D&D 5E WotC On Tasha, Race, Alignment: A Several-Year Plan

WotC spoke to the site Dicebreaker about D&D race and alignment, and their plans for the future.

• On of the motivations of the changes [character customization] in Tasha's Cauldron was to decouple race from class.
• The 'tightrope' between honouring legacy and freedom of character choice has not been effectively walked.
• Alignment is turning into a roleplaying tool, and will not be used to describe entire cultures.
• This work will take several years to fully implement.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

That may potentially be good for new players in one sense, when they are making characters. It's bad in the other sense of actual play, where they are confronted with things in the course of adventuring and have to be ethically conflicted about whether it's ok to fight anything. Every. Single. Time.

Am I the only one who has seen players get frustrated and fed up with moral ambiguity when they just want to eat some chips, roll some dice, and kill the bad guys?

Have you ever played a game other than D&D? There are a lot of settings where the humans are the only sapient species, like you know, the real world. How do you run games in those?

 

[pukunui]

"I think these changes are mainly directed at new players. Being able to show them a statblock that says "any alignment" rather than "chaotic evil" lets them know right away that they can have a good orc in their game, and it backs up their choice."

That may potentially be good for new players in one sense, when they are making characters. It's bad in the other sense of actual play, where they are confronted with things in the course of adventuring and have to be ethically conflicted about whether it's ok to fight anything. Every. Single. Time.

Am I the only one who has seen players get frustrated and fed up with moral ambiguity when they just want to eat some chips, roll some dice, and kill the bad guys?

Yes. That's why it's on the DM to portray the bad guys as engaging in bad behavior, so that the players will kill them because they're bad guys, not just because they're orcs or goblins or elves with dark skin and white hair.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Yep, Drow starting to not look like Drow... We've gone from black skin to purple skin to gray skin... How about they just do all the artwork in grayscale for everything from now on and no one can worry or complain about it anymore? Oh, that's right, then they will just complain about the artwork not being in color...

Am I the only one who has seen players get frustrated and fed up with moral ambiguity when they just want to eat some chips, roll some dice, and kill the bad guys?

No. No, you aren't the only one.

 

[Mistwell]

Quibble - Yawning Portal is reprints of old adventures, so would lean more towards murder hobo-ism.

How is that a quibble? That emphasizes even more that WOTC made efforts to provide support for that playstyle. It's why they would collect adventures from the past, convert them, and publish them together so new players could access that style of play.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Am I the only one who has seen players get frustrated and fed up with moral ambiguity when they just want to eat some chips, roll some dice, and kill the bad guys?

I'm sure you're not the only one, but my table has no issue with that problem, especially with aberrations, fiends, and perytons existing.

 

[Charlaquin]

I guess I'm asking how "Orcs are evil, but your PC can be whatever you want" is insufficiently inclusive and has to be changed to "Orcs are not evil".

Obviously if your PC can be an orc and doesn’t have to be evil, it is demonstrably not true that all orcs are evil. You can say “orcs tend to be evil,” but that then raises questions of why they tend to be evil and why they are sometimes not. And there just aren’t answers to those questions that aren’t uncomfortably reminiscent of bigoted things that have been said of real life groups of people.

 

[Mistwell]

You implied that all stormtroopers were clones. I was setting the record straight.

How did I imply that by saying "movies 1 to 3?"

Are you being argumentative just to be argumentative? If so, I am down with that. Just checking where this is coming from?

 

[DemoMonkey]

Have you ever played a game other than D&D? There are a lot of settings where the humans are the only sapient species, like you know, the real world. How do you run games in those?

Completely differently, and for different reasons, than I play or run D&D.

Moral ambiguity and uncertain alliances are wonderfully rich RP fields to explore. My Apocalypse World game is full of them.

But D&D is a very poor fit for that. It's designed for other things, and attempting to retrofit it is IMO wasting it's strengths.

 

[DND_Reborn]

How did I imply that by saying "movies 1 to 3?"

Yeah, it was pretty obvious. Some people just like to be argumentative I suppose... shrug

 

[Warpiglet-7]

I don’t think anyone has a problem with those things. The issue is the outsized influence having a bonus to the game statistic known as Dexterity has on the race’s viability for different classes, as well as the associated racial alignment.

I think perhaps you don’t or some don’t but there are many who argue against racial differences very broadly and here on these very threads for very specific non game related reasons.

I doubt they draw attention to this example because it carries the argument to its illogical conclusion.

As to the necessity of a floating bonus....I don’t see it as different. When I see Crawford talking about real world hurts...

actually I would rather people be excited about new toys in the game than go over this nonsense again. Been beat to death.

I am pretty excited about new invocations for warlocks and feats. I will disregard the humans with dark vision bit.