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.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm asking whether white people historically considered dark-skinned people Evil, because that's more relevant to the issue of whether the depiction of Orcs & Drow in D&D today hearkens back to older racist beliefs.

Yes, asked and answered by multiple people.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I might be playing the devil's advocate here, and as a European from a country without "colonial baggage" or a history of slavery I might have a different outlook on things, but when I see "my" orcs, and I mean old-school pig-faced orcs, I don't see a connection to any group of actual people!

No one said the depictions were uniformly hurtful to all people. Is that the standard that has to be applied, though?

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

...but in the country where I live, racism is not systemic to U.S. culture or U.S. law. It was in the past, but that ended.

Are you sure you’re living in the USA?

 

[Var]

We do have some already, at least as far as dragons and undead go. Metallic and gem dragons. Baelnorns are undead elven liches that are not evil. Exploring concepts of variants of established evil monsters, like good red dragons and evil silver dragons...hell, I've already done as much in games I've run. It came about as a way to keep my players on their toes and to remove a sense of "been there, done that". Undead...I typically leave most of them as inherently evil, as the soul that once occupied that being has long departed to its afterlife and been replaced by a dark, soulless energy. Whatever memories it may have of the being that was once alive in that shell are echoes of the soul long departed.

Fiends, demons, devils et al strike me as an embodiment of evil. Distilled from the emotion of darkness that all mortals hearts conceivably possess and manifested in various planes where such darkness thrives. Likewise, celestial beings of good exist in balance, generated by the light that all mortal hearts conceivably possess and is manifest in various planes where such light thrives.

These fiendish and celestial beings interact and interfere with such mortals in an attempt to tip the balance of light and/or dark in their favour, for what precise purpose no mortal can truly know.

Well looking at IRL humans, you're a sentient creature and hugely influenced by the environment you grow up in. From that you forge yourself an oppinion ond going from there your free will kicks in.

DnD's alignemnts are pretty weaksauce in how rigid they are and how badly they express the variety of nuance within spontaneous decision making in the heat of a moment. A dictator isn't beyond random acts of kindness, why would a Drow Matriach be?
Or just random acts of boredom/curiosity with the same result, what are you going to do as a teenager when willful destruction is normal and not woke enough to express yourself and your rebellion against society?
In case of the "oh so, so, soooo evil, you wouldn't believe how irredeemable evil, oh gosh you have no idea to what depths these things would be willing to sink..." entities like devils, demons or liches, what speaks against individuals who cares for humanoids the same way we'd care for an ant farm or a pet?
Their action would be virtually indistinguishable from i.e. Chaotic Good as long as their pet project keeps them going that way, which might be a decade or ten, who knows.

Oddly enough this is the moment where I remember Liches comminting suicide by not feeding their phylactery anymore is a thing. Because they have seen it all and don't have a drive to continue existing anymore. Just kinda lie down and die like a very, very depressed and mentally ill person.
Evil things are people too, maybe someone needs to open up a mental hospital for aspiring lords of death, Chromatic Dragons looking to defy their parents and eldritch thing who wouldn't mind musing a millenia on how something with as little brain capacity as a humanoid can cope with its place in the multiverse.

For all the "evil" in the DnD world someone had to make the claim that their culture is a bad thing. Dehumanising the enemy is step one to make your soldiers kill stuff without asking question, just saying.

On the flip side celestials are completely fine with feeding legions of mortals into the meatgrinder of their endless strife against "evil". "For the greater good" or something. Funny how that always is an endless cycle with no change in sight.

Good and evil are concepts based on human morals. Projecting them on demons and angels makes about as much sense as projecting them on bugs, dogs or great old ones.
Alignment as a whole is something you can grasp really fast and it works as long as you don't question it. It's been around forever, maybe that's the problematic part of DnD that has outlived it's usefulness and really needs to go the way of the dodo.
Figuring out where something needs to go within the very narrow scope of an alignment while designing yet another stat block, doesn't work in the slightest when combined with the 5E streamlining approach.
5E also chooses to not use specifics and give vague guidelines on how to run things, enabling a sandbox to play with, which actually has been a big complaint in comparison to 3.5E when pretty much every course of action had a rule or a system written in lawyer terms somewhere.

Alignment might have been better off with the sandbox treatment rather the streamlining one. Someone probably wanted to play it safe and decided it's too iconic and needs to be there to make DnD 5E. Understandable, yet 5E might finally be in a position to ditch the whole idea. Unlike earlier editions there's not a lot of mechanical ties to alignment left, so the prep work is done, just a few item requirements to retcon and we'd be good to go.

 

[Guest 6801328]

What's been insufficiently discussed in this thread is blatant conjecture about the NEW BOOKS.

I like the previous ideas about the Vistani being guides to the planes. What I'm picturing is that for mysterious "reasons" the Vistani just happen to be around whenever/wherever weird planar events are happening. Sort of like Angela Lansbury just happening to be around whenever somebody is murdered. (Anybody else find that suspicious? And don't get me started on Doctors Without Borders: wherever they go, trouble just seems to follow.)

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'm asking whether white people historically considered dark-skinned people Evil, because that's more relevant to the issue of whether the depiction of Orcs & Drow in D&D today hearkens back to older racist beliefs.

I'm aware that historically European peoples considered Others less intelligent and morally compromised, but Orcs & Drow don't just have "moral failings"; they're irredeemably evil and implacably dangerous. They're monsters -- more like forces of nature than wayward children. D&D Humans view them with fear, not condescension.

It would make me uncomfortable if Humans commonly kidnapped Drow children and placed them in residential schools, distinguished House Drow from Field Drow, etc. That would be inappropriate, no question. But...it's the other way around. Drow enslave Humans.

This comes across as trying to not understand, tbh. I hope that isn’t your intent.

There is a pair of articles that explain all this, specifically in reference to orcs, but most of it applies to Drow. I’m not going to do all the work of that article, but I’ll try to summarize with a quick example.

One line of Volos (and agin, this is one example) refers to orcs being domesticated if removed from their native culture, but even the most domesticated Orc having an inherently aggressive and angry temperament. The wording is literally almost identical to colonist rhetoric about Black and Native people, used to justify their enslavement and/or eradication.

If your interest is to understand what others are talking about, try being less literal, and actually actively listening to what people are saying, rather than trying to pick every statement apart in order to find whatever pedantic flaw you can find.

 

[Guest 6801328]

I might be playing the devil's advocate here, and as a European from a country without "colonial baggage" or a history of slavery I might have a different outlook on things, but when I see "my" orcs, and I mean old-school pig-faced orcs, I don't see a connection to any group of actual people!

Right. As has been explained repeatedly, in this thread and others, that is not the problem. That's the simplistic but completely wrong caricature of the problem used by people who either don't understand it, or who intentionally want to mischaracterize it in order to undermine attempts to solve it.

 

[Bolares]

I have no evidence off course, but I still don't believe that people are TRULY hurt by the fact that orcs and drow are evil in d&d.

People are truly hurt by watching racist police brutality in a democracy. People are truly hurt by watching homosexuals being persecuted or worse.

People are desperately trying to make the world a better place - and this is what they feel they can. IMO it doesn't make any difference, though.

Wait, who elected you to determin what people are trully hurt for? And more, does it really need to get to the point where people are trully hurt by something for a company to want to change the direction their are going to take their product? Can't people just be annoyed, offended, lose interest in buying the product because of this for the change to be warranted?

 

[Greg Benage]

So, as a practical matter, do you need an entire race to accomplish this? Why not just telegraph to your PCs that the particular group they are up against is nasty, and let them hack away?

The game definitely changes from Law vs. Chaos or Good vs. Evil to something a lot trickier. Why are they "nasty"? According to whom? Are they really nastier than other peoples are or have been, including the peoples who consider them nasty? Why are they "nasty" (i.e. what made them that way)? How "nasty" does this particular group have to be before you can kill them and take their stuff? Who makes those rules, and how do they get made?

You might want to run that kind of game, and maybe it's even more interesting than an old-fashioned Law vs. Chaos or Good vs. Evil game. But maybe you instead just want to run a game where Good Heroes slay Evil Monsters (and take their stuff). In that case, it would be better if all the monsters weren't turned into people.

Keep on the Borderlands is freaking disgusting if the residents of the Caves of Chaos aren't, um, "forces of Chaos," as described in the setting, and are instead just people. Now, instead of heroes defending the Realm from the forces of Chaos that press upon its borders, you're conquistadors. Have fun with that.

(I'm aware that some outspoken critics of D&D believe exactly this: That the metaphysical and spiritual essentialism stuff is just a veneer to whitewash what is "actually" biological essentialism that grounds a fundamentally racist and imperialist game. That's part of what worries me.)

To be perfectly clear: Wizards absolutely should strip out any depictions that riff off stereotypes of real-world marginalized people. They should do that whether the depictions are of monsters or of "peoples who are just usually evil") or any other fictional group in the game. But if what you've got is basically a monster-hunting game, I don't think it puts you on more solid moral ground when you start turning your monsters into people.

 

[Guest 6801328]

The game definitely changes from Law vs. Chaos or Good vs. Evil to something a lot trickier.

Yeah. And likewise the world is tricky. Reinforcing the trope...the stereotype...that the world is simple, that Good is Good and Evil is Evil, and you can tell the difference by looking at somebody's physical features, by asking what group they belong to, maybe isn't provably making the world a worse place, but it sure ain't making it better.

As I've said elsewhere, I understand where you're coming from. I kind of like my orcs to be irredeemably evil. But it's a game, and it's a minor change we're talking about. If a lot of people who have been getting screwed for centuries are telling me that they'd really like to see the game tweaked, I'm ok with that.