Orc Wizard He was cloistered and very educated. But mechanics gives him a 13, +1. Only average~above average. Him being really smart and scholarly is already failing. Should be a competent wizard, but a +1 is very far behind a +3 so he seems to others to be very weak, especially cause he only ever missed.
So my roleplay as a Orc Wizard, someone who isn't brutish and is supposed to be quite smart and competent in his own right, got boiled down to me failing and people noting that I was just bad at being both an Orc and a Wizard. Mechanics and character concept could not match. A competent character should only miss a few times a session, but a combination of bad luck and low stats meant I failed every kind of check related to my PRIMARY stat.
DnD is a roleplaying game. You want both roleplaying and game, and both are connected. Without one the other does not stand as well. Yes too strong or too minmaxed of a character can break RP but so can too weak of a character. I was able to roleplay initially but the game part breaking down meant the RP broke down. On another character, an aasimar celestial warlock, I was able to roleplay very effectively as a healer because mechanically I had that and
TLDR; Because DnD is a roleplaying game, both halves are important and contribute to eachother. Tasha's makes it easier to have a balance.
Your orc was very smart and educated compared to 99% of all other orcs and even to common humans. Again, your only complaint is that you want more power because the role is perfectly playable without Tasha's and offers its unique challenges and journey. Just own it that you want to powergame instead of playing the role of an orc wizard.
Then I recommend you try it, it feels very draining to roleplay failing again and again and again for a few hours. I have had sessions where I died, and sessions where I was useless, but the Orc Wizard, once I got past introduction roleplay (which was fun and engaging) became very very very unfun when the game parts came up. If stats did not exist at all, he would have been beyond fun, I loved the concept and plan to return to it with Tasha's in effect, but with stats it was bad. There were obviously checks where a plus one or two would have done nothing, but there were a lot where it was clear that I was missing by one or two. So I really might as well have not been there. History check, you don't know. Nature, you don't know. Firebolt, miss. Bonfire, they passed the DC 11. That was the experience where the game mechanics and the roleplay concept no longer matched for me.
That you found it no fun is on you and maybe on your DM. And when you use Tasha you are not revisiting this concept, but are playing something very different (human or elf wizard, depending on how you exchange stats). And by the way I currently play what in D&D would probably be translated as a Goliath or Half-Orc support bard with more of a ranged focus despite having a dex penalty. So you can save your "you try it".
