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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9724159" data-attributes="member: 4937">I kind of come at the problem in the opposite direction.  It's probably reasonable to assume that 75% of goblins are vicious cannibals who only want to kill, enslave, and eat everything that isn't a goblin.  But the PC's are very unlikely to encounter that "representative goblin" as their first encounter with goblins, because if they did then they'd probably die from that encounter.  Instead, the first encounter they had with goblins in my last big D&D campaign was as some of the buccaneers getting off a warship in the harbor alongside the PC barbarian that was ultimately destined to join the party, led by some rich looking pale skinned red headed human officers who were specifically called out as being an ally of the nation that the PCs were currently in.  And the first five or so encounters with goblins are like that, members of society that weren't attacking them or being attacked on sight by "in groups", because if you meet a goblin living in cosmopolitan lands amongst other races, chances are they are already "weird" from the standpoint of goblins as a whole.  Even like the goblin knight they met in the woods was going about his business and they let him go about it by that point, because they really had no way of knowing what that knight was up to.  What they did know by that point is that goblins aren't all easily characterized and don't attack on sight.   Looks and greetings were exchanged and they both warily went around each other.  Now, there is an argument to be made that if you meet a goblin knight in civilized lands there is a good chance he's scouting for a raiding party and will return and murder people and eat babies in the campaign season, but that wasn't really something I'd introduced to the players at that point.  In fact, one of the few characters that they captured and let go on parole was a hobgoblin mercenary, because by this point they had no preconceptions about goblins even though in the campaign setting it really is true that the majority of goblins are brutal murderous violent individuals.  They were judging them as individuals despite that because that's the direction the presentation had gone.Now, in a different setting on the fantasy planet where they start out directly near a goblin kingdom, a very different set of first impressions could have been created, and it would be I think an interesting sort of experiment to see how players in my game exposed to both first impressions reacted.</blockquote>

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