On a side note, my super powered 6th level party gleefully obliterated a dozen of my fungus orcs today. The fact that they were a full on evil road block begging for divine intervention was pretty fun for them to run through.

I give my players plenty enough moral dilemmas when they have to decide who to help between neutralish humans. Sometimes it is a lot of fun to blast pure evil.

Quote from: MDBrantingham;478232*snip*

Holy crap dude that was a block of text.

I think you got my reference, but in the case of the The Dark Crystal, the point is that modifying the McGuffin may actually redeem those who are driven by its evil power.

So Evil in that case would be a supernatural force, but the race themselves would merely be a slave to it.  The heroes in this case may not only be able to save themselves, but their enemies as well.

Personally, though, I prefer redemption to be an option.  Maybe it's not an easy one to achieve, maybe it'll require more sacrifice on the part of the PCs in changing some supernatural or divine elements of the game-world, but I think it's a good option to have.  I think it'd be a huge smack to the face of whatever evil gods imbued a race with their chaotic bent if you altered them so that they could join the free peoples rather then forever being slaves to their nature.  That'd probably be really high-level play, but I think it'd be interesting.

Quote from: Peregrin;478257Holy crap dude that was a block of text.

I blame Sam Adams Octoberfest brew.  This time of year you'll notice I am more tarnacious on the whole.

Look - I respect your view...that everyone and every thing is redeemable.  And in your campaign it makes sense.  And if I were in your campaign, I would accept the parameters.

I don't agree with your view.  Not, at least, as far as roleplaying settings go.  In my campaign, where there is supernaturally defined morality, there is absolute evil and absolute good.  

Respecting your view is not the same as agreeing with it.  

I dont expect your campaigns to be like mine.  I dont want your campaigns to be like mine.  I dont think it would make sense if they were.  That's roleplaying.  The roles in your campaign are defined differently than in mine.

Quote from: MDBrantingham;478258I blame Sam Adams Octoberfest brew.

Next try a Guiness Stout before typing....  

Quote from: jhkimJohn Morrow suggested an alternative that he thought was useful - positing that orcs had an inborn trait of psychopathy

That's because Morrow has a hardon for psychopaths. Seriously, he brings them up all the fucking time, in most discussions on politics, and on the rare occasions he posts about roleplaying. Even way back in 2006 in a discussion about Pundit's landmarks.

It's D&D, for fuck's sakes. Psychology is irrelevant, notwithstanding the random insanity tables.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;478261That's because Morrow has a hardon for psychopaths. Seriously, he brings them up all the fucking time, in most discussions on politics, and on the rare occasions he posts about roleplaying. Even way back in 2006 in a discussion about Pundit's landmarks.

It's D&D, for fuck's sakes. Psychology is irrelevant, notwithstanding the random insanity tables.

Actually not sure as you could argue that he vast majority of PCs display Psychopathic behaviour (oh and it was me that brought up the Psychos first this time )

It's all about taste. If you want a simple hack and slash, efffectively turning D&D into a tactical combat games then fine. Alignmen, morality etc are all irrelevant in that game. And that game has a place.

If you add more depth to the game and make your PCs more rounded then you want to consider how they react to certain things. Like it says in my sig I am a method roleplayer I expect the world to be inhabited by 3 dimensional characters on all sides.
 I have no problem with orcs being irredeemibly evil so long as that has some justification (orcs in Tolkien being created by corrupting elves for example) the interesting part comes in how the PCs interact with that evil. I can not except that the GM gets to define good and evil in his world. He can define the Laws of the world, he can define the customs of the world, but the players are bound to bring their own good/evil with them and trying to pretend that isn't the case ends up becoming a semantic arguement of the type you have when you are trying to be edgy when you are 15. Saying 'but in my Aztec world Human sacrific is Good,' is just being dickish. You can say 'Human sacrifice is the way we do things, it is the Law,' doesn't make it good.

So by all means define goblins or giants in a racist way but be aware that you are doing it. Or just play a hack and slash. What I find unsupportable is the game that claims to be using imagination and deeply immersive and far superior to MMOs and CRPGs when the PCs just wade into groups of creatures kill them with no remorse and still claim themselves to be Goodly heroes.

Quote from: MDBrantingham;478258I blame Sam Adams Octoberfest brew.  This time of year you'll notice I am more tarnacious on the whole.

Look - I respect your view...that everyone and every thing is redeemable.  And in your campaign it makes sense.  And if I were in your campaign, I would accept the parameters.

I don't agree with your view.  Not, at least, as far as roleplaying settings go.  In my campaign, where there is supernaturally defined morality, there is absolute evil and absolute good.  

Respecting your view is not the same as agreeing with it.  

I dont expect your campaigns to be like mine.  I dont want your campaigns to be like mine.  I dont think it would make sense if they were.  That's roleplaying.  The roles in your campaign are defined differently than in mine.

Fair enough.

As for Orcs being irredeemably evil, that's just factually wrong. Over and above whatever diplomancy rules exist in whatever edition you're playing with, the spell atonement has existed since forever. It converts a humanoid from any alignment to any alignment. Period. Orcs can be redeemed for full value: it's in the rules.

Now if you're playing 3rd edition, the game actually has tags to distinguish things that come in multiple alignment flavors and things that don't. Orcs fall squarely in the first category. The Orc Warrior is "Usually Chaotic Evil", Orcs as a species come in every alignment.

So the question of whether Orcs can be redeemed or not has a genuine answer in the rules: yes they can.

-Frank

Quote from: John Morrow;478208"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:

I didn't say it was 'vicious'.  And the GW Bush type Republicans seem to be big promoters of the "We're all La Raza" mythology created by the white Mexican ruling class in the 1920s to deter the Mestizos from allying with the Indians against the elite.  I think they know they'll never get more than 40% of the Hispanic vote, even in Texas, but they put big-business interests over party interests.  Mexican immigration drives down labour costs and helps enable de-Unionisation.  This, combined with outsourcing, hurts long-settled white, black and Hispanic workers and benefits business, shareholders, and to a lesser extent consumers (US business profits are vastly higher now than they used to be, indicating that the consumer benefit is minimal).

Quote from: John Morrow;478219IAnd 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.

That's the political orthodoxy here in Europe - speaking the truth is no defense if the potential effects are bad - in various countries non-Muslims can't legally quote violent passages from the Koran if doing so might increase fear of Islam, for instance.  I thought the US was pretty similar in terms of social condemnation, if not criminal prosecution.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;478237The entire premise of Christianity is that everyone is wicked and redemption is available for everyone. That is the entire point of the religion. So any time a Christian says that someone is genetically wicked and thereby excusing doing something final to them, they have already broken the irony meter. Because premise 1 of their religion is that being wicked from birth is the default state of absolutely everyone. Therefore being wicked from birth does not - and cannot - justify treating any person different from any other person.

And if my fantasy setting with monsters and magic had a fantasy Jesus who died for the sins of all sentients and could save them by grace rather than a cosmology where one's alignment is determined by their deeds and reincarnation exists, that might be relevant or ironic.  Would you consider an atheist running a setting with deities ironic, too?  Do you really have that difficult of a time separating reality and fantasy?

Quote from: J Arcane;478241I think there is far less imagination in insisting everything be an imitation of the world, than daring imagine one beyond it.

And I think there are a lot of people in the role-playing hobby who imagine themselves to be far more imaginative than they really are.

Quote from: CRKrueger;478242Yes, yes it is.  With you just vaulting yourself to the top of the list.

I thought it was a pretty good thread until Pseudo posted, actually.  He kinda took it into rpgnet sneeredy-cat territory.

Quote from: S'mon;478270I didn't say it was 'vicious'.

Perhaps not, but you stated something as fact which a few minutes with Google showed me wasn't fact.  Yet another example of the fact that political quips that sound too good to be true (I was all Nixon's fault) usually are.

Quote from: Peregrin;478257Holy crap dude that was a block of text.

I think you got my reference, but in the case of the The Dark Crystal, the point is that modifying the McGuffin may actually redeem those who are driven by its evil power.

So Evil in that case would be a supernatural force, but the race themselves would merely be a slave to it.  The heroes in this case may not only be able to save themselves, but their enemies as well.

Personally, though, I prefer redemption to be an option.  Maybe it's not an easy one to achieve, maybe it'll require more sacrifice on the part of the PCs in changing some supernatural or divine elements of the game-world, but I think it's a good option to have.  I think it'd be a huge smack to the face of whatever evil gods imbued a race with their chaotic bent if you altered them so that they could join the free peoples rather then forever being slaves to their nature.  That'd probably be really high-level play, but I think it'd be interesting.

Yeah, I definitely think it's an interesting idea.  Although The Dark Crystal analogy indicates there might be a very heavy price to pay.

Personally I tend to go with the default D&D Orcs who are Evil but not mindless demons; and can even be quite affable when they're not chewing your legs off.  I'm running 4e Forgotten Realms which includes Many Arrows,  a relatively peaceful orc kingdom.   In this kind of setting orc genocide is morally questionable within our Christianity/Enlightenment-derived RW morality, or within the current D&D Alignment system.

Quote from: John Morrow;478276Perhaps not, but you stated something as fact which a few minutes with Google showed me wasn't fact.  Yet another example of the fact that political quips that sound too good to be true (I was all Nixon's fault) usually are.

I didn't mean that Nixon himself personally invented the Hispanic category.  I didn't see anything in your quote to disprove what I wrote.  The Nixon Presidency created Hispanic/Latino as a political-ethnic category as a wedge against the (mostly white, part black) Democratic base in the Unions.

It's not just the Republicans' fault.  Hispanic political activists on the Left - typically white, or nearly all white, in ancestry - eagerly supported this.  And the soil had been primed back in Mexico as early as the 1920s, when the white elite there started claiming to be the same 'Cosmic Race' as the mestizo majority; pretending they were all descended from the Aztecs, etc.