How RPGs turned goblins into people - TTRPG culture and design

[dreadlordmrson]

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This is an absolutely fascinating video.
Most times when people talk about the humanity of fantasy creatures in TTRPGs it's a discussion of prejudice. Or our real world morals. Of racism.
But this video is approaching the topic with the framing of game design and psychology, and it has a lot of fresh angles to consider.

Highlighting this comment from Bluecho4:
On another note, a species being "people" does not negate their ability to be antagonists, even on a large scale. It just requires recontextualizing their antagonism. Give them "people-reasons" for opposing the protagonists. Whether that is diagetic, like Drow living in deeply unjust hierarchies that profit from internal division, to a dragon's greed being a mirror of our own.

Person-enemies, by their nature, demand complexity. Individual monsters or monstrous societies granted personhood don't need to be rational or sympathetic, as such. If they're going to be granted "human-ness", they must simply have human qualities we recognize. Anger, desire, love, desperation, pride, spite. A PC should look at, say, Drow or Goblins menacing them, and say "but for the grace of the Gods, that would be me". Much as how a Drow or Goblin PC stands with the rest of the party because of very "person-y" reasons.

You can have traditional "antagonist species" in your D&D campaign, and also have them be entirely person-able in a party. It just demands a bit more effort in the world-building. (And it makes the truly inhuman adversaries seem all the more inhuman, because they diverge even farther from what we consider "human".)

And the reply by henry6715:
Yes, exactly! I don't think "antagonist species" are so hard to build. There have been "antagonist ethnicities" historically - non-agrarian peoples who live on the fringes of agrarian civilizations who raid for vast swaths of wealth: vikings, steppe nomads, etc.. Goblins can both be authentically vicious raiders who burn and plunder settlements regularly and be people.

This also opens up a lot of historically inspired narrative possibilities: A great hobgoblin conqueror has taken vast swaths of land, now divided amongst their descendants; which lands will stay under the control of the invading "monsters" and eventually integrate cultures? Which lands will rebel against their ruling caste?

Comments

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

Interesting discussion.

Emotions aren't instincts, though. Instincts are survival routines that can be passed down, and when needed can work faster than thought. Some can manifest as emotions, like fear of snakes, but they're deeper than the feeling itself.

In fact the root of instincts is valence: the ability and desire to move toward what sustains life and away from what threatens life. It's the first thing an organism has to develop in order to persist, and while it is a simple binary, it's surprisingly hard to get up that first step. Even sessile organisms need ways to meet their survival requirements and thus can be responsive in ways that humans just don't think about.

So when crafting an organism for storytelling, think about what it needs, how it pursues those needs, what threatens it, how it defends itself -- those are all basic biology. And biology is deeply weird.

One of my favorite references is Humon Comics.