This OSR V Orc Thing Is Dumb

The picture appeared on my thread with the statement, " This clearly presents a problem...Have your players ever stumbled upon orcish women and children? I have mixed feelings about it. I really don't want orcs to be sympathetic in any way. I want the players to feel like they can slaughter them in the thousands and not feel bad about it." While it's a nice piece of art and a naturalistic style of depicting a green-skinned humanoid who is so evil that toting around twenty pounds of skulls while lugging her kids around, it does evoke some empathy in most viewers. We all dig skulls and like to look at big breasts, right? Luckily she's still lugging along the ankle-biters reminding us how vile ork-kind can be. I mean I can almost hear the hiding wizard conjuring a cloud of poison gas to cleanse the world of this marketplace in some sunny and warm, far off location.

Apologies to the artist of this picture, it wasn't attributed.

I am not going to once again go into how this sort of deeper fantasy has been around since about two minutes after LotR was first released.  The guy promotes what he calls "OD&D" which I assume means "Original D&D" where in the games, and OSR which is where I expect this level of question to come from. I sat through plenty of sessions where DMs wouldn't allow the PCs any sense of heroism let alone any foe to have anything interesting about them besides number-crunching. It's that once again, a self-appointed aficionado of roleplaying with the letters "O","S", and "R" attached to their name is telling the rest of us that there is a problem with other people's imagination.

Look if someone else has a take on fantasy that you're uncomfortable with, I suggest that you do some soul searching and figure out why it makes you uncomfortable. The rest of us have already answered the question what it is that we like about rpg sessions and fantastic literature. Sometimes we're into what being another species is like when humans aren't cleaving them from helmet to cod piece.