Why are goblins a playable race now?

[pixierose]

thejeff wrote:

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...

Hi there, I want to say I'm not 100% sold on my own argument for some of the same weird reasons you brought up and it isn't really how I play the game( I've recently had a redeemer paladin spare a fairly weak devil who was enslaved. The creature is still trapped in its current location, and her hope that if she frees the creature by defeating the bigger bad perhaps the creature can one day change its ways.) So I don't really think that even if something has like innately evil characteristics on a metaphysical level that it always makes sense to just deem them kill on sight.

This was more of a response to those people who wish to use goblins as creatures with completely alien mindsets who all think the same, are well they function well as xenomorphs or gremlins who don't really function in the she narrative purpose as most things with the humanoid tags.

[thejeff]

Albatoonoe wrote:

"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.

There's some debate about how long that history actually is, though there are certainly modern examples. I'm not so sure the connection is strong enough to taint all depictions of goblins. The negative traits of Paizo's goblins don't seem to have anything to do with anti-Semitic tropes, even if you treat goblins as pure monsters. It's hard to see the adorable little homicidal pyromaniacs as Jewish caricatures.

[SuperBidi]

In my opinion, the real answer to the question is that, by making goblins a core race, Paizo is giving an anti-racist message. It's a political position, and I can understand why some people are annoyed when their hobby is used to carry political messages. But at the same time, you can't really avoid political messages in art, litterature or whatever, everything is politics.

[PossibleCabbage]

I'm just against the idea that any person (whether it's a green person, or a pointy-eared person, or a person with a weird thing above their eyebrows a la Star Trek) would have their morality encoded in their DNA.

Anybody who can choose, can choose to be evil, but can also choose to be good. The reasons why they choose to be evil are much more interesting than just insisting that their wickedness is somehow intrinsic.

[dirtypool]

Examine that a second. Your fantasy is to have someone left that it's okay to crush because you are clearly the right and they are clearly the wrong. It's a power fantasy in which there must be someone that it is okay to subjugate

The argument PossibleCabbage and many other are making is that the view that there should be people whom it is okay to crush because they are clearly evil and must be destroyed or crushed has been used in the real world to subjugate real people. The first step toward dehumanizing a real population is to paint them as an evil monolith, savage and unmovable.

It hits close to home to some people for whom the effects of that overt othering and its covert aftershocks are still felt in real life.

Why is your power fantasy more important than their response to the real world version of your power fantasy in an online conversation? If everyone at your table wants to play with older tropes like that, no one is stopping you. So why do you have to shut down a more nuanced conversation? Why must we only discuss fantasy games on the terms that suit your interpretations?

Is there not space for nuance in this community?