I really think people blow this crying about Orcs out of proportion, there was NEVER an actually interesting villain in this game whose reasons of being a villain boil down only to “I’m an Orc, Goblin, Drow or other evil race”. And saying a whole species is inherently evil effectively diminishes all evil they do because you are saying they never could choose not to do it, which reduces them to children who don’t know better. People should move on and stop flooding my yt feed with identical videos repeating the same points.
The Pillars of Eternity series has your typical humans, elves, dwarves… and then orlans (vaguely like halflings), and aumaua, which are larger and more muscular than humans but instead of being dumbed down and ugly and beast-like or demon-like as orcs are, they have a huge amount of lore including their own distinctive maritime civilization.
This really is one of those “Wow, some people really do only play one game” things isn’t it?
If you go outside the world of D&D and a handful of games that were released back in the eighties that were just doing things because D&D did them, the entire notion of alignments basically doesn’t exist. That’s not to say that you won’t find species / races being described as inherently evil, there was still a lot of that, but it gets less and less as you move towards the modern era of RPGs.
I’m not saying this to shit on anyone, but I just really wish that every D&D player would play just one other game at least one time. Go try out Hearth or Spire. Play some Blades in The Dark or a Powered by the Apocalypse game. Try a Numenera one shot, maybe some Deadlands or Shadowrun. Broaden your horizons a little with Werewolf or Vampire, try out Nights Black Agents or Call of Cthulhu or The Dresden Files. If you want something a little more crunchy give Exalted a go.
I could literally keep going for pages and pages. There are so many God damn games out there. It always blows my mind to see this kind of drama going down over one single game when it really just one single game, and it feels like so much of this drama wouldn’t even happen if some of these people had ever been exposed to the idea that games could be anything else.
All of which is to say that you’re right, but also that I can barely believe that people are still having this argument.
I wish it was true that this is only “people who only play D&D” problem but I have also seen those argument with people who participate in rpg online communities or forums where they know and play other games. I’ve seen videos whining about orcs come from same channel with something like a 100 reviews of various different rpgs. Sadly I do not think this is only people who only play D&D who are the problem here.
Agreed but each time people forget that DnD isn’t the default context for some groups/communities/countried … it’s annoying.
I have a character I’d like to play in a one-shot someday. He’s a brutish, cruel and irredeemable orc bandit on a quest to enlighten the world about the virtues of orc culture, because he’s sick of humans thinking being an orc is what makes him a monster. He is a monster, but not because he’s an orc.
“Orcish poetry is so beautiful that many front-line orc soldiers comfort themselves by thinking about their memorial poem. Personally, I think poetry is for sissies, but most orcs disagree with me!”
One of my players is that. His parents were an orc and a bard so he’s trying to atone for what they’ve done
That’s kind of the opposite, actually. This guy absolutely doesn’t want to atone, but wants to make it clear that most other orcs have nothing to atone for. And the idea that a monster seeking recognition and a half-blood trying to atone for perceived sins of the father are “the same” because they’re both orcs is part of the problem.
At times like this, I regret that I am bound by the ancient Orcish custom of not giving a damn about what Humans think of me. But you’d better believe that if I wasn’t an Orc, I’d be bashing your head in!
It is an ancient Orcish custom that one should take pride in the work itself and not seek glory from others, yes. This is one of the virtues of orcish society he points out to his survivors while making it clear that he DOES want the glory. Not all orcs are the same. Most are more virtuous than him.
“Grug brings dishonor on family! Grug’s parents no want grug speak like this. Grug supposed go be cleric or wizard like brother or philosopher like sister!”
Oh man, now there’s a take on Orks. They’re just a population that happens to suffer from higher-than-average rates of speech pathologies. They’re not evil. They just need speech therapy.
See i was picturing a gangbanger whose siblings and parents have doctorates. This kid is talking like orcish Jrock while their parents are using perfect orcish and lamenting their kid having fallen in with a bad crowd.
They don’t even need speech disorders. They just aren’t native speakers, and orcish has wildly different gramatical structures to humanic (or “common” as humans call it). If you spoke orcish, they’d seem more like a race of poets.
So honestly the shortcut of “evil species” of enemies is so that you can have throngs of sentient beings that you can kill without having to deal with morality in games. It’s just a shortcut for “Those are the bad guys.” and frankly been going since Tolkien who used it interchangeably with goblins which in folklore goblins were throughout Europe in one form or another which and are typically evil and mischievous for the most part. Weirdly in our RPGs, Hobgoblins seems to be the bigger, nastier goblin but in lore they’re typically friendly, just gonna play tricks. This creating “peoples of evil” is a tale as old as our mythologies.
On one hand, I get it, it’s an easy part instead of trying to be JRR Martin and build a political machine with all the workings and the easy button of “And then the orcs invaded.” I mean, Tolkien did it, I need batches of enemies… uh… “Uruk-hai!” And partially too, unlike “Real Life” us gamers/readers/movie watchers want our bad guys to have motivations that make sense, and complain when someone “acts out of character”… yet we see daily people who get to in charge positions do things that screw themselves up for… reasons? But many people don’t have that issue of “Well, why are they invading? Why can’t we talk them out of it? They should be more logical!” (that last one being frustrating "no, there are some jerks out there you can’t just talk out of a violent situation) when you have them as orcs. This is the “Look, I just REALLY want to have a swashbuckling tale and don’t want to have to think about geopolitics because real life has way too much going on with exactly that.” It’s not a wrong way to play, just a way.
On the flipside… I agree with you that it isn’t interesting in beyond “I need a mook machine” and far more interesting, especially in the right GMs hands, that gives them a whole society. Hell Shadowrun covers that when the goblinization came, SUDDENLY Trolls and Orks everywhere in modern day society, and the age old hatreds of these species can go off… when that Ork over there might have just been a dude who suddenly bulked up, got lower fangs and pointy ears after April 2021. They’re just people, and especially not being long lived and “not a pretty race” to humans, they get treated roughly. Ork social circles are trying to bring back the old ork language from the era last orks existed… it’s fun to have an ork rocker screaming in Or’zet as a yell against the system. This is exactly what you’re talking about, lots of nuance and people are just people.
The third, which I think my group runs into the most is the “evil races” might be used by the GM, but often ignored by everyone, including the GM. Everything from your standard “We found this goblin and he’s our mascot now!” to trying to change a faction to the side of good, to one time because we were playing a one-shot and I was doing a silly bit, my elf was so long lived she was once a BBEG, and the GM rolled with my recognizing a Kobold as a former hired minion, scolded him out of a fight, got his friends together to unionize against his dragon and work for the tavernkeep because she pays better.
Reality of this wall of post is me bringing a discussion to a meme lol, I really hold no opinions about what Charlatans of the Shore doing anything as I’ve wandered off of D&D a few years ago. People are gonna people and if they need a “Light side” and a “Dark side” alignment in their story without a lot of deep discussion of politics/ethics/and philosophy, then having a species of “this thing is bad” removes a lot of complication. Sometimes I want that story the same way I sometimes want junk food, but sometimes I want the dramatic, sweeping plots and the Orc lands are their own tribe of people and the fight is a massive cultural misunderstanding between sides.
In the end I think Tolkien’s orcs are just Nazis right?
The weirdness that a political/military movement got turned into a species somewhat explains the weird monoculture feel, all the orcs that weren’t fascist presumably ran away to neutral countries to avoid being conscripted or something.
Aren’t Tolkien’s orks corrupted elves, or is that just the uruk’hai (or how ever it’s spelled)? Either way, aren’t they basically cannonically self-selecting to be shitty? Even if there’s some lesser ork that’s just there, the fancy fallen elves have long since taken power for themselves and basically forced them to be shitheads. Or at least that explanation makes sense to me!
Not to excuse the behavior. After all, shitty rulers come about all the time. It behooves any populace to dethrone nonrepresentative shitlords.
Yes, that’s the in-universe story. I more meant he based the idea of evil industrialist orks on the Nazis, so I jokingly suggested the orks were self selecting the same way the Nazis did, but in-universe they are of course just born evil.
I heard Tolkien regretted making Orcs inherently evil and was thinking of replacing that with something else, but I cannot find which letter was that in.
Reality of this wall of post is me bringing a discussion to a meme
The is the way for meme posts.
The people who are whining about it are the ones who like D&D and therefore have opinions on it. If you don’t like D&D, you aren’t going to think this is interesting at all.
I have opinions but I also am tired of D&D so I dont engage with those. I might return to D&D if they make it a dungeon crawler but that’s definitely not going to happen
I like it. With the current rise of popularized fascist politics and extreme polarization, I feel like anything that leans toward nuance rather than essentialism is probably a good thing. The change to species also makes it a lot less awkward listening to D&D players talk about the game without saying things that come off as incredibly racist to anyone who doesn’t know the context.
They should have just axed the alignment system as a whole. It’s been wildly misunderstood for decades (cf. every alignment chart meme ever) while being overly simplistic at the same time. And it implies a universal morality system that doesn’t really work outside of dungeon crawls. It also has almost (?) no mechanical impact in 5e as is.
Might as well just assign star signs at this point, that’s probably a better descriptor at this point.
