https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/dungeons-and-dragons-is-shedding-race-in-gaming-heres-why-it-matters/
The nerd culture powerhouse is rebranding its elves, dwarfs and orcs, previously referred to as races, and moving towards use of the term species
Makes sense. Pathfinder already shifted over to Ancestries in their 2nd Edition. Paizo has a pretty good history of representation and sensitivity to stuff like this though.
Except Pathfinder already switched to “Ancestry” 6 years ago.
Stop trying to act like you’re leading the pack, when the reality is that you’re lagging behind.
I don't know how this helps anything? People's disdain for each other is not about what you call it.
Regardless of my understanding though it's good to see them working to improve the game like this
Can't find the comic at the moment, but it immediately came to my mind:
People can hate each other for any reason imaginable. Looking differently is just the simplest one.
Also, did the game not have things like half orcs and such? That wouldn't be a thing with species
Race was always a flawed idea. To be honest i think it's not that bad in a fantasy setting but it can also lead to some weird and uncomfortable stuff and i don't think there's a good reason to keep it.
On the flip side, "ancestries" or backgrounds or whatever are a lot more flexible as a concept and let you do some cool stuff.
"oh that race doesn't make good wizards they are less intelligent than others"
With the word race out of the descriptions, its less likely that someone will get mad over something like that.
This is a real example from early 5e that some people got upset over, to the point some people still mention it, acting all wigged out.
Anything that pushes real world politics away from me games is inherently good.
D&D might be a soulless product of middling quality because it is so corporatized now that they refuse to take risks or even release an actually new edition for their big anniversary, but they changed a word so we need to celebrate them.
All the while games like Fabula Ultima don't even have the concept of race or species and you can define it via a quirk if you feel there is something important to distinguish your character. Lancer doesn't even ask the question and just wants you to define what your character is good at. And yea the default setting of lancer only has humans, but it's also a post-scarcity hyper future where people can change their genes and looks with great ease.
But we didn't read those games and in the TTRPG space, only talking about D&D gets clicks, so this had to be about D&D.
Honestly don't mind the change, but it should be "kinds" and not "species". Or don't change at all, no change was needed in the first place.
It's ridiculous that the author thinks they can tell other games to follow D&D when they've only looked at D&D. Not only does this update lag well behind most TTRPGs, it doesn't actually bring it up to date - species has its own issue of being inaccurate in a game rampant with half-lineages, which is why other games moved to terms like lineage and ancestry instead. These are discussions people have had because of the problems of D&D, it hasn't been a trailblazer since the release of 3.0.
