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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7019656" data-attributes="member: 4937">Ironic that orcs were led to victory by a highly organized warbands that focused fire at crucial times in the early morning, while goblins fell in large part because their fans could never agree on what to vote on - goblins, hobgoblins, or bugbears.  (I voted once for each.)  You need only go back about 3 pages to see both goblins and hobgoblins at 28, with orcs at 20.  Yet the orc crew managed to burn down both very quickly.  Of course, regardless of the outcome of this thread, I have the last laugh.  In my homebrew orcs were killed so completely they were excised from existence.  Orcs to me served no good purpose.  At 1HD they were slightly too rough for starting characters, but did not have any longevity to be interesting villains in the long run.  As soon as I realized  that in canon, goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears were different racial groups of the same species, orcs went out as useless.   Bugbears at 3+1 HD and strength bonuses had staying power that orcs lacked.  Hobgoblins made better armies than orcs.  Goblins were sneakier, and with worgs had better cavalry.  Personally, I was hoping for a run off between goblins and gnolls - which for me are the two archetypal fodder.  Orcs don't even scream 'D&D' to me outside of the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon.  To me, orcs scream 'Lord of the Rings', 'Warhammer Fantasy', or 'World of Warcraft' - not D&D.  So now that they are the champions, where do they actually show up iconically?   There are bugbears in 'Against the Giants' and in 'Temple of Elemental Evil'.  There are hobgoblins in 'Dragonlance'.  The first encounters in the Mystara arcade games are with goblins and gnolls.  It's norkers (another goblin subspecies) at the beginning of 'The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun'.  Even in D&D ripoffs like 'Bard's Tale' its bugbears and berserkers that are the iconic fodder of that game, and Rich (appropriately IMO) focuses on goblins/hobgoblins as fodder in 'Order of the Stick'.   In FR, orcs are alien interlopers - its hobgoblin armies in the Bloodstone Pass.  The only place I can ever remember encountering orcs in D&D is in 'Keep on the Borderlands', but even there they just aren't as interesting as the iconically 'Bree Yark!' screaming 'hard working goblins', the hobgoblins with their armory (the first huge treasure trove you are likely to find), or the bugbears with their entrance observation post, or even the kobolds with their pit trap.</blockquote>

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