[DF] Why not have some pure "bad guy" races in DF?

[blacksmith]

Originally Posted by Lonewulf

This goes both ways. if an alien culture cannot communicate with us (perhaps they communicate by ultrasound or the like), then they would be perfectly justified in making us extinct for our resources, no?

Sure. It is easy to set up such situations. See Speaker for the Dead for such an issue. It is not hard at all to come up with non humans who need to be killed in large numbers with out making them Evil.

Of course communicate can be in some very basic and violent fashion, like protecting a boarder fiercely.

We prefer to see humans winning this kind of war in fiction but it doesn't necessarily mean that they are better. This is because we can empathize with humans and characters who can not be empathized with are just not that useful as protagonists or getting the reader to feel something when they achieve victory.

It is easy to make species that are either alien enough(say some thing like hive insects) or intelligent but not social like my proposed dragon so that they really can not empathize with the humans position.

I mean in the same reasoning I can argue that vampires as a predator that must kill humans are not evil, but as a human I would support genocide against them.

[aesir23]

If the tiger is not evil for eating a man, than why is the ogre evil for doing the same?

[Anders]

Because it says so in the stat block.

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Most RPGs (indeed, most cultural media) are relentlessly anthropocentric, so of course we're not evil. We're just doing what it takes to survive (or more).

Like the xenomorphs.

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by aesir23

If the tiger is not evil for eating a man, than why is the ogre evil for doing the same?

The relevant quote is from G.B. Shaw, to the effect that when a tiger murders a man we call it savagery, but when a man murders a tiger we call it sport.

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by davidtmoore

David Brin (who among other things wrote the Uplift series and consulted on both GURPS Uplift and Tribes!) in the foreword to The Dogma of Otherness, tells about how he was forced to abandon his sentimental notions of intelligent dolphins. They're smart, but no more than chimps, and possibly less.

Appeal to authority! Nice!

[Evil Roy Slade]

Originally Posted by Lonewulf

No.

Evidence that monkeys are sapient, plz?

If they are sapient, then this causes one hell of an ethical issue we have to answer, don't we?

I have to wonder what will happen when we make First Contact with an alien race. You all seem content to kill or capture on sight if they aren't Homo.

Any statement is true if you are allowed to redefine the terms. As long as humans are safely Homo and chimpanzees are safely Pan, they are kosher (as it were). I urge you to look into the lengthy history of where that line between WE and THEY got drawn in Hominidae.

[davidtmoore]

Originally Posted by Evil Roy Slade

Appeal to authority! Nice!

:-P

Just that I see no need to duplicate his research. And if the man who wrote about space dolphins had to admit they weren't that smart, there must be something to it.

[b-dog]

Maybe more back on topic, in DF there is a force of evil that is real and I feel that races like orcs, trolls, ogres, goblins, hobgoblins, etc. would be aligned with this force. Good vs. evil has been part of DF since it started.

[Stone Dog]

Originally Posted by aesir23

If the tiger is not evil for eating a man, than why is the ogre evil for doing the same?

One reason might be...

To a tiger a man is just handy protein walking about and probably not being very careful about who is going to try to eat it. So tigers are incapable of comprehending the value of a moral argument. Even if you could magically "talk" to one of them, morality would be simply alien. They are amoral even if trained.

To an ogre a man is something that will scream and suffer when he is roasted alive and devoured. Ogres might be capable of understanding talk of mercy and compassion, but usually they willingly reject it in favor of cruelty and oppression. They are immoral, but you can sometimes dig up a fairly well behaved mercenary or something.