D&D General WotC’s Official Announcement About Diversity, Races, and D&D

Following up on recent discussions on social media, WotC has made an official announcement about diversity and the treatment of ‘race’ in D&D. Notably, the word ‘race’ is not used; in its place are the words ‘people’ and 'folk'.

 PRESS RELEASE

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Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is strength, for only a diverse group of adventurers can overcome the many challenges a D&D story presents. In that spirit, making D&D as welcoming and inclusive as possible has moved to the forefront of our priorities over the last six years. We’d like to share with you what we’ve been doing, and what we plan to do in the future to address legacy D&D content that does not reflect who we are today. We recognize that doing this isn’t about getting to a place where we can rest on our laurels but continuing to head in the right direction. We feel that being transparent about it is the best way to let our community help us to continue to calibrate our efforts.

One of the explicit design goals of 5th edition D&D is to depict humanity in all its beautiful diversity by depicting characters who represent an array of ethnicities, gender identities, sexual orientations, and beliefs. We want everyone to feel at home around the game table and to see positive reflections of themselves within our products. “Human” in D&D means everyone, not just fantasy versions of northern Europeans, and the D&D community is now more diverse than it’s ever been.

Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That’s just not right, and it’s not something we believe in. Despite our conscious efforts to the contrary, we have allowed some of those old descriptions to reappear in the game. We recognize that to live our values, we have to do an even better job in handling these issues. If we make mistakes, our priority is to make things right.

Here’s what we’re doing to improve:

• We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples. We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do.
• When every D&D book is reprinted, we have an opportunity to correct errors that we or the broader D&D community discovered in that book. Each year, we use those opportunities to fix a variety of things, including errors in judgment. In recent reprintings of Tomb of Annihilation and Curse of Strahd, for example, we changed text that was racially insensitive. Those reprints have already been printed and will be available in the months ahead. We will continue this process, reviewing each book as it comes up for a reprint and fixing such errors where they are present.
• Later this year, we will release a product (not yet announced) that offers a way for a player to customize their character’s origin, including the option to change the ability score increases that come from being an elf, a dwarf, or one of D&D's many other playable folk. This option emphasizes that each person in the game is an individual with capabilities all their own.
• Curse of Strahd included a people known as the Vistani and featured the Vistani heroine Ezmerelda. Regrettably, their depiction echoes some stereotypes associated with the Romani people in the real world. To rectify that, we’ve not only made changes to Curse of Strahd, but in two upcoming books, we will also show—working with a Romani consultant—the Vistani in a way that doesn’t rely on reductive tropes.
• We've received valuable insights from sensitivity readers on two of our recent books. We are incorporating sensitivity readers into our creative process, and we will continue to reach out to experts in various fields to help us identify our blind spots.
• We're proactively seeking new, diverse talent to join our staff and our pool of freelance writers and artists. We’ve brought in contributors who reflect the beautiful diversity of the D&D community to work on books coming out in 2021. We're going to invest even more in this approach and add a broad range of new voices to join the chorus of D&D storytelling.

And we will continue to listen to you all. We created 5th edition in conversation with the D&D community. It's a conversation that continues to this day. That's at the heart of our work—listening to the community, learning what brings you joy, and doing everything we can to provide it in every one of our books.

This part of our work will never end. We know that every day someone finds the courage to voice their truth, and we’re here to listen. We are eternally grateful for the ongoing dialog with the D&D community, and we look forward to continuing to improve D&D for generations to come.

 

[Umbran]

OK, Perhaps, however, OCR was originally designed to read text of a scanned image and i have used OCR to do just that I suspect there is a DRM issue.

The screen reader is not itself an OCR application.

Consider, for example, your standard web page. The page source contains the text on the page, plus a whole lot of HTML and CSS drek used to format it for visual presentation. A Screen reader parses out all the formatting, and gets at the text embedded in there, and read it aloud.

The same idea goes for pdfs. The publisher scans their material to an image. They should then run it through OCR and edit the results (which, if you've used OCR, know is necessary on pieces of any real size, or which have complicated formatting and tables), and then embed the text in the PDF back where most users don't see it, for the screen reader to pull out and read for the user.

This process is tedious, and requires a lot of human supervision, and is hard to get right. Many companies may find it is not economical for materials that they don't expect to sell well.

 

[Professor Murder]

A lot of activity on this thread, which I admit to not having time to read all of. These articles feels germain to the topics being discussed and is well reasoned and argued. While I don't agree fully with everything in them, they did make me think a good deal and question some of my personal assumptions when it comes to fantasy races like Orcs.

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror — James Mendez Hodes

This is the first installment of a two-article series about the racist origins, nature, and ramifications of orcs, a malevolent humanoid species from English author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy setting. I started researching this article with the hypothesis that a collection of n

jamesmendezhodes.com

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human — James Mendez Hodes

This is the complement to my previous article , “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror.” In the previous article, we learned how racist myths from the British academy and army fueled JRR Tolkien’s creation of orcs as an analogue for Asian people. Today

jamesmendezhodes.com

Part of the issue is that for many evil fantasy races, the cultural signifiers and shorthand that is used to get across that they are evil have their origins in racist depictions of real world cultures. There are no easy answers, and I can get how people can be defensive and feel attacked. Just remember, not everything is about you.

 

[Sadras]

It seems like ability score bonuses are not a good idea.

Good is subjective.
There are other ideas such as minimums and maximums.

 

[plisnithus8]

Also, my perspective might not be the one that matters in this case, which I totally get.

I think you got it here. I don’t have the perspective to see the nuances other than my own without input and practice. If the few inclusive moments for someone playing the game to see someone depicted that resembles themselves reveals hurtful aspects, aspects that likely would have been avoided with a cultural consultant, then there is a better way of doing things.

I’ve seen a few people mention that they feel the term sensitivity reader is cringy, I can’t tell what point you are making. Many people feel that Cultural Consultant works better because it expresses working through the creativity process instead of just being called in after the fact to read over a project that is waiting to head to the printer and thus really too late for systemic issues to be addressed.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

I can sort of see that, but Port Nyanzaru actually seemed quite advanced as far as technology, economy, and arts. There are very serious social problems there, but no worse than some of the Sword Coast and Sea of Fallen Stars cities (Baldur's Gate, Hillsfar, etc). The majority of the "Sword Coast colonist" types we met seem to be deeply misguided, foolish, crazy, or some combination of the three and weren't, as far as I can recall, depicted as wielding any power over the Chultans. But having played and not read it, it's impossible for me to say what came from the book and what was my DMs. Also, my perspective might not be the one that matters in this case, which I totally get.

Exactly, Port Nyanzaru was quite advanced before the arrival of the colonist. They are not the ones who improved it. Its probably confusing to some because the ''advanced'' city was built upon an older decrepit city. So for players not versed in the never ending lore of FR, it could seem that the colonist brought with them technological superiority and ''improved'' the rudimentary settlement of the natives. In fact, the colonist more or less stole or benefited from the advanced chultan technology while letting the rest of the city crumble to dust.

 

[Chaderick]

I'm out. naughty word WotC. Enough of the revisionist history woke left naughty word.

To quote the movie Tombstone, "Well...bye..."

 

[Chaderick]

Every time I hear the words "sensitivity reader's" I cringe.

Well, to be fair, they have to be called something, and "50 years of cultural naughty word detectors" doesn't roll off the tongue.

 

[Sacrosanct]

On the other hand, they've really crapped in the OSR pool, somewhat ruining that scene.

"Is this guy into old school games or old school ... oh, dear."

That's really disappointing for me, as an old school grognard. Things change and evolve as we learn new things and become more socially aware.

Getting all upset and offended by these changes to me seems exactly like when people get all offended and demand that female PCs should be capped at a max strength score because that's how it was originally. How does that position look now?

 

[jgsugden]

Well, to be fair, they have to be called something, and "2500 years of cultural naughty word detectors" doesn't roll off the tongue.

FTFY.

 

[Chaderick]

That's another great side effect of the recent discussions: the toxic members who drape themselves in their old-school illusions and chose to stick to their regressive ideologies as the hill to die on are all rage quiting in a tantrum. Good riddance, I say, communities need less negativity and hate!

On a personal note, I reflect on how many times I worked hard to create a fact-based, intelligent-sounding argument, only to be laughed at and told that I'd been "triggered."

To see the amount of "triggered-ness" going on right now because checks notes people are being treated fairly now...is sadly ironic.

I guess we're seeing a subculture of bullies facing the fact that their time is passing, and they're not going to fade away gracefully. The only question is how much damage can they do on their way down?