Writing up a description for goblins for an upcoming game got

>>49687161
Anarcho-capitalism. Everyone's looking out for numero-uno first and foremost, but sometimes to save your own hide you have to help someone else - either so they won't seek retribution or so you can call up a favor later.

Lots of backstabbing and maneuvering, either low-grade gang shit or highbrow courts.

Of course, if these are goblins we're talking about, and you're going for a lower fantasy kinda vibe, odds are most of them would be loners, or have small tribes. Think Hall of the Mountain King type stuff.

>>49687161
It's kind of pointless to navel gaze about how they come to exist and cooperate. They literally exist to be the bad guys in your game. That's what they are, and that's what they do. The story and campaign dictate how they work.

>>49687161

Tolkien's own explanation was that the Will of beings like Morgoth, Sauron, and Saruman was required for orcs to be anything more than a disunited rabble.

Cf. also stormtroopers or clone troopers and either Emperor Sheev or Joruus C'Baoth.

>>49687937
Would they make bad guys, though? They sound more like comic relief.

>>49687161
I can tell you've never worked in a hotel.

Humans are all of those things, magnified by ten. working in a hotel gives you an insight into how monstrous we are for our own sakes.

>>49692075
I sense storytime in this post.

>>49687270
Anarcho capitalism uses the honor system instead of a government. That's what the NAP is, something that isn't enforced but everyone is supposed to follow for the society to work.
So, no. You've got it backwards. Anarcho-capitalism requires a society of only pure good creatures to function, humans aren't fit to maintain it, never mind these goblins.

>>49687161
>How WOULD a race of beings like that would form a society?

Easy, just look at Arab countries, especially back when they were just nomadic bandits.

>>49692063
See the Skaven. They're a lot like this, and people think they're funny...until they turn your army into insane clanrats, or bombard you with warpstone-laced chlorine gas, or unleash plagues and lightning cannons, or shoot you AND their troops with steam powered gatling guns.

>>49692502
>nomadic bandits
>"society"

>>49687161
M8, those things exist in the our world and are called Austrians.

This feels like an attempt at starting up a racism bait thread. Clever, since you never specify which race they stand for. Every /pol/lack on board will assume they're referring to their favorite. 7/10, nearly got me to say something.

Reported.

http://articles.latimes.com/1997/jul/25/news/mn-16208

It'd look like Israel.

Not even kidding or trying to be /pol/, just read that article to see what it'd be like.

Drawing from that, I'd say that you need a strong enemy that completely surrounds them.

>>49693124
>>49693132
The whole Middle East is like that, the Israelis are just the newest inhabitants, so they've just learned it and think of it as a revelation.

In the UAE, murdering your own father is a perfectly acceptable way of advancing in life. Half the emirs got their position this way. If your sheikdom has a weak army and lots of oil, it's only natural that your neighbors will invade and conquer you. An Arab man who wouldn't kill another person who threatened their interests appears not to deserve them in the first place.

It's just the cultural history of the region.

>>49693156
Except the concept developed in the ghetto, i.e. before they actually got to the ME.

>>49693132
>In negotiations, an American generally will put his cards on the table, expect the other side to do the same and assume that a happy compromise lives somewhere in the middle. But Israelis and Palestinians do not bargain in this way.

Amusingly, when we learn about negotiating with Americans, we're taught they're the exact opposite. Overly polite, double-talking backstabbers who only ever say what the other side wants to hear because they're counting on cheating them anyway the moment the deal is sealed.

>>49693132
>>49693156
>>49693190
>>49693203
Weird, it's... it's almost as national stereotypes are... bullshit?!

>>49687937
This. You've designed literally the last plausible successful organism, tautologically. You've literally just said, "How do I justify the natural formation of a society whose members are only described as having all of the characteristics that naturally forming societies select against?"

>>49693215
>implying it hasn't been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Australians are inveterate shitposters

>>49687937
BOOORIIING. Seriously, that is boring as fuark. No complexity, nothing to marvel upon, no way for players to think outside the box and exploit the weakness of goblin society, no way to make them into allies with some cuting edge diplomacy, banter and bribery. Just generic go and kill. This style of roleplay is so painfully boring.

>>49692063
>>49692517
This.

You've got a culture of individuals that only care about themselves. You'd want a high birth rate- unsustainably high. Parents would eat their own children if food was scarce.

Children develop quickly, because parents usually get bored of the novelty within a month or two. Faster in times of war or famine.

Under a strong ruler goblins will collaborate, provided they're not forced to give or accept charity. Wounded are left to die or recover, and a wounded goblin that is rescued will usually attack the rescuer out of shame and outrage.

Goblin society could be considered ultra-capitalist, but they virtually never use consistent currency. Goods such as slaves, weapons, food and clothing are exchanged directly. Goblins who can't 'afford' food or shelter will often sell themselves as slaves.

By goblin standards, offering charity or mercy is unthinkable and dishonourable. Helping the sick and injured is considered a waste of resources, and birth rates are so high that many goblins are named in batches.

Any ruler employing goblin troops usually keeps non-goblin caretakers to feed and raise goblin children. Most parents don't consider this charity- a child's much easier to make than a sword, after all.

>>49693270
Yeah but none of us drink Fosters.

>>49693374
This. It would be a kind of tribal monarchy. The family is ruled by the father because he can beat the shit out of anybody else in the family. The village is ruled by the mayor because he was the last one standing in the yearly "elections" (everyone who wants to be mayor jumps into a pit and the last person standing becomes mayor). He might have some elder goblin advisors simply because it takes serious wits and cunning to survive to age of 20 or more for a goblin. The King rules all the towns because he beat up all the mayors. There is a standing rule that if you kill the king you become the new king, but most goblins don't want to deal with ruling a kingdom's worth of goblins.

The goblin laws are very strict (punishable by humiliation, torture, and maiming) but have absolutely no qualifiers or description. Take for example the laws on how you become mayor
1) Every year elections are held
2) During the election all candidates enter the voting ring
3) the last candidate left in the ring becomes the mayor

Cut and dry but also with no additional rules. Non-goblins can participate in these elections since they laws never specify that they only apply to goblins. This makes it exceptionally easy for other races to enter and rule goblin society (if an orc feels like he wants some goblin servants all he has to do is find a town during election season and beat the piss out of all the goblins) but dangerous as goblin laws should be borderline nonsensical, or at the very least so vague that it is impossible to follow all of them, goblin society mostly functions due to the fact that the laws are only brought up if one goblin feels like he needs to kill another goblin.

Goblins are fucking boring. Never been done anywhere remotely interesting since Warcraft, and by god has this been done to death already since then.

>>49687161
Sounds like some kind of socially experimental enclave from Eclipse Phase, DESU. Why they'd make themselves all ugly and grotesque I don't know.

>>49687161
Just got to nitpick a second by saying that laziness is one of the best traits of humanity as it gives us the urge to come up with more efficient ways to do things. Without it we wouldn't be where we are today as a species as new inventions and technology are in the most part based upon the desire to do something with less effort.

>>49693495
>>49693374
Don't take this to mean goblins are dumb. They aren't... always. They are practically always illiterate and uneducated, however.

Goblins are actually rather social and will perform, chant, sing dance and tell (bad) jokes just like any other species. They're dreadful at all of it, but some try nonetheless.

In battle, lack of discipline is tempered by ferocity and volume. Most goblin soldiers will only take orders from someone who's personally defeated them in combat, so battles usually go like this.

>The chieftan or king presents a battle strategy
>a gang of short murderous humanoids do whatever the fuck they want

>>49696523
>as new inventions and technology are in the most part based upon the desire to do something with less effort
This is so bullshit I don't even know how that could've come out of anybodied mouth. You sir are trully gifted in the retardation department. As new inventions and technologies are made to do things more efficient and better and for most part coming up with said things required the inventors to invest huge ammounts of effort and work for testing, building prototypes and failing repetaidly. No lazy person ever made anything worthwhile.

>>49696537
Wouldn't they educate themselves for personal advantage? A literate, educated person can make more money, and someone who knows maths is harder to cheat out of it.

>>49697345
In theory, yes, but that investment of time and money often pays itself out over the long term: years if not decades. If goblins detest their own young they aren't gonna take the time to teach them, and a goblin hitting the books isn't likely to be earning food and board in the mean time. Likely only those that are already rich or strong by their means would take the time and effort to educate themselves.

>>49697434
Once that's taken care of, though, there's an advantage to propagating knowledge.

>>49697434
>>49698222
This would explain why goblins make such good inventors/technicians/alchemists. Their manic thought processes are well suited to experimentation and inventing, however, in typical goblin society there is little exposure to anything remotely scientific so most knowledge is centered around how to survive (with the trial and error process leading to deaths by eating the wrong thing or performing a suicidal maneuver in combat, but also potentially leading to obscenely rewarding results). If separated from "regular" goblin society at birth, goblins can make excellent apprentice engineers/magicians as their reckless pursuit of knowledge and suicidal curiosity help give aged and cautious wizards advantageous lackeys/test subjects.

>>49697325
No, see, innovation lets you do less later by doing more now. It's budgeting laziness for the future.

>>49699799
No lazy person is "budgeting laziness", and most inventors bust their balls working, testing and inventing untill they die or physically can't do it no more. Maybe you think that people who uses the invention are working less? No, they just are capable of producing more or doing more actual work with the same effort or less people working. After all the years of progress and invention modern man actually works the most in history.

If you tried to be funny with "budgeting laziness", you are not very funny,

You're essentially reinveinting Tolkien's orcs

They don't really have enough creative impulses to build a civilized society on their own, so they stay as loose tribes until something forces them to get in line

>>49699996
my headcanon has always been that orc, goblins, trolls, anything with green skin are all the same species. Environmental factors just change how they develop.

>>49687161
Maybe the strongest goblins lead goblin tribes through fear? So basically: "work for me, so you'll get loot and don't get killed by me and my men".

>>49699996
>Mordor was scattering like dust in the wind. As when death smites the swollen brooding thing that inhabits their crawling hill and holds them all in sway, ants will wander witless and purposeless and then feebly die, so the creatures of Sauron, orc or troll or beast spell-enslaved, ran hither and thither mindless; and some slew themselves, or cast themselves in pits, or fled wailing back to hide in holes and dark lightless places far from hope
To illustrate

>>49693203
Not really wrong desu

>>49699996
Yeah, but Tolkein doesn't give details on stuff like family culture or anything.

Aside from Goblin Town in the Hobbit, they're basically just generic goons.

>>49700024
Age is the factor.

"Goblins" are infants, "Orcs" are adults and "Trolls" are elders. They're like crocodiles, the longer they live, the bigger they grow.

>>49701670
So do they lose the ability not to turn into stone in sunlight with old age?

>>49705130
Very old Trolls just tend to "stoneify" with age. They don't actually turn into stone, it's just that with age their skin becomes more and more sturdy to the point that they can't even move themselves. They die unable to move because they natural skin armor is so hard they can't bend their joints. With that they usually die standing but their skin is so hard it doesn't decay, it's just stay there like a peculiar sculpture. Trolls that were stricken with this while they were travelin often found later by member of different species gave birth to the myth that the sunlight turns trolls into stone.

It's really tragic because trolls can be intelligent creature but because of this "condition" they lose ability to speak coherently and sound like mumbling brutes. What is stranger still is the fact that there are rare tribes of greenskins that don't let their elders just starve to death. Smaller of the tribes feed their elders and even "shave" (with great effort) some of the calcyfied skin from the mouths. This stone-elders provide much wisdom to their lesser brethren sometimes giving rise to primitive greenskin civilizations.

>>49706720
That's silly. OP had a solid premise with a fairly unusual interpretation of the race (by modern standards at least), no idea to muck it with more of that postmodern "look at how the thing I call a [classical fantasy creature] isn't at all like your boring old [classical fantasy creature]".

Personally, I actually rather like the nice trolls of Norwegian folklore. Barely even monsters, just another "type" of people who live in the forest leading an agricultural lifestyle, occasionally interacting with humans, sometimes friendly, sometimes not. And not even in that "HO HO CAPRICIOUS INSANE FAIRIES" kind of way, just "today the troll came to our village to trade wool for bread, but last year we accidentally shot him during a hunt so he was pissed and demanded we pay more."

File: Nofun_robot.jpg (59KB, 448x473px) Image search: [Google]

59KB, 448x473px

>>49706944
I wasn't even directly trying to supply OP with ideas I was merely building upon the
>>49701670
>>49700024

>no idea to muck it with more of that postmodern "look at how the thing I call a [classical fantasy creature] isn't at all like your boring old [classical fantasy creature]"
Yea I agree we should stick with the original prehistoric ideas. I hate when people use this post prehistoric fairly tales like Norwegian folklore.

Take that stick out of your butt.

>>49707492
IMHO, Norwegian folklore trolls would appear pretty exotic by modern fantasy standards, since the concept has gone so far from there.