Honestly, I’m a bit more confused now. I definitely agree that humans have a tendency to dehumanize others, but I wouldn’t consider this a good or healthy thing that we should just accept. So having a ruleset that says, canonically, “this group of sentient creatures is inherently evil” and not “this group of sentient creatures is believedtobe evil by this other group” you are encouraging the players to take an unnuanced view of the world.
However, as a gamemaster you have to allow your players to make two choices:
Are the monsters we are fighting people or not?
Does my character agree with me?
Isn’t this what the lore changes encourage, by not making a factual statement about the groups, so the players should ask themselves this question on a case-by-case basis and not simply based on what type of creature they are? And I’m not sure how the changes would prevent the narrative approach you describe. Saying that goblins and orcs live in human-like societies doesn’t prevent you from telling a story that’s analogous to what has happened between human societies.
Maybe we’re working off of different data points, what WotC material are specifically referring to for the changes?
Sorry if my answer was off-topic. I thought you were asking about personhood in your personal games, because you made the statement that if a critter acts like a person that indicates you should treat it as a person. I personally agree, but I wanted to point out the fuzziness of personhood.
Looking back over my comment, I think I ended up rambling and only mostly saying anything. These are the points I wanted to express:
Personhood isn’t objective fact, and every person at your gaming table has a different idea of what a person is.
Since only people count when making moral decisions, personhood is a bit of a touchy subject and doesn’t get examined much. As a result, pretty much everyone thinks all the good people they know agree with their personal definition of personhood because disagreeing on that means you are Evil and Bad.
Because this is such a touchy subject, people are really sensitive to it. It’s hard to make a work that interrogate personhood without it coming across as preachy, so if you want to interrogate it it’s best to present them with a nuanced situation and let them make up their own mind without non-diagetic criticism nudging them in a direction
i also wanted to repeatedly emphasize that our fantasy tropes can be traced back to colonialist, imperialist, and often very racist tropes that were common in the 19th century, and a lot of more modernized fantasy tropes stemming from those old tropes can still be pretty yikes if you think about it for any period of time. Not something most players think about, but I think trying to improve on them is worthwhile.
Also, I should point out that in 2e, 1e, and ODnD, the phrasing was usually “Orcs tend towards chaotic evil due to the Rage of Gruumsh inclining them to solve all problems with violence” or “Elves are generally chaotic and will react to a party with suspicion or hostility”. Back then, alignment was more about external relationships than your character, but this wasn’t communicated well. The widespread misconception that alignment was about your internal character got enshrined in 3rd edition and then just got carried forward from then into later editions, which is really unfortunate. The point of alignment was supposed to be that good characters and evil characters don’t get along, and the same with Lawful and Chaotic characters, even if their individual ethics don’t actually overlap much. But that’s not how most players see it, so now WotC has reacted to this with a full walkback on creature alignment in a way that kinda erases the little nuance that was left.
Honestly, I’m a bit more confused now. I definitely agree that humans have a tendency to dehumanize others, but I wouldn’t consider this a good or healthy thing that we should just accept. So having a ruleset that says, canonically, “this group of sentient creatures is inherently evil” and not “this group of sentient creatures is believed to be evil by this other group” you are encouraging the players to take an unnuanced view of the world.
Isn’t this what the lore changes encourage, by not making a factual statement about the groups, so the players should ask themselves this question on a case-by-case basis and not simply based on what type of creature they are? And I’m not sure how the changes would prevent the narrative approach you describe. Saying that goblins and orcs live in human-like societies doesn’t prevent you from telling a story that’s analogous to what has happened between human societies.
Maybe we’re working off of different data points, what WotC material are specifically referring to for the changes?
Sorry if my answer was off-topic. I thought you were asking about personhood in your personal games, because you made the statement that if a critter acts like a person that indicates you should treat it as a person. I personally agree, but I wanted to point out the fuzziness of personhood.
Looking back over my comment, I think I ended up rambling and only mostly saying anything. These are the points I wanted to express:
Also, I should point out that in 2e, 1e, and ODnD, the phrasing was usually “Orcs tend towards chaotic evil due to the Rage of Gruumsh inclining them to solve all problems with violence” or “Elves are generally chaotic and will react to a party with suspicion or hostility”. Back then, alignment was more about external relationships than your character, but this wasn’t communicated well. The widespread misconception that alignment was about your internal character got enshrined in 3rd edition and then just got carried forward from then into later editions, which is really unfortunate. The point of alignment was supposed to be that good characters and evil characters don’t get along, and the same with Lawful and Chaotic characters, even if their individual ethics don’t actually overlap much. But that’s not how most players see it, so now WotC has reacted to this with a full walkback on creature alignment in a way that kinda erases the little nuance that was left.