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

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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.

 

[Shardstone]

Honestly, and this might just be my opinion, but positions like that are coming from a position of privilege. (Yikes, I bet a few people just cringed at that word lol).

Disclaimer: privilege doesn't mean you're a bad person, or mean, or bigoted, or anything else. It's just an inherent benefit that chances are you never gave a second thought to because you never had to worry about it before.

The reason I think it comes from a position of privilege is because as a white person, it's easy to identify orcs or drow as evil, or vistani as "gypsies" because you've never been part of a demographic that has had the exact same stereotypes and racial identifiers attached to your ethnic group before. It's hard for D&D to be inclusive to dark skinned ethnicies in real life when the dark skinned people in D&D are generalized as having moral failings or evil tendencies---the exact same things said by white people towards dark skinned peoples for the past 500 years. to a white person, that correlation might never even be made. Orcs are fantasy, they aren't meant to represent black people, etc. But to that dark skinned player, I guarantee they see that connection. Why? Because they keep telling us.

So yeah, these changes, even if you might not agree with them because it doesn't feel right compared with what you're familiar with, comfortable with, or tradition, or whatever, are not a bad thing, and certainly nothing to get offended over. Anyone who does, is going to be on the wrong side of history on this one, just like those people who insist that female PCs should have capped STR scores.

As someone who comes from a black family, I find this a pretty interesting post. So if I posted what that person put up, would you tell me that I'm also privileged? Or would you just admit you're wrong and talking for the entire black community for some strange reason?

 

[CleverNickName]

Woah. This press release was posted just yesterday, and there are already 13 pages of comments?! It looks like race and racial stereotypes are getting some long overdue attention in the gaming industry.

I haven't read all 240+ comments. But I saw at least one person has rage-quit over this, and it made me chuckle. Don't let the door hit you in the backside on your way out, Random Internet Stranger! If racial stereotypes are so vitally important to you and your game, I doubt you will be missed around here.

But I really liked the press release.

1. To their point about presenting orcs and drow in a new light, I think this is obvious and overdue. Drow have always been my favorite D&D villains (I love the spider asthetic and the underground cities), but it doesn't make sense that they would be any more or less cruel, cunning, and malevolent than humans. We love to project the worse parts of humanity upon others in order to distance ourselves from them, to make us feel better about our own history. We like to think of ourselves as being above horrible stuff like slavery and genocide, and talk about how far we have come as a people, and et cetera....but look around.

2. About removing racially insensitive text when reprinting D&D books, though, I'm a little uncomfortable. On one hand, I think that racially insensitive material is inappropriate and should meet a fiery end. But on the other hand, I think that it's important to see how bad things used to be, and to remember that yes, it actually happened and people were actually okay with it somehow. Warner Brothers has started airing a disclaimer at the front of their old cartoons that explains my opinion about it more succinctly:

I don't have any better ideas, and WotC sounds like their hearts are in the right place. I'm not sure what the right thing to do is.

3. I am SO looking forward to the new product that will be released later this year that will allow you to customize a character's origin. More options? Yes please.

4. Hiring advisors, consultants, and sensitivity readers to review and provide input is an excellent idea. Many other entertainment companies and writers already do this. The assumption used to be "there is no such thing as bad publicity," but that is patently false here in the age of social media. It's far less risky and expensive to hire a consultant, than to deal with public outcry and backlash. We can argue about whether it is right or wrong for the public to be able to organize and react so quickly...but we all agree it's important to consider.

5. Proactively seeking new, diverse talent? Excellent! I hope we do the same with (redacted, Political Discussion is inappropriate for this forum).

 

[Vexorg]

Orcs and Drow are fictional. And because they're fictional they can be whatever the game designers or individual play groups want them to be.

If you want orcs to be a metaphor for oppressed people, that's fine. If you want them to be a metaphor for the existential fear of never being good enough in life, that's fine. If you want them to be mindless savages that threaten towns, And not a metaphor for anything, that's fine.

What matters is the quality of the product. What matters is how fun the game is. One major reason the comic book industry is suffering now. They sacrificed quality to persue diversity. And fans are abandoning comics, not because they hate diversity, but because they dislike the stories being told.

 

[Var]

Lots of people complaining over what will end up being a variant rule in a book of variant rules.

Its amazing how the older generations call these ideas "snowflakes" while unironically being snowflakes themselves.

Gotta say you make a good point both ways.

It's 5E we're talking about. Ofc it's going to be optional, huh. Kinda escaped my notice till now... whoops.
I'm all for more content, guess the people jumping the bandwagon will be disappointed how the changes are going to be options rather than revisions.

God old 5E, never talking a clear stance that could make anyone unhappy (looking at your Ranger reworks and Psionics).

So can we just go back to be excellent to each other?

 

[BookTenTiger]

I agree I made narrow and sarcastic interpretation, And I do like Monk class and your monk is great.

Is this really an appropriate discussion for "narrow, sarcastic" replies?

I think your instinct is right, though. When we have a game built on stereotypes, we have to be in a constant cycle of reflecting on those stereotypes and asking ourselves if they are tropes we want to carry forward into the future.

When I first started playing AD&D as a kid, I was embarrassed by the depiction of women in the game with their cheesecake poses and chainmail bikinis. I am glad to see that art and text about women in D&D has changed since then. But that required a conscious effort from designers and producers of the game, it didn't just happen naturally.

So looking at your list of classes, do you see any negative stereotypes we don't want to continue to use in future iterations of the game?

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

That said, once you move beyond the rule books to things like campaign settings, I worry about it a little. I'm a HUGE fan of the HBO series Deadwood. I think it's a masterpiece. And I always try to imagine a "sensitivity reader" reading through its scripts. They'd probably have a stroke.

I don't think so. If Deadwood was a D&D setting under WotC's new thinking, the humans (or, uh, other fantasy peoples in the setting) wouldn't have baked-in genetic disadvantages by the rulebook.

But those individuals could certainly be just as awful as they wanted to be, or as the world had shaped them to be. But if you magically whisked their kids away and raised them in a new environment, they wouldn't be predetermined to be stupider or weaker or meaner than anyone else.

 

[John R Davis]

Really odd because from almost day one dnd has been about very diverse races coming together ( halflings, elves, half orcs) banding together as one to share glory , story and rewards. In-built into the game.

 

[Shardstone]

Really odd because from almost day one dnd has been about very diverse races coming together ( halflings, elves, half orcs) banding together as one to share glory , story and rewards. In-built into the game.

You can do a lot right. That doesn't mean you can do no wrong.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Orcs and Drow are fictional. And because they're fictional they can be whatever the game designers or individual play groups want them to be.

If you want orcs to be a metaphor for oppressed people, that's fine. If you want them to be a metaphor for the existential fear of never being good enough in life, that's fine. If you want them to be mindless savages that threaten towns, And not a metaphor for anything, that's fine.

I see this argument frequently, and I want to address it.

You are absolutely right that individual groups can do a lot at their tables to address and combat the negative racial stereotypes in D&D.

However, racism is a systemic problem, in that it is built into the systems we use, including D&D.

This means that WotC has not just the obligation, but the opportunity, to address racial stereotyping at a much larger scale. If they can set the default of D&D to be more inclusive and less lazy in assigning who is evil and how we are told they are evil, then they should.

 

[Chaderick]

And I loved all of them.

So did most of us. In the 90s.