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]

And before you know it, killing the lizardfolk tribesmen who protect the Green Dragon Garaloth is wrong, because they're being bullied into its service.

Sounds good. Why would my first option be to kill them? A dragon has enslaved them. I'm not gonna kill slaves if I don't have to.

So how will four humanoids convince fifty lizardfolk tribesmen that obeying the big bad skyscraper-sized winged lizard is wrong, that they mean them no harm, and they're hear to overthrow it and are strong enough to defeat it? And why should the lizardfolk believe them when they witnessed said lizard burn to death their thirty best warriors?

Trial by combat seems like a pretty good way to prove that we are better able to take out the dragon than thier warriors, and perhaps get a lizardman or two to go with us and fight beside us.

Or, lizardmen being pretty logical, we could describe in detail what tools we have that they didn't, and what strategies we can employ as a small precision strike team.

Or, we can simply bribe them to bug out while we attack, and use the fight to escape the dragon's territory.

Or the Bard or Paladin or someone can give a persuasive speech.

Or we can mostly just convince one or two key members of the tribe, who can sneak us past the others, "get word" about some sweet loot to bring back to the dragon and use that to get most of the tribe out of there while we strike.

Or these specific folk could actually be evil dragon cultists who want to eat other sentients as part of dark rituals to become more dragonlike, and we can just kill them without qualms.

It's meant to be stress-free.

Firstly, no, it's not. It's meant to be fun. Those are two very different things, that are sometimes even at odds with eachother. I'd say that at least half of the most widely recognized fun activities are also stressful. I can't even think of anything fun that is actually stressfree.
I guess maybe sitting in a dimly lit room listening to music that is both familiar and well loved, with no interruptions or distractions, but...that sin't so much fun as extremely satisfying in a sort of existential way. Even reading a good book is often stressful. It sure isn't fun to read Diarmuid's battle in The Darkest Road, and no amount of familiarity makes it not stressful to watch certain scenes in movies I've loved since childhood, like the scene where Inigo gets his revenge in Princess Bride.

In order to protect your conscience, the creators attempted to create irredeemably evil creatures in order for the player to not feel guilt as he kills them.

Secondly, this. I gotta tell ya, man, I don't feel any guilt when I, in my guise as Dresden the Gnomish Rogue/Wizard, sneak up on a necromantic cultist that aims to bring about the end of the world by bringing an unending army of fiends into the world and splitting his spine with my sword, dragging his body away, and sneaking up on the next cultist, getting as many as possible in this way before my allies strike.

Because they're "nazis", and no one feels guilty killing nazis.

But you can bet the whole town that if some border keep hires me to take care of "the orc problem", I'm taking half payment upfront, going to the orcs and calling for a palaver, and figuring out if there is a mutually beneficial solution, or if I maybe need to double cross the Keep.

Forgive me if this was meant as a joke, but it can be hard to tell in conversations like this. But that’s an anecdote, it’s useless as far as data analysis goes. Also it was the early 90s. A lot has changed since then, for D&D and for the global political situation. I imagine a lot of Muslim people who may have been moderate in the early 90s’ views have changed since then.

I...hope you're not suggesting that most Muslims are too conservative and moralist to play DnD? I want to assume that isn't what you mean.

 

[Nickolaidas]

Yes, because of multiple reasons.

1. Mind Flayers bear no similarities to real life peoples, cultures, or races. The same cannot be truthfully said about orcs.
2. They are aliens and think differently than normal people. It is okay with them being evil. They literally cannot exist as a species without killing people through ceremorphosis and brain eating.
3. Orcs are humanoids and are playable races.

You used narration to explain the behavior of the illithid race, which I agree with.

By that logic however, orcs are made from an evil god who only wants to conquer and plunder. To quote the 5th edition manual:

"Grasping his mighty spear, Gruumsh laid waste to the mountains, set the forests aflame, and carved great furrows in the fields. Such was the role of the orcs, he proclaimed, to take and destroy all that the other races would deny them. To this day, the orcs wage an endless war on humans, dwarves, elves and other folk."

The narration tells me there's nothing redeemable about orcs and it gives me an in-lore reason to believe it, just like it gives me an in-lore reason to believe that Mind Flayers cannot be redeemed (dietary reasons and alien mindset).

I just don't get why one is ok and the other is not.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Race is actually the proper English word, not ancestry or folks.

Our group stuck with D&D 5e vs the new PF2 because we play to escape reality, not to have social justice warriors screwing with the game system.

So much for ever seeing Darksun for 5e.

Before you get kicked out of the thread, I just have to ask: will WotC tweaking the description of orcs so that they're more like bandits (that is, evil by choice, and you still get to kill them) and less like....say, ticks*, really spoil the game for you?

*I've been killing a lot of ticks lately. No, I don't try to parlay with them first. My wife won't let me actually torture them, but I do put them on concrete and hit them with a hammer.

 

[Bohandas]

So, this is off topic, and definitely not true. The only thing I'm going to say is these 2 things:

• It's not politics to support inclusiveness. If you think that is political, you've got a problem with bigotry.
• People that stop playing the game because of their goals to becoming more inclusive won't lose WotC money, because, first, they're not a large part of the community to destroy D&D by leaving. Secondly, they already bought books and gave money to WotC, so that's not a loss of money.

what does any of this have to do with inclusiveness???

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

The narration tells me there's nothing redeemable about orcs

I just want to point out that half-orcs exist before I go on.
Also, orcs have been shown in Forgotten Realms to be good. Lolth is also an evil goddess who rules over a race of people, (subrace technically), but there are still good drow.

 

[Nickolaidas]

So what you’re saying is, you want a game that gives you permission to do a colonialism and not feel bad about it.

I'm saying D&D is a game where killing creatures who are labeled as 'bad' by the lore is ok.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

what does any of this have to do with inclusiveness???

I was responding to the person I was quoting.

Also, what it has to do with inclusiveness is that the people fighting against this inclusive change leaving would not destroy WotC, like the person I was quoting said.

Sure, it's not completely on topic, but neither was the discussion on Muslims or many other side conversations, and I don't see you asking what those have to do with inclusiveness. And, the post was about inclusiveness in the sense that me proving the un-inclusive one wrong boosts the inclusive side.

 

[Charlaquin]

I...hope you're not suggesting that most Muslims are too conservative and moralist to play DnD? I want to assume that isn't what you mean.

Oh, Pelor, no! My bad, I definitely did not mean to come off that way at all.

 

[Charlaquin]

You used narration to explain the behavior of the illithid race, which I agree with.

By that logic however, orcs are made from an evil god who only wants to conquer and plunder. To quote the 5th edition manual:

"Grasping his mighty spear, Gruumsh laid waste to the mountains, set the forests aflame, and carved great furrows in the fields. Such was the role of the orcs, he proclaimed, to take and destroy all that the other races would deny them. To this day, the orcs wage an endless war on humans, dwarves, elves and other folk."

The narration tells me there's nothing redeemable about orcs and it gives me an in-lore reason to believe it, just like it gives me an in-lore reason to believe that Mind Flayers cannot be redeemed (dietary reasons and alien mindset).

I just don't get why one is ok and the other is not.

Ok, but if you feel this way, the response should be to also add more moral complexity to illithid, not to throw up your hands and say “guess that makes it ok for orcs to be universally evil.”

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm saying D&D is a game where killing creatures who are labeled as 'bad' by the lore is ok.

Yes, and that’s the problem.

Well, part of it, anyway. The problem is complex. But this is definitely part of it.