Half-Orc

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A half-orc is exactly what it says on the tin - an unholy fusion of man and orc, hopefully brought about by a male orc raping (or, if the native women are amicable, tenderly making love to) a female human rather than a male human having sex with a female orc (female orcs are very ugly and unfappable, if you go by Blizzard standards). Typically they get small (+2) bonuses to physical stats (STR in 3.5e) and a small (-2) penalty to mental stats (INT and CHA in 3.5e) and tend to lean towards evil and chaos in settings where orcs just swing that way for reasons of giving PCs critters to kill without feeling bad about it. Most get a bonus to indimidation to represent their frightening mien.

Basically, if you wanted to play a big, dumb, "I hit it with my axe" pure combat class, especially a barbarian, half-orc was the race for you. And even then, there wasn't much there a human couldn't do better. The only thing they really had going for them was the flavor and core race status.

Later games opened things up a little, with tweaks to the fluff and the crunch.

Fluffwise, there was implying that female orcs generally aren't as ugly as people make out (after all, only male animals have tusks), and that frontier clans tend to intermarry with some frequency. Some places actually have full on half-orc populations, where man and orc have so thoroughly interbred that everyone's a half-orc. Although traditionally the result of human/orc crossbreeding, the 5e Monster Manual proclaims that half-orcs (or even pure-blooded orcs) can result from any cross between an orc and a non-orc Medium-sized humanoid, specifically calling out dwarves as a potential parent of half-orc children. This is all a matter of fluff, at the moment, but combined with their lack of racial penalties, could make for some interesting character ideas.

Crunchy improvements, on the other hand, came much later. In 4e, for instance, they don't take mental penalties to their stats and make pretty good monks due to their boosts to strength and dexterity. And in Pathfinder, they, like half-elves, get to pick a stat to put their boost into like humans, get to keep ticking once reduced to zero health until outright K.O.'d like orcs, and generally enjoy access to a decent array of versatility in what they try to do. If nothing else, they have access to the awesome scarred witchdoctor witch archetype. 5e went back to the old-fashioned muscle-class fodder, but actually made them excel at it, taking away their mental stat penalties in the process. Their abilities basically make them "barbarians-lite" if they're any other class, or the best barbarians in the game if one goes for tradition.

Exactly how oppressed and angsty they are varies with the setting, and, more to the point, with the setting's orcs.

When they're just traditional rampaging barbarians all the time, they tend to get all kinds of shit on -- Golarion, home of the Pathfinder setting, really plays up the "half-orcs are usually born to rape" in the fluff, so they get a lot of flak... somewhat two-facedly, though, most of their important half-orc characters are not rape-children, and in places like the deserts or the Mwangi jungle, half-orcs are actually quite respected. Desert half-orcs actually get bonuses to diplomacy instead of intimidation.

In places like Eberron, where orcs aren't so bad once you get to know them, they fare much better, though still suffer discrimination due to a perceived lack of intelligence.

Almost every setting, though, points out that anyone big and beefy enough can carve out a niche for him- or herself in among the "civilized" races, and that being the smartest motherfucker in the room an only slightly less strong has its own advantages in the orc tribes. Lots of famous orcish heroes had enough human blood in them to make them, as their spacefaring cousins would say, "ded kunnin'."

In AD&D, Half-orcs were a lot more diverse. The "basic" half-orc entry in the Monster Manual covered not only orc/human hybrids, as discussed in detail here, but also orc/goblin and orc/hobgoblin crossbreeds. Orc/ogre crossbreeding was rumored to be the source of the Orog species (although 3.5 Forgotten Realms retconned orogs as an Underdark dwelling species of bigger, smarter orcs), which itself received magically augmented/created variants in the "Neo-Orogs" of the Forgotten Realms (divided between Red ones, for fighting, and Black ones, for assassination). A confirmed orc/ogre crossbreed, though definitely leaning towards the Ogre (it was actually listed under "half-ogre" in the AD&D MM) is the Ogrillon, which basically resembles a giant orc covered in bony spikes. The weirdest half-orc is the Losel, or "ape-orc" of Greyhawk, which is half-orc and half baboon -- thankfully, that one's believed to be a magical creation, like the owlbear.