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