lol this orc stuff is so retarded. its not like orcs dont have a personality or cant be good (though good orcs like orc player characters are the exception not the rule). orcs are not humans they are fantasy creatures so why would they have the same mindset as a human?
the worst argument for orcs being racist I saw in that that thread (the one on page 54) was that if orcs can be compared to racist statements about black people then they must be censored. like wtf with that logic I can make anything racist. like for example gelatinous cubes are racist because they are slimy horrid creatures that seek out gold and jewlry to absorb like a racist stereotype of a jew.
of course it makes no sense for wizards of the coast to make no monster inherently evil because some monsters like cubes or giant spiders are not really intelligent enough to have a sense of morality. or demons which are the personification of evil. IMO the only change wizards should make is to make a characters "race" its "species" instead. it never really made sense to me why DnD used race when humans elves dwarfs and orcs are all obviously species not races.
Well, a lot of the problem is that, like... So, Shadowrun. Shadowrun did a really interesting thing in the 80s/90s, where it actually saw and owned the "orks are just a reskin of niggers" supposed subtext. This was
30 years ago.
And they fucking ran with it. Their whole game setting actually had baked in, "Orks have trouble with abstract reasoning and anger management. They also have better muscle tone and bone density. We can straight up identify the genes that make them this way. So what? It doesn't make them any less people, and everyone who says it does are explicitly painted as the bad guys."
And I think this actually contributed a lot to nuanced discussions about all sorts of shit. Like, one passage in Shadowrun actually said something very like "so we found out in 2012 when the magic came back that everything we thought about white and black and racial superiority and inferiority was bullshit. We were also introduced to people that matched every stereotype that we thought was true about skin color. And it turns out the answer is the same either way: so the fuck what?"
Mechanically, I can make a Human or an Orc into a super smart computer whiz, and the only difference is a -1 penalty in a particular set of relevant dice pools, which is more than offset by other advantages. Story wise, orcs are a bit antisocial and hot headed. And still, so the fuck what if they are?
The problem in d&d is that the alignment system is tied to a pair of words that designate real-world moral worth. Gygax didn't originally do that; he originally just had 'chaos' and 'order' as the two alignment options. Then someone channeled the Ghost of Future Political Memes and made it a two dimensional grid, which is remarkably like the modern political grid meme. "Chaos" vs "Order" is basically just libertarian vs authoritarian, and "Good" vs "Evil" is just collectivist vs individualist. Saying "on the whole, Orcs are more Evil than Elves" is identical to saying " on the whole, Americans are more right-wing than Scandanavians".
Good vs Evil is a measurable force in D&D, which happens to track real-world religious preconceptions about moral worth. There's your problem, not whether particular races are just well disguised dog-whistles.
As RPG.net used to say before it got infected with cancer, "it's a game about elves. Relax."
