Every time people lament changes to the lore that amount to “not every member of species X is irredeemably evil” and claim the game is removing villains from it, I think how villains of so-caleld evil species fall into two cathegories: a) bland and boring and b)have something else, unrelated to their species going on for them, that makes them interesting.
I feel like the bigger reason to have evil races is to have a more or less ever present challenge and point of conflict. For instance, the underdark is horrible place to be, in large part due to the drow. Their presence and general alignment of evil makes the setting dangerous and interesting. Is this town safe? Have the drow been messing about assassinating local leaders? Should we help this group by liberating them from slavery from the drow?
It’s almost like their species is in of itself a character, with this species sized character being evil. Having an entire species be generally evil gives the world more scale than a single evil character would. But yes, an individual villain needs more than just their evil race to be interesting.
But the reason the drow are evil is primarily because of the Spider god Lolth, not because they’re Drow. Drow free from Lolth aren’t necessarily evil.
Absolutely. But I wasn’t talking about the lore reason why they’re generally evil.
Drow freed from Lolth, in isolation of another way being convincingly presented to - likely forced on - them, have had how many thousands of years of abusive culture hammered & manipulated into them. More likely than not they’ll still develop an evil culture, though the structure of their society would likely shift due to power gaps. Given how they work either a single powerful demagogue or some sort of council system of the great houses.
Drow even under Lolth aren’t necessarily evil but she set them up for biological rewards for evil whenever she can (there’s little detail on this but I think that’s concept’s the source of the terrible “mother’s ecstasy at womb murders” thing - good idea, bad example/implementation), on top of enforcing an ongoing culture of brutality and wickedness. Its how most of the evil deities still allow for Free-will to empower their Faith. They combine physiological reward hijacking, adding aspects that encourage easier exclusion from others (isolation is good for limiting options), and rigorous and brutal cultural and societal reinforcement. It doesn’t prevent good, but it gives far higher hurdles for an evil race to overcome.
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Interestingly though it does make for compelling heroes like Drizzt and Wulfgar.
Did*
Kinda of an overplayed trope now.
From Order of the Stick:
“Wait, aren’t dark elves evil?”
“Oh, my, no. Not since they became a player race. Now the entire species consists of Chaotic Good rebels, yearning to throw off the reputation of their evil kin.”
“Evil kin? Didn’t you just say they were all Chaotic Good?”
“Details.”Because it was a strong character trait, first! So much so, that many people started using it!
I dunno, when you literally have spells that detect or harm specific alignments, it makes good/evil more fundamental than in the real world, and that’s fine for a fantasy world IMO.
Gotta agree with that one as removing pre-existing restrictions from character (playable or not) creation like predetermined “evilness” offers virtually no drawbacks. It opens up the game by improving its core sandbox mechanics and if one dislikes that change then they can just ignore it.
Evil races give someone the PCs don’t have to feel bad about killing. Obviously depends on your party, but if they befriend the hungry wolf pack and negotiate with the bandits, then a band of definitely evil goblins gives the barbarian something to smash without worrying if they’re killing little Timmy’s dad.
Edited to add: And if “he’s an evil race” is your only reason for them being a major villain, that’s bad storytelling. About as bad as “yes they’re going to help you because they’re good,” and not for some kind of benefit to them, monetary or spiritual or whatever.
If you can kill something without feeling bad because of its race, that’s fucked up. A group of goblin bandits can be fun, but they’re villains because of the bandit thing, not the goblin thing. Why should a group defined by plundering travelers be more acceptable than a group defined by being short with green skin?
That said, the undead are, more often than not, fair game. Undead are a mockery of the life that came before and a defilement of their corpse, so killing them is a way of honouring the dead.
You should probably have specified mindless undead, not just all undead. In fact…anything mindlessly violent. Demons, zombies, etc.
Why should a group defined by plundering travelers be more acceptable than a group defined by being short with green skin?
Because in a fantasy world, where we can know for 100% certainty that gods created life, it’s not impossible for those gods to have made a certain creature type objectively evil.
In some settings, Orcs are the way they are because their god is the last one to pick a place for them to live, gets pissy, and decides that “Fuck you guys! If that’s how you want to play it, my orcs are going to plunder the shit out of your guys’ lands!”
In other settings, there has to be some kind of cosmic balance to things, and some gods are just evil because there has to be a natural counterpart to good, and so the creatures they create are just inherently evil.
I think the issue is with this kind of debate is that that it’s referred to as “race”. We don’t really have a one-for-one on this IRL (because Goblins don’t exist) and we don’t refer to animals as “different races”.
No, sorry, that still doesn’t answer my question.
Cosmically controlled goblins are doing the same thing as bandits, but the bandits made the choice to do evil things and the goblins didn’t get a chance to refuse. Surely, the people choosing to do evil are worse than those forced to do evil, right? So why are bandits better than goblins?
The suggestions you gave fall kinda flat to me, really. No matter what the in-universe reason is, the DM made the universe. “It’s what my character would do” doesn’t excuse bad behaviour, and neither does “it’s what my gods decided.” You’re the one who made them do that. You’re the one that decided an entire culture of thinking, feeling people are born objectively evil and can be killed en masse. And that’s fucked up.
You’re the one that decided an entire culture of thinking, feeling people are born objectively evil and can be killed en masse. And that’s fucked up.
I think that’s where the issue falls apart. You want them to be thinking feeling people who can change. They don’t have to be. If an evil deity creates Goblins, and makes them evil for whatever reason, they can inherently lack the ability to freely think and evolve.
And there’s nothing “fucked up” about it.
Look at some villains who are just objectively evil. People point-out the Adventure Time Lich all the time, and that thing is just evil. There’s no point trying to argue with it. No point trying to convince it to right its wrongs. It doesn’t care, because it’s just evil.
Y-you…you do realize the lich, as liches generally work this way, was probably once human, right? And is choosing to believe all life must be quelled? Like…that’s an example of an irredeemably evil person who is actively choosing to be irredeemably evil. Moron.
My players ran across some Imperial guardsmen killing off skeletons, only for the orcs accompanying them to protest that they were destroying “registered cultural artifacts!” The orcs didn’t have much, and they would leave their bones to their children to help them eke out a meager existence.
Your players care about race when murdering people. If you want to murder people then just do it.
Also that’s what we have Nazi metaphor’s for
Szass Tam, Sauron, SecCom, The Empire, etc.
Eh, but maybe the barbarian should have to think about whether smash is the right path forward?
Also, you can have an individual group of enemies who are very clearly definitely evil without needing to relegate an entire species to it.
That said I run campaigns which are pretty far removed from my players wanting to smash dudes without a second thought.
Except the bard, right?
Ayyyyy
Everybody loves zombies - Shane Lacy Hensley
Your game, your rules. That’s the beauty of it. I make everything up as I go along.
Mindflayers are definitly evil (from humanoid perstective) because of their species. They eat and bread brains. And they are interesting.
Polar Bears have a “evil race” reputation… I’m sure they are just misunderstood and will explain it to you while they disembowel you
Polar bears aren’t intelligent enough to be evil. Depending on edition, they’re either unaligned or true neutral.
No quarrel there. The only interesting thing about evil races is when you subvert the trope, but as we’ve all been doing that since the 80s that’s just become another tired trope.
Personally I just run campaigns where 90% of the people are humans.
90% of the people are humans
I go with a setting where humans don’t exist at all. The closest is Elves, and picking them comes with a whole host of implications, like needing twice as much food to survive and everyone assuming you’re mega rich.
I prefer humans to be weak so nobody chooses them. Want a lizardborn x orc cleric? Sure. Want a human fighter? Well, theeeese enemies have + x on these stats against humans.
Wow, what a hot take!
Why punish players that want to be a human?
Cuz they always are either elf or human and that is boring. Also, I’m one of those bastards who force the players to role play, yet I’m no maniac who forces them to poop and pee.
Boring to whom?
To me! I love having post apocalyptic settings where humans are nearly extinct because they were too weak to defend themselves.
One campaign I forced them to be human and they made it their own goal to eradicate all non-human humanoids from the Face of the world. Needless to say their creativity in overcoming their weaknesses was amazing.
Too weak? Nah, that’s just bad story telling. Humans aren’t weak, even if we’d lose a bare knuckle fight against most other animals. Tools will ALWAYS magnify strength far more than bestial fortitude even can.
At least make their downfall something more believable, like they were too prideful and arrogant to take a serious threat seriously until it was too late. Even if the mechanics of the loss involve humans being physically weaker, it cannot be the overarching “just because”.
It’s like Batman. Batman can take out most all of the others in the Justice League despite being “just a human”, in the right scenarios. Nobody likes a story where Batman is simply crushed by a superior force.
I tried to run a goblin sympathy campaign and they just did genocide so
I have been doing this but because I want to keep the party on guard. Also I think villains who think they are the good guys or doesn’t think what they are doing is wrong is better than I’m evil because the plot needs it.
I think a huge problem with this is trying to frame everything through D&D as well as our perspective. Fuck modern D&D and its desire to control the entire dialogue. Wizards of the Coast aside, there’s also a fantasy component here. I personally dislike requiring all races to act exactly like humans with human motives. From a specific perspective, we view the wanton murder and sacrifice of wood elves by the drow as a terribly evil thing. From the drow perspective, why can’t the opposite be true? I’m not talking about Salvatore’s one-sided writing that makes it clear the whole thing is a massive con. D&D is very biased toward human motive and perspective. Why can’t both be true? Drow are evil to us and we are evil to them? That’s a much more interesting story and completely changes the narrative around someone like Drizzt.
This is a really nuanced take on speculative fiction in general. I also strongly feel that, the way WotC writes things, removing racial alignment is very important. There is no nuance in their universe. Even when we see other races, we always evaluate their action through a human lens rather than being presented a cogent paradigm contrary to ours.
DnD good and evil are distinct from common usage of the terms; they are cosmic forces, objective truths. Each action reverberates through the higher and lower planes and tilts the scales towards victory for one side or another in their eternal struggle. This lore doesn’t leave a ton of room to change the alignment of entire races (and that is by design, structure makes it easier for people to get in to the setting).
But this is just in the established settings, any DM is free to homebrew any setting and justification they like.
Note that I am not trying to defend this as the height of storytelling, it isn’t. It is a consequence of how the setting is justified - with deities being active participants, having specific rules for granting and revoking powers, and the physical presence of higher and lower planes embodying perfect conceptions of ‘good’, ‘evil’, order, chaos, etc. All of this can be changed, and again any DM is free to change it, but the ‘deep lore’ of the established settings over the past 40 years is drenched in this stuff.
One way to consider it is simply - the Drow aren’t evil because they are Drow. The Drow are evil because their culture promotes actions that align with the literal true definition of evil that is present in the setting. Evil doesn’t mean bad, it is just a label aligning with some physical rule of the universe. Just like the positive charge of a proton and negative charge of an electron are labels for physical rules of our own universe. Positive isn’t any better than negative, but they are inherently distinct.
What you’re describing is closer to the nuance I’m interested in than WotC’s settings. If you read some of the later Lolth stuff, it’s the exact opposite of that. Evil is bad and the justification for anything always involves this trite movement from evil to good. They’re not presented as counterbalances or equal combatants. Even evil characters seem to always be working under the assumption that good characters are ultimately better.
The 40k universe has a lot of similarities. However, I’d argue its authors are somewhat better at presenting why Chaos is an equally valid choice or why the Orks can do whatever they want. There isn’t a clear choice (some authors are fucking terrible at this and drive WotC-style to the goodness of the Imperium).
The only reason WotC has to remove alignment from races is because WotC has made it very clear there is the thing people should want and there is the thing people should not want. That’s not an even layout of nine alignments. That’s a huge bias and all of their content reflects that.
Dragons are interesting as a species… They’re also in the name of the game. You remove them and the game is just “Dungeons And.”
Dragons are pretty cool, but it’s also sus as hell that the Lawful Good dragon is a cool daddy and the Chaotic Evil dragon is a crazy bitch. It’s got major “divorced guy energy” is all I’m saying.
In Pathfinder the “good” dragons can be just as fucked up. One set up a “perfect society” for humanoid races on an island, where the government performs eugenics and brainwashing and banishes anyone that shakes off the brainwashing
Eugenics is interesting from a dragon’s perspective. They might live long enough to actually see the results.
I feel like:
- No race should have alignment locking in any direction, because people are people and can do whatever they want. Our goodness or badness isn’t determined by our genes.
- But, people are who they are because of the society they grow up in and how people treat them. If humans treat goblins like shit because they’re goblins, and a goblin turns into a big bad because they want to kill the humans that slaughtered their village, then that villain is interesting for reasons tied to their species.
“No villain in D&D is interesting for reasons tied to their species” sounds very dangerously close to “I’m race-blind” in terms of not acknowledging that different people have different struggles, and racism is often a huge part of those struggles.
If you like this idea, you should read the webcomic The Order of the Stick. It’s surprisingly good for a comic that started out as DND jokes and stick figures. It deals a lot with the problem of evil in DND.
Likewise, Goblins.
If humans treat goblins like shit because they’re goblins, and a goblin turns into a big bad because they want to kill the humans that slaughtered their village, then critical support to that goblin
I think the one you’re replying was making the point that you could just swap out “goblins” in that claim with “humans with slightly different features.”
Your number 2 is based around cultural, not species differences. Two humans raised in two different cultures could end up very different.
There could be two tribes of goblins. One that began eating people out of desperation and now just do it because it’s tradition. The other could have grown up in close relationships with their nongoblin neighbors and are seen as a valuable part of their region.
So untying evilness to their race isn’t being race blind or pretending people down have struggles - it’s removing the shoehorning that occurred.
