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Message: <blockquote data-quote="GreenTengu" data-source="post: 8113724" data-attributes="member: 6777454">Is this just an issue with people who grew up with the recent Lord of the Rings movies and just are incapable of getting their mind out of that?Like none of the people having an issue here have been around D&D for the last 25 years-- you just went from those Lord of the Rings movies and popped into D&D and expected D&D to be exactly the same and are just functionally incapable of grasping the idea of diversity among the traditional bad guy people?Like none of you ever played, for example, an MMORPG such as EverQuest or World of WarCraft?If one were to rewind way back, 30 years ago, to AD&D-- then, sure, there was hardly any difference between them.But the moment WotC took over, from 3.0 onward-- there was a very clear artistic direction. Hobgoblins are warm-skinned (yellow to red) and have sort of a cat-like look, but not enough to be full on furries-esque cat-people like Tabaxi are. Meanwhile Orcs were cool-skinned (green to blue) pig-like people, but again-- not like full on Mrs. Piggy, just slightly pig-like influence. Hobgoblins had proper full on smithed armor while Orcs wore hide and chain. More was expanded on the Orcs so that we knew they lived on the colder regions, high in the mountains or deep in the caverns. That they bred with not only humans, but also Ogres... meanwhile edition on edition, it was advanced that the Hobgoblins were civilized empire-builders.So we have these mildly pig-people barbarians who are smaller ogres and yet here we have a few people continually insisting that they are "big goblins". That hasn't been the case for 25 years of Dungeons and Dragons. There is virtually no crossover between goblins and orcs at all.How do you point to orange cat-people and green pig-people and insist they are exactly the same thing, but you have no problem with Halflings and Gnomes who are just short humans whose main substantially different trait is that one is usually portrayed as a bit younger and tend to be thieves and one is portrayed as a bit older with beards and usually wizards?One wants to argue that when you break it down to just saw enemy mechanics where something has 16 hit points and you hit it with a sword or arrow and it dies and drops loot... yeah, I suppose. But in terms of actual world building, there is a world of difference here. The only real similarity here is that they are two human-sized races that are often seen at level 1 just like all of the PC races and yet get pegged as "just monsters" rather than properly getting developed as the kind of regular denizens of the worlds that one would expect to see in an average party.But there has, at least on the narrative side, been considerable development of them over the past 25 years of D&D. And that seems to be the one hang-up here-- that you can't get over Lord of the Rings and insist that D&D perfectly emulate Lord of the Rings and not have a single additional element beyond the limited scope seen in those movies.</blockquote>

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