The thing that annoys me most is that it's very easy to narratively justify having a group of enemies you can't bargain with, or that you should feel fine about killing in combat.

Nobody is gonna bat an eye at the GM creating a bunch of fascists to dumpster, or even a group of merciless bandits who raid the trade routes for their gain and amusement - giving villains agency in their evil acts is infinitely more interesting and it makes violence a more palatable narrative avenue.

Tying villainy to racialized "all orcs are born this way" tropes seems lazy and near impossible to pull off well unless you're really good at worldbuilding and have thought out the consequences of such a world element, and even then it still feels gross 99% of the time

[–] BeanisBrain@hexbear.net 30 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Nobody is gonna bat an eye at the GM creating a bunch of fascists to dumpster

I have a feeling the guy who made the linked comment might

But seriously, this is why the main enemies in my current homebrew project are

Automated weapons platforms
Territorial/aggressive animals
The soldiers of a fantasy counterpart British Empire

[–] Evilsandwichman@hexbear.net 22 points 3 months ago

The soldiers of a fantasy counterpart British Empire

People always claim that we all think of ourselves as 'the good guys', no one likes to think of themselves as evil, but the reality is much of the worst evils that have happened in this world came from people thinking they're superior and the people they're colonizing are inferior; good and evil didn't come into it, because no rational person commits the horrific acts that colonizers have without thinking of it as evil. I recall reading a quote from a British journal from someone involved in colonial India who said he felt the slaughter of all the men in this one village (it was retribution against Indian freedom fighters) was a waste; he said he didn't feel sorry for them and he didn't like them, just that the killing was a waste, which read to me of someone who could clearly tell what they were doing was evil but that he still believed they were superior and the people of India were inferior.

A better alignment system would instead look at cultures that think of themselves as superior and others as inferior, similar to libs and chuds who defend atrocities against non-Western countries as 'our way of life is better', but then inevitably if the game starts to look more like real life history the players would find themselves on the evil side. If you played a game that started you off in 1800's Britain (for a similar Western-centric setting similar to Middle Earth's Western Europe styled setting), your side would definitively be the bad guys and you'd have to commit the 'great evil' of turning on your Western culture (if you actually wanted to be the good guys). There were many people who 'went native' to join the communities they were supposed to be eradicating or helping in eradicating.

[–] NuraShiny@hexbear.net 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Yes. It is very easy to do this. My favorite way in this example would be to make the whole towns citizenry be mainly Orcs as well, who are enslaved by the boss of the mine who only cares about getting more ore out of the ground and who has the means to hire muscle to keep the town under control, until the heroes show up.

I really hate how little thought D&D puts into their evil races too. Orcs? They got an evil god they all worship, so they are evil. Don't worry about why the good races get a whole gaggle of gods while the Orcs get a racialized god that is only for them and also obviously terrible. Gnolls? They got their souls tied to a demon, so their are influenced by that and damned to evil. Goblins? They are just evil don't even worry about it. Trolls? They are hungy because regeneration and will eat anything. And so on and so on.

You could make good redemption arcs out of these and an author worth anything at all would do that. Imagine a group of PC Gnolls who somehow get their souls saved and set out to defeat their demon lord to save their whole race from it's terrible fate. Or a bunch of Orcs who dare ask "Hey is our god maybe not cool? Maybe we should look to other gods?". Or what would happen if Trolls had easy access to plentiful food...any one of these would make good stories to tell.

But adventure modules and D&D books so very rarely go there. They mostly just put these races into rooms in dungeons or into random overland encounter tables and then wonder why players learn the lesson that you should just kill them all.