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]

Yeah I think you have this backwards. The game isn't adopting harmful racist rhetoric for orcs. It's people drawing parallels between words used to describe orcs like violent, savage, brutal, uncivilised and racist rhetoric. "Adopt" implies the game saw the racist rhetoric and thought, hmm that looks like something we should include, I don't think even the harshest critics are saying that's what happened.

Except that at several points I have also said that this adoption of racist rhetoric was likely unintentional and subliminal. There are tropes and ideologies that seem benign to us because they were wrapped up in nostalgia that we only recognize as harmful with retrospection and a critical eye. For example, though I enjoyed reading my dad’s John Carter of Mars books as a kid, it was quite the awakening when I recognized how a lot of the stories were coded with racist and colonialist undertones. But if one were not to recognize those undertones and then adopt these tropes in your own fiction, then that still perpetuates those racist undertones. That is likely how it happened in D&D. It was likely not adopted with any intent of racism, but benign racism is still racism.

 

[Xenonnonex]

The majority of arguments against the racial changes in d&d are actually stating they feel that it was not racist to begin with. I have noticed that many people during these debates are deciding posters are racist because they themselves have already concluded that a number of factors are racist so actually there is a logical loophole between what each opposing sides are trying to rationalise.

Ultimately the difference between d&d and reality is that we need to argue the concepts differently. In the real world we used heresy and belief systems such as religion (which is basically fictional itself and religious leaders could shift the goal posts to what suited their desires) to dehumanize other races in an unjustified way that led to atrocities. In d&d and fantasy settings however, typically the races from a lore perspective are objectively corrupted by objectively evil Gods that wish to do harm (i.e. the orcs within lord of the rings).

Problem is from people who are fine with racist tones. Who think racism is appropriate for the time. Who refuse to even think racist portrayal is wrong. Who then decide if something is racist. They would not of course. Nothing is wrong from that perspective. Extremely disturbing.

Thread is good for showing who people are.

 

[Oofta]

Problem is from people who are fine with racist tones. Who think racism is appropriate for the time. Who refuse to even think racist portrayal is wrong. Who then decide if something is racist. They would not of course. Nothing is wrong from that perspective. Extremely disturbing.

Thread is good for showing who people are.

Thanks for letting us know how prejudiced you are. That anyone who doesn't agree with you is a racist. Good to see people actually say what they think - if you don't agree with an opinion then not only are you wrong, it's okay to smear them.

 

[Bagpuss]

Yes, a fictional nonhuman race is dehumanized with the same rhetoric that real life racists employ against real people. That's the problem. The game unintentionally perpetuates harmful racist rhetoric. How does it feel to know your fantasy elf game talks about orcs with the virtually indistinguishable language that real life racists talk about ethnic minorities? Why exactly do people feel compelled to defend this racist rhetoric in the game again?

So many issues tied up here.

Context matters, there is a difference between racist rhetoric directed at real people (that have feelings), and directed at fictional orcs (that don't). There is a difference between real people that are individuals, capable of a whole range of emotions, thoughts feelings and motivations, and fictional orcs that are incapable of being anything other than violent as it is in their nature (because the fiction makes them that way).

Then even if you want more nuanced orcs, that rather than being made evil by some god, have a full range of emotions, etc. You might still want racist rhetoric because it reflects how mankind treats "others" and it is something you want to explore and challenge in the safe environment of the game. You might want your elf character growing up with a culture of hating orcs, but end up in a party with a half-orc and learns they ain't so bad as they were painted by elves back home.

Or maybe the orcs really are evil, savage and brutal, they don't have true free will that doesn't reflect on real people that do because they are completely different they aren't human. Humans no mater what their ethnic origin in D&D all have the same starting abilities, can be any alignment and have no issues in any class, it couldn't be more egalitarian. Humans are already in D&D and they aren't orcs.

 

[pemerton]

Except that at several points I have also said that this adoption of racist rhetoric was likely unintentional and subliminal.

I think that history and experience show that it is very easy for colonists and participants in racist social structures not to notice, or perhaps to turn a blind eye, to the asymmetry of those structures. I'll try to illustrate with some examples.

I've driven with family past the stadium in Meru where Mau Mau guerillas were held prisoner. My family members described the place, without any hesitation or self-consciousness, as a place where the freedom fighters had been imprisoned. To my family members it is self-evident that Kenyans had a right to fight for their freedom. Which in practice meant attackig colonists via guerilla warfare.

I've also spoken with descendants of British colonists in Kenya who have talked about how horrified their parents or grandparents were by the Mau Mau. It doesn't seem to have occurred to these descendants that many of those parents and grandparents were - at least by conventional moral standards, such as those articulated by Churchill in his famous declaration that "We will fight them on the landing fields, etc" - legitimate targets of defensive violence. Rather, they take the position of the colonists as given, a type of baseline that is not in need of justification - and then see the violence of the Mau Mau as morally impermissible and barbaric.

This is an example of not noticing the asymmetry of the situation - ie that the colonists through their actions have made themselves liable to justified attack, and hence that their claim to be fighting the Mau Mau in self-defence has little more credibility than the claim (in the philosophy 101 anecdote) of a bank robber to be justified in using defensive violence against the security guard who tries to stop the robbery.

Now ass I already posted in this thread, JRRT was an intelligent man. He was capable of working this sort of thing out if he wanted to. George Orwell, who died before LotR was published, wrote essays where he explained how Britain would have to take the economic hit of decolonising India if it was to do the right thing. He was confident that moral English people would recognise this and accept it - rather than treating colonialism as the baseline against which justice is to be measured. Orwell saw the asymmetric positioning of colonist and colonised.

That JRRT didn't see these asymmetries - and that he did not seems amply demonstrated by his choice of imagery for evil - shows that either (i) he was intellectuallly lazy or (ii) was racist. I don't know his biography well enough to pick between them. (Maybe he was both - (ii) creates a reason to let desire lead belief, thus leading to (i) in respect of certain key questions.)

I think you have this backwards. The game isn't adopting harmful racist rhetoric for orcs. It's people drawing parallels between words used to describe orcs like violent, savage, brutal, uncivilised and racist rhetoric. "Adopt" implies the game saw the racist rhetoric and thought, hmm that looks like something we should include, I don't think even the harshest critics are saying that's what happened.

I'm saying that Gygax and others (i) had a conception of "mongrels" being morally, intellectually and culturally inferior - a conception that itself comes straight out of racist ideologies - and (ii) that they articulated that conception using the language of those ideologies.

Now I don't hold Gygax to the same standard as JRRT, because only the latter was a serious scholar, but the intellectual moves required here aren't super-hard. At the same time Gygax was doing this, there were other mainstream cultural creators who were trying to move beyond typical pulp depictions of race and racialisation (eg Marvel Comics).

Now maybe someone wants to come along and say Well, it's OK because it's all just imagination and in the imaginary world mongrel breeds really are inferior. To which my response is What would we call people whose fantasy worlds are wish-fulfilments for white supremacist ideology? If someone hasn't noticed that to date, well, OK - not everyone thinks hard about this stuff. But once it's pointed out . . . ?

 

[Xenonnonex]

Thanks for letting us know how prejudiced you are. That anyone who doesn't agree with you is a racist. Good to see people actually say what they think - if you don't agree with an opinion then not only are you wrong, it's okay to smear them.

I have called for balanced versions. For discussions with vested groups. For input from consultations. For education. For balance. Yes. Goddamn. Definitely prejudiced am I.

People who are fine with racist portrayal. Who are fine with racist tone. Are showing the thread for who they are. Up to them whether they want to change that. Or keep making excuses.

 

[Oofta]

I have called for balanced versions. For discussions with vested groups. For input from consultations. For education. For balance. Yes. Goddamn. Definitely prejudiced am I.

People who are fine with racist portrayal. Who are fine with racist tone. Are showing the thread for who they are. Up to them whether they want to change that. Or keep making excuses.

Reasonable people can disagree without painting others as racists or bleeding heart liberals. Hate can come in many forms. Unlike orcs, you are portraying real people as evil.

But keep making those excuses.

 

[Sadras]

Thanks for letting us know how prejudiced you are. That anyone who doesn't agree with you is a racist. Good to see people actually say what they think - if you don't agree with an opinion then not only are you wrong, it's okay to smear them.

Yup, warnings all around for calling people insane in a hyberpolic manner.
Implying others are racist, numerous times, and meaning it, well that gets a free pass.

 

[Xenonnonex]

Reasonable people can disagree without painting others as racists or bleeding heart liberals. Hate can come in many forms. Unlike orcs, you are portraying real people as evil.

But keep making those excuses.

All there to read in this thread. Not painting anything. Am I.

 

[Oofta]

All there to read in this thread. Not painting anything. Am I.

You've crossed a line repeatedly. I don't think describing a fictional monster as evil is racist because they are fictional monsters. I've never used slander to portray your position, never called you names, never impugned your moral character.

But you? You called everyone who disagrees with your interpretation "disturbing" and "racist". That's slandering real world people.

You can disagree without being insulting.