Of the 'good' (approved for PC use, unlike those icky orcs and goblins) races, dwarves and gnomes specifically have race hatred built into their game mechanics.
They hate goblinoids and / or kobolds with such intensity, that even populations of those races who have never seen a goblinoid or kobold, due to their location, train their children fanatically in techniques to kill them.
And the 'evil' races? Goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, kobolds, even the downright malicious ones like bugbears that get off on scaring people to death? No race hatred bonuses at all. No parents waking them up in the night and drilling them to fight their hated racial enemies.
Let's see:
[Hobgoblins] generally need little reason to declare war, but more often than not the reason is to capture new slaves - life as a slave in a hobgoblin lair is brutal and short, and new slaves are always needed to replace those who fall or are eaten.
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Slaves with analytical minds are quite valued, and as such raids on dwarven cities commonplace.
Yeah, those hate-filled dwarves, the only reason they're training their children in hobgoblin-fighting techniques is because they're racist. It certainly couldn't be because they're afraid that their children might get eaten by your oh-so-tolerant hobgoblins.
I think you're being pretty disingenuous here.
1st and 2nd editions had many references to orcs, hobgoblins, etc.'s hatred of particular races (e.g. "If elves are nearby, hobgoblins will attack them in preference to any other troops because of the great hatred they bear."-Gary Gygax, Monster Manual (1978) p. 53), but those are mostly though not all gone in 3rd edition, I presume because of space restrictions.
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Still not a fan of the write-up orcs got in Advanced Races Guide, though; that's more general-purpose and the source of the unfortunate implications brought up earlier.
Oh man don't even get me started on that.
After the huge disappointment with Orcs of Golarion, I had high hopes for the ARG's Orc entry. Then it went and just copy-pasted Orcs of Golarion. :(
Sad thing is, the ARG's Half-Orc entry had more flavor and support for non-evil orcs and actual depth for their culture in one paragraph of background and origin info than the entirety than the entirety of the Orc entry and Orcs of Golarion.
I really hope Bastards of Golarion leans more towards the attitudes behind the Half-Orc entry...
it is stated in the bestiary that the hobgoblins are militarized slavemasters, but it doesn't state why they are so militaristic or why they feel the need the slaves.
the bestiary entry says what basically amounts to "they capture slaves for the lulz." i dislike the lack of a motive. a motive i feel, would be very important to fleshing them out.
but for most exotic races, especially ones initially designed as bags of experience points with loot attached, we never get a reason why they do what they do, just a handwave saying they do what they do
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Since monsters have a default alignment, you can simply say 99.99% of orcs are born-sociopaths. You might rescue the infants, attempt to raise them to be something better, but the effort is ultimately futile.
The one Orc in a thousand who has the potential to be something other than what he was born to be, certainly makes for an interesting character, but turning that into the norm kind of defeats the purpose of having generic evil monster races in the game.There's a purpose to it?
Sorry, they aren't born evil. Nothing is. That makes no sense. It's culture. They LEARN it, and they can unlearn it, or learn differently. Heck, if you think about it, they can't even be considered evil your way because morality is a choice; if you're 'born evil', you can't make moral choice. You're just a puppet, an automaton.
Everything's culture then? We, and all possible fictional sentients, are born as blank slates?
I'm no expert, but that's not at all my understanding of the current state of the nature vs nurture debate.
The idea that there is a "nature vs nurture debate" has been overthrown by post-structural ideas about social construction. To put it simply, whatever "nature" or "nurture" are, both are made intelligible objects of scientific study through social practices, and thus the debate itself is part of the social construction of scientific knowledge. This means that even knowledge that purports to show innate characteristics (whether biological, learned, or social) are themselves socially constructed.
This is why many people have pointedly asked, "how do you know Orcs are inherently lazy or violent?" and "how do in-universe humans know Orcs are inherently lazy or violent?" It is because knowledge itself is socially constructed and thus is subject to the same kinds of interrogation we can subject anything socially constructed. Much of the theoretical foundation this comes from Thomas Kuhn, the work of Latour and Woolgar, and strong programme scholarship in the sociology of scientific knowledge.
Worrying over whether we are born "blank slates" is immaterial because we are born into a world that has already written onto us vast stores of knowledge. In the months proceeding our birth, much knowledge has already accrued about who we are to be. Things like race are written before hand onto the bodies of our parents and ancestors. Things like gender are written onto our bodies as we are born (alternatively, through technology some months prior). By the time the doctor has issued the birth certificate, who we are has been already rendered through social practices (whether scientific or not).
During the early 90s, a political crisis within the scientific community produced a moral panic that solidified a kind of naive scientific realism in the minds of professional scientists and laypeople alike. This is why people still talk about a "nature vs. nuture" debate: it assumes there is a discussion of conflict over innate vs. learned characteristics. It supposes a hierarchy of "permanentness" where innate biological "fact" is given the maximum weight and learned behavior is its binary opposite. This whole discussion occurs within finely defined rules which produce the very results that scientific realists wish to see: by placing the most intimate knowledge about ourselves within the preview of biomedical science, its methods justify its authority before any empirical evidence has been gathered.
The wider intellectual stage is that of scientific realists standing on one side gazing into the corner at their experiments, and anti-realists discussing the nuances of social life, whether scientific or not.
it is stated in the bestiary that the hobgoblins are militarized slavemasters, but it doesn't state why they are so militaristic or why they feel the need the slaves.
the bestiary entry says what basically amounts to "they capture slaves for the lulz." i dislike the lack of a motive. a motive i feel, would be very important to fleshing them out.
but for most exotic races, especially ones initially designed as bags of experience points with loot attached, we never get a reason why they do what they do, just a handwave saying they do what they do
I typically give goblins this creation myth:
There. All the motivation you need for them to be an ever-continuing threat in a neat little package ^^
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I don't necessarily find "all orcs are lazy, violent, and evil" racist so much as boring and a symptom of lazy writing. A species that is so hardcore chaotic evil as a whole wouldn't survive long...The whole culture is self destructive and would lose out to other less blood-thirsty races. It's really really hard to be a social species if there isn't at least basic altruism within your species.
I don't necessarily find "all orcs are lazy, violent, and evil" racist so much as boring and a symptom of lazy writing. A species that is so hardcore chaotic evil as a whole wouldn't survive long...The whole culture is self destructive and would lose out to other less blood-thirsty races. It's really really hard to be a social species if there isn't at least basic altruism within your species.
the orcs would destroy their own kin if they were chaotic evil as a whole and wouldn't make it past the 5th generation.
I don't necessarily find "all orcs are lazy, violent, and evil" racist so much as boring and a symptom of lazy writing. A species that is so hardcore chaotic evil as a whole wouldn't survive long...The whole culture is self destructive and would lose out to other less blood-thirsty races. It's really really hard to be a social species if there isn't at least basic altruism within your species.
Can't it be both, of equal quantity?
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Can't it be both, of equal quantity?
I don't think it makes sense to talking about quantities for this. Like, you wouldn't say "orcs are 23.7% lazy writing, 13.5% Tolkien-derivative, 45.9% green skin and tusks are really cool...".
Can't it be both, of equal quantity?I don't think it makes sense to talking about quantities for this. Like, you wouldn't say "orcs are 23.7% lazy writing, 13.5% Tolkien-derivative, 45.9% green skin and tusks are really cool...".
Everything after the comma was to make everything before seem less abrasive. I was being silly with the quantity mention:
Yeah, heaven forbid that sentience should enter into the equation. *reverse epic double eye-roll with a half-twist*The orcs themselves are actually similar to number of human cultures that existed in real life.And here I was thinking that orcs are imaginary. Silly me.
It's actually pretty funny. I expect none of you would call it evil if a party of PC's killed an man-eating tiger. If it turns out she's a tigress with cubs, I doubt many of you would think that killing the cubs, or leaving them to starve, would be an ethical issue. In real life we often put tiger cubs down due to lack of homes deemed "suitable" for them, even though most tigers that are kept by people who know what they're doing don't hurt people, and there are skilled people who would like to keep tigers but aren't allowed to. But anthropomorphize that tiger, make it stand on two legs and wield tools using its opposable thumbs and give it human-like vocal cords, and all of a sudden it's "killing babies ZMG!"
Sentience isn't a thing. There are no scientific measurements of "sentience". Intelligence is less badly defined, but it's still something greyscale, not something a creature has or doesn't have. You (and when I say "you" here I am referring to all of our society) are basically making a circular argument where you define creatures that look sufficiently like "us" as "sentient" and then say it's "evil" to kill the young of "sentient" creatures. But there's no inherent reason, at least in a fantasy world, why a creature couldn't be capable of (instinctively?) using tools but otherwise not having higher "intelligence" than a tiger (which are actually pretty bright).
Yeah, heaven forbid that sentience should enter into the equation. *reverse epic double eye-roll with a half-twist*The orcs themselves are actually similar to number of human cultures that existed in real life.And here I was thinking that orcs are imaginary. Silly me.
It's actually pretty funny. I expect none of you would call it evil if a party of PC's killed an man-eating tiger. If it turns out she's a tigress with cubs, I doubt many of you would think that killing the cubs, or leaving them to starve, would be an ethical issue. In real life we often put tiger cubs down due to lack of homes deemed "suitable" for them, even though most tigers that are kept by people who know what they're doing don't hurt people, and there are skilled people who would like to keep tigers but aren't allowed to. But anthropomorphize that tiger, make it stand on two legs and wield tools using its opposable thumbs and give it human-like vocal cords, and all of a sudden it's "killing babies ZMG!"
Sentience isn't a thing. There are no scientific measurements of "sentience". Intelligence is less badly defined, but it's still something greyscale, not something a creature has or doesn't have. You (and when I say "you" here I am referring to all of our society) are basically making a circular argument where you define creatures that look sufficiently like "us" as "sentient" and then say it's "evil" to kill the young of "sentient" creatures. But there's no inherent reason, at least in a fantasy world, why a creature couldn't be capable of (instinctively?) using tools but otherwise not having higher "intelligence" than a tiger (which are actually pretty bright).
Intelligence is a statistical score in Pathfinder. Find me a living creature from a Paizo book capable of using tools that has an Int less than 3.
Sentience isn't a thing. There are no scientific measurements of "sentience".
Y'know, something doesn't have to be subject to scientific measurement to be a thing.
Intelligence is a statistical score in Pathfinder. Find me a living creature from a Paizo book capable of using tools that has an Int less than 3.
Gorillas. Int 2, use tools.
Intelligence is a statistical score in Pathfinder. Find me a living creature from a Paizo book capable of using tools that has an Int less than 3.Gorillas. Int 2, use tools.
I just checked the beastiary entry for them and it doesn't mention this.
Do you have a quote for me from a different book that backs what you say?
You're arguing for a fantasy world creature of less-than-human intelligence (which is below Int 3) that can use tools in a discussion of Pathfinder races. I need you to find something from that same fantasy world that proves what you are saying.
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Intelligence is a statistical score in Pathfinder. Find me a living creature from a Paizo book capable of using tools that has an Int less than 3.Gorillas. Int 2, use tools.
To be fair, I think this is PF undervaluing Gorillas' intelligence due to the max animal intelligence being 2, more than anything else.
To be fair, I think this is PF undervaluing Gorillas' intelligence due to the max animal intelligence being 2, more than anything else.Intelligence is a statistical score in Pathfinder. Find me a living creature from a Paizo book capable of using tools that has an Int less than 3.Gorillas. Int 2, use tools.
Oh, it definitely is. Real-life gorillas taught sign language have been shown to be capable of communicating concepts on the same level as human children.
The difficulties come in how they communicate those concepts; repeated work with them shows their brains deal with concepts in a way different from our's.
Which is part of why they're beginning to think a Star Trek-style universal translator would be impossible.
So, really, gorillas are probably actually Int 4 or Int 5.
As it should be remembered, Pathfinder and D+D are essentially descended from Wargames where alignment was just a banner to assign counters to opposing army units. Roleplaying is still an evolving process of adding dimension to something that originally had no more depth than that. Races are assigned an "evil" tag to make easy simple games of Hero Vs. Monster. D+D was never intended to have the depth or story complexity that would later arise in games such as White Wolf's Storyteller.why must we have Generic "X race is always evil?" any of the PC races could be used as a stand in.
Then I'm pleased to take the game and drag it kicking and screaming into the 21st Century.
Sentience isn't a thing.
Wow. Just ... wow. My brain struggles to comprehend how in the world you could come up with a sentence like that with a straight face.
It's called an abstract noun. Here, try this.
http://www.k12reader.com/abstract-nouns/
1st and 2nd editions had many references to orcs, hobgoblins, etc.'s hatred of particular races (e.g. "If elves are nearby, hobgoblins will attack them in preference to any other troops because of the great hatred they bear."-Gary Gygax, Monster Manual (1978) p. 53), but those are mostly though not all gone in 3rd edition, I presume because of space restrictions.
Or because it was stupid.
I'm going to have to play my LG* Gnoll barbarian now, out of pure spite.
In Golarion. Doing Rise of the Rune Lords.
*House rules, deal with it.
This is the sticking point. As MagusJanus rightly pointed out earlier, when creating fantasy races, we draw inspiration from real-world groups of humans. Let's look at how orcs are described. Orcs are described as inherently violent and aggressive. They are the intellectual inferiors of humans. They've an ingrained laziness. They are uncivilized. They are savage. If this sounds like colonialist era racism, that's because it is. The difference is that instead of attributing these characteristics to a real-world group, orcs are the Other in this case.Not just Colonial-era; replace "orcs" with "Africans" or "African Americans." Then you hit racism that's a lot more recent.
Well, while that is the popular one, you could just inset non-European group X really. That is how I found it with the delightfully postcolonial perspective presented in the bestiary entry for lizardfolk.
So anyway, what's the answer? We've gone far beyond "It's bad to kill orc babies". We're now in "It's bad to portray orcs or any other humanoid race as inferior or evil at all", whether it's cultural or inherent. We'd better chance the mechanics so orcs don't get the penalties to Int and Wis. Not sure about the other humanoids.
I actually like the mental penalties that orcs face. This actually hits home their history as residents of the darklands during the Age of Darkness. I mean, have you actually tried looking at the stated out races with a clear history of living in the underdark? This includes orcs, drow, and even more core races such as dwarves. Other than drow, every one of them have penalties to CHA (sometimes massively so). This reflects how every race faced massive degenerative effects while living in those harsh lands.
In the same way that drow carry a small sense of tragedy since they descend from the elves that refused to abandon the people of this planet, orcs suffer from the continued scars of that age. While dwarves have been allowed to move on and rejoin society (due mostly because their experience in mining and as smiths provided them something to trade for entrance into society), the orcs must live harsh lives gained as either hunter-gatherers, or as raiders of civilized lands. Due to the conditions that formed their physiological and cultural states, they are forced into becoming the 'monsters' of the civilized races. I mean, they might have never even bothered coming to the surface it wasn't for the dwarves' Quest for Sky.
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Do you have a quote for me from a different book that backs what you say?
A quick Google search showed that real-world gorillas use tools. That's what I meant.
But, to try to phrase my points better, this is a fantasy game, and orcs and the others are imaginary creatures. So a GM can say "I'm following canon, which says X, and based on that I'm going to say orcs are not inherently evil", and that's fine. Or a GM can say "I don't find inherently evil humanoids plausible, so none of the 'races' in my game will be inherently evil" and that's fine too. But it's also fine for a GM to say "In my house setting, 'orcs' are 'inherently evil' (which means, for example, that they think that killing other sentients is amusing, are incapable of seeing anything wrong with it, and regardless of their upbringing they will end up trying to kill innocents for fun), so there's nothing wrong with killing orc pups, which shouldn't be mistaken for 'babies'" and that would also be OK. Arguing "a humanoid species that we can communicate with that is inherently evil is impossible, and if you play that way at your table you're doing it wrong" is silly when you're talking about a completely imaginary species in a completely imaginary setting, and especially when you consider that "evil" is a social construct.
Arguing "a 'race' that was actually sociopathic/evil like that would kill itself off in a few generations", well, I tend to agree with that, actually. And I find it hard to imagine a species that's good enough at tool use to create and use swords and plate armor but isn't "intelligent" evolving in reality. But, fantasy.
D&D/Pathfinder's scale of intelligence is not realistic at all. But, then again, this is a game where cheetahs use claw attacks.
It's kind of funny that we have some people explaining post-structural theory in the same thread as other people are outraged that anyone should think that "sentience" exists as something other than a social construct. A very self-serving social construct, I might add.
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Thorri, you make a very, very excellent point.
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Fun fact: placing baby mice in the care of a neglectful mouse mother appears to cause an epigenetic change resulting in neglectful mothering being passed on to later mouse generations. Nurture can influence nature.
Sentience isn't a thing. There are no scientific measurements of "sentience".
We've only been studying sentience / consciousness scientifically for a few decades. Pretty sure it took people longer than that to figure out how to properly measure, say, electricity. Just because we haven't got a solid empirical theory of sentience doesn't mean it definitely doesn't exist.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if we did figure out how to measure it and a good chunk of the animal kingdom turned out to be sentient. Not just primates. Crows are crazy smart. Maybe even octopi.
That is a terrible reason to throw out the alignment system, you just made all your PCs Chaotic Neutral..I would probably not have my players find a group of goblin babies after killing all of the combative adults because it puts the group in a situation that is almost impossible to resolve due to the alignment system.Another very good reason to throw out the alignment system.
Do you know what your alignment is? Can people of an opposing alignment smite you for your actions? Does anyone on earth know what their alignment is with any certainty? Does this mean that everyone on earth is chaotic neutral?
Without morality defined absolutely by the nature of the world, we still look for moral guidance from different sets of principles. Some people risk their lives or livelihoods to help others, others hurt and kill out of fear or for personal advantage or fun. Some conform, others rebel. Some people treat animals better than they treat other people. People don't need physical moral forces to act from consistent moral frameworks.
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In the same way that drow carry a small sense of tragedy since they descend from the elves that refused to abandon the people of this planet, orcs suffer from the continued scars of that age. While dwarves have been allowed to move on and rejoin society (due mostly because their experience in mining and as smiths provided them something to trade for entrance into society), the orcs must live harsh lives gained as either hunter-gatherers, or as raiders of civilized lands. Due to the conditions that formed their physiological and cultural states, they are forced into becoming the 'monsters' of the civilized races. I mean, they might have never even bothered coming to the surface it wasn't for the dwarves' Quest for Sky.
Even worse, orcs never even would have heard of Rovagug if not for first contact with humans during the Age of Darkness.
They were also described as having their young, elderly, and other non-combatants go ahead of them while the ablebodied guarded their retreat from the genocidal dwarves. So whatever society they had back then wasn't complete crap.
Though if they can produce people like the father of that recent half-orc paladin and enable the more peaceful unions mentioned in the ARG's half-orc entry, then there must be some non-crap orc cultures still out there.
I'm really not a fan of Tolkien's "always CE orcs", and as such have changed how Belkzen is portrayed. It's mostly tribal, drawing a lot from my knowledge of the European goths and Vandals, granting them a bit more variety in their alignments and social structure.
They have had run ins with Lastwall, Varisia, and Ustalav - some of that aggression has been push back from those lands attempting to colonize Belkzen over the centuries, and some of it was started by the orcs...sort of like the relationship between the goths and Romans.
I plan on having my players meet with a group of orcs from Belkzen led by an aged LG orc magus...
Thorri, you make a very, very excellent point.
Thank you. I enjoy your posts. For what it's worth, I agree that the solution to my alleged discrepancy between peoples' treatment of the tiger cubs and the "anthropomorphized tiger"/"orc" babies is to treat the tiger cubs better. I feel strongly that our society treats animals much more cruelly than is "right". In the unlikely event that I ever run a level 20 mythic game, and it's a homebrew where orcs are "inherently evil", I might very well have an adventure where the PC's have a chance to break the enchantment that is making the world's orcs "inherently evil".
"Good" PC's often act as some combination of soldier/cop/wildlife control officer.
We've only been studying sentience / consciousness scientifically for a few decades. Pretty sure it took people longer than that to figure out how to properly measure, say, electricity. Just because we haven't got a solid empirical theory of sentience doesn't mean it definitely doesn't exist.
Though I wouldn't be surprised if we did figure out how to measure it and a good chunk of the animal kingdom turned out to be sentient. Not just primates. Crows are crazy smart. Maybe even octopi.
Oh, I completely agree with all of that. I'll go further and say that I think it's a safe bet that orcas would turn out to be sentient. But, as things stand at the moment, we each know ourself to be sentient, we infer that other human beings are sentient, and we can only guess at whether members of other species are sentient. I don't think that's a good basis for making our perception of sentience a prerequisite for treating other species decently.
It ends up being that you just can't portray Orcs as bloodthirsty monsters and interesting people at the same time.
Now THAT is certainly true!
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I think the biggest problem with all of these alignment dicussions is that people tend to judge action based on their onw experience/moral etc.
But Pathfinder isn't the Earth!
A Paladin of Immodae rides into a a small town, showing who he is.
He approaches the house of a local woman and drag her onto the street. Then he says "This is the evil witch of Blackwood, she's guilty of murdering innocent people" and then he behead her.
In this situtation in Golarion (and most other D&D Worlds too) no one of the villagers will raise their voice, try to intervene or try to attack the Paladin. Also this act is not evil!
Why?
Because Gods are real! Good and Evil is real! and anyone in this world knows that. The Paladin is a direct servant of Immodae and by this he can judge and execute in her name and NO ONE will question it. Why? Because if he wouldn't act in her name, the god will intervene!
So please try to keep your modern moral/worldview away from these kind of posts.
@TE:
This Death sentence was spoken and executed by a servant of a good god, so where is the problem? He has the god given right to speak justice and if needed also execute the judgment.
Also as far as I understood the Orcs attacked a village and were bound to some demons, so two crimes, at least one major (demon pacting) so this action was absolut good.
Heh, this is why in rpgs you tend to have token kids/babies to further plot, but otherwise you operate in a magical setting that doesn't have things like characters ever needing to poop or even bathe, and similarly magically doesn't happen to have kids so scenarios of "Should we murder/cleanse this pre-school?" never come up.
If you want to bring that stuff in, in a way you're purposefully exploiting the idea that the alignment system is kinda screwy and incomplete (and has been for like 3-4 decades) and its going to be a pain when you try to figure it out at the grey levels.
"but its my game!" some might say. "I want to test the limits of alignment and consequences for choices made!" Well, that's great, but in a game where players themselves don't have to really feel/live with the consequences, its hard to expect that from their characters.
By that I mean, I will continue playing a particular character until it is no longer fun for me to play that character, and bearing no real significant connection to the character other than personal whim and interest, I will then make a new character. And if i've just come from an experience where I feel the GM kinda dicked me around with alignment stuff, guess what, if I do play with the group again I'll make a character that won't have those same limitations.
Side note, when you start seeing alot of CN characters in a group, it might be a sign that the players are getting tired of Alignment issues :)
It's also not very clear if they have actual kids or not (Ie they emerge in full adult form) I certainly dont remember any mentions of none adult orcs in any Tolken fiction or films ive seen.I could see a bunch of rangers from Gondor burning a nest of orcs to the ground, babies and all. But then again Tolkien seems to cleverly avoid the issue of baby monsters, and his monsters seem to sprout from the ground fully grown (as per Two Towers movie).
Rangers from Lawful societies like Gondor would see it a duty to eradicate all monsters from their land. Not sure if it would be "good" or "evil", but certainly along the line of lawful along the lines of animal population control, bear relocation or deer hunting quotas...
Remember that the Orcs of Middle Earth were created and controlled to be evil. They didn't have free will and a choice.
There is a passage in the Silmarillion that says basically that they are living beings like elves and humans. And a couple others about them breeding.
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Execution for crimes is proper treatment.We need rules for "My Little Pathfinder" for those that think the bad guys just need a hugThere's a world of difference between thinking bad guys need a hug and treating prisoners properly (especially considering you accepted the surrender).
Behaving evilly towards Orcs doesn't make you much different than them.
And what was the crime here? Who has the ruling power, and how was that settled?
The PC's where in the orc's settlement, from what I've understood. Did the orc break the laws of their settlement, or was the PC's the actual criminals here? What is more likely for the orcs to have, a law that says "humans aren't allowed to kill orcs" or "orcs aren't allowed to take stuff that humans claim they own"?
The argument "execution for crimes is proper treatment" can actually excuse any action at all, you just claim that they have broken the law you have made. In any setting where there are rulers, what legal systems are mostly used comes down to who's got the most military power. And in my book, Might Makes Right isn't a good sentiment - it's an evil one.
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Heh, this is why in rpgs you tend to have token kids/babies to further plot, but otherwise you operate in a magical setting that doesn't have things like characters ever needing to poop or even bathe, and similarly magically doesn't happen to have kids so scenarios of "Should we murder/cleanse this pre-school?" never come up.
If you want to bring that stuff in, in a way you're purposefully exploiting the idea that the alignment system is kinda screwy and incomplete (and has been for like 3-4 decades) and its going to be a pain when you try to figure it out at the grey levels.
DM's usually don't put that stuff in to exploit the alignment system, they're putting it in because they want moral dilemmas and gray areas - regardless of whether there is an alignment system or not. The issue is that the alignment system makes the result of those moral dilemmas have down-written statistical consequences, which makes the whole thing much more complicated because you need to determine whether or not it'll change the alignment "statistic".
DM's put the stuff in to make players think: "could my alter ego really do this? could she live with herself if she did this?"
Not to make them think: "will my alignment drop if my character does this?"
Most games I've played (and ran) has had plenty of kids around, but not usually for battles (at least when the PC's succeeded).
The reason why you don't have "my character has to poop" is because pooping doesn't aid in defining the world, the story, or the characters. Having children (and "civilians" in general) does all of those things.
"but its my game!" some might say. "I want to test the limits of alignment and consequences for choices made!" Well, that's great, but in a game where players themselves don't have to really feel/live with the consequences, its hard to expect that from their characters.
Your group might be different than the ones I've played with (and it can change culturally between areas as well - I know the general roleplaying community in the US is different to that here in my country) but in my experience, players tend to want to play their characters as their characters, and are fully aware of consequences that might come out of it. In roleplaying-focused groups that don't solely have the game as a tactical combat game that seems to be part of the reason why you play an RPG rather than say a wargame.
Side note, when you start seeing alot of CN characters in a group, it might be a sign that the players are getting tired of Alignment issues :)
I find these claims so weird, because characters have personalities outside of their alignment, you know. Yeah, when I play Fable I can go from angelic good to demonically evil in a few hours because I got bored and wanted to do something else, but that's not the reason people tend to play PnP RPG's, is it?
In the same way that drow carry a small sense of tragedy since they descend from the elves that refused to abandon the people of this planet, orcs suffer from the continued scars of that age. While dwarves have been allowed to move on and rejoin society (due mostly because their experience in mining and as smiths provided them something to trade for entrance into society), the orcs must live harsh lives gained as either hunter-gatherers, or as raiders of civilized lands. Due to the conditions that formed their physiological and cultural states, they are forced into becoming the 'monsters' of the civilized races. I mean, they might have never even bothered coming to the surface it wasn't for the dwarves' Quest for Sky.Even worse, orcs never even would have heard of Rovagug if not for first contact with humans during the Age of Darkness.
They were also described as having their young, elderly, and other non-combatants go ahead of them while the ablebodied guarded their retreat from the genocidal dwarves. So whatever society they had back then wasn't complete crap.
Though if they can produce people like the father of that recent half-orc paladin and enable the more peaceful unions mentioned in the ARG's half-orc entry, then there must be some non-crap orc cultures still out there.
Now the question is where are those orcs hiding...
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...But in the end we are talking about a fantasy creature in an imaginary world.
No one is disputing that we're talking about fantasy, so yeah... I don't know where that came from.
An orc (or an ogre, troll, goblin, harpy) doesn't have to possess a baseline human psychology. As a fantasy creature its mind should be somewhat alien.
If every monster is really nothing more than a human dressed up in some unusual fleshy costume, then the fantasy world becomes rather bland.
What's this presupposition that everything must be referenced to being human: my point was that things are being referenced towards being a person. Maybe at the end of the day we realize that every human is just a monster dressed up in a fleshy costume, and the interesting question is which monsters are people?
The real world nature versus nurture discussion is irrelevant, because in an imaginary world we (that is, each DM individually) can definitively say which applies to an invented monstrous creature.
But the fact is that this discussion, in part, questions whether "biology is destiny" concepts are coherent. I was responding to that rather obvious question.
I think the biggest problem with all of these alignment dicussions is that people tend to judge action based on their onw experience/moral etc.
But Pathfinder isn't the Earth!
A Paladin of Immodae rides into a a small town, showing who he is.
He approaches the house of a local woman and drag her onto the street. Then he says "This is the evil witch of Blackwood, she's guilty of murdering innocent people" and then he behead her.In this situtation in Golarion (and most other D&D Worlds too) no one of the villagers will raise their voice, try to intervene or try to attack the Paladin. Also this act is not evil!
But the thing is that this situation makes sense only because we have real world notions of "guilty" and "innocent" that explain and justify the actions of the paladin. I don't buy the argument that somehow the alignment system comes first in the moral reasoning, because it certainly doesn't come first when determining things like guilt or innocence.
We depend on things like our own experiences and morals to make the fantasy world intelligible. This is how fantasy works.
Even worse, orcs never even would have heard of Rovagug if not for first contact with humans during the Age of Darkness.
They were also described as having their young, elderly, and other non-combatants go ahead of them while the ablebodied guarded their retreat from the genocidal dwarves. So whatever society they had back then wasn't complete crap.
Though if they can produce people like the father of that recent half-orc paladin and enable the more peaceful unions mentioned in the ARG's half-orc entry, then there must be some non-crap orc cultures still out there.
My head cannon for why Orcs are the way they are is twofold:
With the Star-towers failing, Rovagug essence is contaminating the Darklands, and that taint is the reason why we got Drow/Duergar/Darkfolk/etc. That taint has also affected orcs to a degree, although it lessons with more time spent on the surface (See Orcs adopting Gorum). Really...pretty much every major civilization in the Inner Sea Region in the Darklands is a bit darker than there surface relatives. Sviferneblin (or however you spell it) are not evil, but they are far more dour than surface gnomes. Ratfolk might be the only race that is immune, but then again given the kind of living conditions rats can survive and flourish, that might not be a surprise.
Secondly...Orcs probably had a bit more sophisticated culture (They were one of the most dominant if not dominant race in Nar-voth), but the Dwarves pretty much smashed that to hell.
In the same way that drow carry a small sense of tragedy since they descend from the elves that refused to abandon the people of this planet, orcs suffer from the continued scars of that age. While dwarves have been allowed to move on and rejoin society (due mostly because their experience in mining and as smiths provided them something to trade for entrance into society), the orcs must live harsh lives gained as either hunter-gatherers, or as raiders of civilized lands. Due to the conditions that formed their physiological and cultural states, they are forced into becoming the 'monsters' of the civilized races. I mean, they might have never even bothered coming to the surface it wasn't for the dwarves' Quest for Sky.Even worse, orcs never even would have heard of Rovagug if not for first contact with humans during the Age of Darkness.
They were also described as having their young, elderly, and other non-combatants go ahead of them while the ablebodied guarded their retreat from the genocidal dwarves. So whatever society they had back then wasn't complete crap.
Though if they can produce people like the father of that recent half-orc paladin and enable the more peaceful unions mentioned in the ARG's half-orc entry, then there must be some non-crap orc cultures still out there.
Oh, i didn't actually have the book that went into details like that. So the orcs were hit with a double whammy as far as their civilization goes. First, they were forced into the physically, psychologically, and culturally draining environment of the underdark by earthfall.
Well, presumably, at least. My limited resources haven't found anything about what their history was before the age of darkness. Possibly because all the historians were killed by the second disaster: genocide by the 'lawful good' dwarves.
Now I'll admit, the dwarves are also victims of living in that harsh environment. Everyone from the underdark seem to come an attitude of "don't mess with me, or I'll cut you". Even the lawful good gods and codes of their paladins still come off as rather old testament, with all the fire and brimestone they are told to pile on the entire civilization of the 'enemy'. With some of the freaky junk they have as a neighbors, it is not entirely uncalled for at times.
Thorri, you make a very, very excellent point.Thank you. I enjoy your posts. For what it's worth, I agree that the solution to my alleged discrepancy between peoples' treatment of the tiger cubs and the "anthropomorphized tiger"/"orc" babies is to treat the tiger cubs better. I feel strongly that our society treats animals much more cruelly than is "right". In the unlikely event that I ever run a level 20 mythic game, and it's a homebrew where orcs are "inherently evil", I might very well have an adventure where the PC's have a chance to break the enchantment that is making the world's orcs "inherently evil".
"Good" PC's often act as some combination of soldier/cop/wildlife control officer.
That is an interesting world concept, and I'll have to try it sometime.
I can say that, in one of my campaigns, the player characters turned an entire tribe of orcs good; they ran across an orc in a dungeon that had some decency and he helped them. They, in turn, later helped him take over his tribe. Well, he turned his tribe from raiding caravans to protecting them... and once the orcs saw that protecting the caravans got them a more reliable source of food and supplies, they became enthusiastic about it. Several real-life weeks later and the orcs are bartering with a local town for farming supplies, materials to build with, and craftsmen to show them how to build.
The orc encounter was supposed to be a one-shot, not the campaign. I just didn't want them to get slaughtered by the kobolds I had put in the dungeon. But the players had a lot of fun redeeming an entire tribe of orcs.
But Pathfinder isn't the Earth!
Between the write-ups on World-building and the maps I've seen of Golarion (plus what I've read about Golarion), I'm actually thinking this isn't true. So far, it's showing every hint that, at default, Pathfinder is Earth... just a different version of it.
Interestingly, their section on planets is entirely wrong on the typical solar system make-up. They write from the perspective that Earth's solar system is the standard... it's not. In fact, every observation made of other solar systems has shown Earth's solar system to be an anomaly; typically, gas giants actually form closer to the sun than seen in our system while the rocky planets are usually farther out.
So, basically, their guide on creating planetary systems is just a guide on how to make different versions of our solar system.
Actually....Earth does exist as a separate entity in Pathfinder. You travel there in Reign of Winter. Baba Yaga was actually born on Earth for instance.
Incidentally..."Modern day" Golarion is actually time wise equal to 1918 on our planet.
Even worse, orcs never even would have heard of Rovagug if not for first contact with humans during the Age of Darkness.
Or the orcs never have heard of Rovagug, because not everybody uses Golarion for their campaign setting, and he doesn't exist.
Actually....Earth does exist as a separate entity in Pathfinder. You travel there in Reign of Winter. Baba Yaga was actually born on Earth for instance.
Incidentally..."Modern day" Golarion is actually time wise equal to 1918 on our planet.
Earth exists on an alternate plane in the Golarion cosmology. Pathfinder is a rules set, not a campaign setting.
I think the biggest problem with all of these alignment dicussions is that people tend to judge action based on their onw experience/moral etc.
But Pathfinder isn't the Earth!
A Paladin of Immodae rides into a a small town, showing who he is.
He approaches the house of a local woman and drag her onto the street. Then he says "This is the evil witch of Blackwood, she's guilty of murdering innocent people" and then he behead her.In this situtation in Golarion (and most other D&D Worlds too) no one of the villagers will raise their voice, try to intervene or try to attack the Paladin. Also this act is not evil!
Buuullllllllllllllcrap. Big, huge, steaming piles of pure unadulterated bullcrap.
Earth exists on an alternate plane in the Golarion cosmology. Pathfinder is a rules set, not a campaign setting.Actually....Earth does exist as a separate entity in Pathfinder. You travel there in Reign of Winter. Baba Yaga was actually born on Earth for instance.
Incidentally..."Modern day" Golarion is actually time wise equal to 1918 on our planet.
So, basically, an alternate material plane... which, in the rules set, is discussed as being essentially an alternate timeline or alternate dimension.
So, it pretty much goes back to Golarion being an alternate version of Earth, while at the same time established in the rules set as the default setting of Pathfinder.