Ganondox wrote:
I often choose the evil side in games, not because I approve of their actions, but because they are usually so much cooler than the good guys, who are usually humans and elves and other boring stuff while evil gets dragons and demons and other non-humaniod stuff, and they are often red and black, my favorite color scheme. I really annoyed at the "racism" in works, always making the humans to good guys and the orcs the bad guys, so I feel sorry for the poor orcs and aliens and demons. Just because something looks ugly doesn't mean its evil!
Not to mention that half the time the so-called good guys are genocidal jerks.
In the past, that might've been the case. But lately--last five years or so--I've seen a big trend in gaming, in general, to think more carefully about what it might be like to be an orc or a troll or a dragon.
As you know, fantasy gaming started out as a branch of wargaming, with the "monsters" made of little more than a block of stats and meant to be tactical challenges for the players. And in much the same way as we don't think about what it might be like to be a chess piece, we didn't think about what life was like for orcs.
Things have changed since then. People have gotten much, much more into the storytelling aspect of it. Instead of just trying to make powerful characters, they're creating three-dimensional people interacting with a much more realistic world.
With the addition of serious storytelling (whether dramatic or humorous or anything in between) came the need to make both the protagonists and antagonists more than just stats. Now, rather than being a guy in shiny armor cutting down orcs willy-nilly because they're worth 10 XP each, your Human Paladin is more likely to be a diplomat trying to protect his home city, investigating who is trying to unbalance the fragile truce between his liege and the nearby orc tribes.
In D&D and many other fantasy worlds there are species which are all, mostly, or often Evil-aligned and I'll admit that does change everything. In the real world of course we've only got one intelligent species (that we know of) and we've got no tendencies toward anything but neutral. In a fantasy world, though, you can expect about half the orcs to be evil, reliably. So your basic paladin is not just facing the reality that orcs are self-aware individuals capable of making moral choices, but that some of them are not going to be the type he can just smite--some of them are innocent. Even more complicated are creatures like red dragons, which are born with the knowledge of the dragon species imprinted on them and thus are born with an evil alignmment... but even the evil alignment doesn't necessarily mean they would justly deserve death (they might just be unscrupulous lawyers).
It's just getting a lot more complicated. You don't have to play Evil to play an interesting character. And, anyway, the genocidal humans you mentioned? Yeah, they're Evil. Even if they don't have it marked on their character sheet, that's what they're playing. And if I were their DM, I'd force them to explain exactly why they were killing things randomly, because "they're worth XP" is not a good enough explanation.
08 Oct 2011, 6:25 pm
