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.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

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).

"Personhood", or "moral personhood" for specificity, is the term a philosopher would be most likely to use.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

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."


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.

Yeah, I don't get that from the quote, but more importantly I don't think that's a good takeaway from the article as a whole, or the companion article.

They're about orcs, not about Tolkien as such.

edit: spellchecks sometimes guesses wrong which word I've mispelled, and I sometimes fail to look closely at which word I'm clicking on!

 

[Cadence]

But genetics does make someone human. Instead of orcish.

What's a word to say we want to talk about their "humanity" without using "human".

"Personhood", or "moral personhood" for specificity, is the term a philosopher would be most likely to use.

I guess the fact that Charm Person and Hold Person works on all humanoids, but only on humanoids, in a sense means they have some form of "personhood" by game rule. (Makes those Gnolls a little tougher if they change their classification).

In a world where souls factually exist, would personhood and souls be related? What is the status of souls for non-humanoids in 5e?

Humanoids clearly have them in a way that lets you Magic Jar or Reincarnate them -- although it feels very odd that an orc or goblin can have reincarnate cast on them, but they only come back as a PC race. The descriptions of Raise Dead and Resurrection talk about working on (any?) dead creature, but then the soul has to be free and willing to return. So does everything have a soul, but only humanoids have one that is reincarnatable?

Are the restrictions of Animate Dead, Charm Person, and Hold Person to humanoids just a game balance thing? Or is it deeper?

And was it 2e and before where the non-elf demi-humans had a soul and could have Raise Dead used on them, but the elves had a spirit and needed Resurrection?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Galaxy-brain moment: what if we didn’t have always-evil fiends, dragons, and undead either?

lol I mean I'm all for it with dragons and fiends, and willing to listen wrt to intelligent undead like vampires.

But the thing is, orcs, gnolls, etc, in the default have an unnacceptable combination of traits, and the other examples just don't.

Those are, in short;

• They're mortal, have children that they raise to adulthood, have been shown forming emotional attachments in official dnd products, and culture.
• They're presented as inherently antagonistic to the good guys.

Fiends don't have children, they're made by evil people going to hell and getting formed into devils, or spawned from the abyss itself. Orcs may have been made originally by a god, but every orc since then has been born from their mother and raised to adulthood, taught to fight, taught to sing orc songs and chant orc chants, and make and wear orc jewelry.

Devils don't have culture. Each level of hell has a theme, and that is as close as it gets. They have no analogous elements to real world peoples, their descriptions don't contain elements used to talk about groups of IRL people (expect maybe lawyers), they just aren't a like case to orcs and drow.

but if someone wants any creature that talks in a language to have free will, I'm fine with that. Devils are devils because of choices they made in life, and choices they make as devils can set them free from the prison of the Nine Hells. That's pretty dope, as a story conceit.

It's just vastly lower priority than orcs and drow, and I just...it's hard to imagine any good reason that some posters have such a driving need to derail the discussion with this red herring time and time again. It's just weird, at best.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Yeah, I don't get that from the quote, but more importantly I don't think that's a good takeaway from the article as a whole, or the companion article.

Normally when the first paragraph of an article brings up an author and then makes a strong claim about that author's intent, I interpret that claim as a thesis statement: "This is what I am going to demonstrate." I think the article is bogged down by trying poorly to do this historical/literary analysis on top of having other discussions about the topic (some of which do work better), and thus, like I said, not a good article.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Normally when the first paragraph of an article brings up an author and then makes a strong claim about that author's intent, I interpret that claim as a thesis statement: "This is what this article is going to demonstrate." I think the article is bogged down by trying poorly to do this historical/literary analysis on top of having other discussions about the topic (some of which do work better), and thus, like I said, not a good article.

I think it only seems like "not a good article" to you because you are insisting on judging it by a metric that it isn't striving toward or paying respect to.

It's a frank discussion about the history of orcs in modern fantasy, and what their depiction means to people. Try reading in that light.

 

[TheIdeaOfGood]

One thing I am unapologetically excited about is their idea of hiring more diverse talents.
I mean, seriously, how amazing would it be to have new versions of Kara-Tur, Chult or the Al-Qadim setting done with the input or even better, by people intrinsically familiar with the cultures inspiring the setting? There's such an amazingly rich background to be had without resorting to clichees and hurtful tropes.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

Oh my. Literally thousands of posts at this point, and some people still think this is about "orcs == black people"?

I really need a clarification. If it is like you say and this similitude it is not the driver that push toward the removing of the -2INT, what is the reason of removing it?

And another question more general, why it is racist to remove fictional, different from human race/species ability modifier? If in my campaign I introduce a playable race that is 9 meters tall, why have I to avoid to give them a bonus on constitution or maybe a minimum strenght value? Remember that this bonus are relative to humans assuming humans like me and you.

Please note I'm not rethorical.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

To expand upon this a bit:

1. Orcs and other evil humanoids are almost exactly the same as human beings - shape, biological needs, lifeways, etc.
2. The respects in which they are not like human beings - evil, bestial, bloodthirsty, low intelligence, inherently uncivilised, sexual threat, fecund, physically superior, devil worship, etc - correspond to the ideas of racists. These negative traits are racial, biological, and inherited, like 19th/20th century race "science".
3. Orcs and other evil humanoids do possess some real non-negative traits of non-white peoples - non-white skin, shamans and witch doctors, hobgoblin's Japanese-style armour, less advanced technology during colonial period.

Caught the point, really. But this is a weird route of association. From the description you give we can assume that Orcs are the representation of the worst beast side of humans for narrative reasons. In the meanwhile, for all another set of reasons there is a completely uncorrelated phenomenon called racism, this phenomenon identify the worst beast side of humanity as concentrated in one ethnic group: PoC.
Now we are making a short circuit between this two uncorrelated phenomena and decide to avoid the first because the two can be overlapped in a complete, unreasonable way.
This kind of reaction for me is not rational. And as all things driven by paranoia, it is wrong, from a philosophic point of view. Otherwise, from a marketing point of view, it makes perfectly sense, because every businness man fears to loose a slice of customers that could be hurted (rational or not doesn't matter). So, while many things WoTC want to do are perfectly reasonable and I agree with changes they introduce, others are simply marketing and not worth the need to be trumpeted as inclusive. Starting from that I would be glad if we start to consider those changes one by one with a rational approach and stop to divide ourselves between pro and anti-changes or worst.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

I think it only seems like "not a good article" to you because you are insisting on judging it by a metric that it isn't striving toward or paying respect to.

It's a frank discussion about the history of orcs in modern fantasy, and what their depiction means to people. Try reading in that light.

It is also that. But it is making specific historical and literary claims, so it seems to be striving toward or paying respect to the metric of "Are these claims supported by the evidence?" An article is good when all the pieces come together, and they don't here.