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

[Yaarel]

The term "race" is generally unhelpful for D&D.

Of its meanings:
• It is scientifically wrong
• It is antiquated (and typically racist)
• It is archaic convoluted legalese (such as the US census bureau)

None of its meanings is actually useful for gaming.

Mainly, D&D originally used this term "race" because it is antiquated. It sounded pseudomedieval, in the sense that some medievalists around year 1900 also used this term when referring to the medieval period. But this same usage is intrinsic to reallife "racism", especially when applied as a pseudoscience.

In the US census, the usage of the archaic legalese "race" means one of five American melting-pot ethnicities. For example, where Italian and Polish are separate ethnicities in Europe, in the US these and others historically tended to mix together to form a distinctive White American ethnicity. Likewise, where Mali and Gabon are different nations, in the US these and others historically tended to blend together to form a Black American ethnicity. Generally, a Pan-Europe American ethnicity and a Pan-Africa American ethnicity.

Black American is a distinctive "ethnicity". It is distinct from Jamaican, for example. US citizens of African descent may or may not self-identify with the ethnic culture. Likewise, a Black community can include members of European ancestry, such as spouses as well as kids who grow up in it.

Even in the archaic legalese of the census bureau that is peculiar to US history, the term "race" is increasingly meaningless. The US government officially recognizes exactly five "races": White, Black, Native, Asian, and Pacific Islander. But each of these categories is problematic. For example. The Native tends to prefer the term Indigenous, while tending to self-identify as distinct tribes. The White includes the "Mideast and North Africa" or "MENA" who will in the future be counted as a separate "race", and who can include Jewish Americans. Asian includes India and China who no one ever views as if a same "race". Meanwhile, Latino is officially counted, but is officially not a race, and may or may not overlap the official races. Plus there is an additional "Other Race" category that is counted but remains unofficial.

Meanwhile the term "Brown race" is gaining frequency in demographic discourse, as a political category, for ethnicities that are neither European nor African.

The historical forces that separated US citizens from each other − namely slavery and segregation − are vanishing. Americans increasingly mix freely. Increasingly an American ethnicity emerges that comprises a tapestry of different kinds of heritages, forming an inclusive national identity.

In other words, the US legalese is arguably the only "neutral" use of the term "race" left, and even it seems an unfixable mess.



For D&D, the term "race" seems the most unhelpful and the least self-explanatory jargon possible.

 

[Scribe]

For D&D, the term "race" seems the most unhelpful and the least self-explanatory jargon possible.

It really isnt, because literally every single D&D player knows what it means, within the context of D&D.

I'm not saying it is a bad idea for WotC to move away from the term for the game, but for D&D, its 100% the most self explanatory jargon possible, with decades upon decades of reinforcement and use.

Anyway, onward to the survey, so we can say "Use Ancestry please, Species is boring."

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think that it's largely because they heavily lean into the 'steampunk' type of theme, just like artificers.

And so just like artificers, many people struggle to fit them into their settings, even though logically they can be themed in ways other than that.

I don't particularly like Steam punk, but I see tinkerers more in the mold of Heron of Alexandria

In the US census, the usage of the archaic legalese "race" means one of five American melting-pot ethnicities. For example, where Italian and Polish are separate ethnicities in Europe, in the US these and others historically tended to mix together to form a distinctive White American ethnicity.

The census doesn’t match the reality on the ground though. It is a simplification. Not really relevant to the discussion but in the US these are regarded as different ethnicities by most people. That is why you will still have Italian festivals and polish festivals. Also the history of Italians in the US is complicated. I have a copy of my grandfathers old boxing license and it includes a section for “Complexion” and he was entered as “medium”. When he was a kid, they were generally sho’d away from the ‘white’ section of the city. That was back in the 20s and 30s though so things have changed a lot. But even in the 50s my mother grew up in what could be labeled an Italian enclave. Assimilation and intermarriage have also changed things a great deal but I think most Italian Americans consider themselves a separate ethnicity from Polish for sure. A lot of this varied by region in the country though. It seems much less important when I’ve been out west. I’m Italian, Irish and Jewish and here in Boston each of those are considered a distinct group. And each of those identities are still pretty strong even generations later

 

[Yaarel]

@Scribe, I agree jargon is jargon. Its meaning is its technical usage. The nice problem to have, is D&D is becoming culturally mainstream. Now the primary meanings of the term "race" − and problematically charged meanings − interfere with its very narrow gaming nomenclature. It is easy for many people to misunderstand D&D when seeing the term "race".

The census doesn’t match the reality on the ground though. It is a simplification.

Yeah, and that makes the term "race" even less useful and less self-explanatory.

I’m Italian, Irish and Jewish and here in Boston each of those are considered a distinct group. And each of those identities are still pretty strong even generations later

Some fun anecdotes.

I have a good friend who is American. His dad is Irish, and his mom is Polish. My friend is a priest. He has two brothers, one is gay and one is straight but infertile. His parents expected no grandchildren despite having three sons. My priest friend eloped with a nun and got married. Heh, his very Catholic parents have mixed feelings about this.

Boston surprised my brother and I. It is probably the most segregated city I have ever visited, but it seems to have nothing to do with race. Italians have their neighborhood, Irish theirs, "Wasps" theirs, Black Americans theirs, Jamaican Americans theirs, and so on. We went with our friends (Canadians from India and Sri Lanka) to a pub. It was all White college students there, but we didnt think much of it. We heard music upstairs, so decided to go dance. Upstairs was completely Black American, over a hundred easily. We had never seen this kind of self-segregation before. Two rooms of the same place, completely different. But it was about ethnic self-identity. It didnt feel like "race". Anyway, we had a great time. Of all of the groups in Boston, the Blacks felt the most like "normal Americans".

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yeah, and that makes the term "race" even less useful and less self-explanatory.

The US census has a very unusual way of grouping race, and ethnicity is even more unusual. If I remember it is Asian, White, Black, Alaskan, Native American, and Pacific Islander. And I think ethnicity is divided into hispanic and non-hispanic. The reason this grouping is strange is it pretty much doesn't match at all how people in the US talk about racial and ethnic identity. Obviously people might distinguish being hispanic or latino, but non-hispanic isn't exactly a category people think of. And hispanic, I believe doesn't include people from countries that speak Portuguese (it is possible I am wrong on that). Where I live, most of my neighbors are from places like Guatemala, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, etc. So it is a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese, but also a wide cultural and geographic range. When people say ethnicity in the US, it would refer to things like Italian, Polish, Mexican, etc. I think race has a much looser use and can mean either ethnicity or a division between white, black and asian (and I would say I saw more of the latter use on the west coast than the east coast, where ethnicity is more significant than race). Again it isn't really relevant to the topic at hand, but my point is just people in the US know the census is divided into odd categories that don't necessarily reflect how people in daily life think and talk about ethnicity and race.

 

[Cadence]

Heh, this is a pertinent question. Because, as you seem to remember, some of my settings do have mythologically accurate Faerie Knights and Alfar.

It is a challenge to translate them accurately within the context of D&D rules and gaming balance.

To describe them, I start with the reallife folkbeliefs (from an academic, often archeological perspective).

Mostly, the Alfar come from Icelandic texts as well as Norwegian and Swedish contexts, such as place names, and earlier strata within later folkbeliefs.

Mostly, the Fairie come from the records of the reallife Scottish witch trials, where witches describe their encounters with various Elves. Anything that is clearly foreign, such as Christian theology can be safely ignored. Meanwhile, Shakespeare plays happen to describe the English folkbeliefs in Fairy in considerable detail when piecing together all of the comments made in passing. Works like the Merry Wives of Windsor, The Tempest, Midsummer Nights Dream, are especially useful, but also stray comments in other plays that arent really about Fairies. For example, children disguise themselves as Fairies, thereby terrifying the onlookers. We can see from this, the Fairies actually look like humansize youth, are luminous, and Humans value their fateful blessings but are terrified of their fateful curses. Moreover, the more powerful they are, the younger they appear (and likewise the more innocent but less ethically mature). So where the Fairy Queen Titania is described as a toddler, we can see she typically appears as if a human two-year-old. And so on. Generally, the English culture argued that their Nonchristian nature beings arent evil demons, just immature children. There is lots of information about Fairies when one looks for it.

The origins of the folkbeliefs are animistic nature beings. Understanding animism helps. These beings are literal features of nature.

In the Norse traditions, the Alfar are various patterns of sunlight. These military formations of sunlight comprise numerous persons. The light is a person. The light behaves the way it does because it "likes" to and "chooses" to behave that way.

In the British traditions, the Fairy are fertile soil. To see notable areas of lush vegetation, such as a cluster of trees, is itself evidence that Fairies live there. The Scottish and English traditions tend to blend Celtic folkbeliefs about Sidhe (Scot. Sith) with other folkbeliefs of Anglians and Saxons. There is some Nordic influences too. But Britain evolves its own unique folkbeliefs. There are regional distinctions. In the south, in England, the Fairies normally manifest out of the soil to appear as if small human children. But in the north, in Scotland, the Elves (aka the Sith) appear as if human adults. In all cases, the British apparitions are immaterial spirits manifesting from the soil. Some of the Scottish witches compare the Elves to a "shadow" that has a form but without any substance.

And so.



To translate these reallife ethnic heritages into D&D gaming rules is a sensitive ethical challenge. On the one hand, it is cool to preserve these traditions in interesting ways that the world today can enjoy. At the same time, caution is necessary to avoid misrepresentation or insult.



The Norse folkbeliefs translate well into D&D. Unlike other cultures that have all-powerful "gods", the different kinds of Norse nature beings are all moreorless equally powerful as each other. In the Eddas and over a hundred Sagas, there are examples of individuals, a powerful Human individual, a powerful Dvergar individual, a powerful Æsir individual, and so on, each able to defeat the other in that story. Heh, in one story, a Human punches out Óðinn and throws him overboard. For D&D, this seems identical to the concept of Character Level. The Norsesque species have features that moreorless balance with each other. A Human is just as powerful as an Æsir. But. Óðinn isnt a more powerful species − he is simply a higher level character. So the next challenge is to compare which D&D classes compare well to which Norse folkbeliefs. Generally speaking, the 5e Bard is awesome for almost every example of Norse spell effect. Of course, there are no musical instruments, the Nordic lands lacked them. The Norse mages do magic by means of thoughts (Hugar), often using speech and sometimes using novel runic inscriptions as a technique to focus thoughts. I am comfortable with translating Norse Hugar into D&D "Psionics", as the method of spellcasting. Despite the Psionic "Spellcasting Focus", the features of the Bard class work uncannily well. It turns out, basing the Bard on mythologically Celtic folkbeliefs ended up helping out Nordic folkbeliefs as well. Much of it is variations of shamanic animism. Heh, Norse mages are typically psionic Bards.

In addition to Bard, an other surprisingly useful D&D class is Paladin: the abjuration magic coheres well with Norse warrior magic. The Norse males can and did do magic, but it was a social taboo for a male to be cowardly, so it was dishonorable to use magic to harm enemies from a distance. But to use magic to heal and empower oneself and ones allies, in order to face an enemy courageously in battle, face-to-face. Hence the Paladin is awesome. Because I personally like mages, I would also use the Cleric class as a fullcaster, but flavor it exactly like the Paladin class, to represent warrior magic.

Note, the Norse nature beings are literally features of nature. The sunlight is alive, conscious, and sapient. One can communicate (telepathically) with sunlight, and viceversa. On rare occasions, the sunlight projects outofbody sotospeak to manifest in a Human form. Sometimes this form more like a ghostly apparition. But occasionally it is a full-on form of flesh-and-blood. (There is a detailed story about a mountain who becomes a human.) Note, not every sunlight mind is able to materialize in this way. If a mind does this, it is because the mind knows how to do the magic to be able to do this. Almost by definition, an Alfar who can manifest out from the sunlight must be a mage. The Alfar can also teach a Human how to do this, translating back and forth between sunlight and flesh. Viceversa, a Human can teach an Alfar some of the magic that the Human knows how to do. Even the Æsir are learning and teaching the same kinds of magic that Human mages are doing. There is no difference. Indeed, the first Human mages were taught by Jǫtnar how to magic. It is typical for Norse mages to go into a magical trance, to travel outofbody to visit with outofbody nature beings, for these beings to train them to do magic.

In D&D, the Druid class can be useful − not really for the Norse Humans − but the druidic elemental magic helps to actualize the weather magic, and similar, that the sky beings can do. Meanwhile, the Sámi mages do weather magic, and animal shapeshifting is also prominent, so the Druid with some tweaks can help toward these Nordic folkbeliefs.

From a D&D perspective, all of this is caster classes and class levels. High level casters learn how to cast higher level spells. This is true for Humans, Dvergar, Alfar, Jǫtnar, Æsir, Vanir, and Corpses. It is all levels in caster classes.

In the Scottish folkbeliefs, the Elves are immaterial spirits. The D&D 5e concept of the Fey plane works out well. The Scottish Elves are fertile soil, literally. When they project outofbody, they do so as immaterial spirits. D&D represents this well enough. The Fey Plane is an immaterial spiritworld. But the spirits moving thru the Fey Plane appear as virtual bodies whose form behaves as if a material body, or close enough to one anyway. So the Scottish Elves are moreorless like Humans when projecting out-of-soil, except they are Fey, not Material. The Elves rarely materialize into the flesh-and-blood of the Material Plane, and Humans rarely spiritualize into the immateriality of the Fey Plane, but there are stories about this kind of translation happening. For the Scottish witches and Fairie Knights, I am leaning toward the Warlock class, and Fey subclass themes, except healing magic is central. So spells like Cure Wounds and such are necessary for this kind of Warlock to have. Also notably, the Warlocks comprise a community who visit each other across the Fey-Material veil.

Anyway, in the case of Norse, Sámi, Scottish, and English folkbeliefs, it is easy to talk about Nonhuman species who are Humanoid and comparable to the Human species, and who have a strictly Human culture. For example, the Nordic nature beings speak Nordic languages and participate in local Nordic cultures and customs. Scottish nature beings speak Scots and Gaelic, and participate in Scottish cultures and customs. These are Human cultures.

Thank you for the detail.

So the elves or Alfar can be trained to become physically like humans and the humans can be trained to become physically like elves or Alfar?
And, the elves or Alfar have the same culture as the humans?

If so, why are they actually the same thing where the elf or Alfar was raised in the spirit/nature world and the other was raised in the material world in human shape?

 

[Micah Sweet]

And when used in that context it strays far too close to sexual identity, which is at least as fraught a real-world subject as racial identity.

That's my understanding as well. The word "identity", if not coupled with the word "theft", is currently shorthand for "sexual identity".

 

[Micah Sweet]

this is why i think biological species and learned culture should be separated into different build categories, you can be an elf biologically but of been raised by and socially identify as a member of halfling society or as one of the dragonborns or any other culture, you have trance and charm resist, you can speak halfling but not a word of elvish and picked up some of their natural hospitality.

Another vote for Level Up. Sadly, WotC will never do it, because it works against their "simplicity" narrative.

 

[Micah Sweet]

There was a thread on the Monstrosity category a while back that showed a lot of people had issues with it, and it seems to always be a bit of a grab-bag of stuff that didn't fit elsewhere. The main definition that seemed to be of use was "a creature that only came into existence due to the magical manipulation (or perhaps magical warping) of other 'natural' creatures". This would include a lot of chimeric mixes (eg: owlbear, yuan-ti, minotaur, hippogryph, etc), as well as unnaturally sized creatures (eg: crag cat, ankheg, giant slug, etc).

They're not 'evil' so much as 'unnatural'. Of course 'unnatural' is a bit of a vague term, and it's sometimes hard to properly define what is 'natural' in a world of magic and gods and multiple planes of existence.

To me, it seems one of the definitions of "monstrosity" they're using is, "humanoid we don't want to be playable, for whatever reason".

 

[Bedrockgames]

I was talking about the claim made by @MarkB that "Race as used in D&D is about biological identity" which I took to mean only about biological identity. (Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong about that, @MarkB.) That claim is revisionist (as in revsisionist history) because the use of race as a game element in D&D has included things other than biology in every edition of the game of which I can think. Another way of saying this is that it's a false claim.

Race in D&D is a simplification for the purposes of making a character just like class. Race used to be a class in the game. And it still was in basic for many years. A lot of people liked that approach. And if you think of it as race as class, we all understood these weren't representative of all elves. They were just the iconic elves, the iconic dwarves (what leapt to mind when you thought of them). And it was also a game simplification. They weren't trying to do anthropology. The monster manuals often had entries for demihumans in them and it was similarly simple, but that works in a game, where the GM just needs a stat block to use for general elves. You can expand on that much more in individual settings, but by starting simple you create a much easier dial for a GM to start with.

Again, I think a lot of this comes down to how much people see this as a game, and a willingness to engage conceits that are part of it being such. With Evil Orcs its the same, if you are playing a very involved, dramatic and story driven campaign, you probably are not going to be comfortable with evil, kill on sight orcs. Because they've been brought to life more. If you are just going to friends house to roll some dice, kill some orcs and drink soda, it is a different thing entirely.