A bit of half-orc nostalgia

"I've been a half-orc almost as long as I can remember."

-Janara

I started playing D&D during the reign of 2nd edition, and of course there were no half-orcs in 2nd edition, not even in the Monstrous Manual as I recall it. So I had to bide my time playing halfling thieves and human barbarian fighters and yes..even an elf wizard. It's all true. I have the dog-eared character sheets to prove it.

Of course 3e came along and with it came my favored race. I mean, what's not to like about being a half-orc. You get a minus to your INT and CHA scores right away.... okay fine.. so maybe that's a bad example..but you get Darkvision, right? Oh..wait...so do all the other non-human humanoids..but hey, you get Orc Blood. But wait..that's not a good thing either. Wow, being a half-orc kinda sucks...except for the STR bonus. Now that I put it down in those terms, I wonder why all those disenfranchised half-orc players got so vocal when they had to wait a few extra months for their 4e 2nd Player Guide to come along so they could get their game back on. Being a Dragonborn ought to be so much cooler, right?

So..let's have a look at a 4e half-orc, shall we?

I've been following a PbP 4e game on the Reaper forum because 1) I don't want to be counted among the OSR pundits who hate the game but have never really played or even watched it being played and 2) the DM and players are all excellent roleplayers and writers and it should be an entertaining story to read.

I personally don't own any 4e books, but might download the quickstart to get a better perspective on what's going on in the PbP. Anyway, here's the character stats for Kaanite the 1st Level Half Orc Two-Weapon-Fightin' Ranger who just so happened to have once been a cat burglar.

FINAL ABILITY SCORES
Str 20, Con 14, Dex 19, Int 14, Wis 17, Cha 13.

STARTING ABILITY SCORES
Str 18, Con 14, Dex 17, Int 14, Wis 17, Cha 13.

Huh? None of his scores even went down...and he gained DEX...and he has 31 HP starting out?!

And get a look at this!

TRAINED SKILLS
Dungeoneering +8, Acrobatics +9, Perception +8, Athletics +11, Stealth +9, Thievery +10 (+12 w/ Thieves tools)

Acrobatics and Stealth? NO WAY! This guy's TOTALLY UBER! And I say that with the utmost respect for the player (Hi there, Orcsoul) and with no disrespect toward the game. If it works for you and it makes you happy, then go play.

WHIIIIICH brings me slowly round to the point that I alluded to earlier. Early in this blog's archives, somebody corrected me on my assumption that there were no half-orcs before 3e. I had always assumed that it was the not the way of any reasonable game company to giveth and then to taketh away.

Once I joined the old-school, I really had no good reason to look through the AD&D Players Handbook. I was content to play my homebrew-hafforc and call it good, but curiosity got the best of me and I decided to have a look at a 1st edition half-orc for nostalgia's sake. I've made a few observations.

It's a man's world

And by "man" I mean huMAN. Every other race (including half-orcs) has a glass-ceiling in the form of level limits. These limits are based on class of course, but even among the non-human-humanoids, half-orcs get the shaft. A half-orc Cleric can only advance to 4th level...a Thief only to 8th..provided his/her DEX isn't less than 17, in which case he'll get stuck at 6th. The only class that favors half-orcs, the Fighter, limits them to 10th..which is higher than fighters of other races...except humans, of course. THEY can do ANYTHING...pth.

And it's a MAN'S world

By "man" I mean hi-honey-I'm-home-what's-for-dinner-I-wear-the-pants-in-this-household....that kind of man. On the Race Ability Score Minimums/Maximums, it was for some reason necessary to break those scores out by male and female. As you might have guessed, humans are excluded from this table because...well..they're human. They don't have limitations. Also you probably guessed it... almost all women are weaker....by an average of 1.6 points of STR below their male counterparts. I suppose as a self-liberated woman, I should at least be thankful that the gender difference is limited to STR. Even Gygax "knew better than to go there." Interestingly enough, the only race to NOT have weaker women-folk was the half-orcs. Yep, it kinda makes a girl proud. :D

It ain't no world for a half-orc girl, that's for sure

Half-Orcs:
Orcs are fecund and create many cross-breeds, most of the offspring of
such being typically orcish. However, some one-tenth of orc-human
mongrels ore sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human. Complete details
of orcs and crossbreeds will be found under the heading Orc in
ADVANCED DUNGEONS L DRAGONS, MONSTER MANUAL.
As it is assumed that player characters which are of half-orc race are
within the superior lo%, they have certain advantages

The description for Half-Elves is nothing like this. I mean, far be it from me to play a race-card, but this particular description about percentages and racial purity sound a lot less like the world of Tolkien and a bit more like the world of Alabama in the 1920s. Yeah I know it's only a game..a fantasy game at that, but in my opinion, D&D has certainly evolved in the right direction as far as sensitivity to race and gender are concerned.

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So, now I have actually defended 4e and then spoke disparagingly of 1e. I can almost imagine the angry mob gathering outside now with their torches and pitchforks and descending ACs to roast me on a spit.

On the other hand, I've had fun looking at a bit of D&D history.

It starts on the playground

I was just reading this article about character origin and the sexes over at Trollsmyth's blog, and was happy to see an entirely new line of thinking on this old and sometimes overdone subject.

The gist of the article is that female roleplayers tend to craft their characters with much more details concerning their relations, home, how they miss home and are seeking a new one, etc. Whereas male players tend to stick with the here-and-now and leave the family tree either minimally filled in, or completely up to the imagination (however sinister) of the gamemaster.

Trollsmyth's theory is that what we all read has much to do with the sorts of characters we play, and his point is quite valid. Ever seen a guy reading a book with a picture of Fabio on the cover? And have you ever met a girl who read Lord Of The Rings who did not want more Aragorn and Arwen and much less Boromir or Gimli?

But I'm going to pile another two cents onto Trollsmyth's thesis and say it starts much earlier. In fact, it begins at playtime.

Boys like to play action games. They play cops-and-robbers, cowboys-and-indians and an entire host of games that involve seeking and destroying monsters. Boys' games usually start out with the choosing of teams. "You be the Sherrif's guys and we'll be the Merry Men" or "Pretend the wood-shed is the O-K Corral and these sticks can be guns." There may be some bickering over who gets to be Robin Hood or Wyatt Earp, but beyond that, nobody cares about why anybody's character feels a certain way toward anybody else or which one had the worst childhood.

Girls do it differently..belive me. "Let's play house." sounds innocent enough, but in the spirit of post-2nd-edition D&D, character generation can take hours and cause much pain and suffering. "Ooooh I wanna be the big sister so we can pretend she has a car and is bossy and has a boyfriend and never does what mommy tells her to do...and you can be the rich Auntie who takes us all to Disneyland.... and somebody else can be the grandmother that's really a bad witch." But of course everybody argues over who gets to be the baby so they can be Mommy's favourite. And naturally, nobody ever says "Let's pretend we're doing our chores after school.". It's much more fun when the plot involves a huge wedding, twins being born, or the discovery that the middle-sister is really adopted and that her real parents are the King and Queen of Spain.

Yeah, it's not a perfect universal truth, and in spite of thinking of myself as the tomboy who liked to upset the applecart by enticing the boys into plotting a pirate raid or vampire invasion of the girl's playhouse because I was bored with being the spinster housekeeper.... I have been guilty of creating a few "shippy" characters in my roleplaying career. ('Shippy' - (adj) - abbreviated form of 'overloaded with sissy-girly relationship-centered rubbish)

Yes, even a half-orc with no recollection of her mother or father at all can fall into this category. She may be motivated to the adventuring life because she is out to prove something to the people who picked on her as a child..or she has become obsessed with finding her birth-mother..or she is embarking on an ambitious quest to outshine the fair-haired human sorceress in the party who she is convinced has caught the eye of the male half-orc NPC.

Yeah..it's true.. all of it..and I suppose I should be ashamed. But the truth is that the game never suffered for it, and it gave the GM something to do..and like our GM says, "One sure way to keep a character alive is to keep the dungeonmaster entertained."

Skeleton of a muse in my closet

Several years ago, Garish and I were working on a rather large HirstArts dungeon layout, and after weeks of casting plaster, gluing and painting, we assembled our wee dungeon in the livingroom floor.

Of course we wanted to try it out and see how it looked with a few miniatures in, and that is when my X chromosome took over. Next thing you know, the dungeon-o-horrors had become Barbie's Dreamhouse. I went and got his iconic wizard character mini and my favourite half-orc and decided to have some fun with the camera and Photoshop.



Oddly enough, it would be another two years before Garish and Janara would actually participate in the same RPG together..and as it often seems to go with half-orc girls, she and Garish ended up "best friends" and nothing more.

Still....it's fun to pretend.

And now...the long-awaited point.

It's no real surprise that there are not that many girls hanging around the game shop. Most games involve math and logic and a high degree of male macho conquest mentality. Girls just generally don't go for that. It's just our nature. We prefer more freeform creative touchy-feely empathic illogical mushy girly things such as Nano-pets, Barbie dolls, scrapbooking and reality television shows.

WHICH IS PRECISELY why roleplaying should have been targeted more toward girls from the start. It's nothing but pretending..making art imitate life, getting into another person's head, and I'll even go so far as to say it's about drama, even at the risk of you, the Reader, throwing a brick at my head. We as a gender are hard-wired for that sort of thing, but most of us cease to indulge it as soon as we think we are too cool to play with dolls or our toy kitchens. It appears that somebody at TSR or WoTC later figured this out and so the later core rules of D&D are filled with examples which involve female characters and their players (which in most but not all cases are also female..but that's another rant altogether).

But of course there is that perception out there that a girl in the game group automatically means that at least one of the guys in the adventuring party will "get some action" or at the very least there will be some soap-opera interaction. Again, it's just one of those human-nature things that has to be either overcame or embraced. I suppose it all really depends on what sort of game group you are in and whether or not your spouse or your friend's spouse is a jealous person with homicidal tendancies.

It would seem, however, that having a half-orcish physique generally stems the tide of unwelcomed advances from males on game-night. Having a character who happens to be half-orcish helps in that regard too.

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The comic strip, by the way, was the genesis of a long series of comics I made about miniatures in general and orcs specifically. The series was called 28mm Theatre. I may be uploading a few of the more relevant ones to Flickr soon, and now that I am gaming again, am feeling compelled to start the comic back up.