Up to first edition (before Forgotten Realms)
Gygax's versions of the game were explicitly and unapologetically humanocentric. All PC's were assumed to be human unless the DM had explicitly allowed another race (and these optional races were constrained by rules limiting their level), and humanity was assumed to have structured the background society and nations of the campaign settings.
In the 1e PHB (p. 13) Gygax wrote:
Each racial stock has advantages and disadvantages, although in general human is superior the others for reasons you will discover as you read on.
He was even more explicit in an article describing rules for half-ogre PC's in Dragon 29 (p.13):
[W]hy is it that the human race is so favored in AD&D? There is no question that human characters have an edge on all others in the long run—even considering the generally unlimited potential for non-human thieves. The bias was placed in the game on the assumption that the vast majority of campaign milieux would be based on human-dominated worlds.
In the 1e DMG (p. 88) Gygax wrote:
My own GREYHAWK campaign, for example, assumes all player characters (unless I personally place one who is otherwise) are freemen or gentlemen, or at worst they can safely represent themselves to be so. (Note that the masculine/human usage is generic; I do not like the terms freecreatures or gentlebeings!)
Other races that were dominantly forces for good, or at least generally allied with humans, were called demihumans: gnomes, elves, dwarves, and halflings. This largely overlapped with what you are calling "character races", although the concept was more about whether the race was at the end of the day an ally of humanity writ large or not; half-orcs, for example, were playable races but were not demihumans.
Those sentient races that were largely opposed to humanity were called 'humanoids' and again, the distinction here was on their enmity to humanity in general rather than their suitability as PC's.
[As someone who came to D&D through first edition, I still find it jarring when one of my 5e players refers to elves as 'humanoids', a perfectly proper 5e NPC type but which for me still connotes a 'largely enemy race'.]
When one wanted a term to include humans together with demihumans and humanoids, all the smaller sentient races together (most of which were not playable races), the collective group was often called 'persons' or people, and was loosely defined as anyone that was a possible target for a charm person spell.
Finally, when speaking of everyone except humans that could be considered a 'person', and then adding in the larger, higher-HD sentient races that could not be affected by a charm person spell, the collective term was (somewhat counter-intuitively) 'giant-class', which was most well-known for being the races against which PC rangers received damage bonuses and was basically anything sentient excluding humans.
Second Edition and the Realms
The terminology of "humans, demihumans, and humanoids" was carried largely unchanged into second edition, although the hardcore human chauvinism behind it and championed by Gygax had waned along with level limits on non-human characters.
So, for example, when second edition published a 'splatbook' with rules for using 'monster' races as PC's, it was called the Complete Book of Humanoids and included rules for aarakocra, alaghis, beastmen, bugbears, bullywugs, centaurs, fremlins, giant-kin (firbolgs), giant-kin (voadkyns), gnolls, gnoll (flinds), goblins, hobgoblins, kobolds, lizard men, minotaurs, mongrelmen, ogres, half-ogres, orcs, half-orcs, pixies, satyrs, sauriel, swanmays, and wemic. Of these, the more good-aligned or fey races (centaurs, pixies, satyrs, and swanmays), as well as the giants (firbolgs, voadkyns, ogres, and half-ogres) would not have been called 'humanoids' when referenced individually, but as part of a collective work it was perhaps a more elegant title than 'The Complete Book of Humanoids and Some Other Things'.
Eric Boyd, in an explicitly Forgotten Realms product, said that
Demihuman Deities describes the demihuman religions and powers of the Realms: those of the elves (including the drow), the dwarves, the gnomes and the halflings.
Thus the closest term to what you are looking for would have originally been phrased within the Realms as 'humans and demihumans'.
Third edition - Folk and People
By third edition, the deliberate human and male chauvinism of Gygax were equally deliberately replaced by the term 'folk', which was both explicitly gender-neutral and which assigned a sort of equivalence to sentient beings. So lizardmen became lizardfolk, frostmen became frostfolk, etc. In a third edition Realms setting, then, a tavern-goer might tell the party that "there are three villages on the trail inhabited by folk [or freefolk, goodfolk, etc.], but beyond that there are only kobolds and trolls [or evilfolk, or monstrous races, etc.]".
As Quadratic Wizard points out, the collective term for all of these individual 'folk' in the Realms was peoples:
Faerûn is home to hundreds of intelligent creatures, ranging from the teeming kingdoms of humankind to the secret fastness of terrible creatures whose entire species numbers a score or less. Like humans, these peoples run the gamut from grotesque to beautiful, from murderous to beatific.
Fifth edition - The 2020 Announcement
In June of 2020, the WoTC D&D Team made an announcement with wide ramifications. Explicitly tying real world social goals to fantasy depictions of 'races', they said:
One of the explicit design goals of 5th edition D&D is to depict humanity in all its beautiful diversity by depicting characters who represent an array of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and beliefs. We want everyone to feel at home around the game table and to see positive reflections of themselves within our products. “Human” in D&D means everyone, not just fantasy versions of northern Europeans, and the D&D community is now more diverse than it’s ever been.
Without ever using the term 'race' in the announcement, there was now a deliberate attempt to remove the racial essentialism that had been a core conception from the beginning of the game:
Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated...We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples.
There are two things to note here: First, the word you are looking for is now explicitly peoples. And second, there is now a deliberate repudiation of the 'this race is predominantly evil' view for some of those races that had been previously seen as such. Individual orcs and drow are now just as likely to be good, or evil, as individual humans. As far as I can tell, trolls and kobolds are still predominantly evil - but that could change in future products. And if it did change, those changes could well be retroactive. As the announcement explains:
When every D&D book is reprinted, we have an opportunity to correct errors that we or the broader D&D community discovered in that book. Each year, we use those opportunities to fix a variety of things, including errors in judgment. In recent reprintings of Tomb of Annihilation and Curse of Strahd, for example, we changed text that was racially insensitive.
Shortly after The Announcement, in November of 2020, Tasha's Cauldron of Everything was released, with rules for how this affected playable races.
Character race in the game represents your character's fantasy species, combined with certain cultural assumptions. The following options step outside those assumptions to pave the way for truly unique characters.
Thus, the domain of racial essentialism has been dialed back. It now explicitly only concerns physical attributes, like Darkvision or your Strength score (and even there, it is recognized as not universal with rules for non-archetypal Ability Score Increases and even Custom Lineages). Alignment, on the other hand, is now considered part of culture, and not universal or tied to specific races. In many newer products, sentient creatures are not given an alignment tendency in their stat block.
Thus it is entirely possible that while some Forgotten Realms tavern-goer might have once said, "there are three villages on the trail inhabited by people, but beyond that there are only kobolds and trolls", that same canonical tavern-goer could, in the future, be retconned to having actually said something like "there are three villages on the trail inhabited by civilized people, but beyond that there are only wild lands with those who choose evil and lawlessness." Furthermore, it is now understood that among the peoples of both lands are trolls and kobolds, with some living peacefully in civilization and others as monsters in the wilderness.
The end of racial essentialism in D&D means that the terms you are seeking, terms that put people in behavioral groups based solely on physical features or ancestry, are losing currency. Despite being one of the core principles of the game from its founding, these terms will be less and less relevant in the game to come.
