Are drow inherently evil? And other D&D racial restrictions that have been loosened over the years

[HeroMarine]

Are drow inherently evil?​

Yes.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

Not every non-evil drow is a "Drizzt clone"

Per even the updated post-Drizzt description I posted, the "Good" Drow are Neutral at best ftmp.

LLolth is a terrible influence on Drow society, the most despicable and terrible deeds committed by drows are all done in her name and at her bidding.

Maybe, but the general culture isn't her fault imo, even if she encourages it.

The whole debate is really nature vs nurture. Gygax wanted it to be nature. They're basically a fallen and defiled people. A twisted version of Elves, similar to what Orcs were in Tolkien lore.

Salvatore's version and what followed attempted to humanize them, which is gay and dumb, since it robs them of what makes them unique.

That's what I've been saying all along: They HAVE A SOCIETY, and therefore, they have social values, that, while you may disagree with, nonetheless represent a polarity of "good" to them: What is proper behavior. Did you not see the video I linked earlier about this?

Again, Good and Evil are not subjective in D&D. I've said it multiple times and provided evidence, but you just ignore it and blunder on with your misinterpretation, providing no evidence or examples.

And there are examples of shades of gray decline in modern, watered-down D&D. Especially since WotC seems to want to edge closer and closer to dropping Alignments entirely.

But in 2E and before, it's not canon. The Alignment system and its attached philosophies were used to expand the multiverse. They're measurable, almost tangible absolutes that are part of the foundation of the world.

But munchkins don't like it because it restricts them from building their lame Skyrim murderhobo Paladin.

Yes, and at the point your cult becomes mainstream and central to a society, it is now a religion. When you sacrifice children to in a hidden lair away from the prying eyes of society, you're a crazy cultist. When you sacrifice children on public altars in front of a cheering crowd of townspeople to secure the rising of the sun, you're the high priest of a major religion. See: The Aztecs. Are the Aztecs "evil", or do they just have different social values?

They were evil, yes. And in D&D, it would be a provable fact of the universe that only truly deranged people would disagree with. I mean, it is today as well, but people are deluded and I can't cast Know Alignment on any Aztecs to prove my point.

Lolth, btw, is evil. She knows she's evil. Evil has been one of her domains since domains were a thing. She's called the "Queen of the Demonweb Pits". She's a "Demon Lord" who controls one of the 666 layers of the Abyss. You think she's telling people she's really "good" while they sacrifice babies to her? Do you think none of her clerics know "Detect Evil"? Do you think her worshipers don't understand the Abyss is an Evil plane of existence and don't know what demons are?

Anyway, I've said all there is to say here. If you still don't get it at this point, I'm going to assume it's intentional ignorance. You may not like the rules, but they are what they are, and they're there for a reason.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

The Drow are literally a baby murdering spider cult AND a society.

Yes, and at the point your cult becomes mainstream and central to a society, it is now a religion. When you sacrifice children to in a hidden lair away from the prying eyes of society, you're a crazy cultist. When you sacrifice children on public altars in front of a cheering crowd of townspeople to secure the rising of the sun, you're the high priest of a major religion. See: The Aztecs. Are the Aztecs "evil", or do they just have different social values?

This has been covered to death. Morality in DnD is objective, good and evil are tangible, observable forces that do not change based on opinion. As are Law and Chaos!

Unless whoever is currently writing the books changes their opinions on what the alignments mean. E.g. whether slavery, goblin infanticide, or poison is evil or not depends on who is writing. Full stop.

I dump alignment in my games because it’s fucking stupid.

 

[Cael]

The Drow are literally a baby murdering spider cult AND a society.

Yes, and at the point your cult becomes mainstream and central to a society, it is now a religion. When you sacrifice children to in a hidden lair away from the prying eyes of society, you're a crazy cultist. When you sacrifice children on public altars in front of a cheering crowd of townspeople to secure the rising of the sun, you're the high priest of a major religion. See: The Aztecs. Are the Aztecs "evil", or do they just have different social values?

This has been covered to death. Morality in DnD is objective, good and evil are tangible, observable forces that do not change based on opinion. As are Law and Chaos!

Unless whoever is currently writing the books changes their opinions on what the alignments mean. E.g. whether slavery, goblin infanticide, or poison is evil or not depends on who is writing. Full stop.

I dump alignment in my games because it’s fucking stupid.

Just because an author is a retarded leftist cunt doesn't mean the DnD alignments are wrong. We all know leftards should be drowned at birth due to their sheer stupidity. Why base anything off them?

 

[Alex]

The Drow are literally a baby murdering spider cult AND a society.

Yes, and at the point your cult becomes mainstream and central to a society, it is now a religion. When you sacrifice children to in a hidden lair away from the prying eyes of society, you're a crazy cultist. When you sacrifice children on public altars in front of a cheering crowd of townspeople to secure the rising of the sun, you're the high priest of a major religion. See: The Aztecs. Are the Aztecs "evil", or do they just have different social values?

Evil.

(...snip)
I dump alignment in my games because it’s fucking stupid.

I think it is very appropriate if all the impact that morality is supposed to have in your game is divide who is supposed to be a good guy and who isn't. If you want a game where things such as greed, pride and cupidity and their effects in human life take the forefront of the game; sure, giving people a single tag of "good" or "evil" is counter-productive. On the other hand, if the game is about finding traps, killing orcs and finding a way to make off with the greatest amount of treasure without getting killed, having an alignment to settle any issues of whether A is evil or not, or is good or not; or really whether it is an enemy, can keep the game from going into a useless tangent.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

The very fact that there are spergs trying to say the Demon Lord, called the "Demon Queen of Spiders", who rules the Demonweb Pits in the 66th layer of the Abyss, and who demands her followers sacrifice babies to her, isn't "evil" and that Evil is subjective even in that case, proves the necessity of the Alignments in D&D.

Can you imagine being in a game and having to put up with these ridiculous arguments? Of course you can. But thankfully, at least for now, you can just point at the source material and tell them to play a different game if they don't like it.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

In D&D and its various derivatives, alignments are a byproduct of the stated metaphysics of the setting which are objectively true within the latter and not up for debate. So regardless of how one feels about alignment systems of this sort, you gotta treat them as axiomatic for the setting. There's no unreliable narrator to be invoked when it comes to the mechanics of alignment employed in the various rulebooks and the fluff built on top of the mechanical roleplaying system has to conform to them for the purposes of setting consistency.

So if some entity or race is linked to some alignment-based metaphysical plane, then that creature is inherently of that alignment. Simple as.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

"The debates now make me regret that I ever included the system feature, as it is being taken beyond the pale. Better to have the character's actions speak for their ethics and morality than some letter set."

Missed this.

This is just a tired old man being tired and posting about it on a web forum, not a new law passed down from a holy prophet. He also basically calls it a "mess" and refuses to elaborate because he's no longer involved in publishing it, and he says so.

This is a subject that I could write a complete essay on, but it is bootless. Let those who publish the system clean up the mess.

Not his circus, not his monkeys. If he's not being paid to mediate arguments about D&D, why should he bother?

After about 25 years, the subject becomes a tad shipworn and trite, shall we say...

He died less than 5 years later.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

Just because an author is a retarded leftist cunt doesn't mean the DnD alignments are wrong. We all know leftards should be drowned at birth due to their sheer stupidity. Why base anything off them?

Alignments made sense back when it was just Moorcock's chaos/order/balance triad (which were cosmic forces rather than personal codes of behavior) or Anderson's simple "chaos=evil, order=good" logic. D&D made it stupid by giving it two axes that oversimplify the issues of morality and then expecting anyone to be able to agree what this means.

For example, the concept of Lawful Neutral. It only exists to be applied to stuffy obstructive bureaucrats. Humans invented laws because we believe laws promote good, not to exist for their own sake. An obstructive bureaucrat is either lawful good because he believes law is good even if he's overzealous in his enforcement, or lawful evil because he likes abusing his power to make people sweat.

Not only that, but there's a huge difference between concepts like devils that work within laws to exploit it for evil purposes and the cenobites under Leviathan that consider chaos to be evil and go around torturing souls to purge chaos from the universe. Under D&D alignment both would be consigned to Lawful Evil when they don't operate according to the same logic at all. At the same time, "daemons" (the Neutral Evil fiends) are considered a separate race from demons and devils because they sell their services as mercenaries to either. Also, both demons, devils, and daemons are random grab bags of designs and you can't tell which is which without memorizing their MM entries first; whereas chaos daemons from 40k have clearly distinguishable aesthetics.

I think it is very appropriate if all the impact that morality is supposed to have in your game is divide who is supposed to be a good guy and who isn't. If you want a game where things such as greed, pride and cupidity and their effects in human life take the forefront of the game; sure, giving people a single tag of "good" or "evil" is counter-productive. On the other hand, if the game is about finding traps, killing orcs and finding a way to make off with the greatest amount of treasure without getting killed, having an alignment to settle any issues of whether A is evil or not, or is good or not; or really whether it is an enemy, can keep the game from going into a useless tangent.

I just let my group play murderhobos who don't give a flying fuck about the morality of their actions. If they can escape the consequences of their actions, then they can do whatever they want. If they want to pretend to be paragons heroically slaughtering evil orcs, then I'm not going to be an asshole and tell them orcs are actually a persecuted minority. So there's basically only two alignments in my games: "can be reasoned with" and "kill on sight."

But that's just my opinion. I'm well aware that these sorts of argument never go anywhere even after hundreds of pages so it's not a hill I'm willing to die on.

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

For example, the concept of Lawful Neutral. It only exists to be applied to stuffy obstructive bureaucrats.

I just let my group play murderhobos who don't give a flying fuck about the morality of their actions. If they can escape the consequences of their actions, then they can do whatever they want.

Shocking.

 

[Alex]

(...snip)
I just let my group play murderhobos who don't give a flying fuck about the morality of their actions. If they can escape the consequences of their actions, then they can do whatever they want. If they want to pretend to be paragons heroically slaughtering evil orcs, then I'm not going to be an asshole and tell them orcs are actually a persecuted minority. So there's basically only two alignments in my games: "can be reasoned with" and "kill on sight."

But that's just my opinion. I'm well aware that these sorts of argument never go anywhere even after hundreds of pages so it's not a hill I'm willing to die on.

I think that if you want to play a classic dungeoneering game, with a good party, you really only need three alignments:

1. "Good" guys who you are not supposed to mess with and even help when the opportunity arises.
2. "Neutral" guys that can be reasoned with but which can betray you when you aren't expecting.
3. "Evil" guys who can occasionally be reasoned with but which you know they will try to betray you later.

The order/chaos axis can be further used to make the relationships less obvious. Good guys who differ on this axis can end up fighting even though they should be on the same "side". Evil sides likewise might fight along these lines; and while lawful evil characters are bound to betray you eventually just like the chaotic ones, they won't act quite the same and this can create some interesting dynamics for the players to explore. Neutral guys will likewise work differently, with the further issue that they may consider law or chaos as more important than morality, which can make them quite a bit alien (like modrons or slaads (slaadi?)).

If your party is not "good", things change a bit as well. The evil party might look like the mirrored version of the good guys, but the situation is a bit more interesting than that. You still can't trust other evil beings, but you might be able to form deals with them where you don't end up betrayed at the end, at least if there is an actual common threat and especially if you are dealing with lawful evil beings. Neutral beings will probably be more wary of your party (at least if you've accrued a reputation of some kind) than they would be of a good one, but on the other hand you might be able to make dealings with them that you wouldn't be able to as a good party. Good beings will, of course, hate you. But depending on your reputation they probably won't just attack on sight. Which means that there are interesting kinds of deals you can make with them in order to betray them later. Neutral parties of course give you the most lee-way in how you act and who you deal with; but at the same time, many of the more interesting interactions are missing.

If this sounds like the kind of game you want to play, I think using alignments make a lot of sense.

 

[Heroic Liberator]

On that note, you should watch the newer Dredd if you haven't already. Better adaptation of the source material.

Spoiler

And for Stallone lawbringer goodness, you should watch Demolition Man.

 

[mediocrepoet]

I think that if you want to play a classic dungeoneering game, with a good party, you really only need three alignments:

1. "Good" guys who you are not supposed to mess with and even help when the opportunity arises.
2. "Neutral" guys that can be reasoned with but which can betray you when you aren't expecting.
3. "Evil" guys who can occasionally be reasoned with but which you know they will try to betray you later.

Kinda/sorta related to this, do you any of you guys know why they decided to go with Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic for BECMI instead of Good-Neutral-Evil? From what I'd seen, in practice, Law and Chaos tended to be treated as Good and Evil respectively.

 

[Volourn]

Lloth is evil. By definition. No shades if gray. And, she's fine with that. She wants power, and she wants 'revenge' for what she feels is a 'betrayal' by Corelleon and the pantheon. She doesn't need or want you trying to use cock bullshit fake philosophy to paint her as 'good'. Lmao This idea that you can naked sacrifices of innocent babies at an altar can be seen as good or justified us sjw nonsense.

 

[Alex]

I think that if you want to play a classic dungeoneering game, with a good party, you really only need three alignments:

1. "Good" guys who you are not supposed to mess with and even help when the opportunity arises.
2. "Neutral" guys that can be reasoned with but which can betray you when you aren't expecting.
3. "Evil" guys who can occasionally be reasoned with but which you know they will try to betray you later.

Kinda/sorta related to this, do you any of you guys know why they decided to go with Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic for BECMI instead of Good-Neutral-Evil? From what I'd seen, in practice, Law and Chaos tended to be treated as Good and Evil respectively.

The first alignment axis was law/chaos. I believe good and evil became an aspect of it only when they made AD&D.

As for why, I think it is both a direct translation of the sides of the fantasy wargames D&D came from and because these sides represented the strange pulp fantasy that was the inspiration of so much of AD&D. There is probably more to it as well, but I am sure Zed Duke of Banville will come along shortly to explain that way better than I could.

I personally think that having law and chaos as the only components for alignment can be a pretty good setup. In this case, alignment doesn't shackle morality issues so much, and can well represent sides of a cosmic struggle beyond human ken.

Of course, lawful in this case is still the good option. Chaotic beings want a world that would be hell for most people. Neutral beings are either opportunistic or, if they are actively neutral, inimical to civilization. But while the lawful side is the only "good" side, things aren't so well defined on the personal level. There are people and beings who might be called "good" on all three alignments, and some of the beings on the side of order may be every bit as strange and inimical to humans as those on the side of chaos.

 

[Norfleet]

For example, the concept of Lawful Neutral. It only exists to be applied to stuffy obstructive bureaucrats. Humans invented laws because we believe laws promote good, not to exist for their own sake. An obstructive bureaucrat is either lawful good because he believes law is good even if he's overzealous in his enforcement, or lawful evil because he likes abusing his power to make people sweat.

Nah, Lawful Neutral is best summarized in the line "You are technically correct. The best kind of correct!". This is the guy who doesn't care whether the rules are good or bad, just that they are the rules. This is the guy playing Papers Please going for the 100% accuracy mode.

 

[Cael]

Just because an author is a retarded leftist cunt doesn't mean the DnD alignments are wrong. We all know leftards should be drowned at birth due to their sheer stupidity. Why base anything off them?

Alignments made sense back when it was just Moorcock's chaos/order/balance triad (which were cosmic forces rather than personal codes of behavior) or Anderson's simple "chaos=evil, order=good" logic. D&D made it stupid by giving it two axes that oversimplify the issues of morality and then expecting anyone to be able to agree what this means.

For example, the concept of Lawful Neutral. It only exists to be applied to stuffy obstructive bureaucrats. Humans invented laws because we believe laws promote good, not to exist for their own sake. An obstructive bureaucrat is either lawful good because he believes law is good even if he's overzealous in his enforcement, or lawful evil because he likes abusing his power to make people sweat.

Not only that, but there's a huge difference between concepts like devils that work within laws to exploit it for evil purposes and the cenobites under Leviathan that consider chaos to be evil and go around torturing souls to purge chaos from the universe. Under D&D alignment both would be consigned to Lawful Evil when they don't operate according to the same logic at all. At the same time, "daemons" (the Neutral Evil fiends) are considered a separate race from demons and devils because they sell their services as mercenaries to either. Also, both demons, devils, and daemons are random grab bags of designs and you can't tell which is which without memorizing their MM entries first; whereas chaos daemons from 40k have clearly distinguishable aesthetics.

This is why we get idiot players who think Paladins going ping-thump! is THE thing to do. A complete misunderstanding of the alignment system and an insistence that their interpretation is the correct one, when even the source material tell them they are wrong.

 

[Cael]

For example, the concept of Lawful Neutral. It only exists to be applied to stuffy obstructive bureaucrats. Humans invented laws because we believe laws promote good, not to exist for their own sake. An obstructive bureaucrat is either lawful good because he believes law is good even if he's overzealous in his enforcement, or lawful evil because he likes abusing his power to make people sweat.

Nah, Lawful Neutral is best summarized in the line "You are technically correct. The best kind of correct!". This is the guy who doesn't care whether the rules are good or bad, just that they are the rules. This is the guy playing Papers Please going for the 100% accuracy mode.

Correct. Lawful Neutral is the alignment of judges. They are completely neutral on whether the law is Good or Evil. They are just there to adjudicate the law. They don't allow their own biases into their ruling. Having Tyr being Lawful Good is a massive mistake on the part of the FR creator, for example, but given that it is Ed Greenwood, what the heck did you expect?

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

Kinda/sorta related to this, do you any of you guys know why they decided to go with Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic for BECMI instead of Good-Neutral-Evil? From what I'd seen, in practice, Law and Chaos tended to be treated as Good and Evil respectively.

The first alignment axis was law/chaos. I believe good and evil became an aspect of it only when they made AD&D.

As for why, I think it is both a direct translation of the sides of the fantasy wargames D&D came from and because these sides represented the strange pulp fantasy that was the inspiration of so much of AD&D. There is probably more to it as well, but I am sure Zed Duke of Banville will come along shortly to explain that way better than I could.

I personally think that having law and chaos as the only components for alignment can be a pretty good setup. In this case, alignment doesn't shackle morality issues so much, and can well represent sides of a cosmic struggle beyond human ken.

Of course, lawful in this case is still the good option. Chaotic beings want a world that would be hell for most people. Neutral beings are either opportunistic or, if they are actively neutral, inimical to civilization. But while the lawful side is the only "good" side, things aren't so well defined on the personal level. There are people and beings who might be called "good" on all three alignments, and some of the beings on the side of order may be every bit as strange and inimical to humans as those on the side of chaos.

BECMI uses a single-axis, 3-alignment system of lawful/neutral/chaotic because this is the same system used in B/X, which in turn took this system directly from original D&D (though not Holmes basic D&D, which is the only version to use the two-axis, 5-alignment system proposed by Gary Gygax in that Strategic Review article mentioned earlier).

However, "lawful" in the context of these three versions of D&D really means good, and "chaotic" similarly means evil. Gygax's inspirations for alignment were Poul Anderson's novel Three Hearts and Three Lions and Moorcock's Elric stories (possibly also some other Moorcock stories featuring law versus chaos). In Anderson's novel, Law was associated with human, Christian civilization while Chaos was associated with the supernatural, sinister elven realm, and neutrality represented a physical borderlands between them. In Moorcock's Elric stories Chaos is almost always demonstrably evil, while Law is generally good. The OD&D rules frequently use the word "evil" in place of "chaotic", in particular for a number of spell effects, both clerical and magical, such as Protection from Evil, and sometimes use "good" in place of "lawful" for similar effects. Notably, clerics of chaotic alignment were referred to as evil anti-clerics. After publication of the D&D rules, Gygax became dissatisfied with using the words "lawful" and "chaotic" in this manner, leading to his proposal of a distinct lawful-chaotic axis orthogonal to the good-evil axis. The initial five-alignment system proposed in a Strategic Review article and implemented in Holmes basic D&D became a nine-alignment system for Gygax's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

When Tom Moldvay and David Zeb Cook designed 1981's B/X D&D, they reverted to the original alignment system of D&D, and Frank Mentzer kept this system for BECMI D&D, which began publication in 1983. In 1987, TSR shifted focus to campaign setting material and began publishing a series of gazetteers detailing the various countries of the Known World setting that had been sketched out vaguely in previous D&D material. Although these campaign setting books maintained the same single-axis three-alignment system of BECMI D&D, the authors had been influenced enough by AD&D's two-axis system that sometimes a "chaotic" or "lawful" alignment would indicate chaotic or lawful in an AD&D sense rather than necessarily meaning evil or good, which could be quite confusing as the intention would need to be divined from whatever character description was provided.

 

[FriendlyMerchant]

The Drow are like every other non-Gnomish race; Retarded, smelly, and Turnip deficient.

 

[Sarathiour]

virtuous women like Viconia? (at least trying to be virtuous )

Viconia is still an evil character trough and trough from BG1 to ToB. She's an outcast and hunted by her own people because she was slightly less evil than you typical drow priestress. She's still gonna steal, lie and murder her way trough, it's just that she's deviant among drow because she gains no pleasure in commiting senseless atrocious act.

 

[BruceVC]

virtuous women like Viconia? (at least trying to be virtuous )

Viconia is still an evil character trough and trough from BG1 to ToB. She's an outcast and hunted by her own people because she was slightly less evil than you typical drow priestress. She's still gonna steal, lie and murder her way trough, it's just that she's deviant among drow because she gains no pleasure in commiting senseless atrocious act.

Yes but we have discussed this and we agreed people can change and part of Viconia journey is a change of personality and views....lets be positive and support people who want to become good ?

 

[BruceVC]

Lloth is evil. By definition. No shades if gray. And, she's fine with that. She wants power, and she wants 'revenge' for what she feels is a 'betrayal' by Corelleon and the pantheon. She doesn't need or want you trying to use cock bullshit fake philosophy to paint her as 'good'. Lmao This idea that you can naked sacrifices of innocent babies at an altar can be seen as good or justified us sjw nonsense.

You raise an interesting question, what about a campaign where Lolth wants to become good or she is cursed by Helm of Opposite Alignment?

If Devas and Archons can become evil why cant demons and devils become good? Lolth is hot, I would Romance her but not as a Drider obviously

 

[hello friend]

hahaha this guy

 

[Non-Edgy Gamer]

You raise an interesting question, what about a campaign where Lolth wants to become good or she is cursed by Helm of Opposite Alignment?

As a Chaotic Evil being, Lloth wouldn't want to become Good. And she's so baked into evil that even forcing an alignment change would be difficult to have a meaningful effect beyond making everyone think she was nuts.

For example, she controls a layer of the Abyss. That layer and its inhabitants don't become good just because she does, does it? Or will Corellon Larethian forgive her betrayal and welcome her back as one of the Seldarine just because some weird curse made her into a spider nun? Do the Drow suddenly become Lawful Good just because Lloth asks them to one day?

If Devas and Archons can become evil why cant demons and devils become good?

It's ultimately a lot more impactful story-wise for someone good to become evil and than for someone evil to become good. What's she going to do, NOT sacrifice babies? Do random acts of charity? Not the most interesting campaign.

And besides, Deep Space Nine did it already.

Lolth is hot, I would Romance her but not as a Drider obviously

Obviously, since as a Drider you would have no genitalia.