Choosing your character or the "Which one is better" syndrome
Child scene to set up character (thanks MadKeithV or Ingenu, whichever of you it was). This idea was suggested a while ago and I thought it deserved a mention. There is so much emphasis in the beginning of a game as to what character you choose to play. This may be a wrong decision for you as you do not know what the game-designer intends about each character and their class. A way to allow a customisable setup is to add an initialisation mode. The idea that was suggested required the player to act through a sequence in a child form of their character. Depending on what they choose to do in certain circumstances determines what attributes they gain for their character. The setup is completely non-threatening to the character, but the player may choose to be violent (hence increase their strength and decrease their charisma for example) to anything. This would allow for a reasonably diverse character build for the actual game.
Including a place for the character, "There's no place like home"
Allowing the player to build and destroy buildings in the town. This is mainly to give the players something of their own in the game. If they can build a house in a town, then they know that they own a piece of the game. That is theirs and nothing can take that away from them (except maybe a crazed Orc warlord). If anyone takes it from them then they will have a reason to go after the creature. Having a place of their own also allows them to stash things there, which allows for a more diverse collection of items for the player.
This is an idea that has been pondered over on GameDev.Net (Roleplaying a nonhuman) but has several important questions to ask. Would role-playing a goblin be different from role-playing a human? The answer, quite simply, is yes. The problem we face is how do we make it a different experience. This is a tough decision as it is almost impossible for any of us to think how a goblin thinks. One suggestion is abstraction (I refer to it as abstraction instead of what it was referred to in the thread). This means, that all humans that the goblin sees, look the same. The same armour, the same colour and generally the same look as every other human. All text from humans becomes unrecognizable, so the goblin cannot speak to the NPC's (unless they had learned the language). See also Learning 'goblinish', breaking the language barrier.