The Gaming Den

Voss wrote:

I know that many people who play D&D use many of the species of the world as stand ins for different races in the real world (heck, I describe my dwarves as Prussian) but this short hand is not in the rules.

Honestly, I'm pretty sure I just re-read Generic Scottish Jew-Dwarves, a Short History on page 12 of this 5e document.

But honestly the orc thing gets uncomfortable, as the heavy brow, sloped posture, inherent violent tendencies and rapey attitude makes me wonder if I'm reading about orcs or 19th and early 20th c propaganda (complete with caricature drawings) about 'the Negro.' The overlap is pretty high enough to be uncomfortable, even if it isn't intentional.

Remember the audience. An uncomfortably large number of geeks honestly care so little for the rights of people of colour and gays that it had to be packaged to them as being about superheroes before they could be made to care.

Laertes wrote: Remember the audience. An uncomfortably large number of geeks honestly care so little for the rights of people of colour and gays that it had to be packaged to them as being about superheroes before they could be made to care.

Oh sure, I've had some pretty unpleasant experiences with gamers in that regard. But that the developers are rolling right along with it despite the industry/society in general moving away from it is downright weird. Especially since 'the hordes of pagans at the edge of the map' who exist only to punish sinners for their transgressions because God made them that way [or evil creations of evil gods with no agency] is also the central tenant of Christian Historiography since Eusebius.

Demons as inherently evil makes sense from a game/universe stand point. Races we like have free will, but not races we don't like, on the other hand... even from a game/universe perspective this is pretty fucked up. You can tell stories about orcs being enemies because they're evil, but that is literally the only story available. It limits the narrative just because, and I'm not sure what the because is... is it to make slaughtering them mindlessly something you can do completely unexamined?

Scrivener wrote: If you were to try to make orcs less like green humans and more like monsters how would you go about that? I would assume making if clear that they were made for murder and destruction and even the best of them feels that genetic pull would be a reasonable path.

Instead of going down the "they're evil, they hate our freedoms" route, make them all berserkers- akin to an aggressive wild animal in a humanoid body, incapable of even complex discussion, due to the all-consuming rage they're filled with. Or maybe they're the genetic experiment of a mad wizard, who was aiming to create a soldier built for war and survival but incapable rebellion. Or, maybe they're ORKS ORKS ORKS ORKS ORKS ORKS ORKS ORKS.

Scrivener wrote: If you were to try to make orcs less like green humans and more like monsters how would you go about that?

The best way I've found to do evil races is just make them all sociopaths. They don't feel guilt or remorse and they take pleasure in the suffering of others. And this isn't because they were raised in a specific culture, that's just because their brains are hardwired to think that way. You might run into a good orc from time to time, but that's not because someone reformed him or he was raised better, it was because his brain is a genetic mutation that happens to look closer to a human brain and he was actually born with a conscience unlike most orcs.

Cyberzombie wrote:

Scrivener wrote: If you were to try to make orcs less like green humans and more like monsters how would you go about that?

The best way I've found to do evil races is just make them all sociopaths. They don't feel guilt or remorse and they take pleasure in the suffering of others. And this isn't because they were raised in a specific culture, that's just because their brains are hardwired to think that way. You might run into a good orc from time to time, but that's not because someone reformed him or he was raised better, it was because his brain is a genetic mutation that happens to look closer to a human brain and he was actually born with a conscience unlike most orcs.

Then the race implodes on itself because you removed its capacity for empathy. It can work for monsters, but not for beings who live in densely packed quarters like goblins.

We don't actually need evil races. We have evil people and evil governments. You can just have Hextorite nations whose soldiers you can face stab with a clear conscience. Evil races gets into discussions of murdering children and civilians, and that is disgusting.

For fuck's sake, the document doesn't name check a whole lot of heroes, and one of them is a fucking Drow. If they wanted the narrative simplicity of it being OK to slaughter any numbers of the black skinned races under any circumstances, they blew that already.

Orcs should just be a PC race, with the note that a lot of them live in Evilia.

-Username17

nockermensch wrote: Then the race implodes on itself because you removed its capacity for empathy. It can work for monsters, but not for beings who live in densely packed quarters like goblins.

Well, implosions are kind of okay, because orcs aren't supposed to be a major player in the setting. You are talking about a bunch of savages that occasionally turn on each other and generally don't accomplish a hell of a lot. Orcs generally don't have cities or many long lasting settlement and when they do establish that sort of thing, it's the exception, not the rule. By and large, they live in small settlements and are the adversaries of low level adventurers.

Now if you're talking about evil races like the drow, then you have to worry about how they'd set up a society and function, because they have cities and are somewhat of a major player. Orcs are basically just the cockroaches of the D&D universe. They never actually get anywhere but they just seem to always hang around and breed in enough numbers such that they keep coming back.

Laertes wrote: Remember the audience. An uncomfortably large number of geeks honestly care so little for the rights of people of colour and gays that it had to be packaged to them as being about superheroes before they could be made to care.

I guess I've had a very different experience than you. I've found all of my gaming groups to be very diverse, but maybe I'm the minority here.

I think the big problem comes down to how your group sees race on a whole. I don't see it as racist because I don't see orcs as a stand in for black people. I'm not even arguing that orcs need to be inherently evil, I just personally don't see inherent evil of any monster to be a bad thing. I don't have an issue with gnolls being described as demonic and evil, I don't have an issue with Hobgoblins being described as evil militaristic slavers, and I don't have an issue with orcs being described as evil bloodthirsty savages.

Frank Trollman wrote:We don't actually need evil races. We have evil people and evil governments. You can just have Hextorite nations whose soldiers you can face stab with a clear conscience. Evil races gets into discussions of murdering children and civilians, and that is disgusting.

This is a very valid point. I'm not a fan of baby murder, and am willing to take the bold stance of not condoning baby murder. I do think the argument gets strange when you start talking about the alignment of demons and undead, but I'm comfortable separating supernatural evil and ethical evil.

Scrivener wrote:I guess I've had a very different experience than you. I've found all of my gaming groups to be very diverse, but maybe I'm the minority here.

I started off being a teenager LARPing White Wolf games. I was honestly shocked when I went to university and learned that RPGs weren't a female dominated hobby. The whole idea that they're actually more commonly played by the comic-book-collection population than the black-trenchcoats-and-industrial-music population took a long time to get used to.

So yeah, if you're in the minority then I'll gladly join you there.

Scrivener wrote:I think the big problem comes down to how your group sees race on a whole. I don't see it as racist because I don't see orcs as a stand in for black people. I'm not even arguing that orcs need to be inherently evil, I just personally don't see inherent evil of any monster to be a bad thing. I don't have an issue with gnolls being described as demonic and evil, I don't have an issue with Hobgoblins being described as evil militaristic slavers, and I don't have an issue with orcs being described as evil bloodthirsty savages.

Thinking about it, I think it's less about race than it is about power. A lot of players want to experience a fairly primitive power fantasy which involves the following script:

BAD GUY: I am bad.
ME: I will defeat you.
EVERYONE ELSE: My hero!

This power fantasy weakens if one can identify with the bad guys; therefore, they're kept anonymous and Othered, and usually caricatured broadly with whatever traits feel good in a mook, whether those be military discipline or barbarian individuality.

This is also why we tend to be fine with killing all the Orc adults but not the Orc babies (and why a lot of fantasy monsters are careful to make their infant stages either nonexistent or deadly in and of themselves.) It doesn't play into the power fantasy of achieving admiration through violence, and therefore isn't wanted.

Scrivener wrote: I do think the argument gets strange when you start talking about the alignment of demons and undead, but I'm comfortable separating supernatural evil and ethical evil.

I'm... not quite sure I'm following you here. Demons and shit is where the argument starts making sense to me. 'Demons are violence without cause' is pretty fine. Here you have things made out of evil, so alignment actually intersects with the game's setting. But it falls apart when you have non-supernatural sapients. Orcs are unable to be anything but violence without reason because... they aren't like humans, elves and even lizardfolk because we say so. Uh... what?

On the other hand, the rest of the new alignment system is about societal expectations without context and about doing what you want, which makes it complete gibberish for both ethics and the supernatural. A Solar, as a paragon of good and law, is advocate of social expectations and...nothing else. I can't know what that means, because the society and its expectations are completely undefined, and even if they were those aren't static things, so it still doesn't help.

'Its OK to kill orcs because they're evil' is actually inherently wrong, and we know this because fucking nasty people actually make this kind of call in real life. Martin Luther was an advocate for genocide of the Turks because he honestly felt that their only value was to make Christians fear for their lives and turn to God out of salvation. Fortunately for the Turks, Christians sinned too much to be worthy of a spontaneous Turkish genocide.*

Fighting the band of orcs that raid your village? Perfectly fine. Raiding their village to rescue captives? Also fine. Just killing them because they're red dots? Shitty design.


* Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Volume 54: Table Talk, ed. Theodore Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). Citation because for some reason people often don't believe it. Fun fact, he also hated peasants and felt they weren't worthy to have children because peasants as a whole were 'less than pigs.' Even better is that the Lutheran church is actively involved in the publication of this stuff.

nockermensch wrote:Then the race implodes on itself because you removed its capacity for empathy. It can work for monsters, but not for beings who live in densely packed quarters like goblins.

...is it seriously going to be your position that you need inherent empathy for society to function? That sociopaths are literally incapable of maintaining a society?

GnomeWorks wrote:...is it seriously going to be your position that you need inherent empathy for society to function? That sociopaths are literally incapable of maintaining a society?

Pretty much. I mean, I suppose it's not physically or even anthropologically impossible -- you could have some strongman beat and threaten all of the sociopaths into shape -- but it heavily, heavily stacks the deck against society lasting very long or even forming by having all of its inhabitants be solipsistically selfish.

Voss wrote:

Scrivener wrote: I do think the argument gets strange when you start talking about the alignment of demons and undead, but I'm comfortable separating supernatural evil and ethical evil.

I'm... not quite sure I'm following you here. Demons and shit is where the argument starts making sense to me. 'Demons are violence without cause' is pretty fine. Here you have things made out of evil, so alignment actually intersects with the game's setting. But it falls apart when you have non-supernatural sapients. Orcs are unable to be anything but violence without reason because... they aren't like humans, elves and even lizardfolk because we say so. Uh... what?

I was unclear. I think when you say "No creature should be inherently evil" that is a fine and easily acceptable statement with creatures such as orcs. When you say "No creature should be inherently evil" that is a confusing and bizarre statement when applied to demons and other physical manifestations of evil.

I was willing to give them a pass for lumping monstrous races like Orcs in the inherent evil category, I have been convinced that this is not the best way to portray orcs, and permitting disdainful activities, like baby murder, is reason enough to not want a race to be called inherently evil. I still do not believe that it is racist towards any human to declare a species of monsters genetically evil.

Parallels to real life

I'm still not buying it. No race, group or religion is evil in the way D&D evil works. Once you show me an example of Armenians being made by demons and summoning demons to help them murder people (not an accusation of that, but proof of it, like a detect evil spell), I'll believe that rhetoric of hate used to justify killing members of your own species applies to D&D.

Just to be clear. People have done evil stuff. Really evil stuff where they they justify the systematic enslavement and murder of a race of peoples. This is a bad thing that goes on today. I feel calling a species of make believe monsters an obvious stand in for a race of real humans is offensive and trivialises the reality of the situation.

Scrivener wrote:Just to be clear. People have done evil stuff. Really evil stuff where they they justify the systematic enslavement and murder of a race of peoples. This is a bad thing that goes on today. I feel calling a species of make believe monsters an obvious stand in for a race of real humans is offensive and trivialises the reality of the situation.

Huh. I see it the other way. Creating an obvious expy of a real group of humans is the offensive trivialization, not the realization that people are actually doing so. Because it happens a fucking lot. That no one is actually D&D Evil is kind of obvious and irrelevant and not the point.



More fun with 5e rules:

When rolling initiative. If a player (or players) tie with monsters.... the DM just decides who goes first. Optionally there can be a roll off, but by default, DM fiat solves ties.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Pretty much. I mean, I suppose it's not physically or even anthropologically impossible -- you could have some strongman beat and threaten all of the sociopaths into shape -- but it heavily, heavily stacks the deck against society lasting very long or even forming by having all of its inhabitants be solipsistically selfish.

Sociopathy is not the same as solipsism. Sociopaths are aware of the existence of other people. That's an important distinction, because - for whatever reason - APD is the one fucking mental disorder that society deems acceptable to dogpile on with pretty much no exception, and exaggerating the disorder is not cool.

Logic, opportunity costs, rational actors. Estimates in the states are that between 1 and 2% of the population has APD. Call it 1.5%, assuming .35 million people in the US, that's 5.2 million sociopaths. Prison statistics indicate that around 25% of the prison population has APD. Looks like... roughly 2.5 million incarcerated at the moment, so that's .625 million sociopaths in prison at the moment.

Let's also say that, for various reasons, for every sociopath in prison, there is another one out there that should be but isn't (mistrial, didn't get caught, just that clever, whatever). So let's double the number of criminals with APD to 1.3 mil.

5.2 - 1.3 = 3.9 million. So that's 3.9 million individuals with APD who haven't committed any felonies, that don't regularly break laws, who probably manage to live life among the normal folk with minimal difficulty. Aside from lacking inherent empathy and probably sometimes coming off as assholes, they're managing to get along.

I see no reason that these people wouldn't be able to live together relatively peaceably, in a society of their own. You don't discourage things like murder by saying "killing other people makes them sad and you should feel bad," you do it by saying "if you kill someone, the rest of society will either put you in a hole the rest of your life, or kill you." Without inherent empathy, you treat every action that would normally fall under morality's jurisdiction as basically a math problem: make the potential cost of actions you don't want to occur so high that the RoI on committing those actions stops being worth it to the vast majority.

Society is more than just 'don't infringe upon the rights of others', GnomeWorks. That's a necessary but not sufficient condition for it. And even trying to do a Vulcan and going 'you should try to give some food to the injured hunter while he recovers, because he'll help you out when he comes back' isn't going to cut it. That's enough to have a small tribe with the sophistication of a chimpanzee clan, but not enough to build a society.

Voss wrote:* Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Volume 54: Table Talk, ed. Theodore Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). Citation because for some reason people often don't believe it. Fun fact, he also hated peasants and felt they weren't worthy to have children because peasants as a whole were 'less than pigs.' Even better is that the Lutheran church is actively involved in the publication of this stuff.

Trufax.

A lot of Luther's later works were written as basically the mouthpiece of the Emperor rather than as a scholarly authority of his own; this is because the Emperor was protecting him from all the people who wanted to do horrible things to him for defying the Pope. The Emperor hated the peasantry anyway but the people he really despised were peasants who didn't stay in their place and tried to rise in station, so Luther's later writings contained a lot of exhortations about those.

This isn't to say that he didn't hate the peasantry of his own free will too. Luther was a terrible human being.

GnomeWorks wrote:...is it seriously going to be your position that you need inherent empathy for society to function? That sociopaths are literally incapable of maintaining a society?

Yes.

A specialist economy requires a base level of trust in one's fellow humans. Unless you have that, every person needs to be a subsistence farmer and then you have no society at all. Simple things like money and having city walls with more than one house inside them break down when you have to be in a constant state of fight-or-flight around your fellow citizens.

The reason our society can advance to the point of having specialised craftsmen in it - and therefore be capable of things like metalworking - is because we are not sociopaths, we are capable of building webs of trust and reliance on our fellow humans. A society that doesn't have that isn't a society at all, it's just a collection of people preying on one another.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Society is more than just 'don't infringe upon the rights of others', GnomeWorks. That's a necessary but not sufficient condition for it.

Sure. But my point was that sociopaths seem to be often presented in such a way that they break that rule constantly and intentionally.

I was trying to illustrate that that doesn't have to be the case, and - for most sociopaths - probably wouldn't be the case. Starting with "don't fuck with other people" is not enough to make society, sure, but it's a pretty solid starting point.

Once you get sociopaths to the point where they aren't going to stab each other for shits and giggles, you can build on that base principle and construct a moral framework that most will have good reason to follow, because it basically comes down to enlightened self-interest.

Laertes wrote:A specialist economy requires a base level of trust in one's fellow humans. Unless you have that, every person needs to be a subsistence farmer and then you have no society at all. Simple things like money and having city walls with more than one house inside them break down when you have to be in a constant state of fight-or-flight around your fellow citizens.

If you can get a sociopath to accept cause-and-effect, you can basically enforce their participation in the social contract by making the rules of society particularly heavy-handed.

I'll grant you that, at some level, sociopaths have the capacity to completely screw people over. Where that level is seems to differ wildly across the disorder, however; surely with strong laws and such, you can get to the point where the majority of sociopaths will play along with them just to avoid the consequences of breaking those laws.

There will always be criminals, and sociopaths aren't the only ones who break the law. So clearly it isn't the case that you need everyone on board with your social contract and laws and such for society to function and progress. Having a few people mucking up the place isn't going to lead to society imploding.

I don't see why you think that 'can' equals 'will'. Sure, you can contrive a framework of how it exists and we can nitpick it, but it'd be easier to just point to counter-examples.

In the real world right now we have countless examples of individualism and self-interested short-sightedness and lack of empathy upending society. And the majority of humans aren't sociopaths. You can go from minor examples like, oh, tax revolts or overgrazing to more existentially threatening ones like religious wars and nullification. In the real world right now it's really, really hard to get people to feed orphans and return library books even when you tug at their hearstrings for all its worth.

And the thing is, once you betray someone's trust out of self-interest the chain of harm doesn't just stop there. Balkanization and beggar thy neighbor are the touchstone of international relations for a reason. To put it in perspective, 40,000 years ago, humans were developed enough to develop musical instruments. 12,000 years ago is when the first settlements started showing up.

I'm amazed that you think that cranking down the empathy would allow a society of inherent sociopaths to develop civilization in a comparable timeframe.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:I don't see why you think that 'can' equals 'will'.

Because the statement that started this discussion was that a lack of empathy causes a race to implode. Full stop, no question.

Now, if that was meant to be understood that it would generally cause that to happen, and that exceptions exist - sure, that I can get behind. Getting a group of sociopaths to cooperate is probably a massive pain in the ass and will probably implode at some point - but I can also see it potentially working.

I'm amazed that you think that cranking down the empathy would allow a society of inherent sociopaths to develop civilization in a comparable timeframe.

I'm not saying it would necessarily be comparable. I'm just trying to point out that you can have a civilization started by inherent sociopaths, that it does not necessarily implode by its very nature.

GnomeWorks, I think you're a smart guy. I thought you handled the Zak S thread very well. But if you're going to argue that the Tragedy of the Commons is not a real thing, and that it will not lead to clear-thinking rational sociopaths totally wrecking any society with a statistically significant number of them in it, then my respect for you lessens.

Laertes wrote:

Voss wrote:* Martin Luther, Luther’s Works Volume 54: Table Talk, ed. Theodore Tappert (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). Citation because for some reason people often don't believe it. Fun fact, he also hated peasants and felt they weren't worthy to have children because peasants as a whole were 'less than pigs.' Even better is that the Lutheran church is actively involved in the publication of this stuff.

Trufax.

A lot of Luther's later works were written as basically the mouthpiece of the Emperor rather than as a scholarly authority of his own; this is because the Emperor was protecting him from all the people who wanted to do horrible things to him for defying the Pope. The Emperor hated the peasantry anyway but the people he really despised were peasants who didn't stay in their place and tried to rise in station, so Luther's later writings contained a lot of exhortations about those.

This isn't to say that he didn't hate the peasantry of his own free will too. Luther was a terrible human being.

I was going to say, this isn't from HRE propaganda materials. This particular volume is his 'collected wisdom' that he shared with his buddies (who dutifully wrote it down) over dinner and a few pints. Hence the volume title Table Talk. The 'peasants are less than pigs' passage describes him with a beer stein in one hand while bouncing his kid on his knee, and he looks at his friends and says 'Peasants don't deserve this kind of happiness'


On the other hand, almost all his rants about the papacy center around shit and farts, and are vaguely entertaining to read and consider that people actually took this fucker seriously. When people talk about nailing up the 95 theses as a defining moment of western civilization, I just facepalm.

Laertes wrote:GnomeWorks, I think you're a smart guy. I thought you handled the Zak S thread very well. But if you're going to argue that the Tragedy of the Commons is not a real thing, and that it will not lead to clear-thinking rational sociopaths totally wrecking any society with a statistically significant number of them in it, then my respect for you lessens.

I do not understand this argument at all. The tragedy of the commons exists in non sociopaths. I have no idea how you think it would be a bigger deal with sociopaths, because we have laws that exist for the express purpose of dealing with the tragedy of the commons because regular people cannot do anything without those laws.

I mean, there is no particular reason that Hobbesian social contracts can't be formed by sociopaths since the entire argument of Hobbes is based on a simplification of humans into Sociopaths in effect anyway.

Laertes wrote:But if you're going to argue that the Tragedy of the Commons is not a real thing, and that it will not lead to clear-thinking rational sociopaths totally wrecking any society with a statistically significant number of them in it, then my respect for you lessens.

Acknowledging that a tragedy of the commons is occurring does not require empathy, it requires a shift from short-sightedness to looking into the future.

It... hrm. I guess you do potentially wind up with the issue where sociopaths stop giving a damn at some point, because if you're mortal, you're gonna die eventually, and if your death is around the corner, society can't really threaten you with much at that point. Which means you do whatever the fuck you want anyway, because the consequences are moot. So if you have enough of them, and they wind up as the "old guard," you wind up with a situation where they exploit the fuck out of everything for immediate short-term gains and do a bunch of things they wouldn't have before because now there aren't any real repercussions on them.

If that's your point (or at least in the same direction), I'd argue that you could try to encourage the sociopaths to care about their legacy in the society. Doing the whole "you will be remembered" thing may be enough to influence some - probably not all - into continuing to not act to society's detriment.

Again, my point is not that every society of inherent sociopaths will succeed. Just that it's not an inherent quality of such societies to necessarily eventually always implode.