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'.

 

[Hurin70]

We're talking about player characters though. So why not have a halfling that's as strong as the minotaur, if that's the player's vision?

Physics?

 

[3catcircus]

Injustice is wrong regardless of culture. Sure.
Yet, what qualifies as just and unjust is debatable. If a country has a law, forbidding something that we, as westerners, perceive as a human right, we are obviously going to think that law is unjust.
But it's the law of the land, and maybe a long-standing cultural (or religious) tradition, obeyed and respected by the vast majority of the locals.

We can hope for change, encourage it from the outside, but the moment we FORCE that change, or, without going that far, simply the moment we declare all those people to be wrong, and evil...that moment, we are the colonialists, imposing our world view upon everyone.

It's really difficult to have this kind of discussion on this forum without violating rules, though. I think we should stop.

The issue isn't the perception of injustice or not. The issue is the real-world problem of being impossible to separate objective injustice from moral relativism that forms the basis of opinion for authors writing books, screenplays, whatever. This is especially difficult in the case of D&D where you've got alignment and the endless arguments that have occurred over whether or not something that the real-world "we" would consider to be evil would or could be considered not evil in a fantasy society that has a different moral compass.

Of course, it helps if DMs and players actually have critical thinking skills.

A DM can declare "in my campaign, halflings are always evil," while having different definitions of what "evil" means based upon different fantasy nations/cultures. For example - in one region, a DM may decide that "x" is legal. A halfling in that society might try to stop "x" from occurring. The locals would consider that person to be evil for trying to stop "x." In the neighboring kingdom, perhaps "x" is outlawed. In said neighboring kingdom, the same halflings doing "x" instead of trying to stop "x" would be considered evil.

That's the problem - by even reading the above paragraph, every one of us substituted something in the place of "x" in our mind's eye - and guaranteed more than one person used the same substitute for "x" but probably with differing opinions of whether or not "x" is evil.

 

[Vexorg]

Race sounds better than species for fantasy; species feels like more of a science word. Totally works for a sci-fi game, feels odd for fantasy.

If we call elf, orc, halfling, etc "breeds" , it subtlety suggests that PC races are actually all the same species, just differentiated by appearance. Considering how the bloodlines can intermingle (like half-orcs) that seems accurate anyway.

 

[Guest 6801328]

A DM can declare "in my campaign, halflings are always evil," while having different definitions of what "evil" means based upon different fantasy nations/cultures. For example - in one region, a DM may decide that "x" is legal. A halfling in that society might try to stop "x" from occurring. The locals would consider that person to be evil for trying to stop "x." In the neighboring kingdom, perhaps "x" is outlawed. In said neighboring kingdom, the same halflings doing "x" instead of trying to stop "x" would be considered evil.

That's the problem - by even reading the above paragraph, every one of us substituted something in the place of "x" in our mind's eye - and guaranteed more than one person used the same substitute for "x" but probably with differing opinions of whether or not "x" is evil.

I was thinking, "baking bagels with fruit in them"

 

[cbwjm]

I was thinking, "baking bagels with fruit in them"

I was thinking "x"

 

[3catcircus]

I was thinking, "baking bagels with fruit in them"

Raisins aren't technically fruit anymore, seeing as how they're undead...

 

[Lanefan]

Only got through the first couple of pages, so sorry if this one's already been hashed out...

PCs of a given race/species/ancestry/whatever should in general reflect the tendencies of that ancestry due to simple genetics; thus to make a PC be different (e.g. a super-strong Hobbit or a Sickly no-Con Minotaur) should entail a bit of fighting the system - you're in effect fighting your PC's own genetics.

The Monster Manual write-up sets the general parameters for any given creature type. If monsters are to be PCs (and that's a whole nother debate of its own) then for non-negotiable reasons of internal setting consistency either those PCs have to fit within the MM parameters oarameters need to be expanded.

For the "kindred" species, there's nothing at all wrong with Elves in general being more Dextrous than Humans, Dwarves in general being stronger, Hobbits in general being tougher, and so forth - it's just how they are.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

The orcs are always the invaders because that's how they're written . . . . that's the problem we're talking about here.

Allow me to rearrange my last sentence in a way that will perhaps make my point clearer: When orcs aren't the invaders, PCs aren't fighting them.

 

[Vexorg]

Whoosh.

The orcs are always the invaders because that's how they're written . . . . that's the problem we're talking about here.

They can be written differently, less problematically. Eberron is a great example of this, in how orcs are portrayed.

That's the distinction between classical fantasy and modern fantasy.

In classical fantasy the wilderness was the true threat. The destruction of civilization, which was the "good" was always looming. Monsters were symbolic of that, so Tolkiens orcs or Greek harpies were no different than dragons or forest fires.

In modern fantasy, the definition of evil is one person or group dehumanizing another group.

But you don't see orcs as being the racist ones because of this false and dangerous idea that racism requires power over another group.

 

[Haffrung]

that's not what the data shows at all.........google is your friend. Study after study shows we are good, generally. And data about homicide rates, other violent and non-violent crimes, food we eat, how we eat, etc.......is clear. Humans tend to be good.

Humans tend to be altruistic and compassionate to those in the in-group (typically around 300 people). However, attitudes to those in the out-group are very different. When human communities were struggling just to survive (so for most of our history), rates of intra-group violence were very high. And we were simply more violent all-around before the Enlightenment and modern society developed.

Non-state societies (hunter-gatherers and hunter-agriculturalists) have an average violent death rate of 15 per cent - that is 15 per cent of all deaths in the population are due to violence. The average annual death rate from warfare in non-state societies is 524 per 100,000. In the Aztec state, the annual death rate from warfare was 280 per 100,000. To put that in perspective, the annual death rate from warfare for Americans in the 20th century was 3.7 per 100,000.

The annual murder rate in 14th-century Oxford was 110 per 100,000. The annual rate in London today is less than 1 per 100,000.

Of course how much you want your fantasy world to reflect the brutality of pre-modern human societies vs the far more peaceful environment we have today is a matter of choice.