The Gaming Den

So in the generic TOME setting description of orcs, they're low a low INT nuisance that dwells in shitty unfarmable land, yet their populations swell somehow and they pour out until enough are killed to drive them back into the mountains.

In a world with high level Elvish wizards and human clerics why haven't all the orcs just been exterminated? How could orcs even threaten a PHB race's kingdom if they have high level casters on their side?

If the orcs did have high level clerics of their own, wouldnt a cleric that can challenge civilization's full casters also have the means to make their mountain dwellings a less shitty place to live in?

Well my guess with orcs is just that they're widespread, live in a variety of terrains and breed a lot. Given that they're one of hundreds of different monsters, they generally don't bother attacking them unless they're doing something that draws their attention.

Wiping out the orcs just isnt' a huge priority, and you're also likely to stumble upon something stronger by accident when you're doing so. Would your PC party constantly want to go on low-treasure orc slaying missions when they got high-level?

Orcs reproduce really fast, and reach sexual maturity quickly as well, making actually wiping them out really difficult. Orcs are a playable race and therefore have PCs but also an int penalty which makes public works projects difficult. Orcs are not a big enough threat to justify genocide, so unless your high elves are led by evil bastards they won't actually do that because they are already guilty of ethnic cleansing actually trying to kill all orcs would put their social policies on equal footing with Nazi Germany, not even hyperbole.

OgreBattle wrote:So in the generic TOME setting description of orcs, they're low a low INT nuisance that dwells in shitty unfarmable land, yet their populations swell somehow and they pour out until enough are killed to drive them back into the mountains.

And yet, post-Roman Empire to pre-Americas Europe was in much the same state. Low INT population that can't put together public works projects, has mostly shitty armies with a small collection of superbadasses that still manage to get their asses kicked, farming yields so low that they get worse results than pretty much any post-Tigris and Euphrates civilization that discovered literacy, and kept wallowing in the mud by their shitty god and shitty priests who stop them from reaching their full potential.

Wonder how that place didn't end up being completely cleansed and conquered.

I know it's a widely disliked idea, but there could be some merit in using WH40K's "sapient fungi that spore when fighting" thing to explain why orcs haven't been wiped out.

I don't know what WH40K says specifically but one could say that orcs are a pre-ancient psuedo-fungoid race which were seriously so widespread that there are pockets of dormant spores in subterranean caverns and such just waiting for blood or nearby violence to rapidly develop into full-grown orcs and pour out to raid the nearest settlement.

Or you can just say that their god is supporting them. I still suggest something similar to the fungal spore idea above for their actual physical origin, but it wouldn't be the first time "a god did it" was the answer.

I don't see why orcs need to have some kind of special explanation as to why they haven't been wiped out yet.

Pre-industrial genocide is very, very difficult. Your enemy needs to exist in a limited geographical location and the attackers need to be exceptionally organized themselves. If we're talking about a species that also could very likely number in the tens of millions like orcs instead of the mere millions like Cathars, this task is pretty much impossible even if we assume that orcs are pretty much just muscular humans with deep voices and green skin.

Orks (to refer to the Warhammer version) were genetically engineered to be soldiers, millions of years ago. The fungoid is a kind of symbiosis. Ork knowledge is largely genetic/instinctual--they're born knowing how to build their tech and speak their language. As a group of orks gets larger/more populous, ones with specialized roles show up--medics, shaman/psykers, mechanics, and the like.

If you kinda-adopted this for Tome, it'd make orcs a counterpoint to the origin of the elves. Same origin--bred by ancient powerful mages to be their servants--but it went with a lot of different desired attributes: Quick reproduction, physically powerful. Great horde creatures

I forgot to add this, but in the fungoid orc idea, I'd say that being a half orc is basically a fungal infection of a human. Hell, I might make it a template so that other races can be "infected" with orc spores.

edit: huh, apparently it's actually possible for a fetus to get a fungal infection so that would work pretty well, really.

People have a lot of problems on their plate with local manticores and shit. Riding off into the steppes to slaughter Uzbeks just isn't a high priority thing to do, even if failing to do that means that periodically there are invasions by Huns, Cumanians, Mongols, and other Central Asian nomads.

Consider a game of Crusader Kings 2: Europe is going to be attacked several times by various Central Asian tribes. Does the idea of declaring preventive war and marching on Turkestan every occur to you? Even if it could work, that would be a tremendous waste of resources compared to just expanding your holdings in France and waiting for the next Khan to blow over.

That's basically the Orcs. They have 15 year generations and large families. So every 60 to 75 years, there are enough of them to mount a serious offensive somewhere (and enough of them to need to find food and resources from somewhere other than the shitty lands they have been forced to live on). Then a lot of them get up and start invading (or migrating, whatever you want to call it). But there's no guaranty that they are going to go try to move into the same areas as last time - indeed they probably won't. Even at Elven lifespans, an Orc invasion probably only comes to their neighborhood once in a lifetime.

-Username17

If Dark Sun is any indicator, an entirely sufficient justification for not waging genocidal campaigns is to avoid acquiring painfully awkward nicknames.

Wemic Annihilator indeed.

Q: Why haven't orcs been exterminated or gotten better?
A: For the same reason the civilization of the "race of change" lives frozen in the same moment in time for millennia.

Well Orcs have a few advantages over other races as for their reason for not being wiped out.

1) They can breed with the usually predominant setting race, the humans. To Humans that makes them a lot more Us then Them. This is a big psychological thing for social creatures.

2) They are not alien. They eat, sleep, breathe and can understand humans. It makes more economic sense to try and trade or conquer or whatever then to wipe them out. Subjugating the orcs is a much more attractive option then wiping them out.

Seriously, with a human predominant setting, long term I would expect peace between humans and elves, humans and orcs; but war with the dwarves, gnomes and halflings.

It also explains the was of Orcs and Dwarves. They occupy the same location (mountains) but no breeding is possible. Its a racial thing, if you can't f*** it (and produce children) and they are competing for the same resources, you kill them / drive them away. Its not evil or immoral, just how things work.

Who says dwarves and orcs can't have children?

darkmaster wrote:Who says dwarves and orcs can't have children?

Dorks.

Well, yes, obviously they'd have a terribly embarrassing name, but that's why dwarves and orcs don't do it.

If the orcs have been raging maniacs for a length of time which is only infinite as far as oral history is concerned, perhaps the archmagi just haven't fixed things yet. Orcs who were living relatively peaceful lives in harmony with nature probably weren't on the elven archmagi's shitlist.

Doesn't apply in a setting where the orcs really are and always have been waging war on the elves of course.

I'd also wouldn't be surprised if most adventurer tier orcs capable of swinging major engagements often end up going native when they leave home in search of magical swag and women with positive charisma modifiers. It's easier and more justifiable to just drop a cloud kill on some marauding assholes if necessary than it is to scry and die a level 17 orc grapplemancer or CoDzilla that was minding his own business in Finality anyway.

Being similar in every edition, this question about "Why isn't X just killed off so it isn't a threat anymore?" is answered in 1st edition.

They exist in stasis in the gamebooks. Neither alive, nor dead, just available.

As a group and also a a DM the players decide what monsters exist and which don't. After a few fights the players are tired of seeing orcs, then the dying race was ended during the last battle with the players. Now build your world around that and what it means to everyone morally.

Still want orcs after a few times? Then keep using them.

Why are there still mosquitoes? Why is there still malaria? Even better, why do all of the various STDs still exist even though eliminating them is logically quite simple?

Because the world isn't that simple, and problems generally can't be solved so trivially.

Orcs are to fantasy worlds what herpes is to reality: unpleasant and difficult to get rid of.

In a world of High Level casters, wouldn't they be able to nuke the Orcs when they finally do get "big enough", and unite an assault? From there, Scry on the leaders, and telepot in to SoD those guys as well, and finally put up walls to corner the orcs, and proceed with artillery bombardment? All of this, that could probably be done in less than a day, by probably even less than a party of 4 spellcasters, so I see little reason NOT to just exterminate the problem once and for all. Wherever the Orcs would hide, I would think the Spellcasters can just find them, and kill them in all short order, without getting in the way of their other responsibilities, just a minor sidequest basically.

Otherwise, whole "high level dudes have better things to do" is an explanation I've done in my campaigns, so I can understand that. However most higher level NPC's that supposedly exist in Cities, aren't evidently constantly on quests, and probably care about their city, so be better off just solving a problem they do in an hour, that takes years for their peons.

Wouldn't high-level casters be able to destroy the world (or the planes, or the multiverse, or whatever) relatively easily?

D&D really isn't about reality. High-level D&D even less so.

FrankTrollman wrote:People have a lot of problems on their plate with local manticores and shit. Riding off into the steppes to slaughter Uzbeks just isn't a high priority thing to do, even if failing to do that means that periodically there are invasions by Huns, Cumanians, Mongols, and other Central Asian nomads.

Consider a game of Crusader Kings 2: Europe is going to be attacked several times by various Central Asian tribes. Does the idea of declaring preventive war and marching on Turkestan every occur to you? Even if it could work, that would be a tremendous waste of resources compared to just expanding your holdings in France and waiting for the next Khan to blow over.

-Username17

So what's the D&D equivalent of scheming jews?

Occluded Sun wrote:Wouldn't high-level casters be able to destroy the world (or the planes, or the multiverse, or whatever) relatively easily?

D&D really isn't about reality. High-level D&D even less so.

Hell, there's an entire thread on GiTP dedicated to that. Some could actually make good plots even!

OgreBattle wrote:

FrankTrollman wrote:People have a lot of problems on their plate with local manticores and shit. Riding off into the steppes to slaughter Uzbeks just isn't a high priority thing to do, even if failing to do that means that periodically there are invasions by Huns, Cumanians, Mongols, and other Central Asian nomads.

Consider a game of Crusader Kings 2: Europe is going to be attacked several times by various Central Asian tribes. Does the idea of declaring preventive war and marching on Turkestan every occur to you? Even if it could work, that would be a tremendous waste of resources compared to just expanding your holdings in France and waiting for the next Khan to blow over.

-Username17

So what's the D&D equivalent of scheming jews?

Oh, that's easy... it's go fuck yourself.

Aryxbez wrote:In a world of High Level casters, wouldn't they be able to nuke the Orcs when they finally do get "big enough", and unite an assault?

High Level Casters tend to want to see other characters gain levels. This may be their followers and cohorts, or this may be people that they care about for other reasons. At some point, even if you can do something, it is a better use of resources to allow someone who can gain XP to do so - and you can help them if necessary.

So, you let the orcs live; they raise an army, your underlings take care of it, and they gain a level. Your underlings are now more useful to you.

Aryxbez wrote: Otherwise, whole "high level dudes have better things to do" is an explanation I've done in my campaigns, so I can understand that. However most higher level NPC's that supposedly exist in Cities, aren't evidently constantly on quests, and probably care about their city, so be better off just solving a problem they do in an hour, that takes years for their peons.

There's certainly going to be some 'better things to do', but there's also going to be a certain amount of 'why do I care'? Maybe that's not the right expression... There's a certain amount of pragmatism that goes into International Affairs. If you have a kingdom next to you and you prepare a large army and they don't 'waste resources' in that way, they can advance in other ways (say, commerce) and actually pose a real threat to you. Dealing with the orc problem rewards them for choosing not to invest in a military - leaving the orcs creates a situation where they're forced to prepare to defend themselves (because why would the orcs attack your well-established army when the economically rich and militarily weak country is right next door? Unless you're not in any type of perceived competition, leaving these kinds of 'problems' helps maintain desired relationships...

It's also worth considering what happens when there are no external threats. Are we prepared to live in a world that has no challenges? Are we prepared to follow leaders when we have no need to continue to cooperate?