Going to try to stay on topic, but explain my thought process about updating the orc.
So what makes an orc and orc, at least in D&D, is that they are savage, evil killers. They are not supposed to be sympathetic characters. Now, say in World of Warcraft, orcs are a noble species with a proud and honorable warrior tradition from a different planet. You are supposed to be able to identify with them and understand their struggles. However, both takes on orcs are NOT human.
I have been reading about people removing the Int penalty, but really, that would just make it slightly less racist to compare people to orcs. I mean, they are still savage and usually evil, but at least you aren't calling them stupid. And of course that is not enough. To not be insulting at all you would basically have to make the orcs completely human.
Or, the other option, just don't compare people to fictional races. That just seems simpler and the obvious way to avoid being racist.
Now I am fine if people want to point out where I am incorrect in my reasoning. I'm of course willing to listen to reasoned arguments. But I won't sit idle while I am insulted.
There is a fundamental problem with this approach though, something that I encountered in 4e and see no way around.
Half-Orcs.
I've told this story a few times in these discussions, but I had a player come to me during a 4e game, after session Zero, and express extreme discomfort with a fellow party member's Half-Orc fighter. Not for anything that PC had done, or was planned to be, but because the first player had been interested and read the lore in the PHB 2, and immediately picked up on the rape themes. It made them incredibly uncomfortable, and the solution I found was pretty simple, but cuts right through this idea that orcs should be savage evil killers.
I made the half-orc a full-blooded orc.
The Player of the orc character was happy, and my other player was happy, but it shows this deep problem with keeping orcs as always evil and warring with humans and elves and such. That means that most half-orcs are children of rape, and that is deeply troubling for a lot of players, myself included.
Making them a PC race is far easier than rolling back the clock and taking half-orcs out of the game, and since we have WoW Orcs as an example, we know that depicting orcs as a complex, multi-faceted race can work.
It seems like a win for everyone, except those people who want faceless "I'm evil" drones to throw at their parties. But even those people have other options. From as simple as saying "The Kill-All tribe is evil, but the Greenskin tribe isn't" or fighting things like bandits or cultists, who can be any race.
Except with a 17 STR you can carry more than a 16 STR, so.... not mechanically identical.
I know you are joking, but come on man. 15 lbs of encumbrance wouldn't even make a difference in a game where they actually tracked that stuff, let alone in a more standard game.
And even if it did, the Orc's powerful build giving them an additional 255 lbs would make far more of a difference.
There are other issues regards half-orcs and the descriptions of them mainly coming about by rape, and how they are rejected by human societies, or how their human intelligence allows them to dominate orc tribes. The more you look for problems the more you can find depending if you start with the assumption Human = white, and orc = non-white.
I personally think that is a false assumption, I think narratively in D&D, Human = Human and orc = represents the aggressive, violent, destructive, raiders from human history, the idea that just being stronger give you the right to take something that belongs to someone else. Be they the Mongolian hoard attacking Europe and Asia, which is likely to have inspired Tolkien in creating orcs, Crusaders invading the holy land, Nazi's in WWII or even the US Cavalry attacking the Native America population. If you start from that assumption then yes is makes sense they are strong, violent and savage by nature, that they rape and pillage, etc. They don't represent any particular human race, but some aspect common to the human race.
See, the problem with your view here is that you are assuming that the problem is specifically skin tone.
White vs non-white is not the issue.
"human" vs "lesser and more brutish version of human" is the issue.
Because the Orcs are not like the Nazis, or the US Cavalry, or the Knights of the Crusades. All of those groups are highly trained, organized, and come from nations states.
Orcs are tribal people. People who define themselves by clan and small nomadic groups, who are violent and savage and do not hold land, but despoil it. They are "uncivilized". And since they are also human (even your own post admits this when you say "represents the aggressive, violent, destructive, raiders
from human history" we can find so many examples of how "civilized" folk talked about and treated similar people and find that this is deeply problematic.
So can we talk about what's problematic with the depiction of orcs that we have now, not the depiction that was written nearly a century or for editions that have been out of print for decades?
Have they really changed that much from earlier editions to now? They all seem to be written in a very similar vein to me.
Your words here have been said as nauseum in those threads as well. They didn’t end the debate then and they aren’t going to here. Without rehashing it here, There’s a fundamental disagreement about what you assert above.
Right because certain people want to keep holding up a paper mask and saying " but look, they aren't really human, you can't be mad because we made them up. We aren't talking about
you, your just reading too far into things."
"Now lets go kill some savage brutes who are squatting on that land that clearly should be civilized and have a city built on it."
