Quote from: Chris24601;1125829Because that's what the name Orc LITERALLY means.

The term is used in Beowulf as a reference to those condemned by God and it is generally translated as "evil spirit." Its a variant of Orke or "Ogre"; a common term for evil spirits throughout the medieval world.

As I'm sure you're aware, it derives from Orcus, a euphemism for the Roman god of underworld. In the context of Medieval Europe however that meant "The Devil."

You may as well ask "Why do Nazis have to be bad guys in the first place?"

Words either mean things or they don't.

This is an intellectually dishonest argument. The orcs aren't literal demons in the lore of the game canon. They're basically human beings, except the writers said they're arbitrarily born evil as a shallow for building the game around killing them. Why not fight the literal demons of the game? We don't need orcs in that case. We don't need to worry about fictitious moral dilemmas like "should we kill the baby orcs?" At least demons are the transmuted souls of people who did evil in life of their own free will.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125829You may as well ask "Why do Nazis have to be bad guys in the first place?"

The nazis are the default bad guys in a lot of fiction because they historically did bad things. It's an easy shorthand. Orcs are wholly fictional and never existed in reality. More importantly, nazis are still human beings. They didn't choose the path of evil because they were born evil, they chose it because they were indoctrinated by their culture. They don't even believe themselves to be evil, they believe their enemies are... orcs, basically.

The philosophical implication with orcs is they exist solely to allow the PCs to commit genocide without guilt as a game convention. That feels a lot like racist propaganda to me, so I naturally find the concept disturbing. The concept of orcs being people in their own right is still an outlier in tabletop games, whereas in wider fiction like video games and prose it is far more common.

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But trying to argue using that kind of sophistry is pointless, so I'll just switch to the visceral argument.

To quote a few choice articles:

Quote from: Greyhawk GrognardYou play an RPG so your character can kill his enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.

Quote from: James Mendez HodesWe need imaginary non-people we can fight and kill for fun

Quote from: Cultists of KhorneBlood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne!

I feel like orcs are some lame moral salve to our consciences. We want elf-games to indulge our secret fantasies of being murderous psychopaths, but we cannot accept that we enjoy that fantasy so we introduce orcs as a substitute for human beings that we can kill without conscience.

That makes us losers and pansies. We should own up to our bloodlust and embrace the indiscriminate murder of innocent people for fun. In the game, not reality.

Tabletop games give us the choice between a paladin who heroically murders baby orcs and a soldier of Khorne who slaughters all races equally. Playing the former is intellectually dishonest.

Play games where you kill innocent people for fun and profit. Don't be a loser by pretending they're orcs and that magically makes it okay. Own up to your bloodlust. Embrace it! Follow the darkness with all your strength!

Quote from: Lynn;1125835Yes, but what I think is also avoided is that notion that 'orc psychology' is somehow simply based on human or elf deviance.

In D&D, it was made clear from early on that half-orcs are typically the result of rape. Then there is the lack of CHA penalty of half-orcs to orcs.

LOTR orcs may not be all that sex driven. A bunch of male orcs pillaging a human town may be thinking in terms of labor slaves or simply slaughtering everyone. Violence alone may simply override most other considerations. Or orcs may simply cannot get it up for anything other than an orc female.

It may be possible that orcs reproduce asexually and/or hermaphrodites. It does make the most sense to engineer them that way if you want disposable soldiers.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827It is edgelordy and cliche.

To you, obviously.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827Why do orcs have to be monsters in the first place? Why can't adventurers fight literal nazis? Or [insert real life group you don't like here]?

Because they are cliches? Because Nazis in a medieval fantasy setting is jarring as fuck and catapults Players right out of their immersion?

Seriously, if you don't want to use a real life group as a generic violent and brutish enemy, then why shouldn't people choose orcs and half-orcs?

You remind me of this meme:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]4247[/ATTACH]

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827Conversely, couldn't you play up the banality of evil by having the overlord legitimately hiring people to birth brainwashed soldiers for his army? Seriously, imagine a conversation between two prostitutes who casually talk about how many babies they had who were sent to death and only care about how much money they were paid for each one. IMO, that is far more horrifying than any amount of imagined torture porn featuring women getting raped by orcs could ever be.

Birthing takes time. Raising orc whelps and brainwashing them takes time. Prostitutes would demand a lot of money to bed an orc.

Plus I've already one upped you. Last fantasy game I ran, the Players were hired by the father of a daughter who married/mated with an orc chief so that the village could have a fighting force to defend themselves with. The orc chief has turned out to be an acceptable father,  but the human father of the daughter still wants the chief and the rest of the orcs dead (even though it would make the village vulnerable to a band of gnolls roaming around).

Real question for you: If you get this bent out of shape over a bit of setting in a fantasy game, then how can you live your life day-to-day? There isa lot of even more awful stuff out here in reality.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827Nobody is harmed by playing FATAL but that doesn't mean we should tell everyone that they're wrong, stupid, immature, etc unless they play and praise it.

Are you equating the use of Half-orcs and people's inability to deal with any potential insinuation of their origin with FATAL? That says more about you than me, and passive aggressively calling them stupid, immature and wrong?

I will say people that believe this (which may be you) might be a little immature, for believing that if true. Stupid or wrong? eh. I wouldn't go that far. But that's a mighty broad brush you're painting with.

The tragedy here is that faux-activists clearly don't practice their own advice.

IF you decide you want half-orcs in your setting, and you had a discussion when forming the group/campaign, clearly you would know exactly how you should handle it for that game.

1) People don't want rape/ non-consensual sex as a feature nor do they want it to come up? Half-orcs are the union between willing couples. They are the product of either brief dalliances of fun or loving relationships.

2) People are fine with 'R' rated stuff as backstory or window-dressing, but would prefer not to deal with the ugly stuff in-game. You're half-orc can be from any kind of union BUT we're not playing out any 'in-game' orc raids on the local village.

3) We want hard-core X rated in your face gritty Conan drama. Not only do I want to know the tragedy of your rapey conception, but I also would like you to tell the story as your father or mother. In character, first person with detailed descriptions. I'll grab the tissues.

I'm really tired of reading the moral admonishments of gamers riding atop their lofty high-horses condemning rape, incest and skeezy-sex as impure and repugnant. Yeah, great, you're a shiny knight of purity who is perfect and only plays rainbows and unicorns and spreads happiness across the land. Good for you. I don't believe you. I know you're a skeezy pervert. Your grandstanding bullshit is not convincing me.

If people want to have weird fetish sexy-times fantasies in their games, who cares?

The REAL issue here is WHERE some people decide to partake of said sexy-time fantasies! For fucks sake where did we find all these exibitionist RPG flashers?!?!

Places one should not do sexy-time RPG stuff;

1) A game store game.
2) A convention game.
3) A home game with your young children and their friends.
4) A home game where several participants described discomfort with the subject. Because, you intelligently decided to discuss ahead of time.
5) A public game at your church or boy scouts / girl scouts meeting.

Places where sexy-time RPG stuff is acceptable;

1) A home game where everyone enthusiastically wants to play the game under the specific parameters agreed upon.
2) A home game between consenting adults as part of your broader sexual relationship.
3) A home game where you are literally "playing with yourself".
4) A convention game slotted for the "after dark" midnight table where you card everyone at the door AND they all signed-up for your meticulously detailed disclaimer.

The Adam Koebel incident is all too common because GMs are humans. We get horny, which makes us stupid and forget that people have feelings and we're not the only horny thing in the room. People can be selfish. Many nerds are not as socially-aware as we could be. We get stubborn, and distracted, and opinionated and often lose the forest for the trees. Shit happens. EDITED to add: So we need to learn from our mistakes and be MORE cognizant.

So, rape and sex are not the problem. Dark, difficult subject matters are not the problem.

It's WHEN and HOW they are brought up, often against the consent or will of the participants - that is the problem.

TL;DR - Half-orcs origins should be based on the subjects that are acceptable to that group. There is no need to follow cannon or any other factor. Talk about it, set a precedent for your group, and run with it.

EXTRA TL;DR - The subject of rape/sex/skeeze in RPGs is not evil. It's just potentially difficult for some people. Consent is king, so put your grown-up pants on and have a FUCKING conversation which is the core of the FUCKING hobby in the first place since you'll all be around a GODDAMN table having FUCKING conversations on the regular. Also, stop flashing public game tables with your perv!! For the love of Jesus Christ and all his disciples.

Have fun. Smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125837It may be possible that orcs reproduce asexually and/or hermaphrodites. It does make the most sense to engineer them that way if you want disposable soldiers.

Which would make them 40k Orks (seriously; 40k Orks are essentially sapient fungi).

If you're looking for guilt-free beatdown targets, though, the undead are always there. You can argue the morality of slaughtering backwards barbarian hordes, but fighting creatures that are not only 'not alive' but are actively dangerous? Hey, sign me up.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125808From a world building perspective, you would expect that women raped by orcs would abort their pregnancies as birth control has been practiced throughout real human history. I expect the overwhelming majority of surviving half-orcs to be the children of slaves or consensual relationships.

As for other monsters whose lore involves rape... any time a monster is mentioned as being sexually compatible with humans then this will typically involve either violent rape (orcs, ogres, minotaurs, etc) or rape through mind control (succubi, lamiae, etc). The exact lore varies by edition.


That is because it is a strawman. In my surveys, I have found the accurate argument to be "savage humanoids in general, orcs being a commonly cited example, are disturbing because their characterization is reminiscent of real world racist propaganda that dehumanized non-white people." Ultimately, this is a side effect of the fact that elf-games are violent fantasies of murdering and looting. Attempting to justify the actions of the murderhobos would necessarily require dehumanizing their victims in a similar manner to historical racist propaganda.

The problem goes away if you stop depicting savage humanoids as inherently evil and deserving extermination.

Just because abortion has technically existed since the dawn of human history that doesn't mean that abortion in a primitive world is therefore safe, effective and readily available or even desirable. Ancient abortion practices included things like ingesting poison that could also kill the mother or surefire methods like jumping up and down or riding on horseback. If riding on a horse was always an effective method to abort a baby they'd be renting out pony rides for knocked up teenage girls in places were abortion is illegal rather than doing surgical procedures in a back alley. And that's not even getting into the morality of the thing or what sort of objections religious institutions might have against such practices in the game world.

Even if you want to bring magic into the mix, just because magic technically exists that doesn't mean that you'll find a willing wizard with a ready abortion spell in every village or settlement. Magic is supposed to be rare in some worlds, or even dangerous and undesirable.

Also, just because you're queasy about rape or savage humanoids could technically be portrayed as noble savages rather twisted creations of evil that doesn't mean that therefore 100% all humanoids in every single world now have to be naturally evolved creatures that are just as worthy of dignity and respect as human beings. Sometimes fantasy creatures are demon spawn or soulless creations of magic, like the original orcs were intended to be--and that comes straight from literature that predates RPGs, so giving players excuses to not feel bad about slaughtering countless "evil" creatures has nothing to do with it.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125836This is an intellectually dishonest argument. The orcs aren't literal demons in the lore of the game canon. They're basically human beings

No.....They are orcs, or else they would have been called bandits or pirates or berserkers or any number of other names for human monsters.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125836Why not fight the literal demons of the game? We don't need orcs in that case. We don't need to worry about fictitious moral dilemmas like "should we kill the baby orcs?" At least demons are the transmuted souls of people who did evil in life of their own free will.

You never read Orcs of Thar, have you?

In Orcs of Thar, there is a little known secret which slips out. Humanoids in The Known World are all the reincarnated souls of sentient beings which did evil in life. It is a stage of life that they must go through as their spirits slowly evolve to be able to be ascendant or devolve to the point where their souls become demonic. I always liked that little wrinkle.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125836The philosophical implication with orcs is they exist solely to allow the PCs to commit genocide without guilt as a game convention. That feels a lot like racist propaganda to me, so I naturally find the concept disturbing.

WTF? You do understand that this is a fantasy game and not Real Life, right?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125836I feel like orcs are some lame moral salve to our consciences. We want elf-games to indulge our secret fantasies of being murderous psychopaths, but we cannot accept that we enjoy that fantasy so we introduce orcs as a substitute for human beings that we can kill without conscience.

That makes us losers and pansies. We should own up to our bloodlust and embrace the indiscriminate murder of innocent people for fun. In the game, not reality.

Tabletop games give us the choice between a paladin who heroically murders baby orcs and a soldier of Khorne who slaughters all races equally. Playing the former is intellectually dishonest.

Play games where you kill innocent people for fun and profit. Don't be a loser by pretending they're orcs and that magically makes it okay. Own up to your bloodlust. Embrace it! Follow the darkness with all your strength!

OK, you've been in quarantine for too long.

Quote from: trechriron;1125842The Adam Koebel incident is all too common because GMs are humans. We get horny, which makes us stupid and forget that people have feelings and we're not the only horny thing in the room. People can be selfish. Many nerds are not as socially-aware as we could be. We get stubborn, and distracted, and opinionated and often lose the forest for the trees. Shit happens. EDITED to add: So we need to learn from our mistakes and be MORE cognizant.

Dude, if your games result in you getting horny and your Players getting horny and you all forget common sense and manners - you need to get out more and maybe game a little less.

Gaming time is gaming time. Sexy time is something else.

Half-elf is to elf and human as paladin is to cleric and fighter.  It's a concession to the reality of a class-based game mechanic dealing with archetypes.  You want a race that's sort of human, sort of elven, because of something that happened in the past, maybe a long time ago?  Here's your widget.  I think people get so hung up on the "Half" part of the name, they take it a little more straight-forward than it is meant to be. A half elf is merely someone with both elf and human ancestors where neither side is yet diluted enough to lose some racial mechanics.  Could be your direct parents.  Could be that the elven blood lasts through many generations of human descendants.  That's all it is.

Since I don't much care for the whole "Half" anything races as a mechanic, even recognizing why it is there, I find I can't get all that excited about half anything, especially orcs.  If you don't like the implications (or anything else for that matter) of half races, it's easy enough to drop them or change their purpose.

Quote from: Ghostmaker;1125843Which would make them 40k Orks (seriously; 40k Orks are essentially sapient fungi).

If you're looking for guilt-free beatdown targets, though, the undead are always there. You can argue the morality of slaughtering backwards barbarian hordes, but fighting creatures that are not only 'not alive' but are actively dangerous? Hey, sign me up.

Whole books have been written about the undead as tragical villians.

Quote from: Omega;1125791Stupid people claiming stupid things about games. News at 11.

No. Really. These morons just parrot/cut-n-paste the same tired old spiel because they have no brain cells to rub together.

Orcs = Rape
Orcs = Black People

sooooo. That must mean Orcs = Black rapists?

Thats what these nuts are obviously claiming then.

I thought that the Drow were supposed to be the Black rapists?  :rolleyes:

Quote from: jeff37923;1125847OK, you've been in quarantine for too long.

I have been noticing things getting a little crazier then normal online.

I've always assumed half-orcs were the products of the enslavement and rape of human women. The orcs in my worlds aren't green-skinned barbarians who socialize with humans; they're horrible monsters who murder/eat/rape humans given any opportunity.

I don't know when or why orcs started being regarded in RPGs as analogous to human barbarians, rather than monsters. Or why some people feel they should be treated with more empathy and nuance than gnolls, sahuagin, or mind flayers. To me they've always been monsters.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125836This is an intellectually dishonest argument. The orcs aren't literal demons in the lore of the game canon.

Really? The guy who has wastes pages arguing that there shouldn't be both ogres and oni or both spectres and wraiths in the same game because they're the same things expressed by different cultures is now arguing that the definition of a word doesn't matter?

Words only mean things to you until you need them not to. Got it, you fucking hypocrite.

Also, which canon are you discussing? Greyhawk? Mystara? Forgotten Realms? Eberron? Nerath? Warhammer? Adventures in Middle Earth? Rokugon? Old Praetoria?

That you act like there's just one shows your utter disingenuousness. You act as if all settings present orcs in the exact same way with the exact same "problematic" issues attached when you already know better.

And in some campaigns the orcs are literal demons (basically the foot soldiers of the demon armies). In others they're evil spirits inhabiting some corporeal shell (birthed rather like depicted in the LotR films). In still others they're vat-grown magitech abominations.

Regardless, all of these different versions, despite sometimes having nothing otherwise in common, get named orcs in their respective settings because etymologically ORC (or orke or ogre) means "evil being."

Some settings may play with those assumptions (see Eberron), but the reason for the name is because the name has a specific meaning... just as Nazi (i.e. a national socialist) does.

So just for you, because I know you'll hate it ... in my next game the creatures that people call orcs will actually be the twisted evil spirits of actual fucking Nazis released from Hell by a fell ritual and picking up right where they left off in this new world; proclamations of being the master race and eternal rule, swastikas, book burning, death camps, the whole nine yards.

Because Orc and Nazi mean the same thing... they're the Bad Guy.