In the games you play in, do the fantasy "evil" races have motivations, objectives, etc, or are they mindlessly evil?  Are they misunderstood, or even if not misunderstood, do they just have conflicting goals?

I try to keep my NPC psychology in mind when I DM.  Mentally I create a mental construct, like a shell of say, an orc, then I fill that mental construct with goals, temperment, background, etc and I kind of bounce mental rubber balls off the construct asking it "what will you do now? How about now? Does this make you angry? What about this, does it make you afraid, hurt? Blah?"

In many ways I think it makes it a little tougher to be a "good guy" in my gameworlds, because you never know when you'll be able to push enough ideas on a creature that suddenly it's objectives and your objectives are one, and so what that it'll slaughter and plunder to get what it wants, as long as its slaughtering and plundering your enemy.

Of course when I run modules its a bit more straightforward, my NPCs don't wander off the track as much, which maybe helps keep the story focused, but is it better?

Ironically, when I approach the game as a player, I like to play racial stereotypes to the hilt.  If I'm a dwarf, then I HATE orcs, goblinoids, etc.  If I'm a gnome, I hate kobolds, etc.  I recently had my dwarf leave the party and I brought in a new character because the DM repeatedly kept giving us quests to save goblins and orc babies and such.  Thats fine, whatever, but the DM didn't want to give good motivations for my character to help, I felt like the rewards should be above and beyond special to convince the players, or at least the dwarf, to help the enemy out, but no, just regular rewards like we were rescuing a human or elf baby.  My new character's background is from this strange town where dwarves, humans, orcs, etc all live together, so hes fully in support of the game direction now.

Anyone else think about such things?  Do you like moral ambiguities as a player?  Do you prefer black and white good and evil as a DM?

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