Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482481That too (otherwise it's an XP tricorder), but a single consistent standard helps everyone know what they're getting into with detect evil.

I'm partial to the BECMI/RC "detect danger" interpretation of detect evil, myself.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482470It depends on what kind of god Jalai actually is. IRL, pagan gods are not considered the source of goodness like a lamp is the source of light. Rather, they set laws that must be obeyed, and provide good things to their followers. Jupiter doesn't determine what is good, any more than the state determines what is good. Both simply define what is permissible or not. Jalai sounds like that kind of god, and if he is, then crushing the skulls of his foes is not a question of good or bad, but of doing what one is required to do, regardless of how one do, it was a matter of necessity and divine command. I'm sure many Aztecs desperately wished their gods were capable of surviving without human sacrifice and if they thought they could, would have given up heart-cutting quite readily.

I was thinking more of a god who created the universe and morality, that sort of thing. One where you you could tie his will to right and wrong.

Quote from: CRKrueger;482499Protip: All you really did was set up a bunch of very dubious assumptions, claimed those were the only possibilities and then presumed to build arguments off those erroneous assumptions, then cry foul when I labeled them as such.

I stripped away all qualities considered good, just as you asked, to present a creature that was "irredeemably evil". i.e. one that had no good qualities that would redeem it. I realise now, of course, that your questions were not asked in good faith, but were intended to be rhetorical, since you were unaware that they could be answered.

QuoteI'm not the one who can't keep the argument straight.

Get back to me on that when you can keep a consistent position for more than two posts.

QuoteBTW, the bravery shown by Islamic suicide bombers who take their own life willingly for their cause is inherently good, is it?  According to you, I guess.  For me bravery has nothing to do with good or evil, it could be bravery merely for self-preservation.  The act of bravery is not aligned, the intent that drives it is.

You keep on pretending you know what you're talking about, and sprinkle terms like "inherently" and "absolute" as if they had some obvious meaning in context when they're just bafflegab here. What would it mean to say "bravery is inherently good" that would not be captured in "bravery is good"? You also don't appear to know what "bravery" is, as "bravery merely for self-preservation" doesn't make a lot of sense.

And yes, I will say it: Bravery, even in the service of awful causes, is an admirable trait. Intent matters, but it is by no means the only relevant factor.

Groups like the Nazis, AQ, etc., recruit individuals of good character whenever possible and then convince them that false facts are true so that they act in line with their good characters on the false facts. Not that these people are saints, but a hard-working, disciplined terrorist with a sense of duty and plenty of personal bravery is more useful than a lazy braggart who also happens to be cowardly and careless in accomplishing his mission. A soldier who is loyal, brave, and will not shirk his duty is far more useful for gunning down Russians soldiers than a shithead sadist.

On a final note, please spare me the hypocrisy of you condemning Islamic terrorists. The only point on which you differ is the initial conditions - they believe God exists, and you don't. You've otherwise already laid out that if God told you to kill evil unbelievers you would consider it righteous, good and justified to do so.

Quote from: Spinachcat;482493So after 157 pages, is it okay to kill orcs again?

Yes, but only if you rape and crucify their orcwomen and boil their orcbabies alive.

Quote from: Spinachcat;482493And if so, what if they are Black Orks from Warhammer?

Black? Wavelengthist!

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;482505I was thinking more of a god who created the universe and morality, that sort of thing. One where you you could tie his will to right and wrong.

The concept just goes back to being incoherent. We're going around in circles here. Why did he allow orcs to exist in the first place? Why can't he save them and turn them good?

Either you've got the shittiest creator god around, or the whole thing's a soak.

Also, for the umpteenth time, gods don't create morality, they create laws. Morality arises from human life.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482507Get back to me on that when you can keep a consistent position for more than two posts.

So that's a "no" on response to systematic destruction of your strawman assumptions - big surprise there.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482507And yes, I will say it: Bravery, even in the service of awful causes, is an admirable trait.

Admirable, yes, I agree, but does that make it Good? Remember that you started down this road yourself when you stripped out bravery by stripping out Good and claiming "irredeemable orcs" couldn't be brave.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482507On a final note, please spare me the hypocrisy of you condemning Islamic terrorists. The only point on which you differ is the initial conditions - they believe God exists, and you don't. You've otherwise already laid out that if God told you to kill evil unbelievers you would consider it righteous, good and justified to do so.

I claimed that under the right cosmological conditions, it could be righteous, good and justified to kill Evil beings.  The "unbeliever" strawman you just threw in.  

As far hypocrisy crap goes, there's that very small matter of Allah not being real.  I know, you're having a real big problem with the whole "god's not real here, yet god could be real there" concept.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482509The concept just goes back to being incoherent. We're going around in circles here. Why did he allow orcs to exist in the first place? Why can't he save them and turn them good?

Either you've got the shittiest creator god around, or the whole thing's a soak.

 life.

There are plenty of explanations of evil in a world created by an all good god. The chain of being is one i've found useful in games. I rarely run games with cosmic good and evil but that is what i used for my demon hunting setting.

I doubt it is a solution you will find satisfactory but it worked just fine in my campaign.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482496What you then get is a caricature of historical (and current) xenophobic beliefs. But unlike Tolkien, who wavered at describing Orcs as fully natural, biological beings (with women & kids), and certainly never showed any scenes of such, you'd be establishing those beliefs as certainties regarding a group of "pseudo-people".

(Wikipedia runs down a list of theories & comments about orcs' nature & origins that can be found in Tolkien's writings. In an unpublished letter he wrote "there must have been orc-women", but he doesn't seem to have been willing to stare the implications in the face. Compare the actually-published passage in LotR where he talks about men under the influence of evil, where Sam sees a dead man of Harad and wonders "...what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was truly evil at heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would not really rather have stayed there in peace.")

The degree of xenophobia extending to the biological level has antecedents in stories about the origins of the Huns, actually; the ancient historian Jordanes wrote that the Huns arose from Gothic witches having sex with "unclean spirits". But modern thought & science not only makes this sort of thing an anachronism, but modern attempts to square radical xenophobia with science strongly parallel the language found in RPG discussions of "irredeemable evil" justifying the slaughter of noncombatants. This is what makes the latter particularly distasteful to me. I'd speculate that it's largely the byproduct of math & science geeks being attracted to fantasy.

What's your point? What if I want my orcs to be caricatures? Do you have something against caricatures? I don't care about historical or current xenophobic beliefs, Wikipedia, or Jordanes. It's a game, and I'm tired of all this silly pseudo-academic effort over a game of "lets pretend". Have fun with it, I'm gonna go roll some dice now.

Quote from: Sigmund;482419Honestly, I think the non-com killing is not that big an issue when it comes to the game at the actual table.

Here's the thing. I don't think it's an issue because IME folks who use irredeemable evil races don't make it a habit of putting the non-com of the race(s) in their games. Sanitized play, as Morrow refers to it as. I got no issue with that.

Regards,
David R

Quote from: David R;482532Here's the thing. I don't think it's an issue because IME folks who use irredeemable evil races don't make it a habit of putting the non-com of the race(s) in their games. Sanitized play, as Morrow refers to it as. I got no issue with that.

Regards,
David R

Good deal, so we're left without a problem here then. Sounds good to me, I'm tired of this thread anyway.

Quote from: Sigmund;482531What's your point?

My point: it's highly distasteful to me. Suppose you've got a fantasy, any fantasy. I don't think fantasies are neutral, as if they just sprung up out of nowhere, and I have to accept them because they have their own internal logic. No: fantasies are a product of the interest of the people making them and enjoying them, or, at least, the interest I have in them comes from me. I'm repelled by fantasies where there are subhumans who are shown as "real humanoids" (tribes, cultures, parents, kids), yet the fantasy presents it as "good", with metaphysical certitude, to kill them even when they don't present an immediate threat--like if they're infants.

I've said several times, I think, that I've got no problem with violence and killing in games; you can add racial prejudice and the portrayal of violent cultures. What I don't care for is "scientific" and "philosophical" justifications that encourage distasteful scenarios and which parallel real-world theories underpinning some of the worst violations of humanity in history. As I wrote before, to take these approaches basically turns the douchebag thesis in the OP into truth, when there are plenty of alternatives to provide the thrills I'm looking for (action & adventure) without setting up a bunch of unpleasant premises.

These next replies group together quotes thematically to keep ideas together.  The quote links should go back to the original quotes in context.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482195As for Morrow, he explicitly stated that he ran a game in which his good PCs mowed down a bunch of greenskin kids without any moral consequences. This was because they were irredeemably evil.

The color of their skin was irrelevant.  Do you really spend that much time obsessing over such details in your games?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482263John is talking about a world in which there is a clear conception of what he calls "absolute good" and in which the Gods actively enforce this, and with Paladins and Druids who must uphold certain alignments. And to slay noncombatants in this world is not immoral (it would not cause a Paladin to fall). The players might have felt emotional turmoil, but the characters should not have based on what he claims. If they did, then it is simply because his moral theory is inadequate (a claim I've made numerous times).

That's not correct.  The players were all playing in character to one degree or another and the emotional turmoil was from their characters' perspective as well as theirs.  That was the right reaction because it was consistent with the task being a grim necessity rather than a happy sport.  

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482368You can ignore these problems if it makes you happy, but as I said, it assaults the versimilitude of the setting, just as if you introduced screwed around with another metaphysical property, like the flow of time or causation.

The verisimilitude of a setting depends on what the characters consider plausible.  Games screw around with all sorts of principles -- causation, flow of time, conservation of energy and matter, and so on with magic and most people don't notice because they don't care.  

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482381If a DM wants to justify unseemly crap like killing noncombatants, I am certainly going to investigate the reasoning behind it, and hold it to a fairly high standard, just as I would if a DM said to me "In this world, rape is cool because God created women to be the slaves of men," or "In this world, black people are less intelligent than whites - the stat bonuses I assign to each are just the objective facts of this world."

I guess you hated Old Yeller then?  I mean, what kind of sadistic author would depict a boy shooting his own dog and make it seem like the right thing to do, right?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482410Orcish combatants don't require any heavy lifting beyond what human combatants require to justify killing them. Some dude is waving a sword at you, you stick him with your sword before he gets you, whether he has tusks and green skin or white skin and blue eyes. I have evil orcs in my games, they just aren't some sort of special uber-evil in the soul.

Why do you obsess so much over the appearance of orcs?  Frankly, if you asked me what color the goblins' skin was in my game, I'd have to look at the picture in the Monster Manual because it really doesn't matter to me.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482410Someone going "There are these orcs, and they're completely evil, but they're helpless so you can remorselessly murder, torture and rape them and still be good" strikes me as weird. Not only that, but I do want a good explanation for why that is the case, just as if mythusmage pulled out Kiddie Raper the RPG, I'd demand a pretty good explanation from him about why Dracomangus the Sodomancer, Lord of All Creation, is OK with paedophilia.

What a wonderful straw man you've found on the Yellow Brick Road, Dorothy.  Who said that good characters could torture and rape them or should even be remorseless about killing them?  Again, from the Paladin code in my game:

"15) Do not attack those who have not attacked you unless you know them to be Evil.  Do whatever you can to spare those who are not Evil. Those who have turned to Evil yet still might be redeemed should also be spared.  Kill that which is Evil by nature, for only through the Lethe might they be redeemed."

"17) You should accept the surrender of your enemies and they will become your charge.  Evil that cannot be redeemed that is in your charge should be dispatched quickly and without malice.  All others in your charge should be treated honorably and humanely."

In other words, you shouldn't be killing them out of hatred.  You should make their death as quick and painless as possible. In addition, it indirectly acknowledges that killing them isn't particularly honorable or humane and expresses hope that Evil creatures will eventually find redemption after reincarnation from the afterlife.

I'm not even sure how rape entered into the picture, Dances with Straw Men.  I've repeatedly explained why I wanted it and how it actually played out in my game.  And what makes all of your apparent assumptions and insinuations about crypto-racism so amusing to me is that the player who demanded the killable bad guys is African American.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482445Sure, I would agree that fantasy worlds do not need to be consistent entirely with the real world. However, I don't think elements like magic and dragons are irrational, just fantastical. Magic in games is often organised, with clear conceptual boundaries on what it can do (usually provided by the rules on casting spells if not otherwise explicitly listed). It is not scientific, but it is rational.

A person with a decent understanding of real world physics can abuse the magic in any fantasy game and a person who asks about the details of how various spell effects work shouldn't have much trouble asking questions that are difficult for a GM to answer without creating more problems (e.g., If I transform a person into a frog and put them in a tiny frog-sized box and then turn them back, what happens?).

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482445Morality isn't fantastical though. Morality already exists, and we know how it works, and we are all already reasonably well-trained in it. We don't even really require rules for it (a good, though not perfect, indicator, of whether something is fantastical or not) though we do have some in classic D&D.

Physics also exists.  We know how that works at least as well as we know how morality works.  That doesn't stop games from telling us how things work or taking liberties with how they work to add magic or make games more "cinematic".

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482451Yes, but that part isn't exactly clear either. Is it permitted to steal from orc children? Is it permitted to lie to them?

Of course not.  Do you really not understand the concept of killing out of necessity rather than malice or cruelty?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482451If one has no moral obligation to orcs, then one has no moral obligation to them. Rape, torture, it's simply a matter of when your stomach starts turning, not logic. Sticking your dick in a tree is weird, but you have no moral obligation to the tree not to stick your dick in it.

Who is claiming that characters have no moral obligations to orcs or other monters?  Is this straw man really necessary for you to make your case?  If the Good character rapes or tortures and orc (or any other monster), then they are being cruel which would make them...uh...Evil.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482451Not really. For example, in real life we usually lock up psychopaths and segregate them from others. In tales with demons they are usually banished, rather than slain, sent back to the prison of Hell.

That because, of course, as moral people we understand that we have moral obligations even to the worst people who are incapable of recognising their own moral obligations back to us.

Beyond the fact that quite a few psychopaths get executed in the real world for their crimes, I'm not sure why you interpret an argument for killing out of necessity means that one has no moral obligations to those being killed.  Just because slaughterhouses kill cattle for food does not mean that they don't have a moral obligation to treat them humanely.  Just because prisoners are convicted of crimes and sentanced to execution does not mean that they get beaten to death or the police invite a bunch of people in to rape and torture them to death.  Is this really where reading too many philosophy books takes your mind?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482451Mythusmage is a real person (he used to post here), and he really does have a setting where adults fuck children, and it really is totally cool according to the metaphysics of the setting. He posted about it here a couple of times, and I find it an evocative comparison with orc child-murder on how moral permissiveness in games can work.

And what is the greater good served by having sex with children in that game?  How many innocent lives does it save and how much suffering does it prevent?  And, of course, killing orc children was never intended to be an enjoyable diversion for the players.  But don't let that get in the way of your false equivalency argument.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482451I'm not suggesting you find raping kids acceptable, but I am attempting to point out how once you've decided that morality is totally arbitrary for game purposes, it can lead you to some super-fucking-weirdo places.

It's only arbitrary if you play the post-modernist(*) game of claiming that disctinctions don't matter so you can claim equivalency.  

(*) Yeah, I'm sure I'm using the term wrong but the people who don't care will understand what I'm talking about.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482262You've missed the point again. Psychopaths are able to reach adulthood in our society because they are not surrounded by other psychopaths, and not in a psychopathic society with none of the fruits of human cooperation and reciprocity. Orcs, if they are a self-contained, self-perpetuating society of psychopaths, do not have that host society to burrow into like a human psychopath does.

Psychopaths can engage in cooperation and reciprocity as a means to an end and there are pragmatic reasons why monsters would want to have offspring that live to adulthood, not the least of which is to make their gang larger.  If that's not sufficiently plausible for you, then it's not that hard to imagine them having selective instincts that are in play only while their offspring are very young but fade as they mature.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482262It precludes their existence outside of that brief window of time, which makes intergenerational societies almost impossible. This is what we've been debating for a while now. That's why I said earlier that only short-lived societies that can externalise (or ignore) child-rearing and other tasks that the psychopaths are totally unsuited for could survive, and even then for only brief periods of time.

Psychopaths do manage to raise human babies when they have an interest in doing so.  Sure, sometimes they kill them when they become inconvenient, but not always.  Make their offspring more relilient, less needy, and more numerous (which is how the goblins worked in my D&D game -- remember that I mented the children attacked the party -- all of them) and a enough of them would survive until adulthood.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482431The removal of a capacity for good could happen in one of two ways:

1) Removal of sentience
2) Removal of all of the neurological machinery that makes one capable of recognising and appreciating what is good, the value of others, etc.

(1) is not evil, just "noxious", to use Elliot's term.

(2) is a creature so intellectually limited that it cannot understand the value of loyalty, cooperation, reciprocity, etc. even through reasoning about it. It must lack the capacity to understand the point of view of others in any deep way, but perhaps it can mimic their behaviour sometimes when there is an immediate goal. It must lack the capacity to control and discipline its own social behaviour, and to ever improve or learn from the results of that social behaviour.

(2) IRL exists only as aberrations - the psychopath - and even then we're really looking at the most extreme examples thereof.

I agree with (1) being noxious rather than evil but (2) is not correct.  There are plenty of examples of clever psychopaths who exhibit pragmatic loyalty, cooperation, reciprocity, and other social behavior when it benefits them precisely becuase they can think their way through the benefits of doing so.  Many can also control their behavior to some degree, which is why you'll see serial killers going years between killings.  That doesn't change the fact that they will engage in evil when the opportunity presents itself, or work toward creating that opportunity even when it doesn't exist.  I think you are confusing little-g good (anything that might be socially constructive or beneficial) with big-g Good (being willing to make sacrifices to be benevolent toward strangers with no expectation of reward).  Redemption is about more than having a minor good trait or two.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482431A creature that cannot regulate its own behaviour and must succumb to impulse (and where those impulses are only evil, as part of our initial constraints) could possibly get pregnant. It could even give birth. But the moment it gets angry at the baby, why would it not kill it in an impulsive rage or abandon it? How would it, if it cannot discipline and regulate its own behaviour, be able to maintain the routine of child care that young sentient creatures need?

The regulation of one's own behavior is not an all-or-nothing proposition.  That humans have trouble regulating their hunger to eat does not mean that they eat 7X24 or eat indiscriminately, though they might become so if they are sufficiently hungry.  Even people with severe addictions do not necessarily feed their addiciton 7X24.  

An angry evil mother might get angry enough to kill or abandon their child but if there is some value in keeping them around and keeping them alive, they might simply abuse them without killing them.  As long as she has other outlets for her cruelty, it need not be directed at her own children, especially if they are useful to her.  Think of it as the evil flip-side of women who have babies so they can have someone to love and care for.  The monstrous mothers have babies so they can have someone smaller than them to abuse and young and inexperienced nought manipulate.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482431Let's say that it is possible that orc children are much more self-sufficient from an early age than human children are, so that they can be abandoned by their parents (though this means they won't be hanging around the lair to be slaughtered) and raised to adulthood. Why would they then join with other orcs in a society, even a gang? They take no pleasure in socialisation (the capacity for friendship is a traditional good, and thus is impossible for them), and the risks of associating with a gang of equally monstrous individuals would be far greater than staying alone in the woods. You wouldn't have a society, you'd have a collection of intelligent, asocial predators avoiding one another. There would be no culture, no orcish language, no orcish technology (to build the swords etc.).

The risks of associating with a gang of monstrous individuals is not far greater than staying alone in the woods if that individual has a good chance of being hunted down and no chance to successfully prey on other humanoid settlements.  There is power in numbers and while you are correct that psychopathic serial killers can and do turn on each other, there are no shortage of psychopathic gangs of young men around the globe who direct their violence and abuse toward others because they have power in numbers.  There, you don't look at the lone serial killer as a model but at the lawless gangs of young men taken in or even kidnapped as children and initiated into a life of horrific violence against others.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482431Also, it's extremely questionable whether these creatures, which we have defined as totally incapable of anything good, would even be brave enough to physically confront one another or anything else unless absolutely forced to. Their cruelty might overcome their cowardice in certain circumstances, but you're really looking at something much more like Gollum than like a typical orc.

A creature does not have to be incapable of anything little-g good in order to be big-E Evil.  Being Evil is not defined by what they aren't but what they are.  Just because a child molester sends half his income to Unicef doesn't make him any less of a menace to those around him.  Just because a serial killer gives a few dollars to a homeless person doesn't mean he's not an evil killer.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482431IRL, a psychopath can get by acting like this because most people are not like this, and he is a parasite on the results and benefits of their goodness and socialising. In our example though, the orcs don't belong to a larger host society that they can take advantage of and steal the benefits of. They are left with the complex society and material culture that a bunch of solitary nomads have - none.

If you look at more lawless parts of the world, gangs of them can be parasites by preying on others and taking their stuff instead of hiding withing a non-psychopathic support network.  They don't need to be a part of a society to benefit from it.  They can take from it from the outside, instead.  Another option is to look at the Spartans, who pretty much raised their sons to be ruthless and remorseless psychopathic killers and who survived by terrorizing and abusing a captive population and killing their own weak, as a model.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482262Sure. Fortunately, Jesus didn't say "Love everyone, except those irredeemably evil monsters".

Correct.  And if I were running a Christian game, I would not have irredeemable monsters, since redemption is sort of what Jesus does.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482262You have missed the point of the analogy. As I said to Krueger, obeying power out of fear or respect for power is not an inherently good act, even if the power in question is itself good.

Correct, but I think you are making a false assumption if you believe that people only follow God out of fear or respect for power.  One may follow God's lead under the assumption that God's perspective allows Him to see good more clearly than any mortal can.

For example, it's been said that the flapping of a butterfly's wings on one side of the globe can start a hurricane on the other.  Taking that particular example literally for the sake of argument, it could be possible to stop a hurricane that could kill hundreds by squashing a butterfly to stop it from flapping it's wings.  If a king told me to start stomping butterflies because it will save thousands of lives, I'd probably think they were mad and would only comply out of fear or respect for the king's power.  If God told me to stomp some butterflies to save thousands of lives, I'd do it under the assumption that God can and does know that cause and effect relationship as a certainty in the way that no human power does or could.  

Similarly, if a human king told me to murder an infant because he's going to grow up and murder millions, I'd think he was made and would balk at doing so (I'd like to think I'd refuse, but I won't rule out that I might do so if the consequences of not doing so were great enough).  If God told me to murder an infant because he's going ot grow up and murder millions, I'd still be uneasy with doing so but could imagine doing so if I had confidence that God knew for certain that not killing the infant will result in millions of deaths and that a greater good is served by that one death.

Yes, I'm sure that creeps you out.  And, no, I don't want to go off on a tangent about how one might know for certain that it's really God talking to them or that God isn't lying.  This is getting into the "going back in time to kill Hitler" turf that you said didn't really interest you.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482324You don't appear to understand that people in the classical and medieval eras saw what they considered to be the real signs of the gods / God's work in the world. They weren't "waiting for a sign" like a modern believer.

Uh, there are plenty of modern believers who see real signs of God's work in the world and aren't "waiting for a sign", too.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;482381You can have a world in which goodness comes from God, but God must be consistently, absolutely, and inflexibly good in order for that to be the case. He can't be an asshole to some orcs, and then kind to other people, and have that be anything more than favouritism and ultimately inconsistency.

So there is no possible reason by which God can distinguish one person for another or one group from another and not be showing favoritism or inconstency?  That sounds an awful lot like saying that a police officer, who considers it good to protect people from having their things taken or being restrained against their will by others is inconsistent or showing favoritism if they capture a prisoner who will be fined or imprisoned.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482271I'm not an expert on evolution or ecology, but I don't think very many extinctions have occurred due to a parasite or predator wiping out its prey or host. Usually they live in local equilibria; if the host/prey species is wiped out, it's because of some external influence.

All that's really necessary is that the host or the parasite change faster than the other can compensate for of if a parasite gets introduced to a new host and one can't deal with the other.  While we don't know for certain, there are scientists that speculate that diseases and parasites contributed to or caused several large extinctions, including the decline of dinosaurs seen before the K-T boundary and North American megafauna.  Diseases and parasites are also implicated in the extinction or drastic reduction of amphibians and non-vertibrates, as well as plant.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482271No, but vampires aren't a species, they don't propagate by mommy & daddy vampires having baby vampires, and they're highly supernatural.

They have to willingly produce other vampires and not exterminate them.  It's not that difficult to imagine naturalistic vampires (or werewolves or zombies).

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482271Is this a rhetorical question? I'd appreciate if you'd actually take a stab at it yourself.

The point I was trying to make is that parasites exist in a sort of arms race with their hosts.  If the parasite is too good, it kills off the host and hurts itself.  If the host is too good, it fights off the parasite.  When the changes happen slowly, there is a certain balance in the arms race but when things change quickly or there is a major leap, one can overwhelm and defeat the other.

How this relates to monsters is that so long as the monsters are in some sort of balance with the population that they are parasitic upon, the situation can last for quite a while.  How this relates to orcs is that so long as subsistance-level humans lack the resources to go on an extended world-spanning extermination campaign, the monsters will survive and so long as the monsters don't get the upper hand, the humans will survive.  Give humans the resources and will to exterminate, however, and they could wind up going extinct.

In a world with active deities and wish spells, there is no reason why monstrous humanoids would have to develop naturally.  They could have been magically or supernaturaly created as a weapon of destruction, for evil or even well-intentioned reasons.  They were designed to be evil and reliably produce evil offspring.  

If you want a more naturalistic explanation, I can think of a few off the top of my head:

Perhaps they evolved in an environment with other monsters and predators so brutal that their lives has no place for compassion or sentiment but simply brutal hostility and hatred against all others.  As humans encroached, they slaughtered the other monsters leaving them with no enemy but the humans, and when the humans withdraw, they turn on each other.

Perhaps in an environment where humans and other humanioids could magically detect the evil in a person's soul for millenia, they exiled the evil violent people in their midst into the woods as soon as their evil manifest and those evil individuals banded together for survival against natural threats, even though they brutalized each other.  Over time, they started to reproduce and then produce offspring that were always inevitably evil like their parents.  And they know that the best way to shift the abuse from theselves is to go after other intelligent prey to brutalize, which they do when they can.

Maybe they started out as an isolated group of evil cultists that grew and transformed over time into a different species, constantly culling the good or even neutral children in their midst until there were no more good or neutral children born to them.

Maybe they were humans or humanoids that mixed genes with a more brutal species of monster to form a new species that combined human intelligence with monstrous brutality and resiliance, even from birth.

Adding environmental magic and the supernatural to those naturalistic causes only makes htem more plausible.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482271Oh dear, more psychopaths...I'm sorry, but I really don't see the relevance here.

The relevance is that when we are discussing how evil could or couldn't work and would or wouldn't do in a game setting, examples of how real evil works are relevant.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482271This is a better argument, one that occurred to me. I'm not entirely sure how convincing it is, but I don't have a good answer either.

It's not difficult to make the concept more robust.  If you can't buy the idea that monster babies are born resiliant enough to endure the abuse from their own mothers and survive, it's not that difficult to modify the monsters' instincts so that they aren't as brutal to their own children as they are to adults and other species, something one sees in humans as well as animals (with some interesting variations, including mother animals that pick which of their young survive, so they care selectively for them).  If you want to go a step further, you could have them respond to "cute" with a desire to possess (like gold, gems, and other pretty things) rather than brutalize and slaughter, such that the monsters might kidnap human young rather than slaughtering them, creating a dynamic in the game where rescuing human infants and toddlers from such monsters is a job with some demand.  I don't find it that difficult to think of reasons why evil mothers might want to have and care for children, even in the absence of instinct.  Where a normal mother might want children to feel loved, an evil mother might want to collect them as minions to control and do her bidding, getting protection from their own mother in exchange for extending her power.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482271I don't give a damn, to be honest. If your orcs or goblins are naturally awful to each other as a species or as society (not as individual deviants), then I can point to real species where stuff happens that's pretty hard to stomach. For example, infanticide and cannibalism among chimps, infanticide among lions and gorillas, female preying mantises biting the heads off males, etc. As long as we're talking about natural behavior, I don't see how it turns the entire species or society into a candidate for extermination. Even in the case of social behavior among humans:, yes to stopping suttee if you're in a position to do so, no to killing entire tribes because "they're a bunch of animals who are better off dead".

We don't exterminate animals for their moral failings becaues they are animals.  We don't exterminate entire groups of humans for their moral failings because, at worst, they are cultural rather than inborn or the practices of a minority.  You can stop something like suttee through cultural changes, and that's because humans are not monsters.  I'm talking about monsters.  Animals are not people.  People are not monsters.

Also please note that medical organizations are trying to make a species extinct right now.  There is an effort to erradicate guinnea worms from the planet.  From a fictional perspective, there are plenty of genre movies about wiping out monstrous threats to humans, be they vampires or intelligent aliens.

Quote from: Elliot Wilen;482271I exclude zombies, vampires, and the like because, again, they aren't natural species. (Haven't watched 28 Days Later, do the zombies there breed and have kids?) It's not the evil of the Terminator, etc., that I question. I think I should have put it better by saying that once you start talking about species with a pretend scientific rationale for their psychology, ecology, and the like, it becomes harder to think of them as evil in an absolute sense since, first, nature just does what it does, and second, it becomes harder to rationalize genetically-inborn evil as being compatible with human characteristics such as sentience and sociality.

Sentience is perfectly compatable with evil and humans are a part of nature, too.