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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8847843" data-attributes="member: 85555">Fair enough. I think I object to people on a few grounds. One it humanizes orcs and elves, but they aren't meant to be human. The magic of fantasy is that you have non-human races. Doesn't mean they aren't sapient and don't have internal interesting lives as species but I always loved the thought experiment aspect of fantasy and science fiction of you have humanoids and intelligent sapient species with different biology, drives, etc than humans and the writers thinking those through logically to develop different cultures, etc. The other reason is I do think if the point here (and not saying I agree with the point as I think most people can make distinctions like race is used one way in a game and another in real life, or that race has multiple meanings in general and D&D is relying on one of those meanings not the other), is to avoid the problems inherent in the term race, then terms like peoples also are bogged down with those problems (probably even more than race because with terms like ancestry, bloodline and peoples you can really get into that kind of blood and soil problem that connects a lot more directly to the kind of thinking that was going on in nazi germany but also in a lot of the racialist science of the early 20th century (because that was often about this idea of human bloodlines and peoples being able to be breed like dog-breed, and some of us were categorized as poodles or pugs, others as German shepherds or bloodhounds). Again, I think most people can see the term people and not assume that is the implied use, but if the concern is people do that sort of thing, then you probably want to pick a more neutral term. And the last reason would be that I don't think peoples captures what demihumans are. Peoples are just differences of culture and ancestry: you are from this place and belong to this nation or have this culture or are part of this tribe so you belong to the X peoples. There is no real difference, besides superficial ones there. But the differences between a dwarf and elves are deep, more like the difference between species. Now that said, you can change that. You can make races/species in fantasy just different shades of human (like someone said elves are just slender humans with pointy ears), so the differences are no more than human differences like eye color, skin color, hair color, etc. And if you did, sure peoples would be accurate. I just think that would be very dull for a fantasy setting, and especially dull for D&D (where the point of choosing race and class at the start is both for flavor but also for game purposes of having simple but mechanically meaningful choices during character creation).</blockquote>

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