ttrpg

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.

It bugs me too which is why in one of the campaigns I'm in, I'm playing as a goblin whose main quest involves uniting various goblin tribes into a powerful army that can stand up to the other kingdoms of human or whatever. The idea is to show the complexities and otherwise unseen aspects of goblin society so they're not just low level fodder.

It felt so fucking unreal seeing how normally chill people can almost reproduce word for word the vile shit that Zionists are using right fucking now as a justification for mass murder and not have a single moment of "oh shit wait wtf am I saying".

this is simply the natural state of the mayo brain

You see, the mayo evolved in the tundras of ice age Europe, which were cold and dark. Food was scarce, and so to compensate for this, mayo tribes held much larger territorial areas. One square acre of land in Africa or India produces 10x more food than the same in ice age Europe. So tribes in these warmer and richer continents saw other foreign neighbors very often, and the most extreme violence was selected out over the generations--this never happened with Europe, so the descendants of these northern tribes retain the same atavistic behavior towards perceived strangers.

Ok what if i make the orcs the white people

Checkmate liberals

Thank you for this Ted Talk, comrade.

fwiw, I've never put up with this at my table and I've kicked people out for much less. kept the group pretty healthy.

I as a noble woman human arcane archer went into a bar where a barfight had erupted between goblins and human. 8 used all my multitarget ages to kill all the goblins, sparing the humans. I was immediately put in jail and they laughed at my 'goblins aren't people' defense. I out of character knew this, and knew it was only in this campaign for the day and not the long term. I myself have played a goblin bard and it's one of my favorite characters, this role-playing was all in good fun. I long ago abandoned races being inherently evil, but every now and then it's fun to play characters with those racial prejudices. (That is to say I think all racism is bad but acknowledge racial stereotypes are a thing and people hold biases and I try to make my characters true to life and definitely not all my characters are asshats like this)

If it makes you feel any better, most players and DM's rarely take the always chaotic evil nonsense seriously. I do still enjoy the Law vs. Chaos stuff, but we've all read a little Moorcock in middle school.

Honestly playing games from other franchises is probably the way around this. I am pretty sure Star Wars doesn't do this with aliens in their RPGs.

I am a big fan of fighting the space hippos that are meant to be a pastiche of the British Empire, also Mind Flayers as an example of the cyclical nature of collapse from an ever devouring empire. I do however like also showing that races aren't codified as evil and can have examples of those that disagree with the nature of their birth culture (Drow calling out Lolth as freaking evil or goblins that live in the city and vibe).