I just can't with innane articles like this anymore. Just stop it.
This bullshit that Orcs must remain "villains" cause D&D needs monsters to kill is barbaric and just telling on yourself.🧵
This bullshit that Orcs must remain "villains" cause D&D needs monsters to kill is barbaric and just telling on yourself.🧵
Comments
People can portrait orcs as they like in their own game. There is no right or wrong.
It is unavoidable that different generations are biased by mainstream media.
"You do you"
"The whole species is inherently evil yet it somehow survived and cooperated inside itself."
Am I the only one seeing the mismatch?
It’s this lack of media literacy that these people aren’t likely to enjoy Shrek.
Can I just be a lich that lives in waterdeep and feeds on city guards
A barbaric warrior culture, but not necessarily evil
Making orc playable doesn't hurt anyone
Eberron is my wife and our bestie's favorite setting. While I typically devour lore, they are the experts in Eberron and I merely the apprentice lol.
Yeah, throw that whole article in the trash.
So it's clear where their biases are from. And that's coming from a fellow lover of Warhammer.
Dude's never played a good story of D&D
in Fantasy didn't Grimgor fight against Archeon in the End Times?
The point of 40k especially is the entire place is a hellscape and no one is exactly "good". It's the tensions and dramatics within that which makes it compelling
*also as someone who really enjoys the setting
If you want a campaign where you have evil orcs ala tolkien, fine
If you want a campaign where orcs are just a different kind of people, fine
If you want a campaign where orcs don't exist, fine
These things are unique to each person's worldbuilding?
My bet is on tourists and Elon cultists, the sort who hate D&D 5e more than they like to play games they enjoy. Real grognards have better things to do, like DCC or Knave.
Orcs have been non-evil only in need culture for decades now.
And nothing about this means you can't have an evil orc barbarian tribe as villains.
They aren't evil. Just had a lot of enemies. https://paizo.com/store/pathfinder/adventures/adventurepath/triumphofthetusk
There is a massive rational disconnect between the levels of violence implied in spells and abilities versus the peaceful and pastoral lives being depicted on the pages.
Forgotten Realms is a "everything and nothing" setting.
Hoping Greyhawk in 2023 provides something more solid at least in a small part
The pages describing spells show the violence
The worldbuilding is shakey for sure. But, moving away from orcs = evil is not a bad worldbuilding decision
Especially the part about Tolkien purism.
There’s some seriously media illiterate people in the hobby.
I’ve been in and around fantasy for 30 years and no matter what your stupid political opinion is, how are you not simply booooored by the tropes?
Did you learn something today?
So I'm hearing basically since the game was invented Orcs weren't "all evil".
Pantheons of both races were evil and the General Alignment in monster books was evil, but it was always understood Alignment on the Individual Level was different
Also the first appearances of the drow in general.
This is one of the main problems I've had while writing my own campaigns, which one day I hope to sell. People are people, orcs included.
In ONE GODDAMN STORY. Middle Earth lore is not fantasy scripture, nor should it stand immovable against societal changes
People forget the idea of "evil" races is also just lazy writing. You want a villain? Just write an actually fleshed out villain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tolkien's_moral_dilemma
We have Fiends, Oozes, Monstrosities , Undead. Dozens of other options that add variety you smooth brained banana of a "journalist"
But I do prefer the Pathfinder lore for them much much more.
There is nothing stopping you from having an evil orc army, but that doesn't mean you say ALL orcs are evil
https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/problematic-orcs
They're notoriously anti 5e jackholes.
Yeah, the elves also hunted the dwarves for meat .. guess we should go back to making them geocial carnivores too?
Come off it, a game evolves. For everyone like this, go play F.A.T.A.L. It's probably more thier speed.
Wargamer: cool. We're going to use this picture of an orc woman so simultaneously hot and adorable you want to cuddle, marry, care for, and do unspeakable things with her. This will in no way undermine your headline. Abs.
Its so confusing.
It seeks like it's a constant cycle never mind the around 2 decades that Orcs have been playable?
They're really mad that DnD's developers are trying to appeal to a crowd that prefers more depth in their storytelling.
It allows the players to attack the reason why the Orcs are doing bad things, instead of the orcs themselves.
The default game deserves to be respectful and if ...
The same advice they've been pushing down people's necks for years.
It consumed a mimic that has just eaten a human, and grew a gelatinous humanoid hand out of the top of its 6 sides.
My players named him "Coob".
you'll kill bandits that used to be impoverished farmers until the recent famine and you'll like it.
Like, they're a sapient species, the individuals can be as good or evil as you want.
I might make it mechs cause that's who I am
When I wrote my LARP world this was at the forefront of my mind.
You never see honey bees trying to explain to flies why honey tastes better than shit.
It's not about the "rules", it's about the story.
And if the DM/GM wants to ignore what the book says, and do their own thing, then THE BOOK ITSELF strongly encourages them to do exactly that.
Pathfinder2 made GOBLINS a corebook player ancestry, the remake added Leshi. Look past the monoliths to the indie games and there's so many fun cool ideas.
And the D&D thought pieces are still at "racism allegory.... good actually?"
I believe it's doable for D&D, they just don't seem to care
At this point I think I'd only ever be playing 5e again if someone gave me a really compelling pitch, never going back on my own.
More settings should.
I'm forever glad that Lancer and other systems picked up the good ideas and ran with them
Where Piazo hires people from the culture to flesh out the lands of the Tian Xi, etc; tsr just would rather pretend it no longer exists, same with Dark Sun
Pathfinder good!
in one of my homebrew settings i made a specific effort that all the playable races doubled as common enemies. dwarves as viking raiders that take slaves to support their crumbling, post-golden-age empire, etc.
So glad to see it wasn’t just me.
If they’re playing the “engagement game” then I guess they win? Except I kinda skip their content now.
So thanks again! I guess reason and humanity may still stand a chance!
GOBLINS
So I agree with you, that they’re sorta “telling on themselves” by wanting the orc specifically to be “always bad guy”. 2/2
you can have villains, just give them a REASON beyond "is evil race". these people are lazy and uncreative
God forbid players have to flesh out their character motivations, justifications and values in a role-play game
An entire culture of warriors who live in the wilderness and fight with primative savagery? Come on...it takes zero effort to strip out the "savage primative" from that class.
Their king was tired of being a second rate civilization. Their only option was to have peacefull relations with their nabours or get wiped out in a great war.
In 2007!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/280125.The_Orc_King
Individuals have never been bound to it. There are *good aligned demons* in lore.
Smooth brain take ngl
I did like the Gazetteer times, but just for the ideas laid out in them....
Oh, these guys would HATE my campaigns
Im mad that in WotC attempts to make orc "unproblematic" and *all* their races/species "less problematic" they just removed half races entirely for PCs.
I think its entirely cowardly.
And god I've known so people warhammer people like that, it sucks
-looks at my badass Orc Fighter I'm really happy with-
I feel like i can instantly counteract this by saying i'm very pleased currently.
problem solved, you can now murder with impunity and nothing has fundamentally changed
And i didnt even need to write an entire whiny article
Things have moved on from the 1940s.
What I was trying to point out, however, is that D&D as it was originally structured, had very rigid definitions of who were the "good guys" and the "bad guys".
Later games were often more flexible.
Other than some aesthetic similarities, modern D&D shares very little with the original version. Gary himself changed a whole bunch of things as the game evolved and grew, and the idea of non-evil Orcs dates back to at least 2e.