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.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Since he is pretty active on Twitter and a person of color, I'm just making a ballpark guess and claim he saw a good bunch of tweets from other people of color. Looks too me like he saw one too many "kill all pigs" posts and was trying to be a decent human being.

Oh, I don't think anyone who's familiar with Terry Crews thinks he's a bad guy or had a bad intention. But his original tweet was very hard to parse.

If you have to have people come in and explain at length what you meant, your original communication wasn't great. (Something that normally doesn't apply to Crews in the way it applies to many others, ironically.)

 

[BnaaUK]

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.

Dragonlance Age of Mortals
Road to Danger
Ravenloft Domains of Dread
Book of Crypts
Most of the Dragonlance Saga products like citadel of light and so on.
Van Richten's Monster Hunter's Compendium, Vol 1
Van Richten's Monster Hunter's Compendium, Vol 3

I'm sure there was a 3.5 adventure, but I can't remember which one.

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.

A group that could do something would be great, but it would need the cooperation of WotC because the DRM will prevent you from using an OCR software like Finereader, or Tesseract. The best OCR stuff is pretty expensive, so where one could find a group of people who WotC would trust and had the funds or the skills to use the expensive things like Finereader or the skills to use the complicated things like Tesseract (nightmare level difficult). But a group that could do that is a good idea, just a lot of obstacles for it.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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.

And people will still be free to say "this tribe of orcs are real pieces of work, who survive off of banditry and slaughter." No one is taking away any evil NPC by WotC saying that mortals aren't automatically evil.

Just like in real life, evil is a choice.

 

[BookTenTiger]

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.

That's true! I've always loved the diverse cast of characters that pop up in every game. We can celebrate that D&D has a built-in system that rewards a diversity of character types.

At the same time, we can also acknowledge that D&D has built-in systems that reinforce stereotypes about races (including heavy use of the term "race").

So this conversation is not about dropping what we love about D&D, but about dropping or changing the things that perpetuate harmful stereotypes.

 

[Sacrosanct]

Forgive my ignorance of the history of racist attitudes, but is it actually true that white people for hundreds of years believed that dark-skinned people were evil? That seems unlikely to me.

to add to the already given responses, it's been that way for...well...the dawn of man. Look at how Europeans viewed the Moors, and basically the entire slave trade coming out of Africa. It's been true that pretty much every region of people has viewed people not like them as bad/inferior/etc. That's certainly not limited to white vs dark skinned, because every regional group has done this. But over the past few hundred years, it's been white people who have generally made the rules and held the power globally.

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?

Well, as part of a mixed race family myself, I don't think that your position necessarily dismisses my point. I never claimed that ALL black people have some hivemind. So no, I wouldn't admit I was wrong because I'm not. Regardless of your individual background, or my individual background, we have plenty of examples from the black community as whole that have repeatedly given the same message over and over. So maybe we should listen.

Also, we all have privilege on some level, so it's also not wrong to say a particular held position comes from a position of privilege even if you happen to be a minority. Ie.., you can be a black person and also hold a particular position based on privilege (like being a male, or an English speaker, or from an upper class family, or belonging to a majority religion, etc).

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

So did most of us. In the 90s.

Only '90s Kids Will Appreciate These 13 Vampire Clans!

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

And people will still be free to say "this tribe of orcs are real pieces of work, who survive off of banditry and slaughter." No one is taking away any evil NPC by WotC saying that mortals aren't automatically evil.

Just like in real life, evil is a choice.

Can we have that quote in big red letters at the top of this thread, please.

 

[JPL]

It kind of worked with the Vault of the Drow, since that society was in crisis, with the matriarchy being under attack by an even more nihilistic religion. It was supposed to be a mess. (It was also, as I recall, a far smaller city than the 2E ones in the Forgotten Realms.)

Interesting. My last experience with the drow was that setting-neutral book they did between 4th and 5th Editions. Certainly, some thoughtful writers have gone to considerable lengths to develop drow society into something plausible, or at least interesting, but there's also a lot of stuff where it's just hammering home, no seriously, these guys are really super evil and super chaotic (and something something spiders).

“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” I guess I'd add that even in a fantasy game, in which Good and Evil aren't exactly what they are in the real world, the DETAILS about how and why a specific culture or person or decision are good or evil are kind of where the action is.

 

[imagineGod]

Find all, replace all, done. It's pretty easy.

Harder is WotC's reluctance to issue a 5.1 Players Handbook, cleaning up the Ranger, etc., which is one of the main drivers for the Big Book of Alternate Class and Racial Abilities, since, several years on, it's clear that some of the stuff in every PHB is not as good as it ought to be.

But from a market fragmentation standpoint, it's not hard to see why WotC doesn't to repeat the 3.5 edition.

How easy is it to replace this special edition D&D 5e set that cost a lot of money.
I have not heard anything from Wizards of the Coast about the buy back scheme.

 

[Retreater]

My group has been wanting to play Al-Qadim since the early 90s, and I just started (finally) working on making it a reality. And man, it's so problematic. Didn't realize it at the time, but through the modern vantage, it's really odd. This is the kind of stuff that just can't happen anymore. (I was talking about this even before the statement.)
I wonder what modern D&D will look like without these stereotypical real Earth cultures put in?