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.

 

[Lem23]

The way I'd subvert Keep on the Borderlands would be to make most of the inhabitants ordinary everyday monsterfolk going about their lives. They probably have a hunter-gatherer way of life and the caves are a temporary residence, or they are there to celebrate a religious festival. The captain of the keep lies to the PCs, telling them that the humanoids are raiders. The priests of Chaos are evil, and probably in cahoots with the captain.

This changes almost none of the actual content in the original module, and yet changes everything.

...and they require a large blood sacrifice in order to empower an evil ritual, hence the need for the heroes to slaughter them. At some point, the players should start to find clues and put it all together, hopefully before they've killed off everyone, because they're going to need the help of the orcs etc if they want to stop it before its too late. And the surviving goblins aren't going to trust them or listen to them until they make amends.

 

[Umbran]

The way I'd subvert Keep on the Borderlands ...

So, while what you describe does subvert the original, it risks making it a kind of bait-and-switch, where you trick your players into having their characters commit murder. That may go over poorly with the players.

 

[Maxperson]

I just want the D&D rules to stop telling me that certain kinds of people are morally inferior by birth and that finding that horrific makes me a bad person.

D&D rules don't tell you that any people are inferior. None. There are no people in D&D.

 

[Cadence]

The way I'd subvert Keep on the Borderlands would be to make most of the inhabitants ordinary everyday monsterfolk going about their lives. They probably have a hunter-gatherer way of life and the caves are a temporary residence, or they are there to celebrate a religious festival. The captain of the keep lies to the PCs, telling them that the humanoids are raiders. The priests of Chaos are evil, and probably in cahoots with the captain.

This changes almost none of the actual content in the original module, and yet changes everything.

I certainly agree it subverts it. I assume it's ok I borrow the idea for my own use? (With Umbran's note in mind).

It is interesting how it could be done changing less than a page worth of text in the module (alignment isn't part of monster text boxes), and maybe a paragraph or two worth of text in the Moldvay basic rules.

But, for the sake of me thinking back to 11 year old me and my friends, the alignment rules were much stricter back then. Moldvay's rules note the monsters are Chaotic and the DM is instructed to "be careful to play the alignment of each monster correctly". And in the module, it is that forces or Chaos that are the ones pressing in on the "narrow and constricted" realm, and the forces of Chaos are trying to "enslave [the realm's] populace, rape its riches, and steal its treasures", and will overrun the realm if not stopped. We weren't playing genocidal vigilantes back then, even if the rules change might have taught us to think more deeply as we grew.

 

[Doug McCrae]

I assume it's ok I borrow the idea for my own use?

Yes, you're welcome to it.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I might just go play Hello Kitty: Island Adventure.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This isn't some flowery work of european literature, it's a mass market corporate entertainment produced by the Hasbro corporation. Not only is it not meant to have meaning, I'd go as far as to say that it's meant to not have meaning.

The idea that pulp entertainment is “meant to not have meaning” is generally an elitist (and therefor classist, even if internalized) line of thinking, that creates a wholly fictional dichotomy between “real art” and “pop/pulp art”.

In short, no. D&D has, and is intended to have, meaning.

The way I'd subvert Keep on the Borderlands would be to make most of the inhabitants ordinary everyday monsterfolk going about their lives. They probably have a hunter-gatherer way of life and the caves are a temporary residence, or they are there to celebrate a religious festival. The captain of the keep lies to the PCs, telling them that the humanoids are raiders. The priests of Chaos are evil*, and probably in cahoots with the captain.

This changes almost none of the actual content in the original module, and yet changes everything.

EDIT: *Make sure there's at least one good religious person somewhere in the adventure though so there isn't a wholly anticlerical message.

I’d, as Umbran alluded to, be careful to have the initial targets of violence be cultists or creatures irreparably corrupted by the cult, and I’d put goblins and others willing to work with the PCs to rid the area of the cult from the first time they set out from the Keep, but otherwise yeah that sounds fun.

So, while what you describe does subvert the original, it risks making it a kind of bait-and-switch, where you trick your players into having their characters commit murder. That may go over poorly with the players.

Definitely would with me.

 

[Derren]

How can you have sensitivity readers for fictional races and cultures that do not exist?

Having less always evil races is ok, as long as WotC doesn't make them too sugary and politically correct. History is full of people and nations who are technically not always evil but are still huge jerks (to avoid stronger words) who murder and plunder their way through the countryside and get treated as such.


Also, rolleyes at the reason given by WotC. That smells like virtue signalling for marketing purposes now that racism is a big topic. And if they are really serious about that, where do they stop? Mind Flayers? Dragons?

 

[Guest 6801328]

How can you have sensitivity readers for fictional races and cultures that do not exist?

Seriously?

Ever heard the phrase “nothing new under the sun”? Creatives don’t invent new stuff out of thin air; it comes from the ideas in their heads. And we don’t always know where those ideas came from originally, or what connotations they might have among different groups.

Take the example of fecundity up-thread. I’m sure the original author wasn’t consciously doing this, but he was still channeling an idea founded in white supremacist ideology.

Now, I didn’t know this, prior to this thread. I might easily have written something similar.

A good sensitivity reader would have alerted me to this, before I published something I regretted.

 

[Sadras]

Could you direct me toward even a single reference where somebody claimed that anybody was "fataly (sic) hurt" by this?

Apologies, my error. I misinterpreted a comment by @BookTenTiger to me he mentioned the "fatality of racism" I bungled it up in my reply to him. You are correct on this point.