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'.

 

[Haffrung]

The bigger problem is that these "monstrous" and "exotic" races are being used in the narrative role of the indigenous population that is being pushed out by a settler/colonizer population (usually humans, elves, sometimes dwarves). There is a narrative of the "common races" taming the frontier and expanding civilization, which is seen a "good" thing, while pushing the people who were already there, usually "monstrous races" like orcs and goblinoids, to the fringes of society.

This shows how varied the campaign settings and experiences have been for D&D. Because I have honestly never read or played in a campaign where dwarves and elves colonize the lands of humanoids. On the contrary, dwarves are typically clinging to fading glory in ancient halls, resisting the threat of orcs or other creatures from the depths, while elves play the same role of beleaguered defenders of remote forest enclaves against invasion from rapacious humanoids and humans (so pretty much as sympathetic indigenous peoples). I struggle to think of a single setting where orcs and goblinoids are characterized as indigenous.

That's the catch-22 of any portrayals of conquest: if the humanoids are the conquerors, then they're crude stereotypes of barbarian invaders; while if humanoids are the conquered, then they're crude stereotypes of indigenous people. Both distasteful to modern sensibilities.

I don't see how a game like D&D can survive the application of modern mores and sensibilities across the board. You have to set aside modern enlightened values if you're going to play a game with heroes, villains, and monsters, where most problems are solved by lethal violence. Because some individual or group, possessed of identifiable traits, will always be the villain, and will always be overcome by being hacked to death or blasted to cinders.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I personally prefer Species because I like science and I think it fits better, but Ancestry probably works the 2nd best.

The trouble with species is that they aren't. Half-Elves can breed true. Humans and Elves are definitely the same species. So are Humans and Orcs. And it's not a scientific world, it's a magical one, where miracles happen, so taking a science-based term isn't a great approach, especially when it is "wrong" immediately.

 

[Umbran]

@Aldarc and @Olrox17 - Whatever each of you may think about the posts you are making, the two of you are at this point guilty of badgering each other. Stop it. Walk away, please.

 

[Oofta]

The trouble with species is that they aren't. Half-Elves can breed true. Humans and Elves are definitely the same species. So are Humans and Orcs. And it's not a scientific world, it's a magical one, where miracles happen, so taking a science-based term isn't a great approach, especially when it is "wrong" immediately.

Except that orcs are specifically called out as magically blessed with fertility and elves are more adaptable than other races. Magic trumps genetics. I mean, the first centaur came from somewhere, right?

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

And don't forget that some of them are now trying to make Hawaiian shirts a part of racist iconography (those "Blue Igloo" people). The mental gymnastics required there boggle the mind. Hands off tiki culture, racists!

On the subject of ice cream, apparently this was a thing, albeit in India:

Tasteless but true: Made in India Hitler ice-cream, café

Photographs of an ice-cream cone manufactured in Uttar Pradesh and named ‘Hitler’ have been doing the rounds on social media, with the brand drawing severe flak from across the world. Media reports said the news had outraged many in Germany.

www.hindustantimes.com

But back to D&D, there are hundreds of non-problematic monsters that you can use once you start allowing for a more inclusive approach - undead, aberrations, constructs, and dragons never go out of style, for example.

I don't know. Are they using it as intentional branding, like they do the Crusades, Sparta and Viking iconography?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well but all lives matter, and it would have been a more inclusive slogan imho (with clarification that no matter what skin color, religion, gender, age etc. they matter). Of course I do not want to dismiss the actual problem which BLM is based upon with that reply, which exists, especially for black Americans but not exclusive for them.

The slogan might have been better understood had the word “too” been affixed to the end, but the point of the slogan (and organization) is that black lives have been historically and continually undervalued. Inclusivity isn’t the claim, it’s the petition.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

The trouble with species is that they aren't. Half-Elves can breed true. Humans and Elves are definitely the same species. So are Humans and Orcs. And it's not a scientific world, it's a magical one, where miracles happen, so taking a science-based term isn't a great approach, especially when it is "wrong" immediately.

It's not really a problem, though. Again, there's no true definition of species. There are species that are definitely distinct, but can interbreed and produce fertile offspring, like Beefalo, Pizzly Bears, Neanderthals and us, and so on. It's like that.

Sure, Species kind of sounds science-y, but I don't think that's bad. It's better than culture, which to me just feels cheesy. Ancestry kind of feels that way as well, but isn't as bad.

And, also like Oofta said. D&D is a magical world. They can be called species even if that doesn't fit the most widely accepted definition of species because magic exists. D&D worlds be default are magical.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

But back to D&D, there are hundreds of non-problematic monsters that you can use once you start allowing for a more inclusive approach - undead, aberrations, constructs, and dragons never go out of style, for example.

Yeah. Making Orcs not evil doesn't mean that you can't have enemies in D&D games. My games typically have more human villains than orc or goblin.
You can use orcs, drow, goblins and other races as villains still, but the whole race doesn't have to be evil.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

That's the catch-22 of any portrayals of conquest: if the humanoids are the conquerors, then they're crude stereotypes of barbarian invaders; while if humanoids are the conquered, then they're crude stereotypes of indigenous people. Both distasteful to modern sensibilities.

Wow that applies uncomfortably well to Warcraft, huh, where the Orcs manage to play both roles (but because we always saw their perspective on matters, never quite seemed as "uncomfortable" as D&D's usage of them).

One thing that's always struck me as a bit oddly missing is how rarely we portray "evil empire builders". They've started to creep in with "Hobgoblins as Romans", but where's "Elves as the British Empire" - I mean, it's in Warhammer and arguably Spelljammer, but it's never really fully executed upon. Fighting a colonial/colonising power, even from the perspective of a very advanced culture, would I think make for some great D&D, and some really memorable opponents (I had great fun with an "East India Company" type deal in a campaign I ran a while back).

And it's not like D&D doesn't skew hard towards the 1600s/1700s in a lot of ways. Minus gunpowder, most thing in D&D are more "1690" than "1290", let alone "990".

elves are more adaptable than other races

Wait where is this coming from? I'm not saying it's not true, and there are a lot of "subraces" of Elves, but is that actually a lore thing?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah. Making Orcs not evil doesn't mean that you can't have enemies in D&D games. My games typically have more human villains than orc or goblin.
You can use orcs, drow, goblins and other races as villains still, but the whole race doesn't have to be evil.

What strikes me as a bit odd here is that when I look back on D&D over the last thirty years, the number of times I've used orcs as any kind of major threat or seen published adventures which do that is... well it's tiny, practically non-existent. And the number of times, in my games or published ones where I've seen a situation where orcs needed to be an "evil race" rather than just "some evil orcs"? I mean, it's zero. I've never seen that. I've seen it with goblins, once, but ironically that was Pathfinder and they went on to make goblins an entirely playable race, and not only that, a pretty popular one and iconic of Pathfinder, so not an "evil race" anymore!

Do people even really use orcs as a major threat all the much?