D&D (2024) The Half Orc. Are they still needed?

[bedir than]

Another boring conversation about mechanics that ignores that trend of the game is to widen the stories being able to be told, not shorten them.

Yes, you could insist to my friends that are considered half that their play option is to be half-devil, sure. I wouldn't expect that to go over well.

 

[Medic]

I would rather aasimars than tienflings, because the last is the bad guy being the popular star in the high-school, and the aasimar like the brighter student being totally ingored, and suffering bulling and the syndrome of the tall poppies, and a bad repuration by fault of false rumour created by enviers.

While I am in the minority that vastly prefers aasimar to tieflings, this is... oddly specific.

I can get behind that as a player.

But, from a larger perspective, the feeling of having one foot in two worlds is a trope as old as time, and there are other ways of doing it, as opposed to being "mixed race." I think the new ideal will be a person of a race (say an orc) that was raised by elves or dwarves or humans or whatever. They will strongly associate with their culture but feel a longing for the ancestry.

I feel that this does not do justice to the difficulty that complicated ancestry brings in places where it matters. It just so happens that I am of mixed lineage myself. Reality being what it is, I frequently face prejudice from both of my parent cultures, not acceptance. It is not so much having a foot in two worlds as it is being barred from having a foot in either.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Exactly this.

Yes, the game still “needs” half-orcs.

Rather, I think the game "needs" multiracial and mixed lineage character options, but not "half-orcs" specifically.

If the game has no intention of adding in more multiracial archetypes, then I suppose half-elves and half-orcs are better than nothing... but I don't see their inclusion to the exclusion of other mixed parentages to be worthwhile. Elf/humans and orc/humans are no better than dwarf/orcs or elf/gnomes or whatever. So if you are going to include mixed lineages in the base game, then open them up wider.

 

[Micah Sweet]

While I am in the minority that vastly prefers aasimar to tieflings, this is... oddly specific.


I feel that this does not do justice to the difficulty that complicated ancestry brings in places where it matters. It just so happens that I am of mixed lineage myself. Reality being what it is, I frequently face prejudice from both of my parent cultures, not acceptance. It is not so much having a foot in two worlds as it is being barred from having a foot in either.

The first fantasy character i ever encountered like that was Tanis Half-Elven from Dragonlance, and that was his story. That idea is definitely still very relevant to a lot of people.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Rather, I think the game "needs" multiracial and mixed lineage character options, but not "half-orcs" specifically.

If the game has no intention of adding in more multiracial archetypes, then I suppose half-elves and half-orcs are better than nothing... but I don't see their inclusion to the exclusion of other mixed parentages to be worthwhile. Elf/humans and orc/humans are no better than dwarf/orcs or elf/gnomes or whatever. So if you are going to include mixed lineages in the base game, then open them up wider.

Specific mixed race heritage options with their own history and place in the world are not “better than nothing”, they’re important on their own.

We may also benefit from more robust custom lineage rules, but that does not replace the role of these specific options.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Specific mixed race heritage options with their own history and place in the world are not “better than nothing”, they’re important on their own.

Which means they ARE better than not having them.

But I disagree that the half-orc lineage is better than the gnome/halfling lineage. They are equally as important.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

The discussion reminds me that in Critical Role there has been several Uniya, that is elf-orc, NPCs. I don't know if Mercer has written any PC rules for them in case someone wants to play one.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Saying half-orcs aren't necessary because there are more popular options is like saying Avengers don't need Hulk, or Justice League doesn't need Green Arrow, X-Men doesn't need Polaris, Vampire: the Masquerade has got enough number of bloodlines, Transfomers has got enough characters, or Fortnite has got enough skins. Always there is space for one more when the idea is good.

When you find the right way to sell an idea somebody will be willing to buy it.

An orc shaman could be interesting because for the eyes of the rest of the tribe the spellcaster orc would be the equivalent to a nerd, suffering more bulling and reject than the ordinary wizards, or the warlocks.

Sometimes I thought about the idea of a funny love-hate relation, with a piece of unresoluted sexual tension and echi comedy, between a metrosexual male half-elf ranger and a tomboy half-orc shaman.

Linderium Tesarien Racem: Invasion of the Sombers is a fantasy saga where the bad guys are the elves, and the female main character is an orc queen who marries whith the human king for a orc-human alliance. I guess there is a traslation to English.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

My friends that are clearly both part of, and ignored by, both 'races' of their parents absolutely love the half-orc. It helps them feel like themselves, with a foot in both worlds. Telling such a person that they're really just an orc doesn't enable their story - it ends it.

It's not telling them that they're "really just an orc", it's telling them that they're mechanically identical to an orc. I would still give some roleplaying advice on how Half-Orcs are treated differently from full-blooded Orcs and stuff like that. I just don't think they need to be mechanically distinct races, especially with how Orcs aren't assumed to always be stupid and evil anymore and they share a lot of the same racial traits.

I would absolutely give advice on what it's like to play as a mixed-race/species character in D&D 5.5e. I just don't think that we need both Orcs and Half-Orcs as different mechanical races.

 

[MGibster]

But as fantasies, RPGs allow us to be the better, more awesome, more well liked and appreciated versions of ourselves.

Are you kidding? Part of the reason I play D&D is so I can pretend for just a little while what it's like to be a heroic wizard or fighter instead of the epic demi-god I am on a daily basis.

The outsider angle is an interesting one. "Ownership" over the outsider characters has kind of drifted from the nerdy white kids of yore to the queer folk and PoC players of today. Note: I am not saying that there are now no nerdy white kids that feel like outsiders, nor am I saying that all queer folk and PoC feel like outsiders.

I don't know if the outsider aspect was ever about nerdy kids or that they had ownership of the concept. I never interpreted the half-orc as representing nerdy white people who didn't quite fit in. I always viewed them as the red head in a society where the only red heads are our neighbors who occasionally raid our villages to murder and plunder. But, yeah, the idea of what outsider might mean changes as the decades roll on by. In the second X-Men movie, mutants were a better allegory for LGBTQ people than they were for race. We even have a scene where Iceman comes out to his parents and his mother asks, " Have you tried not being a mutant?"