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'.

 

[Zardnaar]

For who, exactly? This is nonsense as a generalisation. I mean, I can't take anyone who says stuff like "Pax Romana" entirely seriously, but that's an absolutely ludicrous and ahistorical perspective because it's so generalized. I mean, I'm not sure it was even true for most people who literally lived in Rome itself! Not given all the violence, criminality, regime changes and so on - and noting that 20% of people in Rome itself was slaves, but just as much "people" as everyone else, so their health, prosperity, freedom and so on must be equally considered to Roman aristos, equites and so on - which you clearly aren't. In some parts of the countryside around Rome it was as high as 40% slaves, often in much worse conditions than Rome too (these are somewhat conservative modern figures note, not the overblown figures of the 1970s and earlier, or the minimized figures of some earlier eras).

It's also full of ridiculous assumptions, like that the Romans arriving across-the-board "improved" the situation, rather than merely changing it. Britain is a good example. Prior to the Romans, the Britons used an elaborate and highly productive system of crop rotation, that was superior to Roman methods. After the Roman invasion, this was abandoned, and they used drastically inferior Roman farming methods.

Sure, baths, wine and so on are lovely, to modern sensibilities (though Britain was importing tons of wine pre-conquest, pre-Caesar's little jaunt, even), but just painting everything "Roman", totally mindlessly, completely failing to see where the locals did something better (unless, perhaps, it let them be better at killing people), just engaging in light syncretism to avoid religious warfare wasn't some kind of wonderful thing.

In many other places, literally all the Romans ever did was cause utter havoc (especially to the East of Rome), kill a lot of people, and take a lot of slaves.

You're also promoting the completely ahistorical idea (particularly undermined by archaeology) that without Rome or the like, there was "constant low-level warfare", and with Rome, all was calm. In many cases the presence of Rome had limited or no impact on "low-level warfare" (this is nonsense that the Romans themselves spread). In many more, it simply wasn't the case before the Romans arrived that was "constant low-level warfare". There's no evidence to support that assertion as a generalization. What next, you're going to tell me the Delian League was for the benefit of all Hellenes? Imagine repeating Roman (or Athenian) propaganda, thousands of years later, uncritically.

You're welcome to pick a specific place and claim the Romans improved it, but to talk generally about the "Pax Romana" being a huge improvement is ahistorical nonsense. In some cases the Romans massacred more people that we can even imagine being killed in "low-level warfare", even over decades (again Britain is one of these - there's no evidence of any warfare on remotely the scale the Romans engage in before they arrived, and no evidence of "constant" warfare - none - the evidence suggests it was irregular/sporadic and small-scale (not this overwrought, even romantic-Grimdark idea of people constantly fighting. This isn't the 41st Millenium, mate). The one massacre of Boudicca's rebels might well have killed more people than had died in decades or centuries of warfare in Britain before that, as what evidence of warfare we do have seems to suggest generally low casualty rates in the centuries before Rome).

The alphabet you're using. Aquired that via Rome

They didn't invent it though.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Then why does D&D have evil races? Why not just evil individuals?

As Tom Shippey says in The Road to Middle-Earth "There can be little doubt that the orcs entered Middle-earth originally just because the story needed a continual supply of enemies over whom one need feel no compunction, 'the infantry of the old war' to use Tolkien's phrase." Tolkien was telling stories about war so he needed an army of bad guys who were unquestionably evil. The fantasy supplement for Chainmail had the same requirement.

D&D doesn't because it's about individuals and small scale action, not armies.

I'd say the problem is greater because it's small scale action. If you're playing a strategic wargame, your 8-3 unit attacks the 4-4 unit, moves and gets the victory points for controlling the city. You're so far removed from the action that you can abstract away that on the ground, the siege and invasion are probably rife with war crimes.. If you're roleplaying an individual confronted to other individuals, it's more difficult to abstract that away. You need those "unquestionably evil bad guys" more IMHO. Opponents with human-like free will are able to change. We rehabilitate criminals, even if it's not always successful, we don't kill them. If a group-of-beings has no free will and is absolutely evil, you can kill them without moral problem (and not worry about the dependant baby gnoll problem mentionned above in the thread). That's why I think D&D need those. I generally like human opponents with credible motivations, and PCs not to be murderhobos. They are expect to act morally, not kill on sight bad guys but arrest them and bring them to justice. But sometimes, players can also want to "just kill things to let the steam off" and meeting an evil intelligent group-of-beings gives them decent opponents. If D&D orcs are Afro-American people in disguise (something I didn't realize until this thread, probably because I was roleplaying my orcs wrong, with porcine traits), they should be removed altogether (and not just changed to have good aspects as well as continuing to be a proxy for Afro-American people), but another species of evil, intelligent group-of-beings should be introduced (in my recent experience, gnoll/goblins/bugbear have more often filled the niche occupied by orcs). Preferably one not modeled to evoke a real life human group (no indian, no roman, no basque...) to avoid a repeat of the problem at some point in the future.

 

[InnocentPope]

Hyperbole much?

No one is taking your stuff by making the game more accessible for people of different background that yours, get over it.

If "your stuff" is something that you view as harmless fun, which is now being deemed "problematic" and banned from all ongoing play (as with those magic cards), then yes, they are "taking your stuff".

 

[Haldrik]

Drow need a fix. Probably something like +2 dex, +1 int or charisma. They're supposed to be good wizards. Oops.

Or all races get a floating +2 a'la Pathfinder 2.

Personally I hate the "racist" assumption that all elves are dexterous.

If the recently announced ethnicity/people/folk/origin customizability allows me to officially delete elven Dexterity, I will breathe a sigh of relief.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I find it a problem that people assume that because Goliaths are tall that they're strong. I mean, that's not true in real life. You're not born strong, you have to exercise a ton to become strong. I'm personally fairly tall, and God knows that I couldn't beat a 10 year old at arm wrestling.

I mean, this isn't racist really, it's just strange that people have been justifying Goliath's strength by their size.

 

[Eyes of Nine]

I find it a problem that people assume that because Goliaths are tall that they're strong. I mean, that's not true in real life. You're not born strong, you have to exercise a ton to become strong. I'm personally fairly tall, and God knows that I couldn't beat a 10 year old at arm wrestling.

I mean, this isn't racist really, it's just strange that people have been justifying Goliath's strength by their size.

My Firbolg monk has an 8 STR and a 17 Dex. Because we allow ability scores to be assigned as desired (+2 to one, +1 to any other). Why not, right?

 

[Haldrik]

Simple dna testing should solve this argument one way or the other.

Egyptian DNA testing has already been done. They are mix now, and were a mix then.

Still it should be noted that the most powerful (and scientifically advanced) dynasties 12, 13, 17, 18 originate from the south from black Africa.

Reading the article:

"From 1400 to 400 ... a cluster of ancient non-African populations based east of the Mediterranean Sea."

This is to be expected because we know from Egyptians records, there were massive influxes from "Amu" (East Mediterranean) associating with the "Hyksos" dynasty, and that many of these Nonafricans became slaves belonging to the Egyptians.

 

[Grazzt]

If the recently announced ethnicity/people/folk/origin customizability allows me to officially delete elven Dexterity, I will breathe a sigh of relief.

What's stopping you from doing it in your campaign now? I mean, my campaign, the last 30+ years, we don't have halflings. At all. Like they don't even exist. They never have; never will. (Same for dragonborn and a few others.) I don't care what the rule books in any edition say.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I wish this was a completely different thread, because it's really interesting to me. @doctorbadwolf it sounds like you are talking about a system more like Cypher system, with Might, Speed, and Intellect - especially your mention of pools and fueling abilities.

I'm playing in a Numenara game right now, and I haven't yet been able to articulate why I don't like the core mechanic. Maybe because it's fiddly and takes me out of the fiction just when the action is getting good; maybe because the "Effort" and "Edge" concepts don't really come out of the fiction itself (I don't describe what exactly the "effort" I am expending and how my Intellect "edge" supports that effort). Maybe that's it; maybe it's something else. It's sad, because the setting is awesome.

I wouldn’t know exactly, because I bounced off Numenara and haven’t looked at the cypher system by itself, but I think a thread on this could be really interesting.

 

[Cadence]

I find it a problem that people assume that because Goliaths are tall that they're strong. I mean, that's not true in real life. You're not born strong, you have to exercise a ton to become strong. I'm personally fairly tall, and God knows that I couldn't beat a 10 year old at arm wrestling.

Size doesn't make each individual stronger, but I would guess that if we took someone who is medium framed and 4' tall and someone who is medium framed and 6' tall, and had them each put the same amount of time into training that they would end up in very different places strength wise. The 6' tall person feels like they would be able to put less work in to lift x pounds than the 4' person of equal training (e.g. a bonus?). That seems to fit with the steady increase in world record weights lifted by weight class, for example, unless the lifters who weigh less are all putting in less training.