D&D 5E WotC On Tasha, Race, Alignment: A Several-Year Plan

WotC spoke to the site Dicebreaker about D&D race and alignment, and their plans for the future.

• On of the motivations of the changes [character customization] in Tasha's Cauldron was to decouple race from class.
• The 'tightrope' between honouring legacy and freedom of character choice has not been effectively walked.
• Alignment is turning into a roleplaying tool, and will not be used to describe entire cultures.
• This work will take several years to fully implement.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I would say less.

I've posted before how when going to 0 hit points doesn't have to mean unconsciousness or death, but could be automatic morale failure (drops weapons, runs away, or surrenders).

Already here. Killing evil is fine, for most people, but killing people in order to take their stuff isn’t. The game is mostly designed for killing evil.

I feel split on this. In my own games, I like having a diversity of races to roleplay with, without the straight jacket of racial alignment. That’s one reason I like Eberron.

I also understand the parallels of racial descriptions (like “savage”) in both fantasy and real life and how such language could be painful for some players.

On the other hand, virtually every culture (whether you go to Asia, Africa, or Europe) has mythological creatures that are universally evil. It feels like it’s important part of myths and storytelling.

None of that requires that people be inherently evil by birth. Devils aren’t people, nor are mindflayers or beholders, or dozens of other D&D monsters.

I hate to break it to you, but “killing people and taking their stuff” hasn’t been what D&D is about for years.

Respectfully disagree.

Respectfully, you’re mostly wrong. D&D isn’t about killing things and taking their stuff. In order for it to be about that, that would have to be the primary focus of the game. At most it’s a playstyle that the designers nod to occasionally with the patient tolerance of the family of an opinionated old uncle.

Everything that is made primarily for new players, is about heroes saving people.

I can't help but think this is like tanar'ri in 2nd edition: a change to placate people who don't play the game or know anything about it.
D&D won't work without evil humanoids to fight. Moreover, popular culture depends on it. Look at Stormtroopers. Look at any of the faceless Marvel villain grunts. Evil creatures in evil hats have to exist in our media. You can't be a hero against shades of gray.

Nothing in this post is even close to the mark. Like, just to pick one point that is totally off base, all those marvel villain grunts are evil because of the organizations they’re part of and the things they do.

I am Probably about done with this kind of silly sh*t. I bought tashas but that may be the end of it. No problem though...among the books we have, there are thousands of combinations for PCs.

when dwarves having dark vision or cats being good at stealth is equated to “real life hurts,” I just cannot buy into or go along with that.

this is getting silly. In phb, it was “inborn traits” but now humans can have dark vision.

remember when dwarves could resist poison? We really need to get away from that because that hurts others? Omg.

This is overwrought nonsense. You’re jumping from “not all orcs are baby eating psychopaths” to utterly unrelated nonsense.

I guess I'm asking how "Orcs are evil, but your PC can be whatever you want" is insufficiently inclusive and has to be changed to "Orcs are not evil".

The change isn’t “orcs are not evil”, though. The change is “all humanoids have members along the entire alignment spectrum, so some orcs are evil while others aren’t.”

"I think these changes are mainly directed at new players. Being able to show them a statblock that says "any alignment" rather than "chaotic evil" lets them know right away that they can have a good orc in their game, and it backs up their choice."

That may potentially be good for new players in one sense, when they are making characters. It's bad in the other sense of actual play, where they are confronted with things in the course of adventuring and have to be ethically conflicted about whether it's ok to fight anything. Every. Single. Time.

Am I the only one who has seen players get frustrated and fed up with moral ambiguity when they just want to eat some chips, roll some dice, and kill the bad guys?

What possible moral ambiguity is there in fighting bandits/raiders, slavers, murder-cultists, etc?
Alignment could not exist and it would still be trivially easy to have a game with no difficult moral decisions.

Oh look, a fantasy-nazi. Kill it. Business.

 

[DemoMonkey]

"Clones were only used as soldiers by the republic during the clone wars."

Incorrect. Clones were still in service in the imperial military as stormtroopers, though increasingly in the minority, for 5 years after Palpatine declared himself Emperor. (This is new "current" cannon by the way, not Legends.)

If your point is that all Stormtroopers were born humans by the Times of a New Hope, that would be probable though not certain.

 

[Scott Christian]

I think that's entirely reasonable, but with two caveats:

• just because the culture as a whole is like that, the individuals within it don't have a wide variety of opinions and attitudes. Maybe there's a sizeable minority of people in the evil culture who just keep their heads down and hope to survive. Maybe there's a tiny minority of resisters who seek to reform or overthrow it. And so on.
• it's a problem if all of the 'evil cultures' that end up being created always seem to reflect 'tribal' or 'savage' cultures, or any of the other various dehumanising stereotypes used in history to justify colonialism, oppression, etc. Sure, have your evil pillaging cannibal orc tribe - but also consider having some of your urbanised or agricultural kingdoms/republics/whatever be rapacious exploiters who murder relatively peacable orc tribes over land and resources. Evil shouldn't be CONFINED to tribal-coded cultures made of people with unusual skin colours.

Completely agree.

 

[Scott Christian]

Probably not, such a culture would end up destroying the very people it preys upon & collapse when there is ultimately nobody in the area left to prey upon if the victims don't ally together and directly purge the reavers or hire some outside power to do it for them before they themselves are wiped out. Even the mongols were more self controlled & productive than that "orc clan"

It has happened for thousands of years here? Dynamics shift. And it was literally a 16 word summary to make a point. So yes, there would be some organization. Maybe they are slavers as well.

 

[Charlaquin]

As DM, I would definitely put the blame on the environment. Be it lack of resources, being told by a dragon to do it for a thousand years and then just accepting it as commonplace, or having a long standing hatred of the people next door. It doesn't mean they don't try to protect their children. It does not mean that they don't find comfort in some of the same things others might: a good meal, a tryst, etc. But, they might also find comfort in torturing the human explorer that stumbled into their camp.

Yeah, that checks out. The taking comfort in torturing a human part seems a bit extreme to me as inflicting that kind of trauma on another thinking being tends to itself be pretty traumatic. Though I can imagine conditions in which this group of orcs might have grown so hateful towards humans that they’ve convinced themselves it’s comforting.

 

[Minigiant]

How can you leave that completely up to the DM? I mean, when people buy a PHB, or when they are creating a charcter, don't they want to read a little bit about what they are like? Can you just ask people to forget 100,000's pages of lore?

Because who is saying me the DM is using any of that 100,000 pages.

 

[Hurin70]

This is why the Powerful Build and "small races have disadvantage on attack rolls with heavy weapons" features exist. Small races can have the same Strength score as a goliath or orc, but they still won't be able to carry the same amount or use the same weapons as effectively.

Yes, they exist to represent common sense racial differences, just like racial attributes do.

There are many things Powerful Build does not apply to. This is why, imho, it is not sufficient to represent all the many differences massive size entails.
Your mileage may vary of course. I am just expressing my opinion.

 

[Charlaquin]

You have no logical basis for that claim. These are merely different mechanical ways to represent biological defences.

But only one of these ways of representing biological differences restricts the viability of certain gameplay roles.

 

[NaturalZero]

Decoupling ASIs from race is a boon to the game. I remember when my group dropped them in 4e and suddenly everyone we played with felt free to run novel concepts. Now, in 5e, I'm seeing the same thing with Tasha's as players feel freer to try different combinations that were previously mechanically penalized for no compelling reason.

People can argue whether or not they think cultures should be evil in a sociological or political context, or whatever, and I don't really care because I never bought into universal objective alignment in the first place, but the character building stuff is just about freedom. Freedom to build what you want without arbitrary penalties for choosing something outside of what the designers tell you should be an "on-type" match-up is good for the hobby.

 

[DemoMonkey]

"What possible moral ambiguity is there in fighting bandits/raiders, slavers, murder-cultists, etc?"

But what if they're bandits because they're hungry?

What if they are slavers to avenge themselves on the creatures that enslaved them?

Murder-cultists are just paladins who don't worship YOUR god.

Previously, if the party kicks in the door in a dungeon and there are 4 drow and a Drider inside and they know Drow are evil, they can lead with a fireball.

Now, they can only lead with a "Hey guy's, sup? How do you feel about evil and stu OH GOD I'M POISONED AND STABBED!!"