Okay, for Fergus I can stomach a goblin paladin character.  But you're never going to get me to agree that goblins are 'lovely'.  Eww!

LOL

Our DM's elements all sound good to me...maybe we can work in a little Locke Lamora and the Gentlemen Bastards angle for our group.

I'd love to play anything in this group, and would love exploring a character more of talker.

In our world, is it true that goblinoids at one time were the dominant species in Khorvaire?

(as long as we have an elven dentist and a reindeer navigator in the party)

I believe the choice of the word "race" to describe interspecies differences was one of the biggest mistakes that early D&D made.

Yes, I said "interspecies." I don't believe that nonhuman humanoids should be nothing more than reskinned humans with superpowers. I think they are and ought to be entirely separate sentient species, with some commonalities but also widely divergent ways of being in the world.

In the real world, "race" is a social construct. More to the point, it's a self-serving fiction invented to justify exploitation and abuse of others, built on a foundation of pseudoscience and outright lies.

There's no difference between "races" of RL humans that's nearly as great as the differences among individuals—and, moreover, that can't be explained by nonbiological social factors. Which is why bioessentialism, when discussing RL peoples, is a pernicious error.

In D&D, however, there are profound, canonical differences among sentient species that go far beyond RL human variation—differences in sensory acuity, lifespan, the need for sleep and sustenance, respiration, natural defenses, mobility. In-game, these differences are FACTS.

Therefore, race, being socially constructed—not to mention fundamentally untruthful—is the wrong schema with which to think about these differences. It tricks us into treating them as superficial rather than worldview-defining, because we want to avoid validating RL racist lies.

But interspecies differences are interesting to explore! They're part of the wonderful strangeness of the game world—a place where sundry sentient creatures can have evolved, or been created, and see and experience morality, mortality, struggle and joy and time in their own ways.

Reducing this fantastic diversity of natures to appearance and a few stuck-on special abilities collapses the entire spectrum of playable beings into a costume party.

As we head into the next iteration of D&D, ditching the ill-fitting and misleading term "race" is an important step. Because we can't separate it from the baggage it carries in players' minds, and it clouds our thinking and poisons our discourse.