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.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Thanks for pointing out this well-reasoned essay.

Well-reasoned? Seems to me mostly a compilation of the same misunderstandings (or red herrings, depending on intentionality) that recur in this thread.

 

[Cadence]

My question now is: Can please somebody give me a clear answer to the question WHY it is problematic to use the word "race" in a fantasy context where it is perfectly fitting and why it is problematic that two species that are ultimately designed to be evil and that are ultimately and definitely described as NOT HUMAN but HUMANOID (which basically means: two legs, upright walk, certain intelligence) are SO SO SO problematic that an entire game design needs to be rewritten? I really want to understand the point of view why this is something that was overdue.

In America, in particular, the term race has a very charged meaning. It is almost always used to mean the unscientific grouping of people by skin-color that has little non-racist value (except for historic tracking of numbers on government forms). The term is rarely used outside D&D for the other three meanings in the Oxford English Dictionary that are along the lines of much more tightly bound lineage, tribe, or kin group that share a relatively recent common ancestor.

It might not ever have been a problem if the only D&D books were the old Moldvay Basic and module B2. In them, Chaos (standing in for Evil) was unwavering, there was no grouping of humanoids, there were no half-orcs to fit in, there were no real descriptions or images of most of the monsters, and the monsters were never PCs or NPCs, and the forces of Chaos were pushing in to destroy humanity (humanity wasn't going out to conquer and take).

But we've also had most of the humanoids made playable as characters, and thus all of the different types have at least some members who are allowed to be any alignment, and we have quite a bit of description of the physical appearance and culture of those humanoids. In some cases those descriptions closely match the language Americans and the British have used throughout their history to justify inhumane and genocidal treatment of other real world groups. In some cases those descriptions use images or recognizable traits of real world groups.

It isn't clear to me that the changes will be large. Perhaps simply make it clear that humanoids have free will in the RAW even if they look different and have different abilities, don't use descriptions almost identical to how real world groups were othered, have a variety of good and evil empires in the examples for them, and maybe give a hint that the party might actually want to know that the particular group they're going to go take care of have been doing evil, instead of killing them for their appearance. And if that's too much, there are still all the monstrous humanoids, aberrations, outsiders, etc...

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Two blog posts that explain why some are particularly put off by the current way it is set up are at:

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror — James Mendez Hodes

This is the first installment of a two-article series about the racist origins, nature, and ramifications of orcs, a malevolent humanoid species from English author John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s Middle-earth fantasy setting. I started researching this article with the hypothesis that a collection of n

jamesmendezhodes.com

Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human — James Mendez Hodes

This is the complement to my previous article , “Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror.” In the previous article, we learned how racist myths from the British academy and army fueled JRR Tolkien’s creation of orcs as an analogue for Asian people. Today

jamesmendezhodes.com

 

[Panda-s1]

OK, I'll reply one last time to this thread, because I do not want to leave the conversation / discussion with the bad aftertaste that I might be thought of as a racist or something, just because I do not get the problem with evil races of humanoids in Dungeons and Dragons.

My group consists of a woman and six men, including our DM.

• 4 of us are basically "German" with the individual Jewish, Romanian and Hungarian ancestor here and there
• 1 is half Greek, half Cypriot
• 1 is Russian
• 1 is Croatian

We are all pretty left wing in our political beliefs and I dare say none of us ever considered the skin tone, the religious beliefs, the sex or the sexual orientation of any person any time a reason to like her/him less, not even to speak about hating people because of such things. Yes, we are all white, still I think we are a considerably diverse group of people with a wide array of social and cultural backgrounds. And still none of us ever considered Orcs or Drow problematic, because we all know that these are MADE UP races or species or whatever you want to call them. Additionally, I have to say that in German the word "Race" or "Rasse" has a pretty dark history when being applied to human. No German in her/his right mind would call a black person or an asian person as a different race than a white person. "Rasse" was used by the Nazi's to make jewish, black, bascially any "non-aryan" person a...non-person.

I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to gain by telling us how white your group is. seriously, did it ever occur to you that maybe some of the people arguing for change here are actually people of color who have had to deal with racism and know what kinds of forms it takes? that maybe just because it never occured to you that Orcs and Drow are problematic that others probably have some very valid reasons to believe otherwise?

That being said: Using the word "race" for another human being is in my eyes unacceptable. And there is the point: None of my buddies would ever consider an Orc or a Drow or a Tiefling something similar as a human. Humanoid is defined in the Monster Manual of the 5th edition as follows:

"Humanoids are the main peoples of the D&D world, both civilized and savage, including humans and a tremendous variety of other species. They have language and culture, few if any innate magical abilities (though most humanoids can learn spellcasting), and a bipedal form. The most common humanoid races are the ones most suitable as player characters: humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings. Almost as numerous but far more savage and brutal, and almost uniformly evil, are the races of goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), orcs, gnolls, lizardfolk, and kobolds."

This definitely sets them apart from humans themselves. It even states other "SPECIES", so according to the rules Orcs and Drow are not only NOT HUMAN, they are other species and in that context species is the same as race.

this doesn't help. Orcs, Drow, Tieflings ALL of those are people who have free will and are capable of independent thought. all of them can have children with humans, and they can also participate in a community together. isn't it weird to have all that and then just say "lol they're not human so it's okay!". (also, sidebar, why are Tieflings on this list when they're explicitly human?) no one's arguing on the side of something like mind flayers to be considered humans, who we already explained are very far removed from humanity, but that's not the case for orcs and drow.

also, like I've tried to emphasize before: certain groups of people were once thought of not human. let me say that again: certain peoples of this world once thought of as a completely different species than the people of Europe. the argument you're making above might be echoed by some scholar several hundred years ago trying to explain why indigenous Americans aren't actually worth the dignity of human beings.

if it helps you, just think of it like indigenous peoples were the orcs of the late middle ages (yes the analogy is bad, but that's basically what happened.

My question now is: Can please somebody give me a clear answer to the question WHY it is problematic to use the word "race" in a fantasy context where it is perfectly fitting and why it is problematic that two species that are ultimately designed to be evil and that are ultimately and definitely described as NOT HUMAN but HUMANOID (which basically means: two legs, upright walk, certain intelligence) are SO SO SO problematic that an entire game design needs to be rewritten? I really want to understand the point of view why this is something that was overdue.

because D&D isn't some sorta game where everything is a made up concept completely detached from our own world. it borrows very heavily from real world concepts. people describe the default setting as "Medieval Europoean". it's not actually Eurpoean, but we call it that because that's what it draws from. if I see a castle in game I call it a castle.

why is it hard to grasp the idea when we use real world terms and concepts to describe the stuff in the game?

 

[Anathema]

this doesn't help. Orcs, Drow, Tieflings ALL of those are people who have free will and are capable of independent thought. all of them can have children with humans, and they can also participate in a community together. isn't it weird to have all that and then just say "lol they're not human so it's okay!". (also, sidebar, why are Tieflings on this list when they're explicitly human?) no one's arguing on the side of something like mind flayers to be considered humans, who we already explained are very far removed from humanity, but that's not the case for orcs and drow.

also, like I've tried to emphasize before: certain groups of people were once thought of not human. let me say that again: certain peoples of this world once thought of as a completely different species than the people of Europe. the argument you're making above might be echoed by some scholar several hundred years ago trying to explain why indigenous Americans aren't actually worth the dignity of human beings.

I know I said I wouldn't reply to this thread again, but I just have to, because this is exactly the point I am making: YES. It is ok, because they are not human and more important than that: THEY ARE NOT REAL. No matter how much you want them to be, no matter how great and powerful your imagination is, Orcs and Drow and Elves and Halflings and all those little buggers are for the love of humanity, NOT REAL. You are talking about them as if they were, listen to you: "ALL of those are people who have free will" - no they do not. They cannot decide, they cannot act, they are nothing but imagination. We are not talking about depictions of people, but of orcs and elves.

For the love of every God one may pray to, please stop making fantasy figures real life figures. You are saying that the game borrows from real world concepts. YES it does. There are people being murdered, especially in America. People being tortured. People being raped and people being ripped off. All those concepts are real life concepts and all of them are condemnable, horrible, unspeakably evil. And we all are having fun committing such atrocities and none of us - hopefully - thinks that killing some person just because of his belief (BANE!!!!) is completely ok. Some of us even played evil groups, for the fun of just letting go of moral and ethics and rob commoners. Some even do so while playing in a "good" group, because they think that the need justifies the matter ("we are here to help you! So give me all the healing potions you have, clerk, or you will taste my sword").

We do evil things in DnD, we are murder-hobos, we are killers, we are murderers, sometimes thieves. Those are real life concepts, those things happen - not only down in history, but right now as we are discussing this matter here on the forum. Somewhere someone is getting killed - horribly - right now and you guys do not care about it. You do not care about it ingame also, but you are really trying to make a stand to stop racism in the game because of real life issues with racism? Do you really think this is the right place for social justice? A world where you grab a tavern wench's ass, just because it is not a real person? Where you kill the townsfolk because they did not pay you enough after defeating the dragon? Were you possibly hail a demon god and murder in his name and sacrifice innocent children on his altar?

I think - sorry for the unpopular opinion - as long as players live out their hate and their aggression in games like DnD and not in real life, let them murder, rape, maim, torture, kill and hate everyone based on whatever reason. Better they kill and hate orcs than killing and hating real persons for whatever reason. And just like Counter-Strike does not make people run amok, DnD does not make people hate black persons, just because of those damned orcs.

Oh and btw.: Tolkien described orcs as "sallow skinned". How bout that, huh? Maybe we just have instructed the artists wrong. Would this discussion be the same, if orcs had the skin of a stereotypical vampire? I highly doubt it. Even though my position wouldn't be different.

#MakeOrcsWhiteAgain

 

[Panda-s1]

I know I said I wouldn't reply to this thread again, but I just have to, because this is exactly the point I am making: YES. It is ok, because they are not human and more important than that: THEY ARE NOT REAL. No matter how much you want them to be, no matter how great and powerful your imagination is, Orcs and Drow and Elves and Halflings and all those little buggers are for the love of humanity, NOT REAL. You are talking about them as if they were, listen to you: "ALL of those are people who have free will" - no they do not. They cannot decide, they cannot act, they are nothing but imagination. We are not talking about depictions of people, but of orcs and elves.

For the love of every God one may pray to, please stop making fantasy figures real life figures. You are saying that the game borrows from real world concepts. YES it does. There are people being murdered, especially in America. People being tortured. People being raped and people being ripped off. All those concepts are real life concepts and all of them are condemnable, horrible, unspeakably evil. And we all are having fun committing such atrocities and none of us - hopefully - thinks that killing some person just because of his belief (BANE!!!!) is completely ok. Some of us even played evil groups, for the fun of just letting go of moral and ethics and rob commoners. Some even do so while playing in a "good" group, because they think that the need justifies the matter ("we are here to help you! So give me all the healing potions you have, clerk, or you will taste my sword").

We do evil things in DnD, we are murder-hobos, we are killers, we are murderers, sometimes thieves. Those are real life concepts, those things happen - not only down in history, but right now as we are discussing this matter here on the forum. Somewhere someone is getting killed - horribly - right now and you guys do not care about it. You do not care about it ingame also, but you are really trying to make a stand to stop racism in the game because of real life issues with racism? Do you really think this is the right place for social justice? A world where you grab a tavern wench's ass, just because it is not a real person? Where you kill the townsfolk because they did not pay you enough after defeating the dragon? Were you possibly hail a demon god and murder in his name and sacrifice innocent children on his altar?

I think - sorry for the unpopular opinion - as long as players live out their hate and their aggression in games like DnD and not in real life, let them murder, rape, maim, torture, kill and hate everyone based on whatever reason. Better they kill and hate orcs than killing and hating real persons for whatever reason. And just like Counter-Strike does not make people run amok, DnD does not make people hate black persons, just because of those damned orcs.

Oh and btw.: Tolkien described orcs as "sallow skinned". How bout that, huh? Maybe we just have instructed the artists wrong. Would this discussion be the same, if orcs had the skin of a stereotypical vampire? I highly doubt it. Even though my position wouldn't be different.

#MakeOrcsWhiteAgain

 

[PsyzhranV2]

We do evil things in DnD, we are murder-hobos, we are killers, we are murderers, sometimes thieves. Those are real life concepts, those things happen - not only down in history, but right now as we are discussing this matter here on the forum. Somewhere someone is getting killed - horribly - right now and you guys do not care about it. You do not care about it ingame also, but you are really trying to make a stand to stop racism in the game because of real life issues with racism? Do you really think this is the right place for social justice? A world where you grab a tavern wench's ass, just because it is not a real person? Where you kill the townsfolk because they did not pay you enough after defeating the dragon? Were you possibly hail a demon god and murder in his name and sacrifice innocent children on his altar?

People. Can. Care. About. More. Than. One. Thing. At. A. Time.

Many of the people who were asking for these changes are the same people that are currently out in the streets protesting against the police brutalizing and killing innocent, fully cooperative victims, again, again, and again, just because they "were in the wrong neighbourhood", or made the officer "scared for their life", or any other excuse to cover up the fact that they didn't like the look of a Black person not goosestepping to their every demand!

For the record, many people, including myself, are of the opinion that this statement from WotC isn't enough. WotC can say all that they like, but the fact of the matter is that they have an unhealthy office culture, an insular managerial and directorial department, and discriminatory hiring practices. They have a history of not giving their contractors and their lower level employees a fair shake, particularly if they're BIPOC. Their company's leadership is a total "good ol' boys club" that is perpetuating industry conditions that Owen K.C. Stephens described in his tweets about #realgameindustry, and that many people who experienced even worse abuse and exclusion in the industry can readily corroborate.

This fine bloke is probably gonna get blacklisted from wide swathes of the industry for even mentioning the existence of Wizards' NDAs:
And yes, I'd rather be talking about this kind of stuff that happens in the real world, because yes, ultimately what happens in the real world is so much more important than what goes on between the pages of a book. But. People. Can. Care. About. More. Than. One. Thing. At. A. Time. And if a book is spouting off hateful rhetoric, even if the author doesn't realize it, that's something to care about, and see if we can get it changed.

Oh and btw.: Tolkien described orcs as "sallow skinned". How bout that, huh? Maybe we just have instructed the artists wrong. Would this discussion be the same, if orcs had the skin of a stereotypical vampire?

If those orcs are still being described with the following descriptors used to justify violence and oppression against them:

• Inferior in technology and societal structure
• Stupid
• Too emotional/superstitious
• Barbaric
• Dangerous.

Then yes. It would still be a problem! Doesn't matter if they're black, white, or fuschia! Even if they weren't orcs it would be a problem! If somebody wrote a completely unironic story glorifying the turians from Mass Effect invading Earth and rounding humans up in death camps, and sending off the ones they didn't massacre into slavery on Palaven or other planets in turian space, because from the turian PoV humans are:

• Inferior in technology and societal structure
• Stupid
• Too emotional/superstitious
• Barbaric
• Dangerous.

Then that would be just as racist as this entire mess about orcs!

Because. This. Is. Not. Just. About. The. Orcs. Themselves.

I just don't understand what is so hard to understand, here. How is it not getting through to some folks that this isn't "orcs are fantasy Black people and that's racist", but "orcs are described as innately stupid, boorish, violent, rapacious, and only relatively safe when 'domesticated' by being removed from their culture and raised by 'good sorts of people', and that is word for word the same rhetoric used against Black people for the last several hundred years, up to and including right now in the countries where DnD is most played."

How on Earth or any other world does it not compute for y'all that those are different things!?

 

[Guest 6801328]

I know I said I wouldn't reply to this thread again, but I just have to, because this is exactly the point I am making: YES. It is ok, because they are not human and more important than that: THEY ARE NOT REAL. No matter how much you want them to be, no matter how great and powerful your imagination is, Orcs and Drow and Elves and Halflings and all those little buggers are for the love of humanity, NOT REAL. You are talking about them as if they were, listen to you: "ALL of those are people who have free will" - no they do not. They cannot decide, they cannot act, they are nothing but imagination. We are not talking about depictions of people, but of orcs and elves.

For the love of every God one may pray to, please stop making fantasy figures real life figures.

Nobody is saying they are real.

"All of those people who have free will" is in the context of fictional depiction.

After all these pages I'm truly perplexed how this can still be hard to understand.

• No, the individuals in D&D are not real.
• No, the orcs in D&D are not real.
• No, orcs are not meant to represent black people.
• No, nobody (I hope) is saying that playing D&D turns people into racists.

It's really quite simple:

• In attempting to paint a picture of an imaginary race that would evoke "the bad guys", the writers used language and imagery that seemed most likely to accomplish that.
• Unfortunately, some/much of the language and imagery that is most useful to suggest "the bad guys" to the primary audience (white Americans) is useful precisely because people trying to defend slavery or colonialism or other forms of oppression used it for centuries to dehumanize certain populations, until the connotations were ingrained into our language.
• Those of us who aren't in those groups, and haven't suffered from the ongoing repercussions of that oppression, tend to be completely f**king oblivious to the subtext of this language. We take it its meaning at face value, without any awareness of the history and baggage it carries.
• But for those who do understand its original meaning, and are in the groups that were targeted by it, it's quite hurtful and exclusionary. True, many people in that group have tolerated it without complaining because, let's face it, this sort of thing is so prevalent that if you kick up a stink every single time you encounter it, you're going to have a hard time getting by in our society. But others have, gently or otherwise, been trying to point this out for years, and too many people have been dismissing them with deeply ignorant arguments like "D&D doesn't cause racism" or "orcs aren't meant to be black people." EDIT: or my favorite: "My ancestors weren't even in America then, why is this my fault?"

If we genuinely want D&D to be appealing beyond a white male audience it just might be worth our while to try to find ways to evoke "the bad guys" without relying on the, admittedly easy, method of invoking the imagery used to justify oppression.

 

[Guest 6801328]

A world where you grab a tavern wench's ass, just because it is not a real person?

P.S.: I'm beginning to suspect you are not quite as liberal as you have claimed in some of your posts.

Just a hunch.

 

[Guest 6801328]

This might seem slightly off-topic but please bear with me.

I just read this excellent, and sobering, op-ed from the writer Ishmael Reed:
Opinion | America’s Criminal Justice System and Me

Here's my own catalog of run-ins with the police:

• As a teenager, pulled over on a country road with two friends, with an open bottle of gin in the car. As the cops took our names, each time they said, "Oh is your father so-and-so?" They made us pour out the gin and let us go.
• Pulled over going 74 in a 35 zone in New York City by a motorcycle cop. This was the only time a cop was aggressive toward me. Real Nazi type in tall patent-leather boots. In traffic court I basically taunted him for doing a bad job patrolling that stretch of the FDR because nobody drove slower than 50. The judge stifled a laugh, and let me off with the lightest allowable fine.
• Pulled over (for various reasons) in Delaware, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Pennsylvania, Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah. (May have missed some.). Warnings more than half the time, cops always polite. (In the case of Utah, extraordinarily so.)
• A few months before 9/11, forgot my passport going to Canada (and was already on the other side of the country so couldn't easily get it). Got into Canada and back into the U.S. again without much problem.

In other words, my experience almost couldn't be more different than what african-americans face. And this is just with the police. Never mind store clerks, the DMV, airlines, HR departments, real estate agents, educators, etc. etc. etc. Our realities almost couldn't be more different.

So if they tell me that something that I'm used to, that seems to me totally innocuous and common, is in fact offensive, I'm probably going to take that at face value, and assume that I've just been fortunate enough to have been able to waltz through life oblivious to it. I may ask for more details, because I want to understand what has been invisible to me, but I'm not really going to try to explain to them why they are asking for too much.

Especially if it involves slight changes to the language of a game about elves and dragons.

 

[Catulle]

This is clearly a sensitive topic to a lot of you (as it should be), and I do not intend to trivialize it in the slightest. I really don't.

But you must also realize that not everyone was born in America. Not everyone has a history with racism ...

We, all of us, have a history with racism. Every. Single. One. Of. Us.