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.

 

[Ogre Mage]

First off I will say I am a gay Asian man who is familiar being at tables where everyone else is a (mostly) heterosexual white man.

Yes, I do think there is still a place for race in D&D as I think it helps suggest details about your character and his or her place in the world. Did your character grow up in an area where there was a lot of racial diversity or in an area where one race was mostly dominant? Is he or she a member of the region's dominant group or a minority? How did this affect the character?

I am currently playing a female dwarf PC living in a society which is 95% human. Dwarves are relatively welcome in Ustalav compared to some others, but she has faced some prejudice. It's been an opportunity to explore some themes of being a minority at a certain safe buffer distance and I'd like to think my life experience has made me better at portraying this. Given the current state of U.S. politics, I certainly would not want to play a person of color/LGBTQ PC in present-day America. The reality for us is f**king depressing and I need to escape that reality for awhile.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

You could take the OGL and write KKK and Dragons if you wanted to.

"Dungeons and Grand Dragons", obviously.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Except they were language based. The whole quoted section about “mongrels”, etc. has been expressly pointed out as being a bit too on the nose.

I wouldn't call that language based. I'm pretty sure the problem would still be there if Gygax had described a genetic hierarchy using different language. (That was Gygax, right? I'm losing track.)

 

[Hussar]

You could take the OGL and write KKK and Dragons if you wanted to. WoTC does not really read and screen all DMs Guild additions for content and the official WoTC 5e stance on the use of the word race is clear in chapter 2of the PHB.

I could use ancestry or species of people and write a racist tract with each of them.

That is one of my arguments, as long as what your species is determines something in the game rules, you automatically are classifying by it. 5e is careful to show there is one human race, not many. The others are not humans. All races get attribute bonuses, not penalties, and the intro words before the mechanical meat use people and species interchangeably with race.

Other than the word supposably causing other associative thoughts, there has been no reason why it should not be used.

You could start all characters off as a featureless blob and build a character using points (like Champions),but you would not be playing D&D.

But, that is kind of missing the point that's being made. The argument is that using "race" as a term will mean that humans in D&D will not have any mechanical differentiation. However, we've already passed that point. Race as a term has been, and most likely will be, used to differentiate humans based on ethnicity and culture. By changing the terminology, and then making it abundantly clear what the new terminology means, it's possible to break with that past association and make sure that it doesn't happen again.

If we retain the terminology, are we not giving at least the appearance that previous usages are ok?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I wouldn't call that language based. I'm pretty sure the problem would still be there if Gygax had described a genetic hierarchy using different language. (That was Gygax, right? I'm losing track.)

He may not have known it, but the words he used were loaded. In another context, it would be called a “dog whistle”.

(To be clear, I absolutely do not think he was using those words with intent, and may not gave even been conscious of the fuse he lit.)

But remember, someone in this thread already quoted a self-proclaimed white supremacist who stated he found resonance with his noxious worldview in the pages of D&D. It wasn’t GG explicitly presaging the work of those who wrote RaHoWa he saw, it was the unfortunate coincidence of GG employing the same language in the same way as those who believe in race-based bigotry.

 

[Jhaelen]

Race+background+culture is bad.
Ancestory is ok?

Leaving the discussion about the proper term for 'race' aside, I'd prefer not to mix background and culture into it.

While I don't like how complicated character creation in "The Dark Eye" ("Das Schwarze Auge") 5th edition is, there's one thing I really like about it:
Each character picks a race, a culture, and a profession*. That allows for a lot of flexibility and has no problems to model 'exotic' characters,
like an elf foundling brought up by dwarves.

A system gets extra points from me, if it allows you to mix and match several options from each category.



*: This is especially interesting, considering that TDE/DSA started out quite similar to OD&D, i.e. there wasn't even a distinction between 'race' and 'class',
i.e. you could be an adventurer, a fighter, a mage, a dwarf, or an elf.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

He may not have known it, but the words he used were loaded. In another context, it would be called a “dog whistle”.

(To be clear, I absolutely do not think he was using those words with intent, and may not gave even been conscious of the fuse he lit.)

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?

But remember, someone in this thread already quoted a self-proclaimed white supremacist who stated he found resonance with his noxious worldview in the pages of D&D. It wasn’t GG explicitly presaging the work of those who wrote RaHoWa he saw, it was the unfortunate coincidence of GG employing the same language in the same way as those who believe in race-based bigotry.

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.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

If we retain the terminology, are we not giving at least the appearance that previous usages are ok?

Which previous usages are we talking about here? Because "race realism" is a previous usage, but so are "critical race theory" and "All persons shall be entitled to be free, at any establishment or place, from discrimination or segregation of any kind on the ground of race, color, religion, or national origin..."

 

[pemerton]

This is where I don’t think you are reading the rules. WoTC did the Marvel thing already, it is called 5e.

I am arguing that the word race in the 5e rules is being used properly and does not give the connotations of how race has been used in the past. Those you may bring in yourself, but they are not there because of the way the word race is used. I think that Pathfinder is now avoiding the word but doing what D&D 5e does not do which is classify humans with different attribute packages.

I understand your argument. I don't agree. The passages I quoted upthread from 5e illustrate that the game still puts forward a strong conception of cultural difference and social role/belonging tracking "biology" and heredity.

It's not vicious (either deliberately or casually), which marks a clear difference from Gygax's characterisation of half-orcs (which could be taken straight from HPL). But it's still there.

as long as what your species is determines something in the game rules, you automatically are classifying by it. 5e is careful to show there is one human race, not many.

The second of the sentences I've quoted is tricky, because - in one obvious sense - there are multiple human races. If [MENTION=19675]Dannyalcatraz[/MENTION] and I fill in a form which asks us to tick a box for race, we're going to tick different boxes. One strength of 5e is that it in fact seems comfortable with this variety in human races, whereas earlier editions have tended to equate (in their art) being human with being white.

The first sentence is probably true - but there are ways of loosening this connection between "species" and capability, and also of loosening the connection between "species" and culture. I think changing the way the rulebooks talk about "race" might be one part of such a loosening. While the language of "race" is retained, I don't think it is going to happen.

 

[Riley37]

Most* of the victims of the Holocaust were white, but/and "not the right kind" of white.

* maybe 'all', if you think of the Holocaust as aimed at civilians not soldiers

I hope you're bringing that up to make a specific point, rather than because you think I don't know which groups were sent to the camps. 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. You can learn more on that, if you like, but details are beyond the scope of this thread.

Here's the connection I see, for this thread: people use the term "race" for several different things, simultaneously and with overlap. "Race" has more shades of meaning than "light", which is the opposite of heavy, and of dark, and of serious; but "light armor" doesn't resist Radiant damage, and when "light infantry" tell jokes, they're as grim as any other military humor.

So yes, the Holocaust targeted people in the human race. Of the two main human races of Europe, Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon, the Neanderthals were already dead, possibly in an earlier genocide. Of the white Cro-Magnon humans, Slavs Jews and Romani were targets, more than Aryans; but as mentioned earlier, some Jews were more visible, and more immediately targeted, than others. Was Stella Kübler, who first tried to escape by passing as Aryan, and then bought her own life by betraying other "passing" Jews to the Gestapo, really a member of the same race as Victor Frankl?

If there had also been D&D races in the lands Germany conquered... I dunno, I guess Hess and Himmler would have argued about where they fell in the Thule Society mythos, and whether they shared Atlantean origin with the Aryan race? The Reich would assign them a classification of some sort. Maybe the Finns cut a deal during the Winter War to save their wood elves. Insofar as D&D dwarves are Norse, well, Norway didn't shelter its Jews during the German occupation, so don't count on any mercy for Dwarves either. (See below, on the other side of their heritage.) Ents would become firewood - perhaps even fuel for the crematoria. Orcs, mostly death by forced labor, as with Polish and Russian Slavs, but maybe with an option to become auxiliary soldiers, in expendable cannon-fodder units, always on the front lines.

The most horrible, least optimistic outcome I can imagine, in that scenario, is that the humans would sneer at the half-orcs, and the half-orcs would sneer at the orcs, even as they marched side by side under the gates of "Arbeit Macht Frei". When Tolkien invented the Khudzul language of Dwarves, he wrote "their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic", with what linguists call "triconsonantal roots"; but the Dwarves would deny any affinity with the Jews; "the Dwarves are for the Dwarves". They would choose to enter the gas chambers on Tuesday, rather than Wednesday, if delaying to Wednesday meant sharing the chambers with "gypsies". Elrond would say "You know what I hate about humans? It's the smell of them", echoing Agent Smith, but coughing from crematorium smoke.

The distinction that matters, in the long run, is who volunteered to serve as "kapo", or assistant to the camp guards, and who didn't.

Not that I have any strong opinions on the topic.