You Want Me to Think About How the Orc Feels Before I Kill Him? What Are You? A Pervert?

title unknown by Richard M. Powers

The other day I was reading reddit, as you do, when I ran across a thread that got my attention: Killing people is hard, but not in RPGs. The basic premise of the opening poster is that in life it's incredibly hard to kill people because reality is a complex bastard and that we should transpose this moral complexity over to our role-playing games and find a way to reflect that difficulty in how we play. 

This insistence on playing in a world of complex morality, where every decision should matter morally to me as a player has never appealed to me. Our real world is filled with that complexity and I deal with it every day so why should I deal with it in my game world too?

I don't and I won't. 

The real world that I live in is filled with moral complexity and I don't need to imagine what it feels like to deal with the fallout from terrible people doing terrible things and trying to keep my family safe with murderers, thieves, drug addicts, and criminals of all sorts living around me. I don't need to wonder how I would feel if I have to deal with rape survivors, the families of murder victims, or what it feels like to be robbed. I know all of those things too well and have no interest in replaying them in my games.

 

No, I would rather play in game worlds where things are morally simple. There are firm lines in what is good, and what is evil. We kill orcs because they would kill us, our families, and everyone we know or could ever hope to know. Why? Because they're evil. We don't worry about the moral repercussions of our actions because they're evil and fuck them. Role-playing games can be that simple, and for me they will be because I live with the complexity that some try to emulate every day. 

Orcs Are So Passe

Orcs are boring, passe, trite even. Don't believe me? Just look around online where there are a vast array of voices vying for your attention just so that they can tell you that Orcs aren't worth your time. "Listen, Buddy," they say with a condescending smile, "I'm sure that Orcs were just fine for your campaign back when you were just starting out; too new and dumb to know your asshole from a hole in the ground, and there's a certain nostalgia that keeps you coming back to them. But really, do you want to waste your time with something so lame?"

"Lame?," you say, "but I like Orcs. They're fun and I do this really cool thing with mine where I -"

"Oh I'm sure you think it's cool, but what you're doing is just retreading the same ground that all of us have walked on before. You're Orcs are boring and your insistence on using them in your games means that you're boring too."

There is a fundamental flaw in the logic behind this argument against the inclusion of Orcs due to their banality: everyone plays every Orc, class, and setting in a way that is uniquely their own. That's a central truth for role-playing games and it has been since the first time Dave Arneson looked at Chainmail and said, "That's nice, but I think I like doing it my way better." So when you're talking about how another person runs Orcs you're doing so from a position of ignorance. You don't actually know whether their Orcs are slobbering, thoughtless, monsters -  but do you know what you actually know really well? That your Orcs are boring as shit because you've made them that way.

Orcs don't have to be that way any more than does your Fighter have to be a dull hack and slash machine that never does anything more than give you an opportunity to roll a d20 and growl menacingly at the Dungeon Master. Make them Nazis walking about with a hard on for wiping out the gnomish race. Or better still have them be a bunch of beatniks pissed off at their parents and shooting heroin up their veins while writing protest poems against the Man and rioting at concerts. Hell, make 'em samurai warriors with codes of honor and bad hair! 

What you're doing with your orcs is uniquely your own thing just as what I'm doing with mine is my own. Don't get hung up on what boring people are telling you about how they haven't enough imagination do anything fun with them. You're better than that. 

So, what are your orcs like?