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]

Are you suggesting that centaur, dwarf, elf, and lizardfolk are ethnicities?

Are you seriously trying to strawman him with this loaded argument? He told you the term that the Canadian Census uses, much as you expressed the term that the US Census uses.

 

[Shadow Demon]

Yes, the because the Ancient Greeks never used slurs to negatively talk about neighbouring lands 3000 years ago.

(Spoiler alert: they totally did.)

Don’t you think this was a case where the neighboring lands were more concerned with the “sticks & stones” than the “words”?

In modern society with the advent of social media, words have been upgraded.

 

[jasper]

When I was growing up I played with an half-orc flute band, my mother was half-orc , my father was a half-orc. I grew up raiding the local villages for hobbits eating second breakfast.
Now that I got my results back from Ancestry . scroll, I discovered 1/4 Halfling ( um human under 3 feet who used to be fat now are thin and have darkvision), 1/4 high elf, and 1/2 Canadian Human. Any one what dwarven bacon it is nicely marbled.

 

[Celebrim]

'Ancestry' for example is more accurate (particularly because it elegantly includes the various half-xxx's and part-xxx's which none of the other suggestions do) but also more awkward to say, use and parse.

I agree that ancestry is the best of the bad examples being proposed, because it literally is a synonym for race. But I don't think it is better than race, because "human race" is more accurate in my opinion than "human ancestry". I actually have a Trait 'Human Ancestry' that is available in my 3.X homebrew where you have a distant ancestor that is human, allowing you to be in some sense both whatever your race is and also a human. For example, if you are a goblin with human ancestry, then both goblinbane and humanbane weapons proc when hitting you. And on the other hand, you can take both human and goblin racial feats. However, you can't take "human ancestry" if you are in fact already human.

An example of the problem using real world comparisons would be that I IRL have Creek ancestry, but it is so comparatively minor that I'd never claim to be Creek - doing so would be an act of hubris. Likewise I have more significant Irish ancestry but I would not claim to be Irish in any sense, nor is Irish actually a race in either the modern sense of the term or in the technical sense that RPGs use the term.

Being a lizardfolk is a race. Ancestry is more ambiguous and more problematic in its meaning. But if we must do this, ancestry is better than anything else I can think of; it's just worse than race for several reasons.

 

[Dire Bare]

And now we're left with the idea that humans have no culture, because the mechanics for representing those cultures have been misappropriated into humans being universally adaptable as a trait.

Interesting aside . . . here in the States white folks of European descent often feel like we have no ethnicity or culture. That's not true, of course, but we often look to others, those who are different, as people with ethnicity or culture. The same is true of linguistic accents, those in the US with the midwest accent (the one you hear most often from newscasters, politicians, and other "educated" folks), often feel like it's those "other" people who talk with a funny accent, not us. Also, not true, we all have language accents just like we all have culture.

IMO, as most fantasy gamers are white men of Euro descent, it was too easy to see "humans" as not having culture in the game, that's for elves, dwarves, and maybe those "oriental" or "arabian" humans just off the map . . . A more rich D&D would embrace the cultural diversity of "humans" in the core rules (although we do often see improvement in campaign specific products). And why not a similar cultural diversity in non-human peoples as well?

 

[Jester David]

Are you suggesting that centaur, dwarf, elf, and lizardfolk are ethnicities?

Ethnicity in my opinion matches much more closely to "culture" than it does to anything else. That might be appropriate for distinguishing humans, but if it was, then my ethnicity would be "American" or perhaps "Jamaican-American" or "American-Jamaican".

And I'm sure somebody would have a problem with that as well.

According to the US Census, race is "a person’s self-identification with one or more social groups."
https://www.census.gov/mso/www/training/pdf/race-ethnicity-onepager.pdf

Are you suggesting centaur and lizardfolk are a social group one identifies with?

 

[Afrodyte]

I game and have gamed with some pretty radical people. Prison abolitionists, anti-racist queer activists, literal anarchists, etc. And I have seen a grand total of zero of them bat so much as an eyelash over the fantasy usage of the term "race". It's just not really on the radar. It's not that I can't imagine someone actually being legitimately upset over the term, but it's just... there so many other, way bigger fish to fry, you know?

As has been mentioned before, no, not everyone in the hobby is open and inclusive and welcoming, and yes, there are plenty of bigots and misogynists and other gatekeeper gamers who do care who you are and what you look like, and we would be much better served as a community as a whole to devote our time and energy rooting out and correcting or removing those problems than we would be quibbling over what honestly amounts to little more than semantics.

This is pretty much where I am. I'm a gay Black woman, and that in itself seems to make me far more fantastical in some games than actual elves and dwarves.

My major concerns about the hobby cannot be reduced to the use of a single word. I won't weep if someone replaces race with some other word, but when I think about what the hobby needs to do to be more inclusive of people who are not straight white dudes, this specific terminology is way down the list of priorities. I'm far more concerned about how the hobby responds to criticism of this sort than I am about the word itself. Unfortunately, I've grown used to disappointment.

 

[Jester David]

In modern society with the advent of social media, words have been upgraded.

Because pejoratives and slurs never existed prior to social media? People didn't get upset about words like "negro", "Eskimo", "Gypsy", and "retard" until Twitter was invented?

 

[TrippyHippy]

It's not an issue, per se, of political correctness. Language has always evolved in ways that reflect changing times and attitudes without any legislation or strong arm tactics involved.

'Race' is just a bit of an archaic term, that doesn't have the same meaning it did for Tolkien or whoever. 'Class' is a bit problematic too, because the actual game design has moved away from the original classifications of 'fighting man' and 'magic user' to a series of fantasy archetypes.

In the former case, 'Race' also puts too much emphasis on non-humans in the game. One of the reason why I like the term 'Culture' in games like The One Ring and RuneQuest is that it allows the game to focus on multiple types of humans, with demi-humans being just alternative side-cultures with a few extra physiological advantages/disadvantages.

 

[Afrodyte]

That's pretty sad if they actually censor people for using the term political correctness. I know it's a term of the right and I largely disagree with the people who use it but still, it's a thing. The term is a legitimate expression of opinion. Heavy-handed censorship of legitimate poltical discourse is unfortunate. Your solution that these people should "stay out of those threads" is another kind of censorship. Political censorship is anti-1st amendment and anti-American in my opinion.

The 1st amendment means that you can't be thrown in jail for running your mouth about the government. It doesn't mean that private citizens who own or maintain a product or service owe you a platform.