ttrpg

We already have a group of semi-intelligent four-limbed upright-walking baddies you can mindlessly slaughter, they're called undead. Works great too because the undead masses generally don't have free will. Replace undead with robots for a sci-fi setting.
If you're killing and plundering sapient (is that the right word?) creatures for no good reason, you're the baddies.

Well if inherently evil races aren't real, how do you explain white people?

TTRPG writers need to learn the lesson that video games learned in the 90s: the universally-acknowledged acceptable target of unlimited violence is the nazis. The D&D shorthand for this are the mortal worshippers of demons and evil gods (there's usually at least one obvious fascist god of tyranny or something), characters that are consciously choosing to side with unfathomable cosmic evil because they'll personally get some small benefit.

Every good DM I know basically ignores alignment and gives characters at least a hint at a realistic set of motivations. A few months ago I ran The Sunless Citadel for a group that I recruited on this site, and one of the characters in that module is a were-rat (Alignment: Always lawful evil according the 3rd ed monster manual) known as the rat king who attacks the players on sight, and the most memorable thing he can possibly do is land a bite attack and make a character roll a fort save against lycanthropy.

In my interpretation, the rat king was a solo adventurer who had also come to the ruins looking for the golden apple that cures all diseases. When they and the party first bumped into each other, they actually did shoot at each other - a result of everyone being on edge from fumbling around in the dark, fighting skeletons - but when they and the party realized that they didn't actually have to kill each other, they stopped fighting and talked it out. The rat king joined the party, helped them fight some actual non-sapient monsters and capture the necromancer at the bottom of the dungeon, and then at the end of the adventure the party rewarded him by giving him the golden apple to cure his lycanthropy.

...which he didn't actually want to do, so he pocketed it with a "...thanks!" and then ran off with the valuable loot before they could change their mind. Way more interesting of a side story than "a big rat jumps out at you, roll initiative", and it played out just because I asked myself "what would this character be doing in this dungeon" and played them accordingly.

I say this loving Baldur's Gate 3, but it was super disturbing to me that all the goblins are treated as straight up evil to the point where you're allowed to kill goblin children without consequence.

for those unfamiliar:

Q&A with Gary Gygax, Part II | Wed Jun 22, 2005 1:54 pm

Paladins are not stupid, and in general there is no rule of Lawful Good against killing enemies. The old addage about nits making lice applies. [emphasis mine] Also, as I have often noted, a paladin can freely dispatch prisoners of Evil alignment that have surrrendered and renounced that alignment in favor of Lawful Good. They are then sent on to their reward before thay can backslide :lol:

Cheers, Gary [Gygax]

that's a particularly chosen turn of phrase, innit? comes from the sand creek massacre in which hundreds of people, mostly women and children, were murdered and mutilated by white settlers.

In November, 1864, a group of Colorado volunteers, under the command of Colonel John M. Chivington (1821-1894), fell on a group of Cheyennes at Sand Creek, where they had gathered under the governor's protection. "We must kill them all, big and small," he told his men. "Nits make lice" (nits are the eggs of lice).

anyway you're exactly right and it's one of the reasons i've pretty much stopped played d&d and pathfinder.

The race trope in D&D was inherited from Tolkein's racializations in his LOTR. To preface, I don't care for the work nor for the author. LOTR was way before my time and I never vibed with the weird insistence from the r/fantasy crowd that I need to "like" it to get their "fantasy fan starter pack."

Tolkien was a massive racist POS for the racializing and racial coding in his works. Orcs are, by his own admission, inspired by 19th and 20th European racial caricatures of Asian and African peoples. He sees no problem with characterizing them all as canonically irredeemable and the definition of "evil," this coming from a clown who apparently professed to be a "Roman Catholic," who should then know then the importance of the Christian redemption doctrine. He himself later admitted it was problematic that he antithetically made the orcs irredeemably evil when the LOTR is supposed to be a Christianity referenced work... but then did nothing about it.

Fantasy today portrays goblins and orcs and trolls and whatever races as inherently vile, down to even their physical appearance. This is a racial characterization that has absolutely no material basis in reality other than in the racist caricatures of every non Anglo-American race during Tolkein's time which he directly lifted from in his work. Seeing a non-white person back then produced the same conditioned revulsion that fantasy today makes people feel about those "monster" races.

It's very interesting that fantasy, starting with Tolkein in the mid 20th century, rather than casting off the racist tradition of racial caricaturization that authors could no longer get away with applying to real world peoples as an outdated and monstrous way of perceiving "other" peoples, simply continued it within the confines of "fictionalized" races (which conveniently have a massive spoonful of real world racial coding embedded, as Tolkein admitted).

All this would have just been a simple rant on a problematic media tradition if it isn't now being reverse applied onto real world designated enemy groups, like how Russians are now being called "orcs." Fantasy through this trope has basically preserved through fictionalized cryo-statis, the conviction that an entire race can be genocided so long as they look "monstrous" and act "pure evil" used at the height of 19th and 20th century settler-colonial imperialism.

Without exaggeration, I'd argue it has contributed to how easy it has been for regimes like Israel and their Western apologists to resurrect the "shut your brain off, the entire population is inherently monstrous and worth exterminating" mentality, embedded particularly in the younger generations through media consumption of the fantasy genre, by invoking atrocity propaganda (similar to how "evil" races always have the inciting incident in the first chapter/episode where they do "the bad thing" to justify their subsequent extermination by the "hero" protagonists) to justify the Palestinian genocide.

It's incredibly disturbing. Beyond the moral aspect: it's fucking lazy. It's like running a modern setting and everywhere you go there's ninjas to fight, and none of them have names or faces. Rather than making a world where different factions have different motivations, or this culture is superstitious about X because this thing happened a long time ago, it's just "the enemy race is here, eradicate them." Bland, repetitive campaign.

The “Beast tribes” in FF14 are portrayed that way.. until your character interacts and realizes you are also a colonizer to them, the same as the villains are to YOU.

Basically If a mainstream mmo has better handling and dynamics of orcs and kobolds than these books, the books are bad.

Yeah it sucks, what sucks more is how many people stubbornly ignore the parallels to real-world fascism. It's something I would never put in any of my creative works.

This is only tangentially related, but I just played my first campaign with my brothers and couple of friends, most of them completely new to ttrpg's, and it was pretty funny to see the borderline murder-hoboing coming from left-leaning guys testing the limits of the game with their chaotic whatever-is-funniest characters

The most memorable part of the campaign was when my brother-in-law, who we elected as the mayor of Neverwinter (because he missed the session and everyone present hated responsibility), was tasked with judging a guy for stealing bread from the local merchant to feed his kids

He ended up executing the merchant for hoarding food and giving the store to the thief so he could feed his kids

This and also the way "Bandits" are used as generically evil People You Can Always Kill

Just take the math stuff and reskin everything to your liking. It's fucking weird DnD has so much lore and shit anyway, aren't you supposed to be telling your own stories? Even if you wanna play a crunchy kill stab game, just tske the monster manual, cross out 'goblin' and replace it with 'revenant' or 'French person', things that don't have weird implications to kill indiscriminately.

Having a level 7 party get ambushed, defeated, captured and put on trial by goblins was a real fun way to fuck with ppl.

Don’t overthink it too bad, just have a good time.

Everyone's saying far more eloquent shit than me so I'll just add that I agree with you and beyond the "evil race" trope being problematic it's also lazy af

If you need "inherently evil" things in your game, D&D has literal demons who are the actual embodiment of cosmic forces of evil. Seems like that should be enough. Just let the bugbears have a normal society.

I've had this conversation a good dozen times; always evil races put me off games real hard sometimes. When I run standard fantasy settings in RPGs, even fi there are like "orc raiders" or what have you, they at least have reasons for doing what they do! If you're a bunch of mercenary adventurers, no matter how "good" you are, you're probably going to run into someone you are at odds with enough to come to blows with. I don't see why so many people are attached to "the orcs are evil because they are", it strikes me as such a boring excuse.

This issue is also why I love running the FFG Star Wars rpg, because aside from the built in huge narrative flexibility, you've got the blatantly Nazi Empire and shit like pirate slavers who are not a problem to blast on sight. Even fun for campaigns where the party are playing morally ambiguous smugglers and pirates, since they inevitably end up shooting the fascists anyway! Hell, I've run setups for "evil" party campaigns (playing sith, inquisitor recruits etc) with 100% expectations for the players to defect and start shooting fascists, because there's been a 100% success record of that happening in every "evil" themed campaign too.

1000% correct, death to D&D and the Forgotten Realms

Removing alignment as a core feature is one of the best changes dnd ever made. The creepy trope ontologically evil races seems like a holdover from that. At least more "humanoid" races like drow aren't usually treated like that any more, but stuff like gnolls is still fair game. (Not that how drow society is written isn't still incredibly off-putting, but that's a different issue.)

In my Comrades campaign we are playing a revolutionary cell in a WWI type society premised on the idea that LOTR is war propaganda made to dehumanize orcs, goblins, dark elves and wildfolk. Gotta overthrow the dark lord without falling prey to the other imperialists somehow.

Meanwhile my pathfinder DM was very skeptical of my request to play a goblin John Brown who believes Hadregush is a god of liberation and wants to create a free society for oppressed peoples. Maybe that's a lot to ask mechanically or something but I'm pushing back as hard as I can against the racial mechanics built into this system.

Years ago I had a campaign idea where the players would have to play as goblins with a homeland under harsh dwarven colonialism, with lots of gobbo guerrilla action

I don't really know how to articulate this, but I think there's something wrong with 5e at least and maybe ttrpgs in general at a very fundamental level. So many issues with it that people bring up make me think that it's less a bug and more likely the point of the game. Also, no quarter is the default for DnD.

The old pillars of high fantasy need to be torn down. I couldn't get into the genre for the longest time simply because, for something that is supposed to be about imagination, it's mired in orthodoxy that relies on just this sort of unimaginative thinking.

Yeah it sucks. And as long as the main verb in the popular games is hit with sword or blast with fireball, it's going to reproduce the same problem, even if the word "race" is crossed over and replaced with "culture".