Dwarves aren't cool anymore

[Psyren]

If you look at it from the perspective of providing a mortal force in the world to serve as perfect enemies of the heroes, it's all grade A material.

If you look at it from a perspective of "I don't want these creatures to be enemies of people", then I can see the case for not liking it.

Orcs reduced to having no purpose beyond being "perfect enemies of the heroes" is maybe fine if you're playing in Middle-Earth. But that has no place in any officially printed D&D setting.

Don't worry, Captain Highbrow will swoop in and pull those action figures apart. "Now Timmy, shame on you for playing with your toys like that. Haven't you ever wondered how Skeletor got his skull face? Maybe there's a tragic sob story in there that you don't know about. And did you ever stop to wonder if He-Man's bravery, loyalty and muscly heroics are actually hiding some deep-seeded insecurities and character flaws that you could explore?"

As he watches Timmy put the toys down and walk away, never to play with them again, his sidekick says "Another imagination ruined, nice work Captain Highbrow". The hero smiles, "It's all in a day's work Postmodern Pete, all in a day's work."

No one's "swooping in and pulling anyone's action figures apart"; Timmy is free to bash to his heart's content. But they don't have to encourage Timmy either.

Disagree, and I don't think I've seen argumentation for why the core books have to be setting agnostic.

If not that, then what? Should the PHB be linked to a specific setting? Which one, Forgotten Realms yet again?

[Errorname]

Core monsters are things like bears and trolls and ghosts and dragons. Standard fantasy fare in other words. That doesn't seem particularly "constraining" to me.

Yes I would consider mandatory inclusion of standard fantasy fare a constraint.

And even if they were - what monsters are in a given world, hell a given campaign, are entirely DM discretion. It's not like a PC race or class where you need to come to some kind of accord with the players - whatever monsters you feel like running are the ones they'll come across, period. Nothing is forcing you to use a monster you don't want to, even if an obscure wiki entry says that monster has shown up in a corner of that world somewhere.

So ultimately what this comes down to is that I am arguing about how settings should be written in published material, and you are arguing about how these settings should be run in individual games. Ultimately I don't really care if someone breaks the rules of the setting in half in their own game. Even if I'd find all their changes really obnoxious, how someone plays a game with their friends is none of my business.

But yeah, human cultists and necromancers and evil wizards... sure. Cool, if you're into that stuff. My preference is for strong physical threats with some magic sprinkled in, not magocratic nations where everyone is a spellcaster and has warrior minions.

It is very easy to do an evil empire that is a strong physical threat with some magic sprinkled in. Arguably that's the default form of the evil empire

Wondering what is it like to be in the service of Sauron and are they fully autonomous or have they been forced

"He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace”.

And then turning around and saying that, unless we do it that way, the story will be one note and simple and boring and not interesting.

I don't think that. I do think that the Orcs are largely bad and that the brief glimpses of sympathy for the enemy we get with Sauron's human followers are a lot more compelling and a lot more resonant with the tone of the material, but the Orcs being a weak link does not ruin the whole of the story. Lord of the Rings can have bad stuff in it and still be a genre defining classic.

Don't worry, Captain Highbrow will swoop in and pull those action figures apart. "Now Timmy, shame on you for playing with your toys like that. Haven't you ever wondered how Skeletor got his skull face? Maybe there's a tragic sob story in there that you don't know about. And did you ever stop to wonder if He-Man's bravery, loyalty and muscly heroics are actually hiding some deep-seeded insecurities and character flaws that you could explore?"

What you are describing is "The Storm" from Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best episodes of an extremely popular cartoon and something which (at least in my experience) every kid who was watching it absolutely loved. Giving your villains dramatic backstories that inform their villainy and giving your heroes interesting character flaws they must overcome ain't exactly highbrow, it's classic action-drama stuff.

Hell, He-Man probably has that sort of thing. It was before my time and my parents had no nostalgia for it so I didn't watch it growing up, but are you telling me Skeletor doesn't have some dramatic origin story and He-Man never has to overcome a flaw or learn some lesson in order to overcome adversity?

[Deepbluediver]

Disagree, and I don't think I've seen argumentation for why the core books have to be setting agnostic.

If not that, then what? Should the PHB be linked to a specific setting? Which one, Forgotten Realms yet again?

I think trying to make the core rulebooks completely setting non-specific would make things very boring very fast. It's just a bunch of numbers, then, with nothing to make any character or example interesting. For example, no explanation WHY the Drow can cast Darkness at will or WHY Dwarves can resist poison, etc. In other words, no explanation about WHY anyone or anything is the way it is.
To this day, D&D hasn't managed to entirely exorcise the ghost of Tolkein.
Even moving on from PC races and classes, what about monsters? Is an evil-dragon setting specific? Is disallowing evil dragons, more in line with eastern mythology, setting specific? etc etc etc

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think there's anything wrong with giving some fluff, some morality or ethics or philosophy, in other words some WORLDBUILDING, in a core rulebook. And then letting people set stories that work WITH that, but at the same time lead with a big splashpage at the front that says "this is the world-ish we wrote, you're free to revise it for your own gaming-group as much as you want". Except that the corporate legal team would probably have an aneurism at anything that even HINTS at open-sourcing material.

I think that MOST people understand this, but in the interest of heading off arguments between players and DMs (and forum-ites, especially once we start dragging in non-core material) I think it's worth reiterating that the core rulesbooks are a GUIDE and a jumping-off point, and that any group or GM is allowed to have their own rules and fluff that extends no further than the edge of the gaming table.

[Jophiel]

are you telling me Skeletor doesn't have some dramatic origin story

Looking at Wiki, "Classic" era Skeletor has always just been a jerk. He either came into Eternia through a portal on his own or else came through with his old boss but either way just decided that conquering Eternia would be awesome. I do like the original minicomics implication that there's a whole world of skull-faced blue dudes somewhere rather than Skeletor being the tragic victim of some misfortune that twisted his once bright body & spirit. No, there's seemingly just a planet of Always Evil Skullface Guys. I wonder if they all have bone-sounding names.

I didn't bother to look at content made after the classic cartoon and toy era because I don't care what some dork in the mid-90s wanted to retcon to pretend He-Man is actually a great dramatic story and not a toy commercial. Also, I didn't type the above to prove anything: I was alive and cartoon watchin' during that era and didn't remember Skeletor having a backstory of note but was curious to check.

Edit: I did scroll down and see his 2002 origin was being a warlord and fighting the king, he throws acid at the king which is deflected back into his face. So his face melts off and he goes insane. This is a hundred times more boring and trite than an awesome planet/dimension full of swole skull-faced blue guys just because.

[Errorname]

I did scroll down and see his 2002 origin was being a warlord and fighting the king, he throws acid at the king which is deflected back into his face. So his face melts off and he goes insane. This is a hundred times more boring and trite than an awesome planet/dimension full of swole skull-faced blue guys just because.

Yeah it seems like they might have tried to go for a Darth Vader angle at some point too? In contrast to like Shredder or Megatron it doesn't feel like they ever locked in a definitive version of the character's origin that all subsequent derivatives would stick to.

[Dr.Samurai]

But that has no place in any officially printed D&D setting.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, stated as fact.

It is very easy to do an evil empire that is a strong physical threat with some magic sprinkled in. Arguably that's the default form of the evil empire

I'm replying to what people are saying.

And an orc horde or empire is very easy to do, I agree.

"He was glad that he could not see the dead face. He wondered what the man's name was and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart, or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home; and if he would rather have stayed there in peace”.

Are you suggesting that doing away with evil enemies such as the orcs in Tolkien and in Volo's and replacing them with "not all evil" enemies is the same as one character wondering about the mindset of his enemy?

It seems you think you're proving a point here, but my claim was pretty specific, and didn't say that this concept can't be touched on in the game. But it's quite different for a player character, as an example, to wonder something like "Man, I wonder how this soldier I just killed came to make the choices he made", and for the DM to say "None of the enemies in this story are totally evil, everything is going to be a gray quagmire, and you should be wrestling with every choice you make and reflecting on your decisions all the time. This isn't your grandpa's good vs evil tale of heroics..."

I don't think that. I do think that the Orcs are largely bad and that the brief glimpses of sympathy for the enemy we get with Sauron's human followers are a lot more compelling and a lot more resonant with the tone of the material, but the Orcs being a weak link does not ruin the whole of the story. Lord of the Rings can have bad stuff in it and still be a genre defining classic.

The orcs can't ruin the story because they are the driving force behind the story in some instances. They give us the drama and heroics at Helm's Deep, and on the Pelennor Fields, and in Mordor, etc. They set the stage for the heroes to be heroes. If this was all replaced with the pseudo-intellectual exercise of wondering about how good the good guys are and how bad the bad guys are the story would be objectively worse off for it, not improved by it.

What you are describing is "The Storm" from Avatar: The Last Airbender, one of the best episodes of an extremely popular cartoon and something which (at least in my experience) every kid who was watching it absolutely loved. Giving your villains dramatic backstories that inform their villainy and giving your heroes interesting character flaws they must overcome ain't exactly highbrow, it's classic action-drama stuff.

Highbrow is lobbed at the idea that this is the only interesting story that can be told, and anything else is childish, simplistic, boring, etc that has been levied in this thread.

I'm sure "The Storm" is awesome, because dramatic villain backstories and sympathetic villains can be awesome. I can hold that view without REQUIRING that lore in D&D all get morphed to reflect that opinion. Because other stuff is awesome too.

I think trying to make the core rulebooks completely setting non-specific would make things very boring very fast. It's just a bunch of numbers, then, with nothing to make any character or example interesting. For example, no explanation WHY the Drow can cast Darkness at will or WHY Dwarves can resist poison, etc. In other words, no explanation about WHY anyone or anything is the way it is.
To this day, D&D hasn't managed to entirely exorcise the ghost of Tolkein.
Even moving on from PC races and classes, what about monsters? Is an evil-dragon setting specific? Is disallowing evil dragons, more in line with eastern mythology, setting specific? etc etc etc

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think there's anything wrong with giving some fluff, some morality or ethics or philosophy, in other words some WORLDBUILDING, in a core rulebook. And then letting people set stories that work WITH that, but at the same time lead with a big splashpage at the front that says "this is the world-ish we wrote, you're free to revise it for your own gaming-group as much as you want". Except that the corporate legal team would probably have an aneurism at anything that even HINTS at open-sourcing material.

I think that MOST people understand this, but in the interest of heading off arguments between players and DMs (and forum-ites, especially once we start dragging in non-core material) I think it's worth reiterating that the core rulesbooks are a GUIDE and a jumping-off point, and that any group or GM is allowed to have their own rules and fluff that extends no further than the edge of the gaming table.

Yeah, I think we lose too much to make the core books system agnostic, and I don't really know what the benefit is. Who cares if the core books refer to a certain world? We all know that DMs can run the game however they want. Pick the most generic setting and use that. Much better than trying to strip all the lore out and just give mechanics for things. That's uninspiring. And given the quality of the settings they have put out, this seems like it will be more half-assed production of stuff. Here's some core books with minimal lore, and here's a soul-less setting splat. Enjoy.

Edit: I did scroll down and see his 2002 origin was being a warlord and fighting the king, he throws acid at the king which is deflected back into his face. So his face melts off and he goes insane. This is a hundred times more boring and trite than an awesome planet/dimension full of swole skull-faced blue guys just because.

Agreed.

[Psyren]

Yes I would consider mandatory inclusion of standard fantasy fare a constraint.

There's zero chance of me agreeing with that then. Core is exactly where such creatures belong.

So ultimately what this comes down to is that I am arguing about how settings should be written in published material, and you are arguing about how these settings should be run in individual games. Ultimately I don't really care if someone breaks the rules of the setting in half in their own game. Even if I'd find all their changes really obnoxious, how someone plays a game with their friends is none of my business.

I'm arguing both actually; the published game should contain a series of common elements (such as there being a place for all 12 core classes in each 1st-party published setting) and individual games should be allowed to deviate from those common elements as far and widely as they want to for their own sense of fun (e.g. if you want to run a Krynn campaign where Clerics are banned because it's set when the gods are still silent, or it's even set in a more modern era but you're extending that silent period, you're allowed to do that.) Both of these things can be true simultaneously; hopefully that clears up my position relative to what you thought it was.

I think trying to make the core rulebooks completely setting non-specific would make things very boring very fast. It's just a bunch of numbers, then, with nothing to make any character or example interesting. For example, no explanation WHY the Drow can cast Darkness at will or WHY Dwarves can resist poison, etc. In other words, no explanation about WHY anyone or anything is the way it is.
To this day, D&D hasn't managed to entirely exorcise the ghost of Tolkein.
Even moving on from PC races and classes, what about monsters? Is an evil-dragon setting specific? Is disallowing evil dragons, more in line with eastern mythology, setting specific? etc etc etc

Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I don't think there's anything wrong with giving some fluff, some morality or ethics or philosophy, in other words some WORLDBUILDING, in a core rulebook. And then letting people set stories that work WITH that, but at the same time lead with a big splashpage at the front that says "this is the world-ish we wrote, you're free to revise it for your own gaming-group as much as you want". Except that the corporate legal team would probably have an aneurism at anything that even HINTS at open-sourcing material.

I think that MOST people understand this, but in the interest of heading off arguments between players and DMs (and forum-ites, especially once we start dragging in non-core material) I think it's worth reiterating that the core rulesbooks are a GUIDE and a jumping-off point, and that any group or GM is allowed to have their own rules and fluff that extends no further than the edge of the gaming table.

I never said core should be devoid of world-building - just that it should avoid anything that's specific to one setting or a couple of settings. The "orcs and elves hate each other" thing is specific to Faerun and Greyhawk, but it isn't true in Eberron or Ravenloft, so to me putting it into the PHB is pointless, and it would be extra pointless to give elves a racial bonus to hit or damage orcs or vice-versa. But if you, in your FR campaign, wanted to give each race a mechanical bonus to represent their hatred of one another - sure, you're allowed to do that. I wouldn't, but you can.

Elven worldbuilding in core should focus on the traits that they have in common across multiple settings. "They have extremely long lifespans, but the reason they haven't completely mastered every single profession and completely blown humanity and dwarves out of the water in every single endeavor is because they spend a comparatively much larger amount of effort on incorporating flowery artistry into anything they do + they get bored easily" - something like that would be core worldbuilding, because (a) it focuses on traits they have in every setting (long lifespan + trance) and (b) it truly does apply to elves in every printed setting (Ravnica elves, Eberron elves and FR elves all have a strong bent towards artistry, but in radically different ways - FR elves are artistic in terms of blending nature and civilization, Ravnica elves tend to be mad scientists who turn their love of artistry into body horror, and Eberron elves use artistry in their ancestor worship and mummification.)

[Errorname]

"None of the enemies in this story are totally evil, everything is going to be a gray quagmire, and you should be wrestling with every choice you make and reflecting on your decisions all the time. This isn't your grandpa's good vs evil tale of heroics..."

You're acting like I think stories shouldn't have villains at all, which I don't. I am completely fine with a good vs evil tale of heroics, like the Empire from Star Wars does not have this sort of problem

The problem is this desire to completely dehumanize the enemy, to erase any chance that the audience might feel any sympathy for them, and it leads to people writing stories where the bad guys are bad not because of what they do or what they believe, but because they come from the bad race, who are ugly and savage and subhuman and against whom any violence no matter how brutal is justified.

There's zero chance of me agreeing with that then. Core is exactly where such creatures belong.

I would agree that they belong in core. My stance is that that secondary settings should maybe not be expected to include all the core elements, part of the way you distinguish settings from each other is what they don't have.

I'm arguing both actually; the published game should contain a series of common elements (such as there being a place for all 12 core classes in each 1st-party published setting) and individual games should be allowed to deviate from those common elements as far and widely as they want to for their own sense of fun

I think that fundamentally limits what official settings can do. It's not a problem for classes like fighters or rogues, which tend to be pretty setting agnostic, but many of the core classes and races bring with them a lot of assumptions about the sort of setting the game takes place in.

[Jophiel]

I never said core should be devoid of world-building - just that it should avoid anything that's specific to one setting or a couple of settings. The "orcs and elves hate each other" thing is specific to Faerun and Greyhawk, but it isn't true in Eberron or Ravenloft, so to me putting it into the PHB is pointless, and it would be extra pointless to give elves a racial bonus to hit or damage orcs or vice-versa.

Feels like a non-issue. If your setting's race is similar to the PHB version then you just say "Use PHB except as noted..." like, for example, the 1e Dragonlance guide did. If your race is bespoke enough that the PHB description is irrelevant, then you needed to write up a whole race description for them anyway so you just say "This is what elves are here..." That doesn't make the PHB description pointless since it still gives DMs who aren't using your setting a good starting point to either slot in untouched, elaborate on, or tweak to fit their own games. But giving someone a creative starting point is never "wasted" even if they deviate from it.

At no point in reading Krynn material did I ever think "Wow, they don't even HAVE orcs in this world! The Player's Handbook really screwed up that one when they gave some player races an advantage against orcs..."

[Dr.Samurai]

The problem is this desire to completely dehumanize the enemy, to erase any chance that the audience might feel any sympathy for them, and it leads to people writing stories where the bad guys are bad not because of what they do or what they believe, but because they come from the bad race, who are ugly and savage and subhuman and against whom any violence no matter how brutal is justified.

Again, there's some sort of disconnect reminiscent to what Lord Raziere was saying. The orcs are bad not because they are ugly or subhuman. They are bad because they want to kill humans and eradicate them and/or subjugate them for their dark master who also does not care about human life. And insofar as they do these things, then violence against them IS justified.

Drow are not ugly or subhuman, quite the opposite in fact. And yet because of their culture of raiding, killing, and enslaving, as well as demon summoning, etc. they are evil and no one should wring their hands about defending themselves against their depravity.

It's perfectly fine for fantasy creatures to occupy this space.

It's also just weird to me how the idea of "brutality" is focused on with regards to the protagonists, but not the orcs. Like... orcs are brutal in the lore. And that brutality is directed at elves and dwarves and humans, all of which generally represent the goodly nations. But in your comment, you mention "no matter how brutal" in regards to the actions of the would-be heroes, not the orcs. And this again goes back to this concept of self-hatred or loathing. We ignore or reject the traditional lore of the villain (orcs are brutal savages that hate humanity), then turn the lens to the good guys and talk about how brutal THEY are. Lord Raziere did the same thing, where the genocidal aliens were immediately glossed over to instead focus on how brutal the humans defending themselves are and will be.

I'm completely uninterested in this mental exercise and the story narratives that typically spawn from it from a D&D perspective. It would take a pretty talented DM to weave these elements in without it being a heavy-handed and eye-rolling slog to play through. Nothing I've read in this thread has made me think otherwise. If someone can't accept a simple reality like "it's perfectly fine for humans to defend themselves against genocidal aliens" without complaining that the humans are being violent, I don't expect them to handle "gray morality" very well at all.

Feels like a non-issue. If your setting's race is similar to the PHB version then you just say "Use PHB except as noted..." like, for example, the 1e Dragonlance guide did. If your race is bespoke enough that the PHB description is irrelevant, then you needed to write up a whole race description for them anyway so you just say "This is what elves are here..." That doesn't make the PHB description pointless since it still gives DMs who aren't using your setting a good starting point to either slot in untouched, elaborate on, or tweak to fit their own games. But giving someone a creative starting point is never "wasted" even if they deviate from it.

At no point in reading Krynn material did I ever think "Wow, they don't even HAVE orcs in this world! The Player's Handbook really screwed up that one when they gave some player races an advantage against orcs..."

Agreed. Also begs the question... if they are going to be pushing this multiverse thing... presumably we will need multiple settings in order to make use of it. Why not just knock two birds with one stone and make a core setting?

[Errorname]

It's also just weird to me how the idea of "brutality" is focused on with regards to the protagonists, but not the orcs. Like... orcs are brutal in the lore. And that brutality is directed at elves and dwarves and humans, all of which generally represent the goodly nations. But in your comment, you mention "no matter how brutal" in regards to the actions of the would-be heroes, not the orcs. And this again goes back to this concept of self-hatred or loathing. We ignore or reject the traditional lore of the villain (orcs are brutal savages that hate humanity), then turn the lens to the good guys and talk about how brutal THEY are.

We are not talking about how the violence committed by the "good races" against the "bad races" was messed up within the logic of the fiction, we are talking about how it is kind of messed up as a writer to make a story about "good races" vs "bad races".

Dehumanizing an entire race of people as brutes and savages in order to justify your violence against them as noble and righteous has a long and ugly history in the real world, and that parallel does not stop being uncomfortable just because you gave them tusks.

[Witty Username]

Feels like a non-issue. If your setting's race is similar to the PHB version then you just say "Use PHB except as noted..." like, for example, the 1e Dragonlance guide did. If your race is bespoke enough that the PHB description is irrelevant, then you needed to write up a whole race description for them anyway so you just say "This is what elves are here..." That doesn't make the PHB description pointless since it still gives DMs who aren't using your setting a good starting point to either slot in untouched, elaborate on, or tweak to fit their own games. But giving someone a creative starting point is never "wasted" even if they deviate from it.

At no point in reading Krynn material did I ever think "Wow, they don't even HAVE orcs in this world! The Player's Handbook really screwed up that one when they gave some player races an advantage against orcs..."

I am not sure I have a point of reference to say which is better, as D&D as far as I am aware has always used the default setting approach. 'Core' being one particular setting with significant overlap with other settings, Greyhawk for 3.5, Nentir Vale for 4e, the Forgotten Realms for 5e. All I can say I have never felt it as an issue, It makes sense to present things in a context as it gives players and DMs a framework to run games without needing settings books or homebrew. And then a campaign setting can provide comparison and contrast with that initial framework.

I heard at one point One is going with Planescape, is that the case?

[Satinavian]

Again, there's some sort of disconnect reminiscent to what Lord Raziere was saying. The orcs are bad not because they are ugly or subhuman. They are bad because they want to kill humans and eradicate them and/or subjugate them for their dark master who also does not care about human life. And insofar as they do these things, then violence against them IS justified.

You can have all of that, including the justified violence against not-always-evil orc. Those may be evil and can do evil, just like humans.
The only difference occurs when the orcs haven't done any killing, subjugating and so on. With always evil orcs you know they always would if given a chance.


I never found always evil races particularly interesting. I might accept it with some very nonhuman races like demons at best.

[OldTrees1]

Agreed. Also begs the question... if they are going to be pushing this multiverse thing... presumably we will need multiple settings in order to make use of it. Why not just knock two birds with one stone and make a core setting?

In every edition of D&D that I have checked (3E, 3.5E, 4E, 4.5E, and 5E), WotC did exactly this. The PHB uses 1 setting as an example. In 3E it used Grayhawk.

We are not talking about how the violence committed by the "good races" against the "bad races" was messed up within the logic of the fiction, we are talking about how it is kind of messed up as a writer to make a story about "good races" vs "bad races".

Dehumanizing an entire race of people as brutes and savages in order to justify your violence against them as noble and righteous has a long and ugly history in the real world, and that parallel does not stop being uncomfortable just because you gave them tusks.

The presumption of dehumanizing can be premature. Not all sapients are human. Just because a species is written as "this is an antagonist" does not mean they were dehumanized or subhuman. It does not help us to put humanity on some kind of pedestal. (There is an ugly history in the real world where a previous definition of humanity was put on a pedestal, and was later used as a weapon)

Consider the stories about Illithids. Some, not all, but some, of them are written as "protagonist good species" vs "antagonist evil species".

In general, D&D lore does not have always evil orcs. The one time it did to my knowledge (Volo's take) did not strike me as dehumanizing, but rather as a non-human people afflicted by a curse. Many of the elements people would identify as "dehumanizing" ("savages" "tribal" etc) are not related to whether they were one of the allied vs antagonist species. Addressing those concerns is a bit orthogonal.

Edit: Please forgive how many edits this post took. (Forum was slow for me)

Again, there's some sort of disconnect reminiscent to what Lord Raziere was saying.

To be fair what Lord Raziere said was a bit more nuanced
Edit: Lord Raziere posted the very next post. Their post is a better source to use to clarify.

[Lord Raziere]

@ Dr. Samurai:

My point isn't that we should feel bad about defeating genocidal P-Zombie #1452532 or whatever. Its that even in a Good Vs. Evil set up, that is only One. Situation. where the option to genocide is viable, perhaps the only situation. And in that ONE SITUATION you can say you had the moral high ground, that you can feel good about it, for that one goddamn instant. But settings, worlds, people, history, culture, are much much bigger than A Single Instant, a Single Moment, a Single Snapshot of time.

Again, you can go kill the dark god of all orcs and burn every chaotic evil orc out of existence if your truly committed to that species being that evil with no redemption allowed. I have no friggin' clue why that'd be your first solution to that, or why you want that with it even if its morally right, or you insist on jumping to that specific solution out of all solutions if you want to play a good person so much, because if I was running Good Vs. Evil morality, I wouldn't say that solution is Good at all. I'd be stricter than I would be in Grey Morality, in grey I don't care because morality is subjective, who can really say if the solution was "bad" if it increases the overall happiness of everyone and doesn't impact anyone's freedoms?

But in White and Black Morality, subjectivity and situational conditions doesn't matter, every action has an inherent good or evil, and genocide is evil in our world therefore its reasonable to make it evil in the worlds we play because it matches up with what we value, therefore genocide can't be excused in this paradigm, because saying genocide is acceptable in a certain circumstance when it normally isn't, IS grey morality, because its implicitly introducing and acknowledging moral complexity by implying that it needs to be pointed out its not normally done! Therefore its not a moral principle, but an exception being made, and in a Black in White morality, NO Exceptions are Made. You do something bad, that is that, you don't get an excuse, you don't get weasel out, your hand are stained with an action that is by itself A Bad Action regardless of the consequences. You do a genocide, Black and White Morality is less forgiving, because it is blind, it doesn't see the circumstances, it doesn't see the outcome, it just sees You Have Done This Thing And This Is Bad Because It Is Bad, regardless of your opinion on it, but don't worry anyone who kills you for it is also evil because Murder Is Wrong, and they won't be lessening the world's evil at all by killing you, unlike in a Grey Morality system where Killing Genocidal Jerks is Okay because thats an exception to Murder Is Wrong and who can really blame the people who get the opportunity? Not me. It is in fact through Grey Morality that exceptional circumstances like this "Chaotic Evil P-Zombie" hypotheticals are allowed, because it doesn't depend on some Objective Morality from on high turning a blind eye Just This Once, when it doesn't DO THAT. On the contrary, all the simplified black and white morality stories I know of? Are SUPER against killing ANYONE. Forget a genocide, the simplified black and white morality light tales I know of, every story that takes such idealistic and simplified moral stances, don't even allow you to kill a single bad guy no matter what bad things they've done, because murder in of itself is a moral problem that takes moral complexity to solve. You can say whatever to the mortal authorities about exceptions, but the Angels won't be so lenient on your soul. The idea that genocide has any place in such a simplified story for simple morality is baffling and anathema to me, because your wanting to be light with perhaps one of the heaviest topics possible, when people get up in arms over ONE KILLING in such a story! ONE! For ANY reason, no matter how justified! Because people as a society have decided that life has an inherent, intrinsic value in of itself, no matter what you or me think about that! So if you include a single killing as positive at all? Your violating that simple rule, your already making it more complex! and DnD violates that rule A LOT.

And if you response is "I don't agree with that/actually Black and White Morality is different" too bad. There is no actual objective Black and White Morality, not in DnD, not in anywhere because guess what? it aaaaaaall depends on the person your talking to, what they think should be "White", what they think should "Black" and therefore the objective black and white morality.....is subject to all the same problems Grey Morality, but without acknowledging the problems and therefore making it worse and whatever book you cite? will be interpreted differently by different people, no matter how clearly stated. Gee, its almost as if we don't use this Black and White Morality thinking for a reason, because if we did use it humanity either never stop arguing or people would start killing each other over whether its right for someone steal a slice of bread to feed their loved ones or not instead of just acknowledging that sometimes we just have different solutions for things, we don't have perfect knowledge of right and wrong and therefore can't ever KNOW what right and wrong is and therefore we're stuck with the subjective grey morality REGARDLESS of how we feel about it, and just get on with our lives without expecting everyone to agree on how to solve things that don't any objective good solutions. So if you don't like how what the universes/GMs definition of "Black and White Morality" doesn't allow genocide to be done on anyone then uh.....try not to be born in that universe?/don't play with them? don't know what else to say.

But all that is beside the point.

The point I was making, is that even if your in a Good Vs. Evil morality system, even if you face that situation, even if you come out victorious and can feel good in that moment about being victorious about the Evilinians or whatever.....you have to wake up the next day, and deal with whatever jerk decides to say "Hey I hate blond people, anyone else hate blond people? blond people are like Evilinians, we should wipe them out, like we did the Evilinians, remember when we wiped out them out? that felt good, we should do it again to feel good again about killing people we hate" and the moral good in THAT situation is to start explaining "NO, blond people are not like Evilinians, they are people with lives that don't deserve it you jerk" because blond people are not Evilinians! Yes Evilinians are bad! Really, horribly bad! They are the horror of not having a better solution to war than wiping out the enemy!

Like you act like I'm treating the Evilinians invading as a light casual thing. It isn't. When you face Evilinians, your talking about Total War. Anything that ensures humanities survival becomes Good, in that situation. If they come to conquer a city, there is no surrender, no hope of simply being an occupying force and just enforcing their laws or whatever, they are just going to kill everyone and take the city over the corpses. Thus, there are no refugees. No such thing as a civilian. Everyone is in danger. Young, old, infirm, doesn't matter, everyone is either a contributor, or they are dead. A child is either working in some labor, or they are wielding a weapon to hopefully kill two Evilinians before they kill them, because every person counts when it comes to humanity's survival, they don't have time to play. Even if they're laborers, they still have to fight, and thus every civilian is a conscript, a draftee whether anyone likes it or not, there is no human society anymore, only an army, and the support structure for it. Thus all the people you want to save are now potential resources to be sacrificed for this evil to be eradicated. You can't take hostages because they are evil, they're not going to talk, they won't care if another one of them dies and you need to kill them every single one anyways, and they're not going to take hostages of your people, they will just kill them. All the weapons you thought were too horrible to use on people? you can use them now! now or never, either you survive to be tried for it or you die so you might as well use them! Whatever horrible thing you can imagine? you can do to them so that humanity is saved and as many people survive, because not everyone is going to survive, there are going to be casualties, people motivated by those casualties, hurt by those casualties, and all that hurt, oh that gonna be useful to motivate them to kill more! Oh wait an Evilinian disguised as a human tried to use our morals to restrain us from killing them more, guess we can't ever trust any human speaking out against the war effort, anyone that isn't with us is against us, best kill any dissidents just to be safe, any human that isn't actively hating the Evilinians isn't hating them enough! The budget, the economy, screw those, whats the use of money if we're too dead to spend it? Spend all the money to keep us safe, we'll get to that later! Wait, did the Evilinians just do THAT atrocity to us!? we need to respond in kind! no Mercy! NO MERCY! And so on and so forth until all the humans are yelling "PURGE THE XENO" and don't stop at merely killing any leaders or whatever but hunt down every last Evilinian to the ends of the earth, to every last nook, cranny and corner to stab, shoot or burn every last one so that no trace is left, no Evilinian left alive, no stone unturned, nothing left unchecked, over and over and over again, until the war is done.

and then you wake up the next day. The day after the victory. After the celebration. After all the Things That Need To Be Done, Were Done, and all the Hard Decisions that needed to be Made so that Right Thing Was Done, Were Decided Upon. After the high is dissipated. Everyone is traumatized. the Budget for Everything, is in the red. The cultures, the various people that united to face this threat all probably have their losses to mourn, and go their separate ways, sooner or later. People sooner or later begin arguing about where to go from here. there is a faction that argues that humanity should stay in case there are more out there, or something like the Evilinians are encountered again. they want power, to keep that power forever to ever be vigilant and it could be used to harm humans on the suspicion that they could be infiltrators or remnant Evilinians that they somehow missed, made up of popular war heroes that killed a lot of Evilinians in the war. But you know their skills are now useless, that they just want to be important, and that if you left them have that power? it could easily devolve into dictatorship in a couple generations. They use rhetoric preying upon peoples fear, trauma and memories of the war to push for their policies of vigilance that isn't needed, and it has to explained that was done during the most horrible time of humanity's life, the time where their extinction was imminent, that was done during it- was an exception. That we should put away the horrible weapons, that we no longer need the vigilance, that we should move on and heal from the way that the Evilinians have hurt humanity, that hopefully we never do anything like this ever again, that no, the hate isn't needed anymore, that we should move on, that we need to recover not just in terms of prosperity but in terms of morality so that we don't make mistakes based on maladapting to circumstances that no longer apply. One speech won't be enough, and one leader making that speech won't be enough, thats one person trying to stop the river of history. You simply have to hope that enough people will make similar speeches, do similar efforts to course correct enough that humans learning from the Evilinians, won't do something horrible themselves BECAUSE of the horrible things the Evilinians did to them.

Goodness is more than just recognizing and eliminating the bad externally, its maintaining and upholding the good, over and over again internally and externally- this is not a grey morality thing to me, this is simply how being a good person works. That is what the simplified, black and white morality tales I know of, have taught me. What they've also taught me, is that a real hero is not one who takes lives, but one who saves them. That they're not measured in how many villains they vanquish, but in how many victims they rescue, how many innocents they protect, the values they stand up for, the principles they do not bend on. This whole thing where I say you have the moral high ground in one moment? Thats a Gray Morality Concession I'm making To You, thats me giving you the benefit of the doubt.

In my heart of hearts if I was truly going full Black and White Morality, truly holding to the principles that simplified morality taught me and going off into fantasy land where I suggest alternative solutions without any regards to moral complexity or practicality of the solution? I'd just make up a spell for humanity (and whoever else is good) to be teleported away to some other world then any means or knowledge to follow them to be destroyed so they can never be found. After all, the Evilinians are stupid and violent right? they don't know anything other than killing so they won't be able to figure out how to replicate it and I'm taking the moral high ground here, I can just go find some other world to live on, escape and let them destroy themselves and live happily away from them. Now you could criticize me that this doesn't actually solve the problem of the Evilinians existing and that its no guarantee to work or whatever there might be danger son the other world, but that holds true for any genocide plan against whatever fantasy race you care to name, because the rules for how they work are made up and don't matter, the Evilinians might just be too strong for humans to kill! Or too numerous! Or have some other advantage that makes it impossible to win! There is no actual guarantee that you will be able to fight and win against them just because you want to. That horrible war I detailed above? Could all be for nothing! Humanity could just die because it was too stubborn to realize that Hey, while this enemy is certainly evil, its also too strong to kill ourselves! Maybe survival involves....not fighting? Maybe it involves...fleeing and waiting it out somewhere else and returning later to find the Evilinians destroyed each other or whatever, they're violent and stupid after all so they're not going to be intelligent enough to follow to actually organize their society to live without killing so they're just to kill each other for whatever stupid evil desires they want until they screw each over into oblivion. and sure maybe an Evilinian killed my sister or something and I feel angry over that, but y'know what they say, the best revenge is living well, and um, since Evilinians are stupid and violent I'm probably living better than them on a fresh new world. Now to be fair when humanity returns to the old world its probably gonna look like an apocalyptic wasteland after the Evilinians are all dead from their own stupidity, but restoring the world's life and such seems like a much better deed and undertaking than fighting the Evilinians, so morally it all works out. You don't actually need to ever fight something like the Evilinians really, they'll just destroy themselves sooner or later.

The only reason anyone would want to go fight them is well....not for any actual moral reasons. but for deciding AMORAL ones. Namely, Action Hero Amorality. Because Samurai, your not actually advocating for black and white morality. Your advocating for Action Hero Amorality where the action hero gets to jump into the villains lair and go kill the people that Need To Be Killed and walk into the sunset happily with no consequences involving the outside world after the credits of the movie are rolled. Which is fine! I enjoy being an Amoral Action Hero that just kills what needs killing and walks off happily myself. I just don't pretend that there is a moral, simple or complex to doing that. I'm fine with being an action hero that goes around killing stuff to show off and be cool, but that doesn't make the character a good person in any way, I don't NEED them to be good when they are doing that, this is not grey morality this is not ANY morality, this is just ignoring morality to live a power fantasy. If you want to live that power fantasy, just say so, don't muddle the issue with morality of any kind, because honestly that just distracts from the actual point of that power fantasy.

But my point is: if your making a world where peoples actions make sense, where there is history, consequences and such and so on, so forth, you have to consider what the consequences of things are outside that power fantasy, to detail the world and negative effects when something bad things happen, its generally how good GMing is done in my experience, and the consequences of that scenario would be horrible both during and after for different reasons as I detailed! and in my experience the difference between Black/White Morality and Grey Morality gets kind of blurry and indistinct as well because one person's Grey Morality is another's White Morality with Complexity/Exceptions and vice-versa, after all how many exceptions do you make to your white morality paint until the shades start looking distinct, and how competent and considerate can your Grey Morality character be until they resemble a saint pale and pure? At some point, the terms just don't mean anything because what system someone uses to think about these things doesn't really matter as much as how they conduct themselves, what positive impact they have upon the world, what other people think of them, how thankful other people are for what they've done for the good deeds they have done, and how they respond to seeing that in return. Being a good person day-to-day has very little to do with this edge-case scenario you conjured where suddenly you have to go full extreme murder, and I'd wager most good people would be horrified to learn is necessary and try to figure out any other solution before having to resort to it. So, black and white morality isn't really useful to talk about this scenario really because its so extreme and exceptional that it warps what being a good person means beyond all recognition. and as detailed in my pacifist fleeing solution above, there is technically an alternative that is more moral from a nonviolent perspective that doesn't redeem or feel sympathy for the Evilinians at all. And even if you do put the genocide solution to the Evilinians in a world, and you do allow it to be The Right Thing To Do In That Situation, there is still all the situations before and after it. History doesn't stop when the Evilinians die, nor did it began when they invaded. Unless you making a movie-like action-fantasy story about specifically that scenario and ignoring everything else, stopping the game right in a movie finish as you look at the ruins of victory hollywood style no epilogue or follow up, you have to think about the wider implications of that happening, regardless of what moral terms your throwing around, and the Evilinians could inflict cultural wounds on humans that could make them worse! thats simply something that could happen as a result of winning against them, it doesn't matter if there a grey gradient or a binary white/black computation behind it, the result is bad either way and the right thing to do is make sure that influence is healed and stopped so humans are better people.

Because again: a good person is someone who maintains and upholds good, over and over again, not just gets rid of something bad once. I don't think thats a complex moral issue that is too painful for anyone or anything, thats just basic, thats what being a good person is and if your saying even that is too complex for even the most simple of black and white morality stories to acknowledge, then I disagree and cast doubt on what you think is black and white morality is actually that or whether its just an amoral power fantasy of killing those dudes that has no relation to any wider fictional world that actually deals with black and white morality as apart of their story, because what you describe as black and white morality isn't one I've ever seen anyone actually do or replicate intentionally, but does sound a lot like action films that don't think about morality at all and thus aren't moral.

[Psyren]

Feels like a non-issue. If your setting's race is similar to the PHB version then you just say "Use PHB except as noted..." like, for example, the 1e Dragonlance guide did. If your race is bespoke enough that the PHB description is irrelevant, then you needed to write up a whole race description for them anyway so you just say "This is what elves are here..." That doesn't make the PHB description pointless since it still gives DMs who aren't using your setting a good starting point to either slot in untouched, elaborate on, or tweak to fit their own games. But giving someone a creative starting point is never "wasted" even if they deviate from it.

At no point in reading Krynn material did I ever think "Wow, they don't even HAVE orcs in this world! The Player's Handbook really screwed up that one when they gave some player races an advantage against orcs..."

Why do you think it's better to make the core version of something specific to one setting then include a bunch of "except except except" caveats in every splat, than it is to simply focus on what's actually core in the core version and then expand on it via splat?

You're acting like I think stories shouldn't have villains at all, which I don't. I am completely fine with a good vs evil tale of heroics, like the Empire from Star Wars does not have this sort of problem

The problem is this desire to completely dehumanize the enemy, to erase any chance that the audience might feel any sympathy for them, and it leads to people writing stories where the bad guys are bad not because of what they do or what they believe, but because they come from the bad race, who are ugly and savage and subhuman and against whom any violence no matter how brutal is justified.

Exactly, and we already have monsters explicitly designed for this; fiends, undead, and aberrations are designed for this exact purpose. If you absolutely must have the existentially evil threat be orc-shaped, do what Azeroth did and make one of the above (e.g. fiends) corrupt them for the length of an entire campaign war.

I would agree that they belong in core. My stance is that that secondary settings should maybe not be expected to include all the core elements, part of the way you distinguish settings from each other is what they don't have.

That's why the core elements are things that are truly baseline to the race and therefore easy to include. All elves have keen senses and trance, and all dwarves are good with tools and resistant to poison - take those away and you might as well be using something else. It goes back to one of the questions that started this thread - what is inalienable to a given race like dwarves, such that altering it would end up making them not feel like that race anymore? That's the stuff that should be in core.

By contrast, things like "hating orcs" are not, because then that creates assumptions about what orcs should be in that setting in order for such hatred to be justified, and now you've locked yourself out of portraying orcs in any other more nuanced way like how Eberron made them guardians of nature who oppose aberrations.

I think that fundamentally limits what official settings can do. It's not a problem for classes like fighters or rogues, which tend to be pretty setting agnostic, but many of the core classes and races bring with them a lot of assumptions about the sort of setting the game takes place in.

Follow-up question then - why do you need official settings to do everything? I'm not saying that a setting where clerics and paladins are banned (as some versions of Athas have done) or a setting where bards can only be low-magic minstrels, can't possibly be interesting - but you don't need WotC to build that. Just like reducing orcs to slavering monsters fit only for genocide, some things are better left to third party creators. If anything, that would be a win for all involved, because if there's sufficient demand for such unorthodox settings it will fuel the idea that settings don't have to come from WotC to be desirable or playable. Isn't that what critics want?

[OldTrees1]

About Lord Raziere's Point

The point I was making, is -snip Go Read It In Lord Raziere's post. I'll wait-

A long point but worth reading and rereading.

I do suggest people replying to Lord Raziere's point jump to this part of their post. Everything above is context but can be a bit tangential. Don't let that stop you from reading their point itself.

Even with my slightly different premises (see my comments above about parts of the preamble) your point holds up. There will be consequences and you do a good job of laying those out.


About the preamble (These are informative nitpicks. No need to follow up on these comments.)

because saying _______ is acceptable in a certain circumstance when it normally isn't, IS grey morality, because its implicitly introducing and acknowledging moral complexity by implying that it needs to be pointed out its not normally done! Therefore its not a moral principle, but an exception being made, and in a Black in White morality, NO Exceptions are Made.

To be fair, most black and white (deontological) moral systems do divide broader actions into smaller categories before labeling it as moral, amoral, or immoral. For example "killing" gets divided up into subcategories (hunting, farming, murder, warfare) and you could either frame it as those categories being exceptions, or frame it as the original category being too broad.

You address the question of subcategories using a different approach in the body of your point.

And if you response is "I don't agree with that/actually Black and White Morality is different" too bad. There is no actual objective Black and White Morality, not in DnD, not in anywhere because guess what? it aaaaaaall depends on the person your talking to, what they think should be "White", what they think should "Black" and therefore the objective black and white morality.....is subject to all the same problems Grey Morality, but without acknowledging the problems and therefore making it worse

Cultural relativity does not prove moral relativity, so different people having different moral opinions is orthagonal to whether an objective morality exists. This is in part because the "objective" in "objective morality" means a statement about morality will be true or false independent of opinions people have about morality. This does not imply those truth values would be common knowledge nor that people would commonly have beliefs that coincidentally matched the reality.

This is why fiction is in the privileged position where the author can decide what, if any, objective morality is intended to exist in the story. (Whether that intent reflects in the story the reader reads depends on what the reader reads. See death of the author)

I frequently see the "objective" in the term "objective morality" misunderstood. It does not mean people can't/won't have differing subjective beliefs.

Gee, its almost as if we don't use this Black and White Morality thinking for a reason, because if we did use it humanity either never stop arguing or people would start killing each other over whether its right for someone steal a slice of bread to feed their loved ones or not instead of just acknowledging that sometimes we just have different solutions for things, we don't have perfect knowledge of right and wrong and therefore can't ever KNOW what right and wrong is and therefore we're stuck with the subjective grey morality REGARDLESS of how we feel about it, and just get on with our lives without expecting everyone to agree on how to solve things that don't any objective good solutions.

But all that is beside the point.

Not everyone realizes we "can't ever KNOW what right and wrong is" and of those that do, not all conclude to use a subjective grey morality model. So there are many that do use Black and White Morality thinking. Your predictions of their behavior don't necessarily follow.

You are right this is besides your point.

[Witty Username]

Follow-up question then - why do you need official settings to do everything? I'm not saying that a setting where clerics and paladins are banned (as some versions of Athas have done) or a setting where bards can only be low-magic minstrels, can't possibly be interesting - but you don't need WotC to build that.

I mean, why do you need official settings to tell you everything in core is allowed?

This line of reasoning feels 6 of one, half-dozen of another.

[Mordar]

They're reprints, so you'd be double-counting. In addition, there are multiple 3rd-party races on that page, not all of them are WotC.

So assuming there is no playability for the "legacy" versions at all, we're looking at 9/68?

Third party, but included on the officially branded and hosted resource seems like it should count. It isn't just a mention of "you can use other people's stuff if you want", it is "we are including other people's stuff in this resource".

On potency of racial traits:

Why do the traits need to be at or below "first level" of power?

I can understand not wanting to eclipse an entire class, or give something that allows, say, spamming a 3rd level spell as a racial trait. Mechanically, though, I don't understand why it isn't appropriate to have traits that can be impactful through the spectrum of class levels and not trivialized once you hit 3rd/5th/whatever level.

Is it an issue of balance not baked into the system (e.g. too hard to add once the system is established because it skews the carefully calculated power levels and progressions?), or the idea that attribute modifications have persistent benefit so it is already accomplished, or something else entirely?

- M

[Psyren]

I mean, why do you need official settings to tell you everything in core is allowed?

This line of reasoning feels 6 of one, half-dozen of another.

Because expecting material from books labeled as core to the game actually be core to the game is reasonable? WotC themselves set that expectation, so following through on it makes more sense than the reverse.

[OldTrees1]

On potency of racial traits:

Why do the traits need to be at or below "first level" of power?

1) They don't.
2) I don't think Psyren meant the features couldn't/wouldn't scale. Githyanki for example have their spells delayed to later levels. It is more along the lines of species that wouldn't be balanced as 1st level characters. Either because their minimum power would be too high or because they would scale faster than the other species. For example a Troll Cleric 5 would be stronger than a Human Cleric 5.
3) They don't (repeated for emphasis). Higher level species could have been included. Their omission is a choice by WotC rather than a restriction on what WotC could have done. They have done it before (3E). This is one area where Psyren with insist on the status quo while I will critique WotC's unforced omission.
4) They do. WotC made a decision to have the power curve of PCs be an irregular mess. They wanted big irregular spikes at 5th, 11th, 17th and that makes everything, including higher level species, harder to design around. Multiclassing runs into friction around those levels. A higher level species is like multiclassing into a monster class (Troll 3 / Cleric 2 as a 5th level character).

[Mordar]

1) They don't.
2) I don't think Psyren meant the features couldn't/wouldn't scale. Githyanki for example have their spells delayed to later levels. It is more along the lines of species that wouldn't be balanced as 1st level characters. Either because their minimum power would be too high or because they would scale faster than the other species. For example a Troll Cleric 5 would be stronger than a Human Cleric 5.
3) They don't. Higher level species could have been included. Their omission is a choice by WotC rather than a restriction on what WotC could have done. They have done it before (3E).

Not sure who, but someone upstream in the 27 pages was tying a power cap to things not beyond a cantrip (or first level spell) tier. The who doesn't matter much to me, and the fact that I had responded to Psyren in my post was only intended as indicative of that specific part of the response.

My hope would be for *all* the races to have ballpark-balanced power to their racial traits. No character level adjustment muck, all intended for play from the start, but either with something that under current paradigms would be OP for starting characters (but would be the norm in a system designed to accommodate) or evolves to remain valuable at 10th level too. That does mean no "full monster version" Troll as a player character, perhaps...but doesn't mean an evolving DR trait couldn't be included.

- M

[BRC]

Again, there's some sort of disconnect reminiscent to what Lord Raziere was saying. The orcs are bad not because they are ugly or subhuman. They are bad because they want to kill humans and eradicate them and/or subjugate them for their dark master who also does not care about human life. And insofar as they do these things, then violence against them IS justified.

Drow are not ugly or subhuman, quite the opposite in fact. And yet because of their culture of raiding, killing, and enslaving, as well as demon summoning, etc. they are evil and no one should wring their hands about defending themselves against their depravity.

It's perfectly fine for fantasy creatures to occupy this space.

So, I'm going to make up some terms here

A Situational Enemy is somebody who is your enemy because of the situation you find yourself in. A Bandit has decided they want to take all your stuff with either violence, or the threat of violence. The Bandit is a Situational enemy. If you met the bandit under different circumstances, they would not be your enemy.

A Definitional enemy is something that, for whatever reason, is definitionally your foe. For example, if there is a cultist of the slaughter-god, and you oppose people being slaughtered, you want to oppose the cult of the slaughter-god. This particular individual could stop being your enemy by stopping being a cultist of the slaughter-god, but so long as they are a cultist of the slaughter-god, they are your enemy.

Finally, an Inherent enemy is an enemy that is, by it's very nature, your foe. In fantasy terms this might be a demon or undead. It's very existence represents a real and present threat.


In real life, almost all our enemies (as defined as "People it is justified to do violence to") are situational. From violent criminals to soldiers on the other side of a war, they are our enemies today, but could have not been our enemies yesterday. There's an occasional Definitional enemy, somebody who holds to an ideology that makes them a threat. The closest thing we get to an Inherent enemy might be, say, an infected animal that needs to be put down in the name of local safety. We don't have Human inherent enemies, because there is nothing inherent about being human that makes you an enemy of another human.

You can have a cool action story against situational and definitional enemies. If soldiers invade your homeland on the orders of their king, you're not wrong to take up arms in defense simply because those soldiers wouldn't be attacking you if they were not ordered to. You're not wrong to lead a party into their homeland in order to sabotage their supply lines. You're not wrong to assassinate said king and his counselors. It's a war, you're allowed to fight it.

The issue that Fantasy Races usually bring is that they tend to turn Situational and Definitional Enemies into Inherent ones in the name of creating a world of Black and White morality. Rather than creating a situation where our Heroes might justifiably do battle with Orcs, they just say "Yeah, Orcs are inherently evil. Some types of people in this world are just evil by nature and you can wipe them out without guilt". An Orc is a shorthand for "Somebody it's okay to kill", the narrative role of an enemy soldier with the moral certainty of a rabid dog. This is a problem because now you've introduced into your world the following fact:"There's a certain type of person that is just inherently evil and it is morally correct to kill them simply for living". This is something that is UNTRUE in the real world, but which plenty of people throughout history have felt is very true, and you have just created a world where they are objectively correct. Fantasy races tend to be allegorical for different cultural groups, but within the fiction of the universe they are also distinct biological groups. An Orc is born an Orc, a dwarf is born a dwarf.

So while it's obvious to us that a person born to, say, Italian parents but raised in England by English parents will behave like an English person, fantasy races love to conflate biology and culture and say that an orc raised by Dwarves is still inherently an Orc.

The Drow are evil because they are a slave-based civilization. That's fine right there. History is full of empires that practiced slavery, and I feel confident in saying that slavery is an evil practice and that nobody is wrong for defending themselves from slavers who wish to enslave them. If "Drow" meant "Elves who live in this culture and practice slavery" that would be fine. If a surface elf went and joined drow society and therefore became Drow, then you've just got a culture of evil elves.
But Drow are defined as a race of Elves, not a culture (Although I understand more recent lore have introduced alternative drow cultures). So you've got this evil culture whose members just so happen to near-perfectly overlap with a certain biological group of dark-skinned elves. It's an easy shorthand, but one whose implications are pretty disturbing.


Of course, part of the issue is that this idea is so pervasive in both fantasy fiction and history that it's easy to fall into the trap unless you take some specific steps to avoid it. Devoid of any other cultural context, one could assume a perfectly reasonable and non-racist explanation for why The Drow overwhelmingly belong to this evil culture the same way somebody might read historical fiction about Gauls fighting off a Roman invasion and not question why all the people from Italy who show up are the bad guys. But there's almost a default assumption in fantasy that if there's an evil culture which is largely made up of a certain biological group, then we're supposed to read that the group in question is inherently predisposed to that particular flavor of evil.

[Psyren]

Third party, but included on the officially branded and hosted resource seems like it should count.

No - the whole argument that started the counting tangent was whether WotC is printing too much or too little race stuff. Third parties are not WotC.

On potency of racial traits:

Why do the traits need to be at or below "first level" of power?

Because those traits will be available to first-level characters.

I'm not saying they can't spike above, say, a 1st-level spell, nor that they can't ever scale as OldTrees1 correctly stated, but the nature of the ability needs to be taken into account at that point too. A 2nd-level spell like Misty Step or Spider Climb is an okay ability for a first-level character, while one like Scorching Ray or Moonbeam would not be. Invisibility would be fine if it doesn't last for an hour like the spell does. That kind of game designer judgment of the ability is what is needed.

I can understand not wanting to eclipse an entire class, or give something that allows, say, spamming a 3rd level spell as a racial trait. Mechanically, though, I don't understand why it isn't appropriate to have traits that can be impactful through the spectrum of class levels and not trivialized once you hit 3rd/5th/whatever level.

As mentioned, I'm fine with racials that are useful at higher levels, whether due to being things that are always useful (like bonus action teleportation) or that scale with level (like a pool of healing dice.) I think most modern racials fall into one of these categories in fact; I can't think of any off the top of my head that become "trivialized once you hit 3rd/5th level" as you claim, though there's certainly a shift where the degree of power coming from your class and feats eclipses what comes from your race more and more, but that's to be expected. The bulk of your power should come from your build choices throughout your career, not a single choice you made at the start of the campaign.

[Dr.Samurai]

We are not talking about how the violence committed by the "good races" against the "bad races" was messed up within the logic of the fiction, we are talking about how it is kind of messed up as a writer to make a story about "good races" vs "bad races".

Is that what the topic is? I think you are getting hung up on "race". Stories are about good people contending with evil forces. It's sort of not the point if the evil forces all happen to be of one kind of creature.

Dehumanizing an entire race of people as brutes and savages in order to justify your violence against them as noble and righteous has a long and ugly history in the real world, and that parallel does not stop being uncomfortable just because you gave them tusks.

"In order to justify".

Again, I think this is missing the point. I don't think anyone is dehumanizing anything, and I don't think we're doing it to make the good guys. And I don't think it's useful to draw parallels to the real world.

In fact, you guys keep drawing parallels to the real world and it sort of just confuses the issue.

I never found always evil races particularly interesting. I might accept it with some very nonhuman races like demons at best.

A couple of points, I find it funny that even demons might not get this label.

More importantly, I'm not arguing for "always evil races". I'm arguing about lore, and the changes to lore, and the reasons behind those changes and the reasons to object to those changes. I can use the lore in Volo's and still have some orcs be good/resist Gruumsh/etc.

In every edition of D&D that I have checked (3E, 3.5E, 4E, 4.5E, and 5E), WotC did exactly this. The PHB uses 1 setting as an example. In 3E it used Grayhawk.

Indeed. Seems there should be a really good reason not to continue doing it this way. Especially when your big concept (multiverse) requires multiple settings, seems like you should just come out the gate fleshing out at least one, no?

To be fair what Lord Raziere said was a bit more nuanced
Edit: Lord Raziere posted the very next post. Their post is a better source to use to clarify.

Perhaps, but it all goes to the same place. Maybe in cutting to the point I mischaracterized what they said.

@ Dr. Samurai:

My point isn't that we should feel bad about defeating genocidal P-Zombie #1452532 or whatever. Its that even in a Good Vs. Evil set up, that is only One. Situation. where the option to genocide is viable, perhaps the only situation. And in that ONE SITUATION you can say you had the moral high ground, that you can feel good about it, for that one goddamn instant. But settings, worlds, people, history, culture, are much much bigger than A Single Instant, a Single Moment, a Single Snapshot of time.

To be clear... I did not bring up genocide, just as I didn't bring up killing babies or camp followers.

And you are using "settings, worlds, people, history, culture" as these things that are much bigger than a "snapshot" to make your case, but later on you will admit that you would not use violence to defend these "big concepts" because you still find it morally wrong. So these things actually mean nothing to you in the face of a violent enemy. It's a position that I don't understand, and am not really interested in understanding.

Again, you can go kill the dark god of all orcs and burn every chaotic evil orc out of existence if your truly committed to that species being that evil with no redemption allowed. I have no friggin' clue why that'd be your first solution to that, or why you want that with it even if its morally right, or you insist on jumping to that specific solution out of all solutions if you want to play a good person so much, because if I was running Good Vs. Evil morality, I wouldn't say that solution is Good at all. I'd be stricter than I would be in Grey Morality, in grey I don't care because morality is subjective, who can really say if the solution was "bad" if it increases the overall happiness of everyone and doesn't impact anyone's freedoms?

Again, I never put forth genocide as a solution to anything. You and others brought it up.

As you and others keep insisting on removing the context of "d&d game", and keep trying to throw this conversation on rails that inevitably lead to baby-killing and genocide, the points become more and more irrelevant to me. I don't have to defend genocide because I'm not talking about a game that requires it. I'm talking about keeping a world where Orcs are amassing and ready to overtake the Sword Coast because they are godsworn to Gruumsh and the other orc deities and hate civilization and want to destroy it. This concept DOES NOT require ANY of the things you have brought up or that I will reply to shortly, nor many of the things others have mentioned in this thread.

But in White and Black Morality, subjectivity and situational conditions doesn't matter, every action has an inherent good or evil, and genocide is evil in our world therefore its reasonable to make it evil in the worlds we play because it matches up with what we value, therefore genocide can't be excused in this paradigm, because saying genocide is acceptable in a certain circumstance when it normally isn't, IS grey morality, because its implicitly introducing and acknowledging moral complexity by implying that it needs to be pointed out its not normally done! Therefore its not a moral principle, but an exception being made, and in a Black in White morality, NO Exceptions are Made. You do something bad, that is that, you don't get an excuse, you don't get weasel out, your hand are stained with an action that is by itself A Bad Action regardless of the consequences. You do a genocide, Black and White Morality is less forgiving, because it is blind, it doesn't see the circumstances, it doesn't see the outcome, it just sees You Have Done This Thing And This Is Bad Because It Is Bad, regardless of your opinion on it, but don't worry anyone who kills you for it is also evil because Murder Is Wrong, and they won't be lessening the world's evil at all by killing you, unlike in a Grey Morality system where Killing Genocidal Jerks is Okay because thats an exception to Murder Is Wrong and who can really blame the people who get the opportunity? Not me. It is in fact through Grey Morality that exceptional circumstances like this "Chaotic Evil P-Zombie" hypotheticals are allowed, because it doesn't depend on some Objective Morality from on high turning a blind eye Just This Once, when it doesn't DO THAT. On the contrary, all the simplified black and white morality stories I know of? Are SUPER against killing ANYONE. Forget a genocide, the simplified black and white morality light tales I know of, every story that takes such idealistic and simplified moral stances, don't even allow you to kill a single bad guy no matter what bad things they've done, because murder in of itself is a moral problem that takes moral complexity to solve. You can say whatever to the mortal authorities about exceptions, but the Angels won't be so lenient on your soul. The idea that genocide has any place in such a simplified story for simple morality is baffling and anathema to me, because your wanting to be light with perhaps one of the heaviest topics possible, when people get up in arms over ONE KILLING in such a story! ONE! For ANY reason, no matter how justified! Because people as a society have decided that life has an inherent, intrinsic value in of itself, no matter what you or me think about that! So if you include a single killing as positive at all? Your violating that simple rule, your already making it more complex! and DnD violates that rule A LOT.

Needless to say, I disagree with your premise here. If someone kills an animal for food, we don't call it murder. If someone kills another person in self defense, we don't refer to it as murder. There are nuances to this that invalidate your point before it even gets going.

And if you response is "I don't agree with that/actually Black and White Morality is different" too bad. There is no actual objective Black and White Morality, not in DnD, not in anywhere because guess what? it aaaaaaall depends on the person your talking to, what they think should be "White", what they think should "Black" and therefore the objective black and white morality.....is subject to all the same problems Grey Morality, but without acknowledging the problems and therefore making it worse and whatever book you cite? will be interpreted differently by different people, no matter how clearly stated.

"There is no actual object Black and White Morality, not in DnD, not in anywhere..."

And yet... there's a lot of moral posturing going on in this very thread about how awful it is to have orcs be evil as a culture.

Gee, its almost as if we don't use this Black and White Morality thinking for a reason, because if we did use it humanity either never stop arguing or people would start killing each other over whether its right for someone steal a slice of bread to feed their loved ones or not instead of just acknowledging that sometimes we just have different solutions for things, we don't have perfect knowledge of right and wrong and therefore can't ever KNOW what right and wrong is and therefore we're stuck with the subjective grey morality REGARDLESS of how we feel about it, and just get on with our lives without expecting everyone to agree on how to solve things that don't any objective good solutions. So if you don't like how what the universes/GMs definition of "Black and White Morality" doesn't allow genocide to be done on anyone then uh.....try not to be born in that universe?/don't play with them? don't know what else to say.

I honestly don't know what to say to this.

The point I was making, is that even if your in a Good Vs. Evil morality system, even if you face that situation, even if you come out victorious and can feel good in that moment about being victorious about the Evilinians or whatever.....you have to wake up the next day, and deal with whatever jerk decides to say "Hey I hate blond people, anyone else hate blond people? blond people are like Evilinians, we should wipe them out, like we did the Evilinians, remember when we wiped out them out? that felt good, we should do it again to feel good again about killing people we hate" and the moral good in THAT situation is to start explaining "NO, blond people are not like Evilinians, they are people with lives that don't deserve it you jerk" because blond people are not Evilinians! Yes Evilinians are bad! Really, horribly bad! They are the horror of not having a better solution to war than wiping out the enemy!

Yes, understood. My point is that this is Lord Raziere's take on how this would play out. As I said in my previous post, this is not a foregone conclusion. If you want to play it that way as a DM, by all means. But if my players save the Sword Coast from an orc horde, no, it does not necessarily follow that they will turn on themselves, or each other, or some other defined group, or hunt the orcs to extinction, or literally ANY OF THE OTHER THINGS you've posited in your posts. That's just you, and your opinion about what would logically make sense and what inevitable outcomes there might be. So as I've said before, and as others have chimed in, I don't need to contend with this because I don't agree that it has to happen this way.

Like you act like I'm treating the Evilinians invading as a light casual thing. It isn't. When you face Evilinians, your talking about Total War. Anything that ensures humanities survival becomes Good, in that situation. If they come to conquer a city, there is no surrender, no hope of simply being an occupying force and just enforcing their laws or whatever, they are just going to kill everyone and take the city over the corpses. Thus, there are no refugees. No such thing as a civilian. Everyone is in danger. Young, old, infirm, doesn't matter, everyone is either a contributor, or they are dead. A child is either working in some labor, or they are wielding a weapon to hopefully kill two Evilinians before they kill them, because every person counts when it comes to humanity's survival, they don't have time to play. Even if they're laborers, they still have to fight, and thus every civilian is a conscript, a draftee whether anyone likes it or not, there is no human society anymore, only an army, and the support structure for it. Thus all the people you want to save are now potential resources to be sacrificed for this evil to be eradicated. You can't take hostages because they are evil, they're not going to talk, they won't care if another one of them dies and you need to kill them every single one anyways, and they're not going to take hostages of your people, they will just kill them. All the weapons you thought were too horrible to use on people? you can use them now! now or never, either you survive to be tried for it or you die so you might as well use them! Whatever horrible thing you can imagine? you can do to them so that humanity is saved and as many people survive, because not everyone is going to survive, there are going to be casualties, people motivated by those casualties, hurt by those casualties, and all that hurt, oh that gonna be useful to motivate them to kill more! Oh wait an Evilinian disguised as a human tried to use our morals to restrain us from killing them more, guess we can't ever trust any human speaking out against the war effort, anyone that isn't with us is against us, best kill any dissidents just to be safe, any human that isn't actively hating the Evilinians isn't hating them enough! The budget, the economy, screw those, whats the use of money if we're too dead to spend it? Spend all the money to keep us safe, we'll get to that later! Wait, did the Evilinians just do THAT atrocity to us!? we need to respond in kind! no Mercy! NO MERCY! And so on and so forth until all the humans are yelling "PURGE THE XENO" and don't stop at merely killing any leaders or whatever but hunt down every last Evilinian to the ends of the earth, to every last nook, cranny and corner to stab, shoot or burn every last one so that no trace is left, no Evilinian left alive, no stone unturned, nothing left unchecked, over and over and over again, until the war is done.

and then you wake up the next day. The day after the victory. After the celebration. After all the Things That Need To Be Done, Were Done, and all the Hard Decisions that needed to be Made so that Right Thing Was Done, Were Decided Upon. After the high is dissipated. Everyone is traumatized. the Budget for Everything, is in the red. The cultures, the various people that united to face this threat all probably have their losses to mourn, and go their separate ways, sooner or later. People sooner or later begin arguing about where to go from here. there is a faction that argues that humanity should stay in case there are more out there, or something like the Evilinians are encountered again. they want power, to keep that power forever to ever be vigilant and it could be used to harm humans on the suspicion that they could be infiltrators or remnant Evilinians that they somehow missed, made up of popular war heroes that killed a lot of Evilinians in the war. But you know their skills are now useless, that they just want to be important, and that if you left them have that power? it could easily devolve into dictatorship in a couple generations. They use rhetoric preying upon peoples fear, trauma and memories of the war to push for their policies of vigilance that isn't needed, and it has to explained that was done during the most horrible time of humanity's life, the time where their extinction was imminent, that was done during it- was an exception. That we should put away the horrible weapons, that we no longer need the vigilance, that we should move on and heal from the way that the Evilinians have hurt humanity, that hopefully we never do anything like this ever again, that no, the hate isn't needed anymore, that we should move on, that we need to recover not just in terms of prosperity but in terms of morality so that we don't make mistakes based on maladapting to circumstances that no longer apply. One speech won't be enough, and one leader making that speech won't be enough, thats one person trying to stop the river of history. You simply have to hope that enough people will make similar speeches, do similar efforts to course correct enough that humans learning from the Evilinians, won't do something horrible themselves BECAUSE of the horrible things the Evilinians did to them.

This is certainly one way to handle this. It's not the only way.

Again, this smacks of trying to handle the subject in some conceived "real" way that reflects how it would "really" happen. And despite the "no objective morality", this "real" way happens to depict us in a real immoral light. As I said previously, I don't think it's always useful to try and bring the game "back to reality" so to speak. This is also what I meant about how we're killing the fantasy by inserting these gotcha morality issues into the story.

Goodness is more than just recognizing and eliminating the bad externally, its maintaining and upholding the good, over and over again internally and externally- this is not a grey morality thing to me, this is simply how being a good person works.

Sure, and in your view people won't be able to do that. Once they have to do stuff to contend with a potential annihilation, it will send them on a path to evil. Therefore, according to you, there is no goodness, because you're not allowing for the possibility of defeating an existential threat without retaining who you are as a people. I don't like this storytelling, and I'd feel like the DM is setting us up for failure if this is the premise of the game.

That is what the simplified, black and white morality tales I know of, have taught me. What they've also taught me, is that a real hero is not one who takes lives, but one who saves them.

And sometimes you save a life by taking a life. And as I said previously, if someone doesn't understand that, I don't trust them to handle these concepts very well at all.

In my heart of hearts if I was truly going full Black and White Morality, truly holding to the principles that simplified morality taught me and going off into fantasy land where I suggest alternative solutions without any regards to moral complexity or practicality of the solution? I'd just make up a spell for humanity (and whoever else is good) to be teleported away to some other world then any means or knowledge to follow them to be destroyed so they can never be found.

This does not surprise me in the least. And I still disagree with you. These would be the actions of an NPC antagonist in my game. Not an evil person, but someone there to foil the PCs who are trying to stop a threat, instead of using resources to avoid it and not have a way to deal with it later.

I would not consider someone that is so ideologically opposed to violence that they can't fathom killing a threat to your life as "good".

After all, the Evilinians are stupid and violent right?

No idea. You guys are injecting things like spider eggs, genocide, etc. to make your point. Might as well assume the enemy is stupid too.

Now you could criticize me that this doesn't actually solve the problem of the Evilinians existing and that its no guarantee to work or whatever there might be danger son the other world, but that holds true for any genocide plan against whatever fantasy race you care to name, because the rules for how they work are made up and don't matter, the Evilinians might just be too strong for humans to kill!

No, I would just accuse you of being an ideologue with bad ideas, and of posing a danger to your own people, that you purport to care about, but can't get over your own squickiness to actually defend them.

The only reason anyone would want to go fight them is well....not for any actual moral reasons. but for deciding AMORAL ones. Namely, Action Hero Amorality.

I'm afraid that, like others in this thread, you're not aware that you're putting forth an opinion instead of laying down some cosmic law.

This is not the only reason to fight someone. Both FIGHT and FLIGHT in the fight or flight response are intended to save your life.

I get that you're opposed to violence. That's fine. That doesn't mean violence in defense of yourself and others is bad or immoral. You haven't done anything to demonstrate that. So I disagree with you that anyone fighting an existential threat is doing so only for amoral reasons. It's one of the most absurd things I've ever read.

Because Samurai, your not actually advocating for black and white morality.

I'm advocating for D&D to be allowed to keep it's evil creatures.

Your advocating for Action Hero Amorality where the action hero gets to jump into the villains lair and go kill the people that Need To Be Killed and walk into the sunset happily with no consequences involving the outside world after the credits of the movie are rolled.

I don't like your framing but I AM reminding everyone to keep the context of the game in mind. Because yes, I think playing a hero is fun, and I think saving people is fun, and beating up bad guys and stopping evil is fun. And there are consequences to the actions; evil is stopped and people are saved.

Oh... right, you want other consequences, that makes the good guys into bad guys. Yeah, I'll pass.

Which is fine! I enjoy being an Amoral Action Hero that just kills what needs killing and walks off happily myself. I just don't pretend that there is a moral, simple or complex to doing that. I'm fine with being an action hero that goes around killing stuff to show off and be cool, but that doesn't make the character a good person in any way, I don't NEED them to be good when they are doing that, this is not grey morality this is not ANY morality, this is just ignoring morality to live a power fantasy. If you want to live that power fantasy, just say so, don't muddle the issue with morality of any kind, because honestly that just distracts from the actual point of that power fantasy.

No no. This is a common misunderstanding of the action hero. People like to pretend that it's just some power fantasy for the sake of having power. If that was the case, the action hero would be something more like a wizard or god or something.

There ABSOLUTELY is morality baked into the action hero. Going off instinct, having principles, overcoming fear, helping those that can't help themselves. It's all there. You can choose not to see it and reduce it to something to deride, but that's just your perspective on the matter.

Action heroes are people of action. We are dealing with this RIGHT NOW in this thread. Instead of simply taking action to defend everyone you love and care about, we are in this heady conversation about the ramifications and consequences and the implications and all of this other theoretical stuff in the future that may or may not happen but is impacting the choices we have to make right now. The action hero stands against this. Notably, many villains of these types of heroes are NOT action villains but MASTERMINDS. Intelligent/creative/ideological people that justify/plan bad things to harm people. There is absolutely a moral lesson in the action hero, including against black/white stuff. Many times, the action hero breaks or bends the rules/laws in order to do what needs doing in order to stop the bad guy and save people.

But my point is: if your making a world where peoples actions make sense, where there is history, consequences and such and so on, so forth, you have to consider what the consequences of things are outside that power fantasy, to detail the world and negative effects when something bad things happen, its generally how good GMing is done in my experience, and the consequences of that scenario would be horrible both during and after for different reasons as I detailed!

But again, I've already stated that I don't think this sort of world building is necessary or intrinsically better.

This is the difference between Superman Returns, and Man of Steel.

In Superman Returns, the earthquake that hits Metropolis results in shattered glass falling onto the people below, a potential gas leak that would cause a devastating explosion, and the giant statue on the Daily Planet falling to the street below. These things happen with a timing and locality so that Superman can address them all one after the other and save "the day", and "the day" here is these little pockets of potential tragedy that the movie shows us in just the right way so the hero comes out on top and everyone is left unharmed. We are never prompted to think about all of the things we didn't see, or weren't shown or mentioned.

That is fantasy.

In Man of Steel, we get a more "real" version of Superman, with all of that worldbuilding and "gritty" take on "what Superman would really be like". So we get to watch thousands of people die as skyscrapers get demolished while one indestructible being plays whack-a-mole with the other through every steel and glass structure in Metropolis. Explosions abound and we are told that Superman is inexperienced and is outnumbered and this is how it would really happen.

That's "real".

And as I've said before, one is not better than the other. It's just a different type of story to tell. And I'm not saying that the "real" one is bad, I just don't think it's the only interesting or entertaining story to tell, whereas it seems to me others are saying the fantasy version IS bad.

Being a good person day-to-day has very little to do with this edge-case scenario you conjured where suddenly you have to go full extreme murder, and I'd wager most good people would be horrified to learn is necessary and try to figure out any other solution before having to resort to it.

I did not conjure any scenario, especially one about full murder.

So, black and white morality isn't really useful to talk about this scenario really because its so extreme and exceptional that it warps what being a good person means beyond all recognition. and as detailed in my pacifist fleeing solution above, there is technically an alternative that is more moral from a nonviolent perspective that doesn't redeem or feel sympathy for the Evilinians at all.

It's not obvious that fleeing is "more moral" than stopping the threat. That's just your opinion.

Unless you making a movie-like action-fantasy story about specifically that scenario...

I haven't been given a reason why a D&D game has to be anything other than this.

This is like when Eben sacrifices his life at the end of 30 Days of Night, transforms into a vampire to save the woman he loves and an innocent child, and after he kills the lead vampire and the other vampires flee, he asks "Should I go after them?", and she tells him no. I don't take that as an opportunity to castigate Eben as a bad moral actor, or the movie for not considering "the wider implications" of his actions, etc etc etc. Like... you don't have to do this.

Because again: a good person is someone who maintains and upholds good, over and over again, not just gets rid of something bad once.

I don't think anyone is in a position to consider what is "good" if they can't admit killing an evil creature that is trying to murder others is an act of good.

[Errorname]

Stories are about good people contending with evil forces.

Hardly universal, and even for stories it does describe it's still so reductive it might as well be wrong.

It's sort of not the point if the evil forces all happen to be of one kind of creature.

How a story chooses to characterize "the evil forces" matters a lot, actually.

"In order to justify". Again, I think this is missing the point. I don't think anyone is dehumanizing anything, and I don't think we're doing it to make the good guys.

The most common argument I've seen in favour of evil races is that it simplifies the morality of your fantasy action story, no handwringing about "do these enemy combatants deserve death". So yes, I would absolutely say the point of always evil orcs is a dehumanized other that can exist as a target of righteous violence from our heroes.

In fact, you guys keep drawing parallels to the real world and it sort of just confuses the issue.

Well, I'm sorry you're confused, but fantasy stories exist in parallel to the real world.

[Mordar]

No - the whole argument that started the counting tangent was whether WotC is printing too much or too little race stuff. Third parties are not WotC.

Respectfully disagree. The argument as I perceive it was about the lack of distinction between races in D&D, and then it moved to the current state (5e) and the relative number of races appearing that may or may not dilute the "Race Individuality Pool". The pool of races actively endorsed by WotC seems to me to be at the 9/64 level *if* D&D Beyond is a reasonable source. That is way below the number that appeared in WotC Books by the end of the 3e arc, but that number is well below the total available using 3rd party resources...but WotC never seemed to promote those races like I am seeing with 5e.

Further, it isn't directly about the number, but the "true variety". While it is probably easier to have 10 races show "true variety" (however that is best defined) I think you could have many many more and still have it. The question here seems to be (as argued by others to a greater degree) how much overlap is acceptable.

Obviously the pool of races available for play always depends on the table, but I think the 9/64 to be appropriate for discussion.

Because those traits will be available to first-level characters.

I'm not saying they can't spike above, say, a 1st-level spell, nor that they can't ever scale as OldTrees1 correctly stated, but the nature of the ability needs to be taken into account at that point too. A 2nd-level spell like Misty Step or Spider Climb is an okay ability for a first-level character, while one like Scorching Ray or Moonbeam would not be. Invisibility would be fine if it doesn't last for an hour like the spell does. That kind of game designer judgment of the ability is what is needed.

Yes, and?

There are an array of games, with different power curves and design styles, granted, where starting characters get things other characters don't get until much later in their progression. I don't feel "because someone gets it at first level" is necessary and sufficient for why it couldn't be more powerful than currently envisioned. Agree of course on what "higher level" things could be acceptable will vary with design goals etc. Flatter progression games (systems?) obviously have more wiggle room in this regard than D&D.

As mentioned, I'm fine with racials that are useful at higher levels, whether due to being things that are always useful (like bonus action teleportation) or that scale with level (like a pool of healing dice.) I think most modern racials fall into one of these categories in fact; I can't think of any off the top of my head that become "trivialized once you hit 3rd/5th level" as you claim, though there's certainly a shift where the degree of power coming from your class and feats eclipses what comes from your race more and more, but that's to be expected. The bulk of your power should come from your build choices throughout your career, not a single choice you made at the start of the campaign.

Again, I am approaching things is a less-5e centric fashion, and thinking back to both previous editions and other games. For example, at what level do +1 or +2 skill bonuses become trivialized, particularly in a standard mixed party? And then how much later for a +1 save bonus to become marginalized (never trivialized, I don't think).

I think the question of "how much impact should a choice make as impacted by when the choice is made" is interesting, and is reflected differently across systems. But even within D&D, those character generation choices already seem to carry more weight than most later-made choices. Class is massive, arguably the biggest build choice there is for most characters (all?). Sure, race doesn't evolve like class, but I think it reasonable for race to be a momentous decision as well. Maybe this just argues for more evolution in the traits and racial trait choices down the road too?

- M

[Dr.Samurai]

Hardly universal, and even for stories it does describe it's still so reductive it might as well be wrong.

I was replying specifically to what you said, of course not all stories are about good vs evil.

However I'm surprised that you'd accuse anything of being reductive when you're reducing stories to "good races vs bad races".

How a story chooses to characterize "the evil forces" matters a lot, actually.

Not really, no. I think some people are struggling to divorce their own interests from things that matter more broadly. If it's orcs, it means we can expect aggressive physical enemies, some Eyes of Gruumsh, etc. If it's gnolls, we can expect big hyenas, some Flinds maybe, some demonic forces, etc. So yeah, it will change stuff. But it doesn't matter in the way you've been saying unless those things already matter to you as a person. I don't have the same concerns that you do, so they don't matter to me.

The most common argument I've seen in favour of evil races is that it simplifies the morality of your fantasy action story, no handwringing about "do these enemy combatants deserve death". So yes, I would absolutely say the point of always evil orcs is a dehumanized other that can exist as a target of righteous violence from our heroes.

If this is how you want to frame it it would be true of any villain. As an example, the oft lauded Eberron has a villainous organization called the Emerald Claw that is designed specifically to signal to the players that villainy is afoot, and the point of them is that the players don't have to think about it and can attack them on sight in full confidence that they are doing bad things. They are analogous to a certain group of bad guys from a certain world war. This is word of god on the matter.

You can reduce that to say "the Emerald Claw only exists as a target of righteous violence from our heroes" and I would still shrug my shoulders at the accusation. Lex Luthor only exists to foil Superman. Yeah, okay. Guilty as charged.

My objection to your comment is that I feel like all of the focuses in this conversation are backwards. So it's not that the knights of Cormyr are good because they are brave and noble and defend others. They are "good" because the orcs are ugly and brutish and subhuman. And the reason the orcs are ugly brutish and subhuman is so that the knights of Cormyr can be good. I don't think that's the right way to look at it, and it's why I've struggled to agree with virtually anything I've read on this so far.

Well, I'm sorry you're confused, but fantasy stories exist in parallel to the real world.

Again, I can only shrug my shoulders. You can imagine of course that somewhere there is a game running with orcs being depicted as in Volo's, and the DM does not go out of their way to impose any of the moral quandaries mentioned in this thread, and the game is successful, everyone has fun, and no problems arise in the real world from it. It's happening right now as we type and read. I have faith that orcs can be an evil culture/race in D&D without grave consequences leaping from behind the DM screen into the real world. But then again, I appear to have a much more positive and hopeful view of humanity than others in this thread, so there's that hurdle to overcome as well.

The issue that Fantasy Races usually bring is that they tend to turn Situational and Definitional Enemies into Inherent ones in the name of creating a world of Black and White morality. Rather than creating a situation where our Heroes might justifiably do battle with Orcs, they just say "Yeah, Orcs are inherently evil. Some types of people in this world are just evil by nature and you can wipe them out without guilt". An Orc is a shorthand for "Somebody it's okay to kill", the narrative role of an enemy soldier with the moral certainty of a rabid dog. This is a problem because now you've introduced into your world the following fact:"There's a certain type of person that is just inherently evil and it is morally correct to kill them simply for living". This is something that is UNTRUE in the real world, but which plenty of people throughout history have felt is very true, and you have just created a world where they are objectively correct. Fantasy races tend to be allegorical for different cultural groups, but within the fiction of the universe they are also distinct biological groups. An Orc is born an Orc, a dwarf is born a dwarf.

Sorry BRC, I missed your post earlier. I think your definitions are helpful.

I am just quoting this bit because I think it's the biggest point of contention. As everyone's surmised by this point I'm sure, I don't have any particular qualms about orcs or other creatures being presented as (mostly) inherently evil. I think we've come A LONG way from any association to allegory, and I play D&D regularly throughout the week every week and this type of stuff just has never come up and I suspect never will come up for my games (with one exception actually... an old greyhawk game back on the WotC forums where a player rage quit because we killed a cambion instead of taking them hostage). So one game in decades of playing that I can remember.

Even as mostly inherently evil beings, I don't think I run into many scenarios where we kill orcs on sight without cause. Usually we already know that they're evil and are committing bad acts. Further, elves and dwarves and halflings and gnomes are all presented as mostly good. And we don't question about whether it's inherent or not because we don't really care. They are mostly good and that's great. And the ones that aren't are clearly identifiable and clearly separate.

And despite the fact that dwarves and elves and others are mostly good or neutral, we still know that evil ones exist. Not every shield dwarf is a lawful neutral/good devotee of Moradin. Some may be evil.

That's always been true. It's always been true of orcs as well; not all are evil, some are good. D&D has beholder innkeepers and all sorts of other wacky things. It's always been true that even when it comes to aberrations they aren't always evil. I played Descent into Avernus and on two occasions we ran into a demon that didn't want to engage in violence.

This is all much ado about nothing in my opinion. It matters as much as anyone goes out of their way to make it matter.

[Jophiel]

Why do you think it's better to make the core version of something specific to one setting then include a bunch of "except except except" caveats in every splat, than it is to simply focus on what's actually core in the core version and then expand on it via splat?

Because this way people who aren't buying splats have expanded lore instead of the barebones minimum and because most settings honestly don't change things enough for "except except except" to be a regular and realistic issue.

The intent of the game was that it's playable entirely from the PHB if you wanted, with the MM being obviously helpful, the DMG being pretty optional and everything else being "If you think you're interested". I'm all for giving PHB owners a complete race, not one stripped down to the bare minimum with the expectation that they buy additional settings to get any meat on the bones.

[Psyren]

Respectfully disagree.

Okay.

Yes, and?

There are an array of games, with different power curves and design styles, granted, where starting characters get things other characters don't get until much later in their progression. I don't feel "because someone gets it at first level" is necessary and sufficient for why it couldn't be more powerful than currently envisioned. Agree of course on what "higher level" things could be acceptable will vary with design goals etc. Flatter progression games (systems?) obviously have more wiggle room in this regard than D&D.

I'm not sure where we go from here either then. The current slate of racials in 5e (FToD and later) are fine to me, and seem reasonably consistent in terms of power.

Again, I am approaching things is a less-5e centric fashion, and thinking back to both previous editions and other games. For example, at what level do +1 or +2 skill bonuses become trivialized, particularly in a standard mixed party? And then how much later for a +1 save bonus to become marginalized (never trivialized, I don't think).

That depends on the skill system of the game in general. A 5e race granting an extra proficiency means that proficiency scales throughout the character's entire progression, while a 3.5e race granting a +2 to a skill means that bonus becomes less and less meaningful as the character goes up. You're right that those two are very different, but I would see that as a flaw with the latter approach rather than the former.

I think the question of "how much impact should a choice make as impacted by when the choice is made" is interesting, and is reflected differently across systems. But even within D&D, those character generation choices already seem to carry more weight than most later-made choices. Class is massive, arguably the biggest build choice there is for most characters (all?). Sure, race doesn't evolve like class, but I think it reasonable for race to be a momentous decision as well. Maybe this just argues for more evolution in the traits and racial trait choices down the road too?

- M

You say you're not talking about the current edition of D&D but then you throw out conclusions like "arguing for more evolution in racial traits." Yeah, they agree with you, which is why they changed how those kinds of bonuses work in the current game. I know you said you haven't played it, but maybe give it a try then? It's hard to discuss "evolution" if you're stuck on outdated content.

Because this way people who aren't buying splats have expanded lore instead of the barebones minimum and because most settings honestly don't change things enough for "except except except" to be a regular and realistic issue.

"If you want setting lore, buy setting splats" is also a reasonable expectation. Especially since there's plenty of setting lore available completely for free too.

The intent of the game was that it's playable entirely from the PHB if you wanted, with the MM being obviously helpful, the DMG being pretty optional and everything else being "If you think you're interested". I'm all for giving PHB owners a complete race, not one stripped down to the bare minimum with the expectation that they buy additional settings to get any meat on the bones.

The game is playable entirely with Basic, never mind the PHB, so that intent has been achieved. You can legally play a 1-20 campaign without spending a dime.