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In any debate, the most ignoble thing you can do is reduce your opponent's argument to a crude caricature.I think the issue is that quite a few gamers don't want orcs, goblins, etc. to be any sort of 'people,' they'd rather they be two-dimensional cardboard cut outs made out of evil and easily reduced into chunky bits of XP.Mine aren't necessarily nice. They are just not as savage. Think along the lines of Dominic Deegan's Orcs.
Isolationist Tribal People.
Two things.
1) I'm not sure if that was intentional humor, or irony, but in either case, it's funny.
2) Bear in mind that I love playing Warhammer Quest, and it has never, not once, occured to me while playing that game if Skavens or Snotlings or those rat-dudes have cultures or societies or feelings or kids at home, because Warhammer Quest is not a role-playing game and does not have philosophical concepts like 'alignment' built right into the system and has funky rules like 'if the light goes out, everybody dies.' D&D style games, do have role-playing and alignments, and, as such, I tend to try and pay at least cursory attention to them, and therefore not have my 'good' characters engage in wanton genocide because 'it's okay if they're evil / ugly / darker-skinned / less advanced.'
I'm all for either;
A) Getting rid of alignment entirely, and having 'good' people and 'evil' people be solely defined by those who behave in a good or evil manner, and not by those who scribble LG on their sheet, and then go on race-cleansing pograms that would make Hitler say, 'gosh, that's a little over the top, don't you think?'
B) Actually using the alignments as an indicator of what sorts of behaviors are acceptable and as something other than a measuring stick of who gets smited by what, and who is an acceptable target to home invade, murder and rob.
Make it mean something, or don't use it. S'all I'm saying.
'Goodness' and 'virtue' have been cheapened and devalued enough, I think. The D&D definition of good is grotesquely Orwellian.
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I'd rather have some range with orcs, goblins, and other races.
Not a fan at all of the way the game tends to go when entire races get hit with the Always Evil hammer.
Still holding out for the more even-handed and nuanced approach taken in the assimar and tiefling books gets used on those races that have gotten poor focus treatment already. Especially when some Paizo staff were unsatisfied with how some of those older books turned out.
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Do Paizo's modules and APs encourage the Orwellian version? I don't see it. I can't remember the last time I saw adventure that was just "There's some bad guys in the dungeon over there. I bet they have treasure."
I can. :(
And unfortunately the way morality is seen as being set up in the game is often a contributing factor to that. Sometimes it's allegedly good-races having racehate-based abilities. Sometimes it's entire races seeming to get hit by the Always Evil hammer. Sometimes it's the "s/he detects as evil, so we have to murder him/her!" attitude. Sometimes it's the bar for Good being set extremely low and devaluing things like compassion, mercy, and redemption. Having redemption as something you only get to hear about and hardly ever get to see in action(except to blow up in the players' faces) isn't really much help either.
I am so glad I am planning on releasing my own setting books...
I hate the Asinine Locked Alignment Crap.
EDIT: Better yet... Anyone know a good way to setup a Wiki/SRD style site?
EDIT2: What books you talking bout Willis--Err... Mikaze...
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I am so glad I am planning on releasing my own setting books...
I hate the Asinine Locked Alignment Crap.
EDIT: Better yet... Anyone know a good way to setup a Wiki/SRD style site?
EDIT2: What books you talking bout Willis--Err... Mikaze...
Orcs of Golarion, which was pretty much a 32 page essay on how you shouldn't bother playing an Orc in Golarion and did nothing to expand their culture beyond stereotypically evil and didn't present any possibilities for non-evil orcs except for two lines that somehow snuck in that could be interpreted as bucking the one-dimensional characterization that book largely sold. It was like an anti-Player's Companion. :(
It was actually the book I was most excited about before it came out. After it did, it was the book that I was most disappointed in.
Other early race compainions had issues too, like the downright toxic roleplaying advice in Elves of Golarion(see their suggested reactions to half-orcs).
Things have definitely gotten much better (and nuanced) though, looking at the Blood of ___ books. Heck, Goblins of Golarion was a huge step up from Orcs of Golarion in that it actually remembered to give advice to people wanting to play non-evil goblins in Golarion.
The race books have gotten a lot better, it's just that some of the races I wish had gotten better treatment have already had their books "wasted" so to speak.
I meant the Big Damn Good Books...
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I meant the Big Damn Good Books...
Champions of Purity and Chronicles of the Righteous! :D
(also, Shattered Star has been a huge breath of fresh air, and that's all I'm gonna say about that AP here :) )
Sweet!
And I really need to gather up the Money to get the APs so I can read them and hopefully run them...
At the very least I can use them for ideas.
And I really need to build a Role Template for my Settings...
& are you sure you guys don't know of a good Wiki/SRD set up?
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In any debate, the most ignoble thing you can do is reduce your opponent's argument to a crude caricature.I think the issue is that quite a few gamers don't want orcs, goblins, etc. to be any sort of 'people,' they'd rather they be two-dimensional cardboard cut outs made out of evil and easily reduced into chunky bits of XP.Mine aren't necessarily nice. They are just not as savage. Think along the lines of Dominic Deegan's Orcs.
Isolationist Tribal People.
Two things.
1) I'm not sure if that was intentional humor, or irony, but in either case, it's funny.
2) Bear in mind that I love playing Warhammer Quest, and it has never, not once, occured to me while playing that game if Skavens or Snotlings or those rat-dudes have cultures or societies or feelings or kids at home, because Warhammer Quest is not a role-playing game and does not have philosophical concepts like 'alignment' built right into the system and has funky rules like 'if the light goes out, everybody dies.' D&D style games, do have role-playing and alignments, and, as such, I tend to try and pay at least cursory attention to them, and therefore not have my 'good' characters engage in wanton genocide because 'it's okay if they're evil / ugly / darker-skinned / less advanced.'
[/snip]
The second most ignoble thing you can do is laugh at another person's point of view.
It doesn't help to then expand on the caricature.
I actually have
A: a nuanced, morally sophisticated game
\b; in which orcs are almost always degenerate brutes.
Some people seem to think those two things are incompatible, not in my game.
I have expanded on this before on Paizo, several times, when it has been suggested that evil orcs are the mark of the knuckleheaded gamer. I don't really feel the urge to go over those arguments again if people are determined to persist in crude caricatures.
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The second most ignoble thing you can do is laugh at another person's point of view.
Where does 'replying to a general comment with a personal attack' come in on the list of noble vs. ignoble things to do?
Also, I was never noble, so I'm, pretty much by definition, ignoble. As an American, I am also either above or below whichever definition of 'class' you are using. :)
if people are determined to persist in crude caricatures.
It *is* a crude caricature, of the concept of alignment itself, to portray something as 'evil because it's evil.'
(Also? A tautology.)
Check the various 'good orc' threads and you will find posts supporting the idea of 'we don't want a moral dilemna every time we fight something, we just want monsters to kill.' If *you* are not one of those posters, or one of those gamers, then *you* are not the sort of gamer I was talking about, and *you* are then kind of going out of your way to take offense about something that had nothing to do with *you.*
I was shooting off my mouth in a completely 'nother direction, and you just leapt boldly into the line of fire and then asked why I was shooting at you, when I totally wasn't.
And now I've just compared myself to Dick Cheney and feel dirty.
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Sadly this has become another alignment debate thread.
I subscribe to the "No-Prize" school of thought. You don't win the No-Prize for pointing out a problem, you win the No-Prize for rationalizing why things are the way they are.
So let's look at Orcs in Golarion, brutal, clannish, merciless and genocidal. There's plenty of people who sympathize with the orcs because they were driven out of the Darklands by the Dwarves in the Quest for Sky, and in one sense that's true. In another though, what is unspoken is the centuries of warfare between the Dwarves and the Orcs, warfare that had the orcs won would have wiped out the dwarves completely. Torag weeps for the children he lost, and hardened his heart against the enemies of the dwarves because every mercy shown, every concession given to the orcs killed hundreds or thousands of his children. So he drove the Dwarves out of the Darkness into lands where there would be races more willing to deal with the Dwarves fairly because the Orcs had no interest in such. Sadly the Orcs occupied the territories between Dwarf-lands and the Surface. If you move an entire race of people, it's like moving stone through water, the water will be displaced. It moved to where there was space, Belkzen.
Now the Orcs are fragmented, their culture, always focused on strength and prizing brutality found themselves in a strange new world and fell upon each other. Always trying to prove who is the strongest. Tar-Baphon saw this wretched creatures and saw tools, and he united the orcs under his banner and for a time the Orcs were strong because that's what he offered them. Strength. The only thing orc culture cares about. Of course they eventually lost that war, and many wars after that. That's the orc culture, it refuses to adapt. They have one solution to every problem (smash!), and that refusal to grow, to learn and to change is what makes them evil. They do not treaty, they do not bargain. Orcs take what they want and destroy what they can't take.
Occasionally an Orc rejects this ideology, but centuries of conditioning both social and genetic make Orcs naturally angry all the time. So even the odd good orc is good because when he is pointed at irredeemable evil he will smash it, but culturally and mentally he finds it difficult to adapt to new ideas.
What does this mean for your game?
Most of the orcs you discover in game are enculturated towards evil, and usually only want you did if you're a non-orc, or an orc of a different tribe, or another orc who just looked at them funny. They are driven to destruction, culturally and biologically. If you travel through a forest and a human demands your money or your life, that is not the best time to try reason. If a band of orcs takes over a dungeon in another nation's sovereign territory they aren't just local wildlife inhabiting an ecosystem. They are invaders, and they are probably planning how to destroy the nearby village.
Can there be good orcs? Yes absolutely, but even the rare Good orc finds it hard to be a good orc. He was raised in a culture of violence, brutality and fear (all non-orcs are to be feared and therefore destroyed). Paizo hasn't provided you with easy answers to playing a good orc because it isn't easy to be a good orc, that culture doesn't exist and the creation of such would be the point of an entire CAMPAIGN. Orc evil is like sexism, gaycism or racism it's deeply enculturated in a race that is genetically prone to being stupid, unenlightened and cruel. If you are playing one you are THE exception, and maybe you should appreciate that the world may not take your word for it.
It's a great challenge to role-play a good orc. Just don't get mad that some folk aren't looking for that level of nuance in their action adventure game.
Yes... but that's not what Paizo did. Paizo explained something similar to what you describe with Tieflings, but they did nothing like that with Orcs.
One thing to note, though, is that orcs are, in a very real sense in Golarion, somehow 'corrupted', as they have some kind of strange tie to the Black Blood of Orv, which is noted as causing a tendency to mutation, insanity, and chaos, if I'm not mistaken.
Also, there's a difference between creating something that enables you to tell your own stories and having people go, "No, you can never do that ever." which is the strong impression you come off with when dealing with orcs, goblins, or undead as non-evil entities. Certainly they have a lot stacked against them, but there's such a thing as free will, than there must be such as thing as the ability to choose morality (at least that's how most people understand it - I have a slightly more nuanced view, but it's long and involved).
... gah, getting distracted. Must work on stuuuuuuuuuff.
Also, orcs, tieflings, and the like, are kind of off-topic.
Goblins. Creepy, generally evil (though unsuccessful), and loathing of anything that's nice. Totally 'redeemable' though, and pretty awesome when they are. (Check out Council of Thieves for a perfect example of this.)
And now I've just compared myself to Dick Cheney and feel dirty.
You aren't Dick Cheney you are cool.
On-Topic: I prefer the option of having good Goblins, Orcs, etc. Alongside the Evil.
Just because 95% of the Race is "Evil" doesn't mean all members of them are.
Late to the party, but anybody who needs this phenomenon explained to them is probably not ever going to understand it.
As somebody mentioned, we cutify Cthulhu, we think Gremlins have a cute factor, etc.
But it's something you either innately understand or you don't. It's like Monty Python (to dig out that old cliche of an example). If you don't think it's funny, you're probably never going to think it's funny, but if you get it, then it needs no (and would probably not stand any) explanation.
There's nothing disconnected or weird or wrong about it. It's simply another facet of human nature.
Sadly this has become another alignment debate thread.I subscribe to the "No-Prize" school of thought. You don't win the No-Prize for pointing out a problem, you win the No-Prize for rationalizing why things are the way they are.
The fact that alignment has crept in is a measure of how common it is as a descriptor for behavior in D&D / PF. It's everybodies shorthand for behavior. I agree with the rationalization of explaining "what is"; it's pretty much what I've done in my game. Although Goblins are different in my game due to their alignments in original D&D. They were described (in the original three alignment L-N-C system) as Neutral or Chaotic (read evil). My Goblins are CN, as mad as March hares. Irrationally friendly or hostile depending on things no rational mind would think of (although someone with "Knowledge: Goblins" might figure it out). My Goblins are wierd mutated (by Chaos and magical energy) Elves who roam the woodlands and undergrounds. They also tend to have slums in many human cities and towns. They are matriarchal because the female Goblins are not as crazy / unpredictable as the males. Who do make good sword fodder. And sewer workers.