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'.

 

[Oofta]

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 (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.

In general, I think the game needs identifiable bad guys for a lot of people. Although when I think about it more, while I occasionally use orcs as foot-soldiers and minor threats, in my current campaign I think I've used them once in past year.

But related to this - for the people that are in the "saying orcs are evil is racist" or believe that orcs are only evil because of their religion/culture I have a question.

Isn't it just as bad (or even worse) to say that orcs that follow religion X are evil? That if they just worshiped Y they'd be okay?

So as to not get into real world religions, lets say there were people that worshiped The Holy Cabbage. Cabbagers as they like to be called happen to be a different ethnicity and look different from you. In addition you of course are not a cabbage-head yourself.

So if I say that Cabbagers are evil (or at least the vast majority are), that's seems pretty danged bigoted to me. We're just substituting someone's appearance with what religion religion they follow. They're evil because they say different prayers, have different customs. Maybe cabbagers always walk backwards when they walk through the front door which is just weird.

How is that any better? Especially when we're assigning an alignment to a separate species that just happens to have the same general shape as humans?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Although now I'm curious why we have half-orcs. I mean, in 5E it's called out as a blessing from some deity or other, but why were they introduced in the first place? I always assumed it was because they didn't want orcs as a playable race back in they day.

The early days of D&D had a lot of spaghetti thrown at the wall in the pages of the Strategic Review and then what was then called The Dragon magazine. I don't recall when or where half-orcs first appeared, although I think they must predate the 1E PHB. But it seemed like every issue of the magazines had new ideas. Some, like druids or illusionists, made the cut. Others, like samurai and half-ogres did not.

I think you're probably right and, for whatever reason, early players and DMs were uncomfortable with orc PCs, although I can't fathom why. An early Dragon article (reprinted in the great Best of the Dragon, Vol. 1) had someone learning the Wall language so they could interrogate dungeons about what was inside them. Playing an orc hardly seems like too much.

 

[Cadence]

Although now I'm curious why we have half-orcs.

Guessing LotR. Google turns up the quotes from LotR about them.

 

[Helldritch]

Yeah the art is just bad.

Carried over into Menzoberranzan boxes set.

Actually made the old AD&D Drow art looked good in black and white. There the ski colour was obviously inhuman.

And these are what the original drow should have looked like all along. The painting on GDQ 1-7 is gorgeous, but these were not my drows. Drows have jet black skin almost reflecting light as in light can't touch them because they are evil. Their skin is the reflection of their soul. It is relatively easy to do in a drawing. But in a painting it's almost impossible to do.

I had a good drow way before Drizzt. He worked his alignment change through game play and when he reached chaotic good (a 10 on the old chart given in a book, don't remember which but I was using it at the time). His rejection of the drow ways showed and he became a grey elf. A gift from Correlon.

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

I think there are far better arguments for why “species” isn’t an appropriate descriptor than the fact that elves and humans can breed true. Lots of stuff can breed true in D&D, the real-life definition of species doesn’t work in that context. Species is still a poor choice of words to describe the different types of humanoid, but for reasons unrelated to the peculiarities of fecundity in D&D.

 

[Minigiant]

What if we do Ancestry, Culture, Class, Background?

Ancestry: Elf
Culture: High
Class: Wizard
Background: Noble

Ancestry: Dwarf
Culture: Hill
Class: Fighter
Background: Aritsan

Ancestry: Gnome
Culture: Wood
Class: Bard
Background: Charlatan

 

[Helldritch]

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?

I know I do... If this is the setting.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Agreed on all counts. I love a good tiki drink, but tiki culture has issues, absolutely. It's founded in post-war escapism at best, cultural appropriation at worst.

I do think it's awesome that the word Mana is of Polynesian origin, though.

I was reading a Vox article about the Boogaloo quasi-movement earlier today. I love my Hawaiian shirts and am not interested in ceding them to a bunch of "let's start another civil war" creeps. Interestingly, the modern popularity of Hawaiian shirts started with Native Hawaiians in the Hawaii legislature starting an "Aloha Shirt Friday" tradition as a point of islander pride. (It morphed into "Casual Friday" on the mainland.)

I'm a big fan of tiki, but the racial/colonialist aspects to that are tangled up pretty deeply. Some tiki bars, like Jungle Bird in Sacramento, have dumped anything that looks like they're making fun of real world religious beliefs (Jungle Bird just goes with imagery of jungles and birds, hence the name). Other tiki bars have really dug in their heels and are angrily denying there's anything problematic about taking someone else's cultural or religious imagery and making it into something that's at least gently poking fun at it. (You don't see much of that with Western religions, which is a sign that there's some unfortunate components to this thinking.)

I hope there's a way to make tiki culture more celebratory and fantasy and less holding up a real world group and their religious and cultural practices up as something to make into a bit of a joke. I think there probably is.

 

[DammitVictor]

Um, I think that the existence and popularity of retroclones, OSR, and various revivals, including but not limited to the re-use of old material with Goodman Games and even WoTC might mean that there are probably some people still playing that way, even today.

The "old material" included random encounter tables that allowed Player Characters to meet orcs and goblinoids openly walking around human cities in the heart of human empires-- that's AD&D, that's Gygax.

 

[Zardnaar]

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".



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?

My new game Elves are villains. They're basically the East India company with mercenaries. They'll probably control warforged.

They're heavily outnumbered.