What about a goblin?
Or a kobold?
For the first time in years, I’m playing in a D&D (well, Pathfinder) campaign instead of running it. I’m playing a lawful good dwarven fighter. He’d trained to be a paladin, but a tragic mistake convinced him that he wasn’t worthy, and he abandoned the path. My plan is for him to eventually redeem himself and multiclass into paladin. Dwarves a really suboptimal choice for paladins in Pathfinder. Paladins rely a lot on charisma, and dwarves get a -2 to that. And, of course, I’m not a paladin yet. We use a point allocation system, and I ended up dumping enough points in charisma to max it at 18 - before the racial penalty dropped it to a 16. On my fighter, who also has to obey paladin alignment restrictions without getting any paladin benefits. The reason he had to be a dwarf? The tragic backstory happened because he was drunk, and as a result he’s sworn off alcohol. The entire reason I made the character in the first place is because I liked the idea of playing a tea-total dwarf.
It’s paid off, though. The local blacksmith is also an alcoholic, and because he was drunk during a goblin raid, he wasn’t able to protect one of his beloved dogs from being killed. Feeling sympathetic, I helped him sober up and get his life back together, which we resolved through roleplay and a series of diplomacy rolls - which my fighter is really good at, thanks to his high charisma. I ended up rolling so well, that he not only stopped drinking and reopened his forge, he crafted me a +1 version of my exotic dwarven weapon.
Anyway, my point is, I kind of like different races having different stat bonuses. It can lead to some interesting roleplay scenarios.
That a lie. My excuse is that I like different races having different stat bonuses. My point is, I want to brag about my D&D character.
Other than the OP…
No problem, just dont do it to people who dont play. 
I had a thought game once, the DM had to run a errand for a hour:
what character of yours would you like to be the most? In that world.
Part two, in this real world, without any sort of showy or “real” magic- what character of yours would you most like to be? (we were playing 1920 Call of Cthulhu, and several other modern heroic games)
Totally disagree. Scads has been written about the problems with orcs (NK Jemisin, for example), but it comes down to whether you think fantasy acts as pure escapism, or whether it reflects, reinforces, and sometimes subverts cultural norms.
I’m definitely in the latter camp. My game has plenty of monster-killing, but it also has prison labor. It’s got nifty magic, but also has questions of individuality and community. It was escape-from-the-collapsing-castle set-pieces, but it also touches on police brutality and on people in communities caught between law enforcement and criminals. That’s what’s fun for me: using fantasy as a way to play with real-world issues, sometimes deeper than other times, makes the game resonate in a way that killing orc babies doesn’t.
Or, rather, that’s not true: killing orc babies resonates also. Fantasy inevitably reflects the culture of its creators, and when you create a scenario where murdering babies is the right choice, that’s a reflection, too. I’m not super into that kind of cultural reflection.
While I’m not a min-maxer or munchkin, I’ve been described as making the “best worst characters possible” or something like that. This mostly involves coming up with a character concept, making the part that makes the concept work statwise as good as possible, and then minimizing the hits to the other stuff. And I find the racial bonuses (both positive and negative) and the class bonuses to be a good driving force for interesting characters. For example: A gnome sorceress with dragon ancestry with more hit points than the party’s frontline fighter and an AC of 15 before adding magical items. She literally saved the party once or twice by being the last one standing and still throwing spells. A half-orc (wanted full orc, but AL limitations) redemption paladin whose take on redeeming people sometimes required hurting them for hurting others. And a kobold monk, whose backstory was that his warren was mostly wiped out as a child and so he basically became Batman. First for revenge, and then when he found it didn’t really help, to basically help others from the shadows.
The baby-goblin-paladin-trap isn’t very realistic. If you’re in some sort of setting with a goblin nursery, then logically, there should also be goblin nurses there: Someone whose job is taking care of the kids, not combat. After you defeat the warriors, you let the nurses continue to raise the kids. And if you already killed the nurses, well, that was where your paladin should have had problems.
Nah. It’s trivial to set a problem like that up with at least as much realism–and likely far more realism–than yer average dungeon crawl. And the real world is replete with massacres of settlements, including children, by people who consider themselves righteous warriors of God.
Of all the problems with that scenario, “it’s not realistic” is way at the bottom of the list.
I recently ran sections of Forge of Fury, and there is a literal nursery with babies on one of the floors.
I don’t have my old books handy at the moment, but I seem to remember that there were habitat/ecology sections in all the 2e Monster Manual entries which would often tell you how many young you could expect to encounter in a typical monster lair or warren.
The cool thing about D&D is that clerics and paladins who commit atrocities in the name of Good deities will soon find their spell spots unfilled in the morning. There may be a place somewhere for moral relativism, but that place isn’t in Dungeons and Dragons.
Sure, but you don’t need orcs for that, do you? Someone could run a “real Earth” medieval RPG and play the same themes. If you decide to make orcs your proxy for criminals or police or commoners caught in between, that’s on you and has nothing intrinsically to do with orcs.
In fact, let’s stop saying “orcs” because that just leads to tiresome “But maybe Tolkien was racist!” arguments when “orcs” is really just a generic stand-in for “non-human sentient critters” and even AD&D /D&D orcs don’t have anything much to do with Tolkien besides stealing a name*. But, sure, gnolls or kobolds or goblins or hobgoblins or norkers or bugbears or ogres or Yuan-Ti or jermlaine or jackalweres or meazels or minotaurs or Kuo-Toa or Frostmen or lizardfolk or wemics or a bajillion other options to use something with two legs, two arms and an aptitude for tool usage. If someone can’t noodle out how to use those without making it an oh no racist allegory, that’s on them and not a fault with D&D. If they decide to use one of those creatures as the stand-in for [real world class] in their campaign, that’s also their choice. Because none of those things actually exist and they’re all solely what you make of them.
*Myself, I always preferred the 1e pig-man orcs which always made me laugh when people would hand-wring about how orcs just had to be an evil racist African stereotype because Tolkien said they had black skin and mine looked like a bunch of Return of the Jedi Gamorrean Guards.
Yeah, but that was for actual “homes” versus the usual “bandit orcs in a cave” scenario and included noncombatant adults and there would still (“realistically”) be a bunch of chances to tell them to scram or something unless (a) the DM was just fucking with you or (b) the players enjoyed that sort of thing in which case they’d be doing it regardless. In the end, though, if you come across a hole full of babies, it’s 100% because the DM wanted you to come across a hole full of babies and reflects something beyond “Well, this chart says…”
I think WotC would be better off getting rid of the half-orc and just making the orc a playable race.
The orc is a playable race. You want a copy of Volo’s if you’re building an orc PC in 5e.
As both a player and DM, I have no issue with monstrous PCs, but give me a reason for why they’re adventuring. Munchkinry is not a valid reason.
You sound like a great DM.
So do you.
You’re very kind! I definitely am dealing with some mismatched expectations. For one player (my brother) the town politics is pure candy, and he wants to dive headfirst into righting the wrongs of all their imperial bullshit; the lawful neutral guard captain receives the worst of his contempt. For another player, she says very little in the game besides, “I poke it with my spear,” and that’s where she finds her joy in the game. Another player wants more canonical Greyhawk and is I think a little nonplussed by my lack of interest in the pantheon; a fourth player has highly specific character goals involving the missing artifacts of her people, only I can’t figure out how to incorporate that story, since all the hooks I throw at her get dropped, either through distraction or through their not being what she actually wants. For me, I enjoy most the grace notes of roleplaying; the Critical Role podcast has become my new favorite thing.
We can all come together in the big battle pieces, though :). And some day I really want to play with a group of folks who want to shoot the shit in character.
I think getting the right team helps a lot. My husband DMed for me and some of my girlfriends who were new to roleplaying. He decided to set it in the fantasy equivalent of Community - we are (were… before COVID) a party of newbs at a local remedial college with various 101 courses we could take with homework assignments in combat and magic. He even created a school newsletter and required us to fill out an essay application (which, in keeping with my stoner character, I completely plagiarized using great works of literature.) And so I think with this sort of whimsical take on the whole thing, when we encountered our first band of goblins, the instinct was not to kill them, but to see if we could get them to do our bidding (and we succeeded, by offering them unlimited rat tails/bat heads what have you.) They survived so many quests with us that we became rather attached.
I just love the way he thinks outside the box. And yes, it’s fun and funny, but he’s also done more serious campaigns where we had to perform significant feats of diplomacy and shape a city’s form of government. He also let me play as a flumph. So there was that.
I’m not exactly sure how to feel about this rule change because I’ve only played a couple of campaigns and I don’t think I have a full appreciation of how it would impact gameplay. But there is a lot to be said for thinking beyond the usual. Maybe it will open up opportunities that didn’t exist before (and is this really an example of wokeness? Did they explicitly say it was to address racial inequity? Or did they maybe just realize this way provides a more diverse range of characters from a pure gameplay perspective?)
Sort of. WOTC has been dealing with some fallout from racist art and other stuff. And there was an excellent e-book, linked in that article, called “Ancestry and Culture,” that provided an alternative rule-set (short version: you get your physical traits from your ancestry, and your other traits from your culture; so a dwarf growing up in a majority-elvish community might have advantage on saves vs. poison and proficiency with the longbow and longsword). WOTC, as far as I can tell, drew heavily on the ideas in that book.
lol some of us remember those days …even if we don’t play with first ed anymore ,