If anyone buys a book based on D&D or Pathfinder, one can expect a typical line up strait out of Tolkien: Humans, Halflings, Elves, and Dwarves. Oh, there can be some others too: Gnomes, Half-Elves, and Half-Orcs tend to round out the Standard Seven.
Now, I know other places may vary with Aasimar, Tieflings, Dragonkin, and any number of furry races that could be thrown in, though more likely in homebrew settings than in any official book.
But what if Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Goblins were also standard? Would they even look the same? It seems to me that there's a lot of evil = ugly (not all but enough). So would good orcs actually look the same if, going in, one planned on them being one of the 'good' races?
Obviously settings can work fine if there's no race you're allowed to murder because it's always evil (Eberron, for instance), but has anyone here had one or more of the standard "it's okay to kill them" races as a base starting race? What sort of cultures did you give them?
In a campaign I ran, orcs and goblins were both standard races but elves were not. The orcs were from a nomadic culture in the scrublands and had a very ancestor driven culture, whereas goblins were a forest dwelling race of scavengers and inventors.
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As an antipaladin, all races are okay to kill on sight.
As long as no one else sees me.
On a more serious note; Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Goblins are standard to the setting. It's just those civilizations are usually hostile to human civilization.
Maybe you should ask your players just not to be murderhobos and not assume it's okay to kill anyone (without reason).
In my games I teach my players not to make dangerous assumptions. A member of an usually evil race can be not evil. An evil character can be redeemable. Also, another evil character can still be evil and a worthy ally or want to help them on a good faith.
Making not everything be what it seems to be makes the players to be more cautious about what they attack on sight or who they trust (as a good creature could still oppose them with a good reason and be their enemy too).
I've never played in a group that killed <insert race> on sight based on the race alone, even outside of Eberron. Now they have assumed that the race is more likely up to no good, which is normally true, but if the creature is willing to talk, they at least talk to it.
They even talk to demons and undead most of the time, assuming they don't try to immediately kill the party or they dont have an open conflict with them.
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In my homebrew campaign I tend to play the races roughly with their basic descriptions for the commoners of their groups. Maybe with a twist or two.
If you meet an Orc or goblinoids "commoner", there is a high chance that they aren't going to be friendly or buddy buddy to your group, even high chances of being hostile also more so in group. But there are of course always exception to the rules, mostly why they are playable as character races or cosmopolitan npc in my world .
Some races have too much of an awesome fluff that I don't bother changing their stance.
Syrinx for example are evil owl people...and must admit that I like them so much. Most players assume that owl folk would be good people and they are twisted terrible people making experiments of all kind of terrestrial races. On top of it, it's always a good surprise against most players who had never met them.
This isn't hard to do, you just have to dive deep on the culture of the various peoples to give them more depth than "they have bad guy traits because they are the bad guys."
In my setting, Orcs prize philosophy, mathematics, and the arts and are driven to conquer less due to aggression and more due to desire to "spread knowledge." If they have a reputation for aggression it's because they can get really passionate about the things they care about, but this isn't fundamentally different from how Wittgenstein (apocryphally) threatened Karl Popper with a fireplace poker over the question of whether there really are philosophical problems. You'll have to do away with the stat penalty to intelligence, but that's easy enough to do (I did away with stat penalties, and instead you get a choice of one +2 corresponding to your race and one +2 corresponding to your class.)
I think it's better to portray previously "monstrous" races by giving them an ideal and using them for a funhouse mirror look at humanity rather than "Noble savages" or tropes like that. Then again, my goblins are based on reddit/imageboard culture and that's probably a negative thing, so I should work on that.
But what if Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Goblins were also standard? Would they even look the same? It seems to me that there's a lot of evil = ugly (not all but enough). So would good orcs actually look the same if, going in, one planned on them being one of the 'good' races?
Good-aligned orcs actually exist on Golarion: In the Belkzen Campaign Setting book two paragraphs were spent on the Burning Sun tribe, led by a warpriest of Sarenrae:
While Mahja has moved the tribe’s culture away from wickedness, orc values such as the weak serving the strong are still deeply entrenched among the Burning Suns—though the strong are expected in turn to provide for and defend the weak.
As a GM, I usually stick with the stereotypes. My players are not that experienced, so most things are still new to them, even without modification. And I am not that interested in worldbuilding anyway.
Orcs are a popular race around my table. Not a lot go outright good aligned (though some do), but I make sure there's a plethora of CN precedent for nonevil orcish characters (and the occasional Abadarian orc, for fun and for law).
In my home game I have a rule that the vast majority of every race - orc, drow, hobgoblin, minotaur, elf, gnome, dwarf, human, so on, so forth - are neutral and the rest is cultural differences.
There is an in-universe perception by the "standard" races that the "enemy" races are evil and monstrous but that's in-universe bigotry, ignorance, and self-serving perception. Various tribes may be violent and war like but their really upon examination, no better or worse than a tribe of human barbarians or a militaristic human nation.
There's also a somewhat unified nation that is primarily composed of the monstrous races that acts as something of an analogue for the United States by way of the Mongol Empire. A feudal society that through expansion became a great melting pot of various ideas, races, cultures, and religions, seen by many as a curious experiment, a grand ideal, or a great evil.
In that mold it also has (near) complete religious freedom and the high tensions that come with that, with the 'monstrous' races being seen as prime targets for conversion by missionaries of all stripes, so you have the faithful of gods like Iomedae, Sarenrae, Shelyn, and Cayden - all largely unknown to these cultures before - trying to teach these races & cultures peace or at least righteousness with varying degrees of success, lawful deities like Abadar, Irori, and Asmodeus trying to teach them discipline and civilization, again, with varying degrees of success, all conflicting with the established religions and customs, each other, and themselves from those who think it's heresy and blasphemy to let these monsters into the faith.
In terms of law there's huge variation in how good, just, cruel, corrupt, fundamentalist, or secular the law is from tribe to tribe and territory to territory as in that feudal way each faction imposes their own will so long as it doesn't conflict with the king(a mythic and immortal warrior who's rather hands off so long as his calls for troops are answered whenever he feels like expanding).
And of course there's this ever flowing stream of immigrants - newly annexed peoples, mercenaries, fugitives from 'civilized' lands, merchants and traders, all the like, bringing new ideas and conflicting with the locals, and what qualifies as a local changes every generation.
Point being that while I personally find the idea of drawing good and evil along racial lines, and having evil races exist for no other reason than to have enemies that can be killed guilt free, with all the unfortunate baggage that comes with(labelling our enemies as 'the other' and establishing that it's okay to kill them because they're different from us is the cause of so many of the world's problems), I needed a way to ground the idea in something of a historical context, make it accessible and understandable to people who are steeped in the old way of thinking - having someone who believes that orcs are vile monsters is a perfectly reasonable position for someone to have in this world without them being a complete outlier- and also do it without making the monstrous races flawless sue races; they still have flaws, failings, vices, complexities of a real society.