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So anyways, trying to get back to the topic, I think it's important for any GM to make a decision with their players about how goblins will be viewed by the other races as a whole, in particular for the regions the game will take place in, and for the players to know about that decision before deciding to play a goblin. They might not have as much fun if they didn't realize their goblin would be so ostracized they wouldn't be let into the city, and thus are potentially restricted or even totally cut off from some aspects of the game. I think this is especially important with goblins (for better or worse) being one of two ancestries with a charisma boost, and thus making a natural pick for the party's face characters. If they are totally cut off from fulfilling face roles in the party by the mindset of the society they are in, that would be a very unfun character to play.
For me personally, I am writing an adventure centered in Katheer in Qadira, and the 1e source material gives me an easy out in that everyone foreign needs immigration papers. So, as long as the goblin can find sponsorship and get immigration papers, they are allowed to be in town. I expect that the "sponsorship" route, whether through immigration papers or a notice from a local noble, is a good way for any ancestry generally regarded as an outsider to mingle into the general population, though of course they will still face resistance depending on the culture they are in.
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Consider the Paizo baseline. There is a list of topics in the CRB that Paizo has said they will not depict, players should never be allowed to do, and if they feel it is important this one time to have something in a story they will give considerable advance warning. If you are running a Pathfinder 2nd edition game, the expectation of your players is that you are also following this baseline- it is, after all, in the CRB.
If you want to play a game about exploring the dark side of evil people, you're pretty much going to want to get your players explicitly on board with the notion. It's not something that's automatically okay because "you like the idea" or whatever. It's not fundamentally different from if you're changing anything else from the CRB for a given game- you have to let people know and get their consent.
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If you want to play a game about exploring the dark side of evil people, you're pretty much going to want to get your players explicitly on board with the notion. It's not something that's automatically okay because "you like the idea" or whatever. It's not fundamentally different from if you're changing anything else from the CRB for a given game- you have to let people know and get their consent.
And just as important, get everyone else's consent before doing it as a player. I personally find that 9 times out of 10 it's another player introducing something uncomfortable, because lots of players seem to have this idea that they don't need to consider the other people at the table because that's the GM's job, and they can just do whatever they want. But that's a whole different topic.
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For the love of... The question was...
When in Golarion did this happen? I mean, there were stats for them, but... as a serious race? The 2e rulebook describes them like they're some persecuted minority.
The rest of this boiled down to the dumbest and -borderline- offensive slapfight. YES, it isn't your place to police other peoples' games. It's no one's. That's the whole point of this thread. This started because someone was angry about goblins being in Core. Then JL had to take things too far, as usual. Ethics and morality in roleplaying games comes up and people are arguing about what is appropriate for other people to run.
Just stop.
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In any case whatever races are included in a campaign and how they are going to be portrayed and what is to be included as themes and subjects needs to be talked about during session 0.
If the campaign is essentially being hired to clear out an area for settlement by Dwarves of Goblins and the DM refuses to change the Goblins to some other enemy then join another game. Not every DM will be willing to change the premise of their campaign. It is also the players personal responsibility to join the game that works for them.
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I mean, fundamentally isn't the question about "why don't the town guards constantly hassle the armed goblin wandering around town" the same as the question of "why don't the dottari hassle the armed halfling wandering around Egorian?" There are probably parts of Cheliax where being a halfling puts you more in people's crosshairs more than being a goblin (again, there is a goblin canonically in the *Hellknights*).
In practice it mostly works out by "the GM chooses not to hassle players for what they have chosen to play, because that doesn't make the game any more fun."
I have had parties that were quite conspicuously a travelling band of oddities, and I just talked to my players a la "Hey, how do you want people to react to you? Obviously the four of you wandering into town is not something that happens every day." We determined out that the initial response might be some mixture of curiosity and trepidation, but it should be possible to convince the locals, and after a while the party will develop a reputation where people from places they have never been will know them right away since there's no other group of adventurers that match their description.
Right...
So, I do think there was a good point made through this mess, and thats that Paizo could have done a better job over the years of signaling that they were headed in this direction. Certainly in the last three or four years; we might not have known there was a new edition on the horizon (whatever we suspected), but THEY did. Goblins could have been made more mainstream within APs and adventurers a lot more thoroughly and in a lot more places than the bits and pieces they've included over the last decade. It might have given the game away early, but it also might have helped ease into this.
Edit: Mind, I do agree that they've made some efforts. But it clearly hasn't been enough, or has made it into the general playerbase as well as they'd hoped. Even I thought they were doing this more for the benefit of the "We Be Goblin" series than as a serious attempt at inclusion, at least at first. Seeing the devs posts on just how many good and neutral goblins over the years has opened my eyes, but I definetely needed the pattern pointed out to see it.