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

[Yaarel]

I am unsure what to do about the Dragonborn.

I am comfortable to hypothetically describe Red Dragon and Gold Dragon as separate species of the Genus Dragon (Draco).

Compare the taxonomies of the sheep and the dragon

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata (skeleton)
Class: Mammalia (mammal)
Order: Artiodactyla (hooves)
Family: Bovidae (cattle-like ruminant)
[Subfamily]: Caprinae (goat-like)
Genus: Ovis (sheep)
Species: aries (domestic sheep)

Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata (skeleton)
Class: Reptilia (reptile)
Order: Squamata (scales)
[Suborder]: Serpentes (snake)
Family: Draconidae (dragon-like)
Genus: Draco (dragon)
[Subgenus]: Chromaticus / Metallicus / Gemmeus
Species: rufus (red), etc. / aureolus (gold), etc. / sapphirus (sapphire), etc.

While these scientific rankings in Modern Latin are modern from 1700s onward, the distinctions between the kingdoms of life (earth, plant, animal), the distinctions between classes of animals (mammal, reptile, etcetera), and even the taxonomical families (cattle-like, viper, cat-like, eagle-like, etcetera) are all ancient.

D&D True Dragons are the variegated species of genus Draco. The creature type, Dragon, is the wider family of Draconidae.



But the Dragonborn? They are like an artifical lifeform that splices together the Humanoid and Dragon creature types. According to lore, the primordial dragons modified dragon embryos to develop into a bipedal humanlike form. They did this for each dragon species. So in some ways, the Dragonborn are a single species who can reproduce offspring with each other, but in other ways, they are separate species of dragons: red, gold, sapphire, etcetera.

Maybe the simplest way to understand this is, the Dragonborn is a species, but each dragonborn transmits a separate bloodline or lineage, that descends from an ancestor who is a specific species of Dragon. An offspring from different bloodlines only expresses the traits of one bloodline, but can still transmit the unexpressed traits to future offspring.



Importantly, the Humanoid creature type is unrelated to genetics. Rather, it describes a convergent evolution. Different kinds of lifeforms can evolve humanlike qualities of consciousness, freewill, sapience, language, and culture. Typically, they exhibit a humanlike bipedal body shape.

The Humanoid lifeforms can be complex and even nonbiological. Dragonborn are Dragon adopting a Humanlike shape. Elf are Celestial thought but some become Fey spirit and some of these materialize as a Human body. Tiefling are Human altered by Fiend. Shifter descends from Human modified by Beast via lycanthropy. Warforged are a Construct that Humans made Humanoid. Warforged belong to a kingdom of life that is neither Plant nor Beast, and probably accurate to classify as Elemental.

 

[Yaarel]

I've just never seen orcs as stand-ins for real races. I just think you can have evil races in an RPG, or orcs, and it isn't going to contribute to dehumanization unless people are looking for. Just my opinion. We never needed orc depictions to commit racial atrocities: plenty of real world dehumanizing language and stereotypes do that already. But I think terms like peoples, ethnicities, heritage and ancestry get us much closer to it because those are ways we can dehumanize actual human groups. I would say if they want to avoid the issues that a term like race can create, they are better off going with type or species, but I don't think we need to completely retool the underlying mechanics of demihumans.

For me a problem with D&D Evil "races" is the way D&D traditions use reallife ethnic features, like "tribe", "chieftain", "shaman", dark skin complexion, or "yellow" or "red" skin complexion, to describe "Evil" "primitive" races, thereby caricaturizing and demonizing the reallife ethnic groups. To refer to these "races" as nonhumans worsens the insult.

Anyway, that ship has sailed. The term race is gone. I want to avoid debates about race. There are other threads that one can necromance if one wants to revisit the debates about the term race.

That said, the problems that occur with the term "race" might also occur with other terms that appear in the poll in the original post. It is ok to mention these concerns in the context of the poll options to replace race.

 

[Irlo]

I voted for Type (as in Creature Type).

 

[Bill Zebub]

I've just never seen orcs as stand-ins for real races.

So because you see things that way (and I don’t know your ethnicity) what is the implication when other people see it differently, and say it makes them feel unwelcome in the hobby, or worse? Do you not believe them? Think they are overreacting? Ignore them?

I’m kind of with you in that I never, in decades of gaming, saw “orcs as stand-ins for real races.” (And, if you’ve at all been paying attention, you would understand that it’s a mischaracterization of the problem.). But more recently I’ve become aware that the language and depictions we use to dehumanize orcs is the same language that has been used to justify dehumanization (read: enslavement) of other people. And apparently people from those ethnicities find that hurtful.

I’m not going to doubt them. Literally the least effort I can make to address terrible societal disparities is to say, “Ok, sure, I will believe you. If this bothers you, I’m ok with making some changes to my game of make believe elves and dragons.”

To refuse to do that, to kick up a fuss and cry and scream and make angry forum posts, or even to simply try to undermine the effort by saying things like “orcs aren’t black people”, is pathetic.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Dragons aren't even Chordata, much less Reptiles. They have six limbs for starters.

 

[Mecheon]

Dragons aren't even Chordata, much less Reptiles. They have six limbs for starters.

If we're really playing the phylogeny game, I'd argue they're somewhere in Synapsidia per their walking style being far more mammal like, lack of feathers that'd put them in the various groups of Therapoda, having fur (We figure some Synapsids had fur, even before mammals proper) and the general close-to-reptile appearance, but wouldn't go any further than that, but this begs the question if the Hexapoda 'six-limbs' thing evolved once or twice.

Absolutely Chordata though, they have backbones. Just a Chordata who's somehow managed to get another set of limbs out of it from an ancestor. Per stuff suggesting Linnorms are the ancestor, we can use them as the starting point, which suggests that the ancestral dragon started with just two limbs. Various draconiform lifeforms from there gradually would then pick up additional limbs (or loosing as far as the sea serpent and wyrm lines go)

 

[Yaarel]

Dragons aren't even Chordata, much less Reptiles. They have six limbs for starters.

In reallife medieval bestiaries, the dragon (Latin draco ‹ Greek drakon) is a species of snake, a serpent. The texts describe the Central African rock python, which can grow to lengths over 20 feet. But the stylized illustrations can get wild.

Due to ignorance about Africa and under the influence of mythic traditions about flying serpents, especially in Revelation in the Christian Bible, medieval Europe began to depict the draconic snake with wings, whence often both wings and talons of a bird. Because of locomoting by means of slithering the long serpentine body, there was uncertainty about whether the talons were more like legs (like a bird with a long tail) or more like arms (like the D&D linnorm and salamander). One illustration depicts the draconic snake with eight limbs: one set of wings with the arms and an other set of wings with the legs. Afterward, the snake often appeared with six limbs: arms and legs, plus wings.

Meanwhile, the Roman military standard for cavalry was called a "draco". This serpentine wind-sock banner moved like snake thru the air when holding it aloft while speeding on horseback. Different cavalry units would have different animal heads on their draco as its insignia. Some had lion heads, some wolf heads, and so on. The Roman cavalry introduced the concept of the draco across Europe. The concept the draco even reached Nordic lands. The Norse called it the dreki.

Thus medieval imagination came to visualize the exotic snake as having features that resembled those of other animals. The Norse dragon (dreki) typically exhibits features of adder snake, including actual horns in place of the adders hornlike V-pattern, plus lionlike head and mouth, and eaglelike arms. They are born as normal adder snakes, then while maturing, they shed their skin to reveal horns, then eaglelike arms. Never legs. The Norse dragon typically has two armlike limbs, but at a great age, they can shed their skin to reveal eaglelike wings, totaling four limbs.

By contrast, the Welsh dragon (ddraig) typically exhibits six limbs: an adder, with wolflike head, scaly wolflike body but ravenlike hands and feet, and batlike wings.

In any case, all of these concepts of dragon are explicitly a kind of snake.

Of course, the reallife snake itself evolves from a snakelike slithering animal, whose limbs became vestigial, then losing the forelimbs, then the hindlimbs.

The reappearance of limbs of the dragon resembles both snake atavism and further evolutionary mutation, including "draconid" species with two, four, or six limbs.



In this history, dragons are "serpents": class Reptilia, suborder Serptentes, and genus Draco.

 

[Vaalingrade]

The synapsid argument is better by virtue of there being no way these big, quick, obviously endothermic critters are reptiles in any way, shape or form.

 

[Yaarel]

The synapsid argument is better by virtue of there being no way these big, quick, obviously endothermic critters are reptiles in any way, shape or form.

Magic.

Besides warm-blooded birds-dinosaurs evolved from reptiles (now understood as clade Sauropsida). Something similar can happen again from snakes.

 

[Mecheon]

Going further into my phylogeny rambling...

Lung/Ryu probably split off first from the Linnorm ancestry, with Naga being a close relation due to historical relation between the two. But the appearance of the rear legs suggest that there's some mechanism in Draconiformes to allow the generation of more limbs. Once you get that first limb generation the other baseline draconiforms in Wyverns and Drakes are easy alterations of bodyform to either adapt to flight, or to go for a bulkier apex predator body. Drake-line leads to dragons proper with the appearance of the rear wings. Hydra and Zmey are close relatives as I doubt the multi-head thing evolved multiple times. There's probably a line who've secondarily lost their arms and became full snake, leading to your wyrms

Behir are the dragon equivilent of weasels or ferrets, a snake-like body and lifestyle but retaining legs. Giant, angry, lighting-spitting ones.