How do we Rehabilitate Gnolls?

Always evil races are the gayest shit ever. It implies that you need some "Holy Divine super Good" reason to justify you killing someone. Like what happened to the good old days of being happy to slit someone's through for disobeying your emperor, or for sitting on land that you want, or even just because your nations are at war and he has good stuff on him to loot and he was probably an asshole anyways.
Like what are you, some kind of faggot?

we like to think we are killing to do something good, something more then petty material gain

Knock them up to CN, keep the slavery bent and make them more cowardly dick ass scavenger types, opportunists in the highest degree.

That way players never know if they can trust them or not, sometimes allies, sometimes enemies, sometimes devious.
Then include a slightly higher race of lion-alikes if you fancy having a CE race in the area to foil them against.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnoll

We're on Veeky Forums. We're all faggots user.

Aside from that, my point is that developing them beyond their postage stamp backstory in the MM is self-defeating. Furries are going to latch onto anything resembling animals for their degenerate tastes, so there's no point putting work into something furries are going to try to fuck.

Just keep them as vile and evil, and don't allow anyone to talk you into letting them play monsters as PCs.

hmmm, should it be dick slavery all the way or some some have the more humane forms of indentured servitude and burden of responsibility style slavery?

In my setting, I run gnolls as pirates and smugglers. Instead of their HURR DURR EBIL personalities, they're more crafty and group-oriented, though they still like solving problems with blades. Nobody really trusts each other, but they have to work together since it goes well for them. Something like pirates of the Caribbean meets the Sicilian mafia.

Developing a race != whitewashing. You could easily imagine a race of highly individualistic assholes with very low empathy, who work together only on the basis of explicit and temporary social contracts. Gnolls have monstrous constitution, and don't need civilization and division of labor to survive or thrive. Even drawing inspiration from hyenas again, you could say they evolved more ferocious, rapidly developing cubs rather than nurturing mothers, diminishing the need for empathy.

>we like to think we are killing to do something good, something more then petty material gain
That's sounds pretty gay to me man. Good is subjective to what's good for you and the people you are obligated to serve and take care of.

Just because they didn't kick every puppy they saw, and donated money to their local orphanage, doesn't mean you aren't right to kill them for endangering the safety and happiness of your friends, family and loved ones.

how about not caring what furries do with a thing and just enjoy it for yourself, its like saying you let the furries ruin Digimon or Pokemon for you

but my family friends and loved ones aren't the center of the universe, nor is my nation, I have no reason to kill some one just because I don't know them as well

user, by that logic we should just stop playing tabletop games because the entirety of Veeky Forums would fuck EVERYTHING (yes, even the warforged).

You can't let fear decide your fate user. Besides I bet some furry is already drawing rape fantasies with cholla right now as we speak, so it's not like we could make it worse.

I disagree. I love that Gnolls come from the defiled bodies and those killed by the demon empowered. Unlike anthro-animals who have human bodies, Gnolls have hyena bodies cruelly mutated into humanoid shape. They should have hunched backs and wrong looking arms/hands with digitigrade feet.

They're not furry, they're wrong.

this is a board with people who would ironically bed a purestrain genestealer, this is a site where people have been known to get off to bathroom tiles, you cant avoid a thing being some ones fetish

>Furfags ruined Beastraces.

How the fuck are these fetishists relevant to your roleplaying game?

Play whatever you want and the DM allows. If the character acts like a humanoid would act there is no problem. Except some in-game xenophobia, depending on your setting.

Dont focus on the "animal part. Nobody wants to know about their reproductive organs or see cringy animal behavior.

Culture and skills are more important.

Typing on the phone is suffering TL:DR. Just don't be weird about your character and everyone is okay with it.

Dick slavery. They're cackling and cruel. Don't take the teeth out of their character.

>Unlike anthro-animals who have human bodies, Gnolls have hyena bodies cruelly mutated into humanoid shape. They should have hunched backs and wrong looking arms/hands with digitigrade feet.

>but my family friends and loved ones aren't the center of the universe
>claims to want to fight for good
>wouldn't fight for the people closest and most important to him.

Nigga you are not makin any sense right now.

right, gotta remember the days when a non evil drow could be counted on one hand, encountering a trustworthy Gnoll should be both rare and difficult to believe in that same manner

3 is best, 4 and 5 are shit, but even 3 is too clean. Needs to be more mangy and "broken" They're not part human, or born from humans, they're mutated hyenas.

number three is where you stop

he thinks he can fight for both friend and foe, he thinks he can "save them all" he thinks morality is universal and that Mercy means something

The thing is, we're not talking about some random [animal]-folk. we're talking about an icon that has been a part of D&D literally from the beginning, created by Gygax himself. They're no dwarves, but they have enough character and backstory I don't want to see them fall out of the game because people don't want to be accused of jacking off to furry porn just because they run campaigns with gnoll npcs.

This is basically what I'm doing in my setting

I hate that really.

Having alignment colour a race gives it character.

At best drow should be neutral, never flat out good. Altruistic Drow is an oxymoron. They're not opposed to working with and helping others, but they do it for selfish means.

I'm leaning towards 'We're Nomads that live by using every resource we can' type slavery
So, slaves are well kept but only because they're incredibly valuable rather than because its the right thing to do.
You want to get the most out of them, when they're useless? Left behind like discarded tools, to either survive and be free or die of exposure.

Personally the most fun way I ever ran Gnolls was in a not!Silk Road type setting, where they shared land in the upper reaches of !India with Orcs and Ogres.

Orcs and Ogres were a shared race known as the Slaughterers who kept huge beasts of burden (Think Dire elephants and bigger) and basically lived in small tribes within walled settlements, selling meat, Ivory and slaves from other tribes.

Gnolls meanwhile were nomadic raiding dicks that basically lived on the offal of a butcher civilization, selling themselves as mercenaries to the various tribes, assisting in raiding for slaves and bits of meat no one else wanted, secretly making sure no one tribal master got too powerful to avoid the locals uniting for more than a generation or two against them and generally being shenanigans beasts.
The party once invoked sacred hospitality on them and discovered they had a deep, rich history which I shamelessly stole from the Berbers.

if people accuse me, I correct them, if they don't believe me, that's their problem

Their actual God spawned them to simply hunt kill and murder everything. That is why he placed them on the Prime material realm. To murder, not for the circle of life or anything like that. To hunt then murder.

Now their New Lord (Your Pic OP), specifically spawns them and sends new souls to time Prime so just commit evil. Their heaven is forever hunting and torturing non-Gnolls. Because you-know-who is mustache twirling evil. Well mustache twirling between brutal murder and slaughter.

There's a humorous amount of irony in the fact that the people who bitch about "furfags" want to keep their fictional beast people closer to resembling actual animals than relatable humanoids, the latter of which is something civilizations did for ages in art and literature.

It's gotten to the point where I see more players scrunch their noses and reach for their trilbies at the mere thought of someone playing a beastfolk than people who play them for the purpose of living out some magical realm. Classic monsters are being ruined by people like much faster than furries.

I don't understand what you are saying, Furfags are and always will be the worst and it will always be them who make things worse

Glad that worked for you, but even that isn't toothy enough for me.

I love the despicable demonic gnolls. I give them texture by making superstitions about them and hyenas, how they're connected to misfortunes and wickedness. Cackling witches with powers of confusion, children born under a hyena's cry will be born a thief. The man who walks with hyenas is in league with demons. Cannibal cults, tricksters, slavers. The human cultists that follow the roaming Gnoll bands degrade into ghoulish parties consuming the offal. Like hyenas there is cowardice in their hearts, and so if cowed they'd be willing to have discourse with you, even let you eat their food as you are stronger and they don't want to die.

I like my Gnolls really fucking metal.

>gnolls
>leaving perfectly good meat behind like discarded tools
No.

I understand that this is what these guys have been reduced to in the latest edition fluff, and I don't really have that much of a problem with it. But again, compare them to orcs. Orcs (and other 'evil' humanoids) all basically have the "created/corrupted by an evil god to do evil things" backstory. That hasn't stopped orcs from being given culture, language, and character beyond the five sentences in the monster manual.

>Second, they get a bad name from furries latching onto the whole “hyena-like” thing as an excuse to shoe-horn their degeneracy into the game.
At this point, blaming furries for things says more about you than it does about them. When was the last time you saw furries shoving their furshit where it didn't belong, compared to how many times a day you see people whining about furries on Veeky Forums?

But that's what Gnolls ARE. It defines them more than being humanoid defines humans even, and if you take that away from them they cease being Gnolls.

No, what makes Gnolls special (along with Minotaur, Kobolds, and Skaven) is that they aren't lumped into a generic "beastmen" category.

so you like settings with this sense that evil is stronger then good, that choices are not really there to be made, all at the winds of cruel nature

Pretty much. This isn't exclusive to not having deep or meaningful story either.

>I see more players scrunch their noses and reach for their trilbies at the mere thought of someone playing a beastfolk than people who play them for the purpose of living out some magical realm

That's because it's a common opinion that furfags are cancer. People do overreact, but it comes from good intention.

I guess I just dislike the idea of a race being inherently cruel and wretched because of my own beliefs in free will

Reminds me of Uberstadt, where half the time they tried to make the races "interesting" by turning them into blatant ripoffs of other fantasy races they had nothing in common with (the other half were genuinely interesting. The gnolls were actually pretty neat, come to think of it)

...

Free will certainly still exists, not all creatures have the full extent of it. It's not like slavery of the mind as more anti-social behaviour that colours all they do, that's how I largely implement alignment in my games. It lends itself to the character of these things who I feel without these traits can feel bland and uninspired.

Prove it.

It CAME from good intentions. They USED to be an awful cancer on the internet. But that was a decade ago, and I'm sure a lot of the people whining about them don't even remember how it was. At this point it's just people beating up on a safe target to fit in.

What was the point of winning that war if we're just going to keep fighting it like it never ended?

This is actually what I hate about furry races. People think that just having a cat for a head and being all "lol my character licks himself because he's a cat, get it? XD" is enough to make a race interesting. Its not. If anything its a crutch for when you're too lazy to give them a backstory so you just slap on a stereotype from an aesop fable.

Gnolls are obviously inspired by hyenas, and nobody, including me, is complaining about that. Go ahead and make them spotty, laughing, matriarchal, bone crunching scavengers, but don't insist that its just because they're hyenas, because 1. it ties them to an animal that may or may not exist in all settings 2. Tts a lazy definition, like describing your BBEG as "he's like sauron". how is it like the thing? how close is the resemblance? 3. like I said here being hyena-ish is essentially an aesthetic consideration. it distracts from the core concept of the race

it was never intended to end, it was to be an enemy to be unified against for all time

god... stop... It was semi-decent until this.

Return them to the BECMI description as "a wizard's horrible experiment combining a Gnome, Hobgoblin and Troll."

>1. it ties them to an animal that may or may not exist in all settings

Then they're wild dogs, or wild dog-like things.

> 2. Tts a lazy definition, like describing your BBEG as "he's like sauron". how is it like the thing? how close is the resemblance?

Using pop-culture references for shorthand is always useful.

>3. like I said here being hyena-ish is essentially an aesthetic consideration. it distracts from the core concept of the race

That opinion is shit though. There is so much connotation to hyenas beyond aesthetics.

Right, so you admit that at this point we're just fighting for the sake of fighting, not because they're actually a problem?

that user watched to much trigun as a kid

points 1 and 3 are contradictory. either the reference to the unique species (which aren't dogs, and most of the stereotypes only apply to to the spotted hyena) is either explicit or doesn't apply.

But yeah, this has been argued before by and I don't disagree. Just to be clear, my reason for wanting to avoid the explicit reference is to avoid the idea of being an anthropomorphic hyena being their sole distinguishing trait. I don't really even care if you use the word to describe them as long as its elaborated on. The earliest definition I know of just said they had hyena-like heads.

However, if you tried to define an elf as a human with pointy ears, you would be including a lot of things that weren't elves, and omit a lot of things that should be considered elves. I realize this is kind of an exaggerated example, but you get my point.

Have you read 4e's gnoll material? It had a lot of gnolls and gnoll lore.

i like this, their bodies should be twisted abominations mixed between human and animal (their minds would be just as twisted too)

Not in the monster manual, and I don't care for 4e enough that I'd buy the supplements when I can get anything 3.5 free on the internet. I find this gem a while back. wizards.com/files/367_Playing_Gnolls.pdf
Somebody did their homework.

The anti-furry hostility may have been overblown, but it came from a sound instinct. If you want to see what happens when you don't keep the furry population in check, go take a look at how tgchan has done.

Gnolls are very clearly spotted hyenas, so lets actually make them based on spotted hyenas and not the shitty stereotypes that they were based on.

Scavenger status: It depends on whether its northern or southern Spotted hyenas. Northern are excellent hunters succeeding in over 50% of hunts, sometimes taking down things as big as giraffes. 90% or so of their diet comes from fresh kills. Southern hyenas are more scavenger types, but still engage in hunting only supplementing their diet by scavenged kills. They are smart opportunist hunters.

Intelligence: freaky smart for a pack based predator. They out score chimps in cooperative puzzles. Their social hierarchy involves up to 150 individuals at den sites, where they break off into small friend groups to hunt. Understand mirrors better than wolves, lions, and many other pack predators or monkeys.

Social traits: females are bigger, stronger, and have higher status. Females like gentle males who are nice to them. They recognize that other species dont fall under their social system. They are initially scared of new things, but once familiarized are intensely curious and bold. We dont have to talk about their genitals.

Physical ability: endurance, speed, strength. They engage in a form of endurance hunting where they nip and bite an animal causing it to bleed out while it runs. They can sustain speeds of 30 Mph while doing this. The ability to move large and heavy carcasses with little effort.

What does this mean for gnolls? Being made humanoid would result in them being of human intelligence, but geared towards a predators lifestyle instead of omnivore. They would be stronger and have faster movement. They would be excellent hunters, of men and animals. Wary of things that are new, but once comfortable with it, show no fear and will use or exploit to full potential. Gregarious and intensely social, dominating over others, though willing to be lead if not in charge. Work very well in groups regardless of species.

No.

Dear god no.

>latest edition fluff,
Practically ever edition since AD&D, not just the latest.
In every book or modules which talks about their origins or gods at least.

I kind of like this. It's certainly a lot better than Generically Evil Humanoid Enemy #593858

See, this is what I warned you people about. This is why you don't say "this is a hyena-man thing" and give carte-blanche for people to mix and match from a stew of biological facts and bits of antiquated stereotypes and folklore.

This here is at least a consistent approach, but its clearly not a typical gnoll. This really is what I would call a hyena-folk: an actual animal given the bare minimum of alteration to make it playable, without any further development.

Yeah, it used to be that the core rulebooks left more blanks in the settings backstory, and then after that the gnolls' original (nature) deity was undercut by Yeenoghu. I meant the thing about Yeenoghu turning hyenas into gnolls. That is certainly a new thing.

Oh, thank you for this well crafted critic of my post. I now see the light and will henceforth change my ways.

Yeah, its very much just hyena folk, but there really isnt all that much to use from the simplistic D&D lore. My own gnolls for my world are very much not like this, being an actual people with a pretty decent culture and only the minimal amounts of hyenaness to reinforce that they definitely arent human.

Now comes the lore of D&D and what it means for gnolls in this new form of them. Yeenoghu is a demonlord of ghouls and gnolls and thats fucking boring. The only reason he even has this hold over gnolls is because he stole the domain from Gorellik, the original gnoll god of the hunt. Instead were going to re-imagine him as a demonlord of murder and cannabalism. He represents the sociopaths and monsters in the wilderness who prey on their fellow man through murder and cannabalism. His form is that of a gnoll only because he is very much the personification of the ancient predators of humanity, the spotted hyena.

Some gnolls would worship this evil being, this hunter of man flesh, while other would worship Gorellik, the hunter of animals. Teh first would be your classic chaotic evil monsters who prey on other humanoids, hunting through villages or taking isolated caravans. They arent lazy creatures, though they would very much welcome the food that could provide a respite from certain activities. Gorellik gnolls on the other hand would be isolationist N or CN tribes people, who subsist on hunting and possibly trading with nearby friendly or at least tolerant communities. Each type would have their own creation stories, each contradicting the other providing soem mystery as to what was the true origin.

All of the above is based on 2e, 3e and 4e lore. In Races of the Wild we are introduced to N gnolls who worship a nature god from Greyhawk (Obad-hai, i do believe), so I simply substituted their old god instead.

Thing is I also think it's dumb that Gorellik was the god of gnolls if he's a hyena. He should be the Animal God of Hyenas who despises Yeenoghu for profaning his people. Gnolls don't exist naturally, they're a bastardization of nature.

That way you both get Yeenoghu and cool animal totem gods and have them distinct rather than making everything so goddamn bland.

Yeah, thats a decent way to go.

In the lore, there isn't really a definitive origin for them. They are full humanoids like humans and elves and unlike monstrous humanoids such as minotaurs or sahaugin, which speaks to them being divinely made and thus natural and not born of demonkind like the later. And Gorellik is very much a god. Gnolls arent really a bastardization of nature.

Obad-hai gnolls are gay. Gorellik gnolls are ok, but Yeenoghu gnolls will always and forever be the Best Gnolls. Also, there's a lot of synergy between ghouls and gnolls if you think about it, especially in the folklore.

I do want to see gnolls come back as smarter, opportunistic hunters instead of offbrand orcs, and I don't think this is even that unfaithful to the existing lore. They even removed the intelligence penalty in 4e.

I think the vast majority of the haters are just put off by the weird gender issues with spotted hyenas, but I don't think gnolls should be stigmatized because a few perverts somewhere want to take it that direction.

Again that's boring.

Gnolls should be a bastardization of nature, like Minotaurs and the Sahuagin or sea devils. I like that Gorellik is an Animal God of Hyenas, I dont like how Gnolls are another type of being. Most, if not all kinds of Beastmen should be unnaturally born or made. They're a wrongness of the world.

Having pages and pages of well thought out cultural traitsm details of society just makes my eyes glaze over.

You can tell me everything I need to know about them with a short story blurb, stats and capabilities, ecology, and what they drop when killed.

so you just want a bunch of boring slavering horrors you can murder without guilt instead of a nuanced species that can have more things done with them?

I'm curious why you'd want to do more things with them, when you could instead spend your time detailing human and near-human species.

because humans are boring

>slavering horrors you can murder without guilt
>nuanced species that can have more things done with them

These aren't exclusive.

Only because you're either uncreative, or boring yourself.

And that weird gender stuff provides for some fun roleplaying, when the players have to negotiate for the release of some slaves and keep misgendering the large scary chieftain causing her to hate the players. Say for a not necessarily man eating tribe.

And your take is completely boring me. I also strongly disagree that beastmen must always be some perversion of nature, a wrongness of the world. That pigeonholes them into very specific roles that are frankly boring and overplayed.

Why cant I do both? I have a naturally occurring gnoll species with a fairly detailed culture and a pantheon of gods, while also having plenty of human and other races cultures detailed.

oh its simple, making beastmen not unnatural horrors puts them closer to being sympathetic, he doesn't want that for any race that isn't core, especially if it can be imagined as furry bait

Sympathy =/= nuance.

Part of the nuance is in it's wrongness. If it's wrong, it must come from somewhere. What conditons cause the wrongness. There could be ways to prevent it. Gnolls come from hyenas feasting on the flesh of the dead slain by a demon. Rituals would be enacted to properly dispose of the dead to prevent the feasting of the flesh. There must also be stories and superstitions surrounding it. There may be a way to correct the wrongness, like eating consecrated flesh. There is obviously going to be ways to encourage the wrongness with cults and rituals.

Why do people try to do more things with orcs and minotaurs? Gnolls are cooler than minotaurs, why shouldn't they get a little serious development? Dwarves and elves and all the other standard races have been developed as far as anyone could ever want. People want to branch out now and try adding some non-humanoid sentients to the mix, and gnolls have been waiting in line for a long time. Its not like they're some anthro-vixen fap-race someone just pulled out of their magical realm with no character or previous development. read the thread.

Monsters are more interesting to players than NPCs. That's why.

Just because you think you've written a nuanced, sympathetic, interesting species of beastman doesn't mean your players will ever care or bother to explore them beyond interacting with the examples you force on them.

In general, people just steal a real world people and slap an animal/man hybrid on it and call it a day. Tauran from Warcraft are just generic noble savages. Minotaurs from Dragonlance are Carthage with a shitty origin story. Lizardmen from Warhammer Fantasy are Mayan/Aztec for no real good reason.

>read the thread

I've been here since the beginning.

Or they are spirits of hunger and malice that take possess hyenas, twisting them into humanoid abominations that prey on a community. Finding the person or peopel who keep attracting these beings and stopping their evil behavior to prevent more killings.

Or they are nature spirits of the hunt (in a vaguely african place) that take on that form to kill off the humans that have been destroying the local herds and wildlands. Changing their ways to better live in harmony to stop these avenging spirits.

Or they are natural people who live like humans, possibly called something greek like cynocephali or something. Trading with these unique peoples could bring in some great luxuries.

honestly, origins aren't that important one way or another. What matters is the results. If gnolls are chaotic evil monsters abandoned by the gods, it doesn't matter if they started out that way or became that way after the fact, unless the DM decides its important for the setting.

I believe in putting thought into every part of a campaign, not just the good guys, and development/realism does not imply empathy or compassion. Humans evolved as a highly social species and empathy is a huge survival mechanism. It didn't have to be that way. You can explain a psychotic species without resorting to demonic origin stories

>Or they are nature spirits of the hunt (in a vaguely african place) that take on that form to kill off the humans that have been destroying the local herds and wildlands. Changing their ways to better live in harmony to stop these avenging spirits.

>Or they are natural people who live like humans, possibly called something greek like cynocephali or something. Trading with these unique peoples could bring in some great luxuries.

These two are boring to me. I like my Gnolls and Beastmen metal.

Granted, but people always have the option to run 2D stereotypes if that's the kind of thing their players like.
As for the badly done races, that's exactly what I and other people have been complaining about. WOW's 1001 featureless furry races are just another example of what goes wrong if you DON'T put a little thought into your races, and why the title of the thread is about rehabilitating gnolls so they can avoid that fate. So far, gnolls have actually avoided that better than most other species. Even orcs tend to borrow too heavily from generic savages in some settings.

what do you mean by Metal?

Development doesn't have to mean watering something down. If you want to develop the gelatinous cube, you don't have to make it into an anime waifu with a tragic background, it could just mean explaining its metabolism and odd shape, what they evolved from, how it interacts with its environment.

And there are absolutely ways that monstrous biological traits can translate into unusual cultural and diplomatic traits.

legit race with gods, history, and civilization > tribal beast race that > bad guy race

If you're gonna make something that's always evil, it should at least be interesting to fight. Stuff like undead, elementals, demons, etc. They all have special powers and behaviors that are cool in combat. Their motivations can be as simple as "they eat people", because the interesting part is how the fight and how they spread across the world.

But a gnoll is basically just a slightly hairier bandit. If you want to make them an interesting force in the world, they need to have some kind of culture and traits that make them distinct.

The thing is, I don't think they need to be "rehabilitated" because if you change their appearance, change their name, change their origin story... You no longer have gnolls.

Ultimately, to keep their D&D identity, they need:

>hyena/man hybrid appearance
>demon god
>penchant for slavery
>flinds (half-human, half-gnolls)
>evil alignment

Yes, furries will always latch onto the hybrid aspect. That's not going to change. But if you make them sympathetic dindu nuffins (god I hate that term, but it applies here) then you're just rolling out the welcome mat.

And if you hate alignments, gnolls simply have a culture of casual violence, abuse, and acts humans and demi-humans would consider criminal at best.

Fucking metal is what I mean.

urbandictionary.com/define.php?defid=2583515&term=Metal

>Good is subjective -
No. Just no. Take your mouth-breathing freshman intro to philosophy bullshit and get the fuck out of what is otherwise an interesting thread.

This is it. Think of how the drow were. Definitely a bad guy race, but with gods, history and civilization. The core D&D stereotype for gnolls doesn't need to go away, and it shouldn't go away. But it can be developed and elaborated on. We can take the sentence or two about worshipping Yeenoghu and elaborate it into a full-fledged religion, what the rites and holy days are, how they think of other gods, etc. You can take a race of bloodthirsty chaotic evil monsters and explain why they stay that way when everyone else is getting civilized. Are they /pol/tards who think elves and humans are a bunch of dumb cucks fighting for the greater good? Are they more realistic skaven who just can't bring themselves to trust each other long enough to get a working city going? What about the hyena thing? Do they still hold onto vestigial social norms from whatever genetic linkage they had with them, or has that all evolved away?

This is all legitimate development that doesn't involve whitewashing or humanizing them. Its about refining what it means to be a gnoll.

you, I like you

>First, they share the role of low-level chaotic evil humanoids with the more famous orcs, and usually their meagre fluff does nothing to help distinguish them.

I think this is really the heart of it - the various monstrous humanoids used to be considerably more distinct stat-block wise. Most old school games had very abbreviated statblocks, but even under the old school HD paradigm there were very clear brackets:

1d4 HD = Kobold tier. Really, really weak; will rarely survive a blow from any class with good strength.
1d6 HD = Goblin tier. Sometimes this is 1d8-1 or
1d8 HD = Orc tier; the most basic baddie. Their odds of surviving the 1d8 damage output of a longsword is about even. Sometimes Morlocks replace orcs - degenerate cavemen make more sense in some locales.
1d8+1 HD = Hobgoblin. Have slightly better odds of surviving that 1d8 longsword swing, and stay even with fighters of talent (+1 STR bonus or better)
2d8 HD = Gnoll and Lizardmen tier. This is where monsters start to get into the range of no longer getting one-shotted by PC attacks, and get commensurately more dangerous. Gnolls tend to pack bigger damage weapons like polearms while Lizardmen get a triple natural attack routine.