Cultural differences in fantasy races instead of the plain "good vs. evil"

https://lemmy.world/post/2749662

There is a lot of critic against the whole Good/Evil Lawful/Chaotic alignment and most RPG either don’t have any morality system, or different compass… A simplified D&D style alignment is great for board-gaming where you want to quickly says who is good and who is evil, but isn’t representative of real-life and doesn’t work for RPG, at least at the moment you want to write conflict a bit more complicated than Good versus Evil.

More important than culture, there is the point of view of various factions. Orcs are seen as dangerous barbarians who attack humans, but may-be orcs see human flesh very nourishing, need to give human flesh to kids if we want them to grow big and strong. Elves are at war against human, but may-be human are cutting the trees that elves need to live in. You example regarding property is pretty interesting. We’re on lemmy so let’s get political, in real-life many left-winger would agree that property is robberry Who is evil ? the person deciding that a piece of land and the cattle growing there is their’s or the person who cross that land and hunt that cattle to feed their family ? Isn’t the farmer asking gold to people wanting to feed their family the bad guy of the story ? Look at real-life, there is no such thing as good or evil only people with different opinion and objectives.

So when writing conflict, you need to take into account everybody opinion. Everybody needs the water from the river to water their crop, but the upstream clan decide to build a few canal to water more crop leading to drought in the downstream territories. There is plenty of real-life conflict based on that and it’s a very good pitch to start a war with things more complicated than evil orcs like to eat humans

I agree that the traditional D&D alignment is way too simple for role play.

But I still have a soft spot for Lawful/Chaotic. I think many people display a tendency to conform to the standards of their society and are comforted by norms and tradition, whereas others prefer independence and break from order. This tendency seems more universal than good or evil, since it depends slighly less on cultural norms.

I definitely agree with your focus on factions. In fact, I think many differences between fantasy races derive from the ecogical niche they inhabit, which is emphasized more using factions.