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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5107520" data-attributes="member: 4937">The biggest limitation you are going to run into is that to feel 'orcish' and fit the sterotype and not trample on the schtick of other races, your orcs are going to have to be very direct opponnents.  Orcs like to close and beat things down.  They are an assault/bash/stomp sort of race.  I model my orcs tactically as ancient Gauls or other 'warband' type foes.  They want to attack from cover, close to range, disarray their foes and hack them apart.They are going to go into alot of intimidation style tactics, body paint, body art, screaming, frothing, and throwing themselves at their foes with abandon.Unfortunately, this doesn't give you alot of tactical variaty.  You just iterate through bigger and more numerous brutes.  It does however make a nice contrast between the 'Welsh' elves with their mobility and massed archery centered tactics, and the orcs with their charge and bash centric tactics.  There is a nice natural tactical tension there at least at the large scale.To give some variaty, anything you can pair them with that provides ranged attacks and battlefield control is going to be interesting.  Traditionally, orcs employ goblin or kobold archers to handle archery and skirmisher duties, however throwing axes or javelins as part of a massed charge ought to be de rigueur.  If you are using 4e as your system, you can pretty easily do things like having axes/javelins stick into shields on a miss and hindering the target as exceptional attacks without having to write it into the system.  (You can do the same in 3e, it just takes more work.)  Huge ogres and boulder throwing giants make good mobile artillery.On the battlefield control perspective, vs. PC's the thing that orcs will most want to do is freeze them in place and provide cover for their charge from ranged attacks.  So you might have orcs reutinely employ nets, tanglers, lassos, and the like.  For providing cover, giants might hurl smoke bombs to screen the orcish advance.From the perspective of filling out the schtick, anything that charges is good choice for an ally.  Horses never really felt right to me.  That's more of a human schtick or even hobgoblin.  I'd personally mount orcs on aurocks, buffalo, giant boars, yaks, rhinos or elephants to really emphasis that 'we hit you hard' aspect.   Heck, you could mount high level orcs on triceratops if you really wanted to get over the top with it.Balrogs are traditional, but really anything could work here.  Personally, I'd rather have a 20th level Orc as the top villain if you were going orc centric.</blockquote>

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