THIS HOWTO IS NOT RELEVANT ANYMORE

With the release of MONSTERS OF THE MULTIVERSE (5/2022), the character builder's Race page no longer offers the functionality this howto describes.

What I call the "First Word Rule" is simply that the first word of your homebrew race formats in a particular way when displayed on the character builder's Race page. You can see how dndbeyond uses this rule to display variant and subraces. When you click on a Race Group, it'll expand showing any available base or subraces, and variant races. Here is how the 3 subraces and 1 variant race for Aasimar are displayed:

The "First Word Rule" would be the smaller text like Fallen, Protector, Scourge, or Variant in the example above. You'll see this same nomenclature for race names throughout all official races, subraces, and variants. They even account for subraces or variant races with a space in the name, like this:

Some Elf subraces have multiple words in their subrace name, like Mark of Shadow, Valenar High, and Valenar Wood in the above example. You can even reproduce this same effect if you're committed enough to making your homebrew fit in seamlessly with the tools and rules dndbeyond offers. Here's the part of the same list from Elf with the Homebrew switch (character builder/Home) turned on:

Here I'm including three homebrew subraces I built, two replace the cantrip given with the Evolving Cantrips version, and one to show how the "First Word Rule" works. You see the normal Mark of Shadows, a For Example Only Mark of Shadows, and an Evolving Cantrips version. The For Example Only version has normal spaces between the words "Mark" and "of" and "Shadows". Whereas the Evolving Cantrips version uses a No-Break Space between each of these words.

Quickest place I've found to find this character would be from the Windows Character Map program:

Then Select the No-Break Space, it's in the 5th row down, just below the lowercase 'k'. Select and then Copy that character:

Once that character is in your clipboard, you'll replace the regular spaces in your homebrew race's name:

Just highlight the regular space and past in the No-Break Space that's in your clipboard. Do the same for the regular space between "of" and "Shadow". Once you save your race (and wait for the server cache to catch up if you made a change from an older version), your race should show up like the example above where it looks like multiple words fill in the variant or subrace names.

Now this method does change the alphabetized sorting because of the No-Break space. Here's how it looks for a Mark of Making Human:

As you can see the homebrewed version of Mark of Making follows after both Mark of Passage and Mark of Sentinel instead of directly after the regular Mark of Making. So be prepared for that.

 Another useful thing about the "First Word Rule"

The other useful thing about the "First Word Rule" is you can use it to sort any homebrew races that do not fall into any of the preset Race Groups. Since we can't create new Race Groups, things that don't fall into those categories aren't sorted very well. If you change the nomenclature of how you format your race/subrace/variant race name, you can use this to your advantage.

In all of the examples above, I used the format:

sub/variant race (homebrew)

Like "Pallid Elf (Evolving Cantrips)" where Pallid is the subrace, Elf is the race, and (Evolving Cantrips) is the homebrew thing. Using the No-Break Space, this is also done with "Mark of Shadow Elf (Evolving Cantrips)" or "Mark of Making Human (Evolving Cantrips)"

If we're making a race, subrace, and/or variant race that doesn't fall into those race groups, we need to change the format we use to

race sub/variant (homebrew)

In this example I have homebrewed the 3 subraces and 3 variant races from the Harvestborn race. By changing the nomenclature of each race name, I'm able to group these 6 together by alphabetized sorting, even if they wouldn't fall into a specific Racial Group.

We can even us the No-Break Space here too:

In this example the main race name is "Au Ra". Since we know about the No-Break Space, we can use that here too to keep everything as seamless as possible.

We can even use the No-Break Space to separate out a variant race from the subraces like in this example for the different Hyur races:

That's about all the examples I have and I hope this information helps you make the very best homebrew possible.

Well this don't work anymore with the select a race page in the character builder being revamped recently. Oh well.

Wadaya mean? I need to know so I can update the FAQ.

The way race names were formatted by putting the subrace or variant name in smaller grey text above the race's name, like in the first 2 screenshots of my original post.

Now that page has been changed to where this tutorial is now out of date and does not apply. There's no grey text above anymore

So… what do you suggest i do to update the FAQ? Any thoughts?

I'd remove any links pointing here and we just let this thread fade into obscurity. If anyone comes across it in the future they can ignore it or possibly laugh at the crazy hacks once possible.

I updated my original post to reflect this isn't a thing anymore.

I’ll remove the link and update the photo right away. Please take a look at the FAQ and see if that’s all good now or could still be improved upon.