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 Pathfinder shifting from "race" to "ancestry" in its latest edition, it raises the question: should fantasy games still use it?

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

Here's hoping other role-playing games will follow Pathfinder's lead in how treats its fantasy people in future editions.

 

[Aldarc]

What makes a word loaded?

Cognitive semantics and grammar, intellectual history, its associated connotative value judgments, context, usage in colloquial vernacular, and the term's centrality to various forms of discourse (e.g., ideological, political, socio-historical, and scientific).

But the word we're talking about in this thread is "race". Where does that fall, and why?

It may be helpful for you to answer this question as well. Where do you think that the word "race" falls, and why?

That asked, I would wager, as you likely would as well, that the term "race" is probably more central to racial supremacist discourse than the word "evolution." In particular, the term "race" in its modern conception, as it applies to people and not athletic competition, has a longer history of use in its justification of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, apartheid, eugenics, genocide, bigotry, and other forms of systematic oppression and exploitation, etc. than it does for "pick your fantasy race in D&D." Though the term "evolution" predates Darwin, Darwinian notions of "evolution" were later misappropriated by "social Darwinists" and racist ideologies as a means to justify pre-existing racial supremacist ideologies. So regardless of whether race supremacists used the word "evolution" and other words (e.g., genetics, God, Bible, superiority/inferiority, Europe/Africa, white, black, etc.), the term "race" as a means to distinguish and denegrate fellow humans is undoubtedly more important to the discourse of racism, which relies on the presumption that "race" applies to human peoples.

And though "races" in D&D are biologically/magically distinct, they are classified as "humanoids" and possess remarkably human outlooks, dispositions, personalities, cultures, governments, etc. that are otherwise indistinguishable from humans apart from the superficialities of fantasy (e.g., short and stocky, pointy ears, short with hairy feet, long lives, don't sleep, breathes underwater, immortal faerie realms, etc.). This likely stems from how their biological differences that we have ascribed them are otherwise too alien for own human mentalities such that they must remain familiarly "human enough" for human players to roleplay them, rendering them functionally human in play. (See Thomas Nagel's essay "What is it like to be a bat?") We even see this in how "races" in D&D are often derided as being just "pointy-eared humans" and "short and stocky humans," with the implied underlying sense that the "races" in D&D are fundamentally humans with different sets of aesthetics (and culture). And so it is that "human enough" and "functionally human in play" that moves these biologically-distinct "races" closer towards or arguably within the realm of human social conceptions of "race" and its aforementioned associated baggage.

White supremacists can read the New Testament's message of universal love and forgiveness and think the take-home point is "Kill the Jews". Pick the absolute least problematic item of media you can think of and hand it to the Stormfront community, and I bet you at least some of them will find a way to twist it to fit into their twisted minds. So as far as "Is this racist?" tests go, one that always returns a positive is not really useful.

And you don't think that Biblical scholars, priests, theologians, etc. are not persistently grappling with the portrayals of race and ethnicity in the Bible in a post-Holocaust world, particularly because of your listed reason? But the critical difference is that D&D and other tabletop FRPGs are more openly subject to revisions and new editions when it comes to the language used. (The extent to which this is possible in biblical translations is limited.)

 

[Riley37]

One practical solution to problematic language is to change the language.

No matter what you change anything to, someone out there will have a problem with it.

That is true: someone out there will have a problem with it. Clearly, some people participating in this thread, have a deeply held objection to Paizo using any word other than "race".

If your victory condition is "PEOPLE STOP COMPLAINING, GET OVER IT" then there's no change of terminology which will accomplish that goal. Even if there are zero further complaints from D&Ders whose grandparents were unwelcome at the WHITES ONLY swimming pool... and I can't guarantee that... then alt-right-channers will still complain, for the lulz and to sabotage any conversation which doesn't serve their agenda. Do you have a problem with the artwork in the 5E PHB? No? Cool. Do you need 5E to have artwork that *no one* complains about? Too bad, because some people argued that 5E would benefit from depicting a wider range of humanity, and others argued that D&D's artwork should focus on white characters, and leave other characters to other publishers. (Yeah, that happened, complete with "I'm not racist but to each their own.")

If your victory condition is "no one ever brings their racist assumptions into D&D", then there's no change in terminology which will accomplish that goal. That guy who didn't like playing at the same table as DannyAlcatraz isn't gonna change his mind just because Pathfinder 2 uses different terms than Pathfinder 1. (Maybe he'll change his mind because Danny de-escalated and also ran an amusing character who helped the party win fights and find treasure. Paizo can't make that happen, and I'm not holding my breath.) A DM who's a fan of Andrew Jackson ("a very tough person, but he had a big heart") might run a setting in which the High King's policy on killing goblins, cutting off their ears, and turning them in for a reward, is similar to the bounty practices of Jackson's time. No matter how the rules book describes the steps of character creation, his table won't feel right to me. Even if he's using GURPS, which doesn't even have a line for RACE (or anything equivalent) on the core-rules character sheet, that table *still* won't feel right to me. Fortunately, there are other tables. I'm currently playing at a table in which dragons are not quite so conveniently color-coded for immediate visual determination of alignment, as they are in the MM, and neither are the various bipedal tool-users.

If your victory condition is D&D which, over time, gets farther and farther away from Gygax's "superior 10%" defined as the "mongrels" who can "pass", then THAT is a viable goal. It can be done. One way or another.

There are some who prefer "ancestry" and others "origin" and so forth, but that's like a table of D&Ders who agree that they want pizza, and then negotiate which toppings. We might end up compromising, then adding a plain pizza, to make sure that the vegetarians and the meat-eaters both get enough to eat. The D&Der who's allergic to dairy is not entirely satisfied, even though she took toppings from both meat and veggie pizzas, and made them into a stir-fry. (She learned that method of dealing with pizza because many of the people on the Asian side of her family tree are lactose-intolerant.) There might be some leftover slices, because we had to buy a lot of pizza to fulfill all of the compromises. When the worst remaining problem, is leftover pizza, then it's time to declare victory.

Do you recognize a "racism optional, but at least less built-in" victory condition for Paizo? Are you reluctant to let go of the "good old days" when half-orcs knew their place and did not become wizards or paladins... and if you are, then what would make that letting-go easier for you?

 

[Eltab]

Also, not "all", not if you count Hilarius Gilges, whom the Gestapo killed in 1933; his skin was brown, he had African ancestry, as did a few people living in Germany at the time, either from German colonization of Africa, or from German mothers and French Foreign Legion fathers. Gilges was not the only one.

I had not heard of him before. So I learned something new today !

 

[Riley37]

What makes a word loaded?

Safety Rule #1: Treat all words as if they are loaded. Always assume that a word is loaded even if you think it is unloaded. Every time a word is handled for any reason, check to see that it is unloaded. If you are unable to check a word to see if it is unloaded, leave it alone and seek help from someone more knowledgeable about words.

One of the most common mistakes, is ejecting the clip, but leaving a round in the firing chamber... no, wait, that's specific to firearms, doesn't apply to words. Never mind that part.

Anyways, back to words. I've never been called "kaffir" by someone who was trying to put me in my place. A black guy from South Africa tells me that it's loaded. I could, if I were arrogant (well, more than I am), dismiss him. "What, I've never heard that word, it's not loaded. What are you even talking about. Chill out."

Or I could go all academic, and find the ruling in Prinsloo v State (Supreme Court of Appeals, 2014). Which still might not inform me how usage in South Africa differs from usage in Sri Lanka. (It's not loaded, among the Sri Lankans who call themselves kaffirs; whenever a word has been handled...)

Anyways, when a black guy from South Africa tells me that "kaffir" is loaded, then all else being equal, I'm gonna take his word for it. "If you are unable to check a word to see if it is unloaded, leave it alone and seek help from someone more knowledgeable about words.". Or, where relevant, that specific type of word; my familiarity with revolvers doesn't make me an expert on pump-action shotguns, and vice versa.

So if you really, honestly can't tell where "race" falls, and why... then maybe you should leave it alone until you've checked with someone more familiar with what's it's like to be a *target*? Targets understand bullets in ways that the rest of us generally don't, even if we've read all about how the muzzle velocity of the 115-grain 9mm Parabellum relates to its kinetic energy in foot-pounds.

Or check with several people. Any one person can be wrong, or biased, or misunderstanding your question, or pulling your leg. You're skeptical of DannyAlcatraz, fine, cross-confirmation is a good thing. But if you are *defaulting* to the assumption that because you don't see how "race" is loaded, *therefore it isn't*, not until he *proves* to you that it's loaded...

...then please don't apply the same behavior to firearms. Just sayin'.

 

[Arilyn]

Words matter and can, pun sota intended, say a lot. It's why I don't really understand people who dismiss swearing as "just words". If swear words don't have shock value, what's the point of swearing?

I remember similar arguments, back in the day, over the use of man, as in fireman, chairman, etc. Feminists wanted a change, but there was protest. They're just words, people cried (even women). Everyone knows the term man encompasses all of mankind. Chairperson just sounds silly. We're not excluding women from jobs. What's next, we change human to get rid of the man part? And so on...Yet, the change in words was important, because having more inclusive language helps make our culture more inclusive. They go hand in hand. What words exist in a language say a lot about the people who use that language.

Race is loaded. It's an inaccurate term, and although, mostly used innocently in rpgs, and not actually a huge issue, it's time to shed it.

 

[Eltab]

Clearly, some people participating in this thread, have a deeply held objection to Paizo using any word other than "race".

That sounds like an overstatement, but I will assume that you are exaggerating for effect.

I have been pleasantly surprised that this thread has not (so far) drawn red ink, over some comments that were more insults than descriptions of a thought process.

Given that 'race' tangles together several things - part of the problem encountered in this discussion - how about 'culture' and 'genetics'* to cover the concept? Are there other 'threads' involved that should be mentioned separately?
Of course I'm open to synonyms as proposed previously.

* Do characters in a fantasy game have genes, in-game?

 

[Eltab]

If swear words don't have shock value, what's the point of swearing?

Everyone knows the term man encompasses all of mankind.

In order,

1) It still drives me nuts when somebody complains "People don't treat me with respect" and records themselves describing other people with a string of four-letter words.

2) Yah, that was a bobbled opportunity to enhance the education of the persons who were upset but did not recognize their personal extent of knowledge / ignorance: that 'Man' already means 'everyone' and is inherently inclusive. Maybe schools (grammar and civics classes) should put emphasis on using a dictionary when composing an argument?

 

[Riley37]

Tolkien was not a Hebrew scholar.

He did a translation of the book of Jonah from Hebrew to English. That's not enough for you to recognize him as a Hebrew scholar? Sure, it's not his *primary professional identity*, but he had proficiency with the language.

Why did you assert that Tolkien was not a Hebrew scholar? Were you trying to deny that Tolkien used Hebrew roots when he created Khuzdul, even though *he explicitly said so*? You're not trying to counter any and every point I make, just because we disagree on Paizo's plans for P2, are you? If that wasn't your goal... then what was?

 

[Riley37]

That sounds like an overstatement, but I will assume that you are exaggerating for effect.

I said what I said, because that is what I've noticed at several points across the previous 100 pages of this thread.

If you assume that people are exaggerating for effect, every time they make a statement which which you don't agree, then you may miss some opportunities for useful dialogue across difference of opinion. That is, if you don't take people at their word, they may lose interest in taking you at yours.

When actually in doubt as to someone's intent, then I recommend *asking*. Asking is more diplomatic than "I know what you meant, better than you do" or "You cannot possibly have drawn different conclusions than mine".

* Do characters in a fantasy game have genes, in-game?

I've given my answer, upthread. So have others.

If the answer to the genes question is "yes", does that settle the issue of whether Paizo and D&D should (a) stick with "race", or (b) explore alternatives?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

What makes a word loaded? It can't just be that it has been used in racist theories, because racist theories use lots of words. "Evolution", for instance, I hope we can agree is not a racist dog whistle, even though racists have used it to prop up their ideas. "Mongrel" I would agree is one, if not an outright insult, because it's not really used (of humans) outside the context of racist thought, and (even of dogs) connotes a negative value judgment. But the word we're talking about in this thread is "race". Where does that fall, and why?

People have already answered this one, but I’ll contribute nonetheless.

Context is important. When one of my grandfather’s best friends called me “boy” despite my being in law school, it wasn’t an insult. Not only was he my elder, he was also another black man. It was highly improbable that he was using the word as a racial insult.

When Phil Anselmo used that word as the closing word of “Walk”, it is very difficult NOT to hear the racism since it is uttered with pointed aggression, he’s a white man from Louisiana, and basically my contemporary*. He’s also used racial epithets in public. There is virtually no chance he doesn’t have full knowledge of how that will sound combing out of a white man’s mouth.

“Race” is, as stated many times before, a word steeped in bigotry. It is a social construct, with only so much real scientific grounding as “breed” does in animal husbandry. Its has predominantly been used to rhetorically establish, maintain, and discuss hierarchies. That’s why people are having a problem with that word.

And when Gygax used it in that quoted section, he was using it in the precise way in which a RW racist would, complete with the further use of contextual words like “mongrel” and “passing for” human.





* it’s impossible for a southern white man in his 40s-50s of normal faculties to credibly claim he doesn’t understand how “boy” has been used as a belittling term for black men