How's this for playing with the party's morals? Have the party run into a group of neutral -aligned orcs who are outcasts from their society. Works best with a party that has a "slay first, ask questions later" attitude, or where one character in the party has orcs as a racial enemy, but at least one *other* character is neutral good. You need to be quite careful about dropping *really* subtle hints the first time the party encounters them.

A trigger-happy party can find themselves basically murdering an orc that is not hostile to them and then having to account for their actions. Can be an interesting way of turning the tables on a too-clever-by-half party. Have the orc "shaman" actually be a priest of a neutral or good deity that has previously favoured the players.... You get the idea.

I believe that auks sometimes pretend to be penguins

Hahaha, oh diplomat61... too clever by half...

But orcs in tuxedoes, now, there's an idea!

Whats your campaign like so far for some serious advice? What edition?

2nd edition AD&D. The party is around 4th level, very clever, quite well equipped and powerful. They tend towards evil, greed, and mercilessness, and I'm not really interested in playing with moral dilemmas this time out (their moral dilemmas have been settled on the point of a sword, typically).

Mostly I'm looking for ways to rough up the party or present them with unexpected tactics from otherwise cheap humanoids. There will be bigger, nastier things served alongside the orcs, but I'm looking for ideas on how to make the cannon fodder into something to be feared.

Dragon #239 had an article titled "Dirty Orc Tricks" that seemed spectacular when I was a kid, but re-reading it now it's a little uninspired. http://annarchive.com/files/Drmg239.pdf

Ohh, read this http://www.tuckerskobolds.com/

Hahaha, that's pretty great. Kind of gives me some ideas, too... hmm... thanks!

No problem. Check out Reddit DND for some fun stories others have posted, always a great way to get inspiration.

It is always demoralizing to fight something you love. How about you have cats or dogs, or some adorable creature attack them? I don't know much about AD&D but I recall hearing some stories about a cat almost killing a low level in some edition or another.

r/getrektgold

What is that from?

How about a storied group of undying orcs that once performed acts so great that the orc god blessed/cursed them to come to life one hour after being slain in any battle. Typical fixes for this problem (burning/acid) do nothing to solve it. No matter what, they come back. Each time they are slain, they learn from the adventurers tactics and do better on each successive encounter as they hunt the party down again and again. This gives a chance for the characters to get to know each orcs odd personality. The orcs might even show scars from the previous encounter.

Going off of that, what about a single Orc that attacks them, it is very weak, each time they kill it, it copies itself (perhaps a curse). The copies all die eventually, but each can copy itself. The party has to decide to let this one orc live before it becomes too much to take on.

Have you ever read Dragon Mountain? It was a 2nd Edition box set that was a "mega" adventure (3 books). High level PCs have to find a dimension jumping Dragon Hoard in an old Dwarf stronghold. The catch? Scores of Kobalds guarding the Dragon and her hoard using intelligence, tactics, their home environment, and numbers against the PCs.

My favorite is the hollow falling block. Have a trap that triggers a large (8'x8' at least) stone block to fall from above the torches of the party. It lands on a PC appearing to squish them (flying entrails from the bottom and everything). Ends up that the block is hollow and set with bags of animal parts around the bottom edge. When the party is finished lamenting that they can't harvest their fallen comrades gear they move on.

Later the Kobalds come buy and subdue the PC, take their gear, and hold them hostage. Lovely.
Obviously you can have Orcs use this but you may need to include a superior intellect (unusual Orc or just a smarter creature) to plausibly pass off such a clever trap for Orcs.

Depending how good the party's thief is you can lure them through a trap full dungeon with a few secret passages. The secret passages allow the orcs to avoid trap areas and come in behind the party while they are dealing with the traps.

Wow, that hollow block trap is amazing.

I also really like the idea of enemies that keep coming back to life, more for torment and hilarity than challenge and deadliness perhaps but it's a funny idea.

And here I was thinking it was a pretty good gambit to have orcs wear dresses and powder their faces.

Have you heard of the difference between role playing and roll playing?

I have. Why?

" Have you heard of the difference between role playing and roll playing? "

That's what all the Vampire: The Masquerade players were always asking back in the day.

Indeed.

Alexis Smolensk - http://tao-dnd.blogspot.ca/ - makes an argument, either in one of his blog posts or in one of his books (I apologize that I can't remember where), that roleplaying occurs naturally in all games. His example is of a player in Risk who has one army left standing in some province that keeps defeating a huge horde invading it. The player starts referring to that one army as "Green Berets" or gives it some other elite status because of the result of the rolls. Sort of like how D&D grew out of Chainmail, which was a wargame of nameless combatants that grew into the highly detailed game we know today. Roleplaying is just the outgrowth of rolling dice and playing a game... just like how Diplomacy players sometimes take on the persona of their country.

I know there's a bunch of storytelling RPGs out there, but I think D&D is really built for killing people and stealing their stuff. The roleplaying is the result, not the means.

Yes, but the experience is not as much fun; if you are playing the role of a person who is trying to get the most out of a mechanical system, you are better off with a computer than ahuman GM, imho.

Speaking of world of darkness/Vampire the masquerade, CCP (the people who make eve online) just sold it to Paradox (the people who make Europa Universalis and Hearts of Iron) - which may result in something interesting... (CCP having spent a long time developing a Vampire MMO and then not releasing it...)

And don't get me wrong, I like D&D, it is that reason that i think Baldur's Gate 2 is one of the best games out there.

Think of it as the difference between gunboat and diplomacy. Totally different quality to these games. Baldur's gate has a great tactical combat simulator (based on AD&D 2nd ed) and a great story; all handled by a computer. I don't need 5 other people to run a party in the combat simulator...

I've been playing a lot of D&D the past few weeks (that and Ham is actually why I haven't made any videos recently : /) and I like it because it provides such a nice framework with which you can make any type of game you want with minor modifications. If you want a combat-heavy campaign, the rules are all there and you can add things to make the combat more intricate. Similarly, if you want to do serious RP, there is enough built in to make cities, religions, an economy, etc. Of course, you can switch back and forth quite easy depending on people's mood that day, which is a big advantage over a video game.

You can also adjust the campaign for people's play style within the same campaign. When I DM, I quite often have a range of players, some of whom love to do pure role playing and some who want only to focus on the mechanics of the game. I also have a range of people who know the rules inside-out and those who need to be reminded every time that a d20 is used for checks. It's quite easy to accommodate these differences within one campaign, so everyone gets to play the game they want.

That's a great point, @abgemacht. I think that's what I like about D&D, the versatility.

Our campaign is coming off several sessions of "town stuff" - lots of roleplaying, with a dash of an assassination contract - and now it's ramping up to what will likely be many hours of hexcrawling through orc territory, hunting for an artifact rumoured to be held by a shamaness leader - basically, lots of hack'n'slash. And before the town stuff, it was several sessions of gladiatorial fights... and before that, an extended chase scene in a wagon over the hills... and so on.

The ability to change pace, for stories to result from PCs doing hilarious/dumb/amazing things, the ability of the DM to ratchet up the tension a little bit here and there where necessary... that's what makes it the game it is. It's like a box of chocolates, I guess... you never know what you're going to get.

Anyhoo, my list of dirty tricks has grown considerably long, but I'll have to wait until later to post them... one of my players is a webdipper and prone to dirty tricks of his own...

If the party is evil, what is their motivation for fighting the orcs at all?

Gold, magic items, and experience points.

Also rumours of a character-background-related artifact.

I'm of the school of thought where the DM throws out as many potential adventure hooks as possible and sees what the party does... along with lots of regions to explore, NPCs/organizations to interact with, mysteries to investigate, etc. I have no agenda, no grand plot arc, etc. I figure my players can read a book if they want a good story.

Fair enough. Personally (having DMed a lot of AD&D myself over the years) I find the concept of allowing majority evil parties problematic. AD&D is a storytelling game. If the story is "Once upon a time there was a group of well-armed assholes who set out to become rich and powerful because they were selfish", well, I don't think that's a very good story.

I hope, at the very least, you have the forces of law and/or good on their heels the whole time, making them constantly need to look over their shoulders, etc.

Otherwise, what's the point?

I definitely understand that feeling... but I don't like to level restrictions on the party's choices. It's too easy for me to destroy or damage them by any number of other means. Like you say, powers of goodness chasing after them, let alone their greed leading to finding themselves beneath the feet of a hill giant or two (or on the naughty list of an evil lich or whatever)... or simply suffering at the hands of fifty orcs, or fifty guardsmen.

Choices always have consequences, that's what's essential. If my "bad guys" are really the "good guys," it's essentially the same thing from my perspective (only typically it is much more dangerous for the players to be evil because they alienate themselves from the pretty useful/essential "supply depots" of castles, towns, etc.; and the "good guys," who have a whole powerful society behind them, are probably higher level enemies!).

Also in my world the "good guys" - the leaders of big powerful societies - are most likely evil anyway. Ha. Good guys finish last and all that.

From dirty orc tricks to profound philosophy...

Versatility, smersatility...

No abge does have a valid point; i wasn't giving out about your play style, i was bemoaning that lack of imagination it takes to run a dungeon crawl...

The style explicitally encouraged by 'Dungeon and Dragons' - because it is something i do not enjoy - having come from playing Vampire the Masquerade originally, and a style where the party backstabs one an other ( though an 'evil' party in D&D probably has reasons not to trust each other too, right? )

Whether poser corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely, is an interesting question, far more interedting than 'how do we make these orcs more interesting to crush', imho.

If i always fight to increase my own power, so i can use it for 'good' but have to protect it first otherwise i can't do any good - and in protecting my power i do evil; the power has corrupted me.

However if i have absolute power, then i no longer need to protect it, my power has become beyond needing protection (it has arguably gone beyond nature) Absolute power seems like it should be complete and no matter how much of it you give out, there is always more...

That does make an interesting story arc to explore.

In one campaign a good party was fighting their way through a lawful good mountain dwarf cave system. A game watcher asked the cleric if the dwarves were evil and got the reply, "Evil, of course they are evil. They are keeping us from their treasure."

The next session they got a severe smack down from the game master to teach them about alignment infractions and the definition of evil. Which is why I usually ran neutral and evil characters.

It is forty years or so since I first played D&D, using the original rules (three slim booklets in an box). These provided a framework for the imagination of the DM to create challenges for the players to overcome in whatever ways they could think of. Whether a character was good, or evil, depended entirely on the player and did not really matter; solving the puzzles was the aim. It seems to me that subsequent editions of the rules introduced more structure (prescribing behaviour, specifying monsters) which required less imagination from the DM and players. Why specify that a character is good or evil? let the player decide and demonstrate it through his/her actions. Alignment infractions, WTF?

Going back to my original pun, throw the group a curve-ball by describing a bunch of auks flying towards them. See how long it takes them to realise they are dealing with birds rather than humanoid monsters.

@ diplomat: I dislike that sort of "trick", because it destroys the concept of the game as a simulation. Yes it's a simulation of a world in which magic exists and gods are real, but still its basic physics model should be the same as in our world, otherwise nothing would make sense. In the game world, Bob the fighter, presuming he isn't blind, can tell the difference between a humanoid creature and a large bird.

Although, bearing your trick in mind, you may enjoy this comic:

http://www.kodtweb.com/2011/05/20/lair-of-the-gazebo-3/

Fair comment Jamie

(It's fun to do it for a moment - wait for them to get the wrong idea, and then correct them)

My favourite "players only half-listening" moment was when I was setting the scene as the party pursued two wounded ogres through dense forest. I got to the point where "the trail ends" and then started to sketch out a map. One of my players, who'd been getting itchy during the last hour of tracking, started speaking before he looked at the sketch:

"Excellent, we've got them cornered! They're...... oh..... they're in that enormous fortress..."

There was an SPI war-game called CityFight that used a hidden movement system. Players had to declare where they were looking, when we first played it was easy to forget to check the obvious places, which I exploited by marching a squad across a playing field. Unfortunately my opponent realised his error at the last moment and the squad was toast.

Have an overwhelming force of orcs, possibly with bugbear and ogre leaders, invite the PCs to join them on a quest, then have the orcs slaughter them in the thick of battle.

"One is from an ancient druidic culture dedicated to preserving the world from nameless horrors. The other is a roving marauder looking for a fight."

- the question in Ebron is, which is which? http://i605.photobucket.com/albums/tt139/Dusk_eclipse/OrcvsElfEberron.jpg

I like the idea that Orcs (as portrayed by Tolkien) are actually just a misunderstood tribal culture, which is portrayed as evil - because that is what winners do; the Orcs Tolkien wrote lost; and as a result they must be bad.

Portray them as chaotic/lawful as you prefer, but give them culture, let their children cry when the party murders the parents.

Maybe even have some 'Evil' Orcs approach the party and ask them to go and murder some 'good' Orc tribe, in exchange for gold or some such. The players can choose between the clearly evil Orcs offering them gold, or the good/neutral Orc tribe - who may have had lies told about them but are basically living the best lives they can... And totally worship their own good gods.

They might even find evidence that these 'good' Orcs were trading with neighbouring Dwarfs/human/insert_race_here. Who will be a little miffed to find their trading partners have been massacred. AND might hire the party to figure out who dun it.

Orcs hire parties and the parties don't kill the orcs?

Yeah, because gold! Maybe they also kill these ocrs afterwards, or maybe that is also an evil party of Orcs capable of killing the party... Maybe the party tries and is besten bloody and not killed just captured and tortured before being offered a deal.

Maybe attacking the party of Orcs will teach the players a lesson that you can't best everything with swords and sorcery. And maybe anyone who does manage to escape will have their tongue ripped out and meet a flayed man...