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'.

 

[Minigiant]

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 always prefered the mindset that Player Characters are the genetic freaks of the world.
Kinda like anime

Doctor: It's a boy. And he has spikey black and red hair He also has the weight and height 25% greater than normal.
Father: Give it to me straight, doc! I can take it.
Doctor: Your son is a player character halfling rogue. You and your wife will die before he hits age 10.
Father: Is there anything we can do?
Doc: It's risky but... if you have another kid with unusual hair, they might counteract the edge and only one of you will die.

 

[Envisioner]

Personally, I like Burning Wheel's "stock": short, direct, no historical complicated background it must pay for. If 6e drops race, I hope they use something like stock, folk, or people. No ancestry or heritage for me, unless they want to sound both uglier and more pretentious with a single word choice.

YMMV, but I'd have to say that "stock" in this context immediately calls to mind the extreme self-superior attitudes of 19th-century British aristocrats; it's pretty much synonymous with "breeding".

 

[Dire Bare]

What's rahowa?

I didn't get this term either, so I googled it . . . . it's an acronym for "racial holy war" . . . I'm not sure if that's how it's being used here.

 

[Zarithar]

In COS there is a gay character that can be the main NPC opponent of Strahd. You assist him in helping his lover regain the memories of his love and thus beat the curse of rage and revenge that blights that NPC, gaining a valuable ally and safe haven against Strahd.

Don't tell me gay characters in these games are all tokens.

Then there is Strahd himself who is presented as being bi-sexual. Pretty important character there.

 

[TheSword]

At least in 3E such traits were not mandatory, and the game expressly noted that those traits (regional feats I believe they were) were available to any race (species or human ethnicity) that hailed from that geographical area.

You werent locked in to playing a 'barbaric [fantasy not Slav] with -1 to Intelligence' for example.

You could be any race or ethnicity that came from the Dale, and not know one end of a Longbow from the other.

Yes because in their culture the Dalesfolk train with longbows and longswords - but don't have to. In the same way that culturally in Khinasi folk tend to be better educated than Anuireans that spend more time as a squire. However a Khinasi fighter would max out Str and an Anuirean wizard would max out their Intelligence.

The ironic benefit to having different cultures with different stats is that a gamers natural tendancy to maximise abilities will lead to a more culturally diverse party which I reckon is probably a good thing.

As they get +1 Dex in the 5e erea the real superpower would be the Brecht who were losely based on the Dutch. Amsterdam for the win!

I totally agree that penalties are not fun. I would not have penalties to scores in any modern game.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

I didn’t read the whole thread, but I’m going to say this.
I’m not American. I don’t like when current American political debate ends up interfering with the game. I didn’t like it with the satanic panic, I don’t like it now.
Please, let fantasy be fantasy.

The two are completely different. The Satanic Panic was the hegemonic order reacting against some newfangled thingamajig that was challenging their picture-perfect picket fence world. It was the powers that be seeing something they did not understand, not liking it, and thus trying to stamp it out. The Satanic Panic was the politics of domination, of cultural tyranny.

Crawford's creative decision to create a more inclusive game is of a completely different character than the Satanic Panic. It is him making a (long overdue) resolution to trim away the colonialist and supremacist baggage of the lore of D&D that may turn people away. What Crawford is hoping to do here, and what many, much more progressive RPG designers and companies have already achieved with their game systems and settings, is to try and make a game that makes BIPOC and LGBTQ+ feel welcome to participate in, instead of a game that acts as an unwelcome reminder of their problems in the real world. This is the politics of treating people with equity and making reparations for a history of past abuse.

And really, this will probably just amount to WotC making an errata to a few books (like they did with the Triton race, they finally have Darkvision), hopefully hiring more consultants and sensitivity readers for future products, and perhaps attempting to shift the lore of the game in a direction that doesn't give players as much license and leeway to be genocidal plunderers a la Columbus. I'm not optimistic that they'll achieve even that much, which means how much is this interfering with the game really? It's just gonna be them changing a few lines of text and them making minor creative course corrections for their future products.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I've always thought the same, why did they chose the term "race" in the first place?

It's used in Tolkien. Following quotations all from The Lord of the Rings:

"Those were happier days, when there was still close friendship at times between folk of different race, even between Dwarves and Elves"

"Are they Men he has ruined, or has he blended the races of Orcs and Men? That would be a black evil!"

"No dwarf could be unmoved by such loveliness. None of Durin’s race would mine those caves for stones or ore, not if diamonds and gold could be got there."

"These were Men of other race, out of the wide Eastlands, gathering to the summons of their Overlord"

"Pity filled his [Merry's] heart and great wonder, and suddenly the slow-kindled courage of his race awoke."

"But it is told that he was a renegade, who came of the race of those that are named the Black Númenóreans"

"Being what I [Aragorn] am and of the race of the West unmingled, I shall have life far longer than other men"

 

[Haldrik]

I have a college friend who is Roma. His parents left the nomadic culture when he was born, so he grew up sedentary. He seemed normal to me and I would not have known if he didnt mention it.

I really love the pluralism of multiple cultures coexisting, and hate to see groups vanish into the homogeneity.

 

[Cadence]

Race (as we use the term among humans) is a social construct. Species is a discrete biological distinction.

Is there any agreement on what a species is across fields yet?

On the one hand the ornithologists are sure the Black-capped Chickadee and Carolina Chickadee are separate species (in spite of a huge range of interbreeding) and all kinds of similar Lories and Lorikeets that might very well interbreed but are on different islands are different enough to be different species. On the other you have the mammologists who might be ok with the dog being either Canis lupus familiaris or Canis familiaris, and with various sub-species of brown bear and northern giraffe all being brown bears and northern giraffes. I've wondered for a while how ornithologists would have classified humans across the planet, say 20,000 or 5,000 years ago (I'm pretty sure the mammalogists would match up with the way we all wood as just one).

 

[commandercrud]

There are half elves but no half dwarves. Therefore, dwarves can be evil.