D&D 5E WotC's Jeremy Crawford on D&D Races Going Forward

On Twitter, Jeremy Crawford discussed the treatment of orcs, Vistani, drow and others in D&D, and how WotC plans to treat the idea of 'race' in D&D going forward. In recent products (Eberron and Wildemount), the mandatory evil alignment was dropped from orcs, as was the Intelligence penalty.

@ThinkingDM Look at the treatment orcs received in Eberron and Exandria. Dropped the Intelligence debuff and the evil alignment, with a more acceptable narrative. It's a start, but there's a fair argument for gutting the entire race system.

The orcs of Eberron and Wildemount reflect where our hearts are and indicate where we’re heading.

@vorpaldicepress I hate to be "that guy", but what about Drow, Vistani, and the other troublesome races and cultures in Forgotten Realms (like the Gur, another Roma-inspired race)? Things don't change over night, but are these on the radar?

The drow, Vistani, and many other folk in the game are on our radar. The same spirit that motivated our portrayal of orcs in Eberron is animating our work on all these peoples.

@MileyMan1066 Good. These problems need to be addressed. The variant features UA could have a sequel that includes notes that could rectify some of the problems and help move 5e in a better direction.

Addressing these issues is vital to us. Eberron and Wildemount are the first of multiple books that will face these issues head on and will do so from multiple angles.

@mbriddell I'm happy to hear that you are taking a serious look at this. Do you feel that you can achieve this within the context of Forgotten Realms, given how establised that world's lore is, or would you need to establish a new setting to do this?

Thankfully, the core setting of D&D is the multiverse, with its multitude of worlds. We can tell so many different stories, with different perspectives, in each world. And when we return to a world like FR, stories can evolve. In short, even the older worlds can improve.

@SlyFlourish I could see gnolls being treated differently in other worlds, particularly when they’re a playable race. The idea that they’re spawned hyenas who fed on demon-touched rotten meat feels like they’re in a different class than drow, orcs, goblins and the like. Same with minotaurs.

Internally, we feel that the gnolls in the MM are mistyped. Given their story, they should be fiends, not humanoids. In contrast, the gnolls of Eberron are humanoids, a people with moral and cultural expansiveness.

@MikeyMan1066 I agree. Any creature with the Humanoid type should have the full capacity to be any alignmnet, i.e., they should have free will and souls. Gnolls... the way they are described, do not. Having them be minor demons would clear a lot of this up.

You just described our team's perspective exactly.

As a side-note, the term 'race' is starting to fall out of favor in tabletop RPGs (Pathfinder has "ancestry", and other games use terms like "heritage"); while he doesn't comment on that specifically, he doesn't use the word 'race' and instead refers to 'folks' and 'peoples'.

 

[TheSword]

I think they rolled a Nat 1.

They are based in seattle not THAT far from a hotspot of social unrest where unknown people with guns and fire bombs (along with a bunch of people who are dressing as elves and wizards and smoking....Fun things )and pointed out(True or not) that their game is racist and they are sorry and want to change. Also they are a LOT of old white men.

The current situation is untenable and you have no idea what will happen tomorrow.

I just can see no reasonable benefit from doing so.

At the least it was foolish.

If you think this was forced by unknowns outside of the hobby you’re well off the mark.

Doubly so if you think this will hurt D&D. The vast vast majority are happy with the outcome, including the millions of new players who don’t feel the lore of the game is inviolable.

Chainmail bikinis and Eberron all over again.

 

[GameOgre]

You feeling its racist doesn't make it so. The only person who sourced a accusation used a well known false one.


I do however admit one thing.

It doesn't matter about Tolkien. D&D isn't Tolkien and WOTC said they are racist and I believe them.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Thats one way to see it.
In my opinion they recognized a PR opportunity when it happened for a change planned anyway to make orcs more recognizable to WoW player.

They have been working on this for at least months, by necessity.


They’ve been moving in this direction for decades.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I don't know how WotC has made their decision, but my "fair enough" was an acknowledgement to the idea that there were various factors involved, although clearly the current cultural zeitgeist has brought the issue to a boiling point.

But again, what does "gamers of color" mean? It is no different than saying "white gamers," who are ideologically diverse in their interpretive frameworks. Gamers as a group aren't monolithic, no matter what demographic we fit into.

If I say, “Black people have been telling people that the cops are harassing, falsely arresting them, and killing them with impunity for decades.” There is no implied monolith in that statement.

I don’t know if there is a language barrier or if it’s soemthing else, but there is no implied monolith in any statement I’ve made.

 

[Mercurius]

If I say, “Black people have been telling people that the cops are harassing, falsely arresting them, and killing them with impunity for decades.” There is no implied monolith in that statement.

I don’t know if there is a language barrier or if it’s soemthing else, but there is no implied monolith in any statement I’ve made.

The analogy doesn't quite work, because there's a lot more available data for the cops etc. I'm merely pointing out that the phrase "gamers of color" says nothing about numbers, how prevalent the complaints, how reprentative they are, etc. I here you that you're not saying "all."

 

[Weiley31]

Chainmail bikinis and Eberron all over again

At least the chainmail bikini knows how to take a hit.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I think you’re making a point, just not sure which one it is.

You’ve made up a creature that doesn’t reinforce racist stereotypes. Cool! That and the others that are also benign are also fine.

Now does that change the ones that are?

No. But the crux of the problem is that, starting from the observation that current orcs are evocative of both people of Asian and African ancestry (depending on who you're talking to in this thread), and from the observation that customers are unhappy when monsters with stereotypes usually ascribed to them are depicted as "morally irredeemably evil", the proposed answer has been to "paint those monsters in a better light, instead of having a monolithic evil culture, so they are no longer offensive", resulting in the removal of unquestionnably, monodimensionally evil opponents.

This answer is deemed great by some, but others have been saying that it acknowledges that orcs were/are equivalent of Black/Asian people, that it doesn't solve the problem (it's offensive to have orcs reminiscent of Asian/Black people even you point out that some of them are enlightened philosophers living in harmony in enclaves of enlightenment) and that another way of solving it would be to make the orcs removed enough from ANY real life culture/ancestry/stereotype that having them being "just evil monsters" wouldn't offend anyone. It's perfectly achievable (nobody seem to complain that illithid are a racist depiction of real life people), it allows for some intelligent race to be "just opponents" when player just want to kill stuff and not have to deal with the ethical problem of violence in their game (which they can still do because there are lots of intelligent beings with which conflict can happen, such as humans, elves, dwarves, haflings...) If orcs were depicted as Hogus, removed from real life people and with no link to them whatsoever, it would be better, solve the problem and not make some gameplay more difficult...

(well, except that "tendancy to be obese, low intelligence, the color red" are the Hogus designed to be an offensive representation of American rednecks ? )

 

[TheSword]

No. But the crux of the problem is that, starting from the observation that current orcs are evocative of both people of Asian and African ancestry (depending on who you're talking to in this thread), and from the observation that customers are unhappy when monsters with stereotypes usually ascribed to them are depicted as "morally irredeemably evil", the proposed answer has been to "paint those monsters in a better light, instead of having a monolithic evil culture, so they are no longer offensive", resulting in the removal of unquestionnably, monodimensionally evil opponents.

This answer is deemed great by some, but others have been saying that it acknowledges that orcs were/are equivalent of Black/Asian people, that it doesn't solve the problem (it's offensive to have orcs reminiscent of Asian/Black people even you point out that some of them are enlightened philosophers living in harmony in enclaves of enlightenment) and that another way of solving it would be to make the orcs removed enough from ANY real life culture/ancestry/stereotype that having them being "just evil monsters" wouldn't offend anyone. It's perfectly achievable (nobody seem to complain that illithid are a racist depiction of real life people), it allows for some intelligent race to be "just opponents" when player just want to kill stuff and not have to deal with the ethical problem of violence in their game (which they can still do because there are lots of intelligent beings with which conflict can happen, such as humans, elves, dwarves, haflings...) If orcs were depicted as Hogus, removed from real life people and with no link to them whatsoever, it would be better (well, except that "tendancy to be obese, low intelligence, the color red. evocative of rednecks" are the Hogus designed to be representation of Americans? )

I don’t think anyone is asking for the removal of orcs from role playing games. No one I’ve seen in the 1000+ posts in this thread alone.

Preventing inspiration seeping through the creative process is also very difficult, and not necessary.

The solutions detailed clearly at the end of this article...

https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/...he-martial-race-myth-part-ii-theyre-not-human

Essentially reclamation and rehabilitation. Both make for very interesting story telling.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I don’t think anyone is asking for the removal of orcs from role playing games. No one I’ve seen in the 1000+ posts in this thread alone.

I was unclear: I didn't say the answer was the removal of orcs altogether, but that the change resulted in no longer having a low level 100% evil NPCs you can kill without exploring deep storytelling.

Essentially reclamation and rehabilitation. Both make for very interesting story telling.

Storytelling you could already make for decades by using intelligent, free-willed NPCs as opponents (like player races from the PHB). Having orcs moving from the "ireemmediably evil" side to the "free willed" side does not open up any storytelling opporunity, except you can tell with orcs the same stories you could with human or dragonborns. But removing this particular low level 100% evil opponent removes the gameplay opportunity of light-hearted hack and slash that are SOMETIMES fun (to use the combat rules between explorations of rehabilitation of evil opponents). The article you quote briefly touches that in the dehumanizaing violence section, and basically just say that it's morally wrong to even envision people so bad that violence can be a solution to problems involving them. That's the point. If you make orcs people, you can no longer use violence as a tool, but there is no need to make them like people. IN real life, all fights occur with people, because we don't have NPC monsters. So in real life, I totally agree that you shouldn't liken your opponents to evil monsters. But this isn't real life and monsters are a possibility ; make the orcs REMOVED from real life people, so they are clearly monsters you can lob a fireball at. If the whole "dehumanized violence" is morally abhorrent in itself -- which I can totally understand as a philosophical point of view, I am not sure D&D is the best game to play.

 

[Doug McCrae]

There's three reasonable directions to take orcs and other evil humanoids imo.

1) Humans with tusks.
2) Very inhuman like a kind of minor demon or a construct (as Tom Shippey suggested). No children, society, biological needs, etc. This would be a big change.
3) Unlike humans but not evil or stupid, like trolls in RuneQuest. This is very hard to pull off, has no precedent in D&D, and I have no confidence WotC could manage it.

So we are left with (1).