Yep. I acknowledged that it wasn't very strong in one of my first responses in this thread. At least I think it was this thread. There are quite a few going on right now.
Flimsy or not, though, it's a valid in fiction reason for why no orcs are present.
I find its flimsiness specifically undermines its validity. It is, essentially, just a longwinded way of saying, "They aren't there because we didn't feel like it," but
trying to pass it off as objective. "Oh it
couldn't possibly have had orcs; the setting inherently lacks something needed for them!"
I never got that sense. I got D&D elves from them, but admittedly D&D elves have a lot in common with Tolkien elves.
There are two groups, who separated as a result of one group following a leader of their people to a new land. The group that left is associated with Q (Qualinesti/Quenya), and with light and the sun; the group that stayed behind is associated with S (Silvanesti/Silvan elves), and with darkness and the stars. The former prefer to build buildings that surround the trees they love (as Galadriel and Elrond did), while the latter prefer to shape their homes from the forest itself (as the Silvan elves did.)
The parallels are
substantial.
Elf wars are traditional D&D stuff as well.
So are orc wars. I don't see how your point escapes the same criticism as before.
It's part and parcel of the D&D elven race. Long ago the elves warred and killed each other and some fled or were forced to go live underground.
Borrowing from D&D.................................which has borrowed from Tolkien. It's indirect, so a direct desire to exclude orcs is fine.
Except that their
excuse for the directness is "well we aren't in Tolkien's world, they couldn't exist outside of that." But their elves are
heavily cribbing Tolkien's elves, down to copying patterns and even words ("the Kinslaying" is straight-up
stolen borrowed from Tolkien), without any of the
"deep and specific history and origin" actually brought over. No Fëanor, no silmarils, no Eru Ilúvatar, no Morgoth, no special relationship with stars, etc., etc. All of that is left as implied "you know what this is, you've seen Tolkien elves before."
Why is this excuse applied to orcs and not to elves, when both meet the requirements?
It is not capricious any more than deciding to do anything even slightly creative is capricious. They have a different perspective on orcs than you do. That is all. It's pretty arrogant imposing your perspective over the creators of the setting.
Starting off with directly insulting me, nice move.
More importantly: I don't care what their perspective on orcs is. I care that they're asserting a standard which permits the stuff they included, and forbids the stuff they didn't, as though that standard were consistent and objective. The fact that it is neither--that their standard should have excluded elves entirely, and yet they not only included them but heavily
borrowed from Tolkien, up to and including "the Kinslaying" as a key point of history for their own elves--is what bothers me. That is the capriciousness I dislike. If you're going to claim a standard is why you
had to do something, that you couldn't have made any other choice, that standard should actually...y'know...be a
standard. It should be
upheld.
Plus, they have a replacement antagonist humanoid running around in the draconians. That alone would be a perfectly good reason to ditch orcs as well.
And if they had said, "We wanted to tell a story about elves and dragon-people, and we felt the space normally filled with orcs was adequately filled by our draconians," then I would have no problem with the response. It wouldn't be making any kind of "we
couldn't include orcs" argument. It would instead be more of the form "the 'orc-like' niche was already full."
But they didn't. They said they
couldn't have added orcs,
because orcs have Tolkien-specific backstory. But they were totally fine lifting significant portions of Tolkien
elf backstory without any of the associated cosmology (indeed, they exactly contradict that cosmology on numerous occasions, in ways that
should have affected much of this stuff.)
So in this example, you've compared 1 meat with ALL the playable options.
If that is how my question comes across to you - its because your analogy is very much incorrect.
I'm not buying that and here is why
Because unless one ONLY plays orcs EVERY time one plays D&D OR one plays ALL the races simultaneously there is no way one is likely to experience an impoverished experience as you say.
One would have to order the meat burger EVERY time one ate.
You attend a party. The host offers you burgers, pizza, salad, pasta, or soup. You ask for a burger, and receive the interaction stated above. There. Not the only option, and yet still pretty clearly offering a thing and not actually delivering.
And believe it or not, yes, there are people who really are "I (nearly) always want to play X, and have not much interest in playing not-X." I am sometimes like that with dragonborn. I just really, really like them, I think they're the bees' knees (the bees' everything-else would be thri-kreen.) I find the vast majority of alternative options pretty dull most of the time (my previous preference, before 4e introduced me to dragonborn, was half-elves, and on reflection I realized it was basically just because of the "child of two worlds" aspect.)
So if someone invites you to a party they're hosting, and
doesn't really explicitly say that they're doing no-patty burgers as one of the menu items, yes, I really do think one can reasonably say, "You have offered me something and then failed to actually
do the thing you offered."
You playing or DMing?
And if it was $45 would that be ok?
I just...are you serious? Are you really going to quibble about the price point? I am finding it difficult to take your position seriously here.
For those of you who are arguing that the inclusion or exclusion of a Tolkien race requires the inclusion or exclusion of all of them, think about this. You are literally arguing that I can't take inspiration from part of any book or setting.
It's a good thing, then, that I'm
not arguing that. Because, as I said above, it would be
literally completely fine to say, "We included elves because we thought elves were cool, and because dragons played a critical role in our early story ideas, we came up with the idea for draconians as the 'enemy soldier' race, with all sorts of interesting stories that would enable. Since that fills up almost exactly the same niche as orcs, it didn't make sense to us to include those too, so we didn't." I wouldn't--
couldn't--disagree with the logic of that response. I wouldn't have to like it, but it would logically hang together.
What I'm arguing is,
if your standard is "we can't take X thing, because X thing has tons of interwoven backstory and connections that matter, and without those connections it wouldn't make sense," then you cannot reject X
while simultaneously keeping Y when Y
also has tons of interwoven backstory and connections that matter that are just left as a presumed zeitgeist. Either you reject X and Y because
both of them run afoul of your purported "this cannot be included" criterion, or you admit that the criterion is faulty and doesn't actually prohibit anything.
They can. They chose not to. That's allowed, I think.
See above. They gave this as a reason why they, allegedly,
cannot (rather,
could not) do this thing. It is very specifically an "because of property Q, we could not include species M." But species N,
which also has property Q, was included no problem. Indeed, it was a critical component of the story, complete with terms
directly copied from the Tolkien source material. Hence, a contradiction. The above hypothetical alternative answer, "species P already fills the niche for species N, so we stuck with the one that we made for our story," has none of this problem, because it isn't purporting to offer any kind of criterion for inclusion or exclusion. Instead, it's pragmatic and (narrative) design-focused; not a "we
couldn't do it" but "it didn't fit with our goals to do it."