Irony of being a half Orc who is the smartest PC in a party!

[Skip1392]

I started a new game last night and had some awesome rolls so I made a level one half Orc fighter of kord. I am the strongest smartest and ugliest PC we have I just wanted to see if anyone had some interesting ideas going forward with this character.
Stats
Str-19
Dex-15
Int-16
Wis-13
Con-17
Cha-6

[Joe the Rat]

In before dice roll vs. point buy discussion
High Int, Low Cha? Insufferable Genius maybe? Or perhaps the smart guy nobody listens to.

Have you considered the joys of gishing? I'd also be sorely tempted to do something swashbuckler/duelist-y. Or perhaps go ecclesiastical for Knowledge Devotion - anything that lets you work that intelligence. You'll probably have the points to pull in Battle Trickster, if that sort of wackiness appeals.

Cross-class skill ranks in Knowledge (Architecture and Engineering) are also handy. (http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0808.html)

[Psyren]

Warblade - the perfect cocky fighter (and with reason to be.)

[Suteinu]

I did a similar thing with a half-orc swashbuckler. Think Cyrano de Bergerorc :smallbiggrin: Selfconcious about his looks and his origins, an smarter than anyone expects, he goes out of his way to be The Grayte Man.

[Zaq]

I had a character who was, in fluff, a half-orc, even though he was mechanically a human. (His parents were both half-orcs. Punnett squares are where it's at! D&D is the same as 7th grade bio class, right?) I don't know if he was literally the smartest in the party, but he was close to it. And yeah, he was a Warblade. Well, Barbarian/Warblade. I took the basic stereotype of the Barbarian and gave it the BOVD/BOED treatment--in other words, I just inverted it. He was rash and hot-headed and unfocused when he wasn't raging (or, as we called it, "battle focused"), but collected, rational, and tactically savvy when the rush of adrenaline hit.

Basically, I played him as having not-quite-comically over-the-top ADHD (I've got ADD myself, but not as bad as the character did--this fact made some people more comfortable, because I was mostly poking fun at myself, and some people less comfortable, because they couldn't tell just how much was all in fun and just how much was me offering a peek behind the curtain), only instead of methylphenidate, he used adrenaline to give himself that much-desired clarity. (As far as the fluff goes, the idea was that his inability to focus got him kicked out of the human-run Fighter Academy, but the orc-run Warblade Academy didn't care so much about the occasional bits of. He got in on his half-orc heritage, and so he thought of himself much more as an orc than as a human.)

I got special permission from the GM to have one set of maneuvers (Iron Heart, Tiger Claw, Stone Dragon--y'know, the "rawr, kill 'em all" schools) available only when not raging, and another set of maneuvers (White Raven, Diamond Mind--the "I'm a battle genius" schools) available only when I WAS raging, and I'd swap between them. I think I paid a feat for the privilege. (I also had to get GM approval to use Concentration while raging, which he freely allowed as being perfect for the character, but in return, I had to take like a -8 or something when I wasn't raging.)

Since that takes GM approval, of course, I'm not saying it's perfect for everyone. But it was a hell of a lot of fun for me to play, and it was a fun twist on the half-orc Barbarian. I don't even usually gravitate towards beatsticks, but I had a blast with that guy. You might consider something similar, just to acknowledge the stereotype while still messing around with it?

Of course, you can also just be the smartest guy in the party. You can act like your smarts come from your orc heritage, and you blame your failings on your soft and puny human father. I think you could have fun with the ambiguity of whether or not your character is serious. If you play it the way I'm envisioning it, other characters (and other players, I guess) could interpret you as being wryly self-deprecating in sort of an ironic way, or they could interpret you as being 100% serious. Don't give them an answer either way; if they pry, just get offended that they'd be so nosy about sensitive racial matters and clam up.

But as you can tell, I like playing with stereotypes. I like having the stereotypes in place (so that they can be played with at all), but if you do it right, you can almost have it both ways, both embracing the stereotype and rejecting/going beyond it. Might not be your cup of tea, but it's a good opportunity for such a thing if you actually do like that.

[veti]

I did a similar thing with a half-orc swashbuckler. Think Cyrano de Bergerorc :smallbiggrin: Selfconcious about his looks and his origins, an smarter than anyone expects, he goes out of his way to be The Grayte Man.

But Cyrano had a high CHA, he's just pug-ugly. CHA 6 suggests that his romantic poems are going to be more on the lines of Blackadder's Prince of Wales.

Compare and contrast:

"And what is a kiss, specifically? A pledge properly sealed, a promise seasoned to taste, a vow stamped with the immediacy of a lip, a rosy circle drawn around the verb 'to love.' A kiss is a message too intimate for the ear, infinity captured in the bee's brief visit to a flower, secular communication with an aftertaste of heaven, the pulse rising from the heart to utter its name on a lover's lip: 'Forever'."


"Harold the horny hunter, had an enormous horn..."