-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
So it looks like DnD is excising "Race" as a descriptor for species
- Thread starter The Adder
- Start date
Yeah, "species" doesn't feel like the right word choice. "Origin" or "Background" would probably work better if they need something like that.
Great on them for changing it! I would associate Folk more with a type of culture though, but that might be on me.
This. D&D 5e already does Background and Class, so I'd be super into them adopting the Ancestry term. It makes you think about your character more, too, and starts building out the history from the start.
In D&D where you can play a fire person or a fish person, i don't think culture would fit much to characterize them. As it's much more tied to their genetics (or a different plane of existence entirely) than the where and how they where raised.
I like Kin personnaly. But species fit too i guess.
Species works better I think than culture. Unless this is a "race realist" parody.
Species makes sense to me if you don't want to use race. Like, an Elf and a dragon person aren't the same as a white person or a black person. They have different biology.
Background or Origin doesn't fit to me because that implies the character's beginnings, who they are and not what they are (as in "soldier of the royal guard turned mercenary" compared to "human").
Background or Origin doesn't fit to me because that implies the character's beginnings, who they are and not what they are (as in "soldier of the royal guard turned mercenary" compared to "human").
I mean given that half-elves and half-dwarves exist, and that tieflings are just humans whose ancestors made deals with devils, I think delineation between species (individuals incapable of bearing fertile offspring by biology or geography) would be an incorrect descriptor. Moreover, a big criticism of D&D is with the biological determinism, and using the label "species" would only further justify that (i.e. nobody argues that humans are not as strong as gorillas).
I don't think species is the right word either, but not for this reason. "Species" in real life is useful in designating populations of animals, but there's no universal definition and often arbitrary. See: Coyote/Wolves and a hundred other examples. (Even from a human stand point, whether Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens Sapiens should be considered the same species (despite fitting all the traditional qualifications) is controversial.)
I could be wrong, but I don't think the issues are that physical differences exist at all. I don't see a problem with saying, on average, an Orc is stronger than a halfling. The issue is coding the Orc as a stereotypically non-white European based on Victorian era concepts of Race that still exist to marginalize and other people today. Or the idea that dark skinned races like Drow are inherently evil compared to their lighter skinned counterpart (as well as the fact that even the "good" drow are treated as one of the "good ones" and are coded as being morally superior because they act like the lighter skinned races, rather than possessing their own unique culture.
Ancestry is my favorite choice. Only issue is that the Sorcerer class is literally about having some kind of ancestry (dragons, demons, whatever), so there could be some confusion there.
IIRC, there's evidence of some genetic reproductive barriers between neanderthals and Homo sapiens.
Using race instead of species or some other more accurate term has been bothering me in a lot of fictional settings lately. Just on a nit picking accuracy of terminology and language level. All for this. And now if marvel could conceptualise evolution more accurately I'd be rapt lol.
Classification of species can be iffy, but mine is the standard definition you'd pull out of any college textbook, which is good enough with regards to measuring things such as biodiversity. Yes, you get into weird situations where two species can technically interbreed and produce fertile offspring but never do because they occupy different ecological niches, but it's the best descriptor we have, and one that is completely inappropriate for D&D.
In your example, the 5e interpretation of orc also comes with a -2 to INT, which along comes with a slew of unfortunate implications. And with regards to physical differences, we already make leeway for differences between biologically male and female characters with regards to strength.
Yeah. It pretty much has to be species to really get across what the races in DnD really are.
Of course the wierd thing with species though is that some of the species in DnD can breed with other species, and their offspring make a different kind of species... Which would technically make the offspring "Hybrids" instead of "Species"
It's what Pathfinder Second Edition went with, which actually works quite well (love the Ancestry, Background, Class method of building characters), though I don't know if there's any issues with using their naming choice.
OP
OP
It kinda feels bad when you're talking about it. One time I was talking to a girl on Tinder about DnD and said "Tieflings are the coolest race" and the racial supremacy angle made me feel so bad/embarrassed I 😬'd all the way to deleting my account
Ancestry, it has weight and it can be more personable and not at a arm's length kind of tone like species.
This works even better though.
This works even better though.
OP
OP
My problem with ancestry is that it's even more cumbersome than species. It works fine one a character sheet, but people are just gonna shorthand back to race in conversation. Tell me this doesn't happen in Pathfinder all the time.
It needs to be something pithy and casual
It needs to be something pithy and casual
In that case, I like folk.
Kin has too many familial connotations.
Ooh, I like that. It would feel right at home having "ANCESTRY" being a section in a manual.
PoE uses "kith" to refer to the "sentient" races in the world. I always thought that was a concise and flavorful word choice.
OP
OP
Mind, even in a conversational sense, ancestry is stimuch more useful for inquiries than "race".
"What race are you/What's your race?" "I'm half irc and half elf."
"What's is your ancestry?" "Orcish and Elvish."
"Who are your Folk?" "The orcs and the elves."
"What race are you/What's your race?" "I'm half irc and half elf."
"What's is your ancestry?" "Orcish and Elvish."
"Who are your Folk?" "The orcs and the elves."
I happily stand corrected very good points.
This would be a good choice as well, weighty but succinct.
Species works fine, its more accurate, when you compare aaracockra, kenku, tieflings, asimar, merfolk, ect. They are all different creatures.
Speaking as a professor/researcher who studies evolution, ecology (and cancer), I wanted to point out three things:
- Drow ought to be white (albino actually). Organisms that evolve in caves quickly lose pigmentation. Now, given dark vision, this might not necessarily hold, but it would be a reasonable way to improve realism and remove the racist trope of "black is evil".
- As someone who has published on the concept of species IRL, I can address what Lesath and Tabaxi have been debating. Both are right. There is no clear, unambiguous, universally useful definition of species. That is not to say that a species concept is meaningless (it's not merely a cultural construct). Organisms do tend to cluster together with shared features, and this is largely because of reproductive barriers. So, ability to interbreed, as Lesath pointed out, is the core of the species concept that is mostly used by biologists. However, as Tabaxi points out, there are hybrids in nature, and some are fertile (e.g. dogs and wolves can produce viable puppies). However, even if dogs and wolves can interbreed, that doesn't necessarily mean they are the same species. Often the hybrids are less successful than either parental species (wolves and dogs have very different strategies for survival, and a wolf-dog hybrid might suck at both strategies). That being said, it seems like half-elves and half-orcs do just fine. If your world does not include ¼ elves, ¾ elves, ¼ orcs, etc., then perhaps half-elves and half-orcs are sterile in your world, and they really are different biological species. However, if half-elves and half-orcs are fertile and can freely interbreed with elves, humans and/orcs, this would argue that elves, humans and orcs are all part of the same species (from a biologist's perspective) with a wide variation in features ("phenotypes"). This would also imply that orcs should express a full spectrum of moral capacity and choice (good to evil), just like humans and elves.
- Now, from a storyteller's perspective, I get it that sometimes we don't want to tell stories of moral ambiguity, and there is a need sometimes for an unambiguously evil enemy. I'm fine with that, as long as it doesn't reinforce racist stereotypes.
Cool post.
Are half-orc half-humans sterile? Is it mentioned anywhere?
Otherwise you'd expect there to be a wide spectrum of people having some mixed ancestry. I suppose you could say that intermixing is super rare or only started recently.
I haven't played DnD in like 15 years so I have no idea what the lore is
It depends on the setting and i guess what you and your GM decides.
I specifically remember half-dwarves(Muls) from Dark Sun as sterile. Not sure if its changed now. I don't remember half-elves and half-orcs in any DnD setting to be sterile. They could reproduce as normal.