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'.

 

[Morrus]

Please suggest me another way to describe a fantasy that is intended to give the "least amount of offense, especially when describing groups identified by external markers such as race, gender, culture, or sexual orientation", as per ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA definition. I know that this term has often been used in a disparaging way, but my poor english doesn't give me a lot of other way to quickly define it.

Don’t post in this thread again, please.

 

[Minigiant]

I view demons as more like "gravity", mechanical forces that strictly lack freewill.

However, Orcs clearly have culture, society, language, art, competition, motivation, negotiation, and are in fact player characters. Therefore, Orcs are a "person", and are as human as the reallife human who plays one.

Here's the question
What kind of Orc can be PC?
LOTR style orcs or Warcraft style orcs?

Someone could argue the the always evil, ragebeast, runious, brutish, Tolkien orcs lack enough free will, personality, and sapience to be PC. They could call them fleshy robots.

So Crawford is using Mercer's noble savage orcs as D&D PC orcs.

 

[Haldrik]

Let's play a game of... spot the racism!

View attachment 122923

1. The card is called Crusade.
2. They all have christian crosses on as their emblem.
3. They're raising swords in triumph as the foreground burns.
4. All "white" creatures gain +1.

If you don't get why the 4 points above equal a symbol for white supremacy, then I can't help you.

Yes, the confluence of events is decisively uncomfortable. (Especially when the destroy all black creatures card portrays a black person.)

 

[Oofta]

I view demons as more like "gravity", mechanical forces that strictly lack freewill.

However, Orcs clearly have culture, society, language, art, competition, motivation, negotiation, and are in fact player characters. Therefore, Orcs are a "person", and are as human as the reallife human who plays one.

But again, that's just in-game justification of why one creature that looks vaguely human has to be always evil while another does not. Also, where did you come up with this concept that fiends don't have a culture along with all the related accouterments? They build cities, have rulers, manufacture goods and so on.

It just seems like an artificial delineation to me. We know that no human is inherently evil because of their culture or society because we are human. We can't know what an orc or a fiend really thinks because they aren't real.

 

[TheSword]

And don't cause racism.

Im not sure racism needs to be caused. People have an inherent bias that we may not even be aware of and then we try and be conscious of that and work to counteract it.

At least that was one of my takes from the podcast with James Mendez Hodes.

 

[Minigiant]

It’s interesting that The Old World solved some of these problems but not others. The dark elves are white, Orcs are bright green and mainly plant, the civilization based in the jungle is the most advanced in recorded history and is the only thing keeping the world from falling to chaos. Chaos itself is a equal opportunities corrupter targeting every race and with what people do defining whether someone is evil. Basically everyone is a son-of-a-bitch in some form or other. Making everyone equally bad solves a lot of these problems. If only they could get some representation for people of colour that doesn’t involve being a pirate, or dead for 4,000 years.

Well that's after GW removed Pygmys for being racist and Amazons for being sexist.

And GW ended up destroying WFB because they made it too epensive and too Eurocentric to grow on tabletop. It came back after GW sold IP for games and game devs gave a crap about the non-white factions to make tons of money.

 

[Oofta]

In the grand scheme of things it seems to me you have two extremes. Let's say that on a scale of 1-10 a 1 means that orcs are evil monsters, a 10 means Orcs are effectively human that look different.

I rate a 1 on the scale for my games because I want evil protagonists. Sometimes I just want bad guys who are bad guys. I also seems to be the default assumption in the MM (that can obviously be overridden for specific campaigns). From the POV of someone who's a 10 I see where that would be problematic - it seems like people (and Tolkien) just use orcs as a stand-in for a different tribe.

But I think saying that the vast majority of orcs are evil solely because of culture is even worse than they're hard-wired as evil. Let's take a thought experiment. The non-monstrous races have banded together and defeated the orcs. There are still some left and nobody wants to commit genocide, so all the orcs are gathered up into new homelands. Politics being politics, the new homelands are in marginal areas, so they do get subsidies.

However they're still orcs, still worshipping Gruumsh which is an evil nasty god. How to fix that? Well just send all the orc kids off to boarding school! Wipe out their culture, their history, their identity and they can be good upstanding citizens, right? After all, it's their culture that made them evil, if they adopt a better culture they'll be just fine.

That starts to sound an awful lot like what the US did with native Americans and other atrocities around the world where colonial rulers tried to civilize "ignorant savages".

So I get where people that are on the 10 side of things come from, I just don't think it's a better answer. I also don't see a need for yet another human-with-slightly-different-ability-scores in my game.

Then there's the people who try to take a middle of the road. That orcs are not guaranteed evil, but have evil tendencies built in.

I'm not sure how I feel about that. I get that they're trying to find a middle ground, but to me it sounds even more like racist propaganda. "People of [insert race] are usually [insert attribute] they just can't help it. It's not their fault if [insert result]." Usually along the lines of asians academically succeed, African Americans excel at sports along with common, ugly, negative stereotypes.

Ugh.

So I don't think there's a best answer or even a good answer. In a campaign where there is conflict with other sentient races, in almost all cases there's going to be an us or them. Sure, the bad guys can be part of a cult. But what is a cult but a religion you don't approve of?

TLDR: I don't think there's an answer that will work for everyone. I don't have a problem with sentient monsters (whether vampires, beholders or orcs) because I think it's less problematic than the alternatives.

 

[Haldrik]

Here's the question
What kind of Orc can be PC?
LOTR style orcs or Warcraft style orcs?

Someone could argue the the always evil, ragebeast, runious, brutish, Tolkien orcs lack enough free will, personality, and sapience to be PC. They could call them fleshy robots.

So Crawford is using Mercer's noble savage orcs as D&D PC orcs.

If they look like a human culture (tribal, nomadic, urban, whatever), they are by self-definition "persons". They have a moral compass (whether individual pay attention to it or not) and cannot be an Evil race. (Or a Good one.)

Tolkien is a poster child for what not to do.

Likewise, angels are "gravity-like" mechanic forces that strictly lack freewill.



If WotC decides to portray a creature as if having a human culture, then it has freewill, and it is racist (in the strictest sense) to define it as an Evil race.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

And don't cause racism.

Racism causes racism. If the game has racist tendencies, that can be bad for sheltered people who play the game. White people who don't interact with people with darker skin from a young age are more likely to become racists.

Whether having all the evil races in D&D have darker skin causes racism or not is up for debate, but it certainly is racist, should be changed, and is outdated.

 

[Mecheon]

And "widely preferred" measured how? (this is a fair question)

When Volo's came out, most people weren't happy with the orcs and kobolds having negative stat modifiers (Which no other race prior to them had and could be construed as changing the mechanics, per your dislike of doing such). Subsequently, when the Eberron book came out with the adjusted orc stats, people preferred that

5E's whole stat thing has been giving only the positives, so the Volo's orcs weren't liked because they went back on that and unlike Kobolds who have two really powerful abilities where it could be seen as a balance thing, there was no such powerful counter-balancing ability on orcs