D&D 5E So,whats up with those half orcs?

[transtemporal]

Personally, I've never been a fan of the "Klingon-ification" of orcs & half-orcs in modern D&D, so I have always discouraged their use when I could. But that is more of a personal preference thing.

Yes, too long have these filthy half-orcs flooded into our lands, taking our jobs and women.

 

[CapnZapp]

Savage Attack:

Let's say for the sake of argument that you always reckless attack so you always have advantage on your attacks (Let's discount the times you have disadvantage which cancels it out). Barring a champion/barbarian multiclass that is about as good as you will get.

So you crit 1 in 10 attacks.

Let's say you have 2 choices in weapon, 1d12 or 2d6.

With 1d12 you get an extra 6.5 damage when you crit. so 6.5/10 or an extra .65 dmg per attack. You are giving up .5 dmg per hit taking 1d12 over 2d6 in order to get an extra 3 dmg on crit.

If you use 2d6 then you are getting an extra .35 dmg per attack.

This is only when you crit though and some of that dmg will be wasted as you will have already defeated the creature you are attacking so it will be somewhat less than that.

I think getting intimidation as a class skill is more powerful.

Not following your math.

 

[Herobizkit]

In my group, each player has 2 characters and they swap 'em around to suit what "missions" they anticipate taking on.

Drow Fighter and Human Ranger
Wood Elf Rogue and Half-Orc Paladin
Halfling Sorcerer and Warforged Warlock

and the "key" NPCs are Dwarf Stormpriest and Half-Elf Bard.

... and a 3e-sized Wyrmling white dragon named Calcryx (Yes, THAT Calcryx for those in the know).

 

[Cernor]

My group has a pretty wide variety in the races everyone chose. We currently have:
Half-Elf Bard
Wood Elf Ranger
Human (variant) Monk
Hal-Orc Paladin
Aasimar Cleric

Out of a total of 12 PCs, there have been 4 humans, and 3 of those have been the variant. Of the humans, the one non-variant was chosen only because the player didn't have the PHB when he generated it so he went with the default option. There have been 2 players who chose to make humans out of all 5 of us. The first one does it because he likes how it makes him slightly more powerful at 1st level (taking Dual-Wielder and Observant thus far), while the other one just REALLY likes the Alert feat.

 

[Bupp]

Query: how do you deal with the Drow sunlight sensitivity?

So far it hasn't come up (or honestly I'd forgotten it). We started the group late in the playtest, and when the PHB came out we reskinned several characters once the rules came out. I should've brought that into play our last session, but I missed out.

Before that we've done mostly dungeon crawls, and have done a night mission, so it hasn't come into play.

 

[trentonjoe]

In 4 different games, with roughly 30 characters played, we have made two 1/2 orcs. One is a 1/2 orc barbarian who held his own at 1st level with 3rd and 4th level characters. The other is a 1/2 orc druid with 11 Wis. It was a 13 yearold's 1st character and quite frankly it's pretty effective.

Roughly 50% of all characters have been humans, with the rest 5 dwarves, 3 elves,1 dragonborn, 1 tiefling, no gnomes or 1/2 elves.

 

[GX.Sigma]

Personally, I've never been a fan of the "Klingon-ification" of orcs & half-orcs in modern D&D, so I have always discouraged their use when I could. But that is more of a personal preference thing.

I am actually strongly considering replacing orcs with Klingons. At least Klingons have a few mildly interesting aspects ("honor," Kahless, a fully realized language, the bat'leth, cloaking, conspiracies, hipocracy, bloodwine). Orcs have zero interesting aspects (they're dumb, evil, violent humanoids--just like half the monster manual).

 

[Aurelio]

I'm playing in three different campaigns right now and all of my characters are humans. I swear that I didn't even notice until after the fact - I'd look at every race in the PHB every time and think to myself, "A feat at level one would be really useful." I've never thought of myself this way, but I think that I'm secretly a powergamer.

 

[Jeff Albertson]

I am actually strongly considering replacing orcs with Klingons. At least Klingons have a few mildly interesting aspects ("honor," Kahless, a fully realized language, the bat'leth, cloaking, conspiracies, hipocracy, bloodwine). Orcs have zero interesting aspects (they're dumb, evil, violent humanoids--just like half the monster manual).

I have kept them LE, focused on Gruumsh, and their nemesis race: goblins. Makes them more interesting than CE rampaging meanies.