Quote from: Kiero;1036300They weren't the same, which is what you purported. They weren't anything like the same, Alexander and Xerxes weren't kicking around the ruins of already-devastated civilisations, their opponents were still vital and very much in the fight.

The "point of similarity" as you call it are so distant from each other as to be a point of dissimilarity. The Spanish rolled over the Americas with ease because most of the people they might have fought were already dead. Alexander and Xerxes didn't have that luxury.

This is the population of central Mexico:



Sharp fall, which it never really recovers from.

This is the population of the "Greek" part of Europe:



The Athenian plague doesn't even feature (probably too difficult to estimate on that scale), the Justinian plague causes a dip, the next round of bubonic plague another sharp fall, but every time the numbers recover and overshoot where they were.

Proof that no matter what you say online some nerd will come by and out-nerd you.

Quote from: Kiero;1036300They weren't the same, which is what you purported. They weren't anything like the same, Alexander and Xerxes weren't kicking around the ruins of already-devastated civilisations, their opponents were still vital and very much in the fight.

The point of similarity was showing up on the doorstep of a very different civilization with little to no prior knowledge of its existence, more or less announcing (through a translator) you're now in charge, then mercilessly killing everyone who resists...which you missed because you're so incredibly impressed with yourself for knowing about smallpox. Alexander did this multiple times on his march to the Indus (there were lots of tribes between Persepolis and India that Alexander knew nothing of until he killed them down to the last man, woman, and child), and it seems the Persians did a bit of that as well. I'm sure some other empires did that as well, but I mentioned those two because they came immediately to mind for anyone who knows something other than the most boring online talking point in history that suddenly turned everyone into an expert on world military history ever since Cracked mentioned it.

So when you jumped in with "Except SMALLPOX," that was a nonsequiter. You sleepily half-read the conversation, and when somebody mentioned something you think you have VERY IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE about, you jumped in to blather about things everybody knows that weren't germane to the discussion, and demand people be impressed.

(Alexander's Macedonian phalangists also had a great deal in common with Spanish pikemen, both in tactics and motives.)

Quotethe Justinian plague causes a dip

Nobody would call a 25% population loss a mere "dip." But it's also irrelevant. The Arabs had known about the Greeks long before they conquered North Africa and the Levant. Because disease's role in conquest wasn't the point of comparison.

So it doesn't count as racism if the orcs die mostly from a plague we gave them?

"Hey DM, if my cleric casts cause disease just once, and it's communicable and infects and kills several million others, that won't trigger an alignment change, right?"

So long as I still get to butcher orcs horribly, I'm happy. Anything else is communism.

First of all, even though Tolkien said they ware a race and D&D insisted on doing the same, Orcs are not a different race, they are a different species and Tolkien's Orcs are a tragic people who have no chance for redemption and attack other hominids relentlessly. How anyone could avoid killing them and survive is a tough question.

I haven't had Orcs in my campaigns since I switched over from D&D in the mid-eighties but Goblins and Hobgoblins could be thought of the same way. Other GMs who run my rules do treat them as irredeemably evil and the game rules don't prevent that. I treat their evil as cultural and some individuals and even whole tribes are exceptions to their general nastiness. Just the other session, my players encountered a Goblin in a human town, a student of the Mage that they were consulting. They  have fought many Hobgoblins and Goblins and seen the results of a Goblin raid. However, they didn't attack him. He was clearly not a tribal raider.

it would not have been impossible for one of the characters to hate Goblins, given what they experienced and witnessed but none of them hated them enough to do anything about it under the circumstances.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1036593The point of similarity was showing up on the doorstep of a very different civilization with little to no prior knowledge of its existence, more or less announcing (through a translator) you're now in charge, then mercilessly killing everyone who resists...which you missed because you're so incredibly impressed with yourself for knowing about smallpox. Alexander did this multiple times on his march to the Indus (there were lots of tribes between Persepolis and India that Alexander knew nothing of until he killed them down to the last man, woman, and child), and it seems the Persians did a bit of that as well. I'm sure some other empires did that as well, but I mentioned those two because they came immediately to mind for anyone who knows something other than the most boring online talking point in history that suddenly turned everyone into an expert on world military history ever since Cracked mentioned it.

So when you jumped in with "Except SMALLPOX," that was a nonsequiter. You sleepily half-read the conversation, and when somebody mentioned something you think you have VERY IMPORTANT KNOWLEDGE about, you jumped in to blather about things everybody knows that weren't germane to the discussion, and demand people be impressed.

(Alexander's Macedonian phalangists also had a great deal in common with Spanish pikemen, both in tactics and motives.)

That's a meaningless "point of similarity", you've just described most empires expanding everywhere. The significant difference was the impact of disease, the fact that in the Americas 90-95% of the population died. Not merely a quarter to a third.

Considering this is apparently the "most boring online talking point in history", you certainly seem to have a lot of say, to keep trying to backpedal from the sweeping over-generalisation you made.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1036593Nobody would call a 25% population loss a mere "dip." But it's also irrelevant. The Arabs had known about the Greeks long before they conquered North Africa and the Levant. Because disease's role in conquest wasn't the point of comparison.

It's a dip compared to an overwhelming majority of the population.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1036432an evil character could be played in a group without the usual "stupid evil" tropes

Agreed, absolutely. OTOH, evil as "broody Goth but otherwise Neutral" misses the point entirely. IMHO, with or without alignment, a character whose player describes as "evil" should be a fundamentally bad person. Not a bit edgy or selfish. A proper see-you-next-Tuesday in action and word. Depending on your variety of evil (CE, NE, LE) he/she may indulge in betrayal, slavery, torture, diabolism, and should not show the slightest regard for innocent people.

btw I was not serious about rolling up that assassin character. I was being facetious.

Quote from: soltakss;1036449Just Orcs? Yep, racist.

Does it other kinds of creature? Not racist.

Oh, well in that case he better get his shiggles from torturing and killing all sorts of humanoids, otherwise he may not just be a sadistic psycopath but a racist sadistic psycopath.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1036452Sociopathy is always 'OK', as long as it's not racist.

This is an interesting conundrum. Until now, I as a GM have generally ruled that it was not the prejudice per se, but rather what the PC would do about their prejudice that would determine their whether that character was good or evil.

For example, a LG dwarf who warns "never trust an elf" (e.g. Gimli) and who may learn to trust elves once/if the elves prove his prejudices wrong, is still allowed to be good. Conversely, Jon Irenicus' hatred of elves (self-hating elf) had no limits and led him to commit murder, toture and attempt genocide. So, yeah NE as described.

However, if we assume prejudice is evil  and not just a character flaw, then, since the PHB specifically allows for the playing of evil PCs, a player choosing to play a character whose alignment is LE,NE,or CE has license to be racist, sexist or intolerant in whatever way he/she chooses. In that case the player can go ahead and play a LE cleric of the Goddess Hestia  and campaign against gay marraige and adoption by gay couples while being perfectly consistent with the SJWs point of view.

I personally support gay marraige IRL but were I to be told by the GM that prejudice was by definition evil, I would be curious as to their reaction should somebody play the character mentioned above.

For a sly player, the oppotunities are endless: one of the big disadvantages of playing an evil character is that you are required to do evil things and that can earn you a bad reputation and/or bring you into conflict with society's authority. Under the interpretation that "prejudice means evil," a player who would like to play a Blackguard for the kewl powers but would rather not lead armies of orcs and undead, may conveniently play the character as a neutral knight provided that he "just can't stand redheads".

Hilarious.

Oh, and another point of similarity I had in mind is the Spanish, Persians, and Macedonians (and now we can throw the Arabs and Turks in as well) had an idea of their conquests being a divinely appointed mission. Roman, British, and French conquests didn't have nearly the religious dimension. Alexander arguably less so at first, but by the time he took over Persepolis, he was really cottoning to the idea of himself as god-king and was starting to issue edicts in a divine voice the way Persian kings from Xerxes to Darius III did.

There are obvious dissimilarities (and no, the key dissimilarity between Spanish Catholicism and whatever you want to call Alexander's religion is not smallpox), but that's an interesting dimension to pick up.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1036615Agreed, absolutely. OTOH, evil as "broody Goth but otherwise Neutral" misses the point entirely. IMHO, with or without alignment, a character whose player describes as "evil" should be a fundamentally bad person. Not a bit edgy or selfish. A proper see-you-next-Tuesday in action and word. Depending on your variety of evil (CE, NE, LE) he/she may indulge in betrayal, slavery, torture, diabolism, and should not show the slightest regard for innocent people.

Sure. But is a character who is willing to kill, enslave, torture, etc, but simply never "gets around to it" evil?

Quotebtw I was not serious about rolling up that assassin character. I was being facetious.

I know. I just took the opportunity to talk about my character concept.

QuoteThis is an interesting conundrum. Until now, I as a GM have generally ruled that it was not the prejudice per se, but rather what the PC would do about their prejudice that would determine their whether that character was good or evil.

However, if we assume prejudice is evil  and not just a character flaw, then, since the PHB specifically allows for the playing of evil PCs, a player choosing to play a character whose alignment is LE,NE,or CE has license to be racist, sexist or intolerant in whatever way he/she chooses. In that case the player can go ahead and play a LE cleric of the Goddess Hestia  and campaign against gay marraige and adoption by gay couples while being perfectly consistent with the SJWs point of view.

I'm also running a solo campaign for my brother when he's not DMing. I've come up with a religious sect, set in Greyhawk, that believes the gods are all demons manipulating the masses, and that sorcerous magic, and clerical magic of other religions are evil.
It's not that this faction is "evil" so much as prejudiced. Does this justify their actions? That's the kind of scenarios I'm setting this up for.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1036599So it doesn't count as racism if the orcs die mostly from a plague we gave them?

"Hey DM, if my cleric casts cause disease just once, and it's communicable and infects and kills several million others, that won't trigger an alignment change, right?"

So long as I still get to butcher orcs horribly, I'm happy. Anything else is communism.

It depends on whether your cleric knows about the Magical Contagion Theory of Disease or if Fantasy Louis Pasteur hasn't been born yet.

I can think of a number of ways to turn this argument on its head.

Why not play a campaign where the party really are murderous hobos who butcher innocent orcs? Since we are racist murderers, we might as well own up to it. Better yet, replace the orcs with humans of every race and creed. We might as well be indiscriminate about who we slaughter since it gives us more targets.

Why not play a campaign where the party are good orcs heroically seeking revenge against the evil humans for the slaughter of their tribe by butchering every human village in their path? Sure, it does not actually fix anything but it sure is cathartic, right?

Why not introduce leonorks, from Children of the Planes by Tangent Games, as the good orcs? We already have drow as the evil elves.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1036624Oh, and another point of similarity I had in mind is the Spanish, Persians, and Macedonians (and now we can throw the Arabs and Turks in as well) had an idea of their conquests being a divinely appointed mission. Roman, British, and French conquests didn't have nearly the religious dimension. Alexander arguably less so at first, but by the time he took over Persepolis, he was really cottoning to the idea of himself as god-king and was starting to issue edicts in a divine voice the way Persian kings from Xerxes to Darius III did.

There are obvious dissimilarities (and no, the key dissimilarity between Spanish Catholicism and whatever you want to call Alexander's religion is not smallpox), but that's an interesting dimension to pick up.

Alexander's "religion" didn't even survive him. None of his immediate successors (with the possible exception of the Greek Eumenes - who had a thing of pretending the dead king was present when ordering his Makedonian officers around) made any play of it. The only "mission" any of them claimed was either being the rightful heir to the king, or else protectors of the rightful king(s). They were all about the power and the spoils. The latter was especially important for keeping the veterans on-side (who carted most of theirs around with them in their baggage).

His whole dream of a grand fusion of Makedonian and Persian peoples shrivelled to nothing when he died as well. Even the goal of universal empire, of holding everything he'd won by the spear, disappeared with Demetrios a generation later. Never mind that the supposed empire Alexander built was paper-thin. He won some battles and left the tedious business of actually managing conquered territories to someone else so he could move on to the next exciting thing. Half the time he restored a native satrap to run things, who just carried on as though he'd never whirled through with his armies, once things settled down. For many ordinary people, they'd have noticed almost no change whatsoever, only the people at the very top of society changed.

Alexander's conquests weren't even like the Persian ones, never mind being nothing like the Spanish.

And again, Alexander didn't have the way helpfully prepared for him by disease wiping out most of the population.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;1036599So it doesn't count as racism if the orcs die mostly from a plague we gave them?

If it wasn't done intentionally? Then no. Racism requires mens rea.

Also those stories about giving the native Americans small pox infested blankets? It's a myth.

I must have missed the D&D modules:

SJW1 The Log Cabin On The Borderlands
SJW2 Against The Cult Of The Aztecs
SJW3 The Lost Caverns Of The Inca

I'm not sure why any of this is relevant to killing orcs.

Quote from: Mistwell;1036688If it wasn't done intentionally? Then no. Racism requires mens rea.

Also those stories about giving the native Americans small pox infested blankets? It's a myth.

Well your source takes apart a specific lie by lying liar Ward Churchill of the US Army giving smallpox blankets to the natives in 1836/37 (he gets the date of the epidemic wrong too), but also says

First, Churchill addresses the Lord Amherst affair of 1763, in which there is compelling evidence that British colonial forces distributed smallpox-infested goods to Indians in New England.

So apparently it did happen at least once.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1036635Sure. But is a character who is willing to kill, enslave, torture, etc, but simply never "gets around to it" evil?

In the same way that a Paladin is willing to protect, rescue and donate but simply never "gets around to it" is good.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1036635I know. I just took the opportunity to talk about my character concept.

It does sound fun and an intelligent take on the alignment.:cool:

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1036635I'm also running a solo campaign for my brother when he's not DMing. I've come up with a religious sect, set in Greyhawk, that believes the gods are all demons manipulating the masses, and that sorcerous magic, and clerical magic of other religions are evil.
It's not that this faction is "evil" so much as prejudiced. Does this justify their actions? That's the kind of scenarios I'm setting this up for.

Now THAT I would love to play in. :cool: The concept I would want to play would be a monk dedicated to the eradication of magic and false divinities. To counter their infernal and sorcerous powers, he works by stealth, deception and assasination. Kinda like the Mongoose game  with RQ rules called Deus Vult.:cool:

Your brother's a lucky guy.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1036643I can think of a number of ways to turn this argument on its head.

Why not play a campaign where the party really are murderous hobos who butcher innocent orcs? Since we are racist murderers, we might as well own up to it. Better yet, replace the orcs with humans of every race and creed. We might as well be indiscriminate about who we slaughter since it gives us more targets.

Why not play a campaign where the party are good orcs heroically seeking revenge against the evil humans for the slaughter of their tribe by butchering every human village in their path? Sure, it does not actually fix anything but it sure is cathartic, right?

Why not introduce leonorks, from Children of the Planes by Tangent Games, as the good orcs? We already have drow as the evil elves.

It seems a similar idea has popped up on the other SJW thread.:cool:

https://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?38858-The-Insipid-Racism-of-D-amp-D-SJWs/page42