D&D 5E WotC's Jeremy Crawford on D&D Races Going Forward

On Twitter, Jeremy Crawford discussed the treatment of orcs, Vistani, drow and others in D&D, and how WotC plans to treat the idea of 'race' in D&D going forward. In recent products (Eberron and Wildemount), the mandatory evil alignment was dropped from orcs, as was the Intelligence penalty.

@ThinkingDM Look at the treatment orcs received in Eberron and Exandria. Dropped the Intelligence debuff and the evil alignment, with a more acceptable narrative. It's a start, but there's a fair argument for gutting the entire race system.

The orcs of Eberron and Wildemount reflect where our hearts are and indicate where we’re heading.

@vorpaldicepress I hate to be "that guy", but what about Drow, Vistani, and the other troublesome races and cultures in Forgotten Realms (like the Gur, another Roma-inspired race)? Things don't change over night, but are these on the radar?

The drow, Vistani, and many other folk in the game are on our radar. The same spirit that motivated our portrayal of orcs in Eberron is animating our work on all these peoples.

@MileyMan1066 Good. These problems need to be addressed. The variant features UA could have a sequel that includes notes that could rectify some of the problems and help move 5e in a better direction.

Addressing these issues is vital to us. Eberron and Wildemount are the first of multiple books that will face these issues head on and will do so from multiple angles.

@mbriddell I'm happy to hear that you are taking a serious look at this. Do you feel that you can achieve this within the context of Forgotten Realms, given how establised that world's lore is, or would you need to establish a new setting to do this?

Thankfully, the core setting of D&D is the multiverse, with its multitude of worlds. We can tell so many different stories, with different perspectives, in each world. And when we return to a world like FR, stories can evolve. In short, even the older worlds can improve.

@SlyFlourish I could see gnolls being treated differently in other worlds, particularly when they’re a playable race. The idea that they’re spawned hyenas who fed on demon-touched rotten meat feels like they’re in a different class than drow, orcs, goblins and the like. Same with minotaurs.

Internally, we feel that the gnolls in the MM are mistyped. Given their story, they should be fiends, not humanoids. In contrast, the gnolls of Eberron are humanoids, a people with moral and cultural expansiveness.

@MikeyMan1066 I agree. Any creature with the Humanoid type should have the full capacity to be any alignmnet, i.e., they should have free will and souls. Gnolls... the way they are described, do not. Having them be minor demons would clear a lot of this up.

You just described our team's perspective exactly.

As a side-note, the term 'race' is starting to fall out of favor in tabletop RPGs (Pathfinder has "ancestry", and other games use terms like "heritage"); while he doesn't comment on that specifically, he doesn't use the word 'race' and instead refers to 'folks' and 'peoples'.

 

[pemerton]

When JRRT wanted to depict an inherently evil people - orcs - he drew on tropes and images associated with peoples of the Central Asian steppes: scimitars, bandy legs, guttural speech, swarthy skin.

All the Black peoples in LotR are associated with Sauron-worship. Even Gollum is scared of them.

Maybe JRRT thought he wasn't racist - I can't comment on that, as I haven't read his letters. But I've read his book, and it speaks for itself.

 

[Doug McCrae]

To him orcs are an allegory for some "mode of badness" in mankind, not a particular race.

I'm sure that was Tolkien's conscious intent but it's not the message of The Lord of the Rings. Evil is consistently associated with the south, the east, and non-white people. In the many derivations from real world events, such as the Battle of the Catalaunian Plains as a source for the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, the real life eastern and southern peoples used as sources become orcs or their allies. The protagonists and their allies on the other hand reference the pre-WWI rural English (hobbits), Anglo-Saxons (Rohirrim), and Italy (Ravenna was a source of inspiration for Minas Tirith).

Orcs are irredeemably evil, beyond any human evil. They are described as "swart", "sallow", "slant-eyed", "squint-eyed", and "bowlegged". In one of his letters Tolkien states they are intended to look like Mongols.

Therefore the intended idea of representation of a universal, non culturally and racially specific evil fails.

See my posts #2032 and #733 upthread for more on this.

 

[Olrox17]

Uh-huh, but as I pointed out, D&D often has patriarchies without even recognising them as such, because they're simply "normal". You see countless D&D settings where you have patriarchal societies, and almost none of them are ever identified as patriarchal in text. It's just that if you see a list of rulers for the last few hundred years, they're all dudes (or almost all, which still indicates a patriarchy, just with agnatic-cognatic succession). And there's no major society in D&D that's identified as patriarchal and bad, even though Gnomish and Dwarven societies are frequently portrayed with only male leaders and so on.

Also that orc thing is pretty unfortunate given the Many-Arrows are canon non-evil orcs, yet being treated the way as the rest are.

Hmm, I see what you're saying about agnatic-cognatic primogeniture. That's an historically accurate system for the time period D&D tries to emulate, but indeed patriarchal.
The Kingdom of England has employed that system until the early 2000s, and I wouldn't say that 90s England was a patriarchy, but we're also talking about a constitutional monarchy, while the standard D&D monarchy is an absolute or feudal one.
I can see you point.

 

[pemerton]

I want to add: whereas I believe that @Hussar is not a great fan of LotR (apologies if I'm misremembering) I think that @Doug McCrae takes it fairly seriously as a key source for LotR. I'm a great admirer of it.

Part of engaging seriously with a literary work one admires is reading it closely, carefully and realistically, rather than projecting some sort of wish-fulfillment idea onto it. In the non-fantasy context, I think Zadie Smith's essay on race in Graham Greene (another influential 20th century English Catholic author) is a good example of this.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Hmm, I see what you're saying about agnatic-cognatic primogeniture. That's an historically accurate system for the time period D&D tries to emulate, but indeed patriarchal.
The Kingdom of England has employed that system until the early 2000s, and I wouldn't say that 90s England was a patriarchy, but we're also talking about a constitutional monarchy, while the standard D&D monarchy is an absolute or feudal one.
I can see you point.

Yeah, the UK hasn't been a monarchy in a meaningful sense since the 1700s when the power of parliament eclipsed that of the monarch, and it's really been downhill all the way since 1215. And British society certainly leaned patriarchal (albeit with always an interesting strand of powerful women), rather than egalitarian. It still does a bit.

With D&D you see something of a pattern of race being portrayed as basically patriarchal until it's examined closely (say in a book about that race), then suddenly it turns out it was egalitarian all along and just looked patriarchal. But I don't see people complaining about that, and probably with good reason. Yet they do complain about these changes!

 

[Doug McCrae]

I think that @Doug McCrae takes it fairly seriously as a key source for LotR.

Very much so. I think it's the single most important fictional source for D&D even today. The 5e idea of races being created by gods of the appropriate alignment, which I think is intended to make D&D less racist, probably derives from Tolkien.

 

[Derren]

Yeah, the UK hasn't been a monarchy in a meaningful sense since the 1700s when the power of parliament eclipsed that of the monarch, and it's really been downhill all the way since 1215. And British society certainly leaned patriarchal (albeit with always an interesting strand of powerful women), rather than egalitarian. It still does a bit.

With D&D you see something of a pattern of race being portrayed as basically patriarchal until it's examined closely (say in a book about that race), then suddenly it turns out it was egalitarian all along and just looked patriarchal. But I don't see people complaining about that, and probably with good reason. Yet they do complain about these changes!

Thats mainly because there are so many other things to complain about. No society in D&D, even in the FR has a real feudal or otherwise government. Titles are assigned pretty much at random and when in doubt the king can do everything except when he can't. There is no sense in discussion or complaining about the details of succession is such a "system".

 

[Bagpuss]

Sigh. You don't think it's problematic that he gave them physical traits pulled straight out of bigoted writing of the time?

You mean this quote...

Tolkien described Orcs as "...squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes; in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

There are also two disclaimers there "(to Europeans)" which means he realises it is a matter of taste and what you are familiar and culturally predisposed to find attractive. Also "least lovely" which indicates there is a scale of attractiveness, some are lovely, some a least lovely, but orcs look like the least lovely ones. So for the writing of the time it doesn't seem that bad.

 

[TheSword]

Frankly. When posters keep insisting on justifying racism. I am out. Goddamn.

I think I understand now why JMH said talking about this subject being exhausting. Everytime you make it clear why there are issues someone else comes along and says orcs aren’t racist. I know, I was one. It feels like there’s a pressure to try and educate people or prevent this becoming an echo chamber of people who all convince each other there is no problem. That takes time and is frustrating.

To keep it simple...

If the story’s, characters, descriptions or activities in the game, makes people of colour think about racism they have seen or experienced in the real world then that spoils their fun of the game.

Really what this 2,000+ post thread is about is a lot of people justifying why that shouldn’t matter or coming to terms with the fact that it does.

Fundamentally once that explanation is made you either care about that or not. Wizards of the Coast do care, so are doing something about it. It’s rare that something so good, should correspond with making such good business sense. Let’s enjoy that, and the many new people who may start to feel more welcome.

On that note, I’ve up enough of people’s time. Read the forum, read the articles by James already linked. Happy gaming.

 

[pemerton]

There are also two disclaimers there "(to Europeans)" which means he realises it is a matter of taste and what you are familiar and culturally predisposed to find attractive. Also "least lovely" which indicates there is a scale of attractiveness, some are lovely, some a least lovely, but orcs look like the least lovely ones. So for the writing of the time it doesn't seem that bad.

The Quiet American was written in 1955. Which Europeans was JRRT speaking for? The racist ones?