Stories matter. Stories are powerful. Fiction is the brightest and strongest lens with which we use to look at ourselves and the society around us. The stories we tell each other convey messages about what is good, what is bad, and who deserves to win. (yes this is about orcs).

You might disagree with me. Fine. I've been fighting this fight since the Bush II Administration and I'm over trying to convince people that the emotional experiences they had, when, say, Peter Parker dissolved into ash, and then sailed back into frame a year later, matter.

My point is, the stories we tell each other, and how we tell them, reflect who we are as a people. Take Horatio Alger's short stories - fiction that the real rich could use to indict the real poor, for not being clever & hard-working as these characters.

War propaganda is a really good example of this. Take Casablanca. The film ends with "I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship." That isn't just Rick & Louis becoming buddies, it's American solidarity with then-Nazi- occupied France. Justification for US to go to war.

So when you have your pizza and beer and dice and #DnD sheets, the stories you tell around the table matter. The PCs are supposed to be heroes (usually). How do you define heroic? What even is good? Or evil? Is evil born, or is the result of choices?

Raistlin from Dragonlance, for instance, is evil because he is manipulative, cruel, and would do anything for power. He's only nice when he can get something out of it. He always knows just where the boundary of 'too mean' is, and he stays firmly on the other side of it.

And he only does that so his brother, who loves him, won't abandon him. He uses his companions as tools to get what he wants, which is more power. He's totally evil, and is so due to the choices he made. Because he is human - the D&D setting gives him the option of that choice.

D&D doesn't give other characters that same choice.

Like, say, #orcs.

RAW, orcs don't get a choice. Evil is easy for them. Good is much more difficult. In many depictions, they lack the moral framework to even understand the difference.

Now, if we lived in an ideologically virginal society, in which there was 0 history of people ascribing inherent virtue (or lack thereof) to other groups of people, and blaming it on heritage & immutable characteristics, that might be a cool idea. But we don't live in that world.

We live in this world, which does have an extremely toxic and painful history of doing just that - the pervasive idea, which guided policy for many nations for many years - that some groups were inherently superior or inferior, due solely to genetic heritage.

So when you're telling a #DnD story, where an inherent question of the setting is "What is evil?" and you decide to answer it with "Something that some people get to choose to be, and something that other people just are," you're partaking in that toxic legacy.

Maybe it's not on purpose. You're just playing the game WotC gave you, after all.

But the question is - now that you know, what will you do? What choice will you make?

Because it's the choices we make that matter, & the stories we tell about those choices.