I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to “I’m an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race”. And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don’t know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.

  • GraniteM@lemmy.world
    16·
    2 months ago

    I can see the arguments against the concept of evil races. It’s intimately linked with real-world racism about “wrong” groups that “deserve” to be colonized or genocided. Writing the fictional world as being populated by distinct groups that have conflicting cultural motivations is more interesting than “this group is bad because they are bad.”

    But… what about demons/devils?

    • Manjushri@piefed.socialEnglish
      2·
      3 days ago

      But… what about demons/devils?

      That’s actually why orcs in D&D were an evil race in the first place. At its core, D&D is derived from Lord of the Rings. Orcs in Tolkien’s world were created from elves by an evil god/demigod to be his evil army. They had no choice to be good or evil in LotR so that property was inherited into D&D.

      I’m okay with this change. Orcs in D&D lore have a different origin than in LotR and I don’t see why they should always be evil. I consider this just one more reasonable change from the original game which had odd rules like dwarves can’t be wizards and only humans could be clerics.

    • sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      10·
      2 months ago

      It’s interesting, so many cultures have demons or evil spirits. And sometimes those evil spirits can be turned to good, but not usually.

      I think DND mirroring culture in this way is still mostly OK, whereas culture has thankfully mostly moved on from races being good or evil.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
      8·
      2 months ago

      For demons and devils, that usually goes straight into supernatural, as they’re not really a race, but physical manifestations of evil energies.

      • GalacticGrapefruit@lemmy.world
        1·
        2 months ago

        At tables I’ve played and run in the past, ‘Outsiders’ (fiends, fey, celestials, etc.) embody the epitome of an ideal or motive taken to its logical extreme, for better or worse.

        Take Zariel for example.