D&D replaces races with species

[Chronicler]

Oh, okay. If it's just an issue of terminology then that's entirely different. Like if you can play a character of mixed human and elf parentage, even in officially licensed material, but you just can't call them a "half elf" then I'm singing an entirely different tune about that.

 

[m7600]

I mean, would it be feasible, in this day and age, to rule out interracial characters, even if they don't use the word "race" anymore? It would look terrible for WotC if they did that. Heck, I'd even venture that their stock would plummet on the very same day they made it official. That's why I think they're not going to get rid of Half-Elves per se, just the word "Half-Elf".

But I could be wrong. It's not like WotC hasn't been making suicidal decisions as a company lately (i. e., overprinting MtG cards, the OGL situation, etc.). We'll just have to wait and see.

 

[Chronicler]

It's if anything pretty standard to not include mixed races in a setting. People love to create made up racial hierarchies with no room for that, for reasons that I'll try not to read too much into.

Pretty much all Baldur's Gate's imitators have no mixed race option. Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin, probably others I'm not thinking of, none to be found.

That being said, you're right that the optics are probably different when having a setting with mixed race characters, and then removing them. Plus, even without mundane stuff like half elves, it's pretty baked into the life's blood of DnD at this point that you can lay with demons and dragons and all sorts of nonsense and produce viable offspring. They'd get a lot of backlash if they were like "No more tieflings, dragon disciples, etc etc" but the optics would be even weirder if mixing was exclusively impossible when talking about the "lineages" that have occasionally been used as a metaphor for racial issues in their materials, even if they're now attempting to divorce themselves from that.

 

[m7600]

My gripe so far is that they didn't include Aasimars. If we're gonna have Tieflings, we should also have Aasimars.

 

[Antimatter]

Managed to find the exact text:

CHILDREN OF DIFFERENT HUMANOID KINDS Thanks to the magical workings of the multiverse, Humanoids of different kinds sometimes have children together. For example, folk who have a human parent and an orc or an elf parent are particularly common. Many other combinations are possible. If you’d like to play the child of such a wondrous pairing, choose two Race options that are Humanoid to represent your parents. Then determine which of those Race options provides your game traits: Size, Speed, and special traits. You can then mix and match visual characteristics—color, ear shape, and the like—of the two options. For example, if your character has a halfling and a gnome parent, you might choose Halfling for your game traits and then decide that your character has the pointed ears that are characteristic of a gnome. Finally, determine the average of the two options’ Life Span traits to figure out how long your character might live. For example, a child of a halfling and a gnome has an average life span of 288 years.

It's a section from UNEARTHED ARCANA 2022. It's still using the word "race" though. The change is that half-things must mechanically select one or the other ancestry. So essentially, "make it up for yourself, we're not writing rules for it". Pathfinder 2e rules say the same thing: your Ancestry doesn't have to be unilateral and you can choose to have purely aesthetic racial traits that aren't represented in the rules, but that's supposed to represent a heritage that's extremely distant, and they also have specific rules for mixed-race characters having the ability to choose from multiple sets of ancestry feats; typically they "take up" your heritage "slot".

 

[m7600]

The change is that half-things must mechanically select one or the other ancestry. So essentially, "make it up for yourself, we're not writing rules for it".

My guess would be that they haven't playtested this enough, so they haven't balanced all of the possible heritage combinations. For Size and Speed, they'll probably make them the average of the two parents, just like Life Span. As for special traits, that's the part that will probably require some more playtesting and balancing.

 

[m7600]

Update: an official statement from WotC

 

[Chronicler]

Still kind of nervous. Rules for multiracial characters are good but if it's some complex stuff in like a supplementary manual or something that's less likely to be incorporated into future Baldur's Gates and other similar materials. There was a lot of security in having "Half Elf" in big bold letters as one of the standard races in the Player's Handbook.

But that's very good to hear.

 

[m7600]

Paizo has decided to keep the terms Half-Elf and Half-Orc, but in their Core Rulebook they've also decided to drop the term "race". And, instead of "species", they're going with ancestries and heritages instead.