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'.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Why should evil monsters remain in D&D at all? And what are the implications of removing the notion of evil monsters from the game entirely? How would the game change if compassionate and just PCs are expected to reason and negotiate with all living things that show signs of intelligence without resorting to violence?

The thing is that most characters, I guess, have no problem to resort to violence against other people if their deeds are bad enough. It's emulating a trope of both a very barbaric "justice" like England's Blood Code in the 18th century and a tolerance of vigilantism appropriate only, IMHO, in setting where the PC are the only one who can actually do something, not because they only have the firepower to do something but because there is no social structure to mandate them.

 

[Doug McCrae]

You take from it what you want, but at least you agree his intent was not racist.

My concern is not really with Tolkien's intent or whether or not he was a racist or why he might have perceived Mongols as a great force for evil. My concern is with the message of his published works, primarily The Lord of the Rings, partly because it's being read by people today and partly because it's imo the most important source for D&D.

I think by "Mongol-types" Tolkien might either have been referring to peoples of his own time who he saw as being of the same race as the historic Mongols or alternatively he was using it in the same way as the outdated and (to us) offensive racial category "Mongoloid". In both cases the referent is the same - a wide range of East Asian peoples. In describing orcs I don't think he needed to use such peoples as his starting point. He didn't need to create orcs, or write The Lord of the Rings. All these decisions were his own choice.

There are many other derivations from real world history and peoples in The Lord of the Rings such as the Corsairs of Umbar (Barbary Corsairs), Battle of the Pelennor Fields (Battle of the Catalaunian Plains in which the Huns participated), and the Battle of Helm's Deep (Siege of Rhodes where the Ottoman Empire was the attacking force).

If they were meant to represent a specific people

I'd say derived from, rather than represent. Their appearance derives from East Asian peoples. They use scimitars. They are used as stand-ins for the Huns and Ottoman Empire when Tolkien uses battles featuring those groups as his sources. Their main enclave, Mordor, is in the east. The horses of the steppe peoples have become the wolf-like wargs. The grey wolf is associated with Turkic people. Their allies include a derivate of the Barbary Corsairs, real life allies of the Ottoman Empire. There is a parallel between Minas Ithil/Minas Morgul and Constantinople/Istanbul.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

That's exactly my point and my suggestion. Thanks for supporting my position, because I was beginning to think I was the only one to see this solution. I think it's that simple. I think it's the easiest solution to the problem with orcs. But the official answer by WOTC isn't this one, as they said in their announcement :

"We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples. We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do. "

So we'll still have the orcs we know, with all the problem mentionned in this thread (inherited from a racist outlook against asians, physical traits that are lifted from a racist stereotyping handboook) BUT with "culturally complex" societies and the explicit mention that they are like people not monsters. I am pretty sure it doesn't remove the racism of the way orcs are presented. It even acknowledges the link between orcs and, to quote WOTC, "real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated." I don't understand why they didn't took the route of MAKING ORCS DISTINCTIVELY UNLIKE ANY REAL LIFE GROUP.

While the physical descriptions may still parallel stereotypes, the steps taken to make the races culturally complex actually addresses a lot of the complaints levied...potentially.

 

[GameOgre]

While the physical descriptions may still parallel stereotypes, the steps taken to make the races culturally complex actually addresses a lot of the complaints levied...potentially.

Let's take totally fictitious made up races in a role playing game about killing beings and taking their stuff that some people find racist because they imagine the game has based them on real life people....and make those totally fictitious folk more realistic and base them on real life people? That sounds like it can't possibly go wrong. Lets even give them governments and social aspects to flush them out that will not actually exist anywhere in our world and that no one will ever think reminds them of their own country and then become offended.

This is a GREAT idea!


Heck with it. At least D&D will burn bright.

Get's Popcorn.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

When I see the word “race” in a game of D&D, I tend to view it in abstract, game-oriented way; which is to say, “race” is like “hit points.” I don’t have any particular emotional reaction to the word – either positive or negative – when it’s used in this context.

When I see the word “race” in a census question, or as a query into my ethnicity on an application, I scream bloody murder, and rant about the absurdity of the category, and complain about people still being stuck in thoroughly debunked modes of classification based on superficial points of similarity.

The word “race” as it appears in (fantasy) literature is a bit more difficult for me – e.g. the race of Men. Maybe I have a kind of literary or poetic or evocatory attachment to the word when it is used in certain contexts.

On balance, I think we’re better off leaving the word “race” in the past. It’s a pseudocategory based on pseudoscience; its retention in D&D is hard to reconcile with this basic fact.

I do like lineage.

 

[Doug McCrae]

This post is about the word “mongrel”, a racial slur used to refer to a person of mixed race. It was used in 1st and 2nd edition AD&D to refer to half-orcs. A possible pathway for this is traced via two Appendix N authors, HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard.


Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916):

It is scarcely necessary to cite the universal distrust, often contempt, that the half-breed between two sharply contrasted races inspires the world over. Belonging physically and spiritually to the lower race, but aspiring to recognition as one of the higher race, the unfortunate mongrel, in addition to a disharmonic physique, often inherits from one parent an unstable brain which is stimulated and at times overexcited by flashes of brilliancy from the other.​

HP Lovecraft

The Lurking Fear (1923):
“Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to produce the pitiful squatters.”

The Call of Cthulhu (1928):
“My uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor.”

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (written 1927, published 1943):
“Curwen’s own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal.”


Robert E Howard

Black Colossus (1933):
“Legend made Thugra Khotan more than human; his worship yet lingered in a mongrel degraded cult”

Red Nails (1936):
“They’re a sort of mongrel Stygians, mixed with another race that wandered into Stygia from the east some centuries ago and were absorbed by them. They’re called Tlazitlans.”

The Hyborian Age (1938):
“The lower classes are a down-trodden, mongrel horde, a mixture of negroid, Stygian, Shemitish, even Hyborian bloods.”


1st edition AD&D Players Handbook:
“Orcs are fecund and create many cross-breeds, most of the offspring of such being typically orcish. However, some one-tenth of orc-human mongrels are sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human.”

1st edition AD&D Monster Manual:
“As orcs will breed with anything, there are any number of unsavory mongrels with orcish blood… such sorts are basically orcs although they can sometimes (10%) pass themselves off as true creatures of their other stock (goblins, hobgoblins, humans, etc.).”

2nd edition AD&D Monstrous Manual:
“The mongrel offspring of orcs and these other species are known as half-orcs… Half-orcs are distrusted by both human and orc cultures because they remind each of the other’s racial stock.”

Half-elves are never described as mongrels.


From 3rd edition onward the word was never used to refer to half-orcs in the core rules. This is, in my view, a good thing. It also demonstrates that change due to concerns about racism has been a feature of D&D at least as far back as 3rd edition.

 

[MGibster]

I'm actually looking forward to the changes. If I want to play Forgotten Realms the way it was presented in 1992 I can dig out my old books and play me some Forgotten Realms. I really love old school D&D and while I want to remember the roots of the game I don't want the future to be unnecessarily hampered by the past.

 

[DammitVictor]

This post is about the word “mongrel”, a racial slur used to refer to a person of mixed race. It was used in 1st and 2nd edition AD&D to refer to half-orcs. A possible pathway for this is traced via two Appendix N authors, HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard.

Note also that the term is not typically used to refer to half-elves, except by elves we're supposed to recognize as unsympathetic-- because they're racist.

 

[Mercurius]

I guess it's time for me to bow out too.

I'll leave these threads with this thought - I am spectacularly thankful that the people in charge of D&D are not the people in this thread. The defense of the indefensible has been repeated time and time again. Oh, we can't change this or that. It's pandering. Etc.

You are wrong.

Every single time.

You have been shown to be wrong on this issue EVERY SINGLE TIME.

You have never, not once, in history, been vindicated.

I cannot fathom the thought process that thinks, "Hey, real life people are telling me that this is offensive, but, my imaginary friends are so important to me that I'm going to ignore what real life people are telling me so I can continue to play with my imaginary friends."

Folks really, really need to take a very, very hard look at their priorities when their imaginary friends are more important than the feelings of real people.

Nice way to make a straw man while slamming the door on the way out. That is not at all an accurate depiction of my thought process, nor does it reflect an understanding of my perspective. This is a mischaracterization of the people who disagree with your take, Hussar. We--or at least I can speak for myself--are not the latest iteration of the same old cavalry trying to halt progress. I am deeply concerned about racism and want to foster inclusivity, but just disagree on your interpretation of racism in D&D and think there are different ways to address these issues. But ignoring or not understanding that allows you to mis-characterize me and others, and prevents any real dialogue from occuring.

 

[Mercurius]

This post is about the word “mongrel”, a racial slur used to refer to a person of mixed race. It was used in 1st and 2nd edition AD&D to refer to half-orcs. A possible pathway for this is traced via two Appendix N authors, HP Lovecraft and Robert E Howard.


Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (1916):

It is scarcely necessary to cite the universal distrust, often contempt, that the half-breed between two sharply contrasted races inspires the world over. Belonging physically and spiritually to the lower race, but aspiring to recognition as one of the higher race, the unfortunate mongrel, in addition to a disharmonic physique, often inherits from one parent an unstable brain which is stimulated and at times overexcited by flashes of brilliancy from the other.​

HP Lovecraft

The Lurking Fear (1923):
“Many of the crowded family degenerated, moved across the valley, and merged with the mongrel population which was later to produce the pitiful squatters.”

The Call of Cthulhu (1928):
“My uncle’s death was far from natural. He fell on a narrow hill street leading up from an ancient waterfront swarming with foreign mongrels, after a careless push from a negro sailor.”

The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (written 1927, published 1943):
“Curwen’s own clerks and captains hated and feared him, and all his sailors were mongrel riff-raff from Martinique, St. Eustatius, Havana, or Port Royal.”


Robert E Howard

Black Colossus (1933):
“Legend made Thugra Khotan more than human; his worship yet lingered in a mongrel degraded cult”

Red Nails (1936):
“They’re a sort of mongrel Stygians, mixed with another race that wandered into Stygia from the east some centuries ago and were absorbed by them. They’re called Tlazitlans.”

The Hyborian Age (1938):
“The lower classes are a down-trodden, mongrel horde, a mixture of negroid, Stygian, Shemitish, even Hyborian bloods.”


1st edition AD&D Players Handbook:
“Orcs are fecund and create many cross-breeds, most of the offspring of such being typically orcish. However, some one-tenth of orc-human mongrels are sufficiently non-orcish to pass for human.”

1st edition AD&D Monster Manual:
“As orcs will breed with anything, there are any number of unsavory mongrels with orcish blood… such sorts are basically orcs although they can sometimes (10%) pass themselves off as true creatures of their other stock (goblins, hobgoblins, humans, etc.).”

2nd edition AD&D Monstrous Manual:
“The mongrel offspring of orcs and these other species are known as half-orcs… Half-orcs are distrusted by both human and orc cultures because they remind each of the other’s racial stock.”

Half-elves are never described as mongrels.


From 3rd edition onward the word was never used to refer to half-orcs in the core rules. This is, in my view, a good thing. It also demonstrates that change due to concerns about racism has been a feature of D&D since 3rd edition at least.

Thanks for providing a good example of changes that can be made that don't unnecessarily alter D&D heritage. Evidently progress has been made.