Quote from: Haffrung;1125871I'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.

Someone upthread tried to point out that Orcs are monsters by etymological definition, and was quickly labeled "intellectually dishonest". I'm 98+% sure the same people making any claim to the contrary are the same ones who spend all their free time arguing that D&D is all about the evils of white privilege and needs to be decolonized.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125838To you, obviously.

I have read the 120 Days of Sodom... and browsed various Anonkun quests depicting extreme acts of cannibalism, sexual violence, and mutilation.

Women getting ripped apart by orcs is passe.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125838Nazis in a medieval fantasy setting is jarring as fuck and catapults Players right out of their immersion?

Then rename them to Nords or something.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125838use a real life group as a generic violent and brutish enemy

I advocate that adventuring parties should kill human beings as often and as brutally as possible, regardless of their race, gender, sexual orientation, age, creed, etc.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125838why shouldn't people choose orcs and half-orcs?

Humans are quite capable of committing the most brutal acts of violent sadism on their own. We don't need orcs.

Orcs are the fantasy gamer equivalent of teddy bears. Adults substitute human beings as their targets of brutal violence.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125838Birthing takes time. Raising orc whelps and brainwashing them takes time. Prostitutes would demand a lot of money to bed an orc.

This is a thermian argument. It is fantasy fiction. We can justify whatever the hell we want.

[video=youtube;AxV8gAGmbtk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxV8gAGmbtk[/youtube]

Quote from: jeff37923;1125838Plus 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).

I have to give you credit for depicting orcs as non-evil. That's mindblowingly creative and the overwhelming majority of gamers are incapable of imagining that as a possibility.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125838Real 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.

That is precisely the reason why we don't need orcs. Every time I watch the news I hear about humanity's evil. I am looking forward to the real life apocalypse because I hate the human race.

I want to kill human beings, not lame teddy bear proxies like orcs.

Quote from: tenbones;1125840Are 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.

No, I'm saying we should be honest with our true desires and play as dark eldar forever.

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.

Or we could just kill human beings. We don't need to go out of our way to justify wholesale slaughter as morality.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125845Just 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.

You want fictional women to be raped and forced to give birth to rape babies. You want to have entire fictional races who you can fictionally kill guilt-free.

You don't have to justify your twisted fantasies of rape and murder to me. You need to be honest with yourself and stop trying to justify them as morality.

I recommend playing Hatred and/or RapeLay.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125845like the original orcs were intended to be--and that comes straight from literature that predates RPGs

We have no idea what the "original" orcs were meant to be. We're not entirely sure the word comes from Orcus. It might be related to orca, the whale.

The concept of orcs as a race of anything comes from Tolkien.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125847No.....They are orcs, or else they would have been called bandits or pirates or berserkers or any number of other names for human monsters.

The monster manual says they are humanoids, not demons. I assumed we were talking about generic D&D, not any particular campaign setting where the assumptions might be very different.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125847You 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.

Sounds fascinating.

Quote from: jeff37923;1125847WTF? You do understand that this is a fantasy game and not Real Life, right?

Then you should have no problem playing as dark eldar for the rest of your gaming life.

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

I'm being honest about the fact that D&D is a violent crime simulator and that everyone who needs guilt-free targets is a pansy.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876Really? 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.

I'm not arguing the definition of a word doesn't matter. I'm using the monster manual as my primary reference here, and it has its own definition separate from the various others you've given.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876Also, which canon are you discussing? Greyhawk? Mystara? Forgotten Realms? Eberron? Nerath? Warhammer? Adventures in Middle Earth? Rokugon? Old Praetoria?

The monster manual says they are humanoids, not demons. I assumed we were talking about that generic D&D, not any specific campaign setting.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876That 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.

I assumed we were discussing the orcs in the monster manual. It's not a hard assumption to make.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876And 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.

Can you give some specific examples? I'm not aware of any published settings where this is the case.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876Regardless, 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."

We're not sure of the true etymology. The fantasy gaming's primary reference point is Tolkien and the monster manual. Even in reality, the concept of orcs as demons is archaic and has been displaced by the fantasy version pioneered by Tolkien.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876Some 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.

That specific meaning comes from Tolkien. The original demonic definition he himself was aware of is now archaic and displaced by his Middle Earth orcs. And World of Warcraft's orcs, I guess.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876So 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.

I don't hate that at all. It sounds pretty neat. You should totally write a book about it. I curse myself for not coming up with it first.

Quote from: Chris24601;1125876Because Orc and Nazi mean the same thing... they're the Bad Guy.

Yes, but your assumptions about orcs are weird and not indicative of what everyone here or elsewhere in the gamer community seems to agree on.

Quote from: SavageSchemer;1125878Someone upthread tried to point out that Orcs are monsters by etymological definition, and was quickly labeled "intellectually dishonest". I'm 98+% sure the same people making any claim to the contrary are the same ones who spend all their free time arguing that D&D is all about the evils of white privilege and needs to be decolonized.

You are misrepresenting the argument. The monster manual says orcs are humanoids, not demons. It's intellectually dishonest to claim that the orcs in the monster manual are demons because of an archaic definition of the word.

Quote from: Haffrung;1125871I'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: SavageSchemer;1125878Someone upthread tried to point out that Orcs are monsters by etymological definition, and was quickly labeled "intellectually dishonest". I'm 98+% sure the same people making any claim to the contrary are the same ones who spend all their free time arguing that D&D is all about the evils of white privilege and needs to be decolonized.

The OP in this thread was Melan, who seemed to be arguing that the association of half-orcs with rape was off-base. What he said was,

Quote from: Melan;1125731I find it interesting that "half-orcs-by-rape" have become such a default assumption of D&D worlds, so much so that it is often specifically mentioned as their usual origin story. It is also one of the D&D elements which are typically found to be "problematic" by critics; that you have a whole player subrace of, basically, rape babies. Quit correct that it would be tasteless.

The reason this comes out of left field is because it didn't seem to be that way at all when we started playing (early 1990s). The assumption was simply that some people just have seriously low standards - not unlike real life - and there would certainly be many more people like this than rapists.

I don't think that he is arguing that D&D is about white privilege or needing decolonization. Instead, he seems to be arguing that the "problematic" label is incorrect because the association with rape is incorrect. Others are arguing that the association with rape is correct, but that it isn't a problem.

Quote from: areallifetrex;1125782What really doesn't make sense is that orc tribes are always shown as either being racially homogeneous, or only having things like goblinoids or ogres around. Orc tribes should have tons of other demihumans recruited or enslaved from conquered lands. Most half-orcs should be part of orc tribes, not tragic outcasts living in human lands.

Alot of settings, especially D&D tend to depict orcs as very often having a few, or a-lot of other races mixed in. Usually other humanoids like goblins, hobgoblins and ogres. But sometimes also trolls, bugbears, and gnolls. And the occasional human. Sometimes lead by a powerful human.

Other RPGs either go much the same route, ot have the orcs or most any race near purely homogenous one race each with maybee some add-ons somehow.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125882I have to give you credit for depicting orcs as non-evil. That's mindblowingly creative and the overwhelming majority of gamers are incapable of imagining that as a possibility.

Orcs in Earthdawn, 1993, were portrayed as non-evil. Revisionist orcs are themselves an old trope at this point.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125882I have read the 120 Days of Sodom... and browsed various Anonkun quests depicting extreme acts of cannibalism, sexual violence, and mutilation.

Women getting ripped apart by orcs is passe.

Sounds like you have some worrisome taste in literature. But if you enjoy reading about sodomy, cannibalism and mutilation so much, then the question becomes WTF is your problem with the mere implied existence of orc rape babies in a FICTIONAL game narrated within the privacy of someone else's game table you're not likely to ever know, much less attend?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125882It is fantasy fiction. We can justify whatever the hell we want.

Glad you agree we can justify orcs being a race made up entirely out of rape babies sired by members of a monstrous, male-only species that relies on females from other species to reproduce. By force. A la Goblin Slayer.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125882You want fictional women to be raped and forced to give birth to rape babies. You want to have entire fictional races who you can fictionally kill guilt-free.

You don't have to justify your twisted fantasies of rape and murder to me. You need to be honest with yourself and stop trying to justify them as morality.

I recommend playing Hatred and/or RapeLay.

Funny how none of these claim appear nor are implied anywhere in my refutation to the flaws in your argument, which you refused to address.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125882We have no idea what the "original" orcs were meant to be. We're not entirely sure the word comes from Orcus. It might be related to orca, the whale.

The concept of orcs as a race of anything comes from Tolkien.

Yes we do. Just because we don't know with 100% certainty the exact etymology of the word "orc" or because Tolkien was too prudish to come out and spell it out explicitly that orcs are specifically the product of rape, that doesn't mean that we're completely in the dark about what orcs are intended to represent in the greater scheme of things. It's not like the guy didn't write multiple books or left hundreds of detailed notes on his world building.

We don't need Tolkien to explicitly tell us orcs were intended to be brutal engines of destruction twisted by dark magic, they're depicted as such in his works. It's self fucking evident.

Do you even read what you're writing? You're not even trying to honestly address people's points, but are desperately trying to grasp at the weakest straw you can find or invent.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125905Do you even read what you're writing? You're not even trying to honestly address people's points, but are desperately trying to grasp at the weakest straw you can find or invent.

He has gotten overtly antagonistic in the last few posts.

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.

Tolkien was pretty specific that they do in similar ways to humans and elves, but there is no reason for orcs in D&D not to be whatever the DM wants. I guess it depends on what you want them to represent, such as the various types of zombies in All Flesh Must Be Eaten.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1125896Orcs in Earthdawn, 1993, were portrayed as non-evil. Revisionist orcs are themselves an old trope at this point.

I agree that there are several examples of non-evil orcs in the past - like Earthdawn and Shadowrun, along with Sovereign Stone.

I think calling this "revisionist" is kind of demonstrating the point, though. It's not revisionist for orcs in one fantasy world to be different than another. There's no reason why orcs (or elves or dragons) in every fantasy world need to be the same as in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

I think it's annoying how many fantasy worlds slavishly copy Tolkien. Having non-evil orcs just to be different than Tolkien isn't hugely creative, but neither is just making everything the same as in Tolkien.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1125908He has gotten overtly antagonistic in the last few posts.

That's because his one fixed idea is being challenged more than normal.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125905WTF is your problem with the mere implied existence of orc rape babies in a FICTIONAL game narrated within the privacy of someone else's game table you're not likely to ever know, much less attend?

I have no such problems. If you want to play a Rapeborn, then that's entirely on you.

I thought that, hey, maybe the Rapeborn shouldn't be the default option in a game ostensibly made for ages 12+?

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125905Glad you agree we can justify orcs being a race made up entirely out of rape babies sired by members of a monstrous, male-only species that relies on females from other species to reproduce. By force. A la Goblin Slayer.

Don't forget the infanticide! Killing baby goblins is morally right and you should kill them as often as you possibly can, and you should go out of your way to make their deaths as torturous and agonizing as possible. Filthy little anklebiters. The world would be so much better if all those filthy goblins were dead.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125905Funny how none of these claim appear nor are implied anywhere in my refutation to the flaws in your argument, which you refused to address.

It's fiction. Birth control is as easy or difficult as we want it to be. You're making it difficult because you want to force fictional women to carry their rape pregnancies to term and raise the resulting subhuman halfbreeds to adulthood, as opposed to doing everything within their power to avoid that fate including infanticide by Goblin Slayer. I would imagine that the human culture would have a eugenics policy/holy code and order to terminate half-orc pregnancies, or stone the women to death, perhaps calling them literal demons if they aren't already.

I get that you want to torture fictional women. Whatever floats your boat, dude. Why do you want to torture fictional women with rape by orcs specifically? Isn't it plenty sufficient for them to be raped by human men? Humans are born evil, you know. Original sin and all that.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125905Yes we do. Just because we don't know with 100% certainty the exact etymology of the word "orc" or because Tolkien was too prudish to come out and spell it out explicitly that orcs are specifically the product of rape, that doesn't mean that we're completely in the dark about what orcs are intended to represent in the greater scheme of things. It's not like the guy didn't write multiple books or left hundreds of detailed notes on his world building.

We don't need Tolkien to explicitly tell us orcs were intended to be brutal engines of destruction twisted by dark magic, they're depicted as such in his works. It's self fucking evident.

I wasn't arguing that orcs weren't intended to be villains in Tolkien's work or monster manual. I was arguing that there isn't a clear concept of orcs prior to Tolkien, and that monster manual's orc isn't equivalent to that sense anyway.

Look at this quote from 1656, Samuel Holland, Don Zara del Fogo, I.1: "Who at one stroke didst pare away three heads from off the shoulders of an Orke, begotten by an Incubus."

That's obviously not an orc in the same sense used by monster manual. They aren't equivalent. That's like saying that the D&D bugbear is equivalent to the pre-D&D bugbear. It isn't.

Quote from: VisionStorm;1125905Do you even read what you're writing? You're not even trying to honestly address people's points, but are desperately trying to grasp at the weakest straw you can find or invent.

If I actually came out and said I find the Rapeborn's backstory a creepy sexual fetish and think it shouldn't be the default backstory for all half-orcs, then you'd call me an SJW and dismiss my complaints as irrelevant.

I've been trying everything I could, making the craziest of non-arguments, to avoid saying so until right now.

My position is this: I don't think half-orcs should default to rape babies. I don't think savage humanoids should default to born evil.

I think that, as Greyhawk Grognard put it, "You play an RPG so your character can kill his enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women." I think that, rather than imaginary non-people (e.g. orcs, goblins, whatever), we should fight and kill imaginary humans for fun.

That makes me an SJW, I guess.

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

AND?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827Why do orcs have to be monsters in the first place?

They don't have to, but conversely there's no reason why they can't be.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827Why can't adventurers fight literal nazis? Or [insert real life group you don't like here]?

But they do? In different games of course, but why would I want literal nazis in my elf games?
And when we do include speciesm/racism from one fantasy race towards another the same idiots who claim making orcs bad is racism get their panties in a bunch.

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?

I could, but I don't want to. Or are you saying I must?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827Seriously, 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.

Lucky for me I don't do rape porn nor your nazi eugenics proposed porn either.

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.

Anybody that plays, likes and or praises a game I disapprove off is wrong, stupid, immature...

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827The elf-games have this premise where entire races of intelligent beings exist for the purpose of being killed because the author arbitrarily declared they were born evil. This is implicitly done because the author doesn't want to depict the PCs routinely killing other human beings.

Do you even Mythology? All those fantasy races were originally 100% evil or at the very least the vast amount of time. Elf games if anything made some of those not so, because they are based of Tolkien and not the Brothers Grimm. But even if you were right, so what?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827That whole dynamic is eerily similar to the dehumanizing racist/sexist/ideological propaganda used throughout real history.

What are you smoking? Where are the IRL orcs, goblins, etc?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125827What the hell even is a "breeding pit"? Judging by the name, I'm assuming it is literal and not a euphemism for a brothel. Are these like sentient ponds that eat people and spews out orcs? Sounds pretty metal.

Don't know don't care, it's not metal is ugly as fuck, but hey, I'm not the OrcsLivesMatter activist here.

Quote from: jhkim;1125919I agree that there are several examples of non-evil orcs in the past - like Earthdawn and Shadowrun, along with Sovereign Stone.

I think calling this "revisionist" is kind of demonstrating the point, though. It's not revisionist for orcs in one fantasy world to be different than another. There's no reason why orcs (or elves or dragons) in every fantasy world need to be the same as in Tolkien's Middle Earth.

I think it's annoying how many fantasy worlds slavishly copy Tolkien. Having non-evil orcs just to be different than Tolkien isn't hugely creative, but neither is just making everything the same as in Tolkien.

Eh. Now we're quibbling over which trope is less creative.
Personally, I'm fine with either version, so long as the game is good.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1125924Eh. Now we're quibbling over which trope is less creative.
Personally, I'm fine with either version, so long as the game is good.

OK, I agree with that.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1125921I think that, as Greyhawk Grognard put it, "You play an RPG so your character can kill his enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women." I think that, rather than imaginary non-people (e.g. orcs, goblins, whatever), we should fight and kill imaginary humans for fun.

Okay, so you don't like to play games where the protagonists kill monsters. Whatever. But do you honestly believe the RPG hobby needs to be excised of monsters?