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'.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I have lived in Turkey and Saudi and I would call them white. They are certainly not another raceannd in North Africa Arabs call themselves "white" to separate themselves from non-Arab Africans. Another white person can be bigoted towards Arabic people for a number of reasons, including their skin tone, but that does not constitute racism any more than Hitler's bigotry towards slavs and Jews (both also white) constituted racism. Bigotry comes in many forms, racism is only one of them.

Irish people are also white.

Uh-huh.

But what you would do doesn't mean that society in general behaves that way. You don't believe that "Arab" is a separate "race" from "white". But this isn't science. It's not even religion. It's just opinion. Race is a construct, not a fact. If you can't grasp that, I'm not sure what to tell you. For some people, like you, the construct "white" includes Arabic people. For many people, particularly in the US, the construct "white" does not include Arabic people. Do you understand that different people have different ideas about what "races" are?

What you think the races are isn't what matters, except to you. What other people think matters, though. If lots of people think some group are a "race" and then act in a way that is prejudicial to them, that's racism. And let's stick to real-world examples, if you want to argue this.

 

[Umbran]

... and it would have been a more inclusive slogan imho...

Right. So, "Please be inclusive in how you show you are being excluded." That.. doesn't make sense, dude.

 

[Campbell]

From my perspective there is a fundamental difference between making changes to the game based on the assumed desires of existing or potential players and the response to the Satanic panic which was fundamentally about appeasing an outside group that has no real interest in the game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

No. But people who demonize games and fictional representations that have supernatural evil are dumb and wrong.

There is nothing wrong with choosing not to partake in an activity because you don't like it, or because it violates your personal belief structure. That can be admirable. There is something very wrong (dumb and wrong) with burning books because you can't see the difference between fiction and reality, and feel the need to enforce your beliefs on the people around you. Moreso when you are claiming D&D causes Satanism, Rape, and Murder.



This is a misunderstanding of the 80s Satanic Panic that mischaracterize the atmosphere of the time and the absolute craziness of some misguided individuals, like Patricia Pulling*, who explicitly argued that D&D caused satanism.

*In fairness, losing a child is terrible.

Saved me making a post, Snarf - this is exactly what I feel, except expressed far more succinctly than I would have managed!

 

[Doug McCrae]

One obvious difference between the Satanic Panic and racial concerns, that have existed in D&D at least since 3rd edition, is that the former came from people who didn't play D&D and had almost no knowledge of it. I'm concerned with race in D&D and I've been playing since 1982. Based on their posts others in this thread with similar views have a similar background to myself.

EDIT: What @Campbell said!

 

[Coroc]

Right. So, "Please be inclusive in how you show you are being excluded." That.. doesn't make sense, dude.

Hm my fault, I try to explain my view a bit better, police brutality in U.S. is a big problem for the black population. Still there are other minorities afflicted by it and also white people and every case is one case to much.

Black people cannot change their skin color to reduce the danger of being victim, so the plight lies within better training and developing more empathy of the police , which will result in less overall cases - no matter the ethnicity.

 

[Doug McCrae]

different people have different ideas about what "races" are

This is absolutely right and is itself evidence that race don't real. In the early 20th century Anglo-Saxons would have usually been considered a different race to the French, for example.

 

[Xenonnonex]

Well, I think the main reasons are for contrast (as you note, it's hard to make good drawings of obsidian drow, especially at night and in caves, or just to provide extra added spatial perceptions), I wouldn't mind changing them officially.

This is more about the limited palette of fantasy creatures. They don't all have to be our regular skin tones. More purple, blue, orange, and red.

More extensive color palate would be good.

 

[Raunalyn]

I've always played my D&D with the knowledge that there are no races that are inherently evil and that goblinoids, orcs, drow, etc. were all products of their environment (aka nature vs. nurture). It makes an interesting moral conundrum for good aligned player characters going in and slaughtering a cave full of kobolds.

 

[Olrox17]

The problem here is, Faerun already has intelligent, reasonable, non-evil orcs. It's been something that happens in Faerun since at least 1990.

The same problem is the case with the Drow. WotC, as I pointed out earlier, are the ones who retcon'd them. In Faerun, Ed Greenwood and others had been making there be increasingly large numbers of non-Evil Drow and non-Evil or differently-Evil (i.e. not Lolth-worshiping matriarchies) for a long, long time. If you read the Drow stuff from the 1990s, you'll see this. Eilistraee was an increasingly big deal through 2E FR.

Then, when WotC took over, they retcon'd all that. They killed off Eilistraee, and generally "reverted" the FR Drow to basically all be Menzoberranzan Drow, because, I suspect, of the general push with 3E which was to revert to older tropes, hence bring back Greyhawk (even though it go nowhere) and so on.

So don't give me "retcon". You're rolling with a retcon, mate. 5E brough Eilistraee back already, so it's returning to the path 2E was taking, I suspect. It's a more interesting path than having Drow as a monolithic society anyway.

Wait, I'll freely admit that I joined the game with 3.0, so everything before that I don't know much about, but Eilistraee is in my 3.0 FR setting book, I just checked. You may be thinking of something else.
My personal introduction to FR drow was through RA Salvatore's novels, and the lore in there perfectly aligned with the lore inside my third edition setting book.

Just to bring a different example, much of the plot of Neverwinter Nights: Hordes of the Underdark revolves around a city of Eilistraee-worshiping drow. NWN is based on 3.0 rules.

Uh-huh, but I think the point is pretty clear. Believing in literal supernatural evil of the kind that can actually summon demons and curse people, and being terrified of it (with good reason if you actually believe it, I guess) is a bit different from wanting social change, regardless of how vehement you are.

We can finish this particular discussion via PM, if you want.