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.

 

[Greg Benage]

I would love it if one of these first time posters who are all mysteriously on the same side of this issue would mention what subreddit has linked to the article here. I notice you're not doing the same thing at RPG.net, where they've got much more aggressive moderation. Was that intentional?

Other than @EllPro I haven't seen a bunch of first-time posters. I only went back about seven pages to check, so maybe they were earlier?

In any case, the discussion has been civil and I'm not sure I understand why "more aggressive moderation" would be desirable.

 

[Umbran]

I'm a proud libtard ....

Mod Note:

And you just created an account to troll today. We've had more than enough of such. You're banned from the site. If you want back on, e-mail Morrus and convince him that you deserve it.

So folks are aware - from this point on, that's how first-time posters trolling this thread will be handled - once we note them, they'll be banned until such time as they can convince us that are worth allowing back.

 

[Umbran]

Other than @EllPro I haven't seen a bunch of first-time posters. I only went back about seven pages to check, so maybe they were earlier?

There were a few. We'll now be discouraging the behavior - banned and the offending posts deleted.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Second, they have a politics problem. You cannot sell bibles to atheists. You cannot sell left wing politics to conservatives or a fairly decent chunk of moderates. Since WOTC is using their games to promote their politics, they're alienating customers. As we approach November, WOTC is going to get a lot worse. Remember, WOTC let one of their players deface their cards (Should be a game loss by the rules) and demonize an artist who'd been with them for decades on video to publicize their politics, they're not making it through November without using their products to push their staff's beliefs.

They'll alienate conservatives in droves, and depending on how tired of it moderates are, they'll alienate them too. So of the market they have left post-COVID, they're taking a hit of a 33% drop in customers guaranteed and potentially a 66% drop (Figuring equal thirds, which is fairly close). WOTC cannot survive drops that substantial, especially on top of COVID drops.

WotC is a business. They are not in business to promote politics of any sort, they are in business to make money. Whatever the personal opinions of their staff, they wouldn't be doing any of this if they didn't think it would make them more money than doing otherwise. Note that every "political" decision they've made has been a reaction to a controversy, not proactive. They're not promoting other political causes like, say, antimonarchism, because nobody cares about that right now. They, like tons of other companies at the current historical moment, are feeling the direction the cultural winds are blowing, and adjusting course accordingly. And notwithstanding your armchair analysis of their strategy, I suspect they have the market research and business experience to know what they're doing.

And, you know, you've made a falsifiable prediction. So we can be methodological about this. If by the end of the year Hasbro hasn't renovated WotC the way you say they will, we'll know, scientifically, that you were wrong. And we will of course expect from you a full retraction of this post at that point.

(PS: You can definitely sell Bibles to atheists. Or could, before they were freely available online in vastly more convenient formats for research.)

 

[TheCosmicKid]

The articles in question are great...

They're... not, actually. Hodes barely does any analysis of Tolkien's text in an article that is supposed to be, y'know, that. I'm not saying that Tolkien was actually a sensitive progressive with no problematic elements whatsoever, but if you want to demonstrate the problems, you should find a different source.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

(Also: Ewoks are terrible. Always worth reiterating that.)

Ewoks are good.

(Also, Narnia is pretty gross in its thinly veiled depiction of Muslims. Even as a kid, there was a real WTF moment for me when I got to them. No book is perfect or should be treated that way.)

Yeah, love the characters from those books, but...yeah, even as a kid it was like..."what is up with this? This reads like the annoying olds at church who don't think I should be friends with my Hindu friend at school."

So while a person that is Jewish might look at that fictional example and say "Are they talking about me?", I might look at that example and say "Are they talking about corporations?". The example didn't change.

Okay, but in that example, the Jewish person's reaction isn't any less invalid for your reaction. You just don't have the context and history that they do to see the thing in the way that they see it, and when they point it out we should listen. That's it.

Humanity (in all it's forms) should be reserved for humans.

First, how do you feel about elves?
Second...can you really not see, at all, on any level, how this sentiment might gross out someone who has had to read and hear the same sentiment but with "whites" or some coded synonym in places of "humans", their whole life?

That doesn't make you, or even your statement, racist. That isn't the point. This isn't about the damn orcs. It just means that the wording and other elements that have been discussed at length wrt orcs and drow make people uncomfortable, because it is the same sort of rhetoric used by real life people to dehumanize other real life people.

Changing the wording isn't difficult, doesn't hurt the game, and is frankly more akin to not mentioning sexual assault anymore in a game where you know that a large number of gamers are avoiding your game because they know it mentions sexual assualt a bunch of times, and as survivors of sexual assault they just don't want to read that.

Let's imagine we can go back in time and rewrite this story. What if, as you said, the drow were just another kind of elf. In this story, there is a war between factions of elves - high elves, wood elves, and drow on one side, and high elves, wood elves, and drow on the other. The losers of the war are forced underground.

So, like in 4e? I'd be down with that. The Seldarine, Corellon, Llolth, and the Drow, were all much more interesting in 4e, IMO. I do like the mercurial nature of elves in 5e according to Mordy's Fome of Toes, but scrap the rest outright and put in the stuff from Heroes of The Feywild and other 4e sources.

I find the concept of a 'sensitivity reader' to be wildly dangerous and not a road to be travelled lightly. I'm sure all due caution is being observed to ensure they do not become thought police, sponsored censors, or some form of moral governing body.

There are other books.

I find the problem more on the other side

Its basically a consultant to say "Hey, is this going to offend or piss off anyone?" The type of thing say, White Wolf would have wanted before they accidentally almost managed to cause an international incident and get their company shut down. There's a fair chance they're just gonna look over it, find nothing, and go"Yeah all good mate". But then there's the chance they find something that is a problem and have to change something because of unintended results

They also have a chance to inject a different, and more genuine to the inspirations of the piece, perspective and insight into the work, and help the author create something better than they could have on their own. But, I suspect that many americans will balk at the idea that a collaberative effort can be better than the singular vision of the inspired genius, or whatever exceptionalist nonsense.

When Lorde's "Royals" was popular here in the United States, a blogger took exception to the lyrics declaring them to be racist. If you're unfamiliar with the song, the narrator rejects the trappings of wealth like Cristal, expensive cars, diamonds, etc., etc. and Batetti Flores interpreted this as a racist attack on black people. A native of New Zealand, Lorde says the song is about rejecting the consumerist lifestyle presented in the pop songs that dominate the charts even in her native country.

Who was right? Is it Flores because she's the one with the living experience?

Flores. Full stop. Lorde's lyrics in that song, much as I love them, refer very directly to the specific signals of wealth used by Black artists and other celebrities to celebrate reaching a high place that, for most, seemed completely impossible in their youth. It doesn't matter that Lorde became familiar with this trappings of wealth via imported American media, she was fully aware that the specific items she mentions are items that gained traction as signifiers of wealth from Black music. She doesn't mention classic white upper class trappings of wealth, she is specifically rejecting the trappings of wealth associated with Black culture as represented by hip-hop. There are many other ways she could have rejected the celebration of wealth in an excessive and flashy manner, which seems to be her intention, but she instead exclusively used those trappings often chosen by Black celebrities to floss in public in order to celebrate having come up.

That is racist. Where we go from there is even more far afield, and I have no desire to drap this thread into that.

WotC is not staking out a fringe position here. They came out the way they did after NASCAR.

True, although to be fair, they also have to have been working on these things since way before NASCAR made any such statement, which is an overlooked aspect of their statement.

 

[the Jester]

Orcs aren't human, except in Eberron, Exandria and other worlds where they actually have agency. Sure, they're a different species, but genetics doesn't make someone evil.

But genetics does make someone human. Instead of orcish.

Look, I agree that the depiction of orcs over the years has been problematic, and I agree with the sentiment that portraying them as not monolithically evil is good, but they aren't human. A lot of the arguments on this thread really seem to miss this. Orcs are, and should be, different from humans- as are (and should be) elves, gnomes, etc. Having agency is different from being human, at least in D&D. I think it's important to recognize that there's a lot of nuance here, and calling orcs 'human' in Eberron et al really smears a lot of the nuance involved. The fact that they aren't human is why (I feel) it's okay to, for example, keep racial (or whatever term we end up with) ability score modifiers- and even ability score penalties- because those are supposed to be in comparison to the human baseline. (I also feel that giving humans ability score modifiers is kind of problematic for the game if they're going to be the baseline.) But it's important to set them apart from humanity if we're going to do this- and to do so in ways that emphasize their alien-ness without dropping into racist tropes.

I find the depiction of Vistani far more troublesome than that of orcs, because the Vistani are basically set up as humans, but scurrilous ones who follow every racist trope about Gypsies. I accept that orcs are also problematic, and as a white guy, that I don't see or feel that to the same degree that a person of color does, and I recognize that my perspective on it is limited by my upbringing, rather than that the POC's is oversensitive or some such nonsense.

I don't object at all to emphasizing that different orcs from different cultures are different; I have no problem with setting them as "Alignment: Any", or with their MM entry describing their traditional origin story and then stating that not all orcs, and especially not all orcs in all settings, follow this story. But I share the concern of several other posters who really don't want to see the differences between races/peoples/lineages/whathaveyou watered down to the point that dwarves are just short humans and halflings are just shorter humans.

I do think that allowing pcs to play orcs, goblins, etc- what you might call "monstrous" races- has done a lot to 'humanize' them in our collective eyes. I mentioned in the other thread on this topic that the original depiction of orcs as green, pig-faced dudes like Jabba's Gamorran palace guards, who were clearly nonhuman and moreso than in later editions, seems to me like it helped avoid falling into the racist tropes. But again- I'm a white guy. I'm coming at this from a position of privilege and trying to recognize that. I do see a lot of the "savage bestial subhuman" tropes there, but that's pretty much what orcs, at least in 1e, were designed to be- to be (one of) the nonhuman guys you could fight who might just be using gear you could loot. Is there a place for such things, going forward? I think so- and I think it's okay if some of those guys are humanoids. But I recognize and agree with the idea that not all orcs, or goblins, or whatever, need to be in that role. (In fact, I've long had orcs in my game who are struggling to overcome the racism of humans and dwarves and become accepted as a 'civilized' race.)

Anyway, I'm not sure what point I am trying to make here other than that orcs are not human. The rest is just thinking out loud (or rather, on the keys). Like I said, ultimately, I approve of WotC doing whatever it can to combat racism, including by changing the language they use in describing other races/species/peoples to be more sensitive.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

They're... not, actually. Hodes barely does any analysis of Tolkien's text in an article that is supposed to be, y'know, that. I'm not saying that Tolkien was actually a sensitive progressive with no problematic elements whatsoever, but if you want to demonstrate the problems, you should find a different source.

That misses the point of the article. Tolkien is the example, but the article isn't about making some kind of deep academic analysis of his work.



Anyway, folks keep talking about how wotc is a corporation and they thus don't care about anything but making money and...y'all are losing sight of the fact that these decisions are being made by people, and those people have made statements recently and further in the past that show quite clearly that these steps are being made because the people who run wotc want to make them.

If y'all think Crawford is secretly some kind of moderate who doesn't really care that much about inclusivity, read Blue Rose. Follow him on twitter.

There are probably some moderates and even some closet conservatives on the wotc team, but it's unlikely that this is some ungenuine play to keep from being cancelled.

I mean, they still haven't fire Mearls. Social media backlash just ain't their primary motivator, nor do they seem to fear losing the market over such backlash.

 

[Cadence]

But genetics does make someone human.
...
Having agency is different from being human, at least in D&D.

It feels like this is a thing that comes up in sci-fi and comics a lot. Are Data, the Vision, Jocasta, and Zane human? Should they be treated by society like they are? Do we know what their close friends in those media would say if someone wanted to say they weren't?

What's a word to say we want to talk about their "humanity" without using "human". "Personhood" seems like it might have baggage (at least in the US).

 

[TheCosmicKid]

That misses the point of the article. Tolkien is the example, but the article isn't about making some kind of deep academic analysis of his work.

It purports to be: "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 JRR Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy setting. I started researching this article with the hypothesis that a collection of negative assumptions about people of color in general, common among the British of Tolkien’s time, gave rise to orcs. I was wrong. Drawing on the most hateful stereotypes he knew, Tolkien explicitly and purposefully crafted orcs as a detrimental depiction of Asian people specifically."

Anyway, folks keep talking about how wotc is a corporation and they thus don't care about anything but making money and...y'all are losing sight of the fact that these decisions are being made by people, and those people have made statements recently and further in the past that show quite clearly that these steps are being made because the people who run wotc want to make them.

If y'all think Crawford is secretly some kind of moderate who doesn't really care that much about inclusivity, read Blue Rose. Follow him on twitter.

There are probably some moderates and even some closet conservatives on the wotc team, but it's unlikely that this is some ungenuine play to keep from being cancelled.

I have no doubt that it's genuine. Doesn't mean they'd be doing it if it were as bad for business as Rygar predicts.