Removing Default Alignments from "Monstrous Races"
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- Опубликовано: 30 июн 2024
- You might strongly feel that the lore of D&D totally does offer a lot of nuance in some of these examples. But since having two words on each stat block doesn’t offer any of that context, I’d argue it actually doesn’t solve that issue.
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CW: References to racism, colonialism, and white supremacy
Chapters:
00:00 - Disclaimer
02:44 - Remember Wizards of the Coast Changed the Default?
06:49 - The Virtue of Evil Cultures
07:43 - A Word From Our Sponsor
08:35 - Let’s Talk About Racism, Hooray
11:28 - Pre-Responding to the Comments
13:26 - Why Evil Races are Boring
16:01 - Why DM Agency Doesn’t Solve the Problem
17:25 - Why This Isn’t About Illiteracy
20:29 - Pushing Back Against This Change Doesn’t Help Anyone
22:26 - How Might Wizards of the Coast Handle Alignment in the Future?
24:58 - Outro
Asians Represent - Does changing "Race" to "Species" fix D&D? • Does changing "Race" t...
LegalKimchi - Bioessentialism in Gaming: • Bioessentialism in Gaming
Lindsay Ellis - Bright: The Apotheosis of Lazy Worldbuilding | Video Essay: • Bright: The Apotheosis...
Extra Credits: Evil Races are Bad Game Design - Bioessentialism & Worldbuilding: • Evil Races are Bad Gam...
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Развлечения
"Noticing similarities isn't reading too much into stuff. It's just media literacy. It's pretty basic."
I love the way you put that. Thank you!!!
Something else to be considered: 5E has brought a *lot* of new players into the hobby. Sometimes, it's a whole group of folks giving it a try for the first time together, so, whoever is DMing is 100% new to the hobby, as well. Generally speaking, new DMs are going to go with the default settings of what's printed in the books. So, making "any alignment" or "typically [alignment]" is a wonderful help for those neophyte DMs.
Yes that’s a good point!
@@SupergeekMike I agree with what you send in this video. That being sead I find myself falling into this alot. I have a harder time writing . I tened to do heavy combat in my games making cities makes me nervous it is alot to think about. So I tend to stick to the wilds but I want to do more with this.
You described my D&D group lol we were all brand new, first time players who relied a lot on the book. And it’s super helpful!
Also worth noting that THIS EXACT QUESTION of whether orcs were all inherently evil is one that vexed JRR Tolkien throughout his life. He originally designed them to be unthinking killing machines which one should have no remorse about destroying, which is why Aragorn spends years genociding them after the Battle of the Black Gates. But then he changed his mind, bc he didn't want Morgoth to have the power of creation... only perverting and corrupting souls. Which, unfortunately means that orcs are souls with agency. Which means you could have good orcs. Which means it is evil to genocide them. Tolkien died before he figured out a solution that gave him the story need for guilt-free orc-slaying, and the cosmological need that only the One God could create life.
Point is-we're not the first ones to get hung up on this moral dilemma.
And if Tolkien couldn't do it with something HE created, what hope do you think WoTC or anyone else is going to have? 😆
@@Frabnoil then why do anything? why try to come up with any idea for yourself if nobody has done it yet. why try to do anything noone has ever done before, why try to go to mars? why are you going to wake up tomorrow if youve never done it before😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆😆
Source your bullshit.
To be fair, no god in middle earth, other than that one megagod, can actually truly create from scratch.
@@Frabnoil Tolkien lived in a time when such questions weren't as popular and such. He was very progressive by his time, even if that progressivism is dated enough to be problematic by today's standard.
It's important to acknowledge that we are standing on the shoulders of titans.
I got into D&D with 3rd edition, and that edition used "any alignment", "usually lawful good", "always chaotic evil" and the like. It was a bit unclear, because "always" meant that exceptions are rare rather than nonexistent. Still, I think it's weird that they abandoned that for 5e's style; it's good that they're returning to it.
Oddly enough, Pathfinder, a more direct 3rd Edition derivative, also removed the usually/always label from statblock alignments. I guess to streamline things? It was helpful in differentiating things that are supernaturally evil from culturally/ideologically that way.
@@michaelramon2411 That is odd.
I imagine it would be simple enough to have a spectrum of alignment terms that's easy to understand even to players who don't read the whole intro section of the Monster Manual. Maybe, "any alignment", "tends toward chaotic evil", "usually chaotic evil", and "innately chaotic evil"; the last being reserved for demons and the like.
That's very weird, because the word "always" means no exceptions, and the word "usually" means the exceptions are rare rather than nonexistent. It's just what those words mean.
@Dont Misunderstand in 3e specifically the use of the word "always" in the alignment was reserved for creatures without souls or free will.
Devils are always lawful evil.
Demons are always chaotic evil.
Celestials that look like angels are always lawful good.
Celestials with animal heads are always chaotic good.
Sladdi are always chaotic.
Inevitables are always lawful.
Undead are always evil.
Those creature types had set immutable alignments because they were born from the energies of planes that had set and immutable alignments.
Which is a design choice that sabotaged all attempts to bring Planescape to 3e.
for my "evil" faction I tend to like to do a mix of races. I think it is more interesting to have other common things other then species.
Sauron very famously had a very inclusive armies, but even though he had many countries and species 'united' their cultures weren't very diverse, mostly values around violence and power.
Here's my two cents (before I watched the whole video). Certain extraplanar type creatures such as demons, devils, celestials, modron, and slaadi are intrinsically tied to their alignment. If a celestial stops being good, it stops being a celestial (looking at you, Zariel). Non-intelligent creatures would be unaligned, as would most folks, like commoners for the most parts. Other creatures, particularly humanoids can be whatever they want.
In my opinion good and bad aren't inherent, and changes on viewpoints. If you think about angelic servants of a fire god who's prerogative is to spread fire they are still celestials but they are lawful at best. Btw there is a very good Pointy Hat video on celestials and angels especially where he rethinks them.
@@themonolougist , that's not how alignment works in D&D.
@@SamBrockmann So you are saying that there could not be evil celestials?
@@themonolougist , I am saying exactly that. Because that would cause them to cease to be celestial. Several prominent devils prove this.
@@SamBrockmann I call that infinitively unimaginative
I don't think I've ever looked at a stat block when deciding what creature to put in an encounter. I just go by "what would make sense for them to encounter in this part of the world?" and make them either friendly or antagonistic and change the stat block to make them stronger or weaker as needed.
In 3.5, many "evil races" have the word "usually" rather than "always" as their alignment. For example, for hobgoblins, the entry is "Alignment: Usually lawful evil".
That is the default setting for hobgoblin society in the base game - but the "usually" gives the GM plenty of leeway to creature both individuals and cultures that vary from that default setting.
I make a note of telling my players that the MM alignments are not at all set in stone, and in my current campaign, for example, there is a tribe of lizardfolk that have a treaty with the local barony and actively engage in trade etc. And the party has met and worked with a forest troll and his bugbear buddies to liberate a bunch of enslaved bugbears from a band of dracotaur followers of Tiamat.
I have no problem with removing the alignment descriptor, and having fluff descriptions of possible societies would be even more helpful.
My stance is basically: if you need enemies, give them the same weight you give human enemies. Humans could be opponents of your party for any reasons; bandits, rivals, evil wizards, etc. Just do that with other races too. You'll have more interesting villains that way. Hell, our big bad a few years ago was an *aasimar*.
Exactly! And ooh wait, you can’t leave us hanging, I wanna know more about the aasimar!
@@SupergeekMike Basically, she had some sort of premonition of calamity and knew she needed an army to fight it, but to get the clout for such resources she needed to be seen as a hero. So she started charming monsters to attack local cities for her and her friends to fight, ala Syndrome from the Incredibles. It was pretty tragic how she genuinely believed it was a necessary evil, and was particularly personal to the party because (most of us) grew to really like her and look up to her before the reveal, and we're really close with her party who are naturally not handling it well.
@@sagesaria Hell yes, that rules.
yeah but sometimes we want a bunch of evil monsters to kill
this is vegan 'it has a face' kind of thinking ... you are still killing life if its a swarm of insects or a swarm of goblins
@@Xenibalt Removing the default of "all of these creatures are evil by default" doesn't mean you can't give the villains a motivation that makes them evil. We don't feel bad when Bruce Willis kills the terrorists from "Die Hard," yet nobody seriously argues that the film is about how Germans are all evil. The film even makes it clear that the East German government has disavowed Hans Gruber, so canonically the film tells us that this has nothing to do with Hans being German. It's a very small amount of nuance, but it helps promote slightly more interesting villains (even if they still aren't complex, they're still more interesting than a swarm of insects) and helps prevent players from becoming murderhobos who slaughter everyone they see who is from a certain heritage.
Obviously if that doesn't bother you, then don't worry about it, it's your game. But something "having a face" doesn't mean it's bad to kill. There are, like, hundreds of Punisher comics about some of the most vile human beings in fiction getting exactly what they deserve in extremely graphic ways.
Well that's timing. I'd been running a campaign with friends and family starting back in March. The party had made their way to one of the capital cities and their investigation had led them to the royal archive. Literally all they had to do was speak to the head archivist who would have grudgingly given the information which would have lead them to their next step. My mistake was in just generating a random NPC because I expected that the interactions would be a few minutes of RP and a persuasion roll or two. Unfortunately the randmon race that was generated was a drow. Now, I've told my players repeatedly that I don't lean too heavily on alignment, and this particular fellow was a highly placed government official within a stones throw of the palace, so it never occured to me that it would be an issue. Unfortunately one of the party yelled 'DROW! They're all evil! Kill him!" and they attacked.
But that's not the worst of it. One of the party was a half drow elf who was in fact blue skined and she - logically - started to worry that at some point he'd notice so, as the balance of the party attacked the totally not evil, utterly benign archivist who was their only link to the next step in the campaign at that time, she quietly slipped away taking her friend the rogue with her. Things careened out of control, and the campaign collapsed a few sessions later because it devolved to the point that there were essentially two parties just barely able to be in the same room without sniping at one another in and out of character.
I don't know that the proposed changes would have helped in this situation because as the drow slayer explained "drow have always been evil" so updating the source material probably wouldn't have filtered down to him, but hope springs eternal :)
Thanks Bob.
Ugh that sucks, it’s never fun when a game falls apart, but when something THAT avoidable happens, it’s so much more of a bummer. Sorry to hear that ♥️
Sounds like a particular nasty case of a player using metagame knowledge (i.e. knowing that in the DMG Drow are typically evil) to choose their character's actions in a bad way. I'd LOVE to have Drizzt Do'Urden and his panther Guenhwyvar come charging into the room to protect and defend his old friend the Archivist from the racist murder hobo that just attacked them and of course Drizzt would crush the player character and then drag them off to prison/dungeon/etc. for the player character's trial on attempted murder of a high ranking city official. Get's the point across not all Drow are evil, that there's consequences for their character's actions, makes clear that sort of metagaming will not be tolerated at the table, and could keep the story going and lead to an opportunity for some major character growth from the player character.
That would have been a good opportunity to stop the game and talk things out rather than letting them play out at the table. If you really want this game to get back together you could give it a try by bringing the players together again and talking things out, explaining your position and world building and how attacking that archivist was wrong. If they can all agree to that, you can still totally retcon back to that original interaction and continue the game. If the player that decided to attack refuses to see sense you can always kick that player in particular if they insist on being a murder hobo and continue the game with the others. You have options!
The issue with alignment in the sourcebooks like the Monster Manual IMO is that those books pretend to be setting-agnostic while they are quite obviously not. Alignment in adventure modules or even setting-specific books (like Eberron or Dragonlance) is fine with the understanding that it refers to the dominant culture of that species _in_ _that_ _setting_ , and even then for free-willed races it should be "typically XY" (or better yet, "Any alignment (typically XY)" to make it very obvious to everyone).
This is a VERY SIGNIFICANT point that, quite frankly, was missed entirely. The MM leans quite hard towars Forgotten Realms. So does Volo's Guide to Monsters. (Volo is a NPC who originated in the Forgotten Realms.)
But those books are presented as if their material should apply to every D&D setting ever. Now, to be fair, that's how EVERY D&D book is presented, even the ones where it's clear said book is setting specific. (For example, the Eberron books have sidebars telling you how to include the material presented in Forgotten Realms or in the Magic The Gathering settings, despite Eberron material fitting neither.) But that's really the whole problem. These books do not differentiate well between settings, even if they're presented as setting specific. Every new setting book is simply an excuse to add more content everywhere.
That's really why we got into this jam in the first place. What would have been much better is if WotC presented each D&D setting in a more complete and comprehensive manner. Then the conversation wouldn't be, "Why did Drow used to have the default alignment of Neutral Evil?"; instead, it would be, "Are Drow in the Forgotten Realms presented well as individuals and as a society?". (As a sidenote, my answer to that second question would be a hard no.)
Of course, that takes more work.
Yeah, it's more a problem of WotC trying to give less setting details.
Plus there's also the inscrutable evil like Mind Flayers where they ARE not good no matter what you are even if you are on their side they see you as food unless you can be useful in other ways. I'll eat you later. But that is also no different from humans eating chickens. (You may argue that chickens aren't sentient, but the Mind Flayer could argue humans aren't sentient either.)
Good/evil alignment tends to be subjective to the POV you are looking from. And that's what I take the monster manual alignments as from the POV of the standard person living in that world.
@verdantmistral442 , I think that's absolutely true of some settings. Forgotten Realms is a good example.
Now, what about the Planes? Clearly, Planar creatures are cosmically a certain alignment. But also, if you have a human who ends up in the Abyss, then that human becomes corrupted by the chaotic evil nature of the Abyss. Planar settings are arguably some of the most clear in terms of how alignment works.
The big issue is, we haven't got much interaction in the currently published settings with the Planes. (The Magic The Gathering settings stuff doesn't count, because MtG Planes aren't alignment based so much as based on colors of Magic.) Again, WotC doesn't want to flesh out settings to include Planar stuff.
Exactly that! I think thats the best of both worlds tbh. Keep things simple, keep things fair.
After watching the matt coleville video on alignment, stopped really thinking about the "good, neutral, evil" aspect of it and only really started to consider the "lawful, neutral, chaotic" of the table. That seems more descriptive of the culture of an ancestry or the character of an NPC.
I first realized the trouble with default ancestry alignments when I asked, what is the equivalent of "Humanity" in D&D or multi-ancestry worlds.
Personally speaking I never really saw the alignment on monstrous races as end all be all. I always see monster manual alignments as a “default” character. Meaning that this is how the majority of them will be but that doesn’t necessarily mean that this is how it has to be. So if you randomly picked a drow there is an “over 50% chance” this is how that character would likely act. Be it a 51% or a 99% chance of it. Also it specifies that the rules in the books are D&D are yours to interpret and the books are really more just guidelines to help streamline things for you.
One thing people should note is that plenty of settings do different things with monsters than the Forgotten Realms do. For instance, in Eberron, almost any creature can have any alignment.
As an old guy in the hobby but one who is trying to grow and learn, I have SOME feelings on this. I won't dive too deep into a lot of it but just leave it be said that as far back as the early 80s I was running "typically" evil races with nuance and a bit more reasoning. That said, it doesn't stop in-world perceptions of "evil" and "othering". The orcs of the next valley over may be doing what they are doing because you invaded their lands and built farms, but their tactics in expressing that disdain may likely fall into the cultural default of evil, despite them having good reason. The orcs in my games may not be evil, but many of them are definitely going to act evil, just as any complex, multi-faceted culture or even species/race/ancestry will. Our human world has every flavor of human and nearly every single one of them has perpetrated universally evil acts on other humans. They are not by default evil. Evil is in the act not in the blood (though fantasy and scifi can create edge cases for this).
I think there is something to be said for narrative of your game world vs. the narrative of the default game. D&D as it was written was written with a specific world (Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms) in mind and from the point of view of the constants of those worlds. Early D&D was very much couched in the cosmology of the setting as well. Evil, good, law, chaos, were all very elemental things with gods very much a part of the world.
Drow, for example, were never really intended to be analogous to any real world culture or ethnicity. They were, based on articles and interviews from the time, based on the Norse concept of dark elves and the name was a variation of the Cornish Trow, a sort of dark fey/trollish sort of thing. Furthermore, Drow were the original exception to the elves which had always been portrayed as bright, shiny, and elevated, though a lot of them had chips on their shoulders. Drow, are, in many ways, an early attempt to break with monoculture. They were a relatively small group of elves that were led astray by an evil spider queen. Even the Lolth angle isn't initially part of their creation. And of course, nothing was helped when, in the late 80s, some TSR artists started portraying Drow with African American skin tones instead of the very much, non-realistic, straight black as darkness, black they had been (fuck you very much Queen of the Spiders mega-module).
Does all of this mean that things shouldn't change? Short answer yes. D&D, being as big as it is, cannot simply remain as it was. It's no longer played by awkward nerds in basements, it is in the mainstream and has a responsibility to behave like it is. My kids are queer, many of my friends are people of color and i want them to be able to approach the game feeling welcome. I may be the most open grognard out there, but I am not representative of the game as a whole.
All this said, I do feel that the game needs to really work harder on instructing DMs. It needs to stop treating the DMG as an afterthought and burying intro level DM advice as "optional" or "advanced".
I get the too-literal-translation of "dark elves" to dark skin color, but that has always bothered me for biological reasons. I'm sure those early authors were not consciously racist, and that never bothered me. But creatures that stay that far from the sun should develop an albino appearance. If they'd done the biologically sensible route, we wouldn't have this parallelism problem with drow!
About the game on early versions and the cultures being more flexible, it's also worth noticing that Gigax himself wrote the game with this vision.
His "random Orc Enemy" template was Evil, sure, but most of the Named Orc NPCs from that time were actually Neutral. His vision of "Aligments arent about morality but about beliefs" made it in a way that a lot of NPCs could be seem as Evil just because they didnt stand against it (in the Orc / Goblinoid case, quite literally). When you're forced to worship a Devil you become "Evil", but you can change it once you're free.
The problem is less a "80's works are more binary in the choices" and more "the Kids and teenagers who played in the 80's werent capable of understanding the shades of grey"... Gygax made a point showing lots of "non generic aligment" NPCs (specially so for the more problematic ones) wishing people understood that they had the freedom to do the same, but nost of the readers stills taking it as "this means there's only those two / three guys that diverge, everything else is (generic aligment for the race/species)"
@@hawkname1234 never put your biology chocolate in the fantasy peanut butter.
If you do that then you have dragons that can't fly or have breath weapons or giants that can stand up under their own weight.
@@albertonishiyama1980 this is very true. We certainly had plenty of evil druids and by RAW they were supposed to be neutral.
@@elfbait3774 but chocolate peanut butter cups are great, just got to get the ratio of each right.
Too much fantasy and it’s nonsensical. Too much real life and then it’s just Sci-fi
I have never bothered with “always evil”. Never made sense to me. Creatures of the material plane can be good or evil, lawful or chaotic.
Societies can be largely this way or that but individuals are still individuals.
This has been something I have struggled with as I build my own world. I particularly enjoy morally gray humanoids, with one exception: the high elves of Mardynor straight up committed a genocide of goblinoids a couple hundred years ago. Since then, political relations with Mardynor have been very terse.
Still, two of my players are playing half-elf descendants of high elves that left Mardynor due to disagreements with the wider society. Showing obvious and sensible exceptions to ANY norm makes your world feel more nuisanced and lived in.
I tried in the early 90s to run a campaign, taking some idea from the Mystara Gazetteers, where the Humans and their clients Dwarves, Elves etc typified the "evil races" as per the Monster Manual, but the plot twist mid-campaign was when the party discovered why the Orcs and Drow behaved like that - the Humans and other dominant cultures had forced them into marginal lands (the less fertile surface lands, the underground) and continually kept them penned there, suffering dreadful hardships. It didn't go down well with some of my players... Maybe I should pick the idea up again, thanks for reminding me of it.
3.5 put stuff like usually [alignment here]. Like if you want a beholder to be good that's fine. Even drow are usually law evil. Doesn't mean a lawful good drow society can't exist , it's just uncommon.
I completely agree. I didnt have this hangup by the time I started playing/dming because I had been reading the Legend of Drizzt series for years before I ever joined a game. In that series, over the course of many books, the main characters slowly come to the same conclusions about race in the forgetten realms. You will probably cover this Monday but the conclusion I got is that when it comes to 'evil' races like orcs and drow it has little to do with genetics and is mainly due to the society they grow up in. These cultures are shaped by the worship of gods like Grumesh and Lolth because those gods provide power to the ruling class and thus regular members of the race have the 'proper' way beaten and indoctrinated into them. There are examples (and have been for a while) that when these races live outside those corrupting power structures (whether in there own tribes or integrated in society) that they have the same internal proportions of good and evil as all reasoning races. Looking forward to Monday's video.
If memory serves, 3e's Races of the Underdark is explicit that drow aren't born evil, they're raised to be evil. Their society is a theocracy in the grip of an evil goddess, and it's so dysfunctional that it only survives because of literal divine intervention; you either get vicious or get killed.
It's easy to end up "evil" by our standards if you live in a Hobbesian trap. Historically, that includes many if not most tribal societies and herding cultures, which makes tribal-coded D&D races a bit of a minefield.
One gripe I have with your first argument about where to draw the line, is that technically there's nothing stopping WotC from introducing Mindflayers or Demons as playable ancestries. So when that happens, should they receive the same treatment and have a "default alignment" dropped?
Ofc, personally I like the suggestion style of "generally this" or "usually that" or even going further and having "sub-alignments". Like, goblins worshipping X god are generally evil, whereas drow worshipping Eilistraee are generally good.
EDIT: And I also think alignment was never meant to be black and white, just shorthand for building encounters. Everything is nuanced, but not every nuance fits in a rulebook. The alignment needs an update, preferably with the "often/usually" thingy so the shorthand isn't entirely lost if they were outright removed.
Re: your first point, it does actually seem like they’re trending that way, even beholders and vampires are getting the “typically” in Spelljammer. And in fairness, folks have pointed out that I’ve listed angels and devils as “representing a specific alignment” but even those creatures can switch alignment, as we saw with Zariel (or, you know, Lucifer lol), so there’s no reason for them to be as hard-coded either!
The main reason I listed them that way is purely because they represent very different fears than just “They’re different from us so we can kill them” - for example, mind flayers and slaadi represent fears of your agency being robbed and being converted into a monster. So my argument essentially is that their existence as pure-evil can still be dramatic and not lazy storytelling, as it is with tribal creatures being coded as evil. But of course, I’m not gonna say no to getting even more nuance in our monster books 😁
I basically came here to say this too. I'm not sure there *is* a hard line between humanoids and the Far Realm stuff, especially given how that stuff has origins in Lovecraft's racist stereotyping and paranoia. It's not exactly the same kind of problematic as colonialist tropes, but shows like Stargate SG-1 show how even parasitic mind-control worms don't *need* the bioessentialism treatment.
*cough* They already have in the past. Mind flayers used to be playable before, along with many other "monstrous" races.
I've played from way back and, well, old alignments were rather straightjackets, and purposefully so. Much of the game was that way, stats were rolled in order on just 3d6, classes and even races could require alignments, dwarves couldn't be wizzards, etc... It was all meant to force players to work with what they had and to make a DM's world easier in a black and white way. Still, not long after release writers and creators got to work subverting some aspects of the game. These days we're benefiting from decades of improvements and refinements, I say we keep going.
Now, back to working on my magepunk world where the orks have organized into labor unions and the kobolds are trying to make more inroads into the legal practices.
Specific traits of the race can make them inherently evil. For example, the natural reproductive process for the Mindflayers make them necessarily evil, in order for their race to survive at all. The real questions arise with claims of certain races being inherently good, because there's really no possible way for a race with any agency to be born good.
Mike, as an indigenous person (I am Māori, from Aotearoa), I appreciate you doing this.
Ngā mihi, tihei wa mauri ora (thank you, this inspires me)
Thank you so much!! ♥️
Burning Wheel Orcs are one of my favorite ways of having an "Evil" race that aren't evil.
They are a playable race that has Hate as an attribute that can be used to make them more powerful but also can drive them mad if they use it too much. It's an interesting portrayal of how often we have features that we did not choose that we can use, leverage, struggle against, or outright reject.
If you don't take the time to look at these orcs complexly, you may have just minimized them to just being evil. Which they aren't.
I treated the goblins in my last campaign like the kids in the movie Attack The Block. They started off as a gang of thieves, but the players soon realised they were just misunderstood. And after they cleared out a goblin hideout, the goblin leader made them think when he told them he robbed people, but he never killed anyone like they did. The party was suitably ashamed of themselves and it really changed their behaviour throughout the rest of the game.
Oooh I like it!
We should also get rid of the "Monstrosity" shrug-bucket. If a mosquito-bat (Stirge) is a Beast, why isn't an Owl-Bear one too, or an Eagle-Lion (Griffin), or a Falcon-Horse (Hippogriff)? There are things in Humanoid which don't look all that human-shaped, so why can't a Harpy be one?
Mimics should be in Ooze, many monstrosities could be Aberrations, and if a Wyvern is 'close enough' to a Dragon, why isn't a Hydra also? Almost every creature is fictional and the categories were made up, so nothing says they can't have more or fewer categories.
Apart from magical energies, I typically think of alignments with different words, selfish, supportive, and predictable. Chaotic really does fit well, but sometimes I think hidebound vs unpredictable just to give all four a new name. Not to say that angels don't make me weep sometimes with their unwillingness to help, but to me the concepts underlying the Outer Planes are what many mortal races choose to aspire to, or are just taught that was their choice. Things from the Outer Planes, just don't think the way we humans do. Which is half the reason some people want to roleplay unique specimens...
Anyway, thanks for some insightful comments.
I have many things to say about this video. First off, you have easily become my favorite D&D content creator and are the only one I support on Patreon. I look forward to you putting out more stuff.
Secondly, you are absolutely correct that the D&D community likes its tradition. I have seen the many in the community absolutely LOSE THEIR MINDS about WotC's Unearthed Arcanas. Mainly because it changes things they love. But remember, this is a play test and if they don't try things the game will never change.
Lastly, I taking a group through Lost Mine of Phandelver (or as we now call it LOMP). In LOMP you mainly run into Goblins, Orcs, Hobgoblins and many similar creatures. In my head I have never seen them as evil. The Orcs I have called a Roving Band of Orcs. Yes that group of Orcs is all about battle, killing, stealing things, but I have never once suggested it is all evil, and I have Christopher Paolini and Urgals to thank for that. In his world, Urgals are "evil", at least to most people. But then you get to meet them, you understand they have homes, kids, wants, aspirations, but their culture is mainly focused on being the biggest and baddest, that you prove yourself through combat. So they are not evil, but how they earn honor is through combat.
Love the video, looking forward to Monday's.
Thank you so much! I never read Paolini, I just hadn’t really heard much about it until I was much older and reading much less often, but his books are on my list out of curiosity - but this is a full-on recommendation! I’m looking forward to checking that one out and seeing how it reinforces these concepts 😁
@@SupergeekMike The inheritance series is pretty good. Definitely the work of a teenage writer, but he does a great job of telling a compelling story. The things I talked about with the Urgals takes until about book 2-3 to really get into it, but it does get there. And if you like his work in the Inheritance series, I am reading his new book "To Sleep In a Sea of Stars" which is also pretty good. All of these are on Audio books, don't know if you consume books that way, but I have found it very helpful to get back into "reading"
I would like to add a story from one of my games. Feel free to ignore if it gets long...
I played a game with two players which begins with a MANTICORE attacking a halfling and her child in their windmill (some of you might recognise the adventure). The players immediately came to the conclusion that this manticore had some nefarious plot in mind (the truth? Driven away from traditional hunting grounds by a bigger beast).
A game or two later, they come across orcs that have occupied a small shrine. A blizzard is setting in, and this is the only shelter. The players decide to negotiate with the orcs and share the shrine for a night.
Now because I'd set up a combat, I had the orcs plan to kill the party in their sleep, but the adventure puts an ogre here. Having not introduced it yet, I planted hints to it's presence in the shrine by adlibbinh that the "beast" had been captured attempting to fight the orcs and lost its mate.
As soon as I said that, the players immediately exclaimed "that's why the manticore was attacking below! It was driven away by these orcs and had lost its mate!"
Immediately, I changed my plans... because how much cooler is that? Suddenly, the party felt bad for almost killing the other manticore, and they helped this one escape and teamed up with it to defeat the orcs.
This video coupled with that encounter has made me rethink all the decisions that I had originally laid out when preparing the adventure. I'm not sure I've come to any conclusions yet, but the fact that I'm rethinking things is a step in the right direction, I think...
I remember when I read books about Drizzt, I was surprised by a line about gnolls (like they were, I can`t sure).
After Drizzt killed them, he experienced moral anguish. And one of the characters said that Drizzt is naive, because he does not know that gnolls are evil, and killing them is normal.
It was strange for me, because with such logic, you can safely justify the genocide of the entire race, and it will be "good".
The gnolls of the Forgotten Realms setting I think stand apart from other humanoids, they fall more into devil or mind-flayer territory as they are essentially demon-spawn that are driven by an insatiable hunger to kill and consume, and they reproduce by turning regular hyenas into more gnolls. In other settings though, they may be more like other people. I think they're more like other humanoids in Eberron, and in my home setting they are playable hyena-people with a typically evil culture that they regularly break away from.
Also, Drizzt could have easily replied "so why am I still alive? Aren't drows evil too?"
Just today, I played an encounter where we fought against a peasant uprising orchestrated by a church. (It's a game with a fair amount of historical-political inspiration from the real world, so the full story is complicated.) You know what's more memorable than watching a mob of commoners get reinforced by ogres? Hearing that those ogres were wearing church colors and one was in full paladin plate armor.
Subvert aesthetic expectations. Your players wont forget it in a hurry.
I always feel stuck with this argument, because I love being able to use nuance and allow players chances for diplomacy and give opportunities for roleplay rather than just fighting constantly. Because while some societies, some people, may be evil, that doesn't write every person in that society as evil. But sometimes burnout and depression hits hard, and it can feel taxing playing the game of morals and moral gray areas. Sometime you just want something simple for a moment, where good and bad are more rigid and black and white, like superheroes and villains from childhood cartoons or knights and monsters from fantasy stories. I would say I don't like the latter as the norm, and there's ways to potentially make those encounters still interesting in their own right, but I think the main point of allowing nuance and flexibility in alignment is just a universal good. Because sure, some people might want something simple; they want to feel like a hero for the night, slaying the evil villains and monsters and whatnot. But for people who want more depth out of the game, they don't have to feel like they're limited by what the book tells them.
To me the point isn’t what Dnd 5e is saying, it’s the way their saying it.
I heard very few people say “hey, if we remove base alignment it can make more realistic and nuanced worlds.”
I heard “base alignment is inherently evil and if you think Orcs are evil your racist”
The second one is stupid. It’s a fake race, and trying to call me racist for making a fake race be evil is dumb. It’s also dumb for me to say you are stupid for trying to make the the dnd universe more nuanced.
At the end of the day though, I side with the people who want certain races to have certain alignments. Why? Because that’s the baseline. It’s been like that since dnd 3.5 at least, as well as almost all mythology and modern media. Unless there’s a legitimately good reason to change something, don’t change it. No one has provided me with good reasons why it’s bad to make orc evil, until they do, why change it?
Colville's video about why everyone loves the undead basically boils down to this. No moral quandaries when it's a skeleton fueled by evil magic.
I remember playing Storm Kings Thunder, and we needed stuff some Barbarian tribes had. The group anticipated hostilities, especially after just recently offing several Berserkers and their leader (a woman).
My Druid, normally brief with words, suddenly piped up with a plan: We cut off the leader's head, and take it back to her Tribe. No one of course saw how this would avoid a fight.
So my Druid explains that these tribes may be violent and racist, but they had a respect for nature that informed their beliefs. If we were to be meek and bow for forgiveness, they would see that as weakness. If we marched in, and showed the Head of their most secure person among them it would show that we were strong. A wolf may revile a bear, but it will bend to its will because it is wise enough to see the difference in strength.
They still didn't think it would work, but it did, much to the Lawful party members chagrin. The tribe was even grateful to an extent because of how awful their leader had been.
Way back in the days, some centuries ago I do remember reading a Dragon Magazine article dedicated to this subject. It was still in the early days, maybe 2e by then, maybe earlier, but the gist was very similar. Basically, "Having all the monsters of one type being the same alignment is a very boring straightjacket for both DMs and players." It touched on it being lazy storytelling and how it prevented many better stories from being told.
You've got a much deeper dive than what I remember of the article but I think we've learned a lot more these days.
I've never really liked monstrous races being a monolithic thing when it came to their alignment, so when I started running my first DnD campaign about a year and a half ago, one of the first things my players stumbled upon was a little village of Kobolds living in the forest near to the town they initially started in. Just to show them that hey, just cuz its a monster doesn't mean it's evil.
The next ton over they ended up helping a petty thief doppelganger get his life together lmao
Alignment is a tendency to behave in a certain manner. No one is ever fully any alignment all of the time nor is any group fully comprised of a single alignment.
In addition there should be as much information as possible provided to DMs to realize that the “rules” of dnd are more like suggestions than they are commandments.
Now let’s examine the idea of having a “barbarian”
Totally right. Alignment is meant to be two-dimensional and it just is. If you want to push the boundaries of the make-believe game just do it, WotC aren't going to bust down your door for that
Half-orcs kinda make me think in the Mandalorians, of Star Wars. Imagine this very proud warrior tribe born from an alliance between humans and orcs. They're not very well seen because war propaganda, but as you play you can expand their culture and society.
Heres an idea, you are a half orc mercenary who is hired by your local lord to wipe out a goblin camp. You do, mercilessly slaughtering the goblins but then there's a goblin baby and all the sudden you have second thoughts. Kinda like an inverse of keep on the borderlands.
"every rule in D&D is a suggestion, and that doesn’t stop some people from acting like you’re breaking the rules and playing wrong if you don’t use every rule as written." Exactly! It doesn't stop at alignments, too. I had to (friendly) fight tooth and nail with my DM when making my halfling character because I wanted her to be chubby and to weigh more than the usual 40 pounds. (Didn't help that it was my very first game, I'm still very new to RPG, and your videos are a huge help, so thank you very much!)
I really hope they go with the “typically” route. It was really helpful for me to know that hobgoblins were usually lawful evil, because the culture in the book is about both honor and pain. Sort of like extreme Klingons. If most statblocks don’t have any alignment to go off of, it’s more work for a new dm who is unfamiliar with these creatures because they’ve either got to look something up or make something up. Having a “typically” might not solve every issue with the alignment system as a concept but I think it really helps, and I prefer it over just saying “I don’t know, you decide.” for almost every monster.
My contention with the alignment system has been that it's too reductive. The way I've seen the 'default' alignments is it's from the perspective of whichever side the PCs think is 'good'. Your example of the US and the USSR is very apt, because both sides hated each other in similar ways. I have no trouble with changing the alignments of these humanoid races, since no member of a race always sticks with their culture, or retains the beliefs they are 'born to'.
The only thing that makes me defensive, and I appreciate that Mike did not do this for the most part, is that people tend to blame this attitude on older players, or long-time players. It's a little bit akin to how he was saying that some people were already playing with loose alignments for monsters, but didn't see the need to make it explicit in the books. But really that's the truth, many of the older/longer-time players I've played with (and I've been playing D&D for 30 years now) already were under the assumption that a drow could be raised to be good, or you could have a whole society of good goblins, or what-have-you. I mean R.A. Salvatore initiated this idea decades ago. Maybe he should have gone further than the "one good drow" thing like you pointed out, but hey, for the early 80's that was a really good first step.
I mean if you crack open almost any D&D 3.5 handbook that has monsters, you will see they include the exact same language that makes Mike so happy. They introduced the Usually/Often/Always descriptors to monsters in the stat block quite a long time ago, and then for some reason dropped that idea when they went to 5e (presumably to make things more simple?). All five of the 3rd ed./3.5 Monster Manuals use this nomenclature. And they don't use Always as often as you would think. Even Aboleths and Mind Flayers are "usually" rather than "always" evil creatures. Maybe they should have codified drow as "often" evil, or "usually" neutral, but the point is things were already trending this direction years ago, but then we managed to take a step back somehow.
Most of the people I see ranting and raving about default alignments aren't older grognards, they are younger players who don't really know where the hobby came from or why things are they way they are. Anyway, good video, keep up the good work.
For any creature that has any meaningful free will they should have Any Alignment.
Sure, but then why even have an entry for monster alignments? It’s like noting “not applicable”, it gives no useful information.
@@KaliFortuna Some of them may not have meaningful free will. In fact many may not.
@@rainick actually I’d argue that creatures without free will are the ones that shouldn’t have an alignment, since they’re not capable of making ethical decisions one way or another.
@@KaliFortuna Just because they don't make the decision they are still aligned with one of those alignments, assuming you are using an alignment system.
I haven’t used monster alignments except for truly axiomatic creatures like angels and devils since the year 2002. It seemed outdated even then, twenty years ago.
Hell I’ll only share this since my players will never see it but in my current campaign the villains of the next tier of play are going to be twisted evil angels, so I’m even coming around to dispensing with fixed alignment to axiomatic creatures. Alignment should always service the story, not shackle it.
That’s a good point, in the video I describe angels as a creature with a firm alignment…. But there’s a pretty famous story in the Christian tradition of an Angel who definitely didn’t keep his alignment so even they don’t need to be set in stone lol
@@SupergeekMike that’s an excellent point! There also a spoiler plot detail involving a certain Kingmaker character that services this non axiomatic variety of angels. it’s always been out there if people looked for examples.
My half orc Paladin is redeeming the race and gruumsh. Gruumsh felt his children were slighted. He and corallon did fight. My orcs tribe was cut off in a underdark area where the were well taken care off for millennia. The surface orcs have had to struggle so much it’s made the aggressive cutthroats. Rogahl travels around creating fruit orchards and wheat fields with plant growth and teaching farming and animal handling
You know, the thinking of "x is always evil" is one of my best motivators to just play the weirdest shit.
I want to play as Gnolls, I want to play as a Mind Flayer, hell maybe one day I'll try to convince a dm to let me play a freaking Beholder (somehow), I want to do extremely weird shit as long as it's fun for me and it doesn't fuck up with the other player's fun.
I really like that dnd's book (most of them) are like X's book about y, it reminds me that these book are from the point of view of a character. so everything can be reinterpreted. it feels really "real" as in aligned with reality, most books and pieces of media can be interpreted as such even if they pretend to be the most unbiased possible.
"Do you think it’s possible for an entire _nation_ to be insane? You take a bunch of people who don’t seem any different from you and me, but when you add them all together you get this sort of huge raving maniac with national borders and an anthem."
Among the many reasons I have to recommend _Monstrous Regiment_ is the very solid worldbuilding around war, politics, and opposing factions. In particular, it provides a very reasonable counter to the "gods made them evil" argument, by showing the different ways people react when (as Angua puts it) "their religion has gone bad on them".
It not really about Race , it's about Culture. I have always allowed "monster race" PC as long as they were compatible with the party as a whole. And they are prepared for what might be a hostile world.
I agree. I always read the alignment in the manual to mean that the evil humanoid was evil because of the society/culture it resided in and then just reduced that to evil meaning just 'hostile' to outsiders. They didn't nessacerily have to be genetically evil but maybe informed by their society to be that way or in the case or were just more naturally predisposed to more negative behaviour due to evolutionary pressure which kept those Races/Species alive or influenced by outside forces.
This is the first video of yours that I've been suggested, and it was a very interesting discussion. Earned a subscription. Looking forward to the forthcoming Monday video.
Thank you so much!
I'm super glad the "monsterous" races are being de-villified. Even though they come from folklore where they were used as villains, I heckin love goblins. I love the cute ones and the ugly ones, the green ones, the kentucky ones, and my spouses cat who is 100% goblin dna. If you're running lost mine of phandelver, then sure the goblins are low level canon fodder. But if you play in one of my games and hurt one of my sweet little goblins then you might as well start rolling up a new character (I'm kidding... kind of...)
I think for MOST races, there should be a SUGGESTED or AVERAGE alignment. But, it shouldn't be so set in stone as in the Monster Manual of, "Oh yeah. This race is just chaotic evil." Thanks to characters like Drizzt Do'Urden we KNOW that outliers exist.
At the same time, I think an alignment still SHOULD be given. Alongside the average personality/society.
In my setting at a certain time period, Gnomes are evil. Just outright. They're run by a Demigod Barbarian and they are just an outright evil Empire. This ISN'T the case in other time periods. This ISN'T the case for all Gnomes, just the vast vast majority. During this time period Orc and Goliaths are primarily set on an island, and they're the inventors, hell they created the warforged! They're relatively neutral and peaceful. Now this changes later and earlier in the timeline to the Orcs we more know and love, but still; they can show change and have over time, it's an ebb and flow.
Alongside that, I think for a fair amount of 'evil races' it's more cultural, although there are certainly those that are just.. biologically evil. Devils, Daemons, Demons, and there are others. But these aren't really 'mortal' races. Most of the monstrous races I view as 'evil' because of their culture, not biologically... Things do get wonky when gods are ACTIVELY involved in a race, however.
I generally only pay attention to the first word on that top line. "Medium", "Large", and so on. On a rare occasion I read the next word or two for a player's spell. I've never payed attention to the alignments. I just decide how the monster acts in my world base on what I've decided, not a book.
I could be wrong, but this book was written with The Forgotten Realms in mind, where these alignments make sense. That's why WotC is changing it, so they aren't limited to their idea of how these races exist in that universe. Just look at some of the ancestry changes in Monsters of the Multiverse.
That's one of the things i like about the upcoming Tales of the Valiant books: alignments are not mentioned in character creation and monster stat blocks, and I've often wondered about doing away with it before this. Also, I've noticed that Matt Mercer has often broken strereotypes in Exandria or at least explained why some creatures are evil (such as the goblinoids races of the Iron Authority who worship and strive to conquer in the name of the Strife Lord).
Something something D&D's cosmology showing that alignment is a tangible, black and white, thing
Honestly I think that aspect makes it even more interesting. Like the material plane has moral relativism because intelligent beings do, but the cosmology is at odds with that, and that intersection is juicy if it happens.
The problem is when actual human beings can't even admit that maybe genociding black dragons or orcs or mindflayers or whatever might possibly be not good.
Haha, a while back I commented on your Gruumsh video. Today, RUclips recommended this one, and I found out that you pre-empted a good chunk of my comment in this video. Good stuff.
I will argue against the idea that there's a clear distinction between creatures which are permissible to be evil, and those that aren't. You said Hobgoblins have a society, as if Devils or Mind Flayers or other intelligent evil creatures do not. You point out that some of these races are playable-- which I say, "so?" Was it not wrong to consider Orcs inherently evil before putting out a PC stat block for them? I would guess you would say it was always wrong. The issue isn't a mechanical one, so you can't dismiss by talking about mechanics.
But let's just accept your premise that we all know that orcs and goblins have more in common with elves and humans than they do with Ilithids and demons-- that doesn't explain why it's okay for fiends and aberrations to be generally evil. Are they not creatures of free will? Why should their type silo them from moral depth? And what of minotaurs and centaurs, which, if found in the wild, are Monstrosities instead of Humanoids?
One of the best things about 3.5 is that there were rules written that allowed you to turn any creature that had any semblance of intelligence into a PC with information in their stat block. The fact that you can play as these creatures in 5e is in no way a signal that these shouldn't also be monsters. Or more, that players shouldn't be able to play monsters. I mean, the bulk of these monster races came out of Volo's, which definitely treated these races like monsters. PCs are exceptional. There wasn't an inconsistency between saying "Bugbears are evil, but your bugbear PC doesn't have to be."
I'm really disappointed that you're just dismissing this as a bad faith argument.
Still, I appreciate your video overall. I like that you're trying to do good and this is an important topic, if only for awareness.
I DM a campaign where the players include a good-hearted bugbear barbarian, a somewhat sketchy aasimar bard who is also a stripper, and a half-orc cleric who renounced violence after finding religion. I've got lots of thoughts about alignments 😅
😂
Great video and I'm really excited to watch the videos you suggested. I've been looking for more content in this area. I did want to add some additional perspective for the illiteracy argument. Not everyone can read the entire book, even if they want to. Me for example as a dyslexic didn't get access to be able to read the entire books until the beginning of last year when I found a screen reader that would help me. With my dyslexia reading the standard way is actually physically exhausting. So I have to select what things I'm going to read and focus in as hard as I can on those. Or at least that's how I had to do it before. And even when the other players and DM's in my group knew that I had this disability they weren't always conscientious of the problems that could cause. I wasn't able to read all the parts of the combat section because I didn't know where they were or that I should be looking for them. And I had other things to read rather than attempting over multiple years to read the D&D books cover to cover. Luckily now with a screen reader I have a much easier time as long as the books they're releasing work with screen readers.
That’s a good point, it hadn’t occurred to me! But of course, that’s the point, we often don’t think about how our ableism colors our biases. Thank you so much for sharing ♥️
I use default alignments for when creatures aren't fully sentient (able to hold conversion in some extent) ,being controlled on mass, or if the majority of the race/species/ancestry is in active conflict with the party and they're to be KOS
There’s so much here I appreciate your calling attention to. First, even in Forgotten Realms there’s a case of a lawful good red dragon. More importantly though, in Eberron, for example, much of gnomish society accepts and supports a secret police that acts as judge and executioner. Dragons can be of any alignment as can ancestries traditionally considered monstrous. There are good liches that play a crucial role in the society of one of the three major groups of elves. The language of (usually) LNC/GNE respects those settings.
I think it’s good you apply the same treatment to traditionally “good” ancestries-elves don’t need to be good.
What makes D&D complicated is that biological essentialism does exist. A wood elf doesn’t have the same traits as a goblin, gnome, or kalashtar-it’s the association of biology with morality or moral orientation that’s the issue. I appreciate how you pointed out that a purely evil race flattens the world. It doesn’t serve to create a richer culture that has internal debates and discussions about identity.
It’s also easy to confuse systemic racism with interpersonal racism. My elf might despise kobolds, but that’s a personal failing, not something that should be automatic and my elf can choose to despise kobolds as an ancestry without needing to be influenced by a culture somehow predisposed to this.
If a table wants to have an entire ancestry have a certain alignment, it almost feels like that ancestry shouldn’t be playable since “everyone knows those locolaths are shifty.”
I am very much torn between wholehearted agreement with everything said about the main topic of alignments - the nuanced portrayal of orcs and goblinoids was one of the reasons why I immediately fell in love with Eberron when it launched - and wholehearted disagreement with the points repeatedly made on the side about species - and that is what they are, regardless of whether they can interbreed - as any goblin being able to gain as much muscle mass as the strongest of orcs remains risible.
In my mind, allignment can mean one of two things:
1) Allegiance to a specific side in the ongoing fight of Good vs Evil and Law vs Chaos, wherein these are literal factions that you can be allied with. See LotR and Warhammer.
2) A description of behavioral tendencies and/or ideology.
When dealing with the latter, I see "Good" and "Evil" less as moral absolutes and more as "Selflessness" and "Selfishness". In this case, the alignments for an entire race would instead describe their cultural values, and I substiute "Good" and "Evil" with "collectivist" and "individualist" (and I'm not saying that either of those are good or evil, they are just much more useful when describing a culture)
So, a Lawful Good race would have a culture that emphasizes adherence to law, authority, and cultural norms and prioritizes social cohesion and the benefit of the many over the individual.
Meanwhile, a Chaotic Evil society abhors social hierarchy and limits their laws and government powers to only that which is necessary, while prizing personal responsibility and individual achievement.
Not only does that sidestep morality into something more helpful, but it allows individual members of a race to have wildly diverse values even if the aggregate trend of their culture aligns with particular ideologies.
I think that DND is a bit different with this problem then Warhammer 40k. I think the way orcs are designed are clear why their design and style is inherently different from humans
In our campaign I play a bugbear and the player I sit next to plays a drow. We’re probably the least evil out of our party of 7. It’s fun! Also we’re the two heaviest note-takers of the campaign out of game, so I’d like to think that that makes us the opposite of evil IRL too lol
The best way to do this change is just to remove the alignment system entirely. Orcs can still be a horde of evil for you if thats what you want in your world, but its less a mechanical decree from WotC and more just a DMs own personal worldbuilding (and there is nothing, zero, nada, 0 wrong with having Orcs be evil in your world. Or Drow be evil. Or Tieflings be discriminated against etc etc)
Alignment sucks, and is a narrative and roleplay ball and chain.
Me who uses Ancient Roman stereotypes of Germans and Gauls for Orcs and other savages 💪. But seriously tho yeah I definitely get the whole thing about races being inherently evil and all, personally I just don’t like it because it makes them boring. How I’ve interpreted it in my world is that people such as Drow or Goblins are stereotyped as evil or savages by those who don’t get around much and only hear about them through stories. And those stereotypes are based in some group of that race which is evil, like the Drow of Lolth, or the Goblin tribes, but of course they only represent a few of them. Hell people are racist towards the normal races too, like for example people hate Elves because they think they’re all hauty and xenophobic, which leads them into being just like that towards the Elves. That’s one of the things I love about The Elder Scrolls and its world building, the Imperials are Imperialists of course, Nords are xenophobic, Dark Elves enslaved Lizard people, High Elves fancy themselves the master race, they even invented slurs I mean that’s some world building. Anyway what were we talking about again
The way I as a DM treat those given alignments is as "what most people see them as" not every Orc is evil, but orcs often raid villages and humans will therefor have a very negative opinion on them. So they are seen as evil. But are they? No, not all of them.
So in locations, where Orc-raids are rare or non existing, you might find many orcs, that are accepted by the society.
So no species is evil, but the way society sees them matters.
I feel like, as far as replacements for 'race' goes, species is better than ancestry when you want to avoid loaded terms. Nobody that will actually be at your table can credibly be called a different species, while many probably *have* suffered because of perceptions about their race or ancestry.
And it's generally more accurate to what is actually being described in the book by today's language, anyway. (And it's not like the rest of the books use real early-modern-English)
The only place we stumble there is stuff like warforged - but they're clearly not a 'race' either, so w're not getting any *more* wrong by using 'species'. Maybe 'people' would be better? "Who are your people?" "The dwarves!"
As for the default alignments, yeah, I think get rid of them for intelligent non-planar beings, and replace them with suggested *factions* (and their alignments) for new DMs to get multiple ideas of how to use each monster type in their world.
instead of saying this is good and that is bad, you can say both are usually neutral but in this setting they hate each other really badly and here are sample reasons why. Very good video, had my trouble with the recent changes for the orc race/specie
I feel like Matt is describing a utopistic attitude, when talking about worlds with magic that can separate soul from body, gods taking mortal form and roads so treacherous you'd be safer in a bear cave. If you try think as a villager living in a world like that you would have a lot of stereotypes living in your head.
Also to the lizard people running the world trope uhm why are only the good and super charismatic metal dragons are allowed to take humanois shapes? What I mean is you can take out fantasy from racism but you cannot really do the same vicaversa when all of it is based on ten thousand years of human fears of the different and unknown
I can so understand what you mean - and still in my settings there are evil species for a simple reason: in real life it is a constant struggle to give evil-doers second chances, understand why they are how they are, help them to become members of society. I have to weigh the words I use at any and all moments. I try to take on multiple perspectives. And I come home and I am exhausted by the stupidity of so many people (probably including myself).
So in my game I don't want to exhaust myself further. I don't want to start thinking about why orcs are evil or if they really are evil or maybe I am the evil one. No. I want to grab my sword, kill 'em all and feel good about it because for once I want simplicity. Good and evil are not objective, they are a set of values and behavior that society had discussed, discussed, has discussed, discusses and will discuss again and again and again. Is it too much to ask for simplicity in my game?
I honestly don't want to recreate our 21st century world with swords and lances (and - groan - this terrible thing called magic). And I want less nuances. If it helps, I leave out female orcs and orc children. Orcs are all testosterone male no brainers to kill or be killed. They are monsters. Do they have a culture? Yes, killing, burning, destroying, eating humans, dwarves and elves (and especially halflings). And no, I do not have any human society or nation or ancestry that I equate with them. That's what the ancestry "human" is for. Orcs are the terror that stalks in the night, that make the mountains shake with their war drums and that darken the sun with the dust clouds when their hosts are on the move. They are the antithesis to civilization (no matter which one). They are "destruction made corporal". I want my orcs to be as inhuman as possible because they are not humans. I want my humans to be diverse, full of shades of grey, some even bright, some dark.... But they are all humans and as such nuanced. I don't want a "second human specie that is not human but behaves like a human" in orcs.
Just a thought.
I don’t need the good/evil alignment. But I don’t have a ton of time during the week to plan and i use the chaotic/lawful section to help me understand how to play npcs and monsters.
I can say that I've had people look at me sideways when I say I play DnD because I'm not a white dude. They would respond with "Well, black people don't play DnD because all the black people are evil and your goal is to kill them" or something similar. I literally had to explain how I created my own world and how I can pick and choose what I want to include in the game. Just like how some videogames have it where you can disable QTEs. I remember when my players crossed the harsh flaming desert to be picked up by a red dragon that helped them get to the kingdom of snake people. I used a bit of flavor from the yuan-ti types and mixed in a few of the gorgon traits. I had them be very spartan-esque with a few hints of an art renaissance. They were going through a bit of a cultural and social shift. They were trying really hard to get to know the different kinds of 'mammals'. They even overheard a younger snake person trying to explain to an older snake person that they have to ask what their species is because calling them 'mammals' is a derogatory. Since they had trade with knolls, they knew what a knoll was and they overheard some younger snakes sigh when their parent would say "I like that one. That's one of the good ones." Speaking with the residence, they explained that since the desert is so hot, there aren't many mammal species in general and their forefathers came to the conclusion that they were clearly the best suited for life in the desert and therefore superior to other creatures. Things were changing because of things like expeditions going past the desert and realizing that it can get cold out there. Trading with knolls has become vital to getting outside items especially during the colder seasons so being nice to them has become good business sense. I even had a group of mindflayers that ended up a bit trapped in an underground oasis. They ended up basically crash landing there through the astral sea since there are a few portals to others realms deep in the underground caverns and sometimes rifts open up randomly because of all the wild raw magic. The two groups had a deal for trade and helping with building and maintaining water ways throughout the kingdom. The snake kingdom would provide their worst criminals for the mindflayers' 'breeding'. The players had mixed opinions about that last one, but the kingdom didn't see a use of wasting anything. They are in a unforgiving desert where they have fire flashes from the fire plane that turns the sand to glass so they like to make sure everything is used. They also gained these three groups as allies through some very interesting and unique quests. They were all about helping to defeat the big bad since she was planning on using them for experiments and had previously tried to invade, destroying a mindflayer pool and plenty of the snake people's nesting sites and the knolls' breeding dens. So to them, she was a baby killer that had to be stopped. My players were so hyped.
I love these details about the yuan-ti!
But it also sucks that the judgement is on the face for so many people you’ve encountered - that’s such a huge bummer.
I ignore alignment for everything, including devils and celestials. In my setting Inhabitants of the hells are selfish opportunists manipulating the mortal plane and inhabitants of the upper planes are condescending bureaucrats somewhat disinterested in the fates of mortal beings. Both are capable of being helpful or a hinderance to the players in their own way.
I feel context to why the monsters are evil/enemies helps a lot.
In my current game I've been using hobgoblins as a common source of mooks. This is because there's a wandering mercenary army composed primarily of hobgoblins that's getting fed up of fighting for other peoples' lands and are trying to claim their own turf. They're going about this by working with various gangs in the city-state the PCs live in to create unrest in the hopes of taking over when the local government falls apart. They're not the bad guys because they're hobgoblins, but they're bad guys because they are would-be conquerers who are willing to work with the shadiest of the local gangs. Also a couple of the gangs, which contain humans, elves and the like, were much more evil than these hobgoblins.
In general I don't bother with alignment unless the being in question is supposed to be "made" of the alignment in question (such as fiends).
I don't have inherently evil races in my games. I noticed it was narratively boring long before I noticed it could be offensive. However, I also think some things you either stated or implied to be necessarily wrong or hurtful are only so in certain cases.
Aside note: I do not think race is the best term, but all of the options are loaded with narrative implications. As such, for this comment, I have simply defaulted to what the 5e rulebook says because that is the most popular edition.
For example, considering the fantasy races as biologically distinct species who cannot procreate with one another isn't diminishing, it's just one interpretation of how these (in this case) species are. If that's how it works in your setting, cool. If not, also cool.
Similarly (and because I am so late to the party I don't know what came out on Monday, so I can't address that there), if you have some group who were supernaturally made evil by some external being, typically a deity, that is typically just narrative shorthand for "these are our faceless bad guys, don't think about it, there is nothing of substance here to think about." It's rarely in an environment that provides it sufficient malicious context to truly be problematic. Plus, it can lead to some really interesting moral quandries for your players down the road.
These above two really depend on the lore of your setting and how you implement it, because it could be racist or it could just be magic.
We also need to consider historical context for the fantasy races. As an example, earlier on in the genre one wouldn't consider the orcs a fantasy culture or race, they were just the things that meant "kill." Modern settings now treat them as intelligent and morally equal to other humanoids likely because they've been around so long that we started talking about them like that. Thus things like Drow became the new monsters, but now we're seeing them as cultures of peoples rather than the thing we kill. It makes sense at this point to simply recognize the pattern and just stop labelling races with moralities. It both frees up DMs to write these races how they want to in their settings and reduces stereotyping communities that are associated with these fantasy races.
We also do need to ask how and why real-life communities are associated with these fantasy races. The obvious one right now is goblins being associated with harmful Jewish stereotyoes. The question thus follows: were goblins made to resemble harmful stereotypes or were stereotypes made to resemble the pre-existing goblin creatures? I do not know which predates which, but if goblins and their depictions came first, I think it is fair to try to simply (as though the matter were truly so simple) re-associate those qualities with goblins and not Jews. That doesn't mean forgetting the stereotypes and harm done, just no longer harboring them. This may not work, but I think it is a good option worth trying.
In my opinion, best circumstance is that rulebooks do not contain rules that "this race is good, this race is evil." That leaves no room for narrative nuance, which is best handled (hopefully well and tactfully) by the storyteller. Assuming a system has a default setting, like the Forgotten Realms with D&D, the rulebook may, but is not required to, include a note summarizing some details about the race according to that setting. "Drow are [...] worship Lolth [...] generally evil [...]" for example. I would even then avoid moral values, but other comments say this can be helpful for new DMs and players, so I included it.
Edit: I failed to mention that alignment sucks and doesn't work, plus morality is an incfedibly deep and challenging conversation that this hobby is just underequipped to appropriately handle within the pages of its books.
One issue I've noticed with alignment for players is they tend to put a lot of focus on it, especially with newer players. It becomes a center piece of their character, which they build the character out from. This holds them back from making a complex character, and only using the alignment system as a reminder of their character's intentions.
This also (less commonly) extends to the monster manual, because they can start to push back when their foes don't act as they "should". I once had a player who had a problem with the Red Dragon they met in a campaign, who wanted to make a deal instead of slaughtering everything in sight.
I think this is treading into the DM's territory-- if they have Tolkien-esque orcs (a bastardization of elves twisted to serve their dark lord) who are evil by nature, then that's their prerogative. On the flip side, if they have Warcraft-like orcs, then that's fine too!
But in the end, I don't think the fantasy world is supposed to reflect the real world; the whole reason people don't like the idea of "evil race" is because that concept doesn't exist in reality-- but fantasy isn't reality. You could totally have a world where separate gods are vying for control of the universe; a world where the war is mostly fought between a group of races who are aligned with God-A and a separate group of races are aligned with God-B. In fact, that's kind of the original vibe of old D&D.
Even in old school D&D, "evil" wasn't so clear cut-- when you came across monsters in the dungeon, the DM would have to make reaction rolls to see how they would behave. You could totally have an instance where an "evil" goblin would act friendly (or even helpful) towards a party of humans. There were some exceptions, for instance goblins would attack (on sight) a party that had dwarf. But (in my opinion) that was mainly because the goblin and dwarven cultures had a long history of wars and feuding over territory rather than "We're evil, they're good! Must kill!" type attitude.
I like to say... "Words create worlds. Watch your words or you may not like your world afterwards."... and couldn't you make the case that all humans are, "typically..."
I like thinking of orcs as Spartanic. They would leave a baby in the forest if it looked weak. They value being a soldier above all else except motherhood. One of my favorite character concepts is an orc or half-orc who was abandoned for having albinism but is found by some dwarves and raised not quite realizing they aren't a dwarf.
(The idea being that nobody thought to tell this poor guy that he's not a dwarf. His parents have this "Wait, I thought you told him!" thing)
As I wrote in another comment, I made an entire orc nation based on the Romans. As violent as they are, they are very methodical and their civility and cold strategy makes them way more menacing in war. Then there's another nation who only respects those who can fight man to man, and one of the prerequisites to have a meeting with them is to "prove your worth" (usually by killing one of the animals they farm, bred to be bigger and more aggressive than they would be in nature). They're not evil, they're not even that warmongering (unlike the Roman-orcs) they just really like fighting, and can be friendly to those who prove their valor in battle.
The way I see it is the whole of a stat block is based on the ‘typical’ example, it has to be. Do all hobgoblins have a strength of 13? Do they all have a speed of 30 feet? Do they all wear chain mail and wields shields? No of course not. The idea that all hobgoblins are Storm Trooper like clones of one another is so ridiculous it beggars belief. Heck there are even different examples of hobgoblins in the monster manual.
When my player characters go about killing enemies it helps to know that the enemies they are killing are the bad guys. Once you start suggesting that maybe it’s not the hobgoblins that are the bad guys, but it’s actually the player characters , it kind of kills a lot of the fun. Combat (and therefore by default ‘killing other living creatures’) is where I derive a lot of the fun from the game. It’s important that the creatures I kill in the game are the monsters otherwise it’s my characters that are the monsters.
In my campaign world the ‘EVIL’ Draconian Empire are the bad guys. They go around conquering neighbouring lands and enslaving other cultures. Does that mean all Dragonborn are evil? Heck no, one of my players is playing a Dragonborn.
The changes made to monster’s alignment don’t bother me, I’m just bemused that they were necessary in the first place for something that to me was so obvious it didn’t need spelling out.
What does bother me is being accused of being racist, or colonialist, because of the way I choose to represent imaginary creatures in a fictional world
What's weird about my own experience with the "alignment" argument in the DnD subculture is that I was actually into The Witcher before a friend introduce me to DnD, and the big thing about the Witcher is that it is a very "Grimdark DnD"-inspired world, but it deconstructs the whole idea of inherent creature alignment as it throws the reader/player into these complex moral and ethical conflicts. So I kind of got into the game thinking that was a part of it, only learning later on about the "being a GoodGuy means that when you encounter BadGuy you just get to kill them and take their stuff" notion of alignment from Grognards on the internet.
Another interesting thing is that Michael Moorcock, the fantasy-author that wrote his his "Eternal Champion" fantasy stories (which provided a ton of inspiration to Gygax & Arnerson, the creators of DnD) to feature a cosmic conflict between Law & Chaos did so because he wanted to deconstruct the stereotypical fantasy-genre conflict of "the forces of Light/Good vs. the forces of Dark/Evil." A champion of Law could be a just and compassionate protector, or a tyrannical authoritarian dictator. A champion of Chaos could be a free-spirited liberator of the oppressed, or a unstable, violent lunatic. (DnD youtuber LegalKimchi has an excellent video on this).
casually watching one of my favorite dnd youtubers....
wait, that's my video!
great video Mike!
love how you hit some of the tropes as well. Even if all of the sociological issues are absent, it is boring storytelling. a little more effort can add such wonderful flavoring to your game. i've been playing this game for over 30 years, seeing things that defy the tropes is refreshing.
Thank you, Kimchi! 😁
I'm glad that WotC is angling towards 'typically' alignment as opposed to 'always' alignment, including Fizban's adding options to give thinking, reasoning, emotional beings (i.e. dragons) possible motivations that might be antithetical to what their alignment brands them as, such as neutral or good intentions in chromatic dragons, and more villainous goals to metallic dragons. Not to mention skewing away from the stereotype of more tribal groups as savage, or that drow are sadistic and evil.
Speaking of drow, I'm grateful that I know my DM won't lean into using dehumanizing commentary about drow culture during an Out of the Abyss campaign. Plus, there's also a drow in the party who is already breaking the mold for expectations, which is nice.
Chef’s kiss. Thank you. It’s important for the hobby that we move on. Move forward. Be accessible. Even if it’s not for “your” table.
Part of the problem is that having alignment on a creature statblock is that it implies that all such creatures share the same alignment, racially. (I don't know why people can't assume it varies just like STR and CON scores, but whatever.) But I think it CAN BE a helpful shorthand to describe CULTURES as lawful vs chaotic or good vs. evil (which I interpret as altruistic vs. selfish). There are LOTS of evil/selfish cultures: investment bankers, vikings, religious militants and, as you said, the Republican Party. There are also some (more, albeit imperfect) good cultures where altruism dominates: nursing, teaching, environmental work, social work, etc. Maybe the Nordic countries would qualify as good/altruistic cultures. And of course there are lots of individuals of every alignment within, but thats how the structures and folkways of that culture average out.
I think it's a very worthwhile conversation to have and Mike-I applaud you for having it when your channel is still growing and not waiting until you have more power within the industry to take a stand. Good for you. It won't be a costless move-but that's why I think it was altruistic on your part.
Thank you so much ☺️
The alignment in old stat blocks just represented that the majority of the species is evil. Everything in the DnD books is just a recommendation, and that is the perfect example. Of course, not all of the orcs in Forgotten Realms are evil, just majority of them, who belongs to their culture, which is considered by other humanoid cultures as inherently evil.
If we see alignment in the stat block we just understand, that that creature's culture is evil and destructive from perspective of the basic humanoid society. That is not about species being evil from birth.
And goes not only about playable races, but about other monsters too. For example: Beholders are evil in their nature, but it doesn't mean we can't run into a lawful-good Beholder, who was raised differently, or who's alignment was changed, naturally or through magic. It's a pretty fun character idea, though should we remove alignment from Beholder's stat block? Of course not, because it gives us a vector of possible behaviour of this NPC, but to follow it or not is your choice.
Didn't think I could love your channel more until I heard the New Vegas comment
Wow... is the fandom still debating this stuff? We were debating these very exact themes back when I started playing.
13 years ago.
Ten years before that, we were also debating them! The debates have progressed and broadened over the intervening years, but yeah, they're not new.
@@aaronghunter Yep, I remember "the grognards" back in my day going at it with uncharacteristic gusto xD
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
This topic has always been very interesting to me and I'm glad that you discussed it in your channel. What I do in my games as a DM is playing with perspective and point of view. That's probably something I took from being a fan of A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones.
What I mean by playing with perspective is changing the discourse depending on the players point of view. For instance, in my world, elves and orcs have been enemies since a very long time. If the players are working with the elves, orcs will be described as brute barbarians and reckless murderers, but that's not strictly true, just elvish propaganda. On the other hand, if the players work with the orcs, the elves would be described as something quite similar to colonialists that take everything from the natives and proclaim to be the rulers of the place. I think that makes my world more realistic and interesting in a moral sense. There are no good peoples by default as well as there are not evil peoples by default, all depends on the point of view and none is completely right nor completely wrong.
The same happens with dark elves. They're just elves who were kicked out of the surface centuries ago and, due to the countless dangers from the Underdark, have developed a very strict society with moral standards that might seem cruel for the surface people but are actually necessary to survive in a place like the Underdark.
Great video, you make some excellent points. Especially about how fictional races mirror actual racial stereotypes in D&D.
These types of arguments sound very similar to the old sexist tropes that are, thankfully, slowly getting better. Change is possible!
I think the species term makes alot of sense tbh. If you're an Elf then that's your species, but if you're a High Elf then that's your race of Elf. If anything, it allows them to add more creature variants within the established creatures, as well as accurately defines the difference. I don't care about it from a political perspective, I just think that it mechanically makes more sense.
I think the problem words aren't race/species but good/evil.
A large part of the problem is alignment as personal morals versus thematic underpinning of the world. The spell Detect Evil & Good detects fey/celestial/fiend/undead/aberration/elemental, not alignment, not if someone's a jerk. A character is evil because they're selfish. A demon is 'EVIL' because it's trying to bring about the end of the multiverse. By using the same words throughout, it gets muddy on which meaning is which in both the books/rules and narrative.
Drow as a generalization are 'evil' because they have to be selfish to survive and thrive in their own society. They're also 'EVIL' because their society as whole worships Lloth, uses slaves and has casual murder. A society of goblins may be 'good' in that they are very selfless, but only to people in their own group/tribe, which may or may not include other species. But they can still be 'the bad guys' if they're set up in opposition to whoever 'the good guys' are (generally those advocating more civilization ie colonialism).
1 country's king is evil/looking to his own benefit vs the other country's king is good/looking to the benefit of his people. That implies but doesn't say anything about their rulership style or decrees. What if the evil king wants a strong, healthy empire so that they have more riches. He keeps his people happy because his underlying motive is to stabilize/maintain his position as king. What if the good king has spies throughout his own people because it's for their own good? What about a culture that normalizes using necromancy for all their hard labor because the body is only a shell?
Thank you! You have clearly put a lot of thought and research in this video, it shows! I'm studying literature, and you see these tropes and mechanisms of written systemic othering and oppression all throughout colonial and post colonial history. Understanding more and more of it over the last few years, seeing it in DnD has really bothered me. I am a DM and I do my best to avoid it, and I am fortunate to play with amazing people who want to avoid it too, but it's awesome that it's starting to be recognized as an issue!
21:18 I dont think like this, but i know some people who do, and to be honest im not sure i see anything wrong with most of these. Id love a video explaining whats wrong with it. Right now, those emotions about the game seem perfectly reasonable. Alot of people reslly dont want or care to make the world more complex, I dont see why we should push our more narrative gameplay style onto them.
Ofcourse, we should still change stuff. But i dont see why theyre not allowed to dislike those changes.
I think alignments should be an integral part of the core D&D but not essential if you're playing in a homebrew campaign where moral relativism is assumed. The Alignments themselves could be considered cosmic forces that affect the material world at some level that makes some monsters to be heavily inclined to be drawn to an alignment.
The idea of swapping to the term species is probably the best term because they are in fact different species
But orcs and humans, and elves and humans, can mate and produce presumably viable offpsring.
@@pedrogarcia8706 so can different species to extents, doesn't change the fact that they are different and not the same. Humans and Neanderthals could interbreed and produce viable offspring but us and them were still two different species even if we were both hominids. Two different species of hominids.
@@matthewfarmer8246 species is defined by the ability to produce viable offspring
Great video!
Personally, I don't need alignment. I don't use it unless I'm doing something with Planescape.
I prefer how games like Dragon Age handle morality; no one needs to be told that Darkspawn and monsters are evil, but people on the other hand are capable of all sorts of things, good and bad.
Maybe what I say will be something to be ignored. But I feel that I have to say this...
I believe that the BIGGEST issue that bothers people is not that newer players (for the most part) have issues with default Evil Alignments... But that, at least in my experience... the developers, and those of us who played for decades are having motivations and attitudes unfairly assigned to us. Yep. People are looking at aspects of the game from their perspective, and it seems to me, that they then assume that Gygax et al, and old school players saw all of the things that the new folks see, and just thought that these 'bad things" were OK... and thus we are reenforcing all of the issues that are bring assigned to D&D NOW.
Now, PLEASE, I ask that anyone reading this take a step back and consider that today's world. is NOT the world of the 1970s and 1980s.THIS is incredibly important. In those decades, the computer was at best an incredibly expensive playtoy as far as the average family was concerned. The Internet as we know it did not even exist until the very late 1990s.
That means that a LOT of people didn't have access to the reams of daily knowledge immersion that people today have at their fingertips. If we wanted to learn something... then we had to go to the Public Library and look it up. Now take a moment and consider the unbelievably VAST difference in outlooks and knowledge bases that this could create. Even up to the turn of THIS Century... most of mankind was limited to reading newspapers, listening to radio, physically going to school, and going to a bookstore or library if we wanted to learn something. Now you can take 1/2 hour and gather reams of information on any subject from all over the world, translated for you. That just was NOT a thing for the first 30 years or so of D&D.
When I hear things that you touched on... like Goblins were antisemitic... or Orcs were based on Asians... that Drow were supposed to somehow represent people of color... or that Tribal cultures were based on colonialism... I have to blink. And blink HARD. Because I don't believe that any of these things were true.
Take a moment and take away the Internet. Just take it away. And think about what game developers and players had available to us during the 20th Century... and if you are going to make statements about any of the motivations of people who created or played D&D then you HAVE to do do within the limited lens of what THEY could access.
To create the game of D&D, Gygax and co had a limited knowledge of medieval arms and armor. They had made a medieval battle game, so we know that. But then they started to create a game that used creatures and cultures from (mostly) medieval cultures and legends. In addition, we know that took inspiration from various Fantasy novels... VERY notably Robert E. Howard. Have you ever read Howard's novels? Now consider the Elves, Dwarves, gnomes. In the 70s all you would have found when looking them up would be Tolkien and Celtic and Norse folklore. Gygax has stated that when he created the Drow they were based on the 'Dark Elves' of Norse mythology.
My point is that people NOW say a lot of things that are accusing people (designers and players) THEN of doing or believing things that those folks never even conceived of. How were Gygax and co supposed to be aware of Tolkien's beliefs on anything? Most people had no idea that Howard had psychological issues. the devs and players only knew what they could find in whatever limited books we could find at the library or book store. Back then, if you used the word Colonialism, a lot of folks in the US would have immediately started thinking about the American Revolution. The other, more modern attitude in the issue, simply was not discussed beyond academic circles... it was certainly not mainstream. And I am not being "Willfully obtuse". You can read old interviews with game creators at the time... They stated their influences... and often what they were thinking. I read many of them at the time. Not one whit of anything I read indicated that the game was written with knowledge of what people are accusing the creators of.
Am I suggesting that the things that you say are 'problematic' with the game are not? No... Not NOW. What I AM saying is that the game was not designed with an awareness of ANY of the issues now being talked about in mind. Not... One... In many cases it would have been near impossible.There has been a metric ton of information uncovered about all kinds of people and subjects since the 20th Century, that none of us could have known. To hold us accountable for this... well it goes beyond reason.
Much of original D&D was designed based on the concept that this was game where good heroes fight evil monsters.... it was as simple as that. You can watch any fantasy movie from those days to see that was the prevailing attitude of Fantasy. It was Good vs bad, Light vs Darkness... Black and white morality.
And you can easily see where much of these problematic 'evil only' monsters came from. Let's take the Lizard folk. Yuan Ti came later. You ever see old Saturday morning cartoons? One of the most popular shows around the time D&D was created was Land of the Lost. The only real Humanoid enemies? A prehistoric Lizardman species called the Sleestak. They lived in a Lost City and were always enemies of the Heroes. Add that to the Cult of Set in Conan, and the idea that Lizardfolk are just sentient reptiles who have no reason not to see Humans as dinner... and you have a species that is easy to call Evil.
One of the big problems with this subject is the modern concept that 'nothing is really evil.' based on this no one and nothing can BE Evil, because Evil becomes completely subjective based on the individual concerned. Heck, is a tribe of cannibalistic headhunters Evil from their perspective? Probably not. But how is anyone that encounters them going to see them? And,,, if this was an in game culture... what would even the kindest of them eat? How would someone from a nearby town view them if his sister was on last week's menu? Maybe the Aztecs might not be considered an Evil culture... but their temples would suggest that they might be... at least as far as those they captured and sacrificed would be concerned.
I believe... not because I was an old school gamer... but because I am a student of human history...that despite the fact that you can have good people that live within a culture... those same good people might believe in things that are considered down right evil by every other culture. And thus those same good people might well be considered evil as a result.
Consider Rome. You could have a soldier who does all the right family things... married with kids, donates to the poor, is educated... treats people with kindness and compassion.
Then on his day off he takes that same family to the coliseum to see slave gladiators fight each other to the death for their amusement. And a week later, this same 'good family man' marches off to conquer Gaul to take plunder, land and slaves.
Now take the same man and he becomes an adventurer... he has the same beliefs in Rome over all... when he joins a party who has the moral ground when discussing freeing slaves from a roman village? Would this Roman, who is Good, not be in the right for trying to convince the party of the righteousness of the Roman slavery system, and to try to make the party understand that they would be criminals and in the wrong for stealing the property of honest Roman citizens?
I believe that every game world needs to have a set Good and Evil axis for that world. If only so that everyone can have the same perspective on how that world works. I also believe that Cultures can be considered generally Evil by that Axis. Thus... while a member of a classic monster species might act generally Good, if that monster culture behaves and acts evil by this axis, and the creature does not have any issue with these beliefs and behavior.... Would they actually be Good or Evil? If the Lizard folk stole the Halfling baby because he was hungry... is the party really wrong to try to stop him? Yes they could offer food NOW...but what happens the next time? Is the party really in the right to suggest that the Lizard folk should go hungry or not eat halflings? If Lizardfolk believe they can eat anything... maybe even other Lizardfolk... maybe they aren't Evil in their own eyes... but does the party really have an obligation to stop them? And what about the Halflings? Do their feelings on the matter count? Would they not consider the giant Lizards that eat them as being Evil? This can create an ethical and philosophical roller coaster that doesn't end.
I think we need to be more understanding of each other in this area. And we need to stop accusing each other of wrongdoing or wrong thinking, just because they don't agree with us.
The ONLY true resolution that WoTC can actually give us is to abolish the concept of Good and Bad from the game entirely, as well as any and all indicators of how ANY creature in the game should act or behave. "Here are creature stat blocks. Do what you want with them." Backing completely out of the arena of behaviors or attitudes of creatures at all. and leaving it entirely to the individual group is the only truly reasonable resolution. I disagree that WoTC should be a leader of the community. They should simply be a completely neutral game designer. The Community... as such... should make their own decisions.
Thanks for the Video. It creates discussion, and that's never a bad thing.
A good read, and good points to keep in mind.
Great video on a very contentious topic. While I have a lot of opinions on the matter (races _are_ cultural archetypes in D&D, D&D's commercialization of its races has created this monster as they were originally more nuanced by design, the genericization of races erodes their otherworldliness) I think there are two pieces I'd like to elaborate on to add to the overall discussion.
1. *Why is it always about good versus evil?* I've listened to a lot of people talk about this subject now and the one repeating thing I hear is that we're unfairly portraying races as evil through colonialist tropes. I never hear any opinions on law versus chaos, which I find an interesting hole to the debate. Is there not a problem with what is the original axis for alignment? If so, can we just eliminate the good versus evil axis and be done with these petty arguments? Alignment is supposed to represent a creature's beliefs and so law versus chaos seems like a much better axis to measure that on.
2. *I think being too loose with alignment also has the potential to be harmful to the game.* The way D&D is played has changed drastically from the days where groups were local and between people with a baseline of familiarity. Having codified versions of rules and even typical versions of races/species/ancestries is going to important to the longevity of the game moving forward into the digital age of pick-up one shots and new players. I like the use of "typically" for more humanoid races that can play faster and looser with their beliefs, but I do also believe we need to start limiting some of that scope for identity's sake. What I would love to see this trend towards are multiple alignment suggests under a race/species/ancestry entry, ex. hobgoblins are Lawful Non-Good/Lawful Neutral or Evil and orcs are Chaotic Any/Chaotic Good, Neutral, or Evil. While I understand people are upset about races getting pigeon-holed into certain belief structures, I do think it's important to remember that those structures are sometimes necessary for a good time. While I don't want to blanket an entire race under one belief system, I also don't want players getting trapped into moral complexities and leave the table questioning themselves because "Any Alignment" becomes the default for goblins.
It's certainly a tricky topic, but I think videos like these provide a good platform to analyze the problem and discuss potential fixes for some truly damaging views we've created as a community.
I would like to say that from my understanding the "races" themselves individually are not evil, it is the right is might and self serving cultures they are raised in. I usually have a off shoot culture who disagreed with how things were and managed to leave before they are dealt with. It is the popular culture of the group that we see as "evil". Just as we see totalitarian governments as evil.
Everytime I see a new video from you, I click as fast as I can. You’re so dope dude
Thank you!!