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.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

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.

I think that's the last "someone tries to illuminate me by rephrasing what I already said" moment I can handle for a bit.

No longer interested in just talking past each other, so I'm going to peacefully remove myself from the orc topic.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

And then have someone double-check that you've done your homework like, say, a sensitivity reader.

It's entirely possible that Hasbro doesn't care about these issues at all but are instead just trying to make products that won't get thrown back at them by their audience. Making a product bullet-proof, whether that's a car seat for babies, a biography of a living person or a game product is just plain good business sense.

I'd say that it is not entirely possible, I'd say that is the obvious reason.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

Two new people meet to discuss another work of art. One is white, who says the work is not racist. The second person is not white, and says the work is racist, directed at them. Who is correct? The second person. There isn't a debate. Their living experience is better evidence that the first person's.

If it would be so simple...

 

[Rikka66]

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?

Honestly, the biggest reason is that ability score penalties are not popular. They've been falling out of favor in D&D for years, and as soon as Volo's came out everyone knew if they did a setting like Eberron that orcs would get revised stats.

 

[Stefano Rinaldelli]

The articles in question are great, but for those who think reading through two quite long blog posts is too much work, Hodes explains the central point in this video:

I understand completely the point of this guy. BUT it is not rational. It is emotive. For me this is not a sufficient reason to change something. If he feels like that I respect his feelings, but I'd suggest him to analyze the fact that the parallel he is doing is superficial. Said that, I completely agree to avoid ontologically evil sentient beings in the future production, simply because it is ugly and naive from a narrative point of view and upset my suspension of disbelief.

 

[humble minion]

Hmm, just brainstorming a bit here...

Thinking a bit about how in fantasy worlds, the standard bad guy species (orcs, goblins, drow, etc etc) tend to be assigned cultural/visual markers (tribal life, black skin, distinctively non-human features, etc) that 'other' then from the standard good guys, who tend to adhere to more quasi-medieval-European norms (generally paler skin and humanish features, agriculture and settled townships, shops and some sort of capitalist coin-based economy, perhaps monarchy or some sort of quasi-democratic ruling council, priests and temples as opposed to shamans, etc).

Wondering a bit how you'd turn that dynamic on its head in a campaign world, and it just so happens there's a prime candidate, in my mind....

So, I'd like to see a 5e Dark Sun iteration that makes it explicit that Athas is a world where the predominantly-evil race that is a threat to everyone on the planet is ... 'civilised' city- or village-dwelling humans. It's entirely canon, after all. All the sorcerer-kings are (were) human, and they're the setting's big bads. The Cleansing Wars, that broke the ecology of the planet, obliterated entire intelligent species, and left the place a howling hell-hole were a human attempt to commit genocide on everyone else (though it's amazing how rarely canon non-human characters talk about this, even very long-lived ones). Rajaat was a pyreen, but 4e retconned 'pyreen' into an epic destiny, so maybe he was originally human too. Tithian was human. Most templars are human, most defilers too. Humans are the dominant species by population on the planet, and the place they've built is a mess of slavery, oppression, and life being held cheaply. Anyone who wants to play a member of a stereotypically evil race who is rebelling against their own corrupt heritage in Dark Sun can play ... a 'civilised' human. I'd love to see a Dark Sun setting book that talked about how the 'default' heroic PC is most likely non-human, while humans when spoken of in general are greedy, ambitious, and prone to violence, and even good-aligned human PCs are will be looked on warily or with hostility by others as their species is notoriously responsible for genocide and all sorts of atrocities.

(Bit of a snare there is that the various city-states are heavily influenced by real-world largely non-European cultures, so there's STILL a bit of othering from the quasi-European norm going on, but you get the idea...)

 

[Charlaquin]

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.

Yeah, I agree with you that there are meaningful differences between humanoids and extraplanar entities that make them having fixed alignments both acceptable and potentially desirable. I’m just saying, if one insists on consistency in the matter, better that no creatures have fixed alignments than that all do.

 

[Khelon Testudo]

I understand completely the point of this guy. BUT it is not rational. It is emotive. For me this is not a sufficient reason to change something. If he feels like that I respect his feelings, but I'd suggest him to analyze the fact that the parallel he is doing is superficial. Said that, I completely agree to avoid ontologically evil sentient beings in the future production, simply because it is ugly and naive from a narrative point of view and upset my suspension of disbelief.

You don't convince people by telling them how to think, or to get over their feelings. They may have s perfectly rational basis for those feelings.

 

[BookTenTiger]

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?

So first off, keep in mind that nobody in this thread is actually in charge of how WotC will move forward with the depictions of both playable and monstrous "races" in D&D, and there's no one consensus. So you will be seeing a lot of inconsistencies on how people think this problem could be solved.

But a good guiding question for thinking about this issue is does this reinforce negative stereotypes that harm real people?

Now, onto your question. Why should -2 Intelligence be removed from orcs?

In the Monster Manual, orcs are described like this:

Orcs are savage humanoids with stooped postures, piggish faces, and prominent teeth that resemble tusks. They gather in tribes that satisfy their bloodlust by slaying any humanoids that stand against them.

Out of context of the real world, you could argue that a -2 Intelligence penalty would be perfectly appropriate for the people described here.

However, D&D exists within the context of the real world the players exist in.

In the real world, words like "savage" and "tribes" have been used to denigrate and dehumanize people of color. Assumptions of intelligence based on race have actively harmed students of color. Assumptions of the moral standing of people based on race have created a system of justice that treats people of color unfairly.

When we see the same words used to reinforce harmful stereotypes used in our D&D game, it's time to step back and ask ourselves if it's really necessary to do so. Do we have to paint an entire people, even if they are monstrous, with the same broad brush strokes that have been used to dehumanize real humans?

WotC no longer thinks it's a necessary part of the game.

Does that make sense?

 

[Nilbog]

Deleted post, the quote function got messed up