It's not that the Orks are too silly, it's that the other armies aren't silly enough.

Action_Carl said:

I'll agree with tha... Wait... What?

Have you seen the "anime-esque" stylings of the Tau Armies? Their incompetence at close-combat? Their bird-like genetic abominations? Their mind-controlled bee hives? That's pretty silly stuff right there... But God Emperor save you if they have you at range.

Eldar Harlequins? Well, okay, the Harlequins are more akin to the scary versions of the Joker, and not so much silly ha ha.

-=Brother Praetus=-

" The guardsmen climbed the hill and used they're viewscope to look down on the orkish positions. Orks are big and dumb, they had been told. Orks equipment fail three fourths of the time they had been told. Orks have no tactics and Imperial weapons go right through them they have been told.
Frigg that Uplifting primer cause its full of lies.

The orks had come in the dusk, only the gleam of read eyes and the gutteral warscream in the middle of the outpost camp was a warning of the attack. Huge axes and chainswords ripped their friends in half effortlessly, and the heavy caliber guns devestated the flakvest as if it was made of cardboard. Mollander had charged them with his chainsword, the captain had never been a smart one. The ork leader had just grabbed his arm and lifted him up as a ragdoll before he even could swing the sword at him, his arms and legs fell of like it was a ragdolls to... And then the orks was gone, only the embers of the cigar in the ork leaders mouth could be seen in the dark, and then that one was gone to...

And now here they where, looking down on the ork position as the commander had told them to, and they felt real terror, it was a huge green horde, like a moving carpet of enemies moving through the ruins of the city, it was monstrous to even think to fight it, one could only flee this great green waaagh!"

The view of the average guardsman who have fought the orks...

KjetilKverndokken said:

Beautiful. Really.

To some extent I like the the "childishness" of the orks, imagine a 7 ft tall psychotic and slightly demented 9 year old that weights 500+ pounds and is made of raw muscle, has a feral cunning and would like nothing better than to rip you apart.

I played the ork in the adventure on this last weekend. Overall I think they did a good job with it, but in the end I don't think it's my cup of tea. They didn't allow me to keep the character though, so any specifics would be hard to say and they could change anything. The one I played was really only good at melee, but that was only how he was made.

People who like orks will like the orks in into the storm.

The Laughing God said:

In fact they have not always been portrayed in this way.

The original Rogue Trader (1987) does not have any of this stuff in it. In this, the original W40k, Orks are cruel and evil, fuelled by bloodlust and hate. They are plain nasty. Orks were that way for a while but like a lot of GW products the need to constantly publish new rules to sell more copies of White Dwarf corrupted the game. Squigs and silly language began to take over.

This was then codified in subsequent products (and WFB) as GW deliberately tried to appeal to a younger audience. Pokemon showed GW how unwise this was. Suddenly many of their young clientele were spending pocket money on something else. Their older fans had long deserted them.

My Orks are W40k Rogue Trader Orks. Cruel, cunning and consumed by hatred and violence. Oh, and they can shoot straight. That was anothing thing Orks used to do. They don't say dis and dat. They don't use Choppas or paint cars red to make them go faster.

There is nothing to prevent you portraying your Orks in this way. Your players might be indoctrinated with infantile Ork rubbish but their characters most likely have never seen an Ork. So they won't know the difference.

DavidJones said:

It was hardly a slow change - WAAAGH The Orks presented the "comical" imagery of the Orks - almost in its entirety - during Rogue Trader, and was published in 1990, and has been maintained without any particular difficulty for the last twenty years to various degrees. Methinks your personal dislike for that depiction has coloured your recollection of it...

Thing is, the personality of the Orks remains unchanged. The superficial trappings that surround them are largely irrelevant in this regard - a Squig is a fang-mawed monster used as pet, food source and beast of burden (and far more logical than Orks making use of what otherwise appear to be overly-large Terran boars), Shootas are heavy-calibre automatic weapons, and "WAAAGH" is something easily bellowed at the top of one's lungs while charging.

You are probably right about my perceptions being coloured. Or maybe three years seemed longer back then than it does now : )

You are certainly right that I am not fond of the direction GW took with them. Subtle humour can enliven any game, but the Orky stuff is as subtle as a ton of bricks.

However the changes GW made to Space Orks (my original favourite!) are more than superficial. They have been rendered increasingly one dimensional. Their ballistic skill dropped and their close combat abilities were ramped up to make them the bellowing Zulus of the 40k universe.

he acolytes had captured one, but at what cost. Ember was dead, head caved in with its huge axe made from the armoured plat of a rhino, that had taken one of Siegfried's arms too. A turnaka was the only thing that had stopped him from bleeding out.

Hurst the tech adapt was looking at the things shoota. He had been told that these things should not work. And most times they did not, but this was a practical weapon. The mechanism was a very simple floating bolt with a recoil reload. You could throw a bolder in that system and it would not jam. Also it was full of the oily grease excreted from the ork's skin, lubricating the parts to keep it in fine working shape.

“Oiw. 'umie. Ifz a gives yah those teeffz cana 'ave ma shoota back?” the green skin joked from his position chained on the ground.

“Ha. You speak Low Gothic. I heard you don't even have your own language,” Taunted Siegfried hopped up on stims to kill the pain in his arm.

“Wez 'az are own langwage, just likes ta oose 'umie langwage whenz we is fighten 'em.”

“You do not speak it very well.”

“I'z speakz 'humie beters dan oo speakz Ork. Iz betz Iz speekz Panzie an' Comi beta dan oo to. 'umiez iz stoopid. Scradie too. Orks is 'ard. Youez mech boy not made oos good dakka ors Iz be with Gork an' Mork now. Youz iz week, mez stronge,” Siegfried looked at this barrel of mussel with disgust.

“Youz shood letz me out of deze chainz. Ifz yah do I'llz pull off your oder arm and evenz yah up soz yah arn't walken round in serkels,” and with that Siegfried look away. This thing had taken his arm, now it had just taken his dignity.

(see even the comical orks can be sinister)

I enjoy the depiction of orks as cockney geezers....or at least apparrent 'cockney geezers'. Furthermore, I don't believe that their somewhat comical portrayal detracts from the frankly overwhelming sense of doom that pervades the 40k universe. Why? Here's my two cents (pence):

1) I followed a thread on RPG.net (I think) about the 40k universe being digested by the reader through a 'soft lense'...that is, affairs this far in the future would be so incalculably different, that we could only understand them if they were presented in a format that touched on some of our more conceivable modern concepts. One big example would be the gothic tongue: is it really cod latin? Or is it depicted this way because that captures some of the flavour of this fabulously old and classical language? Likewise, are orks literally football hooligans with plasma weapons? Or do they merely seem that way when their culture is compared to the Imperium with its rigid morality and tradition-bound civilities? Personally, I think the universe is softened a little for modern readers...especially since I like to highlight the sci-fi aspect of the setting as much or more than the fantasy aspect. That said, this is a purely theoretical consideration and I think there are other reasons for recommending orks' standard portrayal.

2) The way orks speak is often held up as ludicrous. When we consider that the greenskins are master adapters and were literally created to be a perfect war species (I know this is a later ret-con but I like it)..not to mention that we have a clan in the shape of the Blood Axes(off the top of my head) who literally ape human styles and mannerisms...then we can easly see how those orks that are met within and around the boundries of the Imperium would develop a crude version of the gothic tongue. A couple of generations would see orks move from a stone age to a crude space faring level of tech. Language would follow suit. They're a race of idiot savants (almost). Orks outside of human contact would develop versions of whatever tongue required, based off of the pre-dominant species in an area. It's logical to assume that the orks that bother the Tau's eastern fringe speak crude variants of cod-Mandarin.

3) 40k is black humour. No doubt about it. It's as much Alan Partridge as it is Lovecraft. This is my opinion of course, but I see jokes abound. Sometimes the level of destruction is so high that it's slightly ludicrous. It's a unverse with its laws firmly planted within the realm of the bad trip. Orks play into this nicely. Think of the most humorous moments in Twin Peaks.

4) And that humour can turn around on you in a heartbeat. You think you know Orks? When you've been captured and they're slowly spit roasting you alive for the boyz battle feast you suddenly realise that you knew nothing about them at all. Their eyes hold nothing human. Your dying in the hands of alien horrors without a shred of real empathy. They ape the trappings of humans but they are fundamentally not human. They are unknowable xenos and you die screaming.

Anyway, it's an interesting discussion.

Investigator Spleen said:

Exactly. 10/10

A defice i used when running orks was to put in a brain boy as the leader of the Waaagh. He was not a real Brain Boy, but an experament in combining human and orkiod dna caried out by radical AdMech. But he did ad another element to the game. Orks were no longer a tacticless green tide, but tricky cunning and prepared. i sort of based those ork on the gremlens from gremlin 2. funny, but sinister. You could laugh at them till they payed off a local bunch of roughians to blow up all your air support and then teleported into the middle of your camp because the brain boy had got the mech boyz to build a veriant of the shokk attack gun that created a stable warp brigde. Funny ork / sinister orks. all the same thing.

Investigator Spleen said:

This, IMO, is more of a problem than anything else - the assumption that Orks are without exception just going to rush towards the enemy as fast as possible with no regard for their own safety, and that's all they ever do.

Ork leaders are cunning, and employ quite a wide range of strategies and tactics. Ork engineers and physicians are imaginative and capable, if entirely eccentric. Nothing you described is beyond the capabilities of a normal force of Orks - the creature dubbed Orkimedes by the Imperium developed teleportation devices sufficient to deploy anything up to Titanweight war engines from orbit with them in the years leading up to the Third War for Armageddon, for example, testing early versions in a campaign fought pretty much just to test strategies and technologies in the field (the Piscina campaign).

Characters in-setting often assume that Orks are mindless beasts, incapable of rational thought... but while the average Ork has no time for intellectual nuances, they're still sentient, sapient beings, and made all the more dangerous for the way the Imperium underestimates them. However, the beliefs of characters has crossed to influence the opinions of players, resulting in this pervasive assumption that all Orks are little more than wild animals...

N0-1_H3r3 said:

Not wild animals, no. But also, I feel it would be a mistake to ascribe human values and behaviours to them. They may be sentient, but they are a sentience we can hardly understand. From a human perspective, a lot of what they do is completely irrational, and Dark Heresy is first and foremost a game played from that perspective.

I suppose I'm just trying to defend people who see them - frankly, as I do - as being very barely sentient, and generally lacking the subtleties and complexities that make a race (or roleplay) interesting. Great as an enemy, because they are one hell of a threat, but taking a closer look at them or considering them as player characters... to me, that just isn't interesting, and isn't in keeping with my experience of them throughout their history.

Remember that Gork is the god of Cunning Brutality and Mork is the God of Brutal Cunning, or is that the other way round? The point is when it when it comes to warfare being a the sneakiest most cunning is highly prized.

As for human values, that's not really possible with any Xeno's but for Orks they are closer than most, like a primitive human society that consists of complete d!cks. Plenty of RP potential in that.

Not to go completely off topic, but humorous Orks can work too.

Mind you this was a Rogue Trader campaign, and so the theme was closer to high adventure then creepy terror, and my group would put humor into any campaign, but still it can work.

Indeed we when full bore into funny land. The GM had found an obscure (most likely reconned) bit of fluff mentioned gretchens planning a communist revolution.

First 3 hours we're hillarous. Warbosses argueing with each other in classic Ork speach, every time quoted communist propaganda in his high pitched gretchen voice I laughed so hard it hurt. Captain ends up playing two warbosses against each other and leading the gretchens to "cease the means of production".

The next hour was awesome. We attack the first Warboss and his Nobs, Captain Flasheart insists on fighting the Warboss (who had a powerclaw) by himself. Awesome ensude. Then the other warboss gets wise to our plans and attacks wearing Mega-Armour. Two inferno pistols, a melta-gun and a stormbolter latter...

Then things got terrifying as the GM described in detail what exactly a gretchen revolution looks like. The guy's a big war buff, and knows a he cherry picked from the worst he'd read.

monkyman said:

Ahhh, he found out about the old Gorkamorka skirmish game, and the Gobbo Revulushunary Committi then! Those guys were awesome, I loved the Red Gobbo!

From the newest "Ork-Codex":

I'm only going to paraphrase - but there is an interrogation done against a commander of an Imperial Guard unit - the military leader asks him to recount what happened. The commander recounts a tale of ork deception - of being flanked and routed. Of orks using tactics..

The military commander then admonishes the commander and court marshals him for cowardice.

It's an Imperial flaw that they believe the orks to be completely stupid. Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka - considered a "Prophet of the Waaagh" - is now seriously being considered a tactical genius by even the Imperium.

The book details several ork warlords who have had resounding success against not only the Imperium, but the Tau (after developing tactics to deal with the Tau), and even a Tyranid Hive fleet.

===

Also, death and breeding are the same thing for the orks. Death releases the spores that eventually will become new orks - the spores float to uninhabited locations on a world where new orks grow - and a warboss eventually grows - and a new Waaagh is declared.

If your race breeds as it dies - that completely annihilates any notion that death is in any way negative. Death = survival of your species. That's why orks have no knowledge of fear (though, of course - they still have moral for fairness in games like the tabletop).

That's why they take war light-heartedly. You take out an ork - and he's going to eventually give birth to many other orks - and his progeny are going to kill your sons and daughters.

===

There's another perspective from an Eldar in the Codex where he suggests that the orks are the pinnacle of evolution. That they have reached their ultimate goal - that they won't ever fail like the Eldar have, and the humans are about to - because they aren't stunted with foolish moralistic thought.

In the grim dark future, there is only war - and orks, orks is made fer fightin' and winnin'!