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'.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Honestly, with NPCs we encounter, I am more concerned about whether the individual is someone I can trust, isn't lying to me, and who won't try to kill my PC when they get the chance, than whether that NPC is gay or not.

Cool, but are you a 12 year old who's starting to have a tickle in the back of his mind that he may not be like the characters he sees depicted in fiction and is wondering if he's "wrong?"

Seeing himself in the media, including game worlds, tells him that he's not.

If it doesn't matter to you, then it can slide right past you, without you being inconvenienced at all.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Art can be entirely descriptive. I want d&d to be that.
I already deal with far too much actual, real life politics because of my job. I want that stuff out of my leisure time hobby.

You are pretending to be a person from another culture who goes out into the world and searches through the wreckage of other civilizations to claim their wealth as your own. And you usually believe you have the right to kill whomever and whatever gets in your way while doing so.

I don't think D&D is the game for you if you are trying to avoid political thought.

 

[Flamestrike]

Ethnicities are social constructions of course. That doesnt mean they dont have an importance.

No, but it does mean that the importance they do have is subjective, arbitrary and dependent on the author, and the interpretation.

You're free to tell me 'Culture X is better than Culture Y' for example. And Im free to disagree with you. And we're both correct. What is important to you, may not be to me, and may not in fact be important at all.

Also be a little wary of trying to attribute inherent strengths and weaknesses to 'cultures'. The next step on that path is asserting the inherent superiority of one 'culture' over another 'culture' and then you're in some pretty messed up territory.

Personally, I would rather that stuff be left out of my games. I dont want to read about [not African people] or [not European peoples] or whomever having certain 'traits' that are inherent to those peoples, cultures or ethnicities, with the implication that some of those peoples are superior to others.

All it does is show the authors racial or cultural bias, and is almost always reflective of real world prejudice (either intentionally as in RaHoWa, or innocently as in Birthright).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

It seems pretty simple to me: in the 6e MM, throw in some evil human bandits, dwarf mercenaries, elf necromancers, etc. Then the orc raiders won't stand out.

The back of the 5E Monster Manual already goes a pretty good distance in this direction.

 

[eugenemarshall]

In case anyone is interested, I recently put out a product that tries to solve the issues with race in D&D without changing the character creation rules hardly at all. It was a successful Kickstarter and is now doing well on DriveThru — pick of the week this week and almost Gold in seven days.

I put the free preview at 30 pages, which is the entirety of the Rules section, and an intro essay that explains the purpose of the proposal. It’s also a part of the Black Lives Matter bundle. Take a look if you’re curious.

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[TheSword]

Not everyone can afford Netflix. If we're going to be social-justicey in here, let's remember the fact that a huge number of people are dirt-poor and don't get to indulge in a lot of luxuries, like "entertainment". Most of them aren't playing D&D at all, but some of them are into it because it's a game they can play at public gathering spots (or they could pre-pandemic) and borrow everything from their slightly more prosperous friends. So maybe don't be elitist and just assume that everybody can go watch a movie when you think they should.

I don't know what you mean by 'social-justicy' its not really a term brits use very much. I was recommending a good and interesting three part TV series as a window on how people can try to change culture. At £8.99 a month Netflix is pretty Ubiquitous here in the UK. Apologies if I offended you.

 

[Haldrik]

Culture is a large part of ethnicity, and culture is, well, a cultural construct. But ethnicities do have physical differences, albeit minor without clear demarcation between groups. There are differences in skin color, hair, eyes, body shape, predisposition to certain medical conditions . . . . but all of that is pretty minor stuff really, we all have way more in common that we have in difference.

Ethnicity can have zero to do with biology. Examples include: individuals who are clearly Subsaharan African in biological origin, yet are speaking with a Scottish accent with Scottish values. They are Scottish ethnicity. Similarly sometimes ancient ethnicities share the same biological origins, yet are divided by religions for centuries. And so on.

Because every biological genepool includes admixtures from other genepools, even biological ethnicities blend into each other without the possibility of demarcation. Not only that, most ethnic groups result from other groups that combined in ancient times, making every member a mix.

Ultimately, even biology is a cultural construct.

 

[Envisioner]

I'm sorry, no, that isn't true, not when we're talking about something like an RPG. What's put in is a choice. What's left out is a choice.

What's left out is probably a choice just because of the page count.

Leaving out views politics you find uncomfortable is the designer siding with a possibly fictitious past where "people didn't care about this stuff." (People always cared about all of this stuff. They just didn't have the power to make it part of the mainstream conversation.)

The people of ancient Babylon really didn't care about this stuff. They were too busy working 12-hour days 7 days a week to grow food so they didn't starve to death. If another culture came rolling in and tried to take what little they had, they didn't waste any time questioning the morality of killing those invaders in order to preserve their way of life. Our capacity for hand-wringing and personal second-guessing is a tremendous luxury afforded by our incredibly prosperous modern lifestyle.

But if you want a D&D game that doesn't reflect the 2020s, there's 40 years of stuff you can roll back the clock to.

And I'd like another 40 years of stuff in a similar vein. If you want something completely different, go invent a new game that doesn't have any of D&D's historical baggage that you now have such a huge problem with. Some of us like to continue building on the existing foundation.

 

[Cadence]

We're talking about player characters though. So why not have a halfling that's as strong as the minotaur, if that's the player's vision? Why have the rules prevent that character choice? PCs are heroes!

I'm trying to express why this one bothers me - and I don't know if its the (meta)physics of it, knowing about weight classes in combat sports, or too much of the fantasy literature I've read going the other way, or what.

Can they also choose to be a 7' tall Halfling? Can they be a Halfling that's a foot and a half taller with dark vision and stone cunning and resilience? If yes, why even have separate races or anything. If no, why are those different than physical ability score modifiers?

If someone else in the party is a Minotaur and chose that because they want to be the super physically strong tank and maxes out strength, does it take something away if a Halfling or Gnome does that too? Does it matter if the Halfling plays it off as a joke? Would the population at large notice and comment? Does it feel different than if the Dragonborn character maxes out strength?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

I am hoping to see more gay characters in D&D. Transgender characters are more visible because of clothing and ornament. Gay characters are only recognizable by their relationships, and only visible when a storyline takes place, making it very difficult for gay characters to be visible in D&D.

But for every 20 characters that exist in any world of D&D, two of these should be identifiably gay.

When I run a game....there is no sexuality to any character because sexy time isn't an option we explore.

Not everyone can afford Netflix. If we're going to be social-justicey in here, let's remember the fact that a huge number of people are dirt-poor and don't get to indulge in a lot of luxuries, like "entertainment". Most of them aren't playing D&D at all, but some of them are into it because it's a game they can play at public gathering spots (or they could pre-pandemic) and borrow everything from their slightly more prosperous friends. So maybe don't be elitist and just assume that everybody can go watch a movie when you think they should.

I assume peoe with enough free time to post on ENWorld also either can afford Netflix OR knows someone that already has it if they really wanted to watch something. Call me elitist if you like ...it seems to be the new hotness of an insult on ENWorld recently.