I am very disappointed in WoTC for moving away from “typically” alignments in the new Monster Manual for things like goblins or dragons

Especially after so much discussions about the problematic connotions of making certain races good or evil

And so much for keeping the core books “setting agnostic”

The problem with assigning alignment based off skin color isn’t as obvious with dragons as it is with elves, but your still at the end of the day having good and evil be based on a physical characteristic (such as skin or scale color) rather then the individual or a faction, which many have argued is eerily similar to racist rhetoric in real life

Sure, you could just “ignore it” as dm, but what is written in the monster Manual sets up expectations.

To quote people from a dnd beyond discussion: “Official text presents guardrails and sets expectations at the table, which very much can create problems for DMs wanting to ignore lore that doesn't suit them. It also limits players who want to engage monsters in other, creative ways with restrictive DMs who hold, rigidly, to every letter in print. “

“Monster lore is exactly why I still encounter new players at my table who insist on addressing orcs as knuckle-dragging, murderous morons, despite the fact that this has never been the lore at my table. At my table, orcs do not have a culture bound to their entire species. There is no alignment that is associated with an entire people and no printed lore on orcs is used at my table. Each orc is an individual and part of one or more of many different cultures among the species or within multispecies societies, none of which are the traditionally used orc culture. Nevertheless, any time we have a new player, it is always a conversation that I have to have because of lore from, say, the 2014 MM book that is assumed to apply universally. I shouldn't have to have that conversation every time and if lore is not part of a general book, one day I won't have to.”

“What happens if players find goblin children, is it considered good-aligned to then kill those children? Because those children are part of the “evil race”, is it right for killing them to be considered a just and heroic act? I don’t think so.

The reason why things like “inherently evil orcs” or “inherently evil goblins” have been criticized is because it leads to orc or goblin children being killed, or things like characters coming together to “exterminate” orcs or goblins, and such narratives have very uncomfortable parallels to real world racist rhetoric

Even WoTC acknowledged this in the recent “history of dnd” book when discussing the game’s origins and Gary Gygax”

“Sure I as DM could ignore bioessentialism, but that doesn’t change player expectations. They expect orcs to be “big dumb evil”, they expect chromatic dragons to all be evil, and they might even expect all metallic dragons to be good. Even if a gold dragon burns down an orphanage, people are going to try and find a reason from why the dragon did so rather then accepting the fact that the gold dragon is evil. I fully expect players to turn into murder hoboes the moment they come across an elf or dragon with “the evil skin/scale color”.

and speaking as a player, I don’t want to deal with “evil race” narratives. It almost always leads to storylines involving genocide of orcs or goblins, destroying chromatic dragons eggs with innocent hatchlings inside, or killing dark elves… and such acts being portrayed as “heroic”.

things like flavor text or alignment set up expectations and there are also many DMs who go purely by the book and aren’t willing to deviate.

Pathfinder2e in its remaster moved away from racial alignment. Green dragons, now known as horned dragons, can be good or evil rather than only evil. I don’t see why the remastered 5e rules can’t do the same.”

It also is NOT setting agnostic

Settings like Eberron move away form bioessentialism, where there are good orcs, evil aaracockra, good chromatic dragons and evil metallic dragons

Things like Fizban’s treasury of dragons adding “typically” to the alignments of things like dragons, and MOTM making things like goblins “any alignment” were huge steps forward, but going back to the way things were before by reintroducing racial alignment and removing “typically” is a massive step back