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'.

 

[Kitsune]

All of the hand-wringing over species alignments is wrong and exceedingly dumb. I played a Drow in AD&D in '93 with no issue, and a neutral one at that, gasp. It was always accepted that the listed alignment for a given species was just for the average member and that outliers certainly existed, back in AD&D I was involved in games with PC orcs, goblins, intelligent undead, and at no point did anyone keel over into a fetal ball over some misguided belief that any of the random monsters were surrogates for human races. D&D has never issued any mandate about an individual creature's morality, as far back as first edition there was nothing stopping a player from playing an orc orphan raised by dwarves. It's a game of imagination.

That said, trying to turn everything into a grey morality where every goblin is a misunderstood soul and every Drow is just yearning for the opportunity to pet a kitten is opening a great number of cans of worms. Given the rather life-ending proclivities of your average adventuring party, Dungeons and Dragons goes from a pulp adventure to a wholesale murder simulator, and every PC is some kind of sociopath for splitting an orc's head with an axe instead of questioning them about their childhood and talking them out of their village-burning lifestyles.

 

[TheSword]

The following quotations are from the 1e AD&D Monster Manual:

"The skin of bugbears is light yellow to yellow brown — typically dull yellow."
"Hill giants have tan to reddish brown skins, brown to black hair, and red-rimmed eyes."
"There is a great resemblance between gnolls and hyenas."
"Goblins range from yellow through dull orange to brick red in skin color."
"The hairy hides of hobgoblins range from dark reddish-brown to gray black. Their faces are bright red-orange to red."
"The hide of kobolds runs from very dark rusty brown to a rusty black."
"The hide of ogres varies from dull blackish-brown to dead yellow. Rare specimens are a sickly violet in color."
"Orcs appear particularly disgusting because their coloration — brown or brownish green with a bluish sheen — highlights their pinkish snouts and ears."

"Elves are slim of build and pale complected."
"Dwarves are typically deep tan to light brown of skin, with ruddy cheeks and bright eyes (almost never blue)."
"Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin. Their hair is medium to pure white, and their eyes are gray-blue to bright blue."

It can be seen that colours associated with real world non-white people are very common amongst evil humanoid races - yellow, red, brown, black. The least human-looking, the gnoll, resembles an African animal.

By contrast, elves are "pale", dwarves no darker than "light brown", and the "wood brown" gnomes have blue eyes.

Is it helpful to reference an edition of the game from 40 years ago when since 3e at least there have been serious attempts to stop viewing the core PC races as exclusively ‘white’?

We should acknowledge that there are some troubling roots and then continue to improve representation in the ‘hero’ part of our game - the players and NPCs.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

Blah blah bla
I said it before: it's a game 33% about killing and your sensitivity goes to "let's fix a 2% mechanic that could hurt somebody's sensitivity"... if you really gave a f**k you would address that 33% of direct, clear, undebatable violence that is there in front of your faces, not such a small and useless part of it.

But no, you are all just trolling, surfing the issue PoC are trying to solve, for real, in the real world to try to sound right, because you can't be: it's fantasy - all your academic deductions and theories are worth nothing and you keep telling someone their fantasy is wrong based on a huge set of assumptions you all push there where nobody ever spent a second associating Drow to black people (and for sure not writing a game for that reason).

I don't believe any of you; you are not here to improve the impact this game have, or how this game affects the world, or improve the fun or to be paladins against racism and prejudice. You are just trolls doing what trolls do: find a useless battle to pull all of us into, showcase how much you can use Google to sound smart, and troll with us.

I wouldn't spend a second on this if WoTC for fear of the twitter trolls wasn't near to start ruining this game again.

Now somebody, to escape from the conversation, will say you that you are free not to buy D&D products if you don't like the new age of politically correct fantasy.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

No joke or hyperbole here: You should talk to someone about your empathy issues.

Pathologizing disagreement isn't very productive either.

 

[Rygar]

Reading this thread, some things I am certain about, and some things I am hesitant about. Things I am certain about.

- Every creature that is a player character is a human who simply looks different.

- The word "race" has way too much reallife baggage and must errata away as soon as possible. Its promenance is bad optics for business.

- Each player needs core rules to customize their own concept of an ethnicity, to roleplay it in whatever way that it means to them personally.

- Ability bonuses should come from activities/nurture (class, background, experience, feat, skill), not racial superiority/nature (race, subrace).

To counterpoint...

-That holds true for a very small number of forum goers. I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that if we were to start polling outside of a couple of very closed online communities that we'd find almost no one who says that all of the races are actually humans.

-I think we need a blind poll of a very substantial number of people who play RPGs to make that conclusion. Right now, it's being concluded in an echo chamber, especially since most RPG communities purged wrong-thinkers a long time ago.

-Again, echo chamber, I think if we actually looked at RPG players as a whole instead of the highly insulated microcosms present on the very few forums we'd find that most people don't roleplay. I also think we'd find that most people support racial bonuses over having to spend hours trying to point-buy a human.

-This one is really into small minority territory. We're in 4th edition D&D territory here where we're turning the selection of race into an inconsequential cosmetic choice where every choice yields the same basic product, as 4th edition did with classes. I really doubt you can market a game where a halfling and a dragonborn are effectively identical, this kind of dissonant mechanic didn't work in the past, it won't work now.

Special note: On the second bullet point, I'm pretty confident the part about optics is incorrect. First, I doubt there are many people who would agree a Dragonborn, a orc, and a halfling are all just different human appearances. Second, I'm not at all convinced that the word "Race" with RPGs is actually an issue outside of a couple of very specific parts of social media, mainly because of my first point.

Third, WOTC's going to have to make a choice. If they keep attempting to use their product lines as a platform for their politics, they're guaranteed to alienate the opposing party and have a increasing probability of alienating the moderates as well. So they're guaranteed a loss of ~33% of their business, a high probability as they go further of losing ~66%. Their alternative is to not keep pushing their politics and risk losing some number of people who won't touch a game unless it validates their politics.

So "It's bad optics for business" is an interesting observation, because designing around politics is also bad for business.

 

[kudolink]

No joke or hyperbole here: You should talk to someone about your empathy issues.

So we are standing in front of a game that has violence as a main component and someone is, like, ignoring that to point out a very partial thing in the back of the game that "eh that is not right, it may upset/trigger somebody or subtly perpetuate bias toward the idea of certain behavious that blah blah blah".
IGNORING the HUGE LAYER of violence that is right there in front.
So "CLEAR, UNDEBATABLE VIOLENCE" is fine, but a possible degree of prejudice rises an army that wants the game rewritten?
This MASSACRE in front of you doesn't move you at all, but "hey did someone down there in the back row say that dark skinned creatures are evil?" oooh, yeah, that will not pass on your watch?

Someone so confused between the real reality and fantasy would at least start from that, instead of cherry picking something in which you can be so comfortably supported by the (rightful! and always too late! and never long enough!) contemporary conversation about racism.

Well or this is insincere, or this is an "empathy problem". Pick one.


Oh let me add that I actually agree that it's been an error calling them "races", it should have been "species", but that is the extend of the problem in my eyes.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

The other cards depict racial stereotypes in funny hats. There is no reason for them to stay in the game.

This was one of the 7 banned cards.

 

[Haldrik]

Same difference.
Orcs under the thumb of Gruumsh and Gnolls controlled by Yeenoghu are not on your terms "sentient lifeforms".

If you prefer, maybe tag a creature type: "person".

Right now, 5e has been trying to use "humanoid" in this sense but it is too clunky and disruptive. For example, a Fey Eladrin is currently either "fey" or "humanoid" but never both. I would rather see a playable fey such as an Eladrin be both a "fey person". (Also humanoid seems too physically descriptive, and insufficiently empathic, like "featherless bipedal".)

Regarding Gnoll, you are correct, Gnolls as 5e conceives them are demons having no freewill, hence are neither "sentient" nor, if you prefer, a "person". (Thus never a player character.)

The thing is, the moment a creature stops being a robot, and enters the "roleplay" game, with a culture and motivations that make sense, and even a family of parents/creators and peers, so that a reallife player can "relate" to it, the creature is simply a human that looks different. The creature is phenomenologically and inevitably a human "person".



I know that veteran D&D players often enjoy a game of fantasy racism. The Players Handbook 1e even came with instructions on how to be a racist. (Elves hate Dwarves, etcetera.)

But I dont relate to fantasy racism being "fun". I doubt this is the part of the D&D heritage that is worth transmitting to future generations.



I definitely dont want a new race that is all Evil with blue eyes and blond hair. I want WotC to end the problem of participating in racism, not multiply it.

 

[Helldritch]

Actually, the only conclusion I can draw from that paragraph is that you don't understand the problem. Every single sentence suggests a misunderstanding.

As I've said a couple of times, I actually agree with the following that you wrote:



I'm right there with you.

I wish that my preference didn't require a highly unrealistic simplification of the world, one that is probably rooted in human instinct, and that unfortunately parallels a real world simplification that has led to untold misery and suffering.

Regardless of what WotC and other game publishers do, I will personally probably run games in which orcs...and other such humanoids... are evil and should be killed (although I will check with the other players first.) Like you, I prefer games with that simplistic clarity.

However, I do hope that WotC and other publishers continue to rethink whether this should be the default narrative. Because I do believe that it ("it" being the narrative that some groups are just bad and it's ok to treat them worse than we treat cattle) perpetuates a myth rooted in an ugly and destrutive human instinct.

As for the first part. I really understand the racists implications that some are seeing. I just do not agree. I saw enough racism, bigotry and misogyny in my life to recognize it when I see these ugly concepts in front of me. I have a Muslim at my table, three women, even had a black friend before work claimed him to a far away province (Donald, if you see this, you're the best dwarf I ever had). I also got lucky enough to have a Cri and two Vietnamese at my table. I will fight racism, bigotry and sexism where it matter the most:" The real world". Two of my players have adopted a young Haitian and if he was interested, he would be at my table. Unfortunately, he prefers racing car and motorcycles. What I see in the books of any editions has nothing to do with real world racism. You have to stretch words and find obscure implications to see it. Fight these ugly things where it really matters, the real world.

For the second part. Thank you. I am not a bad person and I really appreciate that you can see that such "over?" simplification can bring to a table.

Again, I have nothing against Lawful Good orcs or drows or whatever else comes to mind. It's those that accuse me of the same thing I fight against in the real world that get to me. I hope my position is a bit more clearer.

 

[Morrus]

Now somebody, to escape from the conversation, will say you that you are free not to buy D&D products if you don't like the new age of politically correct fantasy.

Please review the rules about the usage of disparaging terms like ‘political correctness’ to dismiss the views of others.