Am I the only person who likes removal of evil races?
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In the end I think Tolkien’s orcs are just Nazis right?
The weirdness that a political/military movement got turned into a species somewhat explains the weird monoculture feel, all the orcs that weren’t fascist presumably ran away to neutral countries to avoid being conscripted or something.
Aren’t Tolkien’s orks corrupted elves, or is that just the uruk’hai (or how ever it’s spelled)? Either way, aren’t they basically cannonically self-selecting to be shitty? Even if there’s some lesser ork that’s just there, the fancy fallen elves have long since taken power for themselves and basically forced them to be shitheads. Or at least that explanation makes sense to me!
Not to excuse the behavior. After all, shitty rulers come about all the time. It behooves any populace to dethrone nonrepresentative shitlords.
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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.
The people who are whining about it are the ones who like D&D and therefore have opinions on it. If you don’t like D&D, you aren’t going to think this is interesting at all.
I have opinions but I also am tired of D&D so I dont engage with those. I might return to D&D if they make it a dungeon crawler but that’s definitely not going to happen
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I have a character I’d like to play in a one-shot someday. He’s a brutish, cruel and irredeemable orc bandit on a quest to enlighten the world about the virtues of orc culture, because he’s sick of humans thinking being an orc is what makes him a monster. He is a monster, but not because he’s an orc.
“Orcish poetry is so beautiful that many front-line orc soldiers comfort themselves by thinking about their memorial poem. Personally, I think poetry is for sissies, but most orcs disagree with me!”
One of my players is that. His parents were an orc and a bard so he’s trying to atone for what they’ve done
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“Grug brings dishonor on family! Grug’s parents no want grug speak like this. Grug supposed go be cleric or wizard like brother or philosopher like sister!”
Oh man, now there’s a take on Orks. They’re just a population that happens to suffer from higher-than-average rates of speech pathologies. They’re not evil. They just need speech therapy.
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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.
I like it. With the current rise of popularized fascist politics and extreme polarization, I feel like anything that leans toward nuance rather than essentialism is probably a good thing. The change to species also makes it a lot less awkward listening to D&D players talk about the game without saying things that come off as incredibly racist to anyone who doesn’t know the context.
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Oh man, now there’s a take on Orks. They’re just a population that happens to suffer from higher-than-average rates of speech pathologies. They’re not evil. They just need speech therapy.
See i was picturing a gangbanger whose siblings and parents have doctorates. This kid is talking like orcish Jrock while their parents are using perfect orcish and lamenting their kid having fallen in with a bad crowd.
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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.
They should have just axed the alignment system as a whole. It’s been wildly misunderstood for decades (cf. every alignment chart meme ever) while being overly simplistic at the same time. And it implies a universal morality system that doesn’t really work outside of dungeon crawls. It also has almost (?) no mechanical impact in 5e as is.
Might as well just assign star signs at this point, that’s probably a better descriptor at this point.
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One of my players is that. His parents were an orc and a bard so he’s trying to atone for what they’ve done
That’s kind of the opposite, actually. This guy absolutely doesn’t want to atone, but wants to make it clear that most other orcs have nothing to atone for. And the idea that a monster seeking recognition and a half-blood trying to atone for perceived sins of the father are “the same” because they’re both orcs is part of the problem.
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Oh man, now there’s a take on Orks. They’re just a population that happens to suffer from higher-than-average rates of speech pathologies. They’re not evil. They just need speech therapy.
They don’t even need speech disorders. They just aren’t native speakers, and orcish has wildly different gramatical structures to humanic (or “common” as humans call it). If you spoke orcish, they’d seem more like a race of poets.
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Aren’t Tolkien’s orks corrupted elves, or is that just the uruk’hai (or how ever it’s spelled)? Either way, aren’t they basically cannonically self-selecting to be shitty? Even if there’s some lesser ork that’s just there, the fancy fallen elves have long since taken power for themselves and basically forced them to be shitheads. Or at least that explanation makes sense to me!
Not to excuse the behavior. After all, shitty rulers come about all the time. It behooves any populace to dethrone nonrepresentative shitlords.
Yes, that’s the in-universe story. I more meant he based the idea of evil militarist/industrialist orks burning the entire world on the Nazis, so I jokingly suggested the orks were self selecting the same way the Nazis did, but in-universe they are of course just born evil.
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Yes, that’s the in-universe story. I more meant he based the idea of evil militarist/industrialist orks burning the entire world on the Nazis, so I jokingly suggested the orks were self selecting the same way the Nazis did, but in-universe they are of course just born evil.
I heard Tolkien regretted making Orcs inherently evil and was thinking of replacing that with something else, but I cannot find which letter was that in.
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They should have just axed the alignment system as a whole. It’s been wildly misunderstood for decades (cf. every alignment chart meme ever) while being overly simplistic at the same time. And it implies a universal morality system that doesn’t really work outside of dungeon crawls. It also has almost (?) no mechanical impact in 5e as is.
Might as well just assign star signs at this point, that’s probably a better descriptor at this point.
I love the idea of a TTRPG but instead of alignment it’s, “I actually need to be universally loved because I’m a Leo rising.”
