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'.

 

[Derren]

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.

Or authors at that time were more occupied with real racism instead of far fetched accusations of racism against fictional creatures to create a problem you can rally against.

 

[pemerton]

cultural bigotry is a universal human weakness, not some defect peculiar to European culture.

Whether or not this is true, it seems to miss the point that - as a matter of historical fact, for reasons that may be too complex to go into in this thread (but I personally like Marshall Hodgson's "The Great Western Trasmutation" in Rethinking World History) - Europe conquered the world and subordinated much of the world's population, in the process disseminating and operationalising racist ideologies.

That's the reality that contemporary cultural creators, like WotC, are trying to engage with.

 

[Mercurius]

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.

Fair enough. But historical and cultural context is relevant. While I'll grant you that it was still problematic, it wasn't as "wrong" as it would be today. In other words, I'll meet you halfway but not all the way.

 

[Charlaquin]

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").

Ethics don’t work that way. Wrong is wrong, no matter when it occurs. Some wrong things have historically been more socially acceptable than they are now. That doesn’t mean they weren’t still wrong at the time, they were just easier to get away with.

 

[Mercurius]

Whether or not this is true, it seems to miss the point that - as a matter of historical fact, for reasons that may be too complex to go into in this thread (but I personally like Marshall Hodgson's "The Great Western Trasmutation" in Rethinking World History) - Europe conquered the world and subordinated much of the world's population, in the process disseminating and operationalising racist ideologies.

That's the reality that contemporary cultural creators, like WotC, are trying to engage with.

Another instance where both are true - what you and Haffrung are saying. One does not negate the other.

 

[Cadence]

Fair enough. But historical and cultural context is relevant. While I'll grant you that it was still problematic, it wasn't as "wrong" as it would be today. In other words, I'll meet you halfway but not all the way.

I'd kind of like to distinguish between the acts being wrong and how much blame the individuals who did them should get. Does that make sense? I don't think it was less wrong, but the judgement on those who did it might be less harsh given the situation.

Edit: And now it sounds to me like I want to defend all kinds of awful practices, so I don't think I phrased this well.

 

[Derren]

Ethics don’t work that way. Wrong is wrong, no matter when it occurs. Some wrong things have historically been more socially acceptable than they are now. That doesn’t mean they weren’t still wrong at the time, they were just easier to get away with.

That is wrong. Ethics are a product of their time and change as time progresses.

 

[pemerton]

Or authors at that time were more occupied with real racism instead of far fetched accusations of racism against fictional creatures to create a problem you can rally against.

You seem confused. No one is accusing orcs of being racist. They're identifying real people - REH, HPL, JRRT, Margaret Mitchell - as producing works infused with racist ideas, language and tropes.

 

[Charlaquin]

That is wrong. Ethics are a product of their time and change as time progresses.

So you’re saying that because owning slaves was socially acceptable for much of US history, it was not unethical at the time? I think you’ll find very few laypeople and no ethicists agree with you on this.

 

[Mercurius]

Ethics don’t work that way. Wrong is wrong, no matter when it occurs. Some wrong things have historically been more socially acceptable than they are now. That doesn’t mean they weren’t still wrong at the time, they were just easier to get away with,

Actually they do, depending upon how you understand ethics. Ethics are culturally and historically relative, at least to some degree - unless you are coming from a religious or ideological perspective that espouses absolutisms. The idea that "wrong is wrong, no matter when it occurs" implies absolute ethics, hard-wired into the universe--or at least human organism. I personally don't think that's the case, or at least not a specific set of universal ethics that can be promulgated in 21st century undergrad ethics courses.

This is relatively easily provable in that ethics are always changing; what you view as right and wrong at this instant in time will likely (hopefully) change in the years to come.

Or at least that has been my experience. Some things remain consistent, but subtleties and nuances develop. And some things change significantly.

Now maybe I just don't get it--whatever this hypothetical set of absolute ethical laws is--and some people do, and I'm merely on the way to getting what the Keepers of True Ethical Law know. But that smacks of fundamentalism, and is the general outlook of fundamentalists of different kinds.