I was thinking about playing an orc. I like the idea of a bunch of orcs going around bashing things. I have noticed that there are hardly any people who play orcs. I am assuming that everyone wants to PK them when they hit 11. Are my thoughts correct on this. Anyone have experience playing an orc? Thanks.

nt

Seems like the goodies outnumber the evil people in Thera. Is this pretty common?

The goodies almost *never* outnumber the evils. I don't think it's something likely to happen, either. I think everybody would be very, very surprised. However, I could be wrong.
As an orc, you have some skills to help you: you can forcedmarch to get a bit of extra moves to run from a pursuer, you can hide in caves/swamps if you take the time to learn where they are. Also, orcs have quite a bit of hp, so they're pretty hardy.

Actually, the pendulum swings quite regularly between goodies outnumbering evils and vice versa, with a period of around 3-6 months per swing, I'd estimate. You can go back over the forums and read about how evil are too strong because they have the numbers and the more lethal powers (and can kill anyone they want for gear), then 6 months earlier how good are too strong because they have the numbers and the better powers to keep people alive (and request).

The problem with orcs, I find, is that allies rarely trust you, and enemies like to hunt you, because, when I played one, you weren't that good defensively. I did ok as mine, but mainly by doing hit and runs rather than straight up brawls (although being wanted for 100 hours kind of screwed my pk). The main weakness of orcs is that you know where they recall to.

The overall playerbase consistently has a small slant towards chaos and evil, if you add up all the characters. I could write quite a bit about why this is true, but that's whatthe numbers are.

Some hypotheses follow. You may or may not care.

Part of the good/evil axis imbalance is the class disparity. There is only one class that tilts the good/evil axis towards good (paladins), and empowered classes are inherently somewhat rare. Anti-paladins, necromancers, and berserkers all lean the opposite direction, and last I checked all outnumber paladins individually. This used to be somewhat mitigated by conjurers being a de facto good-aligned class, but with a lot of the recent playability improvements to evil conjurers, I'm not sure that's valid any more. But overall, if you are the type of player who hops from class to class, you'll find yourself being forced evil three times as often as you find yourself being forced good.

As an example along the law/chaos axis, Thera is often as much as 40% Chaotic, because a very simple (and incomplete/flawed) interpretation of the ethos system is "Chaotic means I can ignore laws if it is to my benefit. Orderly means I cannot. Therefore, I should pick the ethos that gives me more options." If no Tribunal is around, the Chaotic person can more easily justify selfish behavior (killing, stealing, etc.) that puts their priorities over the community's. Also, many Chaotic characters won't play their ethos when doing something rash and unpredictable ("I'm sick of waiting for you! I'm attacking them all now!") isn't the most sensible thing to do, so they don't suffer the downsides. Some counterincentives exist-- for example, Tribunals will be more likely to trust the word of an Orderly person. But overall, a Chaotic ethos is probably a small powergame-y edge. I could make a similar argument for evils, especially the much-despised Team Evil demographic. ("Oh. You're evil too? Please, take my extra sword.")

We've considered some incentives (along the lines of Request) to reverse this trend, and it's probably something we'll continue to work on in the future.

valguarnera@carrionfields.com

Thanks for your replies. I am learning how to play my character a lot better now. I currently am playing a storm giant and love it. So I guess that is +1 for the goodies.
Wow I actually think I am starting to understand ethos more from the previous post. Thank you very much.