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'.

 

[Kannik]

This is a good direction. And another great indication of why I've very much fallen out of favour using attribute modifiers on the different species/races/ancestries. For one, I'm finding it a boring way to differentiate between them (unique abilities or nifty options are much more compelling), for two, as attributes are so pivotal to a character's abilities over time that it ends up putting a damper on certain class/ancestry combinations.

But the biggest thing, as others have pointed out on this thread already, is that while perhaps the average Wookie is big and burly, just as we have amazing diversity of body types among humans, why wouldn't we have the same with Wookies? Especially as we are playing heroes, who are by and large out of the ordinary.

In addition, why do we assume that strength (or any other attribute, but strength is an easy one to grasp for an example) is strictly raw meat, that you are gifted with when squeezed out of the womb (or other birthing device for other ancestries)? Even with some pre-disposition, environment, training, interests, development, nourishment, and etc all affect how muscular someone might become. And even then, muscles alone are not the measure of someone's 'strength', especially in a gaming context where this strength is used to represent abilities such as to move, to fight, and a whole host of other full-body uses. Learning how best to use your body, how to link and root, how to efficiently use all your musculature, all of that, plays a much bigger role over one's effective strength than simple muscle mass. In many situations, a body builder with huge muscles could be much less effective and 'strong' than someone with great body control, high muscle recruitment (not just muscle size), proper structure, skilled use of gravity, momentum, and leverage (think rock climbing, for example), and so on.

So without any attribute bonuses, what's left when making a character to help choose an ancestry are more interestingly designed abilities/talents (which in turn allow for more creative and interesting PC capabilities and side uses) and, even better, the items that often draw us to our favourite fiction: culture, style, worldview, way of life, way of building things, and ways of dealing with things. In short: character. Each ancestry has a particular flavour, and if the world is developed to a certain depth, each species will have different races and or cultures, each with their own particular flavour. A much more exciting way to develop a character than "well, I want +2 INT."

(In some of our D&D games, we allow a player to choose both a mechanics 'race' and an RP 'race'. In world, you are fully your RP choice, but your character is built using the mechanics choice. I wrote a post about this here on enworld some years back, but in short, this has worked splendidly. Everyone not only feels like their ancestry choice, but even more so than the default game since the talents of the mechanics choice are brought into the fiction in very flavourful ways that reinforce RP of both of the ancestry and, even more importantly, the PC themselves).

 

[Kinematics]

Must they?

In order to have generically useful game mechanics: Yes.

 

[Fenris447]

If I may, here's an example of why I think racial stereotyping shouldn't be excluded from D&D. This happened in my game yesterday.

Long story short, my players' party were allied with soldiers from the main governing body to fight some oozes. The oozes came from experiments meant to end a threat posed by the "savages", of which orcs are included. The allied soldiers did not outright accuse the half-orc player, played by a Caucasian player who comes from a relatively privileged socioeconomic background. But there was some tension, especially when the topic came up.

One such solider began taking actions that, in that player's perspective, seemed to border on sabotage during the big boss fight. The player began to suspect that the soldier did not have the party's best interest at heart. So he started thinking about attacking him. If he attacked the soldier, he would be potentially proving the stereotypes against his own race to be true; he would risk furthering the perception of his people as savages. He had to weigh that potential versus possibly his own self-preservation.

The game got a white dude to think about that, which is pretty cool IMO.

 

[Morrus]

In order to have generically useful game mechanics: Yes.

Yet many games manage without, including games I've written. I respectfully disagree.

 

[DND_Reborn]

In order to have generically useful game mechanics: Yes.

Well, I don't quite agree with this, although I understand your reasoning. Having a sound baseline is important.

@Morrus can view PCs as heroic and exceptional by default if he wishes to, there is certainly nothing wrong with it. It is just as I pointed out, such views generally vary from table to table IMX.

 

[DND_Reborn]

If I may, here's an example of why I think racial stereotyping shouldn't be excluded from D&D. This happened in my game yesterday.

Long story short, my players' party were allied with soldiers from the main governing body to fight some oozes. The oozes came from experiments meant to end a threat posed by the "savages", of which orcs are included. While the allied soldiers did not outright accuse the half-orc player, played by a Caucasian player who comes from a relatively privileged socioeconomic background.

One such solider began taking actions that, in that player's perspective, seemed to border on sabotage during the big boss fight. The player began to suspect that the soldier did not have the party's best interest at heart. So he started thinking about attacking him. If he attacked the soldier, he would be potentially proving the stereotypes against his own race to be true; he would risk furthering the perception of his people as savages. He had to weigh that potential versus possibly his own self-preservation.

The game got a white dude to think about that, which is pretty cool IMO.

Nice post, given the context of your session it IS cool the player actually had the awareness to think about it and how his actions would promote the stereotype and so he acted to overcome it for his character.

The problem with stereotyping is two-fold IMX:

1. it makes those stereotyped more likely to fall into the stereotype due to outside pressure and feelings of entrapment
2. it makes those viewing the stereotyping as it being acceptable.

I've stereotyped people before and have been stereotyped myself (I am certain most of us have at some point in our lives). It is frustrating to say the least to feel you have to prove yourself to others that they are wrong to stereotype you.

To be honest, I have noticed myself to be more prejudice over cultures than races really. It is something I try to keep in mind constantly so I don't judge others. The issue I have with it, is while I will do everything I can to respect others and their choices and desires, etc., I find, too often, that those people end up not respecting mine and because of the other affronts they have suffered, are thinking only of themselves and their people. That makes it much more difficult for me to be concerned with them, unfortunately.

 

[Nate1970]

Recent Kickstarter called Ancestry & Culture An Alternative to Race in 5e is really good.

 

[CleverNickName]

I like Crawford's ideas. Especially in light of current events, I feel that race in D&D is long overdue for an overhaul.

Not long ago, there was a thread about "things we miss in other editions" or something along those lines, and I remember that I wrote about how I missed the old racial penalties and favored classes of 3rd Edition. I wrote that I wished the game developers had kept those rules, because I liked the versatility and challenges they brought to the character creation "mini-game."

But recent events in my home country (and indeed, around the world) have brought certain things to light for me, things that I should have seen a lot sooner. I've since changed my mind, and I can see that it was the right call.

Renaming race to "ancestry" would be more appropriate, I think. And it would be more accurate too, since there are so many "half-" races (and more are added every year). It used to just be half-elves and half-orcs, but now we have half-lycanthropes (aka Shifters), half-devils, half-elementals...

If this is done properly, we could see a much larger variety of player options. For example, let's say every character gets a number of ancestry options at character creation. For the sake of discussion, let's make it 6.

A straight-up elf would choose their six favorite Elf Ancestry traits; and a straight-up dwarf would choose their six favorite Dwarf Ancestry traits. A character from both ancestries would choose 2 of their favorite Elf Ancestry traits (like Keen Senses and +1 Dex), and 4 of their favorite Dwarf Ancestry traits (maybe Darkvision, +1 Con, Stonecutting, and Poison Resistance).

"What, never seen a pointy-eared dwarf before? Hrmph. My mother was a dwarf, and my dad was an elf, if you must know. Family reunions were very rare, and always fun."

 

[darjr]

Good. I am very glad the designers are taking this seriously.

 

[Doug McCrae]

My personal opinion is that if you look at a fantasy race or heritage or ancestry and see a Human Ethnic Group you probably have some issues to work out.

"I do think of the 'Dwarves' like Jews: at once native and alien in their habitations, speaking the languages of the country, but with an accent due to their own private tongue" - JRR Tolkien, letter to Naomi Mitchison 8 December 1955.

"The Orcs are definitely stated to be corruptions of the 'human' form seen in Elves and Men. They are (or were) 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." - JRR Tolkien, letter to Forrest J. Ackerman June 1958.