D&D 5E What Makes an Orc an Orc?

[Charlaquin]

I really don't feel that you satisfactorily can. It will be a mess of strength score is not a measure of your strength...

Ability scores already aren’t accurate measures of the thing their name means, and I don’t think that’s a problem that can be fixed short of a complete overhaul of abilities and checks.

Ok. Let's accept that this is true. How would you feel point buy allowing to buy up to 16 (perhaps with couple of more points)? Then everyone could always get at least that +3, and some rare races whose specific niche that thing was could get +4. Better? Even a little bit better?

I don’t think so, because then some races could be above baseline competence from 1st level and others couldn’t. This might actually make the problem worse.

 

[Helldritch]

why do I prefer, in general, mono cultured foes and racial ability bonuses?
Mono cultured foes are great. You don't ask yourself if this or that foe is good or not. You know it is a foe. Then once in a while you can surprise your players with an exception. Having foes that can be anything only slows down the game. It is a nice change of pace once in a while, but when the exception is the norm, it gets tiresome. Of course this is setting dependant. But it is a usual trope in almost every setting. One culture is usually the bad guy. Without a monocultured villainous race, the DM is much more complicated as he has to make every vilains very obvious to avoid moral and ethical issues and endless debates.

Ability score bonuses are great. They can make you good if not great at your chosen class. Yet it can also let you play the under dog. A dwarf in armor casting a fireball is a surprise. An Elf barbarian/fighter that beats a soldier in an arm wrestling contest is deliciously fun and unexpected. What about a gnome paladin based on strength? These are not optimal, but they can be fun.

By allowing floating bonuses to attributes you make all races identical. And changing racial quirks into cultural ones; you remove their uniqueness, their role and their flavor.

When you remove these, all you get is one race with different halloween costumes. This is not D&D. It is an entirely new system. It was tried before in other games. No one remembers them as they were bland and tasteless. What makes D&D so fun is exactly what you seek to remove: "diversity".

You will argue that with your system you will have more versatility to make anything you want. I claim otherwise. When your choices have no meaningful consequeces you just have the illusion of choice. When an orc wizard is exactly the same as an elf wizard what did you gain? I'll answer for you. You gained nothing. No pain, no gain. Ho but you gained that your orc will be as good a wizard as any! Sure, but with such a system every wizards will be exactly the same. Same choice of culture bonuses, same stat points put exactly at the same place. Whatever the race, the classes will be the same.

With the orc wizard, presently in Eberron, you get a wizard able to do things that a gnome wizard won't be able. That orc will reach 20 Intel later, but he will be tougher and he won't hesitate to get in a bar fight.

We already have versatility. Versatility with consequential choices. That is the best we could ever wish for.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I don’t think these forums would be a reliable indicator of the general D&D community’s feelings on the matter. At any rate, I think WotC’s decision to include options for customizing racial ability bonuses in an upcoming product is a clear indication that there is significant demand for such options.

There is a difference between customizing ability scores and not having them connected to race at all.

 

[Dire Bare]

TL;DR: I used to play orcs as an archetype more than they were a race. I'm not longer sure what they should be.

My opinion on the whole matter is... conflicted.

In my typical Middle Earth or FR campaign, orcs are an archetype. They are the enemy, the other, the unknown, and the little we know about them is their violence, their aggression, their strength, their pillage, and their numbers. And that's what makes them scary. Reasoning and diplomacy can be attempted, but it will be from a position of fear.

The moment we know everything about them, the moment they stop being the enemy; they stop being orcs. Whether this is a good thing or not is where the conflict lies, because this opens-up the whole morality of the representation of xenophobia in fantasy.

Xenophobia is the fear of The Other, of what we don't know or understand. We all are xenophobic, all of us. That is normal, that is human. What we need as a society is review what we define as "The Other", because as soon as we get to know and understand the other (with a small "o"), it ceases to be the Other (big "O") and becomes one of us. Feel free to apply that to racism, homophobia, etc. This doesn't makes us less Xenophobic however. After we have accepted something as part of us, The Other still exists, and it still instil fear in us. Only, it applies to something else.

The whole concept of monster pivots on fear, and xenophobia is one of them. It is the underlying concept behind the beholder and most aberration monsters, The Great Old Ones, and other alien(ish) entities. Speaking of aliens, the xenomorph of the Alien franchise is the perfect example of it. So playing on Xenophobia is something we do in sci fi and fantasy, and are likely to continue doing; the conflict on the subject of orcs is whether or not they should also represent this archetype. And that is a legitimate question because xenophobia is at the root of racism, and while xenophobia isn't something that can be erased, racism is, and it should be.

Fantasy orcs often fill the role of the feared and unknown blood-thirsty barbarian horde. This is an archetype; not a "race". In a way they are convenient because you can use them in lieu of any human-inspired cultures that would otherwise fill this role in fantasy. You can even make them the enemy of any human-inspired "barbarian" culture highlighted in a setting. But I understand how some can recognise their own culture in a game that otherwise depicts orcs as inhuman enemies, an archetype of violence and aggression. The solution is to make the orc "one of us" and therefore remove it from the xeno, but that only leaves an "archetypical vaccum" in most classical settings that will be filled with another species.

For what it's worth, I feel similarly about dark elves.

So as I said; I'm conflicted.

You make a good point, that orcs aren't really a race in the sci-fi sense (or even D&D sense) but rather an archetype of the savage, bloodthirsty hordes that are going to invade and rape and kill us all. That's what the Tolkien orc is, and the D&D orc carries a lot of that baggage. Other fantasy races embody, fully or partially, other archetypes like this.

Of course, these archetypes IRL were filled by very real peoples and used to demonize them so that we could be racist, violent, oppressive, and all sorts of fun stuff without the moral guilt of doing horrible things to people. And that's the problem of how race is treated in D&D, is that we use the same archetypal and racist language to describe orcs that we used to describes Huns and Mongols and Visigoths in ages past, with some of their descendants still around and being hurt by those stereotypes. Orcs aren't real, but engaging in the same thought processes that led to horrific racism IRL is problematic, and quite frankly hurtful and unwelcoming to minorities who still suffer from those stereotypes.

How do we tell classic stories in the mythic vein if we get rid of these archetypes? By growing in our willingness and ability to tell more complex stories. IRL, Europe was very much in danger of hordes from the East invading and causing all sorts of sorrow . . . . demonizing the Mongol invaders as sub-human monsters, orcs, isn't necessary to tell exciting adventure stories. The antagonists just become more real, more human, more three-dimensional. It makes good storytelling a little harder (not much, really), but it makes it so much more rich and so less problematic and racist.

EDIT: To add . . . . a good example is from the Captain Marvel movie in the MCU. The Skrulls are a classic evil/bad-guy race of antagonists in Marvel Comics, and the movie tricks you into thinking that you are getting more of the same . . . . but the twist makes the movie more interesting and rich, a much better story, than it would have been otherwise had they kept the Skrulls in that boring, always evil mode.

 

[Micah Sweet]

A 3 is sufficient to play the class, what’s your point?


I disagree. Increasing your class’s primary ability mod is about the single most valuable feature for any character.


Min-maxing isn’t the issue here. The game’s math is built around PCs having a +3 in their primary ability at 1st level. Less than that is below baseline competence. That most races can’t make a baseline competent wizard is a problem.


Again, you can mechanically express that orcs are stronger than gnomes without punishing players who want to play gnome barbarians. You don’t have to agree with me that such a change would be desirable, but this is not an effective counterpoint to my stance that it would be.


Who gets to decide what “acceptable parameters” are?


Random ability generation doesn’t concern me because it isn’t tied to race. If certain races got to roll different dice codes for certain abilities, I’d have a similar problem with that.

You know, random ability generation would help fix this problem immensely. Just roll until you have a set of six including a 16, and put it in Int. Poof! "baseline" competent orc wizard.

 

[Charlaquin]

You will argue that with your system you will have more versatility to make anything you want. I claim otherwise. When your choices have no meaningful consequeces you just have the illusion of choice. When an orc wizard is exactly the same as an elf wizard what did you gain? I'll answer for you. You gained nothing. No pain, no gain. Ho but you gained that your orc will be as good a wizard as any! Sure, but with such a system every wizards will be exactly the same. Same choice of culture bonuses, same stat points put exactly at the same place. Whatever the race, the classes will be the same.

I’m not really interested in engaging with the absurd argument that races having diverse cultures makes them humans with Halloween costumes. But to this point I will reply that you don’t have to make orc wizards exactly the same as elf wizards. You can make them equally effective wizards that are still different. If the only change you make is to throw out ability score bonuses, you’ll have elf wizards with keener senses, trained to use a wider array of weapons, and who either know more cantrips and languages, or can run faster and hide in natural terrain more easily, and orc wizards who are more menacing, hit harder with weapons, and can get knocked down but get up again (you ain’t never gonna keep them down). You could take this even further. Give your elf wizards deeper knowledge of the arcane to reflect their longer years of study. Give them a special affinity with spells that tap into the primal magics of the natural world. Give them secret techniques that blend magic and swordplay. Give your orc wizards more powerful destructive spells. Give them resistance to the magics granted by other cultures’ gods. There are all sorts of ways to differentiate characters of different ancestries besides just making them exactly the same but with lower numbers.

 

[Charlaquin]

There is a difference between customizing ability scores and not having them connected to race at all.

Sure, but we don’t know what it’s going to look like yet. It’s quite possible that these customization options will make it possible to play any combination of race and class and still get a 16 or 17 in your primary ability score at 1st level, which would at least effectively address my concerns, if not directly address them. We’ll have to wait and see what these options look like, but given that they were specifically mentioned as a way they are attempting to address long-standing issues with racial representation in the game, I think it’s a safe bet to assume that making nonstandard race/class combinations more viable will be one of the design goals.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You make a good point, that orcs aren't really a race in the sci-fi sense (or even D&D sense) but rather an archetype of the savage, bloodthirsty hordes that are going to invade and rape and kill us all. That's what the Tolkien orc is, and the D&D orc carries a lot of that baggage. Other fantasy races embody, fully or partially, other archetypes like this.

Of course, these archetypes IRL were filled by very real peoples and used to demonize them so that we could be racist, violent, oppressive, and all sorts of fun stuff without the moral guilt of doing horrible things to people. And that's the problem of how race is treated in D&D, is that we use the same archetypal and racist language to describe orcs that we used to describes Huns and Mongols and Visigoths in ages past, with some of their descendants still around and being hurt by those stereotypes. Orcs aren't real, but engaging in the same thought processes that led to horrific racism IRL is problematic, and quite frankly hurtful and unwelcoming to minorities who still suffer from those stereotypes.

How do we tell classic stories in the mythic vein if we get rid of these archetypes? By growing in our willingness and ability to tell more complex stories. IRL, Europe was very much in danger of hordes from the East invading and causing all sorts of sorrow . . . . demonizing the Mongol invaders as sub-human monsters, orcs, isn't necessary to tell exciting adventure stories. The antagonists just become more real, more human, more three-dimensional. It makes good storytelling a little harder (not much, really), but it makes it so much more rich and so less problematic and racist.

EDIT: To add . . . . a good example is from the Captain Marvel movie in the MCU. The Skrulls are a classic evil/bad-guy race of antagonists in Marvel Comics, and the movie tricks you into thinking that you are getting more of the same . . . . but the twist makes the movie more interesting and rich, a much better story, than it would have been otherwise had they kept the Skrulls in that boring, always evil mode.

To be fair, the Kree ended up always evil instead, they just pretended not to be. With the exception of Mar-Vell (who was a Drizzt-like outlier), all of the Kree were depicted as villainous.

 

[Charlaquin]

You know, random ability generation would help fix this problem immensely. Just roll until you have a set of six including a 16, and put it in Int. Poof! "baseline" competent orc wizard.

Wasn’t it you who earlier in this conversation said you don’t care about random ability score generation because nobody you know uses it?

Yes, rolling for starting abilities does go a long way towards making nonstandard race/class combinations more viable. It also introduces completely different issues. I use it in some campaigns, and not in others. What I am more concerned with for the purpose of this conversation is the default rules, which means the standard array.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Wasn’t it you who earlier in this conversation said you don’t care about random ability score generation because nobody you know uses it?

That was me. Maybe they said it too?