D&D (2024) What new jargon do you want to replace "Race"?

[Irlo]

Most Americans didn't consider Indians human beings. They put them in the same fictional category as Horn Helmeted Vikings, Swashbuckling Pirates, and Knights and Dragons. The majority of the country never thought of them as a real living people, who are still dealing with hundreds of years of oppression by our country.

Well said. Thank you.

 

[Hriston]

It comes across as if an effort to make the word "people" mean the exact same thing as "race", including all of the definitions of "race". The word "race" is a problem. But it is what the word means and the ways it gets used that is the problem. So a new word with the same meanings is the same problem.

I missed this earlier due to cross-editing/posting. I disagree. If it was about the meaning of race, it wouldn't be a problem. Race has a meaning that fits quite well with how it's used in D&D. I.e. the nontechnical biological definition:

each of the major divisions of living creatures.​

"a member of the human race"​

I'm sure you've heard it used this way.

The reason race is a problem is the baggage it has accumulated and its associations with racism. The change in terminology is intended to distance D&D from racist discourse. People, in my mind, doesn't have this problem, although an argument could be (and has been) made that, as the best English translation of the German word Volk, it has a similar issue.

 

[Hex08]

It did and still does in the present.

And being casually racist is being deliberately racist. We don't have to be 'in their heads' to understand how this works.

There is no excuse for trying to justify racism past, present or future.

First, I wasn't justifying racism and if you think I was then you are wrong (if you weren't accusing me then that's fine). Second, maybe casually was the wrong word, perhaps unintentionally or oblivious to the possible racism would have been more appropriate, but they certainly weren't being deliberately racist and there is a difference whether or not you believe that to be the case. You do need to be in someone's head before you can justifiably start casting stones. Was and is racism wrong? Yes. However, accusing someone of intentional racism because they were a product of their times is historically naive, everyone is a product of their time (and other factors) and will generally act accordingly. There is no reason to believe that specific people (in this case D&D writers and designers) of prior generations had any hatred for a particular group or thought them less than human, they were simply acting in accordance with their time but intended no harm. There is a world of difference between that kind of behavior and holding hatred in your heart and intentionally trying to hurt someone. Odds are future generations will find fault with something you believe. That's what happens; time moves on and cultural morays change. As time moves on hopefully we all become better but painting whole groups of people with a single brush isn't going to get us there.

Regardless, this is a conversation that is going to go in circles so I will bow out.

 

[Hriston]

The current "Cleric and Revised Species" survey asks to rank three terms:

• Species
• Kind
• Subtype

It looks like OneD&D wants a term that cannot also mean a subgroup of humans.

Species of humans:
Homo habilis
Homo erectus
Homo sapiens

 

[Vaalingrade]

"A product of their time" - Another treasure from The Collection.

 

[Mecheon]

Just on the species thing, my biggest push against it is that, species is a biological thing but, we have options that are most certainly not biological species and it doesn't really apply to.

Revenants aren't a species, you're just back from the dead and are whatever you were previously. Warforged are creations, not a species. Same with Autognomes. These aren't even weird outliers, Warforged are a well recognised race.

 

[Desdichado]

I don't want anything to replace race.

 

[codo]

Just on the species thing, my biggest push against it is that, species is a biological thing but, we have options that are most certainly not biological species and it doesn't really apply to.

Revenants aren't a species, you're just back from the dead and are whatever you were previously. Warforged are creations, not a species. Same with Autognomes. These aren't even weird outliers, Warforged are a well recognised race.

Revenants aren't exactly a race either. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have a separate category of templates someone can add to a character that aren't inherent to their species. Things like Revenants, werewolves and the like, that you add on top of your species.

With the free background feat at first level, a feat could actually work to represent that sort of thing well. It would all work well with my preferred method of handling the half-races Just make a "heritage" feat for each race that players can use to represent mixed backgrounds. Races are basically just 3 feats worth of stuff anyways. Just off 1 feats worth of iconic abilities. For abilities you can use prof mod/day you can make them once per day ,so players still get iconic abilities like a dragonborn's breath weapon, yet still have room for other abilities as well.

I have played around with the idea a bit, and at first glance it seems to world really well.

 

[Clint_L]

You understand why race is a problem, but don't understand why people don't want the new term to have the same problem?

Replacing a term that people see as a racial slur, with a synonym with with same connotations is not fixing the problem. In fact I would say it is worse than doing nothing in the first place. It makes it look like you don't actually care about the issue, you are just making a token effort to make the problem go away. It comes across as, "Fine we changed it, now shut up."

I don't think you read my words, or you would have noted that I specifically wrote: "D&D should avoid mandating terms with serious real-world connotations that we don't need to be debating at our tables." So as it turns out, I am not an idiot.

But that's not what most people are endlessly debating. Pretty much everyone on this thread agrees that we should avoid loaded terms. Instead, we are getting endless discussion about whether "species" can include non-biological creatures, or whatever. It just reads as hopelessly pedantic, like medieval scholars arguing about how many angels can fit on the head of a pin.

Like, let's say you don't think species is a perfect fit that exactly sums up all the different vagaries of playable creature options in this outlandish fantasy game. So what? It should be obvious by now that there is no perfect term from the real world that will fit exactly. That's why I suggested, way back, and somewhat facetiously, that WotC should just make up the word. But setting that option aside, the only other choice is to choose a real world word that doesn't have unfortunate connotations and then just declare that "in the context of D&D, this world means playable creatures." It doesn't really matter what the word is, again as long as it doesn't offend.

 

[CreamCloud0]

Just on the species thing, my biggest push against it is that, species is a biological thing but, we have options that are most certainly not biological species and it doesn't really apply to.

Revenants aren't a species, you're just back from the dead and are whatever you were previously. Warforged are creations, not a species. Same with Autognomes. These aren't even weird outliers, Warforged are a well recognised race.

while an understandable reason to have that opinion i think this is a situation to bring up the old addage: don't let perfect be the enemy of good, species is still the most accurate terminoligy IMO for what it is meant to be describing even if there are a few outliers due to the nature of thier creation, but similarly due to their created nature a warforged or a revenant doesn't have ancestry, heritage or lineage as much or arguably more than as they aren't part of a 'species'

i mean who's to say you can't have an artificially created species.