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this post was submitted on 30 May 2023
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I used to be a giant fan of Drizzt because I got the impression that he didn't just kill his enemies, but instead thought about morality and such; but it was hard to continue feeling that way when you realized actually Drizzt liked killing beings from the 'evil' races.
"Born evil" is a horrible Gygaxian legacy concept that should be driven entirely out of tabletop RPGs.
I reject it entirely in my own campaigns; sometimes cultures have tendencies toward alignments, but apart from colonialist expectations and the oppression of poverty pressed upon them, my players figured out pretty quick that the goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, gnolls, and ogres out in the fringes weren't just driven to precarity and desperation, but were also pitted against one another to keep them divided and weak.
I was so. Fucking. Proud. Of my party coming not as slayers of them, not even as "saviors," but as intermediaries that got the tribal leaders to begin to agree who their real enemies were and joined the native people's vanguard to help drive the governor and his trading company right off of the island. They made lasting friends that helped them out much later in the campaign as a show of solidarity. :mao-clap:
A little trick I do to keep the D&D "treasure table" vibes going without making it all about looting "evil" people's homes and temples and the like is that they received gifts from the people they helped out of gratitude. It worked great; no one minded. :sicko-wholesome:
Nice, now that's my kind of campaign.
I'm a terrible DM but I also don't do the whole 'evil races' thing either when I do actually DM; the only such beings when it does occur being fiendish beings who come from hell or the abyss, or the undead (except for one 'undead' lich who only became a (plant based) lich because he feared death greatly).
I remember reading a forum post by Gygax (so relatively recent post, as in within the last twenty years) where he justified the killing of the children of evil races saying that a certain general's observation of 'nits make lice' (in reference to the general pushing his troops to kill the women and children of native Americans) was an observable fact.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/dtpgim/gygax_on_lawful_good/
Gygax and his chud writings are one of the primary reasons I outright reject "The Thermian Argument" when it comes to how things must be just because that was how the fiction (emphasis: FICTION) was written previously. I don't just apply it to D&D, but D&D is certainly where I actively reject it in my own campaigns.
I've had to deal with some Thermian Argumenters in the past, online but also occasionally in person, saying that anything in the lore or the story's narration that has horrid ideology and/or political messaging in a piece of fiction isn't necessarily "condoning" it, yet it can not be changed or rewritten or retconned because that was how the fiction was already written. Fuck that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxV8gAGmbtk