Sometimes I forget about the differences between D&D as intended by the developers and D&D as I play it (and have always played it, and how it’s played by the people I know, etc.) Reading today’s Dragon’s-Eye View, I saw a description of how goblins work in the world of D&D, the generic “all-campaign” where the developers work. It’s the place where dragons are strong, intelligent capstone creatures, where creatures like giants and golems are as rare and awe-inspiring as devils and gods themselves, and adventurers are shining examples of the heights to which civilized races (and only civilized races) can ascend.
You know, trash like that.
In particular, I really really don’t like the idea of the goblins as written. Part of it is the notion that I’m not sure exactly what the author of the article wanted to write. He talks about giving goblins “some structure and sense of culture”, because they’re a valid race just like humans and dwarves, then going out of the way to make them “appear more ‘monstrous’ and less evolved”. So they want goblins to be real and believable, but not so much that players feel bad killing them. He also goes on and on about how he doesn’t want them to be goofy or bumbling, then says they make great henchman. There’s no mention of any goblin leaders or standouts. So they’re serious creatures, but not so much that you have to take them seriously.
But mostly, it’s that I like the idea of the goofy, bumbling goblin. I like the look of the Pathfinder goblin, and I like the culture they gave it. They made goblins scary in groups, but for a reason, rather than just “because the XP budget is higher”. They gave players and DMs reasons to be afraid of goblins, especially when they were leveraging their strengths, like pyromancy. But they also kept them likable. They gave players a reason to see goblins as a race like humans, which gives them opportunities to interact with them in a non-sword way.
Wizards’ D&D has tended to be super-serious since sometime in 2nd Edition. No humor is allowed in creatures and very little is allowed in books in general. They’ve discussed why this is, but that’s different from what they’re doing, which is going out of their way to remove all possibility of comedy, trusting players to create it on their own, often out-of-character because the in-character world has no patience for it. Some creatures should be able to be goofy, just like they can be noble or wise (which, per the article, goblins aren’t allowed to be). Wizards wants to be able to prevent a race from being comedic, but they’re fine with them being unsalvageable monsters, because in D&D most of your life is determined your race.
It all comes down to intent. Wizards’ intent was to make goblins be a low-level monster and not a second thing (this is almost explicit in the article). My intent is to make them entertaining, with the freedom to be something else instead or in addition. This may just be another instance of Int-based simulationist DMing (“All things have a place in the world determined by the author or DM, and they must occupy that place.”) versus Cha-based simulationist DMing in general (“All things should lead to enjoyment at the table, and they really need to make sense.”). But I actually always thought of vanilla D&D as Wis-based, simulationist in 3rd Edition and gamist in 4th with 5th intentionally somewhere in between. If it’s moving elsewhere, we might have trouble some years hence.
It’s a bug in the D&D world design. They have far, far too many humanoid races, and so they have to boil each down to a manageable stereotype that also falls into the dichotomy of “human” vs. “always chaotic evil” (like you said, fodder for your players to murder without a thought).
I also love goblins. I love Pathfinder goblins. I love my own 3.5E goblins-as-oppressed-minority formulation. There’s a lot you can do with them besides kill them. They’re way more relatable than most of the whackadoo humanoids in D&D.
And to your last point, Wis-based DMing and simulationism don’t mix at all. Being Wis-based I tend to see things a little differently, but I think we can agree on this fact. Games that are good for people like me are those that give players a lot of freedom, allow them to set goals for themselves or their characters, and which have rules that support them driving towards those goals. I just have to steer and play NPCs – that might seem like a lesser form of GMing, but it’s not! It requires a different skill set: setting appropriate scenes; aiming towards player flags; introducing good complications; shepherding the stories that they want to tell.
But that’s definitely not D&D. D&D (especially 3/3.5/PF) has a lot of small, moving pieces and you have to be able to stay on top of all of them (Int) or do magic to draw your players’ attention to the important ones (Cha). Wizards builds their game and writes its DM advice as if, if you could just understand what your players wanted and how to make them play nice, you could run the perfect game. They want to hand you all of the pieces, ready-made so you don’t have to think about the fiddly bits. But the thing is, you absolutely do if you want to have a game.
And that is why stock goblins suck. They’re a goblin-shaped cover over a bunch of potentially fiddly bits, and the one-size-fits-all nature of that cover, while it simplifies things for low-level Wis-based DMs (or low-level DMs in general), is deeply unsatisfying for those looking for real real depth.
So as a DM I’m not sure what my stat would be (maybe Dex?) but I also have to agree that I don’t like seeing goblins (or any race/monster for that matter) purely as a stereotype. One of the most fun campaigns I ran was a humanoids campaign using the Orcs of Thar supplement for D&D (none of this Advanced crap!) and it was full of inter-party conflict and very little got actually accomplished by the party. Thar’s Manual of Good Conduct was an excellent aide to set the tone, but the actual content of the books made the humanoid races unique and interesting (no small feat for original D&D)
I will say I do like the Pathfinder Goblins quite a bit. Should there be redeemable Goblins? Surely. There certainly are redeemable Half-Orcs unless you ascribe to the possibility that a race was created entirely by rape, which is not something I’d prefer to do.
However what kind of campaign your players want can enter into it. If the players just want to kill monsters and get treasure and xp, giving the monsters family, and feelings and empathetic qualities isn’t likely to actually enhance their play experience.
To be honest, I am a bit troubled every time I play Orcs Must Die … while it’s fun, and I suppose there has to be a “bad guy” … what if they’re just misunderstood? And sometimes making your players worry about their actions IS the right thing to do, especially if it’s ostensible a good and/or lawful campaign.
Are you suggesting that someone who is the product of rape is not “redeemable”? A child of rape is at worst a victim, not a criminal. I think a half-orc character in such a world would be highly sympathetic – especially if the society shows as little charity towards the victims of sexual assault as ours does.
Far from it. I guess I didn’t write that well. I meant redeemable as in from the creator’s perspective not the character/race’s. That is to say, I find it pretty irredeemable to create a fiction where there exists a race that is solely the product of rape. The Half-Orcs themselves are not the issue to me, but rather any setting that makes them entirely victims is pretty destitute. Honestly if you sit down and think about it very hard at all the whole situation with Humanoids in D&D, and even orcs in Tolkien, is pretty despicable.
Let me re-phrase it:
There certainly are redeemable Orcs unless you ascribe to the possibility that a race (Half-Orcs) was created entirely by rape, which is not something I’d prefer to do.
Tolkien’s races were very flat and highly essentialist. But Tolkien’s writing was in many ways as much of a metaphor for the world as he saw it as C.S. Lewis’ was. He was making a political and social statement; it’s ultimately left to the reader to render judgment.
You know, I think there is a place in fiction for that sort of thing, in the sense that it mirrors actual things that have happened in history which could be explored in an interesting and tasteful way. There was a time in America where nearly all mixed-race children were the product of non-consensual sex. Is that a place you want to go in your roleplaying? Maybe, if you think you can handle it. But that’s not for everyone.
One of the great things about fantasy is that you can take a real-world issue, file off the serial numbers, and explore it in a much safer context that is only fraught with as much real-world baggage as you want it to be.
I am not trying to trivializing rape by suggesting you should flippantly throw it into your game. You probably shouldn’t by default. But if you want to explore how a character who is the product of rape deals with that; with his/her own issues of sexuality; with being an outsider, undesirable, or suffering whatever other prejudices come out of the greater society… as long as everyone else is cool with that, I think it’s something you could totally do.
A lot of players sort of stab at deep-seated social and emotional issues without really addressing them. How many characters are orphans, or grew up in poverty, or in a violent environment? Few players really explore those parts of their characters – they’re throw-away bits of backstory. I want to see players wrestling with what that really means; how that character would think differently from they do – or if the character shares a background with the player, whether or not the character copes in the same ways.
While I agree that there can be a place for these kinds of stories, I don’t think D&D is the obvious choice for vehicle to bear them. I love that Apocalypse World is fraught with hard or ambiguous moral choices. I love that D&D generally is not. It is nice on occasion to enter the intellectual safety of combat against a foe that you know empirically both IC and OOC to be the bad guy. Having someone is just plain “bad” that you can beat up on without moral qualms can be a great time… which is not to say that having to make hard choices, or having no perfect “right” option isn’t interesting or fun to face. I don’t need zombies in my Friendship is Magic game, nor rainbows and candy in my Walking Dead game.
I agree with you, but there are two problems:
1. A lot of people only play one game or a small group of related games. There are a lot of perfectly good reasons for this. This is a blog about running one specific type of game. We shouldn’t exclude the possibility of people running D&D games with moral ambiguity and hard choices, even if our preference would be to address them in another system.
2. These types of issues are bound to come up occasionally in even black and white, good vs. evil games. And not addressing them can itself have some unfortunate implications.
3. One of the nice things about addressing hard issues in a world with less moral ambiguity is that characters can eventually triumph and overcome them. That’s possible in any game, but I think in a game like D&D the assumption is that if the characters are successful, they’ll get happy endings.
Again, don’t disagree, but I think there’s sometimes room for this stuff in D&D if the players are ok with it.
I am an old Game Master with my roots mired in Ad&D from the late 70s and I was unhappy with both irredeemable monsters and alignment back then. Truth be told, I do not believe goofy races, monster or not, either. DnD has had tried to say that alignment is an inborn trait and a factor of environment in different sources, sometimes at the same time. My players never assumed that goblin was meat bag of small XP, because I never ran goblins (nor really any monster/NPC) that way. I believe that all encounters should be true to the campaign in which they are run, so if there is a campaign that expects there to comedic monsters, then goblins could be buffoons and jokes. If the campaign is there are only Light and Dark races only, then goblins are irredeemable and Dark. I quit using alignment years ago and built racial cultures based on environment and religion. Goblins are dark, despicable, little creatures whose biology drives them to procreate and have large, pack-like clans which worship demons or dark gods. DnD can be a good tool to tell many different types of stories, but it does require a consensus around the table, as to which style of story to tell.