And then I finally got around to reading about Pathfinder's orcs.
Orcs seemed so cliche, so I didn't consider them too much in those early days. But then the more I looked at them, the more I realized that holy crap, Pathfinder orcs are terrifying!
They were as low of challenge rating as any other "weaker" monster and were certainly easy enough to hurt. The true terror of orcs comes from two things. One, they are incredibly strong for their size and if they connect with a hit, they hit hard. Two - and this is the important one - even though they have as few hit points as most other 1/3 CR monsters, they have a trait that essentially keeps them dead on their feet fighting to a negative number double their actual HP. Orcs simply do not die in this game.
I was excited. This was going to be fun...
...So the encounter came, and my team of 5 players were dropped into one end of a rather large orc raid. It was 5 of them versus about seven orcs, one of which was an extra powerful "squad sergeant". Well, the one player was counting HP and immediately felt I was doing something wrong as the one orc soaked up hits and just refused to go down. The one girl got struck and went down as well. In the end, plenty of folks got smattered pretty nicely but in the end survived the battle.
Well, orcs certainly had a reputation for them now. Good, good...
And then the day ended with a fight with a dire wolf, something technically of equal challenge rating to the seven orcs. And they squashed it within three rounds.
Alright, so one single strong thing simply didn't cut it compared to a whole bunch of smaller, less strong things. But they still had to be strong enough that I wasn't simply feeding my players experience (that snack of six effectively useless kobolds kept popping back in my head).
Alright, let's stick with orcs...
