Evil but No Good

[Occluded Sun]

If they're not people, then it isn't particularly evil to slaughter them. That's not a problem with alignment, it's a problem between the players and the GM that exists because they haven't established their world properly.

[Pixels]

So the fact that orcs are creatures roughly as intelligent as humans, with emotions, culture, and a long history doesn't bother you at all? They're not people, so kill them all and take their stuff.

Truly you are the exemplar of Good.

[Occluded Sun]

Demons are roughly as intelligent as humans, and generally moreso. They have emotions, culture, and a long history. They are also, pretty much by definition, manifestations of supernatural Evil with a capital E.

Pixels, I suggest you get out of the deep end of the pool. You're over your head.

[Kaelik]

So the fact that orcs are creatures roughly as intelligent as humans, with emotions, culture, and a long history doesn't bother you at all? They're not people, so kill them all and take their stuff.

Truly you are the exemplar of Good.

Orcs would probably be more free as slaves, is I think what he is trying to say.

[MGuy]

If they're not people, then it isn't particularly evil to slaughter them. That's not a problem with alignment, it's a problem between the players and the GM that exists because they haven't established their world properly.

Other than this not having anything to do with how alignment isn't useful for Jack or Shit what is your definition of "people"?

[Occluded Sun]

If you went about mowing down blades of grass and stepping on ants, a Jainist would be horrified, but most people wouldn't consider that evil. Who's right - the average person, or the Jains?

It's not just 'people' - standards of which beings are deserving of moral consideration vary wildly.

[Kaelik]

If they're not people, then it isn't particularly evil to slaughter them. That's not a problem with alignment, it's a problem between the players and the GM that exists because they haven't established their world properly.

Other than this not having anything to do with how alignment isn't useful for Jack or Shit what is your definition of "people"?

The answer he will refuse to give, but the thing he actually thinks is "not Black people" (or "only White people"). So as a card carrying racist of course he thinks that made up fantasy races that are modeled on racist stereotypes of black people are also not real people.

[MGuy]

If you went about mowing down blades of grass and stepping on ants, a Jainist would be horrified, but most people wouldn't consider that evil. Who's right - the average person, or the Jains?

It's not just 'people' - standards of which beings are deserving of moral consideration vary wildly.

You sure did give me a lot of words that didn't answer my question. Are you practicing to be a politician?

[Pixels]

No, even for demons it is exactly the same case. What makes demons evil in your view? If you turned those same views back around, evaluating them from the position of a demon looking at humans, would they suddenly seem morally reprehensible?

A philosophy based on the rights of an arbitrary group of races that you consider to be people will always end up being cruel or discriminatory because you lack a fair measure of what and what does not deserve rights. Orcs are one of many Rubber-Forehead Aliens Races in D&D – humans with tweaked facial features and skin color. They are as close to humans as elves. Heck, both can breed with humans, which isn’t something that can be said for many races you would probably claim to be in the set of “people.” So why are elves people and orcs not? By what rational basis do you assign yourself the rights to life and property, but not orcs?

Your reason can be as simple as "they're not human and I am" but then you really can't claim any sort of moral high ground when the orc hordes murder a bunch of humans because "they're not orcs and we are."

[DSMatticus]

Occluded Sun shares his views of freedom with pre-Civil War Southern plantation owners, so it does not surprise me at all that he shares his preferred take on fantasy races with the subset of Tolkein fans who are also white supremacists.

Also, fun fact: as far as 3.5's catalog of published/endorsed material, there are lawful good demons. If you use detect evil, they will detect as evil, because they have that alignment subtype. If you use detect good, they will detect as good, because they are on team good. Weirdly, being made out of particles known as evilons is metaphysically descriptive, but not behaviorally prescriptive. 3.5 really wants you to be able to distinguish the black hats from the white hats at a glance, but it also really does not want to commit to mandatory alignments. Presumably not only because it has creepy racist overtones, but because orcs have long since become a fairly standard player race (Elder Scrolls, Warcraft) and because demonic antiheroes are hip with the kids these days (Teen Titans, all the anime - all of it).

5e's orcs are... well... it's fucking great.

It’s usually safe to assume that a half-orc is
belligerent and quick to anger, so people watch themselves
around an unfamiliar half-orc.

Some half-orcs
rise to become proud chiefs o f orc tribes, their human
blood giving them an edge over their full-blooded orc
rivals.

Some half-orcs hear the whispers of
Gruumsh in their dreams, calling them to unleash the
rage that simmers within them. Others feel Gruumsh’s
exultation when they join in melee combat—and either
exult along with him or shiver with fear and loathing.
Half-orcs are not evil by nature, but evil does lurk within
them, whether they embrace it or rebel against it.

Orcs are savage raiders and pillagers with stooped
postures, low foreheads, and piggish faces

I'm sure 3.5 says a lot of the same shit, but it's impressive how every single one of these is clearly something a racist wrote about black people in the late 1800's/early 1900's.

No ability to control their temper? Check!

The ones with some proper people blood in them are better than their kin? Check!

The curse of god is inside them, compelling them to sin? Check!

They're actually savage pig-men with the slumped posture of a gorilla? Check!

I'm not usually particularly bothered by such things (I see it more as a missed opportunity to not be fucking boring with a side of incredible tone deafness than an active advocation for racism), but Jesus fucking Christ that's a little much. I get that 5e's big selling point was "we're pretending the past 20-30 years never happened, plz give us nostalgia moneys" but maybe we're better off not putting racist caricatures with the names scrubbed off in games anymore. Seriously. Is there anything - anything at all - that distinguishes the 5e orc from what Stormfront thinks about black people?

[Occluded Sun]

No, even for demons it is exactly the same case. What makes demons evil in your view? If you turned those same views back around, evaluating them from the position of a demon looking at humans, would they suddenly seem morally reprehensible?

You're confusing Evil, which is a defined philosophical alignment, with evil, which is whatever any given person thinks is grossly undesirable and worthy of opposition.

Demons are Evil by definition.

And you are way, WAY over your head.

[CapnTthePirateG]

I mean, it sucks. What about all the people like me who want to play orcs?

Granted, I have no idea why "dumb orcs and goblins" are a thing because in the actual books the orcs had their own tech that humans didn't have (healing arts, mass-produced weapons, etc).

I seem to remember Tolkien being really upset about the orcs being always evil but never really having a good solution.

[Occluded Sun]

Oh yes, he was convinced that any entity ultimately derived from Elves or Men had free will and could choose good.

The basic problem was that given what had happened to the innate desires, social structures, and spiritual natures of orcs, the chance of one choosing good was about as great as a normal person choosing to become saintly and succeeding - it pretty much isn't going to happen.

Orcs love destruction and disorder. You know the impulse that makes people throw rocks at the windows of abandoned buildings? Imagine that turned up to eleven. In addition, orcs are all partially possessed by the will of Morgoth, the former Vala who hates all Creation and devoted himself utterly to tearing it down.

They're basically Daleks. Now, there have been good Daleks - a handful - but virtually all are hateful, genocidal slaughterers who cannot be reasoned with or bought off. Orcs are just less technologically sophisticated.

[Maxus]

I seem to remember Tolkien being really upset about the orcs being always evil but never really having a good solution.

Not one he could fit on-camera, more or less. If I recall right, he said there were orc rebels who didn't work for Sauron who wanted to be, well, left alone.

[MGuy]

Oh damn I thought OS had excused himself from the conversation after refusing to answer my question. So after being unable to even confirm what you mean by 'people' you're going to 'school' someone on what Evil is?

[vagrant]

Oh damn I thought OS had excused himself from the conversation after refusing to answer my question. So after being unable to even confirm what you mean by 'people' you're going to 'school' someone on what Evil is?

It's the opposite of Good, dumbass. I mean, obviously. (Also stop asking questions, they're interefering with my universal, I mean universally Christian moral system.)

[Pixels]

You're confusing Evil, which is a defined philosophical alignment, with evil, which is whatever any given person thinks is grossly undesirable and worthy of opposition.

Demons are Evil by definition.

And you are way, WAY over your head.

Okay, so we're back to alignment just being hat colors? Because that's fine, but then alignments shouldn't be named good and evil.

[deaddmwalking]

Long story short, Occluded Sun has definitively proven that two people can claim to understand the alignment system and expect completely opposite outputs based on the same input making it, at best, completely useless.

[Berkserker]

Out of curiosity, what would you folks think of someone who brought a character to the table who was a through-and-through racist specifically so that character could view certain groups as 'not people' and avoid this any sort of alignment-based moral dilemma?

[OgreBattle]

Out of curiosity, what would you folks think of someone who brought a character to the table who was a through-and-through racist specifically so that character could view certain groups as 'not people' and avoid this any sort of alignment-based moral dilemma?

It only works if you have a dwarf racist because they're already shaped like Archie Bunker. Anything else and it's uncomfortable.

[MGuy]

Out of curiosity, what would you folks think of someone who brought a character to the table who was a through-and-through racist specifically so that character could view certain groups as 'not people' and avoid this any sort of alignment-based moral dilemma?

I don't 'do' alignments so whatever alignment dilemma would exist is bypassed just by not using the damn thing. Other than that it would be like having any other character who 'hates' some intelligent group of sentient creatures as part of their backstories. Witch Hunters, sole orc raid survivors, demon slayers, etc. I wouldn't really care and it's really not that uncommon. I'm only concerned with whether or not someone's character is appropriate enough for the game that's being run.

As it happens I've had only one incident where one player introduce a character who so thoroughly hated a type of sentient being enough where the character had to be cut/turned into and NPC for the game to continue without disruption. In this case it was a Paladin who hated Undead. That is ALL undead. It was interesting, because at the outset this wasn't a problem. The Campaign was focused on the walking dead as a follow up to an Apocalypse that had occurred in the campaign before that the players only semi succeeded at stopping. So nothing was really out of place until a special snowflake undead youth was introduced to the party in a sort of escort mission type thing. She was basically a Mcguffin of sorts.

Under pressure from other members of the party the Paladin was forced to keep his utter disgust in check and to keep his racism from making them fail their mission. Now as it so happens the Paladin got himself into a situation where he ended up saving this special case (even though it was just by circumstance since he was destroying a demon which he also hated) and this made the young one fond of him. As the party itself became more open minded about undeath (and what it means to be undead and sentient) the Paladin's disgust never went anywhere.

There was some back and forth between the player and I about how he wanted to ride out the situation and he intentionally decided that the Paladin was a hardcore racist. He wanted to play it out just to enjoy the tension between being peer pressured into putting on a brave face despite his hatred at all things undead, and his utter disgust that this particular one would stand as an affront to the sanctity of living beings by looking and acting similar to the living. It went on for a while until his character finally decided to 'come out' and completely rebuff the undead child after a particularly harrowing event where he once again cast as standing up for the Undead youth when really he was just performing his duties. When the child got 'too' affectionate it all came out and he opted to leave the group. The player himself opted to retire the character as he felt that he had had enough of exploring that type of personality. So I took his character sheet and he ended up facing off against the group later on.

I'm the type of GM to let people play out pretty much anything as long as it isn't disruptive to the game. Note though that I've also let someone actually play as a Kender before (with the same stipulation that it not become a problem at the table) so I don't think my experiences are very representative of anything.

[Mechalich]

Out of curiosity, what would you folks think of someone who brought a character to the table who was a through-and-through racist specifically so that character could view certain groups as 'not people' and avoid this any sort of alignment-based moral dilemma?

Most morality systems would refer to the irrational hatred of some outgroup and the discrimination against said outgroup as evil.

The D&D alignment question is that, depending on how you view race/alignment matches, it may in fact be perfectly rational to despise evil races as permanently tainted and utterly irredeemable.

This leads to the weird situation where going around an randomly murdering dwarves because you hate them is evil, but doing the same thing to orcs...might not be. Binding morality to identity is messy.

[Occluded Sun]

Long story short,

Long story short, we've demonstrated that sufficiently stupid people, or people willing to stupify themselves sufficiently, can make any game mechanic, property, or theme, non-functional, regardless of how simple or straightforward it is.

Of course, we didn't really need to demonstrate that, since it's grotesquely obvious. But we increased the size of my Ignore List significantly, so there's that benefit.

[MGuy]

Long story short,

Long story short, we've demonstrated that sufficiently stupid people, or people willing to stupify themselves sufficiently, can make any game mechanic, property, or theme, non-functional, regardless of how simple or straightforward it is.

Of course, we didn't really need to demonstrate that, since it's grotesquely obvious. But we increased the size of my Ignore List significantly, so there's that benefit.

OS's thoughts on alignment in a nut shell:
It's easy to use but really doesn't fit well when applied to any character that's not a card board box. Added bonus: Your interpretation is wrong as long as it does not sync well with OS's interpretation because CLEARLY you're too stupid to understand how it works.

It is also important to note that you can't then ask questions about how OS's interpretation works because asking questions will either get you meandering non-answers or telling silence.

[Pixels]

Look Occluded Sun, if you want to simplify alignment down to Black and White Morality I can't stop you. I can point out that it is juvenille and ham-handed. I can point out that it leads to same-y, boring, cartoonish storylines. I can point out that it is a poor representation of moral good and evil, and that in fact it is not what D&D intends to represent:

Alignment is a tool for developing your character’s identity. It is not a straitjacket for restricting your character. Each alignment represents a broad range of personality types or personal philosophies, so two characters of the same alignment can still be quite different from each other. In addition, few people are completely consistent.

I can point out that Black and White Morality justifies actions that should sicken you. Not that I think you in particular will be put off by the idea of committing genocide, but it should sicken you.

I wonder if I made the cutoff for the ignore list. I might be talking to air here.