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I didn't argue with them, I just had them lynched by a mob the first time they went anywhere near civilisation. Which is what would happen.
2) As far as I can tell, alignments aren't gone. They're just removing the alignment tags from player races specifically since no player race is inherently any one alignment.
1) Alignments are not going away or being changed in anyway in regards to mechanics or lore. All that's happening is that they're removing the alignment suggestions on player race traits in attempt to encourage players to pick any alignment they want rather than what's typical for that race.
2) The reasoning for lore sections in regards to some monsters like Orcs and Drow is not because those are being removed from Forgotten Realms. They're doing it because going forward there's going to be a lot more official 5e books taking place outside the Forgotten Realms lore that'll have they're own lore for a lot of creatures, so WoTC thought it would be best to remove definitive statements about some races' lore in order to cause less confusion for players playing non-Forgotten Realm adventures.
You can disagree with their approach if you want, but WoTC, at least in this instance, has not actually removed anything from Forgotten Realms.
I don't know the truth of it, but WotC is based on the west coast and is a company of creatives that owes a lot of their recent success to hollywood embracing the game. That may be irritating to players who do not live in that environment, but I can see where WotC is coming from.
As always, those who disagree with the changes are free to ignore them.
I think this is the most important response to such changes.
As a DM, I make use of whatever lore makes sense for my games, and ignore the rest. The average tabletop DnD group won't change whatsoever from this errata. I don't think my players have even heard the news. I've always had moral ambiguity in my games anyway, there's really not much new here.
In terms of BG3, Larian is our DM. The idea that a few options changed behind the scenes at WotC isn't going to have any impact on how this story plays out. Why would it?
I'd never want to play in your game. A DM that calls their players "fanbois" (original spelling preserved) and instead of agreeing on things at session 0 doing the sneaky move on their characters to which they invested time and effort is just .. a joke of a DM. Or a very immature one at best. Aaaanyways, moving on
I think the alignment thing was artificial from the very beginning. Because the whole good/evil thing is relative. What's good for one can be a terrible crime for another. Like - the "good" deed of killing the "evil" races "just because they are evil" is a heck of a resemblance with 193x moods in a certain country in Europe, although the reasons differ.
Therefore it's far more practical to have the situation judged by those who participate in it and the resulting morale be a product of the decisions made in said situation.
But in this fantasy game good and evil *are* objective, in the same way Light Side and Dark Side are objectively good and evil categories in Star Wars. There are (well, were) entire spells and abilities dedicated to either detecting or dealing with an entity of a specific alignment. Alignment was more than just a bubble you filled in for describing your character's personality; it was an element based across the cosmology.
On a basic level, some people would rather not worry about their characters beating up monsters who could secretly turn out to be keeping orphans safe or slaying a dragon protecting her eggs. It's the same reason why video games have n@zis or zombies or n@zi zombies; here there by objective evil you should feel unapologetic for killing, have fun. Some people just want evil people to beat up, and deeming a race as "always chaotic evil don't feel bad about it" is as safe of a method as... well, as many authors and artists who have used the trope.
On a deeper narrative level, it holds a lot of interesting questions. In a world of objective mortality where there are divine beings directly correlated with an alignment along with their respective afterlives, how do you deal with this? How do you deal with being evil? What if you are from one of these evil races, and due to a quirk or some other factor, you can show some restraint? Like a succubus choosing chastity to suppress desires. And what if you are good? Can there be a point of changing nature? And indeed, in a world like this, what can change the nature of a man? This was what the RPG Planescape: Torment, set out to ask an answer.
I don't think alignment, especially same race alignment, holds as much space in 5e. The mechanics don't really support it, with so much being cut. But I don't think it's fair to say it *never* worked. There was a lot of potential that could be used and was utilized, even if a lot of DMs and players abused it, and some still do.
Also it gives DMs who craft their own world sort of permission to write races as they wish, and build their culture in their worlds how they want.
Yet to keep on topic in BG1&2 if you had a Drow join your party it was a reputation hit. In fact in 2 we have the option of saving a Drow from a lynch mob. I think Larian might be avoiding certain social issues given recent irl events.
Someone made a really excellent post on reddit on why the "inherently evil race" trope works on races while it brings up all the criticisms about racism and laziness in on others. And that factor is how alien does the ways that that race acts feel in comparison to how humans act. The more alien and distinct a race feels from humans, the more easy it is to accept that they different enough to not have the same level of free will as humans do.
Like look at how Pathfinder handles demons and devils. They aren't just a regular sentient race that acts and reproduces the same way humans do. Instead, the souls of sinful mortals are taken to the abyss/hell where they are then merged and distilled into pure essences of a particular sin, which then goes through a centuries long process until it eventually gives birth to a creature made entirely of that sin. Demons/devils also don't age or have childhoods, they just come out as fully mature adults due to essentially being artificially crafted into existence. The differences from there continue, but the point stands that they are incredibly different and distinct from humans. You can not just take a demon character and replace it with a human version and expect it to play out the same way just due to how different they are from one another. Which is why you rarely hear anyone complain about them being inherently evil since their alien factor is so well executed and communicated to the player that they never feel the need to compare them to humans.
5e orcs are not like that. They're mammals just like humans. They reproduce just like humans, even going so far as being able to have children with humans. They wear clothes that look just like tribal era human clothes. And they raid and pillage just like humans used to do. If you were to replace a tribe of 5e orcs with a tribe of stupid evil human barbarians, it would play out the exact same way, which is why they don't well as a inherently evil race. Yes, I know there is lore explanations about how they were created by some god and that's why they're inherently evil, but that's never well communicated at all to the player even in official 5e adventures. They come off as humans but slightly bigger and greener, which is why they've garnered so much controversies about racism since its hard to view them as that different from any other sentient race like humans.