> how "race" ever came to be the word we use instead of "Species" in nearly every video game I know of that has a character creator

The character creator does not let you roleplay as a tree, bacterium, moss, fish, vole, etc.

It lets you roleplay as an anthropomorphised, sentient, sapient, language-using creature, with minor visual differences - a human, an almost-human that looks like a lizard, an almost-human that looks like a cat, an almost-human that looks like a bird, an almost-human with hooves and horns, a short human, a very short human, a tall human with pointy ears, a dark-skinned human, a blue-skinned human, a green-skinned human, a purple-skinned human, and so on.

If you're Commander Shepard, you're going to have sex with all of them. I suspect the progeny, if any, would be fertile. Claims that these are distinct species that all colonised different parts of the galaxy are a thin veneer. True "alien" life would be hyperintelligent shades of blue like in HHGTTG, hiveminds like in Ender's Game, or the amazing fauna in Scavengers Reign. They would not be a human actor wearing a Cornish pasty, even if you say they're Klingons.

I put it to you that your character creator choices are all the same SPECIES, and their differences are minor genetic and cultural groupings driven by geographical isolation, which we call "ethnicity" or "RACE". And all the stories you make up playing RPGs are, in fact, human dramas. You're pretending that the story tensions aren't just ethnic tensions, but that's what they are. And when you kill orcs, drow, revenants or other "baddies", you're actually just killing stand-ins for humans. Humans that your ethnicity/tribe of humans looks down on (if you fight non-sentient monsters or plants, I'll let you off with that)

My instinct would be it's a borrowing from Tolkien, which is full of "the race of men" and "the Elvish race" etc.

In that, Tolkien was casually following traditional European usage, e.g. the "German race" versus the "English race", which didn't clearly distinguish between genetics and culture. I can appreciate the desire to get away from using "race", since it is such a loaded term. The problem with using "species", though, is that it already has a well-defined meaning incompatible with "race". In the end, I expect that convenience will win out over precision.

I think the use of the term "race" probably comes from early Dungeons & Dragons. The original D&D had dwarf, elf, gnome, and hob^H^H^H halfling as character classes. It used the term "demi-humans" for these.

In 1978, TSR produced "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", the first of many attempts to clean-up and rationalize the game's basic system. It appears to me that this is where they first factored out race (i.e., [human, half-elf, elf,...]) as a separate PC characteristic.

From my cursory search, Tolkien seems to have often referred to dwarves, elves, and whatnot as "peoples" and used the word "race" for different subgroups of those. He at some point wrote (in a letter, not in the stories) that that at least elves & men were able to interbreed on ocassion, and thus were technically the same species. But he was mainly interested in the drama around half-elves, and left open questions about dwarf/elf and hobbit/ent pairings for later explorers...

Tolkien never gave a comprehensive explanation for his position, but Robert Stuart in his Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth (2022) argues that Tolkien consistently assumed that all the flesh-and-blood humanoids in Middle-earth were interbreedable.

One thing I like about the new rules: they let users create their own unique species/class combinations, without feeling like the game's rules are limiting you.

For example, a Barbarian gnome or Half-orc wizard can be fun choices from a role playing perspective, but suboptimal in combat or gameplay. Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.

Speaking as both a D&D DM and player, the "sub-optimal game play" makes the campaign more fun, more diverse, and offers more thoroughly enjoyable role-playing and problem solving opportunities. It doesn't make it less fun.

Not to mention that D&D rules aren't carved in stone. I've never encountered a DM or D&D group that wouldn't allow players the leeway to create a barbarian gnome or half-orc wizard with their desired stats, if that was important to them.

The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.

An experienced DM can of course let their players create whatever character they want, but a less experienced DM might be concerned about balance/fairness/implications of bending the rules. By creating an alternative, flexible rule for ability scores, a table can feel confident that the characters they build are still balanced.

> The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.

As you said above, the DM and table can agree to whatever constraints they want for the game, including using the old ability scores.

Then just like before, don’t use them. You can still roll a sub-optimal character. No one is forcing anyone to make only superheroes.

I disagree. Sometimes you might select such combinations because you like suboptimal combinations for a challenge or for other reasons. (The rules should not prohibit from making such selections.) However, there might sometimes be advantages as well as disadvantages to your selections.

However, I don't like class-based systems so much, and I prefer skill-based systems. Instead of selecting a character class, you can select which skills you want (including narrower skills; I think the skills in GURPS are not narrow enough) and how much of each one.

But see also my other comment for other details.

You can make sub-optimal combinations, but D&D is a team game. If you build a Barbarian that can't deal damage, or a Wizard who's spells never land, you're letting the rest of your team down.

> The rules should not prohibit from making such selections.

The new rules give you _more_ freedom to choose a suboptimal build. You can even play a Gnome with low intelligence under the new rules, something that was impossible before.

> If you build a Barbarian that can't deal damage, or a Wizard who's spells never land, you're letting the rest of your team down.

Such things seems excessive; a suboptimal choice probably would not mean that you cannot cast spells at all if your character is a spell caster, but you shouldn't need to be a spell caster if you do not want to.

There is the things you can do regardless of race/species/class/etc, anyways. In my experience, many of these things are significant to the story (I had done such things more often than class powers, actually).

> Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.

Illogical. Without racial differences there's not such thing as a non-standard combination anymore. The entire flavour of a wizard gnome was that it was not an expected combination because it was suboptimal.

This change removes variety and is thus bad.

Technically "species" is also incorrect, since many D&D races can produce fertile offspring, whether half-breeds or otherwise (half-elf and half-orc have been core races for ages)

You're describing the 'mate-recognition' definition of species, which does not rule out cross breeding because memebers of each species could be geographically isolated but still compatible.

Species, like race and all other human created categorical systems have edge cases, exceptions and oddities and mostly importantly different definitions!

There are many examples where species definitions get thrown out because biology does crazy things. From the all female salamander species which interviewed with other species, to the multi organism man-of-war jelly thing floating in the ocean, biology does crazy stuff that will forever confuse us humans.

Nowadays, in my line of work I now think of nucleotide distance between individuals... But even that metric is troublesome.

Sure, but it seems pretty much all D&D “species” can interbreed, in which case those are no longer edge cases and perhaps the word “race” makes more sense.

In D&D is there a history of how the different races came to be? Did they have some sort of diverging point from a single ancestor?

Domestic dog, wolf, and coyote are described as separate species even though they can interbreed.

That is what the word race is for, not species. Dog breeds in general are races, the fantasy races are like dog breeds.

My understanding is that the word's use has morphed over time and it could be used to mean ethnicity back in the day (probably still can, I'd expect "Irish race", "Scottish race" or "English race" to parsed as intended in most contexts). Given how D&D uses it the people who wrote the game interpreted "race" to mean anything basically humanoid that looked systemically different which seems like a reasonable take for the times. Then people rolled with it because we're generally talking high fantasy where science has no meaning and "race" rolls off the tongue better than "species".

> how "race" ever came to be the word we use instead of "Species" in nearly every video game

Races can interbreed, at least in most European languages. You can't have half elves if they were separate species.

Like dogs for example, the dog breeds are called races in many languages for obvious reasons. So race is something that is less different than species but still noticably different genetically.

I think the main reason is that it kind of pigeon-holed certain races and classes. There were just objectively correct choices. In a game where there should be no "correct" choice. And it was mostly benefit, very few drawbacks. And the drawbacks that existed could easily be circumvented.

I dont think calling Redguards a different species to Nords is going to go down well with the Elser Scrolls crowd