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Yes. Simply put, yes, this was 1000% the right choice for WotC to make, and fuck them for not making it 30 years earlier.

Zero questions here, the only tables I stayed at long term were the ones where orcs and elves and humans had a precisely equal chance of being good or evil. The ones I left? The DMs and players who wanted an instant, easy 'kill this' marker were invariably super bigoted in the real world too.

In theory I like the removal of race-based alignment from the game.

In practice, I hate the way WotC went about doing it, and it was actually one of the reasons I switched away from D&D and to Pathfinder (I bought the Pathfinder core rulebook for Christmas just a few weeks before the OGL thing), because I was sick of how lazy WotC's development was being.

WotC could have doubled down on the idea that those "evil" races are so not because of the races themselves, but because of the currently-dominant culture among those races. Emphasise outliers like Drizzt, or the complexity of the Many Arrows Tribe. Instead, they ripped away pages full of lore from digital copies of books people had already paid for, with no recompense.

I'm also bitter that they removed one of the most poignant anti-racist messages in the game. They removed the "alignment" section on every race's stats, but that included this beauty:

Tieflings might not have an innate tendency toward evil, but many of them end up there.

It's an incredibly powerful commentary on how the way people are treated by others can end up affecting how they behave. How if you always act with suspicion or outright hostility towards someone merely because of how they look, and never give them a fair chance to prove otherwise, they might just end up acting the part. They might not feel they have any other choice.

I think that it's highly setting dependant, and also dependant on the kind of game your DM is running. I've exclusively run things in my own setting, so any particular race's natural alignment was more of a suggestion than a requirement.

Now what really threw me for a loop was orks loosing the 'powerful build' feature. Orks can be twinks now and I love it.

Draw Steel lore is cooler

No, you're not alone. There has been much ink spelled in defense of the removal of geneaological morality from the game, and from Pathfinder before it. It's just that most of that ink has been in replies to people being cranky about the removal in the first place.

Good and evil being a racial trait is just something that about 1/3 of society seems to take for granted. It's a belief they may not even know they have until someone does something that stops reinforcing that belief. These silent, often unnoticed beliefs are often the corner stones of ideologies, and people don't like having their ideologies questioned or challenged. Or even highlighted, in many cases.

So, people who have an ideological belief that good and evil are simple concepts, that good and evil are inherent qualities of a person, and that good and evil are tied to heritage are going to be primed to be giant whiny babies about racial alignment being removed, and to put up a giant stink,while those who see it as a commom sense move are not going to be front and centre making headlines about it. They'll be in the comments, getting down-voted by the tilted reactionaries who like their simplistic, black-and-white world.

One of the most popular DnD characters is a member of an “evil” race who proves that it’s not a racial feature but a cultural one.

(Yes I’m talking about Drizzt, AKA why every DnD group from ~1990 to ~2005 had that guy who wanted to play a drow ranger.)

One of the frustrating things about humans and mass communication is the "for me it's Tuesday" effect. For someone, this is the first time they've encountered "maybe orcs being innately evil isn't a good idea". They want to explore it and go through their feelings and blah blah blah. It's a day that might change their life. For someone else, it's Tuesday. We've had this conversation a thousand times before. It's old hat.

It's hard to be patient to faceless newcomer #3742 when you've already done this conversation so many times. They feel stupid and slow because they blend in with all the other people who brought this up. They're bringing up points they feel are fresh and clever but have been discussed and settled already. But they're a person seeing it for the first time. Somehow.

It feels like "are you stupid? We just went over this", but that's an illusion. It's new to them .

(This doesn't account for bad faith actors, who are trash and should go away)

Gonna write my short story about the orc barbarians who destroy human colonies that get too close to orc territory, not because they're inherently evil, but because they've seen what human greed for power and domination does to subjugated races, the flow of magic, and the health of the earth. So they view humans as evil.

"Your kind knows nothing but exploitation! You drain the lands of their nutrients to feed cities of sycophants until they are fat! Tell me, adventurer, when was the last time you heard of a dragon attacking an orc caravan? We have no fear of such beings as they only attack the depraved greed of man."

"Attacked the village? Do your handlers even lie to hired blades? Yes we burned the village you call Argath, but no one was harmed. Humans, as dangerous as you are, are still cowards. Surrounding a mining village and telling them to leave when they're outnumbered ten to one is hardly, what you would call, a negotiation. We sent hunters to escort them out of the mountains of Gri'ut Kar and burned the village to ensure the trek was one way."

The root of orcs as we think of them is Lord of the Rings, where they’re corrupted elves (or something like that). Literarily, they represent the evils of war. Tolkien orcs are evil.

Orcs have seen the furthest drift from those roots of anything from LotR. Dwarves, elves, orcs, and halflings saw some drift to generalize them for other tabletop settings. But the traits settled on for orcs in the 90s and 00s (strong, nomadic, clan society, warlike, brutal, noble savage stuff) can now feel insulting, because those traits are so often used in racist contexts, so orcs have seen a second drift away from those, too.

I don’t see much of a point to orcs anymore and don’t use them. Regarding 5e, I haven’t read its finished modern take on orcs but if I want Fantasy Mexico I’m just going to use human Fantasy Mexico.

I do disagree that fantasy villains need motivations beyond existing. Conscience and free will are required for protagonists, optional for antagonists. Illithids, vampires, and early Pathfinder goblins come to mind from fantasy. Strahd’s reason for being a villain is that he’s mopey. Everything in Cthulhu, likewise, lacks comprehensible motivation.

It’s hard to make an inherently evil villain that is a foil to the PC, but not every villain needs to be a foil. As a GM it can be really fun to wallow in a villain being unrepentantly, unthinkingly horrible.

I explicitly looked for "evil races ttrpg" in YouTube and most of the results are from 2-5 years ago.

Who's blowing up the algorithm by raising a dead topic?

Can you give some context?

But saying that Orc and Drow are biologically evil feel like good old racism. The whole Drow let's take a nice race and make an evil dark-skinned version of them way more problematic than the Drow is blackface debate

I'm fine with orcs and what not being normal for the most part but I think creatures like demons should be as close to naturally evil as possible maybe just no evolved empathy

I can see the arguments against the concept of evil races. It's intimately linked with real-world racism about "wrong" groups that "deserve" to be colonized or genocided. Writing the fictional world as being populated by distinct groups that have conflicting cultural motivations is more interesting than "this group is bad because they are bad."

But... what about demons/devils?

Meh, I really don't give two shits about it either way. In my campaigns, I'll just ignore this and have orcs and goblins default to evil unless my party decides to do something that requires them to be more nuanced. But most of the time I just need fantasy bugs that can be squashed without any moral dilemma attached.

That doesn't mean that other groups can't have their nuanced orcs that have tragic generational trauma attached. It's just not something I need for my average dungeon crawl. That's the beauty of the hobby. There's no one right way to go about it.

Seems more like a youtube hobby problem. Small YouTuber makes a good point, big YouTuber steals point, small YouTubers steal point.

It's a matter of world building. Orcs can be noble savages, or violent monsters. The main problem is humanizing these creatures. If you instead imagine a separate evolutionary path, then the race can be inherently "evil".

If orcs have evolved for conflict and violence far beyond human levels, then by our standards they would be evil. At least by the philosophy of a middle ages like world. Catholics and Protestants considered each other evil for a few hundred years. A violent species that destroys humans on sight due to their violent instincts would easily be evil. Exceptions could exist, but the mass of individuals would be "evil".

I’m all for a broader scope in the lore of any ancestry in a game. As a Forever DGM a limited scope just means less chance I’m going to use them in a campaign.

Evil isn’t an ancestry it’s a mental illness.

Just look for better settings. You can even keep the DnD rules if you're feeling kinda lazy and just swap some names.

I long for the day when people stop kissing Tolkein's ass and try to make everything about him, whatever direction it goes.