Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478524Beno, 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?

Let me put it this way: I do agree that's something you want to talk about when you have that first session talking about the game with the prospective players, that's for sure, just like boulet mentioned dozens of pages ago on this thread.

From there, if someone's not cool with the idea of having absolute evil orcs and slaughtering baby monsters and their mothers and the like, then that's not going to appear in my game. That's it. It's just the first rule of gaming, the "don't be a dick" rule.

Likewise, if a DM either says he won't to this and then pushes that kind of stuff on people who specifically mentioned they were not comfortable with baby orcs and their mothers, then he's being a douche. If he actually uses the game to push ignoble ideas like racist stuff, pedophilia and so on in a good light, he's likewise being a dou... scratch that, he's scum. Period.

So yeah, I agree with the principle that these sorts of things may happen. They shouldn't IF you know who you're playing with and everyone knows what to expect.

There's a step from this, however, and point-blank saying that if you use absolute evil orcs in your game then you implicitly endorse racist colonial ideas, whether you know it or not. Either you know it and you are a horrible person, or you don't and you're just not "aware". That's bullshit.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;478530I 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.

It doesn't preclude them from being evil. Don't move the goalposts. They were set at "irredeemably evil" and "absolute evil" (whatever those are supposed to be).

And sure, any amount of sophistry to justify one's stupidity is possible. I think that they ought to take all the bad reasoning about why "irredeemably evil" orcs exist and simply expend that giving the orcs plausible motivations to want to hurt and / or kill the PCs or people they care about.

QuoteI 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.

It's lazy worldbuilding. I said this back at the start of the thread.

QuoteI 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.

I think it's totally unnecessary for dungeon crawls and hack n slash campaigns, if not pernicious. It reduces the welter of possible motivations and tactics dependent on those motivations to the simplest and stupidest possible.

Quote from: Benoist;478535There's a step from this, however, and point-blank saying that if you use absolute evil orcs in your game then you implicitly endorse racist colonial ideas, whether you know it or not. Either you know it and you are a horrible person, or you don't and you're just not "aware". That's bullshit.

Technically it's racism towards non-existent creatures, but I don't consider that a highly morally problematic thing except maybe if it were derived from a general mindset or quality of character that, as it was reinforced by fantasy, grew more important in the person's real life. That's fairly unlikely, though. I don't like elves, and if someone wants to call me a racist against elves, I'm fine with being one.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478532Game 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?

Verisimilitude is not a synonym of realism. Likewise, it does not presuppose a juxtaposition of the imaginary world with the real worl on a 1:1 basis. Many impossible, unrealistic scenarios may be believable given their own context. The cosmology of the world is no different, and how that trickles down to particulars like what exactly is an orc and whether it has a soul and is "it" redeemable and so on isn't either.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478532Consistency 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.

I disagree. Consistency is part of verisimilitude, or 'the believability of the game milieu'. Like I just said, this does not mean that the imaginary world has to be a carbon copy of the real world. It means that the former must be internally consistent, given its own context, not the real world's. I think you could play alien beings in some imaginary settings who would be radically different from what you and I would define as "people" in our real world, have these beings be internally consistent with the imaginary world's context, and have tons of fun doing so, wouldn't you?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478537Technically it's racism towards non-existent creatures

It's only racism from a real world point of view if these entities or monsters or creatures could be construed as "people", which completely depends on the cosmology of the world and the wider context of the campaign milieu.

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

You have a very narrow and superficial understanding of evil and seem to think it precludes showing any restraint out of self-interest.  What makes you think that a cruel and sadistic parent can't successfully reproduce, and what kind of "child-rearing" do you think it needs to produce a new generation of cruel and sadistic monsters?  Do you ever read the news?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478526I 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.

That's precisely the reason to want to make them irredeemable, otherwise players who want to play good characters are obliged to take and maintain prisoners according the Geneva Conventions and in games with lots of NPC monsters, that becomes problematic very quickly.

Start watching this film (NSFW) starting about 3 minutes in and note, in particular, the interview with George Niland.  That's reality and what often happened when there wasn't an easy way to humanely deal with prisoners but a lot of people don't want to play that that sort of game.  The only other alternative people seem to be offering is for the GM to spare the players from ever having to deal with such a scenario.  As I pointed out in another thread, this is why I think so many role-playing combat systems don't leave wounded or unconscious enemies and why some systems have mook rules.  Once the PCs become responsible for helpless enemies, you are dealing with a whole different type of game -- a type of game many players don't want to play.

My question for you is why you find the idea of making it acceptable to kill the helpless monsters so unthinkable an option.  As some asked elsewhere in this thread, why aren't people as troubled over killing dragon whelps?

I'm also reminded of this scene from Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Quote from: Benoist;478539It's only racism from a real world point of view if these entities or monsters or creatures could be construed as "people", which completely depends on the cosmology of the world and the wider context of the campaign milieu.

They're not people if they're damned savages that I dislike! There's nothing wrong with this viewpoint!

The thing is that in dungeon crawls alignment means fuckall because my party = good and not my party = evil. But when you go into an actual campaign where you're pretending to be crusading good guys, or neutral mercenaries, or evil bent on self-profit, portraying things as Always Chaotic Evil is just a lazy way of giving the party a target that they can feel justified in killing at best. And at worst it's a way of branding an entire race as savages who hate civilization/goodness/AR FREEDOM.

Quote from: Darwinism;478498I don't get it. A guy mentions that the the concept of it being okay to freely slaughter things because you label them Always Chaotic Evil is abhorrent and he's the one with psychological issues?

Yes, when he identified a depreciating ability to separate fantasy from reality.  Morally, the argument is tantamount to bitching about how Chess enforces elitist ideals because the Queen gets better moves than the pawns.

Or even less that that, because, as the GM defines the world however they like (and to a certain extent does so by what situations he puts the players in), the fact that he and his group are running around killing orc women and babies is totally his own fault and the fault of his twisted imagination. It has nothing to do with any game I've ever run, nor any published adventure I've ever seen. And now to rationalize the messed up crap he's been indulging in, he's trying to blame D&D itself.


In the real world, if someone is racist against a minority, that basically makes them a bad person. If a person is racist against orcs or Klingons, that just makes them a geek.

Quote from: FrankTrollman;478035That's charmingly naive, but here are the old Ral Partha Orcs:



Yes, there has been a concerted movement to make them the "Greenskins" that are no longer associated with any human ethnic group. But let's be honest here: in the old days Orcs were Black people and you were supposed to kill their females and young when you found their villages.

And just in case you try to weasel out that you were talking about goblins (even though in AD&D Goblins and Orcs were all the same "giant class" of humanoid), let's look at the old Hobgoblins:



They were explicitly Orientals. Hell, that hasn't even changed. Even Games Workshop still talks about Hobgobla-Khans.

But detaching Orcs from analogies to real world peoples is part of the (quite commendable) movement to make Dungeons & Dragons less morally reprehensible. So if you get upset at people who want to make the Orcs more complex so there is a reason why you'd kill some and not all (thereby making it less about genocide), why the fuck aren't you upset at your own fucking revisionism where you deny the real-world human racial origins of the fantasy races?

-Frank

Sorry, I never used ral partha minis.  I read a lot of tolkien back in the day, and as far as I recall, the orcs there weren't particularly stereotype-african.  And I read my share of european folklore, and from what I recall Goblins weren't very asian.

Likewise, the art from the D&D books I read didn't seem to have orcs or goblins looking particularly like those racial stereotypes.  It seems to me the problem there had more to do with someone at ral partha than with the concept of humanoids themselves.

RPGPundit

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478536It's lazy worldbuilding.

So what?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478536And sure, any amount of sophistry to justify one's stupidity is possible. I think that they ought to take all the bad reasoning about why "irredeemably evil" orcs exist and simply expend that giving the orcs plausible motivations to want to hurt and / or kill the PCs or people they care about.

I think "they have no conscience and enjoy causing pain and death to others" is a perfectly plausible motivation for wanting to hurt and/or kill the PCs or people they care about, since there are plenty of real world examples of human beings acting on that motivation with expected results.  Or do you mean something more when you say "plausible"?

From the article Psychopaths Among Us:

"There's still a lot of opposition -- some criminologists, sociologists, and psychologists don't like psychopathy at all," Hare says. "I can spend the entire day going through the literature -- it's overwhelming, and unless you're semi-brain-dead you're stunned by it -- but a lot of people come out of there and say, 'So what? Psychopathy is a mythological construct.' They have political and social agendas: 'People are inherently good,' they say. 'Just give them a hug, a puppy dog, and a musical instrument and they're all going to be okay.' "

The reason I keep bringing up psychopaths is that people keep claiming that how they think and behave in the real world is somehow impossible in a fantasy setting.  

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478536It's lazy worldbuilding. I said this back at the start of the thread.

Given how many people in this thread claim that including such creatures in a setting are all but impossible to do well, if at all, I would argue it's a bigger challenge to try to make them work than just making them funny looking people with understandable human motivations.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478536I think it's totally unnecessary for dungeon crawls and hack n slash campaigns, if not pernicious. It reduces the welter of possible motivations and tactics dependent on those motivations to the simplest and stupidest possible.

So the bar for including anything in a fantasy role-playing setting is that it must be necessary?  Why are any fantasy races necessary?  Why is magic necessary?  Why is a sanitized Medieval setting necessary?  

And I suppose I should add that having no conscience and enjoying the suffering of others does not preclude other motivations and a variety of tactics any more than being altruistic and wanting to help others means that you can think of nothing else and behave in the most obvious way possible.

Quote from: Darwinism;478534So you don't like the all orcs are evil approach but orcs are evil.

That second quote isn't mine. Either I was trying to quote someone and failed. Or someone quoted another poster and accidentally used my handle.

QuoteOh 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 don't know Black Tokyo so I can't comment on that one. But I barring a few extreme ends of the spectrum, no games don't reflect anything significant about the people playing them.

QuoteI'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.

That is fine. You don't need to be. But some people are fine killing orcs and it doesn't mean they are pro-genocide. Just like I love to play mobster characters. Doesn't mean I am pro-mafia.

I don't think it is reflecting as much as you think it is.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478517Yes, 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.

You really don't read the news, do you?

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478536And sure, any amount of sophistry to justify one's stupidity is possible. I think that they ought to take all the bad reasoning about why "irredeemably evil" orcs exist and simply expend that giving the orcs plausible motivations to want to hurt and / or kill the PCs or people they care about.

Why?

QuoteIt's lazy worldbuilding. I said this back at the start of the thread.

I don't think so. I think they are just focused on building a different kind of setting than you are interested in. I've played in campaigns with the inherently evil orcs where the setting was textured, deep and interesting. The orc culture can still be fully explored. The consquences of an inherently evil race still explored. Not my top preference for a game, but I don't regard GMs who take this path as lazy.

QuoteI think it's totally unnecessary for dungeon crawls and hack n slash campaigns, if not pernicious. It reduces the welter of possible motivations and tactics dependent on those motivations to the simplest and stupidest possible.

I don't think it is neccessary either. But some people are interested in facilitating gameplay over RP or setting. Just stamping the orcs "evil and killable" gets around a lot of the stuff we've been discussing here for some groups. And if all they want to do is hack. That is one one to make it easier.

Simple isn't always bad.

Quote from: Pseudoephedrine;478533In 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.

I never suggested Zeus was a good god (But to be fair to the Greeks, they didn't always endorse the behavior of the gods). But the D&D pantheon has gods that span the range of alignments and the domains gods cover is very much a hodgpodge of old Europrean pantheons with a PG-rating IMO. If the only gods in D&D were a lawful good deity and a Chaotic evil one, I could see the christian comparison. But you have gods of war, trickster gods, etc.