D&D 5E WotC's Jeremy Crawford on D&D Races Going Forward

On Twitter, Jeremy Crawford discussed the treatment of orcs, Vistani, drow and others in D&D, and how WotC plans to treat the idea of 'race' in D&D going forward. In recent products (Eberron and Wildemount), the mandatory evil alignment was dropped from orcs, as was the Intelligence penalty.

@ThinkingDM Look at the treatment orcs received in Eberron and Exandria. Dropped the Intelligence debuff and the evil alignment, with a more acceptable narrative. It's a start, but there's a fair argument for gutting the entire race system.

The orcs of Eberron and Wildemount reflect where our hearts are and indicate where we’re heading.

@vorpaldicepress I hate to be "that guy", but what about Drow, Vistani, and the other troublesome races and cultures in Forgotten Realms (like the Gur, another Roma-inspired race)? Things don't change over night, but are these on the radar?

The drow, Vistani, and many other folk in the game are on our radar. The same spirit that motivated our portrayal of orcs in Eberron is animating our work on all these peoples.

@MileyMan1066 Good. These problems need to be addressed. The variant features UA could have a sequel that includes notes that could rectify some of the problems and help move 5e in a better direction.

Addressing these issues is vital to us. Eberron and Wildemount are the first of multiple books that will face these issues head on and will do so from multiple angles.

@mbriddell I'm happy to hear that you are taking a serious look at this. Do you feel that you can achieve this within the context of Forgotten Realms, given how establised that world's lore is, or would you need to establish a new setting to do this?

Thankfully, the core setting of D&D is the multiverse, with its multitude of worlds. We can tell so many different stories, with different perspectives, in each world. And when we return to a world like FR, stories can evolve. In short, even the older worlds can improve.

@SlyFlourish I could see gnolls being treated differently in other worlds, particularly when they’re a playable race. The idea that they’re spawned hyenas who fed on demon-touched rotten meat feels like they’re in a different class than drow, orcs, goblins and the like. Same with minotaurs.

Internally, we feel that the gnolls in the MM are mistyped. Given their story, they should be fiends, not humanoids. In contrast, the gnolls of Eberron are humanoids, a people with moral and cultural expansiveness.

@MikeyMan1066 I agree. Any creature with the Humanoid type should have the full capacity to be any alignmnet, i.e., they should have free will and souls. Gnolls... the way they are described, do not. Having them be minor demons would clear a lot of this up.

You just described our team's perspective exactly.

As a side-note, the term 'race' is starting to fall out of favor in tabletop RPGs (Pathfinder has "ancestry", and other games use terms like "heritage"); while he doesn't comment on that specifically, he doesn't use the word 'race' and instead refers to 'folks' and 'peoples'.

 

[Aldarc]

Please tell me which "REAL LIFE GROUP" you think this fella looks like. Because I can't see any resemblance to any.

He's "swart", "sallow", "slant-eyed", "squint-eyed", and "bowlegged" oh and has a flat-nose, just like Tolkien described. But doesn't look like any human ethnic group at all.

I don't think that he looks like a "real life group," but the apelike appearance of the orc does potentially draw it into association with racist, dehumanizing caricatures and rhetoric of black people as gorillas, monkeys, and apes.* Critics have even pointed to that very same picture in this thread earlier and drew the connection before. That's kinda the point. It's far less about any actual resemblance to real life peoples and more about the actual resemblance to real life racist discourse. That's the problem. It's about how our game (unintentionally) contains and perpetuates racist rhetoric through how it frames the fiction of "race."

* Does King Kong look like a black man? No. But it's far from controversial to point out the racist undertones that inform the films.

 

[Catulle]

FWIW, eurocentrism is racism.

 

[Haffrung]

FWIW, eurocentrism is racism.

That's a contestable claim. Up until very recently, every culture saw itself as the centre of the earth. Chinese, Indian, etc. stories and myths were about China and India, with strange or funny or threatening foreign elements sometimes making an appearance. Multiculturalism on a scale beyond a city is new to humanity. In the last century or so humanity, led mainly by the West, has made gradual progress in inching beyond a culturally parochial outlook. If Tolkien's works make us uncomfortable today, then so should pretty much all literature from its era or earlier, European or otherwise. Ethnocentrism is the default setting for humanity. And wringing our hands about art from the early 20th century now is about as useful as getting offended by the lack of effective public sanitation in the world before the 1850s.

 

[Asisreo]

That's a contestable claim. Up until very recently, every culture saw itself as the centre of the earth. Chinese, Indian, etc. stories and myths were about China and India, with strange or funny or threatening foreign elements sometimes making an appearance. Multiculturalism on a scale beyond a city is new to humanity. In the last century or so humanity, led mainly by the West, has made gradual progress in inching beyond an ethnically parochial outlook. If Tolkien's works make us uncomfortable today, then so should pretty much all literature from its era or earlier, European or otherwise. Ethnocentrism is the default setting for humanity. And wringing our hands about it now is about as useful as getting offended by the lack of effective public sanitation in the world before the 1850s.

Just because other cultures were racist doesn't mean yours get to be racist. Especially if their racism was in the past.

Yeah, the majority of cultures believed they were the most important for a while, but that doesn't mean it's okay to perpetuate it.

 

[Mercurius]

Just because other cultures were racist doesn't mean yours get to be racist. Especially if their racism was in the past.

Yeah, the majority of cultures believed they were the most important for a while, but that doesn't mean it's okay to perpetuate it.

I honestly wonder how this leap is made, from what @Haffrung actually said and this interpretation of implication.

 

[Cadence]

Just because other cultures were racist doesn't mean yours get to be racist. Especially if their racism was in the past.

Yeah, the majority of cultures believed they were the most important for a while, but that doesn't mean it's okay to perpetuate it.

It also doesn't mean we can't go back and enjoy our old Tolkien or Mary Poppins (shooting at the sooty chimney sweeps as Hottentots :-/ ) or Gone with the Wind or our OG Dungeon Crawls. But just like with the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry collections you put a disclaimer up front that things were viewed differently (and it was still wrong to do), you maybe point out to your kid what was wrong when you get to it, and you make the new products better.

 

[Mercurius]

It also doesn't mean we can't go back and enjoy our old Tolkien or Mary Poppins (shooting at the sooty chimney sweeps as Hottentots) or Gone with the Wind or our OG Dungeon Crawls. But just like with the Looney Tunes and Tom & Jerry collections you put a disclaimer up front that things were viewed differently (and it was still wrong to do), you maybe point out to your kid what was wrong when you get to it, and you make the new products better.

I agree with the gist of this, with a slight difference: I wouldn't say "it was wrong to do," because that is applying contemporary ethics to a different time frame. I would say, "it is wrong to do now" and discuss how and why we have progressed from that understanding (although my personal rhetorical style wouldn't use the highly moralistic word "wrong").

 

[Haffrung]

Just because other cultures were racist doesn't mean yours get to be racist. Especially if their racism was in the past.

Yeah, the majority of cultures believed they were the most important for a while, but that doesn't mean it's okay to perpetuate it.

Where did I say it made it okay? I'm simply pointing out that cultural bigotry is a universal human weakness, not some defect peculiar to European culture. We must - and we are - gradually evolving past it. North American attitudes around race and culture are dramatically different today than they were 50 years ago. And that's a good thing.

 

[pemerton]

I wouldn't say "it was wrong to do," because that is applying contemporary ethics to a different time frame.

Seriously? When Gone WIth The Wind was filmed, freedmen and freedwomen, and their families and descendants, and many authors and commmentators - both people of colour and others - knew that slavery was wrong, and that celebrating it was wrong.

When JRRT wrote LotR victims of British imperialism knew that British racism was wrong. There were English authors, too, who had noticed this - eg George Orwell. JRRT wasn't a stupid or ignorant man. He could have asked himself why his tropes for evil were associated with racialised thinking. But apparently he didn't.

 

[Asisreo]

Where did I say it made it okay? I'm simply pointing out that cultural bigotry is a universal human weakness, not some defect peculiar to European culture. We must - and we are - gradually evolving past it. North American attitudes around race and culture are dramatically different today than they were 50 years ago. And that's a good thing.

This is probably a wall in mutual understanding. Because I fundamentally think that humans don't have a natural sense of bigotry and it must be implanted in society by someone that wants to make the public in opposition of a certain group.

I don't think tribalism is human nature.