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'.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

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

I couldn't say it better.

 

[Zaukrie]

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.

Except real life humans are generally altruistic....not generally neutral......and over time, we are tending more and more to that side of the scale (probably due to better access to the resources we need to survive).

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

It certainly helps nothing to keep them as they were. Changing them is not bad, besides the one fact that people do not like change.

 

[TheSword]

We’re up to 817 posts with no sign of stopping. With many different views, taboos and sacred cows. I think what is good is that this is a discussion that we haven’t had properly and it feels like a very necessary discussion for us to have. Debating, challenging, listening to the views of other people, re-reading our own views and considering why we feel that way. By opening ourselves up to questioning, where we’ve been and where we should be going next, we are probably learning more about the subject than in any period before.

I dread to think whats kicking off on Reddit!

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

We’re up to 817 posts with no sign of stopping. With many different views, taboos and sacred cows. I think what is good is that this is a discussion that we haven’t had properly and it feels like a very necessary discussion for us to have. Debating, challenging, listening to the views of other people, re-reading our own views and considering why we feel that way. By opening ourselves up to questioning, where we’ve been and where we should be going next, we are probably learning more about the subject than in any period before.

I dread to think whats kicking off on Reddit!

Agreed. It's a good sign that we're having this conversation. It means there's at least a bit of progress happening.

 

[auburn2]

Other than Drizzt, where do the rest appear in art?

I believe all of them appear in art. Deekin, Fantan, Valygar and Yoshimo are all over the internet and in the video games. I think Akash is on one of the covers of the Azure Bonds novels and maybe one of the 1980s video games.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

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.

1. ooookay. An historical phenomenon full of sad things that unfortunately has happened and it's good to be known until some ignorant do the same error.
2. Yes because they were Crusaders. If they were Hammerer they have Hammers. Crusaders dressed that way. They act for Christ (hypocritically) and the symbol of Christ is a Cross.
3. Yes because it is an historical fact that they were in war and in war cities are burning.
4. There are also black creatures and cards that allow black creatures to have a bonus and white creatures doesn't mean WASP creature. It is your projection.

I understand that it is not mandatory to have a deep preparation in history, but the identification of black with evil and white with good doesn't have nothing to do with black people or white people. It is very ancient. Black is the color of the night, in which humans were vulnerable. White is the color of the day when defending is easy. Necromancer in Italian is Negromante, and the roots Negro means Black, not for the skin color of the mage but for the fact that the dark, the black, the obscure is identified with evil. So who consider Black with something Evil a racist combination and worse, who wants to eradicate this from illustrations is a person who actualize something in a naive and uninformed way.
This is what I'm trying to argument from the very start of this thread. Please, before revision every cultural product, please assure yourself to understand what you are doing. Do it only to try not to give offence to some confused people is counterproductive or simply ridicolous (albeit legit from a marketing point of view).

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

Not the best artwork no. In magic white is life

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.

Yeah seems a bit pointless going that far without taking a hard look at what the game is actually played like.

Cognitive dissonance on D&D not causing violence but does cause racism.

The artwork and how things are depicted are a bigger issue and they've already fixed that.

It's also funny a few posters here like Amazon but don't seem to care about their corporate practices.

Fantasy races with intelligence penalties not ok, fantasy Imperialism, looting, murder, grave robbing and real life labour conditions are fine though.

There's a common sense disconnect in there somewhere.

Amazon forced people IRL to work in Covid infected warehouses and fired staff speaking up.

Maybe WotC should stop supplying Amazon but that's not gonna happen.

They care about the optics, they don't seem to really care overall.

But yeah you want to fix the artwork.

 

[TheSword]

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.

Like I said some of these problems and not others... with zero representation of POC that didn’t involve being a pirate or risen dead.

IP killed the old world, and it will be back when Old World Classic comes back.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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

For real, my man, I do think you would benefit from talking with someone who can help you better relate to and understand other people. The fact that you're convinced that all of these people must be trolling you or are otherwise lying to, instead of being able to wrap your head around them being sincere in their points of view, even if you disagree with that point of view, is genuinely a really problematic issue.

My workplace provides free/cheap mental health services as part of my health insurance, and I imagine yours might as well. A lot of people nowadays are taking advantage of such services, as pretty much everyone is massively stressed nowadays. (I saw an article earlier today showing that only 14% of Americans describe themselves as "very happy," which is apparently a record low.)