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'.

 

[The Glen]

Best terminology to use -> Call them all meatbags.

Demand: Only if you force them to preface all their dialogue like HK-47.

 

[Flamestrike]

Ironically the only culture in Anuire that gets +1 Intelligence is the one that isnt white caucasian.

They were going for a historical 'North African Islamic Moors' vibe there. Pre Crusades, those guys were the few regions that avoided the collapse of the Dark ages, and retained Roman and Greek Maths, astronomy and more. The Crusaders were blown away by discoveries of Islamic scholars (in particular the use of the number zero, the works of Ptolemy, Pythagoras and more).

Surely in light of the 'race and intelligence' crap sprouted by White nationalist groups, you can see why attributing racial bonuses to intelligence based on culture or race to be highly problematic, and best avoided?

 

[Envisioner]

The cultural advisor mentioned way up thread has a great point about that......there are some things that are not inherently wrong, but bad people did bad things with those, and now we can't really do them anymore. It is an interesting point, imo, that an action may not be inherently wrong, but become wrong over time due to people acting badly. Perhaps ability score adjustments are like that.....as Haldrik states.

Or maybe those actions aren't really wrong, some people are just overly sensitive to them, and things that would objectively make life better for everyone across the board don't get done, because a few politically influential people dislike the idea without bothering to learn any of the actual facts.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Incorrect. There is extensive medical data indicating that there are significant, but small, differences among the races, mostly in terms of reactions to certain medications. Doctors account for race because it does have an actual measurable effect. That doesn't mean that they treat some races better than others, just that they have to have specific treatment based on what race the person is, in order to have the proper curative effect. Melanin is a biological compound, levels of it have measurable effect, and it is genetically connected to certain other biochemical changes. There's no judgment in that, it's just a fact.

But that is statistical variation. A person who appears to be of race 'X' maybe more likely to have a particular reaction, but that says nothing about that individual.

I assume what Flamestrike was referring to is that there is no clear genetic demarcation between members of what we call "races". Pick a list of physical (or mental?) characteristics that you think define a given race. You will find both:
a) Members of that race who don't show all those characteristics.
b) Members of other races who do show those characteristics.

There is simply no 100% reliable list of characteristics that objectively distinguish one race from another. No matter what you come up with for a list, somewhere in the world there's a person who will defy your criteria.

It's kind of like trying to define the boundary between colors of the rainbow, although in that case it's just a single variable (wavelength, and thus perceived color). With 'race' it's the same problem across dozens (hundreds?) of variables at once.

We may have some reliable rules of thumb that let us make that distinction, but race itself is an illusion.

 

[Dire Bare]

Married, yes...but their actual sexuality is never explored. I have even had same (or undefined)-sex marriages.

Like how Renly Baratheon and Margaery Tyrell were "married" but weren't necessarily having sexy time with each other.

So, all married couples in your campaign have sexless relationships? This isn't getting better.

Renly and Margaery (at least in the TV show) had a political marriage and Renly was gay. I'm not sure how this reference supports your point. And, in the TV show, their sexuality was very much explored . . . not for long as Renly bit the dust pretty quickly there.

Sexuality, gender, and orientation are all related, but independent, concepts. Just because you aren't playing out sexual encounters between NPCs doesn't mean these three concepts don't exist in your world (or should). I also don't roleplay out sexual situations in my own games, but a world without sex sounds like a really weird one.

When my PCs meet the town barkeep . . . at first they're just a guy or gal behind the counter slinging drinks, we don't know much about their backstory at all. And if the PCs have a few ales and then move on to the next scene, the bartender's backstory never gets developed. But if the PCs begin to interact with the barkeep, then we slowly build that backstory and start creating a 3D character, who might be married, and that marriage might be to someone of the same gender or not . . . . while I tend to decide these sorts of things on the fly for minor NPCs, I do try to put some diversity into their backstories. Why not?

 

[Flamestrike]

Demand: Only if you force them to preface all their dialogue like HK-47.

Thats my Warforged in Eberron.

His name is Warmachine.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

The satanic panic was conservative people messing with d&d.
The entirety of your post is an excellent example of progressive people messing with d&d.
I don’t want anyone to mess with d&d for politically charged reasons.

Might I question part of your logic for a moment? You described what you perceive as your political foes with very strong words. Tyrannical, supremacists. Did it occur to you that maybe these people that you seem to despise so are perhaps just people with a different perspective in life, rather than monsters

You seem to advocate for the humanization of non-existent d&d monsters, while seemingly considering some your fellow real life humans, monsters.
Don’t you see a little bit of a contradiction here?

You are equating politics meant to uplift with politics meant to denigrate, without considering the motives of either. To enforce cultural hegemony and to challenge that hegemony are not equivalent acts. Wanting to create a more inclusive game and world is not equivalent to seeking to destroy that game out of misguided moral outrage and panic.

I cannot respect a person with a different perspective if that perspective means that they find it acceptable that two men can be charged and convicted for the same crime by the same judge but receive wildly different sentences on account of the colour of their skin. I cannot respect a person who finds it acceptable that a woman can be denied medical care and left to die by hospital staff because their gender expression does not match their assigned gender at birth. I cannot respect a person who finds it acceptable that a group of police officers can invade a home without a warrant based on faulty intel and shoot an innocent sleeping woman dead, and then all walk free without facing criminal charges. I cannot respect a person who condones mass annexation of land by an imperialist power and the subsequent exploitation of that land's indigenous people.

The pattern here is that I cannot respect "different perspectives" that abet or perpetuate systemic injustice. Too many people are being failed by society because they don't fit in well enough, by no fault of their own. Something has to change. To declare oneself "apolitical" means to turn a blind eye to all this. Some people have enough social cachet that they can do so successfully and not be affected by these systemic problems. Some people are less privileged and find the world's evils knocking on their door no matter how hard they try to ignore them.

It's not about the monsters themselves. It's that the monsters are being used as part of a story that echoes real life colonialism and imperialism, and justifies itself by painting the monsters as, well, monsters. The story seeks to exalt the imperialist by denigrating their victims as something worth less respect and dignity than a "proper human". Many BIPOC people, particularly people of African, American Indigenous, and Oceanic Indigenous descent have faced similar denigration. I don't want to play a game that reminds me of their struggle and does nothing to condemn their oppressors. To quote one of my sources that I previously posted in thread: "You have to understand that language that minimises the humanity of another is one of the most common tools of bigots who seek to justify their actions by treating the oppressed group as “less than.” This is a fact of our racist/ sexist/ homophobic world."

It's perfectly possible to build a fantasy world with many different sapient species coexisting without relying on the colonialist tropes of conquest and plundering. Because to BIPOC people who play games, games that rely on those old and tired tropes serve as an unwelcome reminder of the real life injustices that their ancestors faced and that they themselves might be facing today.

 

[Haldrik]

There are several religions that espouse non-violence and the sacredness of all creatures to the point of including even insects as worthy of respectful treatment. While not every adherent of said faiths goes that far, many of the most devout do.

Yeah, for example, Jainists are fairly extremist about respecting life. (One of the few sentences I will ever write where "extremist" can be a good thing.)

 

[Guest 6801328]

How about "species"? The notion of 'race' is a construct, anyway, and within actual humanity means nothing beyond appearance (that is, it's not tied to behavior or moral or intellectual capacity, like 19th Century 'racialists' believed). And for blended species, like half-whatever, it's easy: a hand-wave of "different species can interbreed in the magical world."

That was suggested earlier. Species cannot interbreed, so you wouldn't have half-orcs, half-elves, etc.

Then again, real druids can't turn into bears, so I guess we can use words to mean whatever we want.

 

[Envisioner]

And, in the TV show, their sexuality was very much explored

psst, spoilers