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.

 

[DemoMonkey]

There is a distinction between inherently and irredeemably.

Tolkiens Orcs are the embodiment of the question I posed early. If they are not defined as irredeemably evil, but no non-evil one is ever seen, heard from, mentioned or interacted with, is it a meaningful distinction?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

There is a distinction between inherently and irredeemably.

Tolkiens Orcs are the embodiment of the question I posed early. If they are not defined as irredeemably evil, but no non-evil one is ever seen, heard from, mentioned or interacted with, is it a meaningful distinction?

We aren’t writing a novel, so we don’t know when writing the books what will be or won’t be seen.

 

[Retreater]

Sometimes I want a simpler game where we don't debate the complex individualities of some of the actors (specifically minions), though the main villain may have their own motivations. I would also want them to be intelligent enough to use tactics, set traps, etc. That is why I use evil orcs, kobolds, goblins, etc. To me it is a part of the game, like attack rolls, saving throws, etc. I don't depict them as analogues to real world stereotypes.
This is why in action movies we don't care when the Rebels blow up the Death Star, Legolas and Gimli make a game out of killing orcs, or when the Guardians of the Galaxy blow up Ronan's horde. And literally every successful video game franchise works this way.
Forcing the heroes into regular moral quandaries about who they're fighting is a disservice to certain kinds of play. And if you say that's "badwrongfun," you're in the absolute minority when it comes to the expectations of popular culture entertainment, regardless of its platform.
Yes, absolutely have exceptions. Have the Stormtrooper with a conscience (Finn). Have the Fellowship debate about the value of Gollum's life. But you can't have everything be an exception.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Sometimes I want a simpler game where we don't debate the complex individualities of some of the actors (specifically minions), though the main villain may have their own motivations. I would also want them to be intelligent enough to use tactics, set traps, etc. That is why I use evil orcs, kobolds, goblins, etc. To me it is a part of the game, like attack rolls, saving throws, etc. I don't depict them as analogues to real world stereotypes.
This is why in action movies we don't care when the Rebels blow up the Death Star, Legolas and Gimli make a game out of killing orcs, or when the Guardians of the Galaxy blow up Ronan's horde. And literally every successful video game franchise works this way.
Forcing the heroes into regular moral quandaries about who they're fighting is a disservice to certain kinds of play. And if you say that's "badwrongfun," you're in the absolute minority when it comes to the expectations of popular culture entertainment, regardless of its platform.
Yes, absolutely have exceptions. Have the Stormtrooper with a conscious (Finn). Have the Fellowship debate about the value of Gollum's life. But you can't have everything be an exception.

I agree wholeheartedly with this.

 

[Hurin70]

Tolkien changed his mind several times on the matter of the origin of Orcs, it is true. He seems to have originally presented them as a result of Morgoth's evil, then thought of them as corrupted Elves, and then finally as corrupted Men. So their origin is definitely ambiguous:



Their nature, however, was not ambiguous. All the Orcs in Tolkien are evil, and there is no hint in any of his writings that they could be anything but evil. They are an evil race.

Given that Tolkien's Orcs are clearly the inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons' Orcs, that raises the question of how we can have evil species yet avoid racism.

Again, I think the solution is not to take the evil out of species, but instead to remove the racism. We do this by having races that are inherently evil, but are not described with racist tropes taken from our own world.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Forcing the heroes into regular moral quandaries about who they're fighting is a disservice to certain kinds of play.

I like the Wolfenstein games. There is no moral quandary, because you’re killing nazis.

Likewise, killing murder-cultists presents no quandaries whatsoever.

When my gnome rogue ganks a cultist of the lich who want to bring down the Goetic Reticulum that keeps demons from coming into the world and destroying it, he doesn’t give half an ass about that guys childhood or whatever. He’s killing a nazi. The guy wants to burn the world in a demonic apocalypse because he thinks a utopia will follow the flames. Dresden believes that such a person needs to die even if the doomed cultist were somehow right.

Now, if some of these guys manage to survive a fight and surrender, Dresden has tried to convince them to abandon their apocalyptic idiocy, but so far no luck.

But quite rightly has no problem killing them as part of stopping them breaking seals.

Likewise the slaving criminal organization that is capturing and selling escaped dwarven slaves to the cult. Nazis. Dead. Business. No moral grey area.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Tolkien changed his mind several times on the matter of the origin of Orcs, it is true. He seems to have originally presented them as a result of Morgoth's evil, then thought of them as corrupted Elves, and then finally as corrupted Men. So their origin is definitely ambiguous:



Their nature, however, was not ambiguous. All the Orcs in Tolkien are evil, and there is no hint in any of his writings that they could be anything but evil. They are an evil race.

Given that Tolkien's Orcs are clearly the inspiration for Dungeons & Dragons' Orcs, that raises the question of how we can have evil species yet avoid racism.

Again, I think the solution is not to take the evil out of species, but instead to remove the racism. We do this by having races that are inherently evil, but are not described with racist tropes taken from our own world.

See the quote earlier in either this thread or the other ongoing thread. Tolkien himself said that orcs are not irredeemably evil.

 

[DND_Reborn]

We do this by having races that are inherently evil, but are not described with racist tropes taken from our own world.

Some people seem either unwilling or unable to do this though, so how do you handle it then?

 

[Hurin70]

Some people seem either unwilling or unable to do this though, so how do you handle it then?

Wizards is actively doing that right now, so I'd encourage them to continue until this isn't a problem in published material.
If individuals at conventions or home tables keep trying to inject racist tropes into specific races, then we should call them on it, and let them know that it is racist.

 

[toucanbuzz]

Star Wars can be awesome up to the point we overthink it (bonus points if you get the Clerks reference). There's fun, and then there's buzzkill. If I want to torture my players, every bad guy will carry around pictures of their kids and a note to their spouse about how much they love them. If I want to enjoy D&D, there's bad guys doing bad things and they need killing.

I've shared the story once, and I'll share it again: one day, good friend player shows up early to game table. She has had a bad day. She asks if today, perhaps, I'll go less on the roleplay and more on the fighting bit. "I just want to kill some monsters" she said. She wasn't looking for a moral lesson from D&D about the intricacies of various cultures and orcish racial sensitivity. She wanted whatever complex thing was going on in her day to be simple. So that's what we did.