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'.

 

[Olrox17]

You are pretending to be a person from another culture who goes out into the world and searches through the wreckage of other civilizations to claim their wealth as your own. And you usually believe you have the right to kill whomever and whatever gets in your way while doing so.

I don't think D&D is the game for you if you are trying to avoid political thought.

I disagree, spectacularly. The mere mention of D&D being inherently linked to current politics (or rather, current American politics. There’s a world outside the US) would be met with uproarious laughter by my gaming group.

The only politics we care about are what are those pesky zhentarims up to

 

[Zarithar]

Wait what are you talking about. Babylonia was a trade culture that had political structures, and human beings living there that rebelled against problems that arose. They weren’t just a civilization of “ammoral wake up farm die” people. They had political alliances with nearby civilizations, ones they had differences with.

Yeah. Let's not forget that's where we get Hammurabi's Code and The Epic of Gilgamesh (though it may have come from other, even older sources).

 

[Cadence]

Sure. That’s too far for D&D. That would take the game far away from its existing structure. But all we’re talking here is eliminating Int penalties for orcs, and not mandating that they be evil. If somebody wants to play a clever, good orc, let them!

I can agree with all of that. I'm all for separating the mental, alignment, skill, and training parts out and making them more immediate-background-options.

 

[Flamestrike]

I agree with you. And wonder, is there any real difference if we do use "species" and then continue to say "Elves are wise and dextrous?"

Its certainly less problematic. I mean there are clear lines of demarcation between different species. A human isnt a fish for example, and its not racist to say 'human beings cant breath water' because we lack gills.

Race (as we use the term among humans) is a social construct. Species is a discrete biological distinction.

The problems come with defining and assigning different socially constructed ethnicities specific traits (positive and negative). Due to the nature of race as a social construct, those traits are also social constructs, and are entirely arbitrary and often reflective of real world negative racial assumptions and stereoypes.

There are almost always racist undertones (innocent or not) to such assignment. Innocent or otherwise.

 

[RangerWickett]

Lots of games use descriptive rather than proscriptive approaches to a character’s identity. If you want a big strong minotaur you load Strength; if you want a nimble little halfling you load Dex. You describe the character however you like.

Sure. That’s too far for D&D. That would take the game far away from its existing structure. But all we’re talking here is eliminating Int penalties for orcs, and not mandating that they be evil. If somebody wants to play a clever, good orc, let them!

I like how Legend of the Five Rings does it. You have five stats, based on elements, and each element represents a different approach.

Air is sneaky and tricky.
Earth is stoic and patient.
Fire is aggressive and flamboyant.
Water is flexible and charming.
Void is serene and attuned to the world, not to your own desires.

Your stats have no bearing on your body. An old guy can have high Earth. A skinny child might have high Fire. A giant could have high Air.

Visuals are divorced from mechanics.

There's still skills to represent what you've trained in. But one character might make a Melee (Air) check using feints and dirty tricks, and another might use Melee (Void) to stand still and make one single strike when the opponent leaves an opening. They'd have the same chance to hit, but the way the dice work, they'd have different options for 'opportunities.' The air strike could then hide or move away. The void strike could intuit something about the enemy or sense something out of sight.

 

[Dire Bare]

I say just use "species" instead of "race" and you solve many of the problems. Vistani are clearly modeled after the Roma people - but it definitely does fit in with the lore of the Ravenloft setting. I'm not Roma myself, so can't say for sure - but D&D human cultures are all modeled to some extent or another after real human cultures, so I am wondering why Vistani would be any more problematic than Sembians or Thayans. FR, like many fantasy settings (Golarion jumps to mind) are clearly drawing from real world cultural analogues. The older editions sometimes referred to the Vistani as gypsies, which has at least been removed as a descriptor (yes I also agree that Pradesh Gypsies in MTG needed to go).

Side note on gnolls - I hate the way 5e gnolls were changed lore-wise from 4e. I much prefer their portrayal in Eberron and previous editions as a humanoid race which lean towards evil and chaos, but are capable of free thought and going against type (playable gnolls).

Anytime you make a fantasy race or culture closely modeled on a real world culture . . . . you are in danger of perpetuating racist stereotypes, if unintentionally. That doesn't mean, in my view, that we can't have fantasy Vikings or fantasy Arabians in our games (published or private), but it would behoove us to be mindful of avoiding racist stereotypes in our thinking and design, be open to criticism when others tell us we've failed at that, and be forgiving of ourselves and willing to change as we are often rather unaware of some of our cultural biases.

The problem with the Vistani as presented in the original Ravenloft module, and more recently in Curse of Strahd, is that they pretty much embody the worst racist stereotypes of the real world Roma people. I don't think Tracy and Laura Hickman (the original authors) are racist people, they just pulled this depiction straight outta Bram Stoker's Dracula and it's depiction of Roma Gypsies. This trope has been largely copied in a lot of gothic vampire fiction ever since Dracula, often by folks who didn't realize they were perpetuating racist stereotypes, like the Hickmans. Somebody at WotC was aware of this on some level as there was an effort to change how the Vistani were presented in 4th Edition books (maybe 3rd Edition too?) by trying to decouple the Vistani culture from any one race by making them a culture of multi-racial travelers. YMMV on how well this worked. 5th Edition went right back to the source material of the original module and ignored all of the "Ravenloft Campaign" material that expanded the setting, and (probably inadvertently) went back to the earlier, more problematic portrayal of the Vistani.

Also, part of the problem is how the Roma have been historically treated IRL. The Roma, along with the Jewish peoples, have long been the scapegoats in European cultures for all sorts of ills and have been the subject of some pretty horrific racism, discrimination, and oppression since the middle ages if not earlier, continuing till today. The Roma are a smaller group than the Jews, and have faded from public perception (at least, in the U.S.) . . . . which results that not everybody actually understands that the word "gypsy" is a ethnic slur and refers to a real group of people, or how they've been treated over the years. "Gypsy" has become as romanticized as "pirate" in pop culture . . . . but the Roma people still face some pretty significant discrimination today, and it wasn't all that long ago when they were included in Hitler's Holocaust, alongside the Jews and other "undesirables" of the time.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

I'm glad we're having the conversation now, and I'm glad some gamers and designers are attempting to tackle the problem, even if I'm personally not fully satisfied with any of the results yet, or have any answers or solutions myself.

That's where I am on the issue as well. Understand the problem with "race" but find "ancestry" or "heritage" to be two very ugly substitutes (and if you think ancestry sounds bad in English, know that it hurts my ears more when translated to my native Portuguese).

Personally, I like Burning Wheel's "stock": short, direct, no historical complicated background it must pay for. If 6e drops race, I hope they use something like stock, folk, or people. No ancestry or heritage for me, unless they want to sound both uglier and more pretentious with a single word choice.

 

[Flamestrike]

I honestly don't giving think stat bonuses is any different to saying people from the Dales are proficient with longbows and can have the Steadfast feat as was the case in 3e.

At least in 3E such traits were not mandatory, and the game expressly noted that those traits (regional feats I believe they were) were available to any race (species or human ethnicity) that hailed from that geographical area.

You werent locked in to playing a 'barbaric [fantasy not Slav] with -1 to Intelligence' for example.

You could be any race or ethnicity that came from the Dale, and not know one end of a Longbow from the other.

 

[Envisioner]

An unintended consequence of this approach is that it ERASES gay people from existence.

It does not erase the person, it only erases their gayness. Which would be kind of horrifying if it was a literal truth that someone could delete an aspect of your personality out of your brain, but when it comes to fiction, it's just a conservation of detail thing. D&D isn't set in a world that's ostensibly our real world, but Vampire the Masquerade is; never once did I feel like my status as a reader of Playboy magazine was erased from existence because no character in Vampire ever mentions reading Playboy.

It is worthwhile to present other ways of making gay couples more visibly identifiable. In any context that has two spouses or two partners, make one in ten of these couples same-sex.

There's that "one in ten" assertion again; I'd like to see some sources on that info, since everything I've ever seen indicates it's closer to 1.5 out of 100.

 

[TheSword]

Terry K Amthor (who in real life is homosexual I believe) copped a lot of flak back in the day for the inclusion of a homosexual pre-generated PC (designed to be played in game) that was openly homosexual.

It was for Rolemaster (and his setting of Shadow World).

The PC was a Healer, and in that system Healers heal by sympathetic healing (they take on the wounds of the injured themselves, and then heal them subconsciously). Due to the prejudice this dude got growing up (Homosexuality was condemned in his human culture) he found that his powers had a mental 'block' and only worked on women (from memory).

One of the other pre-gens was an Elf, and in elven society Homosexuality was a non issue (and it was explored how the Healers powers worked on the Elf just fine). I believe another PC was written as being prejudiced towards homosexuality (a Priest from memory) and another PC was a repressed bisexual., and possible romantic interest for the Healer PC.

The backstory gave some pointers for players for dealing with some of these issues.

Quite a lot of the backstory of many of the pre-gens dealt with their views towards gender, sexuality and race.

It wasnt written as something central to the characters, but relevant to their interactions with each other, more as a sidenote to larger motivations, political views, backgrounds and morals.

I found it bold and refreshing at the time in a game where PCs were not defined simply by alignments (Rolemaster doesnt have those) but by more complex human desires, ambitions and reasoning.

It's worth a read now to see just how ahead of the curve Amthor was. This campaign was written in the late 20th century from memory, when LGBTI characters simply did not exist in RPG's at all. To place one as a central Pre-Gen PC (and be prepared to explore issues of prejudice and the effects thereof) was a bold move at the time.

Very good! I will check it out

This is what happens in a hack-and-slash game of D&D where narrative is unimportant.

An unintended consequence of this approach is that it ERASES gay people from existence.

It is highly problematic.

It is worthwhile to present other ways of making gay couples more visibly identifiable. In any context that has two spouses or two partners, make one in ten of these couples same-sex.

This distracts from the plot an politicises an issue that has already largely been addressed. Morevover you are free to do it in your games.

In COS there is a gay character that can be the main NPC opponent of Strahd. You assist him in helping his lover regain the memories of his love and thus beat the curse of rage and revenge that blights that NPC, gaining a valuable ally and safe haven against Strahd.

Don't tell me gay characters in these games are all tokens.