Question: So, they're called Races...

So celestials, fiends, orcs, elves and humans are all the same species?
That's how aasimar, tieflings, half-orcs, half-elves came about.

"I'm guessing the weave has been busy messing with people's humours" - jock sawbones

It is there to give player help grip the dimensions of their characters and what they can do. Exact same as the character classes, they have very little to do with the definition of class in sociology. And can even be mixed up: The first edition of D&D had 'Dwarf' as a class.

Which is why in my setting they're 'species', though 2 of the species closely related to each other, can, on rare occasion, have an offspring, but which are infertile.

That pic just gave me cancer.

That's not always true, though. Neanderthals are not the same species, but we bred with them. Biological taxonomy is really arbitrary. Which makes the OP's question arbitrary, but I assume everyone knew that to begin with.

>Biologically if members of different races can breed and produce fertile offspring (which is usually the case) they're considered the same species. So yeah.
Not always.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_(biology)

Depends on the setting.

That’s not true. It’s an exceptionally old standard which doesn’t account for possible hybrids and geographic limitations on mating habits. Just because two animals can mate and produce an offspring doesn’t mean they will with an regularity, and a big question is whether the offspring is itself virile or sterile.

Anti-/pol/ is a joke. Crying about /pol/ for the sake of crying about/pol/.

No, it does not. DnD notion of a race can include diferent races, species, subspecies, including sapient walking plants and mushrooms, and magically created non-organic constructs.

>your
I wish stupid people weren't allowed to make image macros.

I assume so since the ones from yesterday have mostly been deleted.

Maybe? Just play the gig, don't get involved in the politics.

Given that in my setting dwarves were forged from stone and earth and elves crafted from wood and leaves and humans born from dust and orcs from blood and so on, it's questionable as to whether or not there's even such a thing as DNA as we understand the term.

Do you realize that constantly invoking /pol/ is actually going to draw them to argue with you?

Even if I was, for example, suspicious that those around me were Satanists, I wouldn't start going around accusing them of being Satanists if my goal was to not converse with Satanists on the topic of Satanism.

If it's not obvious and you'd become upset if you needed to argue with them about that directly, than it's QUITE idiotic to try and force a confrontation with them at every opportunity. So long as they aren't being blatant than just don't bother or else you're the other side of the coin of what is driving all their bullshit to come out into the open and spread in the first place. They will always come, but you're essentially inviting them to speak.

Humans, orcs, elves, etc. generally don't share same ancestors in darwinian terms; They are generally created by different deities, or one really fucked up. The correct term would be "species" not race

But everyone who's a regular on this board already knows that /pol/tards have been shitting up Veeky Forums for the better part of a year. Now that we're in a dearth of moderation, it's gotten even more prevalent.

Better to call OP out early in his thread for being retarded so we can make use of the thread for something productive while OP bumps it to reply to himself throughout the day.

You are directly challenging anyone with /pol/ sensibilities to squabble with you and therefore it's your own fault if you're repeatedly getting into squabbles with them and ruining threads.

It's not an unreasonable question that OP asked unless you're purposefully transplanting it into real life ideological territory, which is exactly what you're doing. If you just let the thread stay on-topic instead of dragging it out of the realm of fantasy and into reality than it never would have left the realm of fantasy in the first place. It's extremely hypocritical to accuse another person of bringing their ideology into a conversation when you are actively forcing that conversation. If you dislike threads being dominated by this horseshit, maybe you should stop dominating threads with this horseshit and just talk about fantasy worldbuilding instead. When you keep derailing threads in your attempts to oust heretics you're the one fucking everything up by poisoning these threads and it pisses me off that you have the gall to act like you're having your hand forced. What you want is for everyone to tread on eggshells to avoid aggravating your sensibilities, and you're blaming everyone around you for the fact that you're easily spurred into wrecking shit all on your own.

To actually answer the question, no; it means something different in fantasy. There's a colloquial difference in how such terms are used in fantasy worlds and our own.

>You are directly challenging me

Nah, I'm just insulting you. There's no expectation of continued discourse here.

THe correct term would be races, since the gods also created the languages and they called it races.

No, the concept of race used to mean basically the same as sub-species, but our modern understanding of the human genome has changed that. We still call them races for the same reason people still call everyone else races, it's simple, appeals to our culture, and makes more sense to the common man since it's a visually based classification.

Yes with an if
No with a but

Are half-elves and half-orcs, etc., sterile?

If yes, they are different species.
If no, they are the same species.

Do you think I'm OP? How do you even know he's from /pol/, and for that matter, why would you think I'm from /pol/? Did I say anything racist? No, I didn't.

You're just on a totally baseless witch hunt, and you're blaming those around you for the fact that you're compelled to be on that witch hunt at your own fault. It's quite telling that as soon as you can't really justify your actions you instead just essentially call me a racist (Unwarranted.) by lumping me in with /pol/ and then trying to act like I'm the one being irrational even though I'm the one attempting to engage you in discourse that you're avoiding. If there's no expectation for discourse here, it's because your own actions are not conducive to it. And if you think that this discourse is off-topic and we shouldn't be talking about this? As I said before; you were the one that asked for it, not me, not OP, nor anyone else in this fucking thread other than yourself. So take responsibility for your own actions and try to stop wrecking threads with your toxicity if you don't like it.

but...magic

Magic fucking with people's genes creating more racial differences than we see in the real world sounds entirely plausible to me.

>upset that my neighborhood is full of Satanists
>tell Satanists to stop sacrificing goats on my lawn or preferably just leave
>wow don't you know that blindly calling everyone who sacrifices goats doesn't solve anything
4/10 got me to reply

It was admittedly a poor analogy, but I'll continue it.

They may be Satanists, but if you don't know for sure that they are and you additionally don't want to start shit with them, it's best to not antagonize them.

>Suspicious that my neighbor might be a satanist because I heard him listening to rock music.
>In the grocery store a week later I approach him and start loudly denouncing him in public to keep his possible Satanist bullshit out of my life.
>Get irritated with him if he responds and says he's a Satanist because he's bringing his Satanist bullshit into my life.
>Get irritated with him if he responds and says that he is NOT a Satanist because I'm still going to accuse him of such regardless and therefore he's still bringing Satanic bullshit into my life.
>No matter what, I'm going to take the high-ground and pretend the Satanist was the aggressor that brought this shit to the forefront.
>In addition to that I'm going to be pissed off that Satanism is getting any visibility at all because I'm an irrational and confrontational cunt that won't stop bringing it up.
Can't win.

The thing about cringey /pol/tards on this board is that their go-to whine for why we shouldn't insult them is always "condemning right-wing shitposts is exactly the same thing as condoning left-wing shitposts, so you're really the shitposter for telling me to stop shitposting".

The difference in my mind is literally always going to come down to who started it.

If a /pol/tard launches into accusations of cuckery, it's them. If an anti-/pol/tard starts whining about their existence on a shitty pretext, then it's them. Pretty cut and dry, and I'm also getting tired of hearing all this petty BS. One side or the other just needs to be the bigger man and knock it off, and if I'm talking to anti/pol/ in the moment all I can say is that you don't control /pol/, you can only control yourself; so YOU should take the initiative and start dialing yourself back. I'd say the same to anyone getting all /pol/ if they were actively fighting, which they're not, at least, not in this thread. Which lends credence to my opinion that anti/pol/ is getting uppity and annoying as fuck in their own right for their own irritating ideology-based reasons as well. If it really was all /pol/'s fault than I wouldn't be listening to this shit in a vacuum without them present, wouldn't I?

lol why are you still talking about /pol/

I wouldn't have brought it up myself, but I'm unafraid of expressing my opinion on it if other people are going there.

So long as a continue getting responses that elicit another response from me in turn, I'll keep talking about it too; I'm not just going to randomly fuck off mid-conversation if someone is still talking to me. And therefore I'm still talking about /pol/. If the conversation doesn't go any farther than this than it will end, but if I get prodded once again I'm going to respond.

There's a pretty clear cause-effect relationship going on here that I'm not sure you're grasping intuitively.

I mean, given that we use the term "human race" to refer to our species, I'm gonna say the terminology isn't an exact science.

They use a different classification system, not the species, race stuff we do now. Imagine a world without darwin. We would just be humanoids with the brave northmen, gooks and orcs.

Depends on the setting. And in at least one setting, yes, originally all sapients came from the same species.

Short answer: No.

Long answer: Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.

If they can breed, they're the same species.

see