaker ones with Evil and Good. (Everybody ends up a kind of dirty gray in Starcraft, so... there's that.)

[momothefiddler]

The Protoss, of course, are more closely tied to Chaos because, unlike the Zerg, they have even the slightest semblance of individual action, whereas the Zerg are all one big group that acts in concert for the whole without any real individuality, like they're all a big... hive, or something like that.

[Korwin]

I agree... just as you can have good antagonists without descending into wholesale stupidity. But from the perspective of a neutral individual, both good- and evil-alignments are going to look stupid at times.

Alignments are dumb. Full stop. Doesnt matter if its good, evil, law or chaos.

I did like the Eternam Champions books by Morcook.
D&D is not the game to recreate the experience.

[MGuy]

The Protoss, of course, are more closely tied to Chaos because, unlike the Zerg, they have even the slightest semblance of individual action, whereas the Zerg are all one big group that acts in concert for the whole without any real individuality, like they're all a big... hive, or something like that.

Zerg are actually pretty splintered. They have parts that break away from the whole all the time. Without someone like Kerrigan, the Overminds or the Hybrid whatevers they'd be way more individualistic.

[momothefiddler]

The Protoss, of course, are more closely tied to Chaos because, unlike the Zerg, they have even the slightest semblance of individual action, whereas the Zerg are all one big group that acts in concert for the whole without any real individuality, like they're all a big... hive, or something like that.

Zerg are actually pretty splintered. They have parts that break away from the whole all the time. Without someone like Kerrigan, the Overminds or the Hybrid whatevers they'd be way more individualistic.

I sorta thought that was the entire point of existence for the Overminds, as... coordinators? something.

I don't actually know much at all about Starcraft lore; I've never gotten to play a campaign and I don't care enough to read through a wiki. So maybe I'm wrong there.

[Kaelik]

The Protoss, of course, are more closely tied to Chaos because, unlike the Zerg, they have even the slightest semblance of individual action, whereas the Zerg are all one big group that acts in concert for the whole without any real individuality, like they're all a big... hive, or something like that.

Zerg are actually pretty splintered. They have parts that break away from the whole all the time. Without someone like Kerrigan, the Overminds or the Hybrid whatevers they'd be way more individualistic.

Yeah, if anyone actually cares, the primeval zerg are basically like a true anarchic paradise where giant monsters eat everyone who pisses them off and threat of force is the only thing that gets anyone to work with you.

The zerg you run into are the ones being mind controlled by the overmind, and then kerrigan, and then the hybrids.

[sarcasmoverdose]

And a delightfully refreshing kind of Evil, too.

The Borg aren't evil, they're amoral. Big difference.