I think the reason this was brought up is because of the idea that things born of wombs spend time as infants, infants cannot be evil, infants require care, such care is ostensibly provided by evil adults, and therefore womb-born races come with the danger that killing evil adults indirectly causes the death of non-evil infants. Spore-spawned races avoid this very specific issue... sort of.FrankTrollman wrote:That being said, whether any particular group are nominally mushrooms or not is completely immaterial to any discussion of how bad they are. The Orks in particular are actually one of the most reasonable factions in the setting, and you can in fact make peace with them and conduct mutually beneficial trade and shit. But that determination is wholly independent of whether they were born out of a womb or spawned off of a rock.
Even without considering immediate progeny, this sort of impact happens all the time with humans. Killing someone you thoroughly dislike, especially if that person is in a position of power, can easily lead to the death of people you didn't mind. If you have any sort of complex society where people depend on each other for resources or protection, making them spawn as adults doesn't get around the problem at all.
Personally I don't think "Evil" is sufficiently well defined for there to be enemies that are irredeemably Evil and thus available for qualmless murder.
If something values your suffering and that cannot be changed, but it also values staying alive and eating cupcakes, that's not actually too different from a given society and you have a set of rules and punishments that gets that thing some of what it wants and gets you some of what you want and if you also value your suffering and you trust it to follow rules for its own good you can even have some funtimes together.
If something has values that conflict with yours (desiring your suffering, wanting the world to be made of tasty tasty diamonds, wanting to get rid of all those annoying plant things, whatever) and none that are sufficiently similar to bargain or otherwise interact and that cannot be changed, then you can kill them because you don't really have a choice, but you're not gonna universally have players be fine with that. It's still a tragedy.
If something values your suffering and nothing else and that cannot be changed, then you do what you need to to protect yourself but there's no moral issue at all. It's not even Evil at that point, as far as I can tell. If you put your baby in the same room as this thing, your baby will die. If you put your baby in the same room as lava or a sufficiently intense gamma radiation emitter, though, your baby will die just as much. And I'm pretty sure I've never encountered lava as Evil (though radiation is sometimes seen that way, admittedly, and I don't understand why). Point is, at that point the thing is merely an impersonal force, not a moral actor.
That's not necessarily a bad thing for a game - overcoming non-Evil challenges can be fun. Years ago my mother decided it was time to get rid of a giant cactus in our back yard and I had a ton of fun chopping it down. It's just that if you make orcs a single-minded natural force like that, you're getting the same fun out of killing them as of chopping down a cactus or using dynamite to blast tunnels through mountains. You get catharsis, you get challenge, you get accomplishment, but you don't get revenge or virtuous justification. The people who go out and keep the orcs away are important, just like the people who get rid of the city's venomous spiders or the people who keep buildings from falling in on their inhabitants or the safety inspectors at the geothermal energy plant.
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