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.

 

[Umbran]

I joined the Forum to respond to this thread...

So, I should put my moderator hat on...

Mod Note:

Please be aware that we've had several folks make their first posts in these contentious threads, and turn out to be inflammatory, trolls, and alts of previously known bad actors. As a result, while we normally give new posters a lot of leeway, in threads related to this topic, we do not. I've banned three or four of them myself, based on single posts.

I advise you review the boards Terms and Rules before you continue, and assume that the moderators have twitchy trigger fingers, and this is your one and only warning.

If dealing with that isn't your bag, that's fine - feel free to post in other threads, where we are far more flexible.

 

[Remathilis]

There seems to be a weird trope emerging in some of the posts, as if:

• Bureaucratic urban peoples = Good
• Tribal nomadic peoples = Evil

Of course, the above bifurcation would be offensive racism.

The opposite tropes are likewise offensive. One need only look at how the Chinese Bureaucracy and the trope of the "Noble Savage" to see the inversion is no less racist.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's not the imagery that's the problem.

You look at that or Uncle Ben's rice and think what's the big deal?

It's the name Aunty and Uncle were used as they didn't want to use the Mr/Mrs titles back in the South.

Flip this: why did people start cities? Why do we build?

We do it for survival. I would imagine lizard folk however do just fine finding food in the swamp. They can hold their breath and dive. Their endurance and semi aquatic nature means that they don’t need giant fields of wheat and the means to distribute crops.

Food storage. We build cities, at least very early on, explicitly and solely for food storage. Everything else came after that.

We lived in cities because we had to to protect the food, and we could spend most of our time tending the land and livestock that way.

Lizardmen certainly don't have to have cities, but when there are no lizardmen anywhere with cities or even small villages of any kind, it gets weird and tropey. Not racist, though.

Like, y'all (and by y'all I do mean the entire thread), realise that there are tribes of people in jungles IRL who have met outsiders and don't want our alcohol and tobacco and whatnot, right?

But an entire species that has no interest in anything that building permanent structures has to offer just seems weird, and like they are just there to be scary junglemen for adventurers to encounter, which can come across a bit...uncomfortable.

It may not be on the same level as the volo's description of orcs or CoS Vistani*, but it's there.


*both of which feel to many like direct, intentional, no way in hell it could be accidental, targeted racism. I think it's actually just carelessness and lack of diverse staff working on the two books in question, but it feels that way to many because it is so very, very, very clear to them, without any thought, without any desire to find something to be mad about, without any expectation of finding something upsetting in a dnd book. It's just plain as day.

 

[Remathilis]

I'm not beholden to things I didn't say.

What I did say was that you can just add good and neutral orcs to FR without changing any established borders. That has nothing to do with them being "off camera". It certainly doesn't mean orcs are still primarily cannon fodder.

Effectively, that puts them in the same boat as aarakroca, tabaxi, goliaths, or tortles; a race that lacks a permanent "home" and just exists on the edge of the established race's lands. Occasionally encountered as an NPC, available for play as a PC with DM consent.

 

[Umbran]

... but this constant drone that people are being fataly hurt by this fantasy based game ...

Please stop the hyperbole. It's a strawman that will tend to escalate the rhetoric. Nobody has claimed that anyone has been directly killed by an RPG depiction of a fantasy race.

It has been said that such depictions are part of a much larger cultural tradition that, collectively, has had major negative impact.

Is it a small part? Perhaps. But it is our small part, and thus our collective responsibility to clean it up. Or, really, our responsibility to allow WotC to clean it up - we don't actually have to do anything here. We just have to not make a big stink about someone changing our beloved status quo.

It is very easy to find rationalizations and justifications for not cleaning up our messes. But, do that long enough (like, you know, decades*), and your place has a half a ton of garbage in it, and you need friends to bring their VW microbus with shovels and rakes and implements of destruction to clean the place out.



*Decades for RPGs. Centuries, for the issue of racism in general.

 

[Panda-s1]

It's not the imagery that's the problem.

You look at that or Uncle Ben's rice and think what's the big deal?

It's the name Aunty and Uncle were used as they didn't want to use the Mr/Mrs titles back in the South.

hey, good news!

See? It's not just WotC?



(Yes...it's the Onion. But, seriously, it's hard to tell these days.)

hey good...news? I mean it's not the onion, it's actually happening.

Bit of both but it's a common anecdote here on ENworld was what I was responding to.

And also online. Ask a D&D player what their parents do. Simple test try it yourself.

I don't play D&D online, I do play other games with D&D players online.

no, no, I want more concrete proof than "that's what a bunch of older players have noticed". and I know it's been discussed on this board before that the average user age tends to skew high.

I do know there's been a noticeable amount of younger people playing 5e, as well as a considerable number of players who fall somewhere in the LGBT area. rectifying attitudes towards one marginalized group probably begets another, which might partially explain why WotC is only now taking actual steps toward addressing racism in D&D.

Maybe it isn't that they "can't manage" it? Maybe they don't want to manage it.

Consider - when playing D&D, you recognize that gathering your party in a tight clump means you are very vulnerable to a fireball or lightning bolt. In a world with, say, dragons, there may be a cultural equivalent - if your settlement gets too large, monsters find it to be a tasty morsel, and come and kill you! Perhaps the society is better served by being more spread out.

Or, maybe their social structures are different. Or maybe the plants in the area are not suitable for agricultural development, so that you can't build the excess food supply necessary to support a city. Or maybe their territory is poor in workable metals, so they can't get past stone age technology. Or, or, or...

We did cities. Doesn't mean everyone has to. And our first cities were perhaps 5000 years ago, but, depending how you want to count, our species is hundreds of thousands of years old. So, we've had cities for perhaps 2.5% of our existence. If someone stopped by a mere hair earlier on the geologic timescale, you'd not see a metal tool anywhere on the planet. So, maybe your game is a hair earlier on their timescale.

And really, cities are not the end-all, be-all of what it means to be a sentient species. Neither are any other particular technologies. In fact, the very idea that there's a linear "advancement" is about as inaccurate as saying that humans are "more evolved" than gorillas.

idk why I'm being explained this with a D&D metaphor. and this misses the point, like I said before there are real world communities of people who never made cities and still exist today (which ngl considering how colonialism has gone feels like a miracle). doctorbadwolf said it better than I could, it's not necessarily racist, but it does feel weird and kinda tropey.

also I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure stuff like "maybe they don't want to" or "why haven't they done it already?" have been used as arguments for certain "primitive" peoples being inferior.

 

[Zardnaar]

hey, good news!

hey good...news? I mean it's not the onion, it's actually happening.

no, no, I want more concrete proof than "that's what a bunch of older players have noticed". and I know it's been discussed on this board before that the average user age tends to skew high.

I do know there's been a noticeable amount of younger people playing 5e, as well as a considerable number of players who fall somewhere in the LGBT area. rectifying attitudes towards one marginalized group probably begets another, which might partially explain why WotC is only now taking actual steps toward addressing racism in D&D.

idk why I'm being explained this with a D&D metaphor. and this misses the point, like I said before there are real world communities of people who never made cities and still exist today (which ngl considering how colonialism has gone feels like a miracle). doctorbadwolf said it better than I could, it's not necessarily racist, but it does feel weird and kinda tropey.

also I could be wrong, but I'm sure stuff like "maybe they don't want to" or "why haven't they done it already?" have been used as arguments for certain "primitive" peoples being inferior.

I know there's lots of younger players and new players.

Try talking to them and find out what their parents do. It's a simple test. Doesn't matter if it's real life or online.

Or if they graduated high school and/or went to university.

 

[Umbran]

I think you hit the nail on the head.

Why, thank you.

Flip this: why did people start cities? Why do we build?

We do it for survival. I would imagine lizard folk however do just fine finding food in the swamp. They can hold their breath and dive. Their endurance and semi aquatic nature means that they don’t need giant fields of wheat and the means to distribute crops.

So, I am currently playing a lizardfolk barbarian, and I built his outlook almost exactly around this kind of thought process.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Is it a small part? Perhaps. But it is our small part, and thus our collective responsibility to clean it up.

I've been thinking more about this (weak) argument that there are better, more constructive things we can do to fight racism than worry about an RPG.

The thing is, I'm not sure that my having showed up for the local protest (in my mostly white, ridiculously affluent town) really did anything, although it was good for my kids to see.

But if even one of the folks in this thread gets to the point of saying, "Oh, I get it now" then that's a measurable amount of good done.

 

[Greg Benage]

In fact, the very idea that there's a linear "advancement" is about as inaccurate as saying that humans are "more evolved" than gorillas.

I find that extremely unpersuasive. One of the main reasons Wakanda is so important is that it illustrates why some nations in our world are less developed than others and offers a strikingly different portrayal of a pan-African civilization than the one we typically see in our media and our history marred by centuries of colonization. As Evan Narcisse puts it, "Wakanda represents this unbroken chain of achievement of black excellence that never got interrupted by colonialism." It matters that Wakanda is the most scientifically and technologically advanced nation in that world.

The idea that you could create fully realized civilizations for all these humanoid species, make them less developed than human, elven or dwarven civilizations, and then try to hand-wave it away with the "there's really no such thing as linear advancement anyway" bit strikes me as the same kind of tin-eared, mule-headed stubbornness demonstrated in the arguments of those who won't accept that Wizards needs to make any changes. Emphasis on the idea, not its author: I'm not trying to get banned. It's not my place to say what would be hurtful to marginalized people, but I feel very confident that Wizards will be called out on it if they try to go that way, and rightfully so in my opinion.

Having said that, I find myself in disagreement on important points with pretty much everyone in this thread, which probably means I'm full of it but certainly means it's time to drop it and crawl back in my hole. The likely outcome of all this is that Wizards will make some changes, leave plenty of problematic stuff in there and most likely create some new problematic stuff in the process...and that's probably okay. Incremental progress is still progress and the important thing is that it continues.