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.

  • dylanmorgan@slrpnk.net
    59·
    4 days ago

    One of the most popular DnD characters is a member of an “evil” race who proves that it’s not a racial feature but a cultural one.

    (Yes I’m talking about Drizzt, AKA why every DnD group from ~1990 to ~2005 had that guy who wanted to play a drow ranger.)

    • Rhaedas@fedia.io
      18·
      4 days ago

      I’d suggest even before then in the early character guides with the idea that one could play a half-orc. Plus a good DM would give the party options in talking to “monsters” instead of just fighting their way through. A group of goblins probably wasn’t evil, they were just trying to survive like anyone else, and sometimes they had to work with the actual evil in the game because they were tools being used for other purposes.

      D&D took a lot from Tolkien, but I don’t think the mythology was included. In wiki footnotes someone had an article in a 1982 Dragon magazine on the background of orcs from a half-orc viewpoint, but I can’t find reference anywhere on that. Point being, Tolkien orcs were created by evil for evil purposes and aren’t simply just a race of creatures. D&D orcs aren’t like that from my understanding.

      • h0rnman@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        13·
        4 days ago

        The article you’re looking for is in Dragon #62 - The half-orc point of view. There’s a whole series of them and they’re all good reads.

        • Rhaedas@fedia.io
          8·
          4 days ago

          Yep, thanks. And I found a source that has an archive here. And it seems that the canon (at least back then) followed Tolkien’s lore a bit in that the orcs were made as revenge for being unfairly treated, but it’s not quite as direct with suggesting evil was directly “poured” into them but more that they’re just following the commands given without thinking about it. So is that evil, or just mislead through generations?

    • DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social
      51·
      3 days ago

      In that case, however, Drow are the descendants of elves that followed a god that betrayed Corellon. They aren’t innately evil, they are innately good/chaotic and programmed to be evil/lawful (by DND logic).

      Orcs are theoretically opposite. Evil/chaotic by essentialist, divinely mandated nature and capable of learning otherwise.

      More importantly, they’re people the PCs can murder for gold with no discussion about morality… And while that’s convenient for some DMs it does have some very, very obvious problems.