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'.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

1. Letting Twitter and Tumblr edit your books for you is monumentally foolish. Especially since it won't take long for people to realize all they need is shill account and they can easily troll WOTC into changing their books over fake outrage.

I have no comment on this besides that it is clearly incorrect.

2. Homegenized classes caused 4th edition to tank. Homegenized races will do the same. Making it so Players are picking a cosmetic word on a character sheet that does absolutely nothing, so they can then just pick whatever bonuses suit them will be a field day for powergamers who'll turn games into power trips. People are going to start leaving pretty quickly.

NO! How can you say that? Races and classes haven't been the same thing for a very long time. They aren't the same thing. 4e tanked because it was too video-gamey, or so I heard. Homogenizing races is not what's happening. They are making it so races aren't restricted to being stupid, or weak, or whatever else ability score bonuses restrict their playstyle.
If anything, this is a victory for people who hate powergamers. Now you can be a gnome with a strength based weapon without being restricted to play a certain way in order to be viable. It opens up diversity a ton.

3. So now we need to hire people to tell us how to present Gypsies in a fantasy world? Seriously?? And we don't think the end result of this will be a group of perfect humans with no drawbacks or liabilities?

Uh, yes. That's what you do when you are basing something off of an existing people. If you want to avoid offending people, you hire people who know how to not offend people if you care enough about inclusiveness.

4. I'm guessing no one ran that last bullet point past legal. It's illegal to discriminate in the US based on a number of qualities. Announcing that you're going to make hiring/contract decisions based on the qualities that are illegal to make hiring/contract decisions upon is a degree of poor judgement that's going to be nearly impossible to exceed. WOTC and Hasbro just guaranteed themselves of at least one, and probably more, lawsuit where they'll be settling for millions of dollars for discrimination in hiring practices.

Eh, nothing is illegal about hiring minorities. It's illegal to discriminate against people based on this, but there are a lot of companies that have to meet a quota of racial diversity. Hamilton didn't get sued because it hired more minorities.

So, overall, you're wrong on all accounts. Think before you post, or you'll come off as racist or uninclusive.

 

[Cadence]

4. I'm guessing no one ran that last bullet point past legal. It's illegal to discriminate in the US based on a number of qualities. Announcing that you're going to make hiring/contract decisions based on the qualities that are illegal to make hiring/contract decisions upon is a degree of poor judgement that's going to be nearly impossible to exceed. WOTC and Hasbro just guaranteed themselves of at least one, and probably more, lawsuit where they'll be settling for millions of dollars for discrimination in hiring practices.

There are numerous places on the EEOC web-site and on sample EEO statements that google turns up wanting diversity. Google for example says "We want to bring new, diverse perspectives to our workforce." on diversity.google - and I'm assuming google isn't hurting for lawyers. What particular phrasing do you think will get them in trouble?

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Wow, that statement from them is a trainwreck.

1. Letting Twitter and Tumblr edit your books for you is monumentally foolish. Especially since it won't take long for people to realize all they need is shill account and they can easily troll WOTC into changing their books over fake outrage.

2. Homegenized classes caused 4th edition to tank. Homegenized races will do the same. Making it so Players are picking a cosmetic word on a character sheet that does absolutely nothing, so they can then just pick whatever bonuses suit them will be a field day for powergamers who'll turn games into power trips. People are going to start leaving pretty quickly.

3. So now we need to hire people to tell us how to present Gypsies in a fantasy world? Seriously?? And we don't think the end result of this will be a group of perfect humans with no drawbacks or liabilities?

4. I'm guessing no one ran that last bullet point past legal. It's illegal to discriminate in the US based on a number of qualities. Announcing that you're going to make hiring/contract decisions based on the qualities that are illegal to make hiring/contract decisions upon is a degree of poor judgement that's going to be nearly impossible to exceed. WOTC and Hasbro just guaranteed themselves of at least one, and probably more, lawsuit where they'll be settling for millions of dollars for discrimination in hiring practices.

The number of truly bad business decisions coming out of WOTC these past couple of weeks is astounding. I'm firmly convinced WOTC will be folded within the next year. I doubt Magic's going to make it much longer since it's a political platform now, and without that, the D&D market isn't going to keep Hasbro funding them. Especially when they're announcing they want to be sued for discrimination.

1) ''Gipsy'' is a racial slur, you may want to change that part of your post

2) Saying they will look too hire special consultant to help them with content is not discrimination.

3) Yeahhhhh.....WotC is gonna fold after record growth for the past three years. I dont think so, sorry.

 

[cbwjm]

I had no idea that hobgoblins had anything to do with Japanese samurai until just now. I'd recently seen some artwork where they were done up as samurai but I thought that was just a stylistic choice of the artist who posted on reddit. I'd always treated them more like romans with their military discipline.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I had no idea that hobgoblins had anything to do with Japanese samurai until just now. I'd recently seen some artwork where they were done up as samurai but I thought that was just a stylistic choice of the artist who posted on reddit. I'd always treated them more like romans with their military discipline.

I did the same. I never noticed the Japanese connection until this thread.

 

[Zardnaar]

I did the same. I never noticed the Japanese connection until this thread.

I had a DM have one commit sepeku.

Outside that I didn't make the connection.

They're usually the most dangerous of the typical humanoid races. By that I mean Orc, Kobold, Goblin etc.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

You're clearly angry and emotional about the whole situation that's going on. I understand.

Emotion is a central component of understanding any situation involving people. A purely logical understanding is necessarily a false one.

I would also like to point out that Jeremy Crawford was one of the lead designers at Green Ronin along with Stephen Kenson, Dawn Elliot, and John Snead of a 2005 game called Blue Rose. Compare how D&D portrays drow, orcs, and Vistani with how Blue Rose portrays vata'sha (dark vata), night people, and Roamers, respectively. I don't think that Jeremy Crawford saying that they want the norms of race in D&D to evolve comes out of the blue. Or maybe it does, though out of the Blue Rose.

I didn’t realize he was on that team! I’ve been meaning to put together a game. I’ve played but never run it.

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.

It’s wild how hard it is to get folks to grok this. It’s...a response to a society that treats Black lives as if they don’t matter.

From copying a style to assuming hobgoblins are a representation that all japaneese are evil by this association... this is a huge step that I will not and refuse to take.

That is a step no one is making or asking you to make.

D&D is a game about racism. That feels self-evident when pointed out.

No, it isn’t.

Well I hate to correct you there but Umbran has posted a roleplay that directly compares the experiences of black americans with descriptions of orcs. So I would disagree with your claim that this is a straw man.

no, he didn’t. That is 100% not what Umbran posted.

With how spheres and the like have worked since at least 3E (probably at least the latter half of 2E, but I wasn't very engaged with that edition), it's really hard to see a reason to have Nature clerics and druids both.

Cool, get rid of nature clerics.

I'm self censoring here but will only add that treating groups as diverse as white or Asian as monolithic instead of as individuals is totally racist.

No one did that. Discussing the state of different groups of people in a social order isn’t treating those groups as a monolith.

 

[cmad1977]

As the world changes around D&D, I feel any hypothetical "new" edition of the game is going to end up far more radically different than 5e's "evergreen" mentality wants. I do not see how "race" and "alignment" survive as concepts in a 6e. I am increasingly feeling even the classic ability scores and many (if not all) classes will not survive.

The ability scores themselves (the 3-20 score) is basically vestigial at this point. The only relevant part of the ability score is the bonus. Ability scores could simply be STR: +3, DEX:+1 etc.

 

[Minigiant]

I got a fair amount of people responding to my hobgoblin comment with various arguments of "not all bad" or "it's not really racist" or "would you prefer all villains be European," but you're the first so I'll respond to you.

It's not just that the hobgoblins are sort-of Japanese in appearance, it's that they take all of the negative of samurai and none of the positive. The negative being, a militant warrior culture. But it doesn't include the positives, such as many samurai being learned poets or artists.

This is especially problematic when you have a race that almost everyone a part of is evil. And I'll add, I don't think all races have this problem; D&D goblins for example seem pretty culturally neutral, and are more of a reflection of a type of person (weak, cowardly, cruel) than a group of people.

It would be cool if their were two goblin gods, one good or evil, going full on Warring States on each other. The good hobgoblins would be offer salvation and be able to represent positive aspects of samurai. This could be a bridge for other gobliniods who normally must stay generic to avoid offense to gain a bit of culture by joining the GGG.

 

[Zardnaar]

The ability scores themselves (the 3-20 score) is basically vestigial at this point. The only relevant part of the ability score is the bonus. Ability scores could simply be STR: +3, DEX:+1 etc.

Not really due to ASI and various feats that grant +1 whatever.