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'.

 

[Minigiant]

That, sir, is the beauty of the drows. They should be dead and yet...
Maybe having such a rigid caste system is the key for a CE society to thrive. And yet, there is so much chaos in their city that they do not qualify as LE. Go figure....

The thing about CE is either you have to be too expensive for the people you threaten to deal with (raiders), have a magical backing that boosts the economy and logistics you aren't running (demons), or stay hidden from your enemies (cultists)

Drow are the opposite on all accounts and their goddess screws them over for fun sometimes.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

Doesn't their society literally only work due to Lolth?

Take that, drow atheists!

 

[Warren Ellis]

Originally, Gygax did NOT intend the 'races' to be races as we thought of them in reality. They were not simply humans with different colored skins. They were completely different creatures.

Orcs were as different from humans as a wolf was from a shark. They were completely different types of creatures, but they were both humanoid in that they could stand on two legs and had arms and an opposable thumb. Something in evolution or otherwise with magic had made it so that there was an abundance of creatures that had these features, but they were extremely different than simply what we call race (which isn't really race at all, but some call it that among our human species). They were monsters and foreign to each other. The very way they thought was alien to the other, it was so completely different that they wouldn't even act the same in their actions.

This explanation was one of those that Gygax used to explain WHY Elves, Dwarves, and others had level limits. They didn't think like humans did. Their entire psych was different. They were not just humans that were shorter, or with pointed ears, or with fangs...they were things that were absolutely NOT human. Because of this, they could only emulate humanity (aka, that which allowed humans to level up and advance in that fashion) to a certain degree. They were only mimicking human behavior, but as it was just a copycat attempt on their part, they could not accomplish entirely what a human could do.

This same idea also applied to monsters. These were monsters in every way and shape. They were as different from humans as a dinosaur is from a person. In fact, dinosaurs are some of the monsters that were included as monsters. These are not humans, they are not people with different forms, they are completely different animals and creatures that think, act, and behave differently.

Gygax tried to present this idea of creatures being different from humans in every way...and failed. Players took AD&D and played elves...like humans with pointy ears. They played Dwarves as humans that were short, stocky, and with beards. They basically played everything as a human, just with slightly different looks.

Doesn't this imply that instead of trying to humanize these races or something, by claiming they're similar to real world ethnicities, instead we should treat them as genuinely alien in thought and biology instead?

Like from what you're saying, it seems like the fault is completely the players and that this entire thread is kind of complaining about nothing because there are genuine, real biological differences with honestly alien thought processes and that instead, to pretend they represent real world ethnicities is speciesist toward them by claiming they're all human in some way.

So it seems like instead we should focus even harder on their mechanical stats for use in roleplaying, becsuse biologically and mentally, they're not human. At all.

It's only superficial.

If anything, it sounds like we're attempting to impose our values on these rsces or species or whatever they are, by claiming they represent real world ethnicities when in fact they don't.

TLDR: It seems to me the issue is nkt D&D but the player trying to force this idea on D&D

D&D: Elves, orcs, dwarves etc aren't human.

Player: No they're all flavors of human and you (D&D) are trying to be rscist or ethnicist about it because I'm pushing that belief they're all flavors of human onto the text.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

And that is problematic with what we see with racial relations today, especially in looking at the real world. If all race is in D&D are different looking humans, than portraying a race (such as Orks) as ugly or lesser simply because...has direct implications on how we see race in the real world as well. In light of HOW we play races and monsters today as PC's, perhaps it IS time for a change where we seriously consider what we are portraying, because if all they are in play are different looking humans, than we should focus more on the equality of representation of those different races and monsters rather than putting one or the other down or making them the enemy just because they look or act differently.

I don't think anyone is talking about putting one or the other down or making them the enemy just because they look or act differently.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Honestly I prefer yuan-ti as the major evil race anyway. Whereas orcs just live in warbands and commit slaughter, yuan-ti send certain agents into civilization to subtly manipulate it while the rest of them capture large groups of people to serve either as slaves, food, sacrifices, or converts (through body-and-mind warping evil rituals).

 

[Warren Ellis]

Honestly I prefer yuan-ti as the major evil race anyway. Whereas orcs just live in warbands and commit slaughter, yuan-ti send certain agents into civilization to subtly manipulate it while the rest of them capture large groups of people to serve either as slaves, food, sacrifices, or converts (through body-and-mind warping evil rituals).

So instead the orcs should be the engineered footsoldiers of the yuan-ti then?

 

[Coroc]

That, sir, is the beauty of the drows. They should be dead and yet...
Maybe having such a rigid caste system is the key for a CE society to thrive. And yet, there is so much chaos in their city that they do not qualify as LE. Go figure....

The rules to prevent self extermination are quite strict, take the example of one house attacking the other. The attack has to be carried out perfectly, eliminating or catching every noble, or the other houses will gang up against the attacker. Everyone else who survives gets assimilated to the attacking house, so it is not senseless extermination or guilt by association.
It is a kind of survival of the fittest for a folk which has not many challenges in the underdark. Of course a house war should not occur every other day, or it still might lead to going extinct.

Labeling drow (of Menzoberranzan) CE makes sense, because they do evil for the sake of evil, no matter if they form a society.

Imagine a society which would not punish , but instead promote killers. Unless there were to mayny killers such a society could well last for a while.

 

[DariusArgent]

The funny thing is that there are SO many other RPG games that tackle these "problematics" and are better than D&D.
Yet people latch onto D&D like it's their holy grail or something.

 

[Charlaquin]

You can’t expect a human to be able to portray a creature that doesn’t think like a human. All humanoids are necessarily reflections of humanity no matter how much Gygax or anyone else professes otherwise because they are written, acted, and directed by humans, with human brains and human experiences. They can attempt to play something “alien” to their own experience, but the ways in which they do so are themselves shaped by their human experiences and thought processes.

 

[Maletherin]

How about "species"? The notion of 'race' is a construct, anyway, and within actual humanity means nothing beyond appearance (that is, it's not tied to behavior or moral or intellectual capacity, like 19th Century 'racialists' believed). And for blended species, like half-whatever, it's easy: a hand-wave of "different species can interbreed in the magical world."

RQ did species decades ago.