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.

 

[reelo]

What questions do you still have? What parts are you having trouble understanding? I'd be more than happy to keep discussing it with you.

The game already has numerous player "races", and even multiple subspecies or ethnicities within said races (cf black Paladin etc) how is it implied that "monsters" suddenly represent real-world people? To me, orcs, goblinkin etc are never meant to be viable options for a PC. They're Koopa Troopas, nothing more.
Of course, if you let players suddenly play gnolls, and orcs, and goblins, and ogres, it begs the question what makes them different from their NPC brothers. So to me, that is the crux of the matter.

 

[Doug McCrae]

To find the closest comparisons with evil humanoids in D&D look to examples of genocidal racism in the colonial period (Africa, Australia, United States), and the attitude toward black people in the US after the end of slavery.

These excerpts provide examples of both these forms of racism. I think there are clear parallels with orcs and other evil humanoids in D&D.

Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide (2007):

Bathurst Massacre, Australia 1824
"Men of 'position' declared 'that the blackfellow was not a human being and that there was no more guilt in shooting him than in shooting a native dog.'"

Myall Creek Massacre, Australia 1838
"A juror called blacks 'a set of monkies and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better'".

"Defending the Black Hills in 1876, Lakota warriors killed Custer and 225 of his soldiers at the Little Big Horn. The San Francisco Chronicle now urged 'no treating or temporizing with the red brutes,' whose 'fiendish atrocities' made them 'worse than wild beasts.'"

German Southwest Africa 1907
"Conservative Party spokesmen… described the Herero as 'blood-thirsty beasts in the form of humans'"


Dr. David Pilgrim, The Brute Caricature:

The brute caricature portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal -- deserving punishment, maybe death. This brute is a fiend, a sociopath, an anti-social menace. Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who target helpless victims, especially white women. Charles H. Smith (1893), writing in the 1890s, claimed, "A bad negro is the most horrible creature upon the earth, the most brutal and merciless" (p. 181). Clifton R. Breckinridge (1900), a contemporary of Smith's, said of the black race, "when it produces a brute, he is the worst and most insatiate brute that exists in human form" (p. 174).

George T. Winston (1901), another "Negrophobic" writer, claimed:
"When a knock is heard at the door [a White woman] shudders with nameless horror. The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal. A mad bull or tiger could scarcely be more brutal. A whole community is frenzied with horror, with the blind and furious rage for vengeance." (pp. 108-109)​

 

[BookTenTiger]

The game already has numerous player "races", and even multiple subspecies or ethnicities within said races (cf black Paladin etc) how is it implied that "monsters" suddenly represent real-world people? To me, orcs, goblinkin etc are never meant to be viable options for a PC. They're Koopa Troopas, nothing more.
Of course, if you let players suddenly play gnolls, and orcs, and goblins, and ogres, it begs the question what makes them different from their NPC brothers. So to me, that is the crux of the matter.

Good questions!

As you know, it is a little silly to say that drow or orcs or kobolds or githzerai represent real human cultures because they are, after all, monsters.

But in some instances, authors have described these monsters by borrowing from negative and harmful stereotypes of people of color.

Furthermore, there is an overall trend that you can tell which races in D&D are evil by the darkness of their skin. This isn't an exact rule, but it's definitely an observable pattern.

So the argument isn't "orcs are analogous to ___ people, and that's bad."

The argument is: the words we have used to describe humanoid monsters are often the words that have been used to communicate harmful and inhuman stereotypes about real peoples."

Moving forward, we get to decide if we want to keep using these stereotypes to describe the humanoid monsters in our game, or if we want to try something new.

Does that make sense?

 

[Lwaxy]

Yup. That's also why I think it would be better to have them as Monstrosities instead of humanoids, just like Medusas, Merfolk and Yuan-ti, if we are to keep the Tolkien-Orc. Hell, they are in the Monstrous race section of Volo's! They have all the prerequisite, from their Volo's lore, to be Monstrosities.

• Created by and bound to a dark power
• One goal: destruction
• Experimented on to further increases predisposition (Orog, Neo-Orog)
• Decadent culture

MM's description:
''Monstrosities are monsters in the strictest sense-frightening creatures that are not ordinary, not truly natural, and almost never benign. Some are the results of magical experimentation gone awry (such as owlbears), and others are the product of terrible curses (including minotaurs and yuan-ti). They defy categorization, and in some sense serve as a catch-all category for creatures that don't fit into any other type. ''

I'd do the same for Kobolds, Gnolls and Goblinoids (which is such a large category that it should be its own thing)

Then you could have the player version of them without the alignment part for those above-mentioned peoples which escaped their dark fate and overcome their tragic disposition as playable folks that could also be used for NPC with the (any race) tag.

I'd prefer if the term "monster" would go away altogether, especially when applied to any remotely intelligent race. Even if they are mostly evil.

 

[Guest 6801328]

The game already has numerous player "races", and even multiple subspecies or ethnicities within said races (cf black Paladin etc) how is it implied that "monsters" suddenly represent real-world people? To me, orcs, goblinkin etc are never meant to be viable options for a PC. They're Koopa Troopas, nothing more.
Of course, if you let players suddenly play gnolls, and orcs, and goblins, and ogres, it begs the question what makes them different from their NPC brothers. So to me, that is the crux of the matter.

First, the issue is not that certain monsters represent real world people. Somehow we just can’t seem to stamp out that misunderstanding.

Second, ability modifiers for monstrous PCs are just one example of the rules and fluff reinforcing negative stereotypes (again, about people in general, not about a specific real-world analogue). So eliminating monstrous PCs would alleviate a symptom but not really address the underlying problem.

 

[Guest 6801328]

These excerpts provide examples of both these forms of racism. I think there are clear parallels with orcs and other evil humanoids in D&D.

Ben Kiernan, Blood and Soil: A World History of Genocide (2007):

Bathurst Massacre, Australia 1824
"Men of 'position' declared 'that the blackfellow was not a human being and that there was no more guilt in shooting him than in shooting a native dog.'"

Myall Creek Massacre, Australia 1838
"A juror called blacks 'a set of monkies and the earlier they are exterminated from the face of the earth the better'".

"Defending the Black Hills in 1876, Lakota warriors killed Custer and 225 of his soldiers at the Little Big Horn. The San Francisco Chronicle now urged 'no treating or temporizing with the red brutes,' whose 'fiendish atrocities' made them 'worse than wild beasts.'"

German Southwest Africa 1907
"Conservative Party spokesmen… described the Herero as 'blood-thirsty beasts in the form of humans'"


Dr. David Pilgrim, The Brute Caricature:

The brute caricature portrays black men as innately savage, animalistic, destructive, and criminal -- deserving punishment, maybe death. This brute is a fiend, a sociopath, an anti-social menace. Black brutes are depicted as hideous, terrifying predators who target helpless victims, especially white women. Charles H. Smith (1893), writing in the 1890s, claimed, "A bad negro is the most horrible creature upon the earth, the most brutal and merciless" (p. 181). Clifton R. Breckinridge (1900), a contemporary of Smith's, said of the black race, "when it produces a brute, he is the worst and most insatiate brute that exists in human form" (p. 174).

George T. Winston (1901), another "Negrophobic" writer, claimed:
"When a knock is heard at the door [a White woman] shudders with nameless horror. The black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. His ferocity is almost demoniacal. A mad bull or tiger could scarcely be more brutal. A whole community is frenzied with horror, with the blind and furious rage for vengeance." (pp. 108-109)​

You missed “superpredator” from the 90’s.

 

[Desrimal]

What part of WotC's response makes you think they are taking away evil drow and orcs?

Both evil and good drow and orcs (or at least half-orcs) have been a staple of D&D for a long time. What part of D&D's fan base do you think will feel alienated by WotC's decision to not use harmful racial stereotypes?

I meant inherently evil orcs and drows.

I think most fans will eventually feel alienated, by these changes.

 

[Doug McCrae]

You missed “superpredator” from the 90’s.

David Pilgrim does get up to that period in the article I linked!

EDIT: No wait, he just misses it. His article goes up to 1994 and afaict "superpredator" starts in 1995.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I meant inherently evil orcs and drows.

I think most fans will eventually feel alienated, by these changes.

Look, it's not like orcs are going to suddenly be good guys, although you may occasionally meet a "good" one. It's mostly going to be that the text describing them is going to avoid certain language.

 

[BookTenTiger]

I meant inherently evil orcs and drows.

I think most fans will eventually feel alienated, by these changes.

If D&D survived the loss of THAC0, I think we can survive this.

Now keep in mind WotC has not said that there will not be evil drow or orcs. That would be as silly as removing evil humans. What is it about having a more nuanced depiction of drow and orcs that you think would alienate D&D players?