D&D (2024) What new jargon do you want to replace "Race"?

[Frozen_Heart]

The point many make however, is that they want all the non-humans, humanized in terms of how players view them, so they are not seen as 'monsters' to be killed.

Orcs can no longer be just raiders.
Goblins can no longer be just "goblin like" (hilarious with the rise of "Goblin Mode" as a term!)

Instead, everything and everyone is maybe just your neighbor who you meet at the pub later and they help you mend your fence that was broken by totally not bad kobolds, last weekend.

Thats how some anyway, prefer it.

I never found settings where every species is just humans in different hats interesting. Having different species be mentally different as well as physically different can lead to far more interesting worldbuilding.

If the setting is just 'humans but they look different', then why not just have a fantasy setting with humans as the sole sapient species?

 

[Frozen_Heart]

The synapsid argument is better by virtue of there being no way these big, quick, obviously endothermic critters are reptiles in any way, shape or form.

Birds, pterosaurs, and many species of non-avian dinosaurs are/were endothermic reptiles.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Orcs can no longer be just raiders.
Goblins can no longer be just "goblin like" (hilarious with the rise of "Goblin Mode" as a term!)

I never saw orcs as pure raiders, at least I never saw them as purely tribal raiders. For me, in most settings I made for D&D, orcs often had a range of societies but those societies tended to be martial (i.e. they might sometimes be vikings, sometimes be Romans, sometimes be tribes of hill orcs, etc). The Roman orcs were pretty advanced by the tech level of the setting. Same with goblins and kobolds. You often did have the traditional bands of goblins and kobolds, but you also had kobolds functioning as scribes and as intelligentsia in the Roman orc region. What is cool about races and world building is them having distinct physical and mental characteristics that shape their culture in different ways than humans (for example a race that has extremely acute smell and can see at night is probably going to have a different culture from humans). Obviously inventing cultures whole cloth can be difficult so we find an analog. In my case Rome. But you can deviate more from real world cultures if you are willing to put in the work (it is just harder and requires a lot more thought).

 

[Branduil]

I never found settings where every species is just humans in different hats interesting. Having different species be mentally different as well as physically different can lead to far more interesting worldbuilding.

If the setting is just 'humans but they look different', then why not just have a fantasy setting with humans as the sole sapient species?

There's absolutely nothing wrong with settings where different species of sapient beings, with very different physiology, exist.

However, if we're talking about D&D, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs are absolutely terrible examples of doing that. Elves and Dwarves are very obviously just Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off. Orcs were that, but then things got muddled with Half-Orcs and a number of quite offensive "savage" caricatures mixed in, in addition to the problems they already had as an inherently "evil" race. This is not Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, there's nothing especially interesting happening biologically here.

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with that per se, I can enjoy Elves or Dwarves as much as anyone, but I'm not going to pretend they're not humans with cool hats 90% of the time.

 

[Charlaquin]

But also, I think the concept of race in D&D, whether it is literally called race or some other term, is crucial to what makes the game work. So the direction it sounds like they are going in (where you pick a trait inherited from your parents (which could be any number of things I assume) misses the simplicity of selecting a Race and getting a standard allotment of modifiers and abilities.

You still pick a race species and get a standard allotment of “abilities” (called “features” so as to not confuse them with ability scores, which are no longer tied to race/species).

 

[Charlaquin]

Not a fan of Type, but Creature Type I like.

Creature type is already a thing though. Humanoid, fiend, fey, elemental, aberration, giant, undead, etc. are creature types.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with settings where different species of sapient beings, with very different physiology, exist.

However, if we're talking about D&D, Elves, Dwarves, and Orcs are absolutely terrible examples of doing that. Elves and Dwarves are very obviously just Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off. Orcs were that, but then things got muddled with Half-Orcs and a number of quite offensive "savage" caricatures mixed in, in addition to the problems they already had as an inherently "evil" race. This is not Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, there's nothing especially interesting happening biologically here.

Now, I don't think there's anything wrong with that per se, I can enjoy Elves or Dwarves as much as anyone, but I'm not going to pretend they're not humans with cool hats 90% of the time.

Yeah I'm not a fan of the 'inherently evil' thing. Unless it's outer plane related creatures.

 

[Charlaquin]

Just to be clear I don't think one should make angry forum posts over these kinds of disagreements. You can disagree with a person's analysis without attacking them and without getting angry. Also if someone feels a certain way about something, in an emotional way, you can be sensitive to that and still disagree. But I do think it is very important to give our honest opinions about these things. I think because the whole debate hinges on whether orcs are stand-ins for black people or other racial groups, saying you don't think they are so (at least generally, obviously there may be cases where a writer is specifically injecting bad stereotypes into the game) isn't about being dismissive of that person but about being honest about what you really think. If you agree with them, by all means, say so. But if you disagree, I find it a bit patronizing to lie to people about what you think on the matter. And if you think deferring to their opinion on the matter because of their personal experience is sufficient, fair enough.

It doesn’t actually matter if they’re “stand-ins.” If the way they are depicted makes a subset of the playerbase uncomfortable because it reminds them of the way they have experienced prejudice in real life, that’s a problem that needs addressing, whether it was intentional or not.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Birds, pterosaurs, and many species of non-avian dinosaurs are/were endothermic reptiles.

If we're going to be that sweeping, all non-arthropod animals are basically just fish.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

If we're going to be that sweeping, all non-arthropod animals are basically just fish.

Except reptiles (including birds) are a class, and so that example is considerably less sweeping than using synapsids. Which are a clade.

Fish are always a bad example, as they're paraphylatic and so don't actually work in modern classification unless you include tetrapods. In which case the 'vertebrate' subphylum is basically the same thing as 'fish'.

As for dragon classification, It drastically changes depending on if you're using 4 limbed or 6 limbed dragons. If you're using 6 limbed dragons, then there are actually lobed-fin fish with 6 lobes which exist irl. If one of those had crawled up onto land first rather than a 4 lobed fish, modern terrestrial vertebrates may have ended up with 6 limbs as a base, rather than 4.