Should creating custom races be allow

[nibmus]

I am a new GM and everything has gone smoothly (we are doing reign of winter). Though one of my players who is playing a fire kineticist has decided that he can make a custom race that is close to max optimized for his class.

In my opinion, I don't think they should be allowed to do this. It ruins the roleplaying purposes of races for the reason of squeezing the most power out that you can.

Does anyone else agree, if not I'd like to hear some opinions.

thanks

(He also said that if he can't be a custom race he will be a hobgoblin, I was also wondering what the roleplaying relation downfalls would be if a PC was a hobgoblin)

[Tomppa]

Okay, this is in the Organized Play forum - you'll probably get more/better responses in the https://paizo.com/community/forums/pathfinder/firstEdition/advice
Or
https://paizo.com/community/forums/pathfinder/firstEdition/houseRules

That being said, Hobgoblin is already a pretty much optmized race for a kineticist - The only thing that could be swapped out is the +4 stealth, for something else, and the race could be small instead of medium. Personally, I wouldn't allow custom built races without having a deep dive with the player into the lore and background and WHY the player wants to make a custom race. "I wanna make a race that's the best" isn't a good reason, in my opinion.

Secondly, you're the GM. You could just restrict the races to the core races, or you could restrict them to the pathfinder society races (so core + kitsune, nagaji, tengu, wayang, and the elemental races Oread, Sylph, Ifrit, undine, or you could decide that races are case-by-case basis and players need to confirm their race with you.

Hobgoblin's aren't really "common" as civilized (player) races, but depending on the campaign, they could fit in.

Although, kineticists are really powerful (fire kineticists especially excel in dealing damage) so he'll probably be fine even without a super optimized race. I think it's also important that the group is roughly on the same level of power - running a group where one person is playing an un-optimized vanilla monk and another is blowing up encounters as a kineticist, for example, could cause trouble and may be difficult to balance. You should probably gather the group together, talk with them about the sort of campaing you want to run (in this case, specifically, the power level of PC's) and go from there. If the group is super optimized, you should be prepared to adjust the encounters in the adventure path to make up for it, or the game may turn a bit boring when everybody just steamrolls the enemies.

Out of curiosity, what race are they playing -now-, and why do they feel like they need a custom race to be more powerful? Are they performing poorly in combat or something?

[nibmus]

We decided that we shouldn’t create custom races. So we agreed to use the hobgoblin stats but use the race idea he made.