Honestly I’m so used to deconstructions of the basic good races vs. evil races dichotomy that when I joined my first long form DnD campaign about a year ago, I ended up having a chat about it with our DM where he had to explain to me that the orcs were intended to be an obviously “we are evil, we are the enemy, you are supposed to fight and kill us” type of enemy. There’s been some more nuance since then, but even since we’ve moved to the next campaign with new characters, mine is once again the “wait, maybe we should listen hear out the chaotic evil demonic minions and find out why they suddenly decided to try and invade our lands” type of character.
Alignment-locked races (or classes for that matter) are just stupid. It’s probably the thing I hated about D&D the most and getting rid of alignment altogether was one of our house rules. I’m actually really happy Baldur’s Gate 3 did that, because suddenly a whole bunch of players realized how you can easily work around those restrictions.
It’s so much more fun when you travel to, say, the Abyss and don’t operate under the pretense that everything you meet there is chaotic evil by default and that you could maybe even meet a morally complex demon. Even more fun in a Planescape campaign.
Honestly I’m so used to deconstructions of the basic good races vs. evil races dichotomy that when I joined my first long form DnD campaign about a year ago, I ended up having a chat about it with our DM where he had to explain to me that the orcs were intended to be an obviously “we are evil, we are the enemy, you are supposed to fight and kill us” type of enemy. There’s been some more nuance since then, but even since we’ve moved to the next campaign with new characters, mine is once again the “wait, maybe we should listen hear out the chaotic evil demonic minions and find out why they suddenly decided to try and invade our lands” type of character.
Alignment-locked races (or classes for that matter) are just stupid. It’s probably the thing I hated about D&D the most and getting rid of alignment altogether was one of our house rules. I’m actually really happy Baldur’s Gate 3 did that, because suddenly a whole bunch of players realized how you can easily work around those restrictions.
It’s so much more fun when you travel to, say, the Abyss and don’t operate under the pretense that everything you meet there is chaotic evil by default and that you could maybe even meet a morally complex demon. Even more fun in a Planescape campaign.
/off-topic rant