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

---

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.

 

[TheSword]

It will be interesting to see how the Wheel of Time works this when it is released in a few years. The cast looks diverse and people expecting the typical LOTR-like, band of young white villagers set of on a quest are going to be very surprised.

The series has always turned on its head typical tropes like the warrior race and the noble savage. Once they remove some of the troubling bits like the nagging and the spanking it has the ability to really set the tone of fantasy going forward.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The irony here, however, is that trying to be sensitive to all groups tends is going to offend many.

I think it's fair to say that people offended by "broad church" approaches like the one proposed here are unlikely to be happy with a lot of elements in RPGs already, and certainly already in 5E, so are perhaps not a major factor.

 

[Olrox17]

Wow, that was fast. Didn't expect them to go from an announcement to something more concrete in less than a week. Let's dig in:

We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last Warand 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.

I'm totally fine with orcs and drow being different in specific settings. I actually enjoy setting differences.
Also, if all they want to do is portraying all the races of D&D in relatable ways, that's ok. There's always been notable heroic exceptions to generally evil fantasy races. If they want to spell it out more obviously in the future, sure.

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.

This might end up being really awesome, or really lame. More options and customization, with deep and interesting lore to match those options, would be great. Just allowing every race to get whatever ability score increase they want, would be boring homogenization.

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.

Yeah, good. The Vistani are clearly inspired by the Rom and Sinti peoples, after all.

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.

"Sensitivity reader" is a bit cringy, as someone pointed out. Whatever, I'm not getting hung up on the term.

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.

All I ask is that they hire people because of their skills. No discrimination on gender, race, or anything else.

 

[Guest 6801328]

We already have a "pretty good balance" game. That's part of my point. A goliath wizard isn't actually noticeably falling behind a high elf or gnome wizard. (at least not because of the ASI)
IME, most new players don't care if the stats line up, and the game doesn't really push them to do so.

On the other hand, the task of making ancestral abilities that don't noticeably favor one class over another (compared to the current races) without making ancestral abilities nothing but flavor ribbons would be incredibly difficult, and IMO not worth the effort.

Not sure what you're arguing for (against?) here. On the one hand you say that balance is incredibly difficult, then you say that even with the ability score modifiers...which very directly favor some classes over others...you say that balance is already pretty good.

So balance would be even better without the ability score modifiers, just using the other abilities. No?

 

[MNblockhead]

Meanwhile, they ignore repeated requests to make their classic products disabled friendly by leaving them OCR'd terribly. So that one cannot use a screenreader, the number of things I've brought off the DM's Guild that I can't use because they're not disabled friendly is enough to make me really angry.

But who cares about that, right? That seems to be the general opinion of lots of the D&D community, in my experience.

This has bothered me since the early 90s when in another life I was a web-developer for University departments and state extension services. One of the promises of the Web was allowing for content that is accessible. But few people want to make the minimal effort to make that a reality. I'm not a fan of the PDF format outside of using it for archival purposes, but it does have built in capabilities to make PDF content more accessible. Yet trying to get people to take advantage of them often feels like tilting at windmills.

Improving OCR may be a bit trickier. I don't know what technology they are using. Probably Adobe's built-in capabilities. They may not have the budget to acquire higher-end tools like ABBYY, Nuance, ExperVision, etc. or the in-house skills to use open-source tools like Tesseract. They certainly don't have the budget to have OCR text proof-read and edited.

Can you provide some examples of poorly OCR'd classic products on DM's guild. I would be interested in buying a couple of them and looking at the OCR and run the PDFs through a variety of tools I have access to see if I can get better results.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It will be interesting to see how the Wheel of Time works this when it is released in a few years. The cast looks diverse and people expecting the typical LOTR-like, band of young white villagers set of on a quest are going to be very surprised.

The series has always turned on its head typical tropes like the warrior race and the noble savage. Once they remove some of the troubling bits like the nagging and the spanking it has the ability to really set the tone of fantasy going forward.

Beyond the nagging etc. I think there is some further problematic gender-stereotyping but the books do challenge themselves a few times on that (though it doesn't really go anywhere in the ones I read, it does show awareness), but I was very interested, when re-reading the first WoT book recently, that Jordan makes it pretty explicitly clear that the leads aren't just "white people". They themselves remark on how in the first city they visit, there are a lot of people paler than them (as well as some darker), and the deeper backstory (avoiding spoilers) means a diverse cast doesn't only make sense but is more or less required.

 

[MNblockhead]

WotC could do is to make sure if they replace or update their PDF files that they're not lower quality, I've had versions of PDFs for 2nd edition that were mostly usable, replaced with files that either lost their optical character recognition (OCR) or had it severely reduced. Making it completely unusable, that's really not good enough.

One clear thing they could do is warn a person if a file isn't going to be screen reader friendly. I've asked OBS and WoTC to do this, oddly those requests are met with silence. Recently, I even sent a message to OBS support with a list of WotC classic titles I wanted to buy, but had no idea if they were screen reader friendly, they said they'd contact the publisher and get back to me... I don't expect to get an answer this time either.

I've always known that DM's Guild community content was a risky thing to buy, so I tend to avoid it for the most part. No offense to anyone who creates it, but if I have been burnt many times by community content with the text in the PDF is just an image rather than true text that can be selected and read.

Unfortunately, e-mailing or using support web-forms is not likely to get a good reaction. Even though I'm not on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc., a few public messages to the brand accounts are more likely to get a better response, especially if they get picked up and liked, forwarded, retweeted, etc.

Even better would be to find or form a group and offer to help. You have a right to complain, but if there were a group of volunteers willing to review content to ensure that they are accessible to people with disabilities, and who have provide technical suggestions to improve things, that would go much further.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

All I ask is that they hire people because of their skills. No discrimination on gender, race, or anything else.

I don't think there's any point discussing this at length, but it's valid to hire writers and artists for their background and art, as well as their technical skills. They're people you hire for who they actually are, not some scores on paper.

And most people WotC hires here are likely to be writers or artists. Most RPG designers are writers, first and foremost, though they may (or may not) have other game-design skills/experience. So the idea that you can "only hire people because of their skills" there is a bit, well, complicated.

You can potentially also get a sort of vicious cycle effect, particularly in the best-paying companies. If you only hire people with "the best" experience and skills, and you're a rich enough company to pick up those with the most experience/skills, you only hire people who are already in the industry. So if, right now, say 90% of people in the industry are white men (which may well be true, sadly), then the vast majority of people with "the best" game-design experience and skills will be those white men, and as your company is rich, it can pick it's hires, and if that's the only criteria (not stuff like writing style, or what they bring conceptually, or how they could shake things up), then you end up endlessly recycling the same people until they retire, and this doesn't just exclude women and minorities, it also tends to exclude younger people (because they cannot have "the best" skills/experience), and poorer people (because they might be very skilled, but without getting hired to at least try to do something, it's going to be hard to prove it, and they'll likely have gone to a less-respected college, if at all). The fact that Ray Winniger is in charge of D&D shows they aren't just looking for the most experience/skill in design, though, but rather for broader skill-sets. Winniger has an extremely strong management background, and enough RPG background to understand what's going on.

So it's a bit of pointless thing to say here. WotC will hire artists/writers for who they are, and that's a good thing. Nobody is going to get hired who is illiterate or can't draw, y'know? Why even worry? There's a huge diverse talent pool, out there, and so long as WotC doesn't only hire people who already work at RPG companies, but rather people who are talented and would like to, they'll do great. It's not like the talent isn't out there. It is.

 

[TheSword]

Beyond the nagging etc. I think there is some further problematic gender-stereotyping but the books do challenge themselves a few times on that (though it doesn't really go anywhere in the ones I read, it does show awareness), but I was very interested, when re-reading the first WoT book recently, that Jordan makes it pretty explicitly clear that the leads aren't just "white people". They themselves remark on how in the first city they visit, there are a lot of people paler than them (as well as some darker), and the deeper backstory (avoiding spoilers) means a diverse cast doesn't only make sense but is more or less required.

I agree that the gender issues are there in the books, but I am confident they can be dealt with in a TV series adaptation. For instance the many stereotypical opinions male and female characters think just won’t get scripted. That men are overall stronger doesn’t add anything to the story, neither does the idea that women are good at healing (water and air) and men are good at killing (fire and earth) nor the idea that women surrender and men dominate. These things never really made sense in the books anyway and we’re contradicted by Moiraine. I sincerely hope men hating lesbians can be safely left on the script room floor too.

 

[Krachek]

Player’s Races morality check.

Honestly I don’t see any solution. all actual races can lead to racist or xenophobic behavior.
and from now it don’t pass the test. so what do we do?

I think that it may be acceptable to offer players three possibilities:
Dog, Cat and Bird.

that can allow great role play opportunities and adventure.

Since all classes don’t pass the check we got now 3 choices

Cat commoner
Dog commoner
and Bird commoner.

lets play!