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...

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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.
T

the_redbeard

Explorer
Celebrim said:
In this contact, I think you are right. On the other hand, if someone puts a prompt of "People:" followed by a blank, it might not be very intuitive what they are asking for. I also think that "people" and "race" are just synonyms in this context, and as such I don't see what you are actually gaining by switching from the accurate and conventional terminology.
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You really don't see what gaming would gain by dispensing with a term still used today to create oppressive stereotypes and justify the arbitrary oppression of them? And that the people that were stereotyped still, today, have less than proportional representation among the gamer demographic? Folks who want to keep the term say they game for escapism; that's fine. The people who are negatively stereotyped by the social construct of race also deserve to use gaming for escapism. When we use the term "race" in our games, isn't that a reminder?

I'll ask again what I asked earlier in the thread: if one more gamer feels welcome in gaming because we move on from this term, wouldn't it be worth it?
Are you so attached to this term (which you admit has functional equivalents without the connotations) that you would leave it as a barrier?

D&D moved on from gender-based ability score penalties years ago. Why can't we move on from this?

Gaming should be for everyone that wants to participate, right?
 
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pemerton

Legend
The biggest argument in favour of the OP's position? That so many posts in this thread think that this is an issue to be addressed from an in fiction perspective (eg telling us how races were created in the legendary histories of various D&D worlds) rather than from a real world persepctive, which is where the actual action is.

Here's one striking illustration:

Shadow Demon said:
this debate isn’t about the real world use of race.
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The debate obviously is about the use of the word "race" in the real world, ie that really-existing place where RPGing actually occurs.

Gradine said:
this is so far down on the list of things that should probably be addressed that I literally cannot see the purpose of this besides to give folks some low-hanging fruit to rally around and, well, whine about "political correctness" and "social justice". Who does this actually help?

<snip>

we would be much better served as a community as a whole to devote our time and energy rooting out and correcting or removing those problems than we would be quibbling over what honestly amounts to little more than semantics.
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I care about it. I don't encounter RPGing primarily as a "community" thing. I encounter it as a cultural thing - it's a hobby I engage in, and it brings with it a whole lot of stories and artefacts (books with words and pictures).

Most of my friends are not RPGers. Many think it's silly at best. One thing that reinforces their negative judgements is the preponderance of pulp-era sexist and racist tropes. I have many RPG books that I wouldn't want my young children to read, in part for these reasons.

So I would be happy if RPG publishers got rid of this sort of stuff from their books. And to be honest it seems pretty easy to do.

DemoMonkey said:
"Race is probably the most accurate and genre appropriate word for describing different sentient fantasy creatures, but it is also a word that some people find offensive in the real world and should be changed to increase inclusiveness." ?
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It's only "genre appropriate" because the genre, in it's origins, is infused with either romantic/reactionary (JRRT) or modernist/biological (REH/HPL and similar pulp) racism. I would be happy for the games I play, and the fiction they bring with them, to transcend those origins.

Jester David said:
Funny thing... the race vs ethnicity debate is old.

Here's a scan from my Sociology textbook, copyright 2000

<snip>

This book pre-dates Twitter by 6 years and Facebook by 4.
Looking at the citations in the book, this question and issue in a modern sense easily goes back to the mid-90s (and has much, much older origins).

This is not a social media issue. This is a long term cultural issue and problem with language.
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You'll find discussions of race and ethnicity in sociology and anthropology texts going a long way back. The first anthropology text I bought and read was remaindered some time in the mid-80s, which means the extracts it contained were probably from the 60s and 70s. Ashley Montagu's Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race (an ironically dated title) was first published in 1942.

Aguirre Melchiors said:
Try to portray real world etnicities in D&D is a hornest nest, a big one.
Just look at the tomb of anihilation controversy
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So does portraying pseudo-Europeans not count as portraying a "real world ethnicity"? The problem with ToA isn't that it's about "real world ethnicities". It's that it's casually racist.
 

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pemerton

Legend
LordNightwinter said:
Gamers don't need social justice in their games, for the most part we're one of the most accepting groups there is.
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Many of the responses in these threads seem to run counter to your claim!

Oh, and look, here's one:

LordNightwinter said:
Alright dude. You sound like you might have a little bit of bias, dare I say racism, toward white people from all of your arguments and negative commentary.
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So suddenly it's racist against white people to note that (i) not all RPGers are angels, and (ii) RPGing is a predominantly white hobby?

You could have at least pretended to be accepting!
 

dwayne

dwayne

Adventurer
I like where they are going with this and always thought that a distinction should be made. If nothing else as a way for balance and fitting thematically into a setting and where the character was raised as oppossed to his inborn abilities. As the example above the resistance and magical abilities and adjustments could be bound to the race, and the other armor, weapons training and others to the background.
 

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Pickaxe

Explorer
I’m happier with Ancestry, though I could see making it “Ancestry or Origin”. Besides the modern social connotations, there are just a lot of ways the term “race” doesn’t really work unless you make it “You are part of a group that has some distinctive features.” Awakened undead and warforged are treated as races. Half-elves and half-orcs are treated as individual races, even though their ancestry is from two other races. Tieflings are humans that happen to express some features of a distant infernal ancestry, but they are treated as a separate race. None of these, I would argue, accord with even the most innocuous definitions of a race.

The race concept, to my mind, exists for the following purposes in RPGs:

-As a game design space.
-To allow player characters to distinguish themselves from some characters and to claim something in common with others.
-To reflect fantasy tropes that are themselves a reflection of the perspectives of the ancient peoples on which they are based.

I think Ancestry is more suitable for this task than race. Half-elves are not distinguished by being members of a race but by having a distinctive ancestry. And I think adding Origin to this is more inclusive of “race” concepts that have no component of inheritance, such as someone who is a dragonborn because they were a humanoid transformed by Bahamut.

I’m fine with leaving behind the term race, as it was poorly suited to the function it identified.
 

T

the_redbeard

Explorer
LordNightwinter said:
Alright dude. You sound like you might have a little bit of bias, dare I say racism, toward white people from all of your arguments and negative commentary. I will not be drawn in to a debate that I can't win because I'm the token white geek. I'm going to take the high ground and bow out. Good luck with your arguments. I wish you good luck and good fortune on all of your ventures. May the gamers you meet be better to you than the supposed ones you've met so far. For my part, if you have seen that side of things and only that side of things, I'm sorry. You're missing out on the better side of gamers. Good day to you sir.
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You need to re-read the post you're replying to. The poster said that a) they have gamed with good people, b) they have also experienced vile gamers and c) they said most gamers are white.

Please LordNightWinter, where did the post make a biased claim against whites? Where did they express racism? I can't find it in the post that you are replying to. I suggest you re-read the post.

Also, it's pretty hard for you to be the "token white geek", given that the majority of gamers are white. From my perspective, you seem very thin skinned and unable to accurately understand the view points of others.
 

Andor

Andor

First Post
LordNightwinter said:
You're talking about changing fictional rules
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No. There is no rule in D&D that mandates what races call each other. Elves and Dwarves can go right on calling each other stench-beards and daisy-fondlers, while Dragons don't care what you call them as long as they are properly seasoned.

We are discussing the terminology used in a rule book printed here in the real world, and read by real people. Who may or may not take real offense. It is not for you or I to cast judgement on someone else's feelings of offense. In my experience when someone takes offense to something I thought was innocuous it usually means I was ignorant of the cause of their offense. Sometimes once educated I may find the justification weak, but that still doesn't invalidate their feelings. Sometimes the justification is BS, but obviously that's not the case here. If you don't know of any reason why anyone in the real world might take offense to the term race, there is an lengthy list of horrors attached to the term in the last century of human history. If you don't know what I'm talking about you aren't qualified to hold a position in this discussion, I suggest you begin your research by googling the term "eugenics."

The question is: Is the game term "race" a sufficiently loaded/offensive term that changing it will improve the commercial viability of the product, or would altering it actually reduce the value of the property by ticking off grognards, or introducing confusion? (A sub question is: What term can you replace it with that is not offensive or confusing?)

For me, the answer is "It's not worth the effort of changing in the face of the terms long history in the game." OTOH I have no particular attachment to the term, other that a combination of familiarity and a lack of a superior option, a publisher would have to try pretty hard to find a replacement term I found so stupid that I would actually refuse to buy a product I was otherwise interested in.
 


DM Magic

DM Magic

Adventurer
Obryn said:
"Some folks find the word 'race' problematic because despite its gaming history, it has real-world connotations that may be uncomfortable to some people. Maybe it's time to use a more respectful word without the baggage."

But nah. You figure - "I'm a good person. I have friends from different cultures. How could I do wrong? How dare anyone insinuate I'm making anyone uncomfortable, or ask me to do anything differently than I am right now?"

Because really what you're saying is, you can't be bothered to change anything to make the game more welcoming. And real peoples' discomfort is meaningless compared to your desire for nothing to ever change, or the mere suggestion that something you've been doing for years might not be the best thing you could possibly do.
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Thank you, Obryn. This topic is exquisitely frustrating for me and you said what I should have said. Eloquent and respectful. Well done.
 

S

Sunseeker

Guest
DM Magic said:
Just spitballin' here, but the way I see it is, what is now called race would be called a heritage or ancestry. And that would only include biological goodies. This would remove half-orc and half-elf and other half races -- you would just have orc or elf or whatever ancestry. As for the biological goodies, people with orc-ancestry would have the stuff that comes with having orc blood (superior strength or whatever) and people with elf ancestry would have the stuff that comes with having elf blood (darkvision or whatever). Stuff like automatically having proficiency in weapons would be moved to backgrounds.
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Actually, I think that'd be pretty cool.

Let people take X number of "ancestry" traits and it would literally define their biological ancestry. Perhaps they're just a mutt and thanks to that they've got darkvision, stonecunning and trance-sleep. Or something.
 

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