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

[Bedrockgames]

I think the ship has sailed on the originally intended meaning. People are going to draw parallels to various human ethnicities, regardless of what we do. I would rather we take a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to the language we use in the game, so that the words we use reflect how people actually play it.

In which case, I think species or type are the best terms for what people are trying to do here (personally I don't think the ship has sailed in the general culture, but I think it has in many places online). But fair enough, if the term is too cloudy, it should at least be a term that doesn't bring us back to blood and soil concepts.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think there is probably good evidence that giftedness at many things whether intelligence, artistic ability, or athletic ability is inherited.

Please, tell me more about this evidence.

 

[Cadence]

But everything possible in the multiverse doesn't have to be a class or race option. These are crafted to maximize the fun of the game, for balance issues, etc. Liches also exist, but players aren't allowed to be liches. Obviously some settings can vary. Maybe you make a setting where Lich is a race or class options (or werewolves, or some other powerful monster). But for the core I think part of the idea is pick a an assortment that best fits whatever D&D is supposed to be at that time.

I wouldn't mind something like 2e (iirc) had for classes hiding in the DMG or PHB, where you could mix and match if you wanted to for whatever-race/species-is called.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think there is probably good evidence that giftedness at many things whether intelligence, artistic ability, or athletic ability is inherited. Maybe not perfectly inherited, but definitely with statistically relevant chances. And practical experience tells me that things like foot speed, mathematical ability and so forth can be trained but that every person has their own plateau. Foot speed is not only a learned trait nor is it some random chance. Your parentage matters. While artistic ability is harder to measure, I know it isn't nothing and some people have more ability to draw representative art or produce musical scores as prodigies than I would ever have through training.

This I think is going to bring you into a situation where you are at war with reality, not wanting the world to function the way it evidently does.

Your reasoning that eugenics is wrong is not wrong, but your reasoning for why it is wrong certainly is. And while this doesn't seem like a big deal as long as you get the answer right, the problem with answers that depend on bad foundations is undermining the foundation creates the perception that the answer probably isn't right either.

I don't want to get into this but I do strongly reject this idea. Sure a person might inherent certain traits from their parents, but I think most differences across human groups are cultural. Obviously some physical characteristics can matter (I'm not a 6 foot tall Norwegian and so I am never going to fight in the heavy weight division of boxing). But a lot of this has also proved to be related to things like diet. I don't think it warrants modifiers between human groups. Like I said, I think the birthright campaign setting, could be wrong here so someone correct me if so, had modifiers for human groups, and the groups seemed to have obvious human analogs. That didn't sit very well with me. I remember when I was young you still had people who believed in some of that old racialist science and I always found it pretty gross (especially since it was a weapon that could be turned on people for fairly minor ethnic differences). And we also saw the results of it in the 20th century.

 

[Charlaquin]

In which case, I think species or type are the best terms for what people are trying to do here (personally I don't think the ship has sailed in the general culture, but I think it has in many places online).

I obviously disagree, but I don’t think we’re likely to come to an agreement on that matter.

But fair enough, if the term is too cloudy, it should at least be a term that doesn't bring us back to blood and soil concepts.

I’m not clear on how ancestry does that. Would you be more comfortable with people?

 

[Celebrim]

Yeah, "nation" is another blurry word.

Nation is a word you really want to avoid because the last thing you want to do is bring up the once primary but now secondary definition of nation. Historically, "nation" was used as a synonym for what we would now call "race" or "ethnicity". The "nation of France" meant "the group of people descended from the Franks and having the characteristics of that family of mankind". The word had the secondary definition of "people living under a shared sovereign", but this was almost a duplicate of the first in practical terms. The term "empire" in fact meant "many nations (ethnicities) with a shared sovereignty".

Starting with the rise of the United States, the term "nation" started to favor what had been the secondary definition - a group of people part of the same government. That definition is now almost completely dominant, so much so that in the USA at least, we almost never think of "nation" as "ethnicity" (contrast China or Japan). Now think what "nation" implies in somewhere like France where the idea is in transition.

No, "nation" is right out.

And I have to have a chuckle at the naivety of people who think "folk" is historically less problematic than "race". So much innocence there I won't even discuss why "folk" is bad.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

I've got to say I absolutely the hate the 'anything can breed with anything' in the playtest. It has no mechanical impact, while also killing off the longstanding half-elf and half-orc player races which have existed for decades. It also makes the entire lore a completely meaningless mess.

If I was dm'ing I'd always be happy to allow a player to turn up with some special OC crossbreed character, as long as they can think of some convincing reason for it to happen which doesn't clash with the setting (a wizard did it).

Between that and aardlings, this definitely looks like an edition where I'll be restricting content within the PHB itself if I run a campaign.

 

[Charlaquin]

@Bedrockgames you keep bringing up modifiers for different groups of humans, but I don’t think there’s any indication WotC would ever do that?

 

[Bedrockgames]

I’m not clear on how ancestry does that. Would you be more comfortable with people?

No I would be less comfortable with people because, again that is even more so, getting us into differences between human groups (not just between elves, dwarves, and halflings), that really do harken back to blood and soil. Especially because you are using peoples mixing to explain the different modifiers players are taking (i.e. I am big and strong because we have orc ancestry mixed in: this is a lot like how modern scientific racialists try to say our policies should be impacted by ethnic difference because some people have more neanderthal DNA than others). It is just an updated form of the old racialist science, where groups say we are better than this group because of our ancestry. Or just look at New England racism, that is all about ancestry, and what people you were perceived to belong to (they just were more concerned about differences among European groups than say southern racists).

 

[Yaarel]

Maybe I should add the term Phenotype to the poll.