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'.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I could see have maximum strength and dexterity vary symmetrically for some races. Eg warforged and Goliath have max 22 str but max 18 dex, while elves and halflings are the inverse.

 

[Cadence]

Eh. I think not displaying them in Gatherer is a mistake likely to result in a Streisand Effect. They should have left the images up prefaced with their statement.

Doesn't everyone pretty much use scryfall instead of gatherer anyway? You can still find them there if you use the "Include extra cards" check box.

 

[Dire Bare]

Dude, people are making arguments like "But it's history!" and it's as dumb here as it is for Confederate statues. Look at the damn card. If you can't see how white supremacists use it as a symbol then don't bother replying.

I feel your frustration with folks playing the "tradition" defense. It's BS when talking about Magic cards, it's BS when talking about fantasy races in D&D, and it's BS when talking about confederate statues. It all needs to go, screw tradition. Tradition doe not equate to good or desirable.

However, to continue with my previous point . . . . the word "crusade", by itself, is not racist. The imagery of knights with crosses on their tunics, by itself, is not racist. The game effect of "all white creatures get +1/+1" is, by itself, not racist. But bring all three of those elements together, and woof, that is an unfortunate card.

I can totally believe the game designers at the time missed what now seems obvious. As a Magic player, I did. I have that card somewhere in a shoebox, probably several copies. I've used that card in my decks back in the day (it's an older card). I never saw it as racist . . . but now I can't unsee it as racist. If I ever get around to organizing my card collection and I find that card again, into the recycle bin it goes (along with the other 6 cards on that list).

I can't blame my fellow Magic players who might have the first reaction to "Crusade" being banned as "What? Really?" But once it's pointed out WHY it's racist and WotC banned it . . . . if you're still saying "What? Really?" I feel sad for you.

 

[Haldrik]

Was it Villains and Vigilantes that had the really detailed formulas for how much someone could lift based on weight and strength and the like?

Given all the other fudging we do for playability, I'm not sure I care if a gnome that goes all out in strength is as strong as a half-orc or dragonborn that doesn't, no matter what physics would say. But it does feel wrong to me that a half-orc that goes all out and picked the race so they could be a tank, isn't one anymore than the standard D&D gnome (where super strength isn't part of their magical nature). Now if it's a world where gnomes as a species can do anything, cuz magic, then that's fine, but then I'd expect that to be in the description of the default world.

The +1 bonus feels enough to let the min-maxer of the race who has it get that extra edge, but not so much that it makes the other races not almost as good as most other races would be in that class.

For me, correlating ability bonuses with nurture (not nature) solves a problem.

I can say, the "typical" Gnome (and Gnomish values and culture) is an Illusionist thus gains a bonus to Intelligence. Now if an atypical Gnome wants to be Bard and gain Charisma instead of Intelligence, or be a Paladin an get Strength, that is fine. They are atypical, and the typical culture still organizes around an intelligent Illusionist. In other words, it is possible to create a coherent culture that makes sense.

For me, Eladrin are mostly Wizard and Bard, hence the culture is more like Harry Potter with seasonal artistic revelries, and revolves around the values of science, politics, and art.

Likewise, a typical Goliath might be a Barbarian with Constitution or Strength, but a prevalence of Druid introduces Wisdom.

Connecting abilities with class (and background, skill, and feat) works better for ethnic groups that make sense.

 

[Dire Bare]

The article about Theros mentioned that while there were 15 gods, the 5 most central correspond directly to the five colors of magic. Heliod is the god of the sun, and that makes him White. Erebos is the lord of the world of the dead; that makes him Black. Again, the Magic colors do not correspond to colors of people.

You're right that the colors of Magic don't refer to human racial groups or skin colors, they refer to sources of mana (magical energy).

But if you can't see how the combination of giving a bonus to white creatures coupled with the card title "Crusade" and imagery of Christian knights . . . . you need to try and have some empathy for the perspective of gamers of color.

I doubt that any of the cards were deliberately created to be racist (well, with the possible exception of "Invoke Prejudice"), but the racist connotation is there, even though "white/black creatures" doesn't mean "white/black people" within the game or fictional universe. They all need to go.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I could see have maximum strength and dexterity vary symmetrically for some races. Eg warforged and Goliath have max 22 str but max 18 dex, while elves and halflings are the inverse.

I think the current situation with a flat maximum is less plausible in universe, but better for the game. If your Strength max is lower as a gnome barbarian, that makes you less viable in the long run compared to goliaths. If you just start lower, you can always catch up.

 

[Haldrik]

For me, correlating ability bonuses with nurture (not nature) solves a problem.

I can say, the "typical" Gnome (and Gnomish values and culture) is an Illusionist thus gains a bonus to Intelligence. Now if an atypical Gnome wants to be Bard and gain Charisma instead of Intelligence, or be a Paladin an get Strength, that is fine. They are atypical, and the typical culture still organizes around an intelligent Illusionist. In other words, it is possible to create a coherent culture that makes sense.

For me, Eladrin are mostly Wizard and Bard, hence the culture is more like Harry Potter with seasonal artistic revelries, and revolves around the values of science, politics, and art.

Likewise, a typical Goliath might be a Barbarian with Constitution or Strength, but a prevalence of Druid introduces Wisdom.

Connecting abilities with class (and background, skill, and feat) works better for ethnic groups that make sense.

By extension.

A High Elf that chooses Elven Fighting Style, depending on the rules might get proficiency with a longsword and a STRENGTH bonus, or gain proficiency with a longsword and a DEXTERITY bonus and learn how to treat the longsword as a finesse weapon that benefits from Dexterity. Or not bother weapons at all, and focus on cantrips and an Intelligence bonus.

Giving these options to an individual High Elf by means of nurture, helps make the ethnicity more diverse and more coherent at the same time.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Doesn't everyone pretty much use scryfall instead of gatherer anyway? You can still find them there if you use the "Include extra cards" check box.

Hah, true enough.

 

[Cadence]

Physical traits are problematic also.

Goliaths are naturally strong and athletic. Okay, now replace "goliaths" with "black people".

As for strength - I'm assuming no one would say weight classes in sports bad because someone might replace bantam-weight or heavy-weight with a racial group. Would anyone say it is bad that Gnomes are inately much smaller than Dragonborn in terms of height or weight? It feels like basic physics/physiology kind of handles that?

If it doesn't, then are faster, nimbler, more resilient, longer life expectancy, able to meditate, resistance to charm and sleep, and more enduring equally as problematic for some racial/ethnic replacement? (If so, there goes sized based movement rates and a bunch of the special abilities).

 

[Var]

Physical traits are problematic also.

Goliaths are naturally strong and athletic. Okay, now replace "goliaths" with "black people". Hopefully the problem with that leaps right out at you. If orcs embody negative racist tropes about black and indigenous peoples, goliaths embody the positive racist tropes. Either way, it's not a healthy way of thinking about groups of people, in the real world or the fantasy world.

So how do we "have our cake and eat it too" by avoiding racist tropes embedded in our fantasy races and being able to play mythic archetypes like the strong giant or the savage barbarian? Acknowledging the problem is the easy part (despite some posters inability to do so), creating a better "race" system for D&D is the hard part. I don't have an answer for that myself yet.

See that's precisely the PC naughty word I don't want to see anywhere close to a game.
What does my 3 foot race of adorable tinkerers have to do with the 7 foot half giants from the mountains? Or what about DnD Races with a genus far enough apart that they can't procreate with each other at all. I'm at a loss if Gnomes and Goliaths are eligible, so let's say Dragonborn and Gnomes instead.

Sorry to say that, if anything I find your remark about Black people being applicable and appropriate for the example bad taste.
If you can't separate the green guys with the tusks in your fantasy universe from IRL racism issues that's definitely on you. Btw I'm all for dropping alignment, which didn't make sense in ADnD and doesn't make sense now. There's some exceptions that have a very strong or even universal tendency towards selfishness, like Demons, other than that there is no straight up good in the universe in a game that expects you to kill people for XP and loot their belongings.

From a moral perspective I'd like to see the player party that always tried diplomacy first, always tried to take prisoners rather than create bodies even if attacked or even left the fallen their dignity by, as a party, not looting the bodies of sentient beings and providing proper burial rites.
After that we can talk about how Orcs being predjudice incarnate is relevant over physical traits, physical as in physics, where mass is ³ and 20 STR Gnomes are stretching my immersion lightyears before my inner white knight feels mild discomfort about how someone else might view Orcs as racist analogy to the real world.

A strong Halfling should be a thing because it's fun and viable on top. Not because some weird PCness infiltrated the design philosophy and they're just hairy feeted small humans with identical stats. How does reducing each race to their descriptive phsique quirks help with that anyway?