Orcs: How Important Are They?

[Mafro]

How important are orcs to a campaign setting? Are they a staple of D&D that the game needs to have or have they been done to death?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

I think they may have been done to death in 2e but now that they're fairly cool in 3e they haven't really been touched upon.

Even today I hear 3.x players and DMs maintain the fiction that "you climb the monster ladder; kobolds at the bottom, then orcs, then dragons, etc". Orcs are allowed to have levels, and can even form part of a campaign arc (as a villain group).

Mind you, I'd love to get rid of the light blindness, and maybe give them +2 Str/+2 Con rather than +4 Strength/+0 Con.

 

[Doug McCrae]

All the humanoids, as Gygax calls them, occupy a somewhat different niche. Gnolls are my favourite.

 

[I'm A Banana]

They're staples. Classic monsters. They are, in my mind, significantly different than goblinoids, though you could certainly run 'em together.

For me, goblinoids are the sneaky things that stab you in your sleep. They're nasty, brutish, and short, but they're a known threat, one with very base animal needs. They make you live in eternal terror that they're right around the corner. They're the embodiment of fear: something's gonna get you, and that something will be the goblin.

Orcs are the things that roar into your town en masse and leave behind nothing but terror and destruction. They're the Huns. They'll create a pillar out of skulls just because it'll FREAK YOU OUT. Shock and awe! They're the embodiment of violence: they will crush you, crush your society, destroy your world, and leave you broken and bleeding.

 

[SteelDraco]

Orcs are fine. The humanoids I have no use for are bugbears and hobgoblins. They almost never show up in a game I run, while orcs do tend to. I tend to run them as primitive Klingons, personally.

 

[kaomera]

IMHO Orcs are best as either a central element of a game or else used sparingly. If you actually have big, politically significant Orc "clans" (or whatever), that's cool. It's also OK if they're just low-level dungeon fodder; it's not that cool, but it's not bad either. It's when you start getting big mobs of Orcs with, say 10 or 12 character levels, just hanging about and waiting to be slaughtered by 18th level PCs, that it starts to just get stupid, IMHO.

 

[kaomera]

Orcs are fine. The humanoids I have no use for are bugbears and hobgoblins. They almost never show up in a game I run, while orcs do tend to. I tend to run them as primitive Klingons, personally.

I dig the Orcs as Klingons idea, but that's how I usually run Hobgoblins and Bugbears...

 

[shilsen]

Orcs are no different than most other monsters. A campaign setting can do well to give a lot of attention to them and a different setting can ignore them completely without suffering in quality. Personally, I think having a place for them in the setting without making them by necessity a central element is the way to go.

And I also really like the Eberron take on orcs as Zen berserkers

 

[Nail]

THere are no orcs (or goblins) of any kind IMG.

 

[Dragonhelm]

I guess that I feel that orcs work best in Lord of the Rings. I'm not certain why that is. I also like the scro variant in Spelljammer (cause "orcs" spelled backwards is "scro"! ). Beyond that, orcs seem like another generic monster with little to no personality.

The Dragonlance setting replaced orcs with draconians, which worked out quite well. Not only are they a cool iconic monster of the Dragonlance setting, they've also got those nifty death throes. Even in death, they can kill their enemies.

Now obviously, draconians won't work for every setting (nor should they), but the point is that orcs are not necessary for every setting.

Orcs, for some reason, come across as "cannon fodder monsters" to me. They're there to beat up the PC's and give low-level adventurers some XP.

Goblins also fall into this trap. The recent preview of the goblins found in Pathfinder has me pretty jazzed. Suddenly, here are goblins who are fleshed out, with a personality filled with whacky sinister fun. I probably will be using Pathfinder style goblins in future campaigns.

So yes, orcs are iconic, and IMO, best left to iconic settings such as Middle Earth. If they're to be used beyond that, then let's see some true creativity go into them so that way they're more than "cannon fodder."

Disclaimer: The above views do not necessarily represent the views of the Orc Rights Council nor its subsidiaries.