D&D (2024) One D&D Permanently Removes The Term 'Race'

In line with many other tabletop roleplaying games, such as Pathfinder or Level Up, One D&D is removing the term 'race'. Where Pathfinder uses 'Ancestry' and Level Up uses 'Heritage', One D&D will be using 'Species'.

Moving On From 'Race' in the 2024 Core Rulebooks

We understand "race" is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds.

www.dndbeyond.com

In a blog post, WotC announced that "We have made the decision to move on from using the term "race" everywhere in One D&D, and we do not intend to return to that term."

 

[John R Davis]

It's only playtest so species may go.
I prefer Pojj ( product of jiggy jiggy) but that may not be favoured by all

Origin is my pick ( as it covers having an elven mummy and human daddy, etc).

 

[Marandahir]

I wouldn’t worry about it, personally. Just include a custom lineage option and direct players who want some exotic combination to use it to express their lineage however they like.

The only thing I'd worry about is minmaxers.

Tasha's "Customize Your Origin" is a stop-gap that works in the context of 2014-2020 character ancestry features having a mixture of proficiencies and innate abilities. You could swap proficiencies, but not innate abilities. "Custom Lineage" sidebar can almost be copy-pasted into the 2024 PHB and cover say, Quarter-Elf-Quarter-Halfling-Quarter-Orc-Quarter-Ardling characters, but otherwise it's just a Variant Human with a couple different options instead of the second ability score boost. And while it can ALMOST capture Half-elf (the only thing you're really missing is Fey Ancestry and the extra ability score bumps), it certainly doesn't help with defining Half-orc as somewhere between Human and Orc, outside of saying, hey, you can choose either human or orc lineage-feats. And even THAT option to help you more carefully define your character encourages minmaxing if such feats are created in a way that breaks when you put them together - something that might be avoided by design with Human-Elf combos and Human-Orc combos due to historic precedent of Half-elves accessing both lineages' feat pools etc and Half-orcs doing likewise with both their lineages, but when you get to Half-Halfling-Half-Thri-Kreen or even Mottled Ancestry characters like my Quarter character I'm not going to type a second time, you're getting into Min-max territory.

Plus, the ONLY thing you could really hang on this lineage are the Size choice (mostly available for everyone save weirdly Dwarves and Elves, despite mythological precedent), the Walking Speed (standardized at 30 for everyone), the Bonus Feat (core Human feature) and the Darkvision/Bonus Skill Prof (choice). You'd need to flesh this Custom Lineage out further to equal the power of the other lineages, given that ability scores and language profs have been pushed into character creation / background.

So you could flesh it out the Simic Hybrid way and give a bunch of other cool flavourful options of a hybrid character (albeit, not a lobster claw or gills or semi-wings or tentacles, probably); you could just list off some other less-OP features that various lineages get, like Damage Resistance to a type of your choice, or +5 ft of movement, or powerful build or fey ancestry, and let you choose 2 of these features instead of just 1 like in Tasha's.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Probably never will go away, not in our lifetimes at least.

They stopped calling it spell memorization 22 years ago in 3e and replaced it with "preparation", I still hear plenty of people call it "spell memorization".

People tend to use the terms and language from when they learned the hobby, especially for core concepts like character race.

In my group, spell memorization is used by a 21 yo student who, apparently, have never been contemporary to the term.

Can you elaborate on that?

Not going to answer for him, but it's very much used like "ilk" in English. Also, it's the generic term for "some sort of". Outside of academic use, where espèce is very much like species (which other deems to scifi) and strongly imply being animal, it's not very evocative and as pedestrian as using "thingy" in English. Of course, the onus is on the translator to find a suitable term in the destination language. Which might be "race", since it's not as loaded as it seems to be elsewhere in the world. The "race of kings" was swiftly ended by a sharp razor, but nobody ever thought Louis XVI, and Marie-Antoinette were a different species. Also, at the other end of the language formality spectrum, it's more used as a stand-in for "mother" in a general insult implying having intercourse with one's race, and as a general expletive, especially among younger people, so the associations are different but not the same as the Anglo-Saxon sphere.

 

[Cadence]

I wouldn’t worry about it, personally. Just include a custom lineage option and direct players who want some exotic combination to use it to express their lineage however they like.

But if John Carter and Dejah Thoris work, what if the Adem in Kingkiller Chronicles are right about how reproduction works for them, and Kvothe (and most readers) are wrong. What if the chickens in the farm down the road bear live young, and the deer in that forest lay eggs? Are the Green Martians 1/2 Centaur 1/2 Thri-Kreen? [Why do I have to grade papers now instead of making up things to throw into campaigns*]

 

[Cadence]

I'm curious which other words were nuked due to what came up during... 'The term "species" was chosen in close coordination with multiple outside cultural consultants.' I assume that many of them were tried out.

 

[Amrûnril]

I take your point. Worth pointing out that Hominidae family has many extant species, though. Us, for one. But also varieties of gorillas, chimps, and orangutans. Yup, we are classified as apes (great apes, specifically, which is nice. I like being known as "great').

Good to know. I study plant ecology, so my animal examples may be a decade or so out of date.

 

[Marandahir]

Taxonomic classifications above species are biologically meaningful in that they denote a group of organisms where each member is more closely related to each other member than to anything outside the group. What they don't have, is any sort of consistent scale. So a family can range in size from Hominidae, which includes only one extant species, to Poaceae, which includes every species of grass anywhere in the world.

That's not always true, though. As a fellow botanist, I'd love to bring up how Raynoutria and Fallopia and Persicaria - all genera - regularly hybridize ACROSS genera, hence why Knotweed has a taxonomic history that would baffle even Ring Species experts. We can't seem to agree whether Turtles are more closely related to Archosaurs (Crocs & Birds) or to Lepidosaurs (Lizards), and even if the molecular DNA analyses suggest that they ARE more closely related to Birds, whether they are within Archosaurapoda or just a sister group to Archosaurs (Archosauramorpha).

We run into trouble with Taxonomy REGULARLY, and things are always moving around. It's just a quagmire, and D&D does NOT need to get into it. Unfortunately, we seem to be running head on for it because now we're treating Eladrin, Sea Elves, Shadar-kai, and Astral Elves as full species sitting alongside Elves, while treating High Elves, Wood Elves, and Drow as subspecies of Elves. We're acting like somehow High Elves and Wood Elves and Drow are more closely related to each other than to any of the others. Narratively, that's not necessarily the case. In some worlds and editions, High Elves and Wood Elves form a distinct clade apart from the others, while in other worlds and editions, High Elves and Eladrin form a clade distinct from Wood Elves. Specifically when it comes to the Forgotten Realms, a key part of the 4e thesis was that Eladrin from the Feywild were discovered to be the same clade as High Elves and Moon Elves, while Wood Elves and Wild Elves were different, and just called Elves for the most part. But then late in 4e, we get Dex/Int Elves as a second option to Dex/Wis Wood Elves, and they start acting like High Elves were a type of Elf and could be built with the Elf mechanics and not the Eladrin ones. And now fast forward to 5e, and Eladrin are most definitely their own thing apart from High Elves and Wood Elves, but this is still FR-official lore.

You see the problem of bringing taxonomy into D&D? We don't need that. Let's just present ALL options as full Species/Lineage/Ancestry/Heritage options, and let players work out the specifics of their character and whether they're like Elrond i.e. Part Dark Elf (Ñoldorin), Part Wood Elf (Sindarin), Part High Elf (Vanyarin), Part Human (First AND Third Houses of the Edáin), and Part Aasimar (Maiar).

Oh, and I JUST realised that Aasimar is a mixture of Asura and Maiar. DOH. I know they dropped it from 4e because it sounds like you want "more donkey", but I never thought about how it's likely just as Tolkien-derived as it is mythologically-derived.

TLDR: Make High Elf and Drow and Forest Gnome etc full separate write-ups from Wood Elf and Rock Gnome, etc. Or collapse them into a single people (Elf and Gnome) and let players work out the specifics. I don't think we NEED to distinguish Wood Elves from High Elves, or Rock Gnomes from Forest Gnomes. Just give features from both to a single people. Drow might be trickier, but I'd take the radical tact of claiming that they'd be better off just as a culture with universal elf stats, and lock some Drow-specific feats behind having a Drow background for your Elf.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

One of the most iconic Hybrid species characters of all time is Star Trek's Spock. He's the iconic Vulcan, and doesn't seem to have abilities much different from any other Vulcan, even if he's part Human. So in some ways as a D&D One playtest example, someone just picked "Vulcan" for their character abilities and then wrote how they were Part-Vulcan Part-Human in the characters concept. Roughly the same thing applies for Deana Troi who's Part-Human Part-Betazoid, in that she just used the "Betazoid" abilities.

 

[Cadence]

Relevant to some of the biology stuff here...

Is evolving from animals into a humanoid problematic at all? Or am I misremembering other things?

 

[Michael Linke]

They should have gone full circle toward race-as-class and called species "Secondary class".