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'.

 

[Umbran]

I really, really don't understand.

Well, let us see if we can help increase your understanding, then.

Create a race to be functional to a narration and then remove the traits that make that race functional to your narration?

It is more that they are beginning to realize that the broad narration that they were supporting has issues. Narration is not morally neutral just because it is "fantasy". We don't just tell stories to "escape". Stories are the major way we communicate the basic moral and ethical values of our culture.

The narration of, "there are entire cultures that are entirely bad," may have seemed okay in the past. It isn't any more. There is no narrative need to connect conflict or alliance with your protagonists with race. "All people who look a certain way are enemies," is not the kind of narrative they want to accidentally support any more.

And remember... orcs do not exist. You are not offending anybody creating a stupid race.

When you create a race that has too many points of similarity to how a group of real world people are also often depicted, then you do offend people.

What about Alien creature? Why depict it as a cruel human hunter? And Vampires? It is unfair to treat them all as scary!

The Xenomorph is dissimilar enough from the depiction of any real-world peoples that it does not offend. Vampires are not limited to being of any one racial or demographic group.

Make a werewolf race that, in human form has bronze skin, and tends to wear lots of feathers and fringed suede, and has a nomadic tribal social structure of people who live in conical hide tents... and maybe you have an issue.

There is no need to make D&D politically correct.

Replace, "politically correct," with "respectful of the feelings of many people," we see how this is false. There is need for a product trying to sell to larger and larger audiences to be respectful of more people.

 

[Flamestrike]

You are right. Remove you and put in they

Who's they?

Tolkiens estate? Are they pulling the book or something?

 

[Cadence]

So we have to modify LOTR retiring all the copies already printed? You are trying to save the world from it's stupidity erasing words from the dictionary, but less words means more stupidity.

LotR is a fixed document with a deceased author. While he was alive he edited the Hobbit after LotR came out. Yeats edited the heck out of the Second Coming between printings. Do you only use the 1st editions?

D&D 5e's authors are very much with us. Presumably like every other edition edits will accrue.

 

[Cadence]

Yeah, the nerdy section of Black Twitter went off on MTG for this last week. That and the Teferi thing.

The biggest point seemed to be WotC's lack of diversity in hiring (before the announcement about the cards and the talk about that took over).

 

[Umbran]

So we have to modify LOTR retiring all the copies already printed?

No, but with other works (like, for example, Gone With the Wind), we wind up having to have significant discussions about the problematic elements of the work. All art is a product of its times, sometimes in ways that we outgrow, and have to address.

 

[lyle.spade]

It's actually called out in the base lore that orcs are magically blessed to be fertile. Elves cross-breed because elves are just better than everyone else or something about being more adaptable.

Good ideas. I do find no small amount of humor when people assert that "species like orcs and humans can't interbreed," when, at the foundation, we're talking about things that are entirely made up in the first place.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

There are already. Humans. Or Drow. Because "characters" become heroes, not races.

Indeed. And some of those races are described as usually evil. Of those usually evil races, most are described as dark-skinned, are inspired by real-world cultures, or both. It's very easy to understand why this was not an issue for a bunch of white wargamers in the middle of the US in 1973 (or a British philologist a few years before, for that matter), but it's also easy to understand why this is an issue for current gamers.

 

[Li Shenron]

In my opinion the only real rule to be cutted is alignment that in fact says that all the single members of a class of creature is good, evil or neutral.

I don't think there is such a rule anymore. From the MM:

"The alignment specified in a monster's stat block is the default. Feel free to depart from it and change a
monster's alignment to suit the needs of your campaign."

As for classes, alignment restrictions are gone in 5e.

Actually now that you mention class restrictions you made me realize that the only true racist leftover is that druids still freaking can't use metal shields and armor!!!

 

[TheSword]

.

The issue is giving "bad guy monsters" real life people inspirations. That stuff doesn't fly anymore. You can't make orcs always evil savage monsters and dress them up as psuedo Britons, Mongols, or Congo people.

"Bad guy monsters" either need generic or completely unique history, icons, and images.

People of colour exist in the game as part of the existing player character races. In later editions we moved well past the idea that the humanoid races had to be white caucasian for good reason. This is shown in the art, both official and unofficial. As a player I get to choose the colour of my skin whether human, dwarf, elf, tiefling or dragonborn. Grand Duke Uldur Ravenguard can have dark skin without having to be from Chult!

Now that is different to the more direct and problematic issue that predominantly evil drow are elves with dark skin. It seems to me that fixed alignment for creatures is a fairly old fashioned trend that constrains storytelling. For instance dragons in Odyssey of the Dragonlords can be all sorts of alignments rather than what the MM says they should be. The story is more powerful as a result.

I frankly couldn’t care less what alignment the mm says a creature is. How something behaves is more important and that should be informed by a number of different causes. There is a tradition but storytellers aren’t constrained by that tradition, in fact confounding and avoiding cliches is a key part of writing. It may well be that Menzoberranzan has a greater predominance of evil creatures because an Evil Demon Goddess Lolth drives her priesthood to bring out the worst in that cities population. That is a very different case than stating drow default to evil.

 

[Cadence]

Right, that also happened. Removing a card because it "destroys all black creatures". As if MtG mana colors ever had any correlation with ethnicities.

Only card I can kinda agree with them removing, is the one that had weird cultists with pointy hoods. That looked like an intentional and insensitive reference to a real life group.

With this pace we'll end up erasing the word "black" from the dictionary.

I've never met anyone since 1994 who didn't think the "card with pointy hoods" was blatantly supposed to be the KKK. The card is called "Invoke Prejudice", and the artist is something in the Neo-Nazi/White-Supremacist assortment. And the company kept ignoring it when it was given (apparently legitimately by accident) 1488 (which has a supremacist meaning that pops up on google) as it's index number in the data base. Kind of feels more insulting or offensive than just insensitive.

There was another card banned that did "destroy all black creatures", but they left in a bunch of other cards that destroyed or exiled or gave protection from black creatures (just like there are for all colors). I'm not saying if it was a good or bad call to get rid of it, but it had a name "Cleanse" that had no other modifiers with it (to stop it from going with "Ethnic Cleansing") and a dark skinned being being blown away in the art. <- Edit.

Hyperbole is funny, but it would be nice to at least have a bit more of the details before jumping to it.