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.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Which does lead to the next question: where are those other orcs?

Places, mostly.

Ya know, like halflings, or gnomes, or dwarves, or anyone else. Maybe in FR good orcs spread out amongst the various other peoples, and only keep small enclaves in hard to reach places for their own. Maybe there are more types of tribes in the north than we've seen before.

 

[Magister Ludorum]

I'm sorry, maybe it's the fact that I'm not an American, or an English native speaker, but I never thought of black people when I read 'savage' and 'tribes'. The D&D is supposedly on a medieval fantasy setting where many creatures are not civilized or intelligent enough to form complex and advanced societies.

If this is a language issue for you, I understand your confusion. If you are a native English speaker and have even a passing understanding of the history of colonialism and racism in the English speaking world, then you have to try really hard not see how the words used to describe humanoid races (orcs and drow especially but not exclusively) are resonant with, and in some cases literally word for word, the words and phrases that were used to demean and dehumanize people who weren't "white". This dehumanization was necessary in order for the dominant culture to kill them and take their land, enslave them or simply eradicate them because they were different. It's how they justified their actions.

No one is saying that orcs remind them of black people (at least I hope not). The real issue is colonization and destruction of people who are different from you. There is an extremely ugly history of this in our civilization, and its hard not to see the resonance between historical acts of oppression and genocide on one side and the language used to describe "evil humanoids".

I'm not picking on English speakers. The D&D rules are written in English, mostly by native English speakers. You don't have to look for the dog-whistle language, it's right there in the open for everyone to see - even if no one consciously tried to put it there. Most likely the authors were so encapsulated in their privilege that they never noticed what they were writing. Why would they? It was the same language that had been used in fantasy literature for generations.

That said, I understand why some people (I'm going to point to Oofta without quotation) prefer their orcs to be innately evil because they were created by an evil god to serve his own evil purposes. There's nothing wrong with that story from a literary perspective.

That ship has already sailed so far as mainstream RPG depiction of orcs is concerned. Thanks to many stories in Forgotten Realms, Eberron, World of Warcraft and other settings, orcs as "people" has already become the norm. It's been a very long time since that version of orcs was the core assumption in the rules.

WOTC has been using orcs as people, but treating them as Tolkien style orcs when it comes to the language that describes them. This cannot remain true in the core rules. The issue is that orcs have already become humanized, but the language to describe them has remained full of dehumanizing phrases and racist dog-whistles.

If I wanted to run a game with orcs that are mindlessly evil, I'd probably not use orcs from the rules. I would create another race (probably of the fiend type or the old native outsider type) and call them something else. If I didn't have time, I would probably just call them uruk-hai or some other term ripped off from Tolkien.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

I step away from this thread for a day or so and there are way too many new posts for me to read through, so I am skipping to the end and not reading. Apologies if I repeat something already settled. Yes, I know, this is the internet, and nothing is ever settled here. lol

Anyway, I don't like the use of Ancestry in place of Race. An Elf is an Elf, not of Elven Ancestry. A Half-Elf, who may be only a quarter or eighth or whatever the minimum amount of Elf blood qualifies for the mechanical benefits, has Elven Ancestry because he is not a full Elf.

Culture does not work because that is really part of Background to me. And part of the character fluff, not mechanics. Same for Heritage.

And even though Ethnicity is the closest as a substitute for sub-races, it probably should not be used in place of Race because ethnic hatred and ethnic cleansings are a real and horrible thing.

The problem with fantasy races is that they get their benefits and drawbacks from their blood and bloodlines, unlike humans, so trying to keep the new replacement term for Race as neutral as possible would be best, which is why I prefer People or Folk. And since they said Folk in their release, I suspect that is the one they are going to use, mainly because it is the same number of letters as Race and that makes is super easy to use Find and Replace when editing a pdf to change. Any other word not 4 letters long would throw off all the spacing and typesetting or whatever.

That just leaves doing something with sub-race, because sub-folk just sounds weird. Maybe get rid of the base races altogether and make each sub-race separate.

 

[Catulle]

One can certainly see who is being dishonest in this conversation.

One certainly can, and looking back over the years and your established positions, it should come as absolutely no surprise to anyone that you're still doing this dance. It boggles my tiny mind that you're still able to participate here given the commitment to inclusively. Truly, the staff must have the patience of inevitables.

Disagreement is fine, being disagreeable is not. Please do NOT make discussions personal. Don‘t attack the poster, attack the assertion. Otherwise, things escalate to where we DO have to take action, and it won’t be limited to those who threw the first few punches.

That goes for EVERYONE, capice?

 

[Catulle]

One time he got so frustrated with me that he screamed in my face, "If that's the way you think THEN YOUR THINKING HAS TO BE CHANGED!"

I mean, it's a lousy use of the passive voice that undercuts the notion of evidence-based practice, but one assumes he was still an undergrad learning those lessons at the time...

 

[MGibster]

the people of Sentinel Island are xenophobic for a reason, it's not like they just up and hated all people who visited, they do not have a good history with British colonists.

In my experience that doesn't typically happen until you're in your mid-40s.

 

[Panda-s1]

There seems to be a weird trope emerging in some of the posts, as if:

• Bureaucratic urban peoples = Good
• Tribal nomadic peoples = Evil

Of course, the above bifurcation would be offensive racism.


So, with regard to Orc cultures that tend toward Good, they may or may not be Good tribal nomads.
With regard to Orc cultures that tend toward Evil, they may or may not be Evil bureaucratic urbans.

Same thing goes for humans, elves, hobgoblins, etcetera.

I mean to be fair this conversation is centered around orcs, and orcs have traditionally not been afforded histories that include large cities or empires, and this is only further enforced by "good" races like humans, elves, and dwarves having great bastions of civilizations that may or may not have fallen. but it is true, orcs having cities doesn't make them good, it just would help if there were more diverse ways of depicting orc civilization.

 

[Panda-s1]

They've made a huge amount of effort it's still white nerds lol. You're getting more women but they're usually white female nerds.

okay do you have the evidence to back that claim up or are you just going by what you see when you go to your local game store?

 

[Zardnaar]

okay do you have the evidence to back that claim up or are you just going by what you see when you go to your local game store?

Bit of both but it's a common anecdote here on ENworld was what I was responding to.

And also online. Ask a D&D player what their parents do. Simple test try it yourself.

I don't play D&D online, I do play other games with D&D players online.

 

[Haldrik]

I mean to be fair this conversation is centered around orcs, and orcs have traditionally not been afforded histories that include large cities or empires, and this is only further enforced by "good" races like humans, elves, and dwarves having great bastions of civilizations that may or may not have fallen. but it is true, orcs having cities doesn't make them good, it just would help if there were more diverse ways of depicting orc civilization.

That is why I didnt mention you guys by name.

There are reallife elitists who pretend to be "enlightened" while using the word "tribal" to demonize the other as if "unenlightened".

It is an old racism, and there is no need to make it a new racism.

I didnt think you guys were doing this. Certainly not consciously.

But that is the thing about racist tropes. They can echo around in weird ways, and resurface in unexpected ways.