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'.

 

[Var]

There is no version of this where White American Man is not in the top 1% of the world. It’s literally ALL the advantages. If you can’t make something of that, we in the rest of the world can’t help you!

You think? Working for a publicly traded company with an US office, several in Europe, Australia and Asia, I'm glad I'm the European branch.
30 days paid vacation, sick leave no questions asked, paid overtime, 40 hour weeks max (well technically), healthcare required by law, functional privacy/data protection laws for employees, hire and fire not being a thing....
The US Office has none of that. Being anything below the single digit percentage doesn't look fun to me.
What would be dream working conditions in a US company scratch what what would be considerd the bare minimum here - from below.

No idea what happened over there, probably more of a the rest of the world evolving without the US of A or something. For reference Canada is a place I'd be happy to work at. And then there's always the Nordics or Switzerland if you really hit the jackpot.

as a resident of KY I am affected by unfair stereotypes

Well I understood it in a way that you don't consider yourself a hillbilly. And in that context that footnote left a bit of a "woe is me", first world problem style ;D

 

[InnocentPope]

Then why does D&D have evil races? Why not just evil individuals?

As Tom Shippey says in The Road to Middle-Earth "There can be little doubt that the orcs entered Middle-earth originally just because the story needed a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction, 'the infantry of the old war' to use Tolkien's phrase." Tolkien was telling stories about war so he needed an army of bad guys who were unquestionably evil. The fantasy supplement for Chainmail had the same requirement.

D&D doesn't because it's about individuals and small scale action, not armies.

It isn't always about individuals; sometimes your Wizard has a Fireball prepared and is just itching for a large collection of mooks that he can blast all at once. Or your Fighter wants to use Cleave a bunch on a swarm of mooks who can't hit him because he's got good armor and they're too low-level to overcome it (this is especially an issue in 3E where the BAB progression way outstrips the AC progression; defensive builds are virtually impossible unless all you ever fight are throngs of cannon fodder).

In cases like this, you don't want to have to sit and wonder which members of the warband attacking you are genuinely Evil, and which are just going along with an Evil act because of peer pressure. I like the occasional intelligent, thoughtful orc, and I personally wouldn't use orcs for this, but some creature should fill this role. I like the Spawn of Tiamat myself; literally created by an evil goddess solely to further her agenda of 1) slaughter the minions of the Good god who's her brother/husband/whatever, and 2) conquer and/or kill literally everything else. No need to question whether you're doing the right thing; Cloudkill them all and then wade in with your Great Cleaving axe and finish off whoever's left, because you're guaranteed to be doing the right thing.

You can't have all your enemies be Constructs or Oozes because they're immune to a bunch of your special attacks. It can't just be human bandits because they're boring. Some campaigns have really cool substitutes that I love, like the Elemental Myrmidions in Princes of the Apocalypse, but if a GM who I liked a lot offered me a chance to go slaughter some Drow and Kuo-Toa and other such evil humanoids in an Out of the Abyss/Rage of Demons game, I wouldn't sit there agonizing over the "representation". It's just a game. You don't have to worry about and torture yourself over the political message being sent by literally everything. I know some people have said "all art is political", and "symbolism matters" and all that, but I just don't agree, and I don't like that their opinion is being treated as objectively more valid than mine, just because the forum admins and a large vocal subset of the userbase agree with them. As long as the discussion is civil, all points of view should be allowed to be freely expressed.

 

[Haldrik]

It's a poverty thing.

Thing that propels extremism the most is economic problems. Communism in 1917, Germany 1919, later with the Fascists in 33.

Fix that and the social stuff will fall into line.

In America they literally can't fix it so yeah regardless if which way the culture war goes rural Kentucky and urban Detroit are still going to have the same issues.

I feel ideology propels most extremism. Teaching values that disrespect the human life of the other, is the problem.

India is often a good example of altruistic values despite poverty.

That said, obviously economic inequality and inaccessibility hurt everyone.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I really don't think that I would. I would blame the guy who was doing the kneeling, not the 50 other people within a two-block radius who did not all form into a vigilante mob and attack the guy to get him off my neck. I would be more scared to live in a society that embraces that kind of groupthink than in one which simply has a handful of violent people in positions that occasionally let them get away with crime for a while, before they are eventually noticed and punished in a legal, prosocial fashion.

This sentiment is, itself, antisocial.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Not anymore.

Norway or Australia probably best places now.

No, Americans still make fun of Aussies. And we all "know" the Scadinavian countries are the new home of the EU's white supremist movement. 'Cause Vikings, you know?

 

[Var]

No, Americans still make fun of Aussies. And we all "know" the Scadinavian countries are the new home of the EU's white supremist movement. 'Cause Vikings, you know?

Aaaand next up on Infowars....

Btw fully comitted to buy a vacation home in Norway or Finnland at some point.
You know, block hut with a single massive window in the roof in the middle of nowhere, moose and reindeer in the 3ft high snow that qualifies as garden and of course a 10GBit symetric internet connection to keep up with society.

 

[Haldrik]

Regarding "hillbillies". I feel, many fail to grok the pain that many in rural communities feel. They grow up watching TV perpetually humiliate and dehumanize them. The suicide rate is reaching epidemic frequency, as is drug addictions and other symptoms of despair.

It is unethical to add to the harm against rural Americans.

 

[Zardnaar]

I feel ideology propels most extremism. Teaching values that disrespect the human life of the other, are the problem.

That said, obviously economic inequality and inaccessibility hurt everyone.

It does people drift towards extreme ideologies when the economy is in the toilet and/or when inequality becomes extreme and there's no way to change it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

With respect, that may be because you are asking the wrong question.

Let's do some role playing. Anyone can join in! I have a pre-generated character for you.

Your character is a contemporary human in a contemporary world. He's never played D&D, does not know its history. He's dark-skinned, and lives in the USA. The primitive tribal origins of his people is often rasied, though that was centuries ago. His people are known for their physical prowess, due to their prominence in professional sports. When seen on the street, the initial reaction to his people is "very possibly a violent criminal", enough that passersby often physically shy away. Enough of the dominant culture around him feel he is sub-human, that a cop might just feel he could get away with casually and slowly killing him.

Now your character is given a description of orcs - dark skinned, strong. Dumb, primitive, tribal. Violent such that vigilante adventurers are often sent to kill them to protect society.

How does your character feel?

Yep. It’s not that orcs are literally a standin for Black people. In fact, either the person who wrote the really good articles about orcs in D&D or another of the prominent people in that discussion, noted that a lot of the description reminded him of the things people say about Latin Americans, and a lot of it speaks to how western colonizers spoke of the people they were driving out of their own land.

The point isn’t some 1-1 correlation that people keep using as a strawman (Morrus wasn’t doing that, I refer here to others ITT), but rather that it mirrors rhetoric that has been used against various people of color over the centuries, and it is uncomfortable for many gamers of color as a result.

 

[Zardnaar]

No, Americans still make fun of Aussies. And we all "know" the Scadinavian countries are the new home of the EU's white supremist movement. 'Cause Vikings, you know?

Americans haven't figured it out yet.

Mate in Aussie working in a big box retail store was breaking $30 an hour. What does Walmart pay?

Worked last year with a guy from Alabama. Our minimum wage was almost double his. He was getting $1000 a week at the local port.

USians and UK not number 1&2 anymore.

Numbers still look good because the 1% distort the averages.

Excluding microstates and Petro states I think Norway might be the richest country now.