Kobolds: The Goblins of 2e?

[Baron Ulfhamr]

keftiu wrote:

How many times can you do that story, though? The first Drizzt novel came out in 1988 - the singular good guy Drow in a world that hates and fears his kind has been a fantasy genre mainstay for coming up on 40 years.

...but what of the players that never experienced that because unlike me (and maybe you) they're under 40 years old?

keftiu wrote:

Sometimes, you just want to play a Gnoll because you think hyenas are cute, or you reach for a Hobgoblin because you like the sound of being a military-trained alchemist - demanding those characters all have suspicion baked into their stories is frustrating and limiting. All of these published Ancestries are meant to be used! It’s a big, fantastical world out there in Golarion, and there’s places for damn near anything to find a home.

Sure, but then there really needs to be some differentiation between these races to make them into the different species that they are, otherwise it feels like a great big costume party- humans in funny suits trope.

I get the desire for one big happy world, but adventure often comes in response to adversity. I LOVE playing around and through difficulties, but this isn't everyone's style. I LOVE when characters break stereotypes, but they have to exist to stand out against them.

[Rysky]

baron Ulfhamr wrote:

but what of the players that never experienced that

Boohoo?

Baron Ulfhamr wrote:

Sure, but then there really needs to be some differentiation between these races to make them into the different species that they are, otherwise it feels like a great big costume party- humans in funny suits trope.

Newsflash, it's always gonna feel like that because all of them are played by humans and written by humans. With that said of course you can have differences and tweaks to culture and mindsets, you don't require racism in order to stand out or make a note. People play talking puppets, planar plants, robots, skeletons, and gnomes just fine without it.

Baron Ulfhamr wrote:

I get the desire for one big happy world, but adventure often comes in response to adversity.

And there's plenty of that, as the adventures Paizo puts out show.

Baron Ulfhamr wrote:

I LOVE when characters break stereotypes, but they have to exist to stand out against them.

That's a tidbit you enjoy doing for fun, not a requirement for everyone or the game itself, and also a lived experience by living people facing real oppression.

Nuance and awareness is more important than you feeding on simple drama.

[CorvusMask]

Can I say real reason why I'm confused by notion of "Why can't there be monsters left to fight"?

Because fiends are still a thing. There literally exists aberrations from other planets that think in horrifyingly alien ways. There is evil empire of worms in darklands. City of body snatchers. Etc, I don't really see why there needs to be playable ancestry that is always chaotic evil when there are already lot of extremely evil monsters in the setting :p

Why exactly would we need humanoid species to be always safe to kill on spot when there are bunch of nightmare monsters?

[Gortle]

CorvusMask wrote:

Can I say real reason why I'm confused by notion of "Why can't there be monsters left to fight"?

Because fiends are still a thing. There literally exists aberrations from other planets that think in horrifyingly alien ways. There is evil empire of worms in darklands. City of body snatchers. Etc, I don't really see why there needs to be playable ancestry that is always chaotic evil when there are already lot of extremely evil monsters in the setting :p

Why exactly would we need humanoid species to be always safe to kill on spot when there are bunch of nightmare monsters?

Shame on you for misunderstanding the poor undertrodden demonic hordes.

Is your empathy that limited?

[keftiu]

Baron Ulfhamr wrote:

[...]but this isn't everyone's style.

You're very close to understanding why we don't want this to be a universal narrative for most Ancestries.

People buy the books, in part, because they want to use the options within. They should be able to without the expectation of their campaign being a parable about inclusion - their PCs can just be cool heroes, which is the game's core assumption.

[Baron Ulfhamr]

@Rysky- we can converse and even disagree without the snark.

@CorvusMask- "I don't really see why there needs to be playable ancestry that is always chaotic evil..." ALWAYS would be terrible, DEFAULT to vary from is what I'm after. It's OK if that's the norm, but this character, or even this story is different!

@keftiu- I feel like the only dissenting voice and you seem to speak for what most here seem to want, so I see no need to argue difference opinions. I always enjoyed homebrewing things to be different, rebelling against the expectation with monsters, but when it becomes the norm it feels less special I guess. Very, VERY different from the games I grew up with.

[Megistone]

Gortle wrote:

Shame on you for misunderstanding the poor undertrodden demonic hordes.

Is your empathy that limited?

This. Demons are intelligent, and yet they are evil by nature. But somehow, in the same setting, having specific other kinds of creatures in the same spot implies that you are evil in real life.

Baron Ulfhamr wrote:

@Rysky- we can converse and even disagree without the snark.

Unfortunately, that's not possible.

[aobst128]

It depends where you are in the world, wether or not specific ancestries will have stigmas attached to them. Like the tieflings living near the world wound have to deal with the fears around infernal anything. Although, that might mostly be 1st edition. But those types of stories can still exist in the world. Overcoming adversity from prejudice fits well enough in fantasy as long as it's not a "you're one of the good ones" mentality.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I think part of it too is that the base assumptions of Pathfinder's worldbuilding are different from those of its predecessors. Earlier campaign settings tended to follow the model of the so-called "Dark Ages:" civilization is limited to isolated pockets with vast and dangerous wildernesses and ruins in-between, and thus the assumption is that the world outside the tiny villages and occasional city and any creature found there was dark and hostile, no matter whether they spoke or not. (Note that this wasn't actually accurate of the time period, but rather the image popular culture developed that later influenced writings like The Lord of the Rings that in turn influenced the writers of table-top RPGs, and thus those writers weren't necessarily concerned with historical accuracy of the living-conditions of post-Roman Europe.) Thus adventurers are those willing to risk their lives outside the safety of civilization for the sake of gold and glory (literally in the very first iteration of D&D your XP was the GP value of whatever treasure you found).

Golarion, on the other hand, isn't like this. There's literally more civilization so-to-speak and travel between places is a lot easier and safer. Thus, the kinds of stories the setting tells aren't of people venturing OUTSIDE civilization, but rather WITHIN civilization, protecting places and people they care about, with things like wealth and power being more an incidental bonus rather than the stated goal of the group. As a result, intelligent creatures are now able to be seen as having societies of their own that are equally valid and worthy of respect, where in the old model they were assumed to just be squatting in ruined locations of the old empires or in roving warbands raiding the isolated pockets of civilization.

There ARE still places on Golarion that are ancient ruins or spooky woods full of monsters, but those aren't places people like orcs, kholo, goblins and kobolds are going to wanna live in the first place.

And yes, a lot of the prejudices of the old base assumptions come from the fact that the earliest games were written by a few rather conservative old white dudes in the 70s (If I remember correctly, there was either an implicit or explicit idea that elves didn't have souls because Tolkien's Catholic beliefs color The Lord of the Rings significantly, and Gygax, being a Jehovah's Witness, abhorred Catholics on principle).

[Vardoc Bloodstone]

willfromamerica wrote:

keftiu wrote:

So not only are you probably brutalizing this violent caricature of striking workers of a marginalized Ancestry, you're bribed by their oppressors for your help breaking the strike and refusing to prosecute the illegal practices of their bosses. Thank you for having me look this up - it's worse than I imagined!

A token note that resolving the situation without violence grants extra XP hardly makes up for what a mess everything else is. If memory serves, this is the volume where the author announced they were donating all their profits from it to charity due to its depiction of 'violence against protestors,' which seems to refer to this very encounter.

Yep, that whole section of the adventure is BAD.

Is it possible that the whole point of that adventure was to show that what the characters may believe was black-and-white was, in fact, gray? That there were bad actors on both sides? That the supposedly “good” citizens at the beginning had in fact done some very bad things?

Could this adventure actually have been intended to be pro-union? Conversation provoking? Creating scenarios where PC decisions have moral consequences? Even encourage PCs to think through when they choose to use violence?

Of course not.

[Dancing Wind]

Vardoc Bloodstone wrote:

Is it possible that the whole point of that adventure was....

And that's why the creators donated all their profits to charity?

It's really difficult to pretend that an adventure had a noble goal when even its creators back away from it.

[Vardoc Bloodstone]

Dancing Wind wrote:

And that's why the creators donated all their profits to charity?

The timing of this adventure was problematic, coming just after George Floyd and the calls for police reform (which I support for the record). And the way the material was presented (such as the passages quoted above) was also problematic in a “this could be perceived as” manner.

So yes, those criticisms were valid. But that is different from the “intent” of the adventure.

[aobst128]

It was definitely a missed opportunity to make a kobold Mafia villain. Could have taken them down to help the workers as well as their employers. But it was just "worker bad". Too bad because kobolds would make excellent laborers with their expertise in cooperation and ingenuity. But they botched it so bad, they won't touch that with a mile long pole now.

[Vardoc Bloodstone]

keftiu wrote:

So I have to ask: are the Kobolds the next big Pathfinder success story? Should we expect to see them in the PF3 corebook, if such a thing comes to pass? How do you feel about the little dragons and their increased spotlight as 2e continues?

Getting back on topic - I agree kobolds have been the next success story and I am happy with their promotion in PF2e.

The two kobolds in Hellknight Hill (Pib and Zarf?) were some of my favorite NPCs of all time. But that adventure had a lot of great NPCs.

[PossibleCabbage]

It's never difficult for a GM to create some context that signposts "this is a thing you should fight" So I don' t know if anything needs a contextless "murk on sight".

In terms of antagonists, Kobolds and Goblins were small fry anyway. So promoting them to "fan favorite PC options" was no loss in terms of "what the PCs should be fighting."

There will, after all, never be any shortage of human bandits and cultists.

[Doug Hahn]

Funny, I opened this thread expecting something else altogether. It seems to me Kobolds are the new convenient dungeon fodder, replacing Goblins as a default from older editions.

After running the intro modules, some PFS scenarios, and looking at the re-release of Kobold King my takeaway is "what the hell did Kobolds ever do to you, Paizo!?"

This isn't to say they cannot be evil or used as weak enemies for adventurers to (perhaps justifiably) murderize, but it sure seems like killing kobolds en masse with little to no provocation is a thing Paizo expects 2e adventurers to do — and do often.

I mean Beginners box:

… is literally like "let's teach you how to play TTRPGs by killing this whole tribe of kobolds who — as far as you know — just stole a few dried fish."

Of course, let's not forget some of the wonky art and mechanically weaker Kobold ancestry. I am pretty sure Paizo hates them :p

[Vardoc Bloodstone]

Crown of the Kobold King is a good place to understand where kobolds started in Pathfinder 20 years ago.

For a recent example look at Little Trouble in Big Absalom.

[keftiu]

Vardoc Bloodstone wrote:

Is it possible that the whole point of that adventure was to show that what the characters may believe was black-and-white was, in fact, gray? That there were bad actors on both sides? That the supposedly “good” citizens at the beginning had in fact done some very bad things?

Could this adventure actually have been intended to be pro-union? Conversation provoking? Creating scenarios where PC decisions have moral consequences? Even encourage PCs to think through when they choose to use violence?

Of course not.

You can tie yourself into whatever knots you want. The text on the page is still "the PCs are Good cops beating up on violent, Evil union protesters" - you can ascribe whatever intentions you dream up, or any meta-textual commentary you imagine, but the published product remains that.

You're doing an awful lot of concern trolling here, Vardoc; there's no ground given on the fact that what you called a "mischaracterization" is straight from the pages, and rather than offer any kind of acknowledgement, you try to spin a bizarre narrative that maybe violence against murderous teamsters is actually somehow a subtle pro-union work of art. Sometimes a writer just screws up and their creation punches down - you don't gotta work this hard to polish a mistake someone else made, especially one they've publicly apologized and made amends for.

[Castilliano]

Vardoc, I think while your interpretation is plausible, there's no evidence for it while the others are citing directly from the text. If Paizo/the author had meant for such a moral quandary re: union-busting that'd require some sort of sidebar for clarification, and with caveats for how to balance such issues at a real-world table of gamers. So taken at face value it's bad, and that's how it'd play out at most tables because they'll run it as is. It's admirable you might take the effort to flesh out the opportunities there, but that's all extra, not in the product itself.

--

And I do think players indulging mindlessly in adventure as entertainment do want clarity on what they can or can't kill, much like the circles underneath creatures in many computer RPGs. Having to ascertain each NPC in context (or *gasp* as an individual) can detract from simplistic enjoyment. Yet that shouldn't be the default! As for professional products I'd Paizo release prefer sophisticated and nuanced situations (even if much of the nuance is "there are exceptions somewhere, but these guys here are outright attacking you").
It's easy to reduce an RPG to its basic form if that's what one prefers, but it takes effort to create/GM the opposite situation without some help from developers. I balked when Belkzen reformed (somewhat), but realized the evil orc marauders I want still reside there, they just have company. Same with goblins, kobolds, etc. The evil versions haven't gone away, no more than evil humans have. If anything we're getting more flavors and options, without even losing the old ones.

[Gortle]

keftiu wrote:

The text on the page is still "the PCs are Good cops beating up on violent, Evil union protesters"

How is that any different to Evil cops and Good protesters? Or any other two sides you can imagine. You are imposing your perspective onto what the author has written.

I am very happy to have stories about good protesters and evil protesters, good cops and bad cops. Both clearly exist and have their place. I'm not overly invested in one perspective.

I'm much more concerned about it from the point of view of lazy writing, that is motivations not reasonably fleshed out. If you are going to kill kobolds for stealing food, then you need to justify it with say a back story of widespread hunger and orphans dying for lack of food. This is what I dislike simplistic Good and Evil labels for. It can be used as a shortcut, with emotionally unsatisfying results. More complex motivations like for example as soon by the choice a Rhaenys Targaryen made on a certain show this week, are much more satisfying. Even if they come with casual deaths and apparent physics problems.

If we are going to role play we need motivations.

I'd really prefer if the writers gave us some background so we don't have to wing it, and potentially end up in very grey area. Not every game should be a morality play.

[keftiu]

Gortle wrote:

keftiu wrote:

The text on the page is still "the PCs are Good cops beating up on violent, Evil union protesters"

How is that any different to Evil cops and Good protesters? Or any other two sides you can imagine. You are imposing your perspective onto what the author has written.

I am very happy to have stories about good protesters and evil protesters, good cops and bad cops. Both clearly exist and have their place. I'm not overly invested in one perspective.

My post is in reply to Vardoc suggesting this scene is somehow meant to be pro-union.

Your frustrations with Alignment are an issue with the inherited skeleton underpinning the d20 fantasy space, not with specifically the scenario in question. You want to gripe about lazy writing? Presenting laborers of a marginalized background who are protesting against the explicitly, textually-acknowledged-as-illegal conduct of their employers as murderous, Evil loons who deserve execution is lazy, while Good cops taking bribes from those criminal employers is something altogether far worse, and that's what we're actually talking about here - not some hypothetical.

[Vardoc Bloodstone]

Keftiu - my disagreement with your opinion was not intended to be a personal attack. It looks like you may have taken it that way. If so, I apologize.

I stand by my opinions but have nothing further to add, so I’ll avoid detailing this thread further.

[keftiu]

Vardoc Bloodstone wrote:

Keftiu - my disagreement with your opinion was not intended to be a personal attack. It looks like you may have taken it that way. If so, I apologize.

I stand by my opinions but have nothing further to add, so I’ll avoid detailing this thread further.

There was no personal attack anywhere in any of your posts; my feelings are not hurt.

My replies are entirely to the points you've been trying to make, points you haven't defended or supported at all. When you come into a conversation to say "Well, what about [...]?" over and over again, answering others with only more moving of the goal posts, it makes you look like someone who isn't here in good faith - it really reads as "sealioning," and this community deserves better than that.

Dropping into a thread to say something inflammatory, then claiming people have misread personal offense into your posts rather than understanding they're upset at the actual content of your commentary feels very disingenuous.

[Vardoc Bloodstone]

Fine Keftiu - you are right, I was wrong. Argument rescinded.

[Ravingdork]

Gortle wrote:

CorvusMask wrote:

Can I say real reason why I'm confused by notion of "Why can't there be monsters left to fight"?

Because fiends are still a thing. There literally exists aberrations from other planets that think in horrifyingly alien ways. There is evil empire of worms in darklands. City of body snatchers. Etc, I don't really see why there needs to be playable ancestry that is always chaotic evil when there are already lot of extremely evil monsters in the setting :p

Why exactly would we need humanoid species to be always safe to kill on spot when there are bunch of nightmare monsters?

Shame on you for misunderstanding the poor undertrodden demonic hordes.

Is your empathy that limited?

You jest, but that really is where this is headed. Just you wait.

[PossibleCabbage]

You know what's a fun AP where you can kill all manner of evil things on sight? Blood Lords.

[Vardoc Bloodstone]

PossibleCabbage wrote:

You know what's a fun AP where you can kill all manner of evil things on sight? Blood Lords.

Speaking of killing evil things on sight, and tying it back to the prior discussion:

There is an old-school charm to having a beer-and-pretzels game where you don’t have to think about morality and you can tell a monster is Evil just by looking at it. All humans and elves are Good, all goblins, orcs, and humanoids are Evil, and all you have to do is roll initiative and swing your shiny sword. As a big fan of Dragonlance, I still thought it was funny how all the magic users were color-coded for your convenience.

But that type of game breaks down when you analyze it more closely. Tropes where an entire ‘race’ is considered “evil” carry negative parallels to real world and have been justifiably criticized. I’m sure others here can expand on this further.

So I’m all for expanding the ‘alignment diversity’ of kobold and goblin PCs and NPCs, and applaud Paizo for doing so. Besides, any true old-school gamer knows that the best villains are humans anyways.

[keftiu]

Ravingdork wrote:

Rysky wrote:

Stop gaslighting just because you're mad people didn't like the cop brutality AP.

What cop brutality AP? I've yet to see one.

And I've played through Agents of Edgewatch. It doesn't qualify under that description. Anyone making such a ridiculous claim had a chip on their shoulder from the start.

How did your group resolve the encounter with the Evil protesters and their law-breaking former employer?

[aobst128]

Vardoc Bloodstone wrote:

PossibleCabbage wrote:

You know what's a fun AP where you can kill all manner of evil things on sight? Blood Lords.

Speaking of killing evil things on sight, and tying it back to the prior discussion:

There is an old-school charm to having a beer-and-pretzels game where you don’t have to think about morality and you can tell a monster is Evil just by looking at it. All humans and elves are Good, all goblins, orcs, and humanoids are Evil, and all you have to do is roll initiative and swing your shiny sword. As a big fan of Dragonlance, I still thought it was funny how all the magic users were color-coded for your convenience.

But that type of game breaks down when you analyze it more closely. Tropes where an entire ‘race’ is considered “evil” carry negative parallels to real world and have been justifiably criticized. I’m sure others here can expand on this further.

So I’m all for expanding the ‘alignment diversity’ of kobold and goblin PCs and NPCs, and applaud Paizo for doing so. Besides, any true old-school gamer knows that the best villains are humans anyways.

We'll said. It's more interesting to have nuanced moralities within groups anyways. There's even precedent for redeemed demons and the like. Few and far between but still.

[aobst128]

If you enjoyed Agents of Edgewatch, that's perfectly fine. It's a game and you're meant to have fun with it. It's just that the company moved away from that kind of writing for sensible reasons. Doesn't mean the people who liked it are bad people. Pathfinder is fun. That's what we're all here for.