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.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

So that's an open question: Is the problematic aspect of orc culture simply that the depiction offers nothing beyond the "raider" stereotype?

Exactly: they are only that!

 

[Umbran]

Throw in some stuff about how reality is not what we perceive as well.

Oh, that's easy - you're not even a blob of cells. You're just a computer simulation, programmed such that its responses are as if it thought it had free will.

 

[Oofta]

Oh, that's easy - you're not even a blob of cells. You're just a computer simulation, programmed such that its responses are as if it thought it had free will.

Dang. How did you 010111010100011110001111 [ERROR: RESETTING PARSER] figure that out?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yeah that was poorly phrased and easy to misinterpret. Sorry.

I just meant that I am able to be concerned about the large and the small.

Why apologise to someone so clearly acting in bad faith?

Can someone point out to me the language which is being used which makes monstrous races sound like victims of racism? I don't know the PHB by heart.

From volo's guide to monsters, "
Most orcs have been indoctrinated into a life of destruction and slaughter. But unlike creatures who by their very nature are evil, such as gnolls, it’s possible that an orc, if raised outside its culture, could develop a limited capacity for empathy, love, and compassion.

No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its blood lust flows just beneath the surface. With its instinctive love of battle and its desire to prove its strength, an orc trying to live within the confines of civilization is faced with a difficult task."

Replace orc with any psuedo-polite old time accepted term for Black people, and imagine being someone who has read this sort of thing about your own real life people while also seeing your people oppressed by every system that defines the world around you, and then reading this when you sit down to make a character you want to play.

Then, check out the "flaws" for orcs below this writeup. I'll quote the two worst ones.

• I have a calm temperament and let insults roll off my back.
  • Now, recall that this is on the list of flaws. Not a personality trait, but a flaw.
• I understand the value of civilization and the order that society brings.
  • Again, a flaw. For an orc, according to Volos which is a dnd canon book, understanding the value of civilization and society is a flaw. Directly and unavoidably implied here is the idea that orc culture literaly doesn't even count as a society.

While I've pretty much given up on Salvatore, I did read the books that covered reuniting the old gang. There was definitely a feeling of going back to old-school D&D for better or worse.

Specifically Cattie-Brie telling Drizzt that goblins are evil because her goddess told her so. Drizzt just kind of shrugs and says "Huh. Guess I was wrong about [insert name of goblin Drizzt met while escaping the underdark]. He really was evil all along."

It struck me as being quite odd.

Oh that is just really gross. What the hell. Within a given continuity retconning such a thing is just...really bad.

Change the language sound sinister to me, forgive me but I'm Italian and in our history we've seen another guy who wanted to change our language and we weren't happy at all with him in charge. Better to change some words not to put the dust under the carpet, but to be more precise in our definitions.
I have nothing against characterize some fictional creatures with mental and physical bonus/malus in respect of humans.

I prefer to say "give to the game more moral and social complexity". This could be a real improvement.
We can stop the alignment barriers (or better remove alignment at all).
More, we can try to remove all those stereotypes correlated to a specific etnicity, like Vistani.
We can replace the word races with species cause is more precise.
We can replace the word monsters with creatures cause monster implies moral/esthetic judgment.

Yes there are definitely many thing we can do, without being irrational and sort of 1984-ish.

You are describing changing the language of DnD.
It's a language barrier thing, trust me. In current English conversation one meaning of "language", especially as in, "the language of [a subject]" is, "the specific terminology, phrasing, and linguistic tone, taken to discuss a subject."

The D&D is supposedly on a medieval fantasy setting where many creatures are not civilized or intelligent enough to form complex and advanced societies.

The very idea that there are sapient peoples who are not civilised enough to form complex and advanced societies is very precisely language that has been used by white supremacists as part of intentional scientific racism, to justify their attitudes and actions toward Black, Asian, and Indigenous people.

 

[Gradine]

I see we've reached the "intent is irrelevant" portion of the discussion. Let's break this down.

"Intent is irrelevant" is pithy and catchy and also not entirely accurate. Obviously, someone who is being intentionally racist is more or less objectively worse than someone who is being racist accidentally. Where intent is irrelevant is in the level of harm caused (and the fact of the harm in the first place).

The typically example (and one that still works well) is that even if you accidentally step on somebody else's foot, you've still stepped on their foot. Unless you're a total tool, you of course apologize. You might, if you were focused on being considerate, make certain you're more careful where you step in the future. That seems like the kind of positive behavior we can all agree on.

The problem is, we're trained (often times quite deliberately) to see internal harm as not real harm. There are tons of reasons for this that I'm not going to go into but if you're the sort to repeat the whole "sticks and stones" refrain unironically, you've fallen victim to this mindset. This mindset is why we also tend to, as a culture, treat mental health way less seriously than physical health. It's this idea that because it's not visible, it must not be real.

Except it is real, and the effects can ultimately be quite visible. Let's take our friends the Vistani as an example. They're an obvious stand-in for the real-life Roma people, who were often caricatured in gothic horror literature because many people (including those authors) genuinely believed those caricatures to be true. As a result, the literature reflected the prejudice, which lead to genuine and real discrimination against very real Roma people. The literature, in reinforcing the prejudice, does not get to claim innocence in all of this.

And the fact is, Roma stereotypes have carried out over the decades without much change in form or function, to the extent that there is very little separating the Vistini of 2016's Curse of Strahd and the Roma depicted in 1800's horror. And the Roma are still heavily discriminated against in multiple places across the world.

Going back to our foot-stomping issue; WotC (and TSR before them) have been told since their inception that the Vistani are super racist. At first, you could claim that it was accidental (simply uncritically re-applying racist tropes). At what point, then, after how many portrayals, does the foot stomping become undoubtedly willful? And thus intentional?

 

[Nickolaidas]

The very idea that there are sapient peoples who are not civilised enough to form complex and advanced societies is very precisely language that has been used by white supremacists as part of intentional scientific racism, to justify their attitudes and actions toward Black, Asian, and Indigenous people.

So by making Lizardfolk content on living in the swamps with their shamans and their spears, WotC are being racist?

 

[Mirtek]

Obould was betrayed and killed and his son was framed, right. Then the kingdom went to war against it neighbors until the Companions (yeah...them) mopped the floor with orcs and reinstated the son of Obould. Its from the SCAG IIRC.

My memories are a little hazy since it was some time since i read the novel, but i am pretty sure it ended with the kingdom of many arrows being mo more.

The new leader actually wanting to rebuikd the razed capitol and start over, but the dwarves bluntly telling him to take the remaining orc tribes and return to the mountains they came from before conquering the lands that then became the kingdom of many arrows for a while

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It is Many-Arrows, specifically "The Many Arrows Tribes" on the bottom right of WoTC's map of D&D Live map for icewind dale it says

"Of the orc tribes living in the mountains, the most powerful by far is the Many-Arrows tribe. Ten-Towners and Reghed nomads alike live in fear of the day when a great chieftain of the tribe will reunite the orcs of Icewind Dale and their banners descend once again from the Spine of the World. There are enclaves of Many-Arrows orcs scattered throughout the Spine of The World."

I'm guessing after Lorgru was restored to the throne he wasn't able to keep the tribes together after retreating back to the spine of the world after that usurpation plot.

What that means for the adventure path we'll have to see when the books out. Maybe it won't be a repeat plot of usurpation but getting the tribes that broke away from the main kingdom back inline.

If nothing else people who are worried this means no more aggressor orc raider well there you go.

Great. The savage low-browed large mouthed primitives who are better off when taken from their kin and raised by civilized people in an actual society can't ever keep a real civilization going. Checks out. Not at all reminiscent of the racist rantings of secessionists and people opposed to the independence of Carribean states after slave revolts. Not at all.

Nope. Your contention was that these remarks were used on minorities and it offends them. You even provided an anecdotal example.
I'm merely reflecting that these adjectives have been used throughout history and that this is a common fantasy trope.
Defend/survive against the wave of others!

Commonality =/= morality. Obviously. Very, very, very, obviously.

I agree with you that some of people could feel unwelcome. But the attack is not in the written word, is in the mind of those people. And I'm no way responsible for that. Thus I have never to change anything. If those people are sensitive about those words, is because there are true bastards around that threat them bad for their origins. Keep condemn them please.

And all of this is out of topic, because WoTC revise orcs to avoid "sentient fictional races genetically less intelligent" possible in the game. And this is even worst from a logical point of view.

No, if you are harming someone, your intention is irrelevant. You need to stop harming them. The end.

And once the harm is known to you, continuing to do it is now an active choice that you are making to harm them, which is even more inarguably your fault and responsibility.

Absolutely YES!

No, it doesn't. Whataboutism literally never excuses a behavior. Period.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

Great. The savage low-browed large mouthed primitives who are better off when taken from their kin and raised by civilized people in an actual society can't ever keep a real civilization going. Checks out. Not at all reminiscent of the racist rantings of secessionists and people opposed to the independence of Carribean states after slave revolts. Not at all.

Just re-read the pertinent guides: SCAG says that the Kingdom was dispersed. SKT talk about Obould and said his reign before his death proves that orc can be good neighbors but the kingdom does not appear on the map.

So the kingdom on Many-Arrows is no-more.

Remains the orcs of Thesk and Chessenta, and the more peaceful grey orcs of the East.

 

[Umbran]

Why apologise to someone so clearly acting in bad faith?

Three reasons:

1) In text, maybe, just maybe, you are wrong about them acting in bad faith. Misunderstandings happen.

2) To generally be a better person than the one acting in bad faith.

3) Because if red text has to come out, it stands in your favor.