I think it’s a pretty cool idea. I lean more toward the sandbox style rather than the fully pre-constructed story line. I also like the idea of having a vast cast of characters, any of which might show on an evening.
What’s in a name? Very few of the “dungeons” in D&D are, in fact, anything of the sort.
And I’ve played literally decades of continuous games without either a Gygax-style dungeon crawl or a dragon showing up. It must have been a dozen years from the last time we encountered a dragon to playing the 5th Ed starter Dragon of Icespire Peak.
MMOs aren’t necessarily a paragon of originality.
I don’t doubt it. The people I play with want something different.
There’s been an announcement. The word “race” will be replaced by “species”. While I am glad a term that was (likely unintentionally) bigotted is being removed, I feel they could have found a better replacement. IMO The word species is too modern, too scientific and carries it’s own (non bigotted) baggage. I know I’ll be corrected if I’m wrong, but IIRC being of the same species means that two organisms can mate and reliably produce fertile offspring. Elves and humans can reliably mate and produce fertile offspring? Yes, they can. Are they the same species under D&D rules? No they are not.
I’ve heard a lot of fans agreeing that Folk would be a better term. I’m with them.
Replacing “race” with “species” sounds much, much more racist, to me. I’ve always seen the D&D concept of “race” as emphasizing that all humans, no matter what our skin color or continent of origin, are all the same race, and if you want to see what a “different race” looks like, it’s much more different than different humans are from each other. And even with those actually-significant differences, all of the different races can still get along and work together.
Referring to other people as different species, though, even if technically accurate (as it is in at least some cases in D&D), is literally dehumanizing, and has a long and sordid history among real-world racists.
That’s one of the most common definitions of species, and it’s the one familiar to most people because of its simplicity, but it’s not the end-all be-all people take it to be. There are many, many, many species that are in theory capable of interbreeding to produce viable offspring, but don’t due to geographical or behavioral separation. Even when species can and do interbreed, we still sometimes consider them separate - chimpanzees and bonobos can interbreed, for example, as can polar bears and grizzly bears. Humans also interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans, and grizzly bears still carry cave bear DNA.
And in a D&D world, a focus on common descent is a mistake. In some D&D worlds there could be two humans (same species) who are entirely unrelated to each other, because if you go far enough back they each descend from a different group of humans that was created from scratch by the gods. While, as you noted, you could be related by blood to elves and such.
The most commonly-used definition of “species” is that the creatures can and do routinely interbreed in the wild, meaning without human intervention. Which, awkwardly, means that it’s impossible to define “species” in terms of us, ourselves.
Good.
Possibly. But don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
And note that you’re applying scientific concepts of evolution to groups that can include machines, sentient rocks and beings made of planar energy. That doesn’t strike you as somewhat … extra?
Sounds too quaint to my ears, but that’s a minor quibble.
“Kind” works too, but also too biblical. “Lineage” and “heritage” and “stock” are also alternatives used by other games. They all share some of the baggage of “race”, though.
The actual article linked to already used what I consider the best alternative, though: “people”. “Playable peoples”, it said, but the “playable” isn’t needed. And it has a nice Tolkienesque flavour:
Learn now the lore of Living Creatures!
First name the four, the free peoples:
They’re literally not humans.
Once again, man tries to stuff nature into these neat, little boxes and she keeps climbing out.
Haven’t the Elvish people suffered enough!?
I’m fine with species. I don’t love it as a world-building term but I prefer it as a mechanical term to say “These are not humans, they don’t need to be treated as humans or with an eye towards human thoughts and sensibility”. Sure, call them folk or people or kin within the world so your realm’s prince isn’t awkwardly talking about the dwarf species like it’s 9th grade biology but, for game rules and clarity, species works fine for me.
I suspect you’re going to run into problems no matter what word you use to replace race. I also think in a few years we’ll be having a similiar discussion one why it’s necessary to replace species.
According to Nethack, to avoid cannibalism, you should not ever eat members of your own species, but, for example, if you are a human then eating, e.g., elves is totally fine (unless you are polymorphed into an elf…)
I don’t know who Nethack is, but I’ve always considered eating any sentient creature to be an evil act, regardless of whether you happen to be the same species. A human eating an elf or an orc or a dragon is no better than a human eating another human. To quote Guardians of the Galaxy, “Normal people don’t even THINK about eating someone else”.
What I said to Doc before about the perfect vs the good still applies.
That’s the problem, I don’t really see it as a good. It’s not an improvement and we’re going to be having the same conversation in the not too distant future. Not that it’s a hill I’m going to die on or anything.
Heck, i won’t eat whale or elephant or monkey.
Yeah, a d&d character that eats an elf, or an orc, is not a character my character wants to hang out with.
My mileage varies quite considerably. It’s a great improvement.
Foodless atheist illiterate pacifist monk challenges only.
To answer your question, Nethack is a dungeon adventure game, a descendant of Rogue and Hack, with a history going back to UNIX in the 1980s. (Maybe earlier, that’s when I became aware of it.) It’s a game created by UNIX and D&D nerds, with a focus on details.