D&D 5E The word ‘Race’

[Hriston]

Why not use the word 'people', plural 'peoples', to denote those of a particular nation, community, or ethnic group. Tolkien did this when he spoke of the Peoples of Middle-earth.

 

[Mistwell]

From Merriam Webster dictionary:

Race
noun
2
a : a family, tribe, people, or nation belonging to the same stock
b : a class or kind of people unified by shared interests, habits, or characteristics
3
a : an actually or potentially interbreeding group within a species; also : a taxonomic category (as a subspecies) representing such a group
b : breed
c : a category of humankind that shares certain distinctive physical traits

 

[Mallus]

I have mixed feeling about this. I've tried to use the word 'race' less in my games, replacing it with 'species' or 'kind' or 'people', etc. But I fall back on race more often than not. It has an established meaning in the context of D&D, and you have to do some work to shift its meaning to something, ahem, problematic.

Here's the thing: who is harmed by the word 'race' used in a D&D context? Not 'mildly peeved'. Not 'annoyed slightly after some thought'. Harmed. Also, if you're troubled by the concept of 'race' as it's used in D&D, how do you feel about real-world racial identity politics? Race is a social construct, but it's important to people for a myriad of reasons and it's not going away any time soon.

Also, re: monstrous and/or evil races -- I'm also a big fan of "monsters are people, too", taking cues from the Buffyverse and settings like Planescape where intelligent monsters, even traditional mythological villains, can be and often are just other members of society.

 

[Mephista]

Not so much with how D&D has typically presented the races. Dwarves are a different "race," but as of 5e, the only thing that might be called definitively "biological" about being a dwarf is that your CON might be 1 point higher than a human if you both max out CON. But why couldn't a "hardy group of humans" get that max?

They can. Bonus feat for a second +CON.

You are also ignoring something hugely biological about dwarves. They're genetically resistant to poisons. Elven brains are wired to resist charm and sleep magics - even a half-elf raised by humans their entire life has that. Tieflings are naturally resistant to fire as a result of their lineage. No human has that without magic.

And lets not forget darkvision. Certainly, that's biological.

One of the more important things to consider, IMO, when discussing "race" in the context of D&D: are there things that the "races" of D&D (or any other game) can do that nobody outside that group can?

Absolutely true. No human can use dragonbreath, nor are they innately born with dark vision.

 

[Mephista]

Why not use the word 'people', plural 'peoples', to denote those of a particular nation, community, or ethnic group. Tolkien did this when he spoke of the Peoples of Middle-earth.

Why not? Because we use people in real life to refer to ethnic groups, just like race. So... yeah. Same issues apply.

 

[Hriston]

Why not? Because we use people in real life to refer to ethnic groups, just like race. So... yeah. Same issues apply.

I thought the issue was the OP's distaste for the word "race". Is people just as distasteful?

 

[Zorku]

I hope nobody has said this yet, but I'm too busy to do more than skim.

The game also refers to magic quite a bit. Archaic and discredited.


The use of race in DnD can mean subspecies if you want, after all there's never been a horde of dwarves mining out a city in a mountain while they fight off trolls, minotaurs, and cave dwelling black people that are all around sinister. OR, you can take it to be the expectation, and much like real life most people play into what is expected of them. If your players are cool with it you can even have a major theme of a campaign be that the notion of race has far less meaning than people assign to it, leading to more brawny elves that play up to their actual strengths, and puny book nerd minotaurs who are collected and cool headed in stressful situations.

If it's a cool story then do whatever you want, or if you can't make the game reflect your view of the world then so what? Who in their right mind is reading this stuff and thinking it's real life biology?

 

[neobolts]

Ask yourself if you are comfortable referring to "humanity" as "the human race", because that what D&D is doing. The modern games (with a few exceptions) take the time to point out the difference in the use of the word race by making mention of the diverse ethnicities, nationalities, and skin tones of humans.

For a more questionable take on humans, consider a game I was recently introduced to, the Dark Eye. Human ethnic groups/races are treated as different creature types, alongside elves and dwarves. In this setting there are direct parallels to medieval Europeans, Vikings, and Arabic peoples that fall into character creation as an analogue to D&D races. They've even quaintly dubbed Native Americans as "Forest People". It definitely raised some eyebrows in my group, and led to a bit of heckling of the game. I'd bought the books and we considered playing it but ultimately didn't, in large part due to the complexity of the rules and our current happiness with 5e.

Not trying to hate on Dark Eye in particular, I just thought my first impressions of it were germane to the discussion.

 

[GreenTengu]

It might be worth considering exactly what terminology you would think we would use if there were Neanderthals or various descendants of Australopithecus around today.

I mean, study of archeology suggests we would either wipe them out due to war or just mate with them so frequently that there would be no real distinction left which makes the way things play out in D&D worlds extraordinarily odd.

But, if somehow those groups did survive as real distinct things to this day, as opposed to aliens who fell from the sky tomorrow and had to be classified,... what do you think we would call them? I could see the words "race", "breed" and "people" being used interchangeably because they have been used as such throughout history for the differences people could see. I could also imagine them being called "monsters" upon the first encounter, but probably subsequent encounters when people got more used to them that would soften... people with dwarfism and gigantism were sometimes called monsters throughout history.

Really, up until about 4th edition it wasn't too difficult to see a lot of the races as just exaggerated versions of humanity... elves, dwarfs, gnomes, halflings... there are humans that look just like those... orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres? Still exaggerated humans with certain features taken from other members of the mammalian family... in fact, features found within the ape/monkey family so it wouldn't even be all that impossible for human to have such physical traits... well, a human quite the size of an Ogre would be impossible as their body would break apart at that size, but there was a hominid species in the real world that was close so all these things are homonids or "humans", and I guess they might be different species, but in the same genus and family...

Sure, once you get beyond that you start getting innate abilities better than simply improved night vision, the ability to eat garbage like a pig/goat and so forth, stuff that no animal in our world could do. Maybe once you get out to things like Lizardfolk and Thrikeen you can't really justify them as being effectively hominids/humans of some sort... but psychologically they still have to be somewhat human to be played.

 

[Mephista]

I thought the issue was the OP's distaste for the word "race". Is people just as distasteful?

Every one of the OP's issues with the word race would apply to the word people as well. *shrugs* Its all basically a question of Political Correctness. Which I find to be odd, considering that PC terms are half the time more offensive than the term they replace.

The original point of Politically Correct terms was to avoid giving offense. However, more than half the time, the PC term was jsut as bad, if not worse, than the original. No one I know of is really offended by the term used in terms of fantasy racism, and its not attempting to insult anyone. Its more that some people are apparently unhappy with the connotations of race in D&D terms and in real life.* That said, however, "people" is often already charged with the same meaning and connotations as racism in reality. "We don't want your kind of people here!" "Ever since the bus route changed, there's more black people down at the store, and I'm scared to go there now!" Race and people are too intertwined to work.



* I think that, since different fantasy races are used as a stand in for different racial groups in real life / real world history, its actually more offensive to remove the term, as if its okay to think of the other races as less-than-human, and thus okay to slaughter. Part of the whole thing with fantasy is that most everything is a metaphor for something in reality, and we're talking about the human condition in some way. So, trying to distance yourself from that metaphor is a way to distance yourself from the actual bad things you do as a character in the game.

On the one hand, that's fine for those who are actually just there to play a mindless game to relieve stress as long as you don't associate. On the other, for something that's modeling the real world, it can have negative messages and unfortunate implications associated with it, as well as push away potential new gamers of various backgrounds. Toxic white-masculinity is harmful to the hobby in this age, especially for the younger kids who seem to be showing interest in the games.