A similar thing ended up happening to me, once. We were playing Shadowrun, and we were doing a straight up robbery of some tech company. I was the driver, and playing a bit of a nutter with a nasty streak. We broke in and found these two employees who we didn't expect to be there, and one of them ended up trying to scream for help. So, I said my guy was going to club him to death, and the GM decided I should roll it out. It ended up taking forever, with roll after roll after roll, and after a little while the whole thing just became exquisitely uncomfortable. We showed up at the table for some high spirited Pulp Fiction, and the dice turned it into Sympathy For Mr Vengeance.
That is the thing I love the most of the RPG hobby. And that is why I think these things shouldn't be just handwaved.
The question is whether such racism is justified in a fantasy setting in a way that it is not in the real world.
It will depend on the 'physics laws' of the world, so to speak. If you decide that in your setting there are absolute good and evil, then racism would be justified in that setting. But you will probably find tons of incoherent situations.
For most people, such monsters are included for the same reason they include demons, zombies, and killer robots in their games, which is to provide a clear enemy to fight and defeat because people often want their escapist fiction to be more simple than reality, with clear-cut bad guys. And for such people, wanting to kill an orc because it's a monster is no more a desire to wallow in justifiable racism than wanting to kill zombies is.
100% agree. That is why I find the OOP idiotic. And I find perfectly OK and fun to desire that your games work that way.
If the DM changes the definition of Good and Evil even once, then the definition of Good and Evil were not at any time absolute. Once you've defined morality relative to something, even relative to the DM, then you have a relative - and thus not absolute - moral system. That is what the fucking word means.
There is another issue, which is that if the moral system in use is subject to the unknowable and changeable whims of someone who isn't the person making moral choices, then neither the moral choice nor the moral system has any meaning. You might as well be spinning the Wheel of Morality at that point.
-Frank
Well put. And this is why alignment are quite useless.
Also, it's super-hilarious to see a bunch of Christian posters in here arguing that innately evil people & species need to be killed to be dealt with.
Nothing new, I'm afraid. Every "religion of peace" through history has done and does the same.
You do understand that Dungeons & Dragons is a *game,* right?
I'd like if people decided if this is or not a valid argument, because it does not seem to be whenever certain other games arise in a thread. In that cases, this argument is not considered a valid defense.
All of these things take place off-camera, so to speak. However, the orcs don't do these things because they are misunderstood or discrimnated against. They do it because they are fiendish sociopaths from birth to death.
Well, if you can make it work with internal consistency, then it's OK. So, for you the reason for defining them Evil wouldn't be the actions they do (after all, humans are capable of doing all those things) but their nature?
Dang! Your an expert on Christianity, too!
:rotfl:
Has he said somethign wrong or false? As far as I can see, his statement is true. And you don't need to be an expert to know that basic tenet of Christianty.
I think there is far less imagination in insisting everything be an imitation of the world, than daring imagine one beyond it.
While you have a point, the problem for me is not to dare imagining something different, but the breaks in internal consistency it entails.