I really don't think it should be called the "ORC license"

[aramis erak]

I mean, that might be so in Anchorage (presumably AK), but I suspect there might have been a lot of other factors in play there. Age particularly. That you're not even mentioning WW games in the mid-late '90s, that you have Torg of all things mentioned, really suggests to me that however that list was generated, it was basically a de facto relict population from the very early 1990s. Or something pretty weird was happening there.

I don't doubt AD&D was more widely played than sales reflected, but when you've got a situation where it's the late '90s and WW games are behind Torg? That's wacky.

You're severely misreading what I wrote.

You could from about 85 on, find a D&D group, even through the late 90's... In fact, at no point was it hard to find a D&D group in anchorage, not even the late 1990's, until I left in 2015.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You're severely misreading what I wrote.

You could from about 85 on, find a D&D group, even through the late 90's... In fact, at no point was it hard to find a D&D group in anchorage, not even the late 1990's, until I left in 2015.

I don't think I misread it, I just assumed you were talking about the late 1990s, and I'm not sure about your extrapolations.

 

[Nylanfs]

Meh. ORC and orcs are not related at all. Might as well be upset at ORCa whales for having orc in their name. I'm not going to worry about it.

I'm mad at orca's, they're jerks.

 

[Nylanfs]

There are no great sources. Going by VTTs has been deeply misleading for as long as VTTs have existed lol.

But I do trust the numbers from Smiteworks slightly more than the one from Orr Group (or Roll20 LLC now?)

 

[Maxperson]

I'm mad at orca's, they're jerks.

They're just misunderstood!

 

[Bedrockgames]

And for many millennials and gen Zs, the “monster” as the good guy rings more true than if we were asked to rally around the PALADIN license or the ELF license.

I just want to point out this isn't a new thing. Monster as good guys has been around for a long time, and comes back again and again. I think the arts need to be able to have good monsters, evil monsters, and monsters that are morally gray. But just to give a big example from Gen X, we had things like Nightbreed, which was literally about the monsters as the oppressed outsiders. Even going back to the original Frankenstein, the monster isn't the good guy, but he is extremely sympathetic and you get the sense that much of his evil comes from the neglect and rejection of his creator.

All that said, I am down with orcs that are good but also down with settings where they are evil. It serves different functions (and evil orcs are not necessarily in the service of anti-liberal messaging). The paladin against the hordes of orcs sort of functions at a mythic level for me of broader ideas about facing evil. But that doesn't mean you can't have an equally interesting setting where the paladins hunting the orcs are the bad guys. What is dull to me, and I think ethically lazy, is saying one approach is the right one, that we should limit ourselves to a narrow handling of complicated literary tropes

 

[nevin]

I get it. It's a bit of a pun. It's cute. And they needed to announce something quickly as things were rapidly in motion.

But I think ORC is probably the worst name for any kind of banner to unite medium and small RPG content creators under.

Some people really don't care about it. Other people are offended that others are feeling offended by it. But orcs are perhaps the most controversial and divisive topic in RPGs in recent years. All the arguments for or against orcs being a dog whistle promotion for thinking in hateful stereotypes really don't matter here right now. But the thing is, we have seen that plenty of people having very strong opinions on orcs as toxic stereotypes that they just won't touch.

I don't even consider myself as having a particularly strong opinion on this, but I certainly would not want to release anything that makes it an "ORC license" product. I have some stuff in the works for OSE, and I actually worry that it might chance to ORC, because that might actually make me cancel my plans. And surely I am not the only one in a position like this. I've not been following anything done by Paizo or Kobold Press for at least 10 years, and I have no idea about what channels one might reach them through that don't end up as spam mail. But I think this is a real problem and that whatever the license is going to look like, it really needs a different name before people start releasing material under it.

From a marketing perspective it's a bad idea. ORC has a lot of baggage that has nothing to do with the license other than they both relate to games. Adding Cognitive Dissonance to the name of your product is not a good idea. It's tends to be popular with inexperience marketers because like internet trolling it gets attention but not attention that's good for the product. I will say since we are talking about game designers i think the damage is very small and limited. The target audience is most likely not going to be affected much.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Guess the OP won't support my idea to call the online place where you can buy all the ORC stuff (aka like the DM's Guild) the Centralized Hub for Accumulation of Systems Materials?