Why are goblins a playable race now?

[Captain Morgan]

So it a GM tells me all X goblins are evil in their world, I as a player know that. The GM's word is absolute. But how does my character know that? It seems like the answer would be "because their family and community told them so" which is uncomfortably close to how real world racism propagates. You could have the gods come down and tell the characters but that feels like worse story telling than just showing this particular group of goblins doing bad things.

And I know you can say "this is a game, don't think about it too hard," but it is a roleplaying game. We are by definition meant to examine our character's motivations, and that just doesn't seem to hold up without saying some really unfortunate things about my character.

[Malk_Content]

In pretty much all rpgs I've played in the past I'd never want to play a "there are monsters go bash there heads in" because frankly the combat in rpgs isn't good enough for it to be the only thing that carries the game, boardgames do it better. Funnily enough PF2 combat actually is good enough to carry an entire adventure, so I can't fault people wanting to rock up and engage in some cooperative tactical combat.

Still nothing about any species having write ups that enable more iinvolved stories tops folks from playing that way so I don't get the complaint.

[Matthew Jaluvka]

I think the other point that's being missed here is that it's not even difficult to write villains that are evil because of the things they do

[pixierose]

If you want your goblins to be like the movie gremlins then I wouldn't wouldn't consider them humanoids at that point. They would be fey, or aberrations, or some sort of outsider.

One thing that I think defines humanoids in pathfinder is funny enough not their physical nature(otherwise anandis wouldn't make much sense with the humanoids tag) but a sense of free will and a general trend of the same range of morality, certain ancestries might have more extreme tendencies in their culture( long lived and shorter lived lifespans might affect how cultures develops) but an individual within an ancestry still has the potential to fall anywhere on that spectrum.

Other tags aren't as inherently tied to that concept, sure some aberrations or fey may have that freedom, and sure there maybe a demon or two who thanks to divine intervention and a sheer amount of will could overcome being made out of evil winery but it's not a guarantee for every entity with that tag.

If you really want gremlin, bump in the night goblins, at that point they kind of are just the gremlin type of fey, or are boogeyman. Give them the fey or aberration tag. Aberrations themselves as a defining trait often have alien mindsets.

I also agree with the majority of people here calling out the nonsense dog whistles, and racist language, I just think they've for the most part have said it better.

[thejeff]

pixierose wrote:

If you want your goblins to be like the movie gremlins then I wouldn't wouldn't consider them humanoids at that point. They would be fey, or aberrations, or some sort outsider.

One thing that I think defines humanoids in pathfinder is funny enough not their physical nature(otherwise anodised wouldn't make much sense with the humanoids tag) but a sense of free will and a general trend of the same range of morality, certain ancestries might have more extreme tendencies in their culture( long lived and shorter lived lifespans might affect how cultures develops) but an individual within an ancestry still has the potential to fall anywhere on that spectrum.

Other tags aren't as inherently tied to that concept, sure some aberrations or fey may have that freedom, and sure there maybe a demon or two who thanks to divine intervention and a sheer amount of will could overcome being made out of evil winery but it's not a guarantee for every entity with that tag.

If you really want gremlin, bump in the night goblins, at that point they kind of are just the gremlin type of fey, or are boogeyman. Give them the fey or aberration tag. Aberrations themselves as a defining trait often have alien mindsets.

This is kind of a strange argument for me, though it's one I've seen here before.

While it sort of makes sense in terms of the game mechanic distinction, a lot of the arguments here get more philosophical. I'm not sure there's a real moral argument that it's okay to be racist against creature A because it has the "aberration" tag, but not against creature B because it has the "humanoid" tag. If the creatures have the same intelligence and the same behaviors, just changing the tag makes it okay?

We were arguing before about creatures making choices and having free will and thus needing to be treated as moral entities who aren't always the same, even if most you encounter will be evil for cultural reasons. But that doesn't apply to these other intelligent creatures, for reasons. I think the moral argument kind of falls apart, if it's only "these creatures can't be really racially evil because Paizo's classified them as the type of creature that can't really be racially evil."

That's long been argued with things like fiends and (some) undead, where the evil is inherently part of their nature - despite the rare cases you mention, and I think it makes a lot more sense there, rather than being something special to humanoids.

[Unicore]

I think it is a mistake to try to have this conversation generically about rpgs generally, because that is such a broad category to try to cover and the mythology of each game and what stories they are trying to tell are all different.

For the sake of why goblins are not just a playable character in pathfinder, but a core ancestry, all we have to look at is the mythology of Golarion and see that biological essentialism is something actively avoided with humanoid peoples on the material plane. On Golarion, it would absolutely feed into racist reductionism for any vast group of humanoids that have developed into multiple different cultures and kingdoms to be inherently tied to one alignment.

The gods of Golarion do not have the infinite power of creation that the gods of many other fantasy genre stories and games have. Many of them were mortals who obtained godhood. Those kinds of stories of entire groups of people created by the gods with metaphysical bonds to alignment are relegated to outsiders in the Golarion mythos. That some can break those bonds is tied to the in game reality that this is the age of lost omens, and the abilities of the gods to just speak reality into truth is limited and flawed in this game.

People arguing in favor of humanoid ancestries being alignment bound, in Golarion, are attempting to force the entire game into a single tiny box for their own comfort, without any attempt to understand the larger picture of the world that Golarion is. Dwarves don't only worship Torag in Golarion. In fact, it is perfectly reasonable to assume that there are dwarves in Golarion who have never heard of Torag and have no social or cultural connection to him. The same is true of Goblins and Lamashtu.

My problem with the entire debate around this issue is that it is way, way more tied to imposing limited perspective ideas on to the setting as a whole, often pulling those ideas in from other source material, making a convoluted mess of hypothetical situations that are not relevant to the game world. It is understandable for people to want to push back against people that are doing so, and ask them what motives they might have for doing so, especially when you hear phrases or language that gets used in other real world conversations, but the bottom line is that the whole hypothetical argument is essentially trolling when presented in the context of asking the question of why goblins are core ancestry in Golorian. The answer to that question is well known, clearly stated, and completely not a contradiction of any existing materials.

It is also understandable why someone might ask it if they have only read one AP or have had limited experience with paizo material, but there are plenty of places where folks asking the question earnestly can be directed to have that question answered at this point.

[Albatoonoe]

"Fictional Monstrous Races" runs a whole gamut, from goblins to Brain Collectors. What a lot of of people here are talking about are humanoids with free will. It is nigh impossible to divorce something like a goblin or Orc from humanity as they exist now.

Goblins have a long history of being used as anti-Semitic caricature. This bell can't be unrung and that is why we need to approach these things with grace and finesse.