Specific, race-wide alignment

Alignment entires for monsters and demihumans are there because it is a generalization of their culture and society. A Society that mutilates the genitals of young women, has child sex slavery, kills ideological enemies without mercy, opresses a large portion of the population with unequal and humilitaing speech and dress restrictions, and attacks other cultures by destroying innocents with sleeper agents is an evil society, end of discussion.

The alignment is meant for the particular stat block the MM is presenting. It represents the kind of creature adventuring parties are likely to encounter in dungeons. An orc is chaotic evil in the same way that it's a 1st level warrior.

>Lawful Good is the only playable alignment.

>Lawful Good is the only playable alignment.
I think you mean Neutral Good

If you're running DnD correctly your players will kill and or rob countless sentient creatures. If you don't want to force the pcs to be assholes it helps to have unambiguously evil creatures to kill

Reminder that all people and characters are just Chaotic Neutrals that occasionally try to use their supposed alignments to justify their actions.

>"grey morality stories are overdone XD"
>implying cliche crystal clear morality isn't the oldest and most tired moral trope in the book

Is this your unironic opinion? Because you're wrong

No I'm not.

in my setting, all beings are evil-aligned by default.

You are though there are people that unironically believe in a follow codes of conduct, for better or for worse people aren't unfettered

Grey mortality is becoming a tired cliché as well. It isn't special.

They might, but the nature of players is always going to be that they act on their impulses and express that through their character by either ignoring their alignment or saying they must be an asshole because their alignment says they must.

>chaotic Neutral
>not being a true Neutral masterrace that generally gets by with the law, but always bends it and breaks it whenever it suits him, instead of a lolsorandumb idiot
Pleeeb.

People have some very widely disparate codes of conduct, though. Which is why I think alignment systems are utterly stupid and should be replaced with something like a values or ideals system, but anyways.

>The new cliche is bad so the old cliche is better
Unless you intend on changing your opinion every 4 years on the subject then you'll need to understand that it's not the point of a story to be upheld by its morality system, rather it's the point of the story to be good in the first place despite how it treats its morals.

>Implying players are capable enough of playing True Neutral as anything but indecisive retards and apathetic monk-types.

True neutral (or Neutral Good) is what most people are in everyday life, though: we may superficially agree and live inside rules, but the rules of society in practice aren't some instruction manual, but rather aspirational, and so they are always bent or even ignored in service of some purpose or other.

Do your damn job!

>Humans, Chaotic Neutral.

>grey means everyone's a bastard
>not "everyone has his own ideals that are not necerilly bad, but these ideals aren't compatible"
Get the fuck out of Veeky Forums, you literal 12-years old.

I agree with you that players are generally shit (but not universally) I just thought that you believed that people only act in self interest without being spiteful or altruistic and completely uncaring about society except in how it effects them, which is obviously false

>grey means "everyone's a bastard"
are you dense? people who aren't evil still come into conflict with each other without being bastards
here's your (You)

Sounds like you should get better players

No redemption, They can't argue that it's just their job, when you spot them in the street they can't just say they're recently fired, etc.

Boo-fucking-hoo Guess what? There's nothing new under the sun. I'd prefer a tired cliche that affords me more options in terms of character motivations and outlooks than a tired cliche that boxes me in with clearly defined constraints that pervade everything (often in nonsensical ways).

That would make them TN like animals, not CN since they are just selfish and aren't actively anarching off.

The only race in my setting who race-wide alignt are the wood elves because they're in a semi-hive-mind with their forest and even those can step out of their society if they truly desire to.

It's one of those things where good writing takes a backseat to gameplay convenience. It takes more work for a DM to justify killing sapient creatures without having an obviously evil race to point at and tell you to kill.

It's realistic, see jews

like, why cant they just kill stuff over survival or self-defense? i never used alignment seriously and i never ran into such problems simply by having "evil" or dangerous individuals rather than to make whole sapient races like that

Yes, Muslims are Lawful Evil.

This is why I don't let PCs play monster races. Someone always want to be that one good orc.

The reason given in D&D is that the good aligned deities support free will and so their races have the ability to choose and thus have different alignments. Evil deities don't care about free will and so their races will be predestined towards certain alignments

They might be bad, user, but on that occasion you were the bad guys. What now? Do you kill yourself?

I kill them but grumble about it.

>kill orc LARPing as a peaceful traveling merchant because all orcs are evil by default
>lose paladin powers because he actually was a peaceful orc merchant

I immediately shot my DM, than the police and then an outdoor cat

...

You're describing murderhobos. There are plenty of players who aren't murderhobos and who use alignment to describe their character, not restrict them.

This, again, reveals the problem with the idea of alignments

The culture most of us live in is highly individualistic, encouraging people to find their own truths and morals (that's the ideal we believe in anyway, really we are mostly mind controlled cogs in big state machines).

But this kind of culture is not the only possible culture.

Some cultures encourage unity. They might use either the carrot or the stick (or both) to keep it's members in line, maybe even slaying those who show signs of going against the norm. In a culture like this, it would be expected that every member is of the same DnD alignment.

If that culture is dominant in a race, it could be that the whole race shares the same DnD alignment. The culture might be colonialistic, racist/race-purist and totalitarian, so it would seek to slay everyone of that race that shows signs of the "wrong" alignment, thus keeping the race "pure" in the alignment-sense.

that would be fine if races wouldnt be treated as mono-cultural so often.

What if I don't want to psychoanalyse every monster I meet?

That's like 90% of america

You could just kill them or negotiate with them when their goals are incompatible with yours, whichever seems more practical at the time.

Yeah but now it's the edgy new contrarian position for people to feel unique and stand out from popular grey morality.