D&D 5E If not the word "race", what word instead?

[Bawylie]

Flavor text that’s divorced from mechanics.

Sometimes I think we poll backwards. What if we all had to pick which terms we objected to and the least objectionable was the winner?

 

[Eltab]

Flavor text that’s divorced from mechanics.

Sometimes I think we poll backwards. What if we all had to pick which terms we objected to and the least objectionable was the winner?

Write up an OP and keep an asbestos suit ready nearby.

 

[ClaytonCross]

The important point was at the end of my post, the part you did not react to.

The races not having common ancestry is just fact, there is nothing to comment or react to. It just is. So I felt no need react to it. However, the half race comment has been used multiple times as a statement that they are the same race now. That disserves to be clarified because people are taking and off hand bit of information and making a judgement that is incorrect due to ignorance on the details of why. Obviously you know the species have different origins but my comment is more just a notification to those who don't know that the fact of half races is based on magic not lineage so it is not the point in fact these people are trying to claim it is.

 

[cbwjm]

I guess something I do like about pathfinder 2e is their use of ancestry/heritage. Whether the terms are good or not (personally I'm fine with them), their mechanics are what I really like. Although similar to race/subrace in 5e they have some differences that I'd quite like to port over to 5e, no half-elf or half-orc races for instance, instead these can be selected as a human heritage instead of the "standard human" heritages of skilled and versatile. Most of the mechanics are in the base race, ability modifiers and some basic traits, then the heritage provides another small package of abilities. This means that, for instance, a high elf, wood elf, and dark elf would all share the same ability modifiers and then their heritage would provide unique advantages for their heritage. In 5e terms that might be basically what their subrace grants but without the ability modifier so that players who want that optimisation are beholden to a specific subrace to start with a 16 in a stat.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Flavor text that’s divorced from mechanics.

Sometimes I think we poll backwards. What if we all had to pick which terms we objected to and the least objectionable was the winner?

Oh great. So you're saying someone needs to put together one of those Survivor - Word To Replace 'Race' tournament threads here on EN World where we spent 2 months slowly eliminating all of them one at a time until there's only a single one left? Wonderful.

 

[Hriston]

I prefer people as an alternative to parent race. For subrace, I think it would be best to have terms that are specific to the particular people of which the subcategory is a part. For instance, a dwarven subcategory could be called a clan or a house, an elven subcategory could be called a division or a sundering, and a halfling subcategory could be called a descent, a blood, or a breed. This would echo how subclass has been treated (which as a term seems to be absent from the books) and has been replaced by terms specific to each class: path, college, domain, circle, archetype, tradition/way, oath, origin, patron, and tradition/school.

 

[MGibster]

If you want to successfully campaign to have race stop being used you'll need to find a word that works equally well in that it's simple and easy to understand. I think I might be coming around on species as I think it gets the job done just as well as race in a way that my choice of people does not. I will probably still say race for the rest of my life though. And they're still the Imperial Guard, Eldar, and Dark Eldar and I don't want to hear it any other way.

 

[Benjamin Olson]

Species is generally what it always really meant in terms of the literal differences between these humanoids. People like interpolating present and historical human racial and ethnic relations into the relationships between fantasy humanoid species for all manner of reasons good, ill, or indifferent, but what they were always really referring to in the game were separate species.

Most of the terms proposed just seem to further reduce differences of species to racial, ethnic, or cultural differences, which to me is a lot more problematic. I'm way more comfortable saying that a weird cat person is more dextrous than a weird dragon person because they are clearly species of radically different biologies from each other than I am saying that there are stat block differences on the basis of any term we use to indicate divisions between humans on Earth.

 

[Aldarc]

Bioform or Origin work for me.

 

[Remathilis]

Well, add that fuel to the fire