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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8844898" data-attributes="member: 6803643">Just because they chose it in "close coordination with multiple outside cultural consultants" doesn't mean most of the alternatives are nuked or that they wouldn't accept changing it. They want a dialogue with us about it, so come 12/21/22, we should be prepared to give our thoughts to them in the OD&D UA #3 survey feedback window. Their outside cultural consultants might even have pushed toward a different option, but WotC decided that Species was "good enough" for their cultural consultants (i.e., NET least-hated option by their panel of 2+ consultants) to go forward with. Maybe each one preferred a different term but the other consultant(s) though that term was awful, and none of them hated Species as much as they hated the other's pick of Ancestry or Heritage or Lineage or Origin or People or Tribe or Thingy or whatever. Species may have been the Nash Equilibrium of replacements for Race - when considering the limited sample size of however many (but clearly at least 2) cultural consultants that WotC hired. That sounded more cynical than I meant it, though. I'm optimistic that the cultural consultants are good people who genuinely make the game better. People have different opinions, though, and the player-base sample size could encourage them to go back to said cultural consultants and say, "hey, a lot of survey respondents feel upset by the term species; it suggests their Drow character is somehow lesser than other Elves when we call it a subspecies. The general suggestions were Ancestry, Heritage, and Lineage. Can we review those terms again and why we didn't go that way earlier?" Maybe the cultural consultants will shoot them down again, or the general response will be something that wasn't even considered previously. Maybe there would be a change of mind. Or maybe they'd bring in new consultants and broaden their cultural consultant sample size. There are a bunch of options and this isn't a closed door that we need to accept Species because they said it was closely coordinated and this is what they came up with.</blockquote>

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