RPG Evolution: Do We Still Need "Race" in D&D?

Race in D&D has always had a positive influence on me, because it demonstrated that WE are all human.

Personally, I like ancestry. It is flexible without being overly ambiguous.

The term "race," however, as it is used in D&D, doesn't bother me much. It is far more inclusive than the real world. In D&D black and white humans are not different races. The existence of Dwarves, Elves, etc. make human one race, regardless of color.

The whole black as evil among monstrous races (e.g. drow) is problematic. While evil comes in all colors in D&D, I can't think of any dark creatures that are good in the game. I'm sure that there are, but fact that I'm flipping through the MM and Volo's all the time and none come to mind is telling.

Celebrim said:

*face palms*

I have no words.

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Yeah I was missing a word there. Thanks for the catch.

Edit: Just gonna re-write that whole awkward statement.

Do we still need "Race" in D&D.

Yes.

Is there a compelling reason to change the name?

No.

Is there a practical alternative?

Sticking with the 5E model, have 2 different backgrounds instead of a race and a background,

"Biological Background" (what is currently called race) and "Cultural Background" (what is currently called just background).
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Fun note: "background" starts to sound like nonsense syllables surprisingly quickly with repetition.

I do not see race in D&D, where it is used in the same sense as "the human race" to be problematic. The fantasy of humans interacting with other intelligent beings is of value. That said, synonyms for race work just as well, and keeping/ditching race as a term would be of little consequence.

[MENTION=5100]Mercule[/MENTION]: It's a very good post, so don't think that by my quibbles I think otherwise. Still, I have a lot to quibble with.

Mercule said:

But it's not 'culture', any more than it's race. Culture implies the social heredity, rather than genetic heredity.

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That realization is so rare these days. So many people think culture just means music, food, clothing or other superficial cultural artifacts. Even worse, so many people conflate culture and race these days it makes me want to cry - as in, "You are black so you like Rap." or "You are white so you like Heavy Metal." Usually these are the same people who'd never think things like, "You are black so you like watermelon."

'Culture' could certainly include things like the elven knack with a bow, but it can't cover everything currently covered by 'race' -- at least not without bastardizing the word at least as much as 'race' has been.

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Culture could include the elven knack with the bow but it's not required, and explicitly in my homebrew the elven knack with the bow has never been cultural, but explicitly racial. Elves know how to use a bow or a sword without being taught how, so that an adopted elf raised among goblins or dwarves or humans, will still get their racial bonus to bows and swords. The knowledge is built in and intuitive to them. Other campaigns could make different choices, but that's how it works in mine.

In general, the issue of nature versus nuture is complicated and debatable and most of the answers are unknown. There is good reason to suspect that complicated behaviors we think of as being learned, like the ability to walk and the ability to use language are in fact mostly products of nature rather than nurture. Babies learn these skills way too fast, for one thing. There is good evidence that babies are born knowing how to walk and they just have to wait for their bodies to catch up and their legs to get long enough to successfully employ the built in algorithm. Likewise, there seems to be slots for language built into the brain and all the baby has to do is figure out which sounds to plug into the basic slots, and this automatically happens at a certain point in brain development. There is no reason to think that things that humans aren't automatically wired to do are culture in another species just because in humans that they are complicated, and vica versa. For example, humans seem to have a hard wired club instinct that a hypothetical alien might lack and need to learn.

In a fantasy world, there is even stronger reason to believe in racial gifts based on the fantastic origins of the species.

Really, I find the first question (mechanics) much more interesting than the second, which I find extremely strange to spend much time on, at all.

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I find the first question much more interesting than the second as well, but I don't find the move from 'race' to 'ancestry' strange because - to pick on myself - I've done similar things for similar reasons. For example, in my game the servitor races of the lower planes are called 'fiends' and never 'demons' or 'devils'. Yet they are basically still the same servitor races of the lower planes and occasionally on the rare occasion that they show up in the story I'll even for convenience employ the same stat block. On some level that seems like a purely irrational and purely cosmetic change, until you consider that I consider the words 'demon' or 'devil' problematic for religious reasons. If you share the same religious convictions as I do, then the change seems rational and reasonable; but, it is rational and reasonable only if you have the same religious convictions I do and thus consider the words problematic. The same sort of thing is going on with Paizo.

Many games are moving away from explicit racial stat modifiers in favor of an attitude of "a 15 dexterity is worth 9 character points, whether you're a human or an elf -- typical elves just spend more points on dexterity than constitution". That's something I gone from being somewhat put off by to a stance I fully support. I'm not sure it would work as well for D&D. If nothing else, I think it'd cause problems for people who like to roll dice for stats. But, it's strictly possible as a mechanical option to getting rid of (or modifying) racial packages.

I'm less sure about things like darkvision.

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Yes. Because if you are supporting darkvision similar physiological differences (like being a quadruped or not being a humanoid or even a demi-human at all) as part of a racial package, then suddenly the whole notion of a point buy race starts to seem really unreasonable. Beyond that, if you are really actually having a point buy race, then you are basically allowing a 'build your own' race and race starts to be really meaningless. What does it mean to be a member of a race of one, and to not share any features necessarily in common with anyone?

The races in my campaign are thematically really different. Sidhe are literally immortal and most of them have never been born and will never age. They have a mindset that is alien in some ways to the other races, and they are divergent in origin from the other six PC races. Elves live for centuries and age slowly, so that they are children for more than a century. They have inherent deep connections to the natural worlds and passions that are cool and strange to humans. They literally die when deprived of beauty, the way a human starves without food. Idreth are born with the memories of past lives and ancestors and regularly reincarnate, something rare in the other races. Orine are somewhat avian in appearance and have passions that run far hotter than humans, so that to the other races they seem insane to the point of being dangerous - an insulted Orine will basically fight to the death unless the insulting party backs down. Goblins have been bred into different social castes that are radically different physically, and not only are seen as physically repulsive by other races but see themselves that way. The eyes of a goblin work like radar, emitting light that they then see upon reflection - giving them the ability to see in the dark but making them nearly blind in direct sunlight. Elves don't need to eat meat and most are vegan; goblins can't really digest vegetable matter. Pixies are 2' high and have wings. Changlings inherently can shape change into animals. You can't change those things with 'culture'.

If race stops being a package, we are doing away with the alien. If we do away with the alien, we lose the ability to learn from our stories what it means to be human by comparing and contrasting humanity with things that are different than humanity. None of my races are merely human tropes. They are fantastic. I don't want to lose that, and I sure as heck don't want do it yourself races.

DemoMonkey said:

Fun note: "background" starts to sound like nonsense syllables surprisingly quickly with repetition.

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That's because it's a redundant word. In this case, "Biology" and "Culture" would be equally meaningful without adding the word "background" to the idea.

So I read the Angry DM article that this bit links to and I found it interesting. Even leaving aside the idea of keeping the term "race" or changing it to something more palatable to modern audiences, Angry presents an interesting idea that could broaden the game in fascinating ways.

He basically uses a Pathfinder sourcebook (the Advanced Race guide) to break down every traditional "race" into inborn biological traits and cultural traits based on a point system. The whole idea that starts this rant, that it's silly that an elf who grew up on the streets of a human city somehow knows how to use a longbow, is correct. It is silly. It's ridiculous. That alone makes this sort of breakdown almost worth it by itself, but it also improves the game in some great ways.

First, it makes the races more balanced (so half-orcs, which were weak in 3.X get a boost) and second it allows some interesting new possibilities. You could, for instance, be a dwarf raised by elves, an elf who grew up in a human city or a human who was part of a nomadic tribe, all with mechanical abilities to back it up. Those would all be interesting characters.

Finally it makes the game more compatible with other settings. Maybe elves in my game are all noble lords who rule from on high. Why would such a group know how to use bows and swords? Using his system they wouldn't have to.

Or maybe my game is a Shadowrun port set in the near future. In such a game knowing how to use a bow or a sword is useless. In the core game I'd have to just accept it, but using his rules I can swap those abilities out with more appropriate and useful ones.

In short, whatever your thoughts on the terms, breaking inborn traits out from cultural ones can't help but make the game better. In 5e I even think you could still have backgrounds. They would just represent some modifications to your culture. So you might be an elf (ancestry/race), raised in a high-elven society (culture) with the noble background, or you might be a human (ancestry/race), who grew up as part of a tribe (culture) with the criminal background (maybe you were even exiled for stealing from the tribe).

It would make culture an additional thing you would have to choose at character creation but the advantages might make it worth it. Now I just need to figure out how to do this point breakdown for 5e races.

Negflar2099 said:

He basically uses a Pathfinder sourcebook (the Advanced Race guide) to break down every traditional "race" into inborn biological traits and cultural traits based on a point system. The whole idea that starts this rant, that it's silly that an elf who grew up on the streets of a human city somehow knows how to use a longbow, is correct. It is silly. It's ridiculous.

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No, on the contrary, the idea that an elf who grew up on the streets of a human city somewhere doesn't know how to use the longbow is silly and ridiculous. And it's silly and ridiculous for a very important reason - it assumes that elves are basically humans and that we can extrapolate from what we know of humans what is nature and what is nurture for a wholly alien fantastic species. In humans we know for certain that the ability to wield a longbow is a product of nurture and not nature. But we cannot extrapolate from that what is true for a non-human in either the general or the specific case.

Just to confine myself to your language, to think otherwise is silly and ridiculous.

I'd like to go much further into that though, because frankly I find 'Angry DMs' assumption here to be so wrong-headed as to be dangerous, but I'm afraid if I really go into that the thread would go down in flames even faster than it is going to.

It's fine to assume that there are things that are nuture and that there are things that are nature, but to make the assumption that we can know what those are for certainty is wrong. And to make the assumption that for a given non-human race, that they are fundamentally in this area identical to humans is uninteresting, unimaginative, and close-minded. Fortunately, at the moment it doesn't really matter, because we aren't sharing this reality with another sentient race. But if that were to change, that sort of unconscious humocentricity would be dangerous in the extreme.

First, it makes the races more balanced (so half-orcs, which were weak in 3.X get a boost) and second it allows some interesting new possibilities. You could, for instance, be a dwarf raised by elves, an elf who grew up in a human city or a human who was part of a nomadic tribe, all with mechanical abilities to back it up. Those would all be interesting characters.

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Sure. But there is no need to mess with the racial archetypes to accomplish that.

Finally it makes the game more compatible with other settings.

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Not mine. Not the historical D&D settings.

In short, whatever your thoughts on the terms, breaking inborn traits out from cultural ones can't help but make the game better.

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Maybe, but not if it comes at the cost of actual diversity. Again, what bothers me about this trend is that in the name of diversity it seems to be mostly motivated by fear of diversity.

talien said:

The term "race" is a staple of fantasy that is now out of sync with modern usage. With Pathfinder shifting from "race" to "ancestry" in its latest edition, it raises the question: should fantasy games still use it?

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Thanks for the article Talien, I think this potentially makes for a great discussion. I'm saddened, but not surprised, that we've already had some cranky gamers try to shut down the conversation by claiming it's nothing but political correctness and social justice "nonsense".

If you feel that the use of the term "race" in D&D is not problematic at all, I disagree with you, but that's fine. Let's have a reasoned discussion about it. But don't be disrespectful and dismiss the concerns of those who DO feel it's problematic. Then you are just being, well, a jerk. We have way too much of THAT in our hobby. If you feel that the term isn't used well, but it's not that big of a deal, I'll disagree there too, but again, that's fine as long as you are not trying to dismiss the discussion or the opinions of others.

The problem with the term "race" is that it's use in the "real world" IS problematic, and while it changes somewhat when ported into fantasy gaming, remains problematic. Using the concept of race in the real world to stereotype, misunderstand, and discriminate is still a very real problem. A problem that we should try to avoid in even our leisure activities, such as fantasy gaming. In fantasy gaming, it's subtle and kinda baked into the DNA of the genre, but something that we should find a way past. It's a way of describing people, real or fantasy, based on stereotypes, lazy thinking, and that easily leads to xenophobia.

Race in D&D describes peoples by a combination of cultural traits and physiological traits, and that mish-mashing of the two makes it hard to distinguish between the two. We've already had one post in the thread claiming that essentially racial traits in D&D are all physiological and not cultural . . . like learning the use of the longsword and longbow?

The way race is used in D&D has bothered me since I was a kid, but I'm not advocating we storm WotC headquarters and demand immediate change. But I am very interested in how Paizo's take on the issue pans out with Pathfinder 2. If it is an improvement on "race", I just might port it over to my 5E game. Might also make for a good DMs Guild product, an alternate take on race in D&D.