Orc's, Orks, and other green skinned folk

[SA]

However, if they're not inherently evil, and one orc gets hacked and/or slashed for what some other orc did, that's racist.

Agreed.

In this respect orcs make intriguing "acceptable targets". I'll never GM a game in the Antebellum American South, because my forebears were plantation slaves and that subject really doesn't sit well with me, but if my players wanted to play the human slavemasters of subjugated orcs (or the orcs themselves) I'd jump all over it. We aren't discussing the experience of African chattel slaves (again, a false equivalence), but we can explore the psychology of the slaver and the slave, the abuser and the abused. Sometimes my players want to play cruel, amoral, selfish characters and sometimes they even want such inhumanity to have consequence. Fantasy is how we make this happen.

It's like Luminous' Daft Mermaids. Using the mermaids as stand-ins for human women would be cheap strawmanning (womanning?), but that fiction could legitimately discuss human male identity. The world described is a world without women, containing only their caricatured perversions. What, then, becomes of their counterparts?

Regardless of what Tolkien's actual intent may have been, you can't pretend like a mongrel race of dark-skinned degenerate cannibals with broad noses and slanted eyes threatening to destroy Nordic-inspired civilization (alongside several even more overtly Orientalist villains) isn't incredibly insensitive at the very least, particularly because that particular trope wasn't as central theme in fantasy writing at the time.

No need to pretend. I for one don't think it's insensitive at all. The "more overtly Orientalist villains", being explicitly human, are another matter...

[Velox]

To address again the preachy and condescending tone I fear might be present in my previous post, let me say it's also true that I have trouble envisioning a world where orcs wouldn't struggle with racism. As a resident and worker of the south-side of Chicago, racism is something I encounter and fight against on a near-daily basis. When something is part of a daily struggle for you and your social group, excluding it from the shared narrative is more disconcerting than including it.

I can respect a gamer and their game if it's run in another fashion.

[Humabout]

I think I already chimed in here, but I'll do it again just in case.  I generally dislike nonhuman humanoids in my serious settings.  They tend toward one of two extremes in most every setting I've read: straw man caricatures of irl cultures and peoples or thinly veiled mashups of the former in an attempt to not be caricatures.  I find both irritating.  Also, keeping everyone human let's a mature group actually address social issues if they choose.

In any non serious gaming (like beer and pretzels dungeon crawling), lots of sapient fantasy species embodying different cultures is the norm.  And within that norm, green skins exist to be aggressive living sources of loot and experience, so slay them without mercy and take their stuff.  This is a world where murdur hobos are considered great men, so screw sensitivity.  Go kill some greens and take their stuff.  You want justification aside from "they have stuff," then, yes, they are evil and bad and gross and want to eat your babies.

That's my approach. Ymmv.

[sparkletwist]

The only way I've seen nonhuman humanoids actually work in a way that resonates with me is to have them there pretty much for the sake of variety. Generally speaking, they essentially are human, they just look different. Any inherent biological variations are modest and within one human standard deviation or so. Culturally, they merge with humans in cosmopolitan nations, and even isolationist countries consisting solely of them have a wide variety of different cultures.

This isn't 100% "realistic," as it's more of the "rubber forehead aliens" approach, and I probably wouldn't do it if I was trying for hard sci-fi or whatever. However, for doing more traditional fantasy without falling back on race-cultures or other really trite (and possibly offensive) tropes, it works pretty well. I'll probably do this if I decide to incorporate Synapsids (my lizard-people from First Age) into Asura, as well; the kind of zany grab-bag feel of Asura would also work well with this approach.

[Ghostman]

I have trouble envisioning a world where orcs wouldn't struggle with racism.

Orcs in Lord of the Rings don't seem to be struggling. They probably couldn't care less what humans elves and dwarves think about them; it's not like they need to. After all, they're about to break the back of mankind and usher in the era of orcs!

I find it interesting that people seem so quick to cast orcs in the role of the oppressed minority, when to me, they seem to be far better fit as the oppressive majority. If they weren't so inclined to consume their foes as food, classical RPG orcs would be pretty easy to portray as discriminating, slave-taking colonizers striving to subjugate and exploit other races they've deemed their inferiors.

[Velox]

Orcs in Lord of the Rings don't seem to be struggling. They probably couldn't care less what humans elves and dwarves think about them; it's not like they need to...I find it interesting that people seem so quick to cast orcs in the role of the oppressed minority, when to me, they seem to be far better fit as the oppressive majority.

That's a good point, and also makes for a good setting or story. The orcs in LotR are employed by Sauron as thieves and murderers, and ostensibly they find that employment to be to their liking (although I am reminded of the scene in the cartoon where Sauron's orcs and Sauron's humans crossed paths and fought for supremacy - was that in the books? Because that's the same shit I'm talking about).

I suppose the setting I envision, wherein orcs are part of an oppressed minority, the real caricature is the racist human jerk. I just assume that there will always be a kind of human who finds differences in other sentient peers as a reason to treat them like crap. That's definitely not the best or only way to portray humanity; it's just what I usually do and what you see in games like Shadowrun.

In any case, this thread has been severely derailed; maybe it should be split into another thread about racism and non-human races in RPGs? Maybe even three threads: one about Orcs/Greenskins, another about Racism in RPGs, and another about whether or not to use non-humans in an RPG at all (because that comes up often). Is thread splitting something we do in the CBG?

[Tzi]

Back when I GMed regularly, I seldom used orcs, because they were too much like humans.  On a mechanical level, there's little they can do that humans can't (at least in D&D, you've got darkvision and... darkvision), and on a thematic level, there's nothing I ever needed orcs for that I couldn't accomplish with cruel, malicious, or simply servile humans.

I've adapted them to some extent or plan to. I have a world that lacks humans so there is space for them but I'm unsure of how to have the work.

My iteration of them might be simply a misunderstanding. All races have some common origin, Thus the "Tyr Elves," and "Orcs" might be related however distantly. The Orc's form the most diverse and numerous race having survived on the world during a period when the world was rendered nearly uninhabitable and throughout the chaotic process of terraforming and rebirth. It is plausible these being's the Tyr Elves call Orc, are in fact Humans who have withstood the obstacles and have taken on a more feral appearance having to adapt to difficult circumstances.

However they are a race somewhat on the retreat as the Tyr Elves have outmatched them in terms of technology and Psionic powers. However the Orc's are endlessly resilient and breed rapidly. Culturally they are as diverse as humans, meaning some have built cities states akin to Sumer, others live in simple tribes and clans, some have forged empires and others have begun to uncover ancient devices and relics to give them an edge as most of the Tyr Elves regard them as a mere nuisance or obstacle to their colonization and rule of the reborn world their ancestors the Sylvan Elves promised them.