Quote from: Darwinism;478513It's this crazy idea that things can be more varied than good/evil, you may want to look into it.

No one is disputing that. A lot of posters here have expressed a preference for more varied and nuanced alignment systems (I personally don't have much use for alignment except in key cases where it makes the game easier to run).

What people object to is this the idea that killing orcs in a fantasy game has racist and oppressive undertones that must be addressed. The implication that people who play this kind of game are simply unaware of their own racist tendancies because they don't connect orcs to real-life minority groups; that they are somehow misguided because they are okay with the concept of black and white morality in a fictional game world.

What I object to specifically is the idea that what goes on in the game has any impact on or says anything about a person's regular life. To me this is the same tripe they were selling back in the 80s when they said RPGs led to satanic worship, violence, and drug use. If the poster in the OP has a problem with killing orcs in game, I don't care. But he seemed to be going beyond stating his own preferences of play and passing judgement on those who do enjoy spending an afternoon slaying orcs and goblins.

Quote from: J Arcane;478324This is not a response to the point.

I don't argue with stationery.

Quote from: jibbajibba;478298But surely you can conceed, as I would, that the orcs may be toally evil. Say they were grown from the ground by evil wizards (like Saruman in the LotR movies). In this case they won't have young at all.  That is a choice for the GM to make when he does his world building but they need to be aware of the implications those choices have

Yes, if one gets rid of the need for child-rearing and social cohesion it becomes plausible, if still unlikely, to have a gang of murder-machines. I've already agreed the Orcs from WFRP are an example of how to do just this, though that particular implementation isn't my favourite (due to the soccer hooligan angle, mainly).

In that case though, you're basically dealing with something like zombies. Might as well just use zombies or something similar.

Quote from: CRKrueger;478327Most of the time I've ran D&D, orcs weren't irredeemably evil, but in some settings they were.  It just depends on the cosmology of that particular setting.  Sometimes orcs reproduce and have young, sometimes they are magic fungus, sometimes they are created by wizards.

I never said the PCs should avoid having a dirty conscience, what the conscience of a character feels is where the roleplaying comes in.  There's a difference between killing being easy and killing being necessary, or justified.  That's what makes it a hard choice, even a horrible one.

This idea of paladins crushing the cute little green skulls of baby orcs under their bootheels while in the background plays "Onward Christian Soldiers" is in your head, man.

You don't appear to understand my position if your final paragraph is any indication of what you believe it to be.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478517I don't argue with stationery.

He does have a relevant point, seems to me: why would every world of the imagination have to be an imitation of our own world? Isn't that showing a lack of imagination to believe every imagined world has to be an allegory relating to our own?

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478335I also think most players I know don't equate the D&D gods or alignment system with christianity in any way.

It's obviously so when you compare the holy warriors of D&D & modern fantasy more generally to the holy warriors of ancient Greece, who happily smashed open Scaramandrus' skull, raped the Trojan women, enslaved the Trojans they didn't kill out of hand, and stole everything not nailed down.

Or the holy warriors of the Aztecs, who captured their enemies to cut out their hearts in order to save the world, and who killed kids to merge their bodies with the gods.

Or... etc.

In the developed West, most of us live within a Christian or slightly post-Christian moral paradigm (even an atheist like me). The alignment system in D&D reflects that paradigm. Not perfectly and not in every particular, but what we consider to be "good" both OOC and IC almost always lines up much more closely with that paradigm that with any of the many competing ones that have existed over human history.

Quote from: Benoist;478334I disagree. It goes to the core of the problem IMO: that whatever evil and good are is something determined by the cosmology of the campaign, a campaign which may be considering orcs as some other culture and projecting all sorts of weird ideas on the part of the DM onto them, or may be considering them as representative of something else, like concepts of bestiality or barbarism, or absolutes of this or that, or may even not consider them allegorical in nature at all... like a certain individual writing a huge book we all know a few decades ago did.

And that gets lesson-givers all worked up. Because there's no lesson-giving to do when you don't know the particulars of a campaign. It's just hot hair, retarded misreadings and projections, kind of like Frank's doing on this thread. Or like he says ... it's a basic failure of logic, so you'd better camouflage it by refuting this simple truth of RPGs, because then, there's no argument to have about words on paper. It really depends how anyone interprets them. And that gets these fuckers who want to tell us what to play and what to think real angry. It's amusing.

Beno, there's more people to a group than the DM, and calls on things like what acts are right and appropriate, and which are not are by no means absolute. If you played in one of mythusmage's games where kiddie diddling is a sacred pederastic bond between diddler and diddlee, would you describe your paladin fucking kids, or would you voice objections, complain, argue, try to convince the other players, etc. both IC and OOC whenever the subject came up, if not outright abandon the game?

And if mythusmage wasn't a shit DM playing with other pedos, don't you think he would acknowledge that whatever his predilections, he should keep that shit out of his game, and not create a world where kiddie diddling was A-OK?

Quote from: Sigmund;478379Would just like to point out that a society of orcs has never existed either. So, if a society of orcs is imagined to exist, why not a society of irredeemably evil orcs?

Lots of reasons. Child-rearing and reproduction are two big ones.

Don't forget, the term being bandied about is "irredeemably evil" or "intrinsically evil", not merely "evil". I'm cool with a world where a bunch of evil orcs runs around robbing, looting, raping and murdering. Those particular orcs may have no desire to change, and may even, as individuals, be incapable of change due to their neurology. On a narrative level, the DM may simply be uninterested in telling stories about orcs suffering pangs of conscience.

I simply don't see why the additional component of "irredeemable" is so important, except insofar as people are interested in killing orcs who are not an active threat, especially helpless ones of various sorts.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478521In the developed West, most of us live within a Christian or slightly post-Christian moral paradigm (even an atheist like me). The alignment system in D&D reflects that paradigm. Not perfectly and not in every particular, but what we consider to be "good" both OOC and IC almost always lines up much more closely with that paradigm that with any of the many competing ones that have existed over human history.

I agree plenty of our assumptions (many of which are built on christian principles) seep into how good and evil were defined in D&D. But I think the gods themselves are quite varied and I don't see too much of a direct connection to christianity. In fact one of the difficulties I had when I first encountered D&D (having been raised in a pretty religious household) was understanding neutral deities. These just didn't make a great deal of sense to me. I also had difficulty with the idea that there were gods in the setting buy no God.

Quote from: Benoist;478387So if Gruumsh says slaying and/or enslaving all other sentient beings is good, is it "Good" as per alignment?

Ask the Amalekites.

Quote from: Sigmund;478388Except being charmed is not being willing, it's being magically compelled. As DM I would never let a player get away with that one. See, it's not hard to keep throwing up imaginary counters to these arguments. None of this shit is real. The orcs aren't going to care if we slaughter their babies, they don't exist.

In very few editions of the game does it explicitly say one's attitude towards the person ends at the end of the spell. It's simply no longer magically compelled to remain there in the face of common sense.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478526Lots of reasons. Child-rearing and reproduction are two big ones.

I don't see how those preclude a race from being evil in an imaginary setting. I agree they make it harder to explain. And personally I am not a fan of the "all orcs are evil" approach. But if someone wants orcs that are all evil in his game and it is just part of who orcs are, I am sure they can keep coming up with reasons why.

QuoteDon't forget, the term being bandied about is "irredeemably evil" or "intrinsically evil", not merely "evil". I'm cool with a world where a bunch of evil orcs runs around robbing, looting, raping and murdering. Those particular orcs may have no desire to change, and may even, as individuals, be incapable of change due to their neurology. On a narrative level, the DM may simply be uninterested in telling stories about orcs suffering pangs of conscience.

I think this is just a matter of preference. I like my creatures to have free will and the moral landscape to have some ambiguity. But I don't see why it is an issue if someone wants to imagine orcs that are simply incapable of not being evil.

QuoteI simply don't see why the additional component of "irredeemable" is so important, except insofar as people are interested in killing orcs who are not an active threat, especially helpless ones of various sorts.

I would think it makes things like dungeon crawls and hack N slash campaigns work better. I would also think some people just find the idea of an irredeemable orc, cool. Probably lots of reasons.

Quote from: Imperator;478434What is more difficult to categorize and make work is things like alignment, because what is Good and Evil is cultural. Heck, maybe the Aztec priest doesn't love to rip heart out but hell, what are you gonna do. It's that or no Sun and everyone dies. Hardly his fault. In other culture (like ours) that is nauseating. So is the Aztec priest good or bad?

Neither.  If the Aztec priest is doing it out of pragmatic necessity and has qualms about killing the innocent, that would make him NEUTRAL according to the d20 3.5 SRD alignment system.  If he enjoys watching them squirm and gets a kick out of it, he's Evil.  A Good Aztec priest would offer himself up as a sacrifice before sacrificing another.

Personally, I think a broad and healthy Neutral band between Good and Evil, that includes those motivated by pragmatism rather than altruism or cruelty, is critical to making the whole alignment system work.  Collapse everything to "Good or Evil" and it does quickly break down.  

Quote from: Imperator;478434My problem won't be with a setting featuring such strange realities. My problem is with alignments, because you're bound to find inconsistent situations.

In my experience, the inconsistencies and problems are minor and few so long as I (A) acknowledged that those who act out of pragmatic self-interest are largely Neutral rather than Good or Evil and didn't try to force them into either category and (B) didn't mix up the meaning capital-G Good (which has a specific and objective meaning in the alignment system) with little-g good, in the relative sense.  Throughout the whole time I was running D&D 3.5, I never had any trouble applying the alignment definitions to the characters and creatures in the campaign, which took place in a setting included various relative interpretations of the cosmology at various alignment points and across several cultures.

Quote from: Benoist;478520He does have a relevant point, seems to me: why would every world of the imagination have to be an imitation of our own world? Isn't that showing a lack of imagination to believe every imagined world has to be an allegory relating to our own?

Game settings don't have to imitate ours slavishly, or be allegories for it, but if they don't possess some sort of verisimilitude, then what handle do you have for immersion and that whole "world in motion" thing you're so big on?

Consistency and sensibility, especially in the face of extrapolation, are critical for good settings. IMHO, fantasy should only depart from reality when it has a good reason to do so. And I think most people agree in practice even if they might claim otherwise - a game where people didn't act like people would be stupid.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478527I agree plenty of our assumptions (many of which are built on christian principles) seep into how good and evil were defined in D&D. But I think the gods themselves are quite varied and I don't see too much of a direct connection to christianity. In fact one of the difficulties I had when I first encountered D&D (having been raised in a pretty religious household) was understanding neutral deities. These just didn't make a great deal of sense to me. I also had difficulty with the idea that there were gods in the setting buy no God.

The topic of how Christian monotheism has intellectually shaped fantasy's depiction of polytheism and polytheistic societies is well beyond the scope of this thread, though it is an extremely interesting one. We used to have a poster named BlackFlag who is an expert of some sort of Roman polytheism, IIRC who commented extensively in a thread about it somewhere in the archives here.

In brief though, either there is something incongruous about Zeus being a good god who also rapes women or there is not. I tend to think that there is, and I think most gamers do as well, since the vast majority of good gods I see are not out there raping women for their selfish pleasure.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478530And personally I am not a fan of the "all orcs are evil" approach.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478530Something that's Evil is formidible and it's alien to our world. For that reason I (personally) find it more interesting to make orcs Evil.

So you don't like the all orcs are evil approach but orcs are evil.

Oh and the games people play very definitely reflect on who and what you are in real life. Or would you argue that the group that plays Black Tokyo is perfectly balanced in every regard?

I'm not comfortable at all in even pretending to be a genocidal maniac even if the game does tell me they totally deserve it for being born, and people who see nothing wrong with it worry me a bit. Not much, this is just pretend after all, but our characters are always reflections of ourselves in one way or another.