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.

 

[Oofta]

Outsiders. Aberrations, elementals, demons, fae, fiends, undead, etc. do not come about naturally like the creatures of the World do. They are created, or corrupted from other created beings, and as such their alignment define their behavior, as opposed to sapient peoples, whose actions define their alignment.

Orcs aren't natural either according to the books. They were created by a pissed off god for the sole purpose of waging endless war. Gnolls are basically mortal demon spawn.

I fail to see why the distinction matters to any game but yours.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

"What possible moral ambiguity is there in fighting bandits/raiders, slavers, murder-cultists, etc?"

But what if they're bandits because they're hungry?

What if they are slavers to avenge themselves on the creatures that enslaved them?

Murder-cultists are just paladins who don't worship YOUR god.

Previously, if the party kicks in the door in a dungeon and there are 4 drow and a Drider inside and they know Drow are evil, they can lead with a fireball.

Now, they can only lead with a "Hey guy's, sup? How do you feel about evil and stu OH GOD I'M POISONED AND STABBED!!"

This is not a good set of arguments.

Evil cannot be excused because it’s done for revenge, and motivations don’t change the nature of actions.

If someone is trying to attack me and take my money, why they want or need my money is irrelevant to whether I’m justified in using force to stop them.

if you want to run a game where drow are evil, guess what, you still can! Have fun! No one much cares.

 

[Jharet]

Kind of like how alignment is used by many people, and not by others? Or how the optional rules in Tasha’s will be used by many people, and not by others?

If you like your games to be about killing people and taking their stuff, knock yourself out. Nothing WotC can do can stop you from doing that. If you’re worried about that no longer being the focus of published modules, you’re about 20 years behind the times.

People like you ruin the game.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm curious: What would be the difference between "All trolls are evil" and "Trolls can be any alignment, but you will never see, interact or hear tell of one of one who isn't"?

Or to put it another way, is it a purely philosophical quibble, or does it actually have to intersect with the characters experience to matter?

Now that is an interesting question! Generally I subscribe to the philosophy that “if the players don’t experience it, it doesn’t exist,” so I would probably say that it has to intersect with the characters to matter. That said, I try to take the campaign bible approach to world building. So, while the fact that non-evil trolls exist may not come up in this adventure, but because it’s in the campaign bible, it’s an idea that could be expanded on and utilized in a later adventure.

 

[GreyLord]

Outsiders. Aberrations, elementals, demons, fae, fiends, undead, etc. do not come about naturally like the creatures of the World do. They are created, or corrupted from other created beings, and as such their alignment define their behavior, as opposed to sapient peoples, whose actions define their alignment.

What about Tieflings, Genasi, or Vampires? At least two of those were playable pretty early on in 5e's lifetime.

 

[Umbran]

So no evil dragons either? I just love to see where all this leads...so not rhetorical....genuinely curious where people draw the line.

I just played through Dragon of Ice Spire Peak. In which the dragon was vicious, greedy, and a threat to the town of Phandalin... all of which we were given full warning of by its actions in the area such that we didn't have so say, "Gee, that's a white dragon, and white dragons are evil, so we should kill it."

So, yes, there are evil dragons. There's just no need to pre-label entire species as evil. Creatures who are evil will act in evil ways, by which you will know them, and then be able to deal with them.

In 5e, there's no mechanic for a PC to know if a dragon, or any other creature, is actually evil, except by its actions.

 

[tetrasodium]

This is not a good set of arguments.

Evil cannot be excused because it’s done for revenge, and motivations don’t change the nature of actions.

If someone is trying to attack me and take my money, why they want or need my money is irrelevant to whether I’m justified in using force to stop them.

if you want to run a game where drow are evil, guess what, you still can! Have fun! No one much cares.

It can however be understood & empathized with or even addressed with local structural changes

 

[Flamestrike]

We're all playing a murder simulator.

I've had a LG PC run through to 20th level who never murdered anyone.

He killed hundreds of humanoids, giants, magical beasts, aberrations etc and put down an equal number of undead, demons and constructs though.

Those killings were always in self defence (or the defence of others) from a creature that was using or threatening violence.

It boggles my mind how people cant make the distinction between the morally justifiable use of force (Police officers shooting an armed suspect, Soldiers in war engaged in armed conflict, defending yourself from an armed home invader etc) and immoral and unjustifiable use of force (killing POW's, murder, random slaughter, genocide etc) when those very things are universally agreed upon in literally every legal code in existence, and enshrined in the Geneva conventions and elsewhere.

Ask yourself the simple question: 'Would this killing by my PC, in these circumstances, land me in prison for murder in the place where I live, or be a breach of the Geneva conventions prohibiting Murder and Cruel and unusual punishments''. If that answer is Yes, the killing is almost certainly immoral. If the answer is No the killing is almost certainly not immoral.

We all know when a killing would land us in prison, and when it wouldn't. Extend that logic to your games, and you're fine.

Alternatively if you want to stretch that morality and 'kill things just to take their stuff' or simply 'kill them because they exist' or 'murder defenceless evil-doers who pose me no immediate harm' then just write an 'E' in your PCs alignment section and get on with it.

Why people find this so hard to do astounds me.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

People like you ruin the game.

And people like you ruin these threads by turning a debate between a bunch of D&D playing nerds into a bunch of non-constructive personal attacks.

 

[Charlaquin]

Tolkien Orcs couldn't choose to be not-evil, could they? I thought Tolkien Orcs were Tolkien Elves who were corrupted by the evil god and thus had to be evil, cause the evil god said so. Strange though, but can't Tolkien Elves decide to be evil?

Not true, actually. About Orcs’ nature, he wrote that,

They would be Morgoth's greatest Sins, abuses of his highest privilege, and would be creatures begotten of Sin, and naturally bad. (I nearly wrote 'irredeemably bad'; but that would be going too far. Because by accepting or tolerating their making — necessary to their actual existence — even Orcs would become part of the World, which is God's and ultimately good.)

There are a lot of problematic elements to Tolkien’s orcs, but this is actually one case where he at least recognized that making them incapable of good was iffy.