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.

 

[Shadow Demon]

...Yes, and...?

If you go back far enough, they would have a single common ancestor that would encompass the entire elven race. Ancestry is too specific. It is not general enough.

 

[Shasarak]

Curiously enough, D&D had to deal with these problems in the 1980's - and managed to do so without nearly the kerfluffle we are facing within the hobby over the 2010's issues.

That is a good point. DnD has already tried to change the words they use to describe DnD creatures which is why you will never see the terms such as Demon or Devil used in any official DnD book since the 80's.

 

[Pauper]

Certainly I am in the camp of, "Non-human races should be different to the point of being alien." and that perspective may be influencing my opinion. But note, part of the reason I do that is that I feel I have to justify why anything in my game is in my game, and what I certainly don't want - either as perception or as conscious or subconscious reality - is for a race to be some sort of thin commentary on real world races. If the dwarfs are drunken gaelic people, the elves are Nordic people, and the orcs are black people or some other 'scary' minority group, I'm going to feel like your world is either a bit racist or could easily fall into racism in the hands of someone who was prone to think in that manner.

That's a very fair point, and worth taking into account. But...

Where as if the elves of my world are representative of child-like innocence and wonder, libertarian social values, and the simultaneously fragile but enduring natural world, no one is going to think my elves are meant to be a commentary on real world racial issues.

Racial issues, probably not, but these are still identifiably human traits; someone might just as easily take issue with your portayal of elvish libertarianism, or depending on how far a player takes the 'childlike wonder' aspect of this group of elves, consider them to be psychologically deviant humans rather than truly alien (much as I took the fearlessness of the kender in Dragonlance, and why I still dislike them to this day).

What's the point in having a fantasy if you aren't fantastic?

What's the point of diversity if the least actual bit of diversity terrifies you?

Good questions, though again, I'd say these 'fantastic' races still aren't 'races' in the sense people want to use it in this thread; human traits taken to an extreme still aren't really 'alien' as much as they can be seen as 'abberant' or 'damaged' -- your elves are different from humans, but not because they are truly non-human, only because their human-identifiable traits are expressed in a measure that generally wouldn't be found in a typical human or human society. And if we're going for 'diversity' among a group of characters who are basically all identified as having human-like traits, then 'race' is not the term we want to use to describe that distinction (though I suspect we agree on this point).

Contrast with a treatment of elves like that in Lord Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter"; though it would be difficult adapting that to Dungeons & Dragons mainly because a big part of the theme of the novel has to do with the role of magic in the world and how it is much more than what human thought believes it is (both in good and bad ways), and that 'theory' of magic doesn't really jibe with how bog-standard D&D treats magic, as a perfectly functional and predictable tool. (Speaking of what's the point of fantasy...) Nevertheless, the creatures of Elfland, though they do share some human traits, are pretty identifiably different from human, in ways that are significant to the story and the world.

As for Bright, I thought the first half the movie was surprisingly good, and the last half mostly embarrassingly bad. There is a sense in which I think you are right, but I also think that they did at least try to portray the orc character in a way that was a bit alien.

The link I put in was to a YouTube essay discussing Bright that I pretty much agree with; I thought the main orc character was portrayed well by the actor who played him, but mainly because the orc was the most identifiably human character in the main cast, which doesn't bode well for him being 'alien'.

In particular, the orc character was receiving information on sensory channels his human partner didn't have. He was literally blind to a lot of things is partner found obvious, whereas the orc was portrayed in a way that for an human would be considered autistic and thus he was blind to a lot of information channels that his partner found so obvious that he didn't need to think of them.

'The orc cop has infravision' isn't really a selling point for me when numerous other cops in the same force also get infravision through the use of IR goggles. The 'autistic' comment is a bit closer, but even then, we're describing the behavior of the orc character in human terms. Maybe that's part of the point -- as humans, we can't really get that far outside our own perspective to really describe an alien viewpoint, and if we could, we'd lose our essential humanity and become servants of Azathoth or something along those lines. But if that's the case, then there's no real way for us to implement 'race' as something truly non-human, because we can only express behavior in human terms, or in terms of things that are non-human that we believe we understand, such as animal or hive behaviors. "What if a bee was as smart as a human" isn't a question we can effectively answer, because the closer we get to expressing the world in the way a hyper-intelligent bee would perceive it, the farther away we get from an understandable human perspective and the more likely we are to reject that expression as unrelateable, so any expression we could really accept simply makes the bee-person seem more like a human with antennae taped to her forehead.

--
Pauper

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Circling back around a bit:

Whatever the right thing to do is is here, the PF2 preview of goblins has me dubious that their particular approach is solving any problems. The ancestry feats mentioned are "Burn It", "Junk Tinkerer", "Razor Teeth", and "Very Sneaky". These sound a lot like they're continuing to conflate biology and culture in their concept of "ancestry". Razor Teeth is pretty clearly biological, okay. But Burn It and Junk Tinkerer are just as clearly cultural. And Very Sneaky could be argued either way (and poses problems either way). If being a Junk Tinkerer is a matter of ancestry, that makes me wonder what PF2's "background" system is supposed to do.

 

[Celebrim]

...Yes, and...?

As a matter of fact, everyone has a different 'ancestry'. Indeed, wasn't it one of the tenants that the move to ancestry was justified by the fact that there is no such thing as racial purity, and no biological basis for race (although how that applies to goblins, centaurs, lizardfolk, and elves I'm not sure).

This sort of leaves the 'ancestry' people in a bit of a bind though. If race is meaningless, why are we just relabeling it rather than getting rid of it? But if race is mechanically meaningful, then it refers to something other than ancestry, which by your own argument is incredibly diverse - indeed so incredibly diverse as to be individual to a particular person. At some point, if 'elf' or 'centaur' has any meaning at all and isn't just a social construct and a group you self-identify with, it's going to have some sort of mechanical game package. And effectively someone is going to have to sort NPC's or PC's into those different categories and apply the package. But by grouping a bunch of different individual ancestries into this package and categorizing them, you are acknowledging the reality of race in the game world. And if you are doing that, 'ancestry' is not only a inaccurate term, but a dishonest one.

Moreover, we've had multiple posters on the ancestry side of this debate suggest that the advantage of 'ancestry' is that we can use it as both a euphemism for 'race' (as Paizo explicitly) does and also use it as a euphemism for culture so that we can use the same umbrella mechanic of 'ancestry' to different both race (elf from dwarf, for example) and use it to differentiate Mwangi from Keleshite. This is even more problematic, because it conflates culture with ethnicity in a way that reinforces racial essentialism. At the very least, if you go that way you have to be really careful to call out that everyone who is culturally Keleshite is not necessarily ethnically or racially Keleshite. But then this is still confusing and problematic, because if I'm selecting 'Ancestry' and my option is 'Keleshite' I'm being steered to think that to be Keleshite culturally I have to have Keleshite ancestry. And you just do not want to do that if you are going to be making a realistically diverse and inclusive game.

In short, I understand the problem that is trying to be solved, but the solution is bad, and not only will I have big problems with it from my perspective as a highly undesirable and loathsome person greatly to be ignored (and who cares, right?), but I guarantee you that if you go this way blind to the problems it creates you are going to find yourself the target of the very sort of ire and indignation you are bringing to these boards.

 

[LazarusKane]

Hm...
I´m not really sure why but according to the thesaurus Merriam-Webster (https://www.merriam-webster.com/thesaurus/race) "ancestry" isn´t a synonym (= the same) for "race" - it´s even a Near Antonym = the opposite.

"Near antonyms are words that do not qualify as antonyms under the strict definition used for this thesaurus but that clearly have meanings in marked contrast with the members of a synonym group."

 

[tomBitonti]

"Ancestry" kind-of fits, in that it works with "Heritage" type feats, and fits well with the idea of having a particular "other" race in one's ancestry. There are many examples of this, using either a feat or built into a character's initially selected race.

"Race" does have some unfortunate connections to real world issues, which would be nice to avoid. What is important then is not the detractions of "Race" per se, but the improvements which can be made by an alternate.

While "Ancestry" can be made to work, I'm not liking it, since it doesn't work for many cases. (What is the Ancestry of a Mind Flayer? Or of a Juju Zombie?) I don't find "Species" to be work very well either, in part because it is too modern, but also because it doesn't fit many of the possibilities, either.

In any case, staying within the current game system features, there are several "functions" to which race contributes, and which I'd want to preserve:

1) In setting basic abilities, e.g., Drow having Dark Vision, and Thri-Kreen having four arms. Goblins are small. Troglodytes stink.

2) As a determinant of Type and Subtype (with extension to type specific spells or abilities, for example, "Charm Person" and "Slaying [Type]" as a weapon quality). An Elf might be Humanoid(Elf), and a Fire Genasi might be Humanoid(Human, Fire).

Thx!
TomB

 

[TheCosmicKid]

"What if a bee was as smart as a human" isn't a question we can effectively answer, because the closer we get to expressing the world in the way a hyper-intelligent bee would perceive it, the farther away we get from an understandable human perspective and the more likely we are to reject that expression as unrelateable, so any expression we could really accept simply makes the bee-person seem more like a human with antennae taped to her forehead.

I just so happen to have a hyper-intelligent bee as a major NPC in my campaign. And I make liberal use of the "talking animals" trope in general.

My approach to the problem is to lean into it. Talking animals in fairy tales and beast fables have surprisingly human perspectives not simply because they were written by human authors and have to be relatable to human audiences, but because they comment on the human condition. That may sound over-pretentious. I don't have any grand literary designs for my long-suffering but loyal bee. But I'd rather embrace the humanness of the character than worry about whether it's realistic.

 

[Andor]

My top three replacements are "people", "species", and "kin/kind". I don't have any objections to science-y sounding words like "species". D&D is full of them already, and from a language standpoint, D&D's terminology reflects its numerous, idiosyncratic source materials, so any appeal to a kind of genre-purity falls on deaf ears with me.

"Kind" is a good one. Humankind, elvenkind, dwarfkind. It strikes the ear properly, and doesn't have any baggage tied to it that I can think of (although I'm probably wrong.)

You know, my first post in this thread was a joke; an immortal elf and partly-made-out-of-stone dwarf agreeing "race" is a social construct. I'll stand by that. It's possible I'm at my most insightful when I'm trying to be funny...

In D&D a social construct is a warforged bard.

 

[Pauper]

I disagree.
1.) Take for example the 3.5 Edition "Races of ..." Books. There is so much material to distinct the races.

Except that much if not all of that material would apply just as well if describing humans dwelling in the same environments those other races come from. To take an example from one of the PDFs I just happen to have lying around:

The outriders are the most skilled scouts of the tribe, and they govern the direction that the tribe hunts and travels, unless the chieftain overrules their choice. The druids, the primary source of healing and magical power within the society, hold a great deal of influence over most aspects of ... life, and often advise the chieftain on important matters. The chieftain makes decisions on everything that affects the tribe as a whole.

So is this describing wild elves? Ghostwise halflings? Gnolls? Or just a group of humans that don't dwell in what we call civilization? As it happens, it's from the Races of the Wild section on Catfolk, but it (like much of the other material in those sources) is so generic that there's you could swap out the catfolk for humans and still find the material utterly understandable and believable. This is a 'rubber forehead race'.

2.) But the bigger reason is that the D&D (basic) races must keep approachable - the more "alien" a race is the harder it is to play (and if I remember correctly even in this thread someone made the arguments that you can´t play a different race (an elf) properly as an NON-Human (=alien) character... and that Thri-Keen shouldn´t be allowed as player characters... I witnessed even more than once the discussion that a male can´t even play a woman properly.

That's much the same as the point I brought up with Celebrim, the idea that players don't really treat the 'races' as anything but 'humans with X trait', so it's not really valid to talk about them as absolutely definably distinct types of beings. I think your point, though, goes toward why some players seem defensive about the 'race' argument -- the idea being that, if making a distinction of 'race' is problematic because the different 'races' can't be played distinctly enough not to be offensive, that the obvious answer is to ban them from being used by players. (Honestly, that's an approach I'd consider in my own games for races like drow elves and full orcs which are explictly described in the Monster Manual as evil.) I'm not sure that banning the use of problematic playable 'races' is the best answer, but I do understand that leaving them in the game as options effectively concedes that some players will choose to use those options, and a player can't be considered wholly to blame for choosing a problematic option that isn't presented responsibly and then playing that option badly.

That´s one of the reasons BRIGHT seems to be ripped from the Shadowrun Manual - the first Orks in Shadowrun are mutated humans - and that happened only 30 to 50 years before the actual timeline of the game.

Depends on which edition of Shadowrun you're using -- in the edition I played, the return of magic to the world simply revealed that some people who appeared human were actually orcs all along. Its a surprisingly inclusive message for its time, though it has problematic aspects of its own. (So if you're secretly an orc but don't know it, does that mean you're only going to be attracted to people who are also secretly orcs but don't know it? And how do you know that if you don't know it consciously?)

--
Pauper