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?
Different person, but in the setting I've been working on, the Orcs do do barbarism and pillaging... but it's because 112 years ago a horrific plague swept through their lands wiping out 95% of their population and only those on the fringes such as outlaws, villagers in the back end of nowhere, and those visiting other nations survived. As such, they're essentially a mad max/fallout archetype. Before that, they were the setting's equivalent of Rome, conquering and "uplifting" the various "primitive" races. In the aftermath, the raider and villager groups who still consider themselves superior to other races blamed the other races for the plague and killed off most non-Orcs in the ruins of their former nation and have no problem making ends meet by raiding "lesser" races.
There are, of course, the remains of Orcish trading houses, diplomatic groups, and tourist groups in other nations, but they're not numerous enough to do much and the stigma their race has gained over the past century has seen quite a few of those groups set sail for lands where the stigma doesn't exist.
Thus, you still get Orcish raiders so that things aren't changed so drastically that players get confused, but they aren't inherently evil, they can be reasoned with, and if the players venture into the lands of the old Empire, they're likely to find the occasional friendly villages composed of Orcs who survived and the non-orcs they took in to protect them from the raider groups.
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u/Clone_JS636 Warlock Dec 19 '23
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"