I think a lot of people just don't like the idea that good or evil is determined at birth. It's not really a "here's my benefit" as much as a "I don't like that idea so I'll change it for my world"
Biological Determinism is pretty fucked. It's literally "These folks are fine to kill because of what they look like." Which is... Not my favorite message to put into my games personally. Which is why I don't do the whole "orcs are evil by birth" thing that's so common and would look side-eye at a table that does.
Just curious, what do your orcs do instead of barbarism and pillaging then? Or is it still that way but just enmity based off social relations with bordering factions/peoples? Like, is it more that you ascribe to the Elder scrolls way of thinking with a rich culture or are we talking more base dnd but "orcs aren't bad for all but just maybe for the elves or dwarves because of the war, they chill with humans" or some such history?
I'd say that my games are definitely closer to the Elder Scrolls model of races. Orcs aren't monsters, they're people. The party might fight them for any of the same reasons the party might fight other people, including things like "those fuckers are pillaging a village". I'm just not at all comfortable with the idea that they pillage because that's what orcs do. If my players talk to them they'll find that the pillagers probably have (what seem to them to be) good reasons for what they're doing.
See, that's why I run "evil" races as evil from a human perspective. The Orcs in my world raid, pillage, kill for fun, and do other things evil to a human. But to an Orc, these are the things their gods value, to do these things is to earn the favor of their creator.
Good and evil is simply a point of view. That's why I always took D&D alignment as being from the perspective of the average human.
Absolutely a valid way to handle things. There are plenty of humanoids in my games who believe that orcs are evil by birth, just like in real life some people are happy to claim another group is evil by birth. It's just the omniscient position of the narrator and rules in my game that those people are wrong.
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u/ReturnToCrab DM (Dungeon Memelord) Dec 19 '23
But like, what's the benefit of this aside from pulling one over your players?