Quote from: Machinegun Blue;478195Maybe killing all orcs is not the real solution expected of Good characters. Maybe truly Good characters should try to change the nature of the Evil orcs in some way.

Again the beauty of an rpg is that this is an intriguing possibility.

Not a desperately needed moral imperative .  

Sounds like a great adult permutation.

Quote from: Machinegun Blue;478195Maybe killing all orcs is not the real solution expected of Good characters. Maybe truly Good characters should try to change the nature of the Evil orcs in some way.

Maybe, and maybe they're irredeemable.  Maybe they have a different type of spirit, one created by their dark gods and invested not with free will, but with the desire to slay, dominate, and inflict pain.

I think people are missing the point that there is no right answer.  
If DM-A says the Orcs in his Setting-A are not Absolutely Evil, and are redeemable, then they are.  
If DM-B says the Orcs in his Setting-B are Absolutely Evil, and are irredeemable, then they are.

That doesn't make DM-B an "ist" of any type, as the OP suggests.

Quote from: Machinegun Blue;478182I can easily see a character that seriously follows a code of chivalry not killing the orc babies. Not a whole lot of valor to gain and there's a good possibility to lose some.

Or even a barbaric code of personal honor, where the orc women and young aren't worth killing.

But a character whose main concern is the welfare of the nearby human society?  Now the fun begins.  

Quote from: CRKrueger;478196I hear where you're coming from, but "babies"...aren't you anthropomorphizing?  Most of the time "baby", when referred to non-humans, is an adjective, not a noun.  Baby elephants, baby snakes, baby orcs, but just the word "Baby"= baby human.

I can understand some people's concern about anthropomorphizing.  But TBH, isn't this something that could also be blamed on scifi and fantasy media over the last few decades?  Nearly every race in Star Trek and and Star Wars are are anthropomorphized in some way, and even when they're regarded as "lesser" beings, there's still a "all life is sacred, find the least destructive solution" sort of feel to the narrative.

Even in the DS9 episode that was linked, the protagonists ultimately let the genetically modified warrior go, rather than killing him or submitting him as a research subject to Starfleet (much more pragmatic solutions, although more morally challenging ones).

edit:

Also, someone elsewhere on the net mentioned that before Good and Evil were added to the alignment axis in D&D, Chaos originally represented a more Lovecraftian/Moorcockian take on evil -- unnatural (rather than just Evil with a capital E), irredeemable, and unable to coexist with more civilized and peaceful beings.  If that's the sort of perspective that was originally intended, it's a lot different than the type of Good/Evil back-and-forth that developed in D&D later on, and what I was introduced to with 3rd edition, but in that light things make a bit more sense.

Quote from: CRKrueger;478198Maybe, and maybe they're irredeemable.  Maybe they have a different type of spirit, one created by their dark gods and invested not with free will, but with the desire to slay, dominate, and inflict pain.

Sure, but let's say that there's some kind of cosmic good/evil switch that can be flipped. Could make for a campaign right there.

Quote from: Machinegun Blue;478201Sure, but let's say that there's some kind of cosmic good/evil switch that can be flipped. Could make for a campaign right there.

Say there was an evil race.  And some sort of...crystal...feeding their power.  But if you completed a certain quest, you might be able to rid the world of pestilence...hmm...

Quote from: CRKrueger;478198That doesn't make DM-B an "ist" of any type, as the OP suggests.

Does make him kind of a shit DM though, as I said earlier. Especially if a PC is uncomfortable killing orc babies and the DM goes "Naw, don't worry, they're irredeemably evil fuckers. Murder remorselessly."

Quote from: daniel_ream;478168Completely independent of the topic (and it probably deserves one of its own) something I'd love to see is an intelligently written alt-historical medieval Church that combines pantheism with the trapping of the medieval Catholic Church.

You've got it, really. Praying to patron saints of this and that, the saints performing miracles of their own, visiting altars of the saints, reverencing relics (ie bits of their bodies and clothing) and icons of the saints, while worshipping one main deity - basically it's pantheistic.

It's much less so since the 1960s and their various reforms of the Catholic church. Plus as people have become more secular generally, they've drifted off from the saints and saved their small amount of spirituality for their God and Jesus.

Quote from: S'mon;478073I think they started off with "Mexicans are mostly Mestizo" - ie most have a good chunk of pre-Colonial indigenous ancestry - and using their 'one drop rule' went from there to "Mexicans are non-White".  Nixon invented the Hispanic/Latino census category as some weird fucked up Republican ploy to split the Democratic base, and now they have a culture where Antonio Banderas becomes non-white the moment he steps off the plane from Spain.

You can find an article from the Washington Post about the woman who coined the word "Hispanic" here:

"There are many Hispanic activists who think that Richard Nixon did it. Well, no, Richard Nixon was very busy -- he didn't have time to be doing this. When I explain it, they get relieved. They were holding this anger that some nasty Anglo named them. Well, no, it wasn't. It was this little Hispanic bureaucrat."

Here is her explanation of why she coined that specific term:

"The biggest concern was in those days they were beginning to hire a lot of minorities, especially Hispanic Americans, and if somebody would say, 'Well, I'm Latin and they're from Portugal, they're going to get hired.' And I said, 'That's not the point of what we're trying to do here. We're trying to open the doors for Mexican Americans.'"

…and…

"All the people in South Texas I grew up with. So many of them were poor, so many were disenfranchised. I thought: How can we argue for more federal funds or more federal help if we don't know how many they are?"

Yes, that sounds like a vicious Republican ploy to me. :rolleyes:

Maybe if Gary Gygax had just made his orcs all look like Richard Nixon, we wouldn't be having this discussion.  Clearly, it would be OK to slaughter orc women and babies if they all looked like Richard Nixon, since everyone believes he was the personification of Evil.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478205Does make him kind of a shit DM though, as I said earlier. Especially if a PC is uncomfortable killing orc babies and the DM goes "Naw, don't worry, they're irredeemably evil fuckers. Murder remorselessly."

Ho now wait a minute.  If in my campaign orcs are irredeemably evil, like they are in... oh let's say Middle Earth for example.  That doesnt make the designer of the setting (e.g. me or JRR Tolkien) "kind of a shit DM" unless I require you to do some particular thing.  It's hilarious to watch you trying to make yourself a victim when what is really happening is that you're beginning to see the point.  The orcs are evil and they have to be killed. You arent required to slit orc baby throats if that makes you "uncomfortable."  That's roleplaying.  You figure out what you do based upon the facts of the setting youre in.  Unfortunately for you, the facts of some campaigns force you to confront evil and have to make a real choice.  In the case of the poor little "orc babies" that's a hard thing to do and not everyone is up to it.  But, when your character hears about the next orc attack in the area a few years down the line - that might factor into the ongoing debate in his mushy conscience.

Quote from: skofflox;478170Thanks for the info!
Love the Tom Meir minis...

EDIT: Could not find any pics. of the Zulu Orcs at "The Lost Minis Wiki" Ral Partha/All American Line so...?!

There's a lot of blank, no picture available slots from what I could see.  Still thanks for turning me onto a cool minis archive site.  Quite a bit broader than Stuff of Legends.

But as it happens I've got one of the RP Orcs from the All American range and it is indeed a Zulu.  I thought it was a pretty cool mini.  But I suppose that just shows my inherent racism.

Quote from: jibbajibba;478058JM hints at it but effectively all the comments from "Orcs are irredeemibly Evil", to "Orcs are inferior and brutish", to "it's our moral obligation to eliminate them before they can harm 'real people' ", to "there are no shades of grey there is good and there is evil and this entire race are evil" .... all of them sound just like racist/creedist polemic used by everyone from the Nazis to the KKK to Al-Qaeda.

I don't think I'm hinting.  I've said outright that the attributes given to monsters like orcs and the statements made about them have clear parallels to the statements made by racists (using the term in the broadest sense, which includes ethnic and sectarian hatred) against the groups they hate, because the purpose is the same.  The purpose is to depict the group as monstrous and worthy of hatred if not destruction.  And racists lie, even outrageously so, in order to apply such monstrous traits to all members of the group that they hate in order to make a persuasive reason to fear, hate, or even want to eliminate a group.

But I think the problem with the parallel is not that it's wrong to identify evil for what it is or to hate or want to destroy evil but that the groups they hate are not evil, which is why they invariably lie when making their case for hatred.  Why did people make up stories about Jews using the blood of Christian children for Passover wine?  Because the reality wouldn't have persuaded people to want to hate and kill them, so they enhanced the argument with lies to make them seem more monstrous.  

Quote from: jibbajibba;478058If anything this thread has some to reinforce my beleive that there is inherent racism in the treatment of gobinoids in D&D. Even the occassional half-orc that manages to overcome his racial origins and rise up to live with humans is a reinforcement of the fact that the other can only be controlled and contained by civilisation.

Of course it's racist!  The first definition of racism from Merriam-Webster is:

"[A] belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race."

If you remove the "human" for a fantasy game where "race" actually means "species", it's pretty clear that defining certain species as inherently monstrous is, by definition, "racist".  But I don't think that the wrong question to be asking.  The question is whether such racism is justified in a fantasy setting in a way that it is not in the real world.  

To put this another way, suppose that Swedes really were inherently violent and murderous and having one living in your neighborhood was akin to having a tiger living free in your neighborhood and that it would only be a matter of time before people would start turning up dead.  Would it be wrong to not want to have a Swede as a next door neighbor?  Would it be wrong to want to run them out of town?  Would it be wrong to want to kill them if they won't go peacefully before they start killing your family?  And if this thought exercise makes you uncomfortable, why is that?

What makes racism indefensible and bad is not that it's mean or hateful but that it's simply not based on the truth.  The fact that racists regularly have to lie in order to sow their hatred illustrates how false and irrational their position is.  And if you want to argue that's not why racism is bad, then I'd be curious why you do think it is bad because you'd essentially be arguing that speaking the truth is bad.

Now, you could ask why anyone would want to create an environment where racism is justified.  Isn't that an awful lot like what RaHoWa does?  And I think that misses the point of why monsters are included in the game.  The point is not to create justified racism but to populate the setting with monsters.   For most people, such monsters are included for the same reason they include demons, zombies, and killer robots in their games, which is to provide a clear enemy to fight and defeat because people often want their escapist fiction to be more simple than reality, with clear-cut bad guys.  And for such people, wanting to kill an orc because it's a monster is no more a desire to wallow in justifiable racism than wanting to kill zombies is.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;478023Orcs are evil->therefore they must be slain

Now I can see how in that over-simplification where the "racism" is. Who says orcs are evil?

(Wow! This thread has grown quick. Someone probably already responded to this. Anyhow...)

The rules (e.g. the Monster Manual) say that orcs are evil. Or, going back to OD&D, orcs are Chaotic. Take your pick.

Quote from: Caesar Slaad;478028This thread reminds me of a DS9 episode:

Probably why you don't get it. D&D ain't Star Trek.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;478145That would by definition also be racist.

Apparently this guy is an expert on racism.

Quote from: austinjimm;478223Apparently this guy is an expert on racism.

The fucking question was "If I use racist stereotypes of this group, is that racist?" And the answer is, obviously, Yes.

You don't have to be an expert on a subject to derive a conclusion from the premises. If you presuppose racist treatment of a group, the conclusion had fucking better be that the treatment of the group was racist. Otherwise you fail at logic.

-Frank