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

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? “Race” and Modern Parlance We previously discussed the challenges of representing real-life cultures in a fantasy world, with African and Asian countries being just two examples...

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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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“Race” and Modern Parlance​

We previously discussed the challenges of representing real-life cultures in a fantasy world, with African and Asian countries being just two examples. The discussion becomes more complicated with fantasy "races"—historically, race was believed to be determined by the geographic arrangement of populations. Fantasy gaming, which has its roots in fantasy literature, still uses the term “race” this way.

Co-creator of D&D Gary Gygax cited R.E. Howard's Conan series as an influence on D&D, which combines Lovecraftian elements with sword and sorcery. Howard's perceptions may have been a sign of the times he lived in, but it seems likely they influenced his stories. Robert B. Marks explains just how these stereotypes manifested in Conan's world:
The young, vibrant civilizations of the Hyborian Age, like Aquilonia and Nemedia, are white - the equivalent of Medieval Europe. Around them are older Asiatic civilizations like Stygia and Vendhya, ancient, decrepit, and living on borrowed time. To the northwest and the south are the barbarian lands - but only Asgard and Vanaheim are in any way Viking. The Black Kingdoms are filled with tribesmen evoking the early 20th century vision of darkest Africa, and the Cimmerians and Picts are a strange cross between the ancient Celts and Native Americans - and it is very clear that the barbarians and savages, and not any of the civilized people or races, will be the last ones standing.
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Which leads us to the other major fantasy influence, author J.R.R. Tolkien. David M. Perry explains in an interview with Helen Young:
In Middle Earth, unlike reality, race is objectively real rather than socially constructed. There are species (elves, men, dwarves, etc.), but within those species there are races that conform to 19th-century race theory, in that their physical attributes (hair color, etc.) are associated with non-physical attributes that are both personal and cultural. There is also an explicit racial hierarchy which is, again, real in the world of the story.
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The Angry GM elaborates on why race and culture were blended in Tolkien's works:
The thing is, in the Tolkienverse, at least, in the Lord of the Rings version of the Tolkienverse (because I can’t speak for what happened in the Cinnabon or whatever that other book was called), the races were all very insular and isolated. They didn’t deal with one another. Race and culture went hand in hand. If you were a wood elf, you were raised by wood elves and lived a thoroughly wood elf lifestyle until that whole One Ring issue made you hang out with humans and dwarves and halflings. That isolation was constantly thrust into the spotlight. Hell, it was a major issue in The Hobbit.
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Given the prominence of race in fantasy, it's not surprising that D&D has continued the trend. That trend now seems out of sync with modern parlance; in 1951, the United Nations officially declared that the differences among humans were "insignificant in relation to the anthropological sameness among the peoples who are the human race."

“Race” and Game Design​

Chris Van Dyke's essay on race back in 2008 explains how pervasive "race" is in D&D:
Anyone who has played D&D has spent a lot of time talking about race – “Racial Attributes,” “Racial Restrictions,” “Racial Bonuses.” Everyone knows that different races don’t get along – thanks to Tolkien, Dwarves and Elves tend to distrust each other, and even non-gamers know that Orcs and Goblins are, by their very nature, evil creatures. Race is one of the most important aspects of any fantasy role-playing game, and the belief that there are certain inherent genetic and social distinctions between different races is built into every level of most (if not all) Fantasy Role-Playing Games.
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Racial characteristics in D&D have changed over time. Basic Dungeons & Dragons didn't distinguish between race and class for non-humans, such that one played a dwarf, elf, or halfling -- or a human fighter or cleric. The characteristics of race were so tightly intertwined that race and profession were considered one.

In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the changes became more nuanced, but not without some downsides on character advancement, particularly in allowing “demihumans” to multiclass but with level limits preventing them from exceeding humanity, who had unlimited potential (but could only dual-class).

With Fifth Edition, ability penalties and level caps have been removed, but racial bonuses and proficiencies still apply. The Angry GM explains why this is a problem:
In 5E, you choose a race and a class, but you also choose a background. And the background represents your formative education and socio-economic standing and all that other stuff that basically represents the environment in which you were raised. The racial abilities still haven’t changed even though there is now a really good place for “cultural racial abilities” to live. So, here’s where the oddity arises. An elf urchin will automatically be proficient with a longsword and longbow, two weapons that requires years of training to even become remotely talent with, but a human soldier does not get any automatic martial training. Obviously, in both cases, class will modify that. But in the life of your character, race happens first, then background, and only later on do you end up a member of a class. It’s very quirky.
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Perhaps this is why Pathfinder decided to take a different approach to race by shifting to the term “ancestry”:
Beyond the narrative, there are many things that have changed, but mostly in the details of how the game works. You still pick a race, even though it is now called your ancestry. You still decide on your class—the rulebook includes all of the core classes from the First Edition Core Rulebook, plus the alchemist. You still select feats, but these now come from a greater variety of sources, such as your ancestry, your class, and your skills.
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"Ancestry" is not just a replacement for the word “race.” It’s a fluid term that requires the player to make choices at character creation and as the character advances. This gives an opportunity to express human ethnicities in game terms, including half-elves and half-orcs, without forcing the “subrace” construct.

The Last Race​

It seems likely that, from both a modern parlance and game design perspective, “race” as it is used today will fall out of favor in fantasy games. It’s just going to take time. Indigo Boock sums up the challenge:
Fantasy is a doubled edged sword. Every human culture has some form of fantasy, we all have some sort of immortal ethereal realm where our elven creatures dwell. There’s always this realm that transcends culture. Tolkien said, distinct from science fiction (which looks to the future), fantasy is to feel like one with the entire universe. Fantasy is real, deep human yearning. We look to it as escapism, whether we play D&D, or Skyrim, or you are like myself and write fantasy. There are unfortunately some old cultural tropes that need to be discarded, and it can be frustratingly slow to see those things phased out.
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Here's hoping other role-playing games will follow Pathfinder's lead in how treats its fantasy people in future editions.
 
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Michael Tresca
talien

Michael Tresca

Mike "Talien" Tresca is the managing editor of the EN World Columnists Program, author of The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games, releases daily game-related content on his Patreon, and has over 50 D&D 5E products for sale on DriveThruRPG. He is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to http://amazon.com. If you like what we do here at EN World please consider supporting our Patreon.
L

LazarusKane

Explorer
Pauper said:
Except that much if not all of that material would apply just as well if describing humans dwelling in the same environments those other races come from. To take an example from one of the PDFs I just happen to have lying around:



So is this describing wild elves? Ghostwise halflings? Gnolls? Or just a group of humans that don't dwell in what we call civilization? As it happens, it's from the Races of the Wild section on Catfolk, but it (like much of the other material in those sources) is so generic that there's you could swap out the catfolk for humans and still find the material utterly understandable and believable. This is a 'rubber forehead race'.
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Ok, maybe my memory played a trick on me, I remembered them as great sources for my players to play nonhumans (and humans) as distintive races - but that was long ago. Now I prepare special writeups for playing races.


That's much the same as the point I brought up with Celebrim, the idea that players don't really treat the 'races' as anything but 'humans with X trait', so it's not really valid to talk about them as absolutely definably distinct types of beings. I think your point, though, goes toward why some players seem defensive about the 'race' argument -- the idea being that, if making a distinction of 'race' is problematic because the different 'races' can't be played distinctly enough not to be offensive, that the obvious answer is to ban them from being used by players. (Honestly, that's an approach I'd consider in my own games for races like drow elves and full orcs which are explictly described in the Monster Manual as evil.) I'm not sure that banning the use of problematic playable 'races' is the best answer, but I do understand that leaving them in the game as options effectively concedes that some players will choose to use those options, and a player can't be considered wholly to blame for choosing a problematic option that isn't presented responsibly and then playing that option badly.
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I require for most of my players (not the newbies etc., but the seasoned) that if they want to play a nonhuman race that they try to play them distinct from humans - and if I think someone can´t play an full-blood ork then he has to prove that he can. It´s sometiomes not a extremely popular opinion, but it´s working for us.


Depends on which edition of Shadowrun you're using -- in the edition I played, the return of magic to the world simply revealed that some people who appeared human were actually orcs all along. Its a surprisingly inclusive message for its time, though it has problematic aspects of its own. (So if you're secretly an orc but don't know it, does that mean you're only going to be attracted to people who are also secretly orcs but don't know it? And how do you know that if you don't know it consciously?)

--
Pauper
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OK, but in the old editions the orks (and all the other races except for some elves) were living as humans thousands of years and so had no cultural differences to the humans. Shadowrun was the ultimative collection of "'rubber forehead races" - but it made playing nonhumans extremely simple.
 

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TheCosmicKid

TheCosmicKid

Hero
Andor said:
"Kind" is a good one. Humankind, elvenkind, dwarfkind. It strikes the ear properly, and doesn't have any baggage tied to it that I can think of (although I'm probably wrong.)
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Hmm... that one has potential. It still sounds a bit off when detached from a group label, though. Taking a line from the PHB and doing the substitution, we get:

"The description of each kind includes kind traits that are common to members of that kind. The following entries appear among the traits of most kinds."
 

Arilyn

Arilyn

Hero
Thomas Bowman said:
I don't believe in banning old words, just because the Millennial generation have decided to label those old words as "racist" and think it is hip to ban old words so they can keep on churning the English language by replacing old words with awkward sentences so as not to offend the "easily offended"! I am not going to give people who are offended by everything total control over the English language so they get to decide what words we can and cannot use!
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This is an old argument that has been going on for generation after generation, and yet language just keeps on changing. Nothing to do specifically with the Millenials.:)
 

P

Pauper

That guy, who does that thing.
TheCosmicKid said:
I just so happen to have a hyper-intelligent bee as a major NPC in my campaign. And I make liberal use of the "talking animals" trope in general.
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As an aside, let me say that Speak with Animals gets me into more trouble as a DM than any other ability in D&D, because one of my regular players is a former vet tech who honestly believes that animals have human-level intellect while I do not. The main advantage I have in that argument, other than being the DM, is that I can point to the Monster Manual and say, "In D&D, this dog has an Intelligence of 3, so it simply cannot retain or comprehend the same amount of information that you do with your Intelligence of 10." In that sense, it doesn't matter if animals really do have human-level intelligence that we simply don't know how to communicate with, because the game rules make a specific statement for the game world. However, she is clearly not happy with the statement the game rules made, and if she were offended enough by that statement, she would likely not play the game.

It's an interesting point to juxtapose against the discussion of 'race' in this thread.

My approach to the problem is to lean into it. Talking animals in fairy tales and beast fables have surprisingly human perspectives not simply because they were written by human authors and have to be relatable to human audiences, but because they comment on the human condition. That may sound over-pretentious. I don't have any grand literary designs for my long-suffering but loyal bee. But I'd rather embrace the humanness of the character than worry about whether it's realistic.
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That's actually pretty cool. And from a storytelling perspective, there is definitely a long tradition of taking exaggerated human traits and putting them on an anthropomorphized 'other' to make them more palatable to the story -- heck, Star Trek swims in this trope and has for decades.

Within the context of this discussion, though, if the bee-person is human enough to be relatable to human players, then the bee-person is probably more 'human with odd traits' than 'bee with some human traits', and in that sense, 'race' is not really descriptive of the difference between the bee-person and any other fantasy ethnicity.

--
Pauper
 

C

Caliburn101

Explorer
The White Sorcerer said:
The concept of race is pseudoscientific nonsense that doesn't have a place outside fantasy.
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Wrong.

The Human Race.

Race as a reference to insignificant genetic, appearance and cultural differences is an outmoded term, but we are talking about FANTASY races here.

Outmoded for inter-human discussions about ancestry - sure. Still relevant to made up races from Scifi to Fantasy - yes.

The article is conflating the two and saying that fantasy has to drop the term because it is thought that because the word racism has race in it, that humans should drop any use of it when talking about each other. The fact is, from the beginning, D&D and other fantasy rpgs described humans as a single race.

If anything they were ahead of the times, and have been in no way outmoded or become out of sync.

The article sets up a fallacious 'truism' and then conflates the error with a question about whether we should all abandon the word race when talking about elves and dwarves and orcs.

It doesn't stand up to examination, so the answer is that we don't abandon it.
 

E

Elderbrain

Guest
Thomas Bowman said:
Actually I have seen it used. Devils rule the Nine Hells, and Demons live in the 666 layers of the Abyss.
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I believe the reference is to 2nd edition, where an editorial decision was made to change the names from "Devils" and "Demons" to "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri" - basically to fool parents who'd been getting incensed at the presence of Devils and Demons in the game. ;) There are very few uses of the forbidden words in 2nd edition. Then when 3rd rolled around, they brought the old names back but also kept the new names. It remains to be seen "Baatezu" and "Tanar'ri" are ever used in 5th (MTOF would be a good place what with the Blood War material.)
 

Shasarak

Shasarak

Banned
Banned
Jester David said:
I mean, who would want to see the ads Google Analytics would throw out of you searched for "Ultimate Race" a few times. The books Amazon would suggest if you ordered from that site. Is it a book you would feel comfortable requesting from a library? If you were the head of a chain book store, would you order & stock a book called "Ultimate Race"?
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Its worse then that, what ads are we going to get after ordering "Ultimate Ancestry"?
 

P

Pauper

That guy, who does that thing.
LazarusKane said:
Ok, maybe my memory played a trick on me, I remembered them as great sources for my players to play nonhumans (and humans) as distintive races - but that was long ago. Now I prepare special writeups for playing races.
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I don't think your memory is off -- the books do have a lot of information on the non-human 'races' they describe. It's just that those descriptions basically translate to 'this non-human race is basically this specific subculture of humanity'; in the Race of the Wild book, halflings are basically described as Romani/Irish Wanderer types, while Catfolk are more Native/First World types, and elves are basically humans who have learned to have their civilization within nature rather than in spite of it.

(Edit: Re-reading this, I basically need to find an alternative for 'basically'.)

They're interesting sourcebooks, but not because they present truly non-human societies; their authors were only human after all.

I require for most of my players (not the newbies etc., but the seasoned) that if they want to play a nonhuman race that they try to play them distinct from humans - and if I think someone can´t play an full-blood ork then he has to prove that he can. It´s sometimes not a extremely popular opinion, but it´s working for us.
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Sounds like that might be workable for some groups, but other groups would rebel -- I've definitely been at tables where the guy playing the half-orc is only doing so because the bonuses and abilities his character gets as a half-orc fit so well with being a barbarian and he doesn't care at all about portraying the character as anything but a gruff axe with a human at one end. Even trying to enforce the text in the Basic Rules about alignment -- "(Even half-orcs feel the lingering pull of the orc god's influence.)" -- would meet with a wrinkled forehead and a disbelieving stare.

I don't see that changing the term we use to describe his character's half-orc-ness from 'race' to something else would really affect him, though; for him, it's just a label on a game mechanic. In fact, I suspect most gamers not participating in this discussion would feel the same way: "Eh, as long as I can still be a half-orc barbarian or an elf wizard, I don't care what you call the non-class options."

OK, but in the old editions the orks (and all the other races except for some elves) were living as humans thousands of years and so had no cultural differences to the humans. Shadowrun was the ultimative collection of "'rubber forehead races" - but it made playing nonhumans extremely simple.
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True enough, and it does explain why all these supposed non-humans still share the same cultural norms with the humans they dwell among. More so that Bright, anyway, which does the same thing despite suggesting that orcs and elves have existed in the world for thousands of years but are still culturally inseparable from humanity.

--
Pauper
 

Celebrim

Celebrim

Legend
Pauper said:
Racial issues, probably not, but these are still identifiably human traits; someone might just as easily take issue with your portayal of elvish libertarianism, or depending on how far a player takes the 'childlike wonder' aspect of this group of elves, consider them to be psychologically deviant humans rather than truly alien (much as I took the fearlessness of the kender in Dragonlance, and why I still dislike them to this day).
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I totally agree that achieving an actual alien effect is very difficult. Quite possibly, with our sample size of one and our invisible biases, we would find it nigh impossible to actually imagine truly alien beings.

Good questions, though again, I'd say these 'fantastic' races still aren't 'races' in the sense people want to use it in this thread; human traits taken to an extreme still aren't really 'alien' as much as they can be seen as 'abberant' or 'damaged' -- your elves are different from humans, but not because they are truly non-human, only because their human-identifiable traits are expressed in a measure that generally wouldn't be found in a typical human or human society. And if we're going for 'diversity' among a group of characters who are basically all identified as having human-like traits, then 'race' is not the term we want to use to describe that distinction (though I suspect we agree on this point).
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Well, to be frank and pragmatic, for the purpose of the game it's a different race if I want to put a different stat block on it. That's the sense in which I use the term 'race'. Although, I think you are underestimating the extent to which elven society is quite unlike any human society ever, I agree that however radical it is, it's still somewhat close kin to humanity. And yes, if you mean that I never want to see different racial packages for different groups of humans, then yes, you read me correctly.

Contrast with a treatment of elves like that in Lord Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter"...
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The treatment of elves in Lord Dunsany is much more in line with the idea of 'fairies' than it is in line with the post Tolkien idea of 'elves', even granting the obvious influences of Lord Dunsany on Tolkien. Moreover, as the lord of fairy, the 'King of Elfland' is more in line not with the power of PC fairies in my game, but of fairy deities. Still, I aspire to be at least that alien in my races, if not perhaps more so.

how bog-standard D&D treats magic, as a perfectly functional and predictable tool.
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I've experimented with techniques for making magic more numinous in D&D and the problem is that those techniques shift too much burden on to the DM. Being functional and predictable allows the player to take control of the magic and be responsible for it, which when you have a party of six is pretty much essential. I think it would take a particular sort of computer game to really handle magic in a way that felt numinous (for at least most of the game) because variations and unpredictability is much easier handled by a computer. The trick would be to feed the computer with enough creative ideas that the magic would not feel redundant before the end of the story.

'The orc cop has infravision'...
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It wasn't really that so much as the call out that orcs had a keen sense of smell and the orcs belief that human faces were so expressive as to be basically transparent. The contrast between the orcs ability to detect emotion and his ability to make sense of it was a big part of the character. Fundamentally, the orc was a human imagined with certain canine traits - intense loyalty, pack structures, alpha males, keen nose, etc. The orc cop was that as a particular sort of yippy dog that is annoying as it is lovable, almost to the point of being a cartoon character.

But if that's the case, then there's no real way for us to implement 'race' as something truly non-human, because we can only express behavior in human terms, or in terms of things that are non-human that we believe we understand, such as animal or hive behaviors. "What if a bee was as smart as a human" isn't a question we can effectively answer, because the closer we get to expressing the world in the way a hyper-intelligent bee would perceive it, the farther away we get from an understandable human perspective and the more likely we are to reject that expression as unrelateable, so any expression we could really accept simply makes the bee-person seem more like a human with antennae taped to her forehead.
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I think that that is true, but I return to my pragmatic definition - if you have to have a racial package of modifiers or abilities to represent it - then it's a race. (And if you feel the need to do that with different members of the human race, perhaps rethink the direction you are taking your mechanics.)
 


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