Saturday, April 17, 2021

Okay, I guess I'll give my opinion on that Extra Credits video

So Extra Credits released a video claiming that "evil races are bad game design" and got massively ratio'd.

There's a lot to unpack about the video because it conflates a lot of things that aren't actually related. So I'm just going to present a massively simplified argument:

Firstly, our elf-games are violent murder simulators that require players to mow down hordes of mooks. The game is designed that way. Most tabletop roleplaying games are designed that way. If you don't like it, then play a game that isn't a violent murder simulator.

Secondly, while you could easily play a game where you go around scalping human bandits... orcs are just cooler. The use of orcs in fantasy has nothing to do with anti-black racism. Using orcs as your mooks of choice doesn't even imply that they're "inherently evil." The "orc baby dilemma" is a really old argument dating back to UseNet.

There's no way for the players to know that there are good orcs unless the GM goes out of the way to tell them. It's extremely inconvenient to stop and tell the players the backstory of Orc Mook #294 when they're just playing for the sake of violence.

Lastly, it's entirely possible that the "pretty" races like humans, dwarves, elves, etc are just racists the whole time. The game books might be giving hugely biased accounts, I don't know?

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