D&D has been doing this , since before  any of you were born.. i stopped gettign thier Books   at 3.5.

 though the game   was good, it was built to make money. This is  just another step  to that means....

 Bottom line?..your  game, your world... Heck? with out Tropes, there would be no movies, no books..no video games... Just? play how you want.

I think my biggest issue is a lack of understanding. I don't understand how the correlation is being made between orcs/drow/goblins whatever to humans who are suffering in the real world. Furthermore I don't understand how this would be considered an important matter given the plethora of other issues we have in the United State that should be getting addressed; feels like small fish.

That being said, if doing this somehow makes people feel better than so be it, I'll still play the game the way I want to, and handle issues at the table the same way I would have before, with conversation and understanding.

 its a money thing..  use   the currant  climate  to cash in.  You runa game..and you go out of your way to hurt your  friends?..maybe  you shouldn't be their friend?

  My people came over to  America from Hungary  before WWI//i  do not have a  thing about Gypsies..Magyar  ect ect..I am quite proud of it.

 i did not have a dog  in the Civil war fight..but i know what side my  grandparents would have been on, had they been here...because they came over to escape oppression.

  Real Life..is harsh... and people don't  care too much.

 GAming is to be an escape... leave the RL  behind  while you play... for me?  I won't help D&D  profit  from this... i can run games  for the next 30-40 years, whatever i have left... There is nothing they can tell me...nothing more i need from them...

Before people get all "SJW" or "PC" just sit and consider this:

1) Races as we know it have evolved considerably as each edition comes by. In the beginning there was little beyond "this race is evil because Lord of the Rings says so". They have constantly been tweaking and evolving races. The Drow are a classic example of a race that got upgraded was the Drow. By spending time and energy on actually creating a society and civlization and history for them, by focusing stories on their outliers and deviants to show they are not ALL the same, that they have their own paragons and abberants like any other society the whole race was elevated from "just another evil race" to one of the most beloved and iconic races in D&D.

2) People want deeper, more mature playing experiences. Having a race be evil just because is very simple and boring. That kind of black & white morality plays is fine for children but as the artform grows and matures there is a significant part of the audience that wants to see more and understand more. There is a great blog post that talked about how Sauron is actually a champion and a hero from the goblins perspective and it is a really fascinating analysis when you "flip the script" and show how brutal elves had been in oppressing goblinlkind. Suddenly this "always evil" race is a lot more interesting and nuanced if you consider that the manual was written from the elves perspective. This draws incredible parallels to real life where the Romans would dismiss the Gauls as evil savages even though the Gauls were actually neither. Introducing the concept that the monster manual is not a universal truth and instead perhaps a biased piece of work that has an underlying agenda is a huge step for the universe. It allows you to introduce new stories and new twists and turns on timeless classics.

3) Nobody is forcing you to upgrade. It is a lot easier to dumb things down then smarten things up. If you want simple black & white tales then you've got 4 editions of "always evil" goblinoids to pick from.

I feel that changing the entire back history and mythology of a species is patronizing to the current world problems.  Crow aren't evil because they are black, they are evil because the vast majority of them worship a CE goddess. I think a better solution is to get rid of the alignment system.  Orcs raid and subjugate other species, if that makes them evil then humans have been evil for their entire history.

The belief that only white humans exist in D&D is a matter of the game world.  The Forgotten Realms has the same diversity as the real world in regards to that and even better all the nations are technically at the "height" of their civilization at the same time.

I do like the idea of tying abilities to classes though.  That makes it so there's no more "Well I'm playing a bard so what species do I need to play to optimize that?" . I think giving every character a +2 to their primary class stat (or one of them, player's choice, in the case of multiples) and a floating +1 is a much better idea.  Then give the species traits to the character (with halfelves receiving another floating +1).

I know it's deviating a bit to talk about how to change the mechanics of the system, but honestly we could remove stat bumps altogether if we wanted. Make up for it with additional points at point buy, or floating point adds for people who roll stats poorly. You don't need to be extra strong just because you are a half orc. Then people would feel they could play whatever race and class combo they wanted without feeling gimped.

Something to consider...

Like it or not, Dungeons & Dragons is the public face of the roleplaying world. Talk to any non-gamer and they will probably have heard of D&D, and precious little else. Like with board games, most non-gamers will know Monopoly and Cluedo (Clue to you Merkins!) but not many more.

As D&D is the public face of our community, for them to be perceived by the rest of the world as racially-biased, old-fashioned, out-of-touch, etc. puts the games we love at risk. In the same way that the Christian Right attacked D&D players in the old days for being a bunch of Satan-worshipping cultists trying to corrupt our kids, a modern perspective might view RPGs as having an agenda against specific racial groups, the ‘evil’ orcs, drow, etc. Any label of ‘racism’ is unwelcome, whether it is justified or not.

Any work done to promote inclusion and diversity of thinking in the games we love is a good thing. And if you don’t want to buy new materials then that is fine, don’t. But don’t stop others making informed choices about what they buy and how they play.

I think y'all would benefit from reading The Iron Dream.

D&D's base landscape is based primarily on the works of white men from the middle of the 20th century: Tolkien (whose "evil race" was justified in his own canon, but taken out of that canon is just...ya built a fantasy world with built-in justification for genocide there) and Howard (who believed that black people were de-evolved from white ones and was best pals with Lovecraft). It centres an Anglo-Saxon, imperialist (Tolkien) "standard" culture where the people you're allowed to kill - that are presumed to threaten the white kingdoms by their necessarily savage existence (Howard) are presumed to be...Not That. You can have whatever colour D&D character, but their world is looked at through that lens, which is reflected in the mechanics.

Heck, we have someone up there comparing people forming certain civil rights movements not to be lynched in the street to green-skinned monster races in this thread with that hashtag, and none of the subsequent posters blinked; that says it all. It will take time to see whether this is more than bandwagon-jumping, but hey, don't like don't buy, whatever.

In reply to tibiotarsus (msg # 15):

I did say the hashtag was flippant, not funny, clever or true.

I do agree that the majority of well known fantasy fiction is written by white men - Tolkien, CS Lewis, George Martin, etc. I can’t think of any BAME fantasy writers, so maybe I need to expand my reading lists... I will check out Iron Dream.

Stan Nicholls (albeit another white male author) writes his Orcs series from the POV of an orc warband. In that series the humans are very much the bad guys while the orcs are the protagonists (not nice guys, but not evil). A change of perspective is always good to provoke thought.

I feel the problem with orcs/goblinoids related to real world people isn't so much on the "orcs are always evil" side and more on the "we included some tropes in their culture which previously were used for 'savages' in pulp fiction and dehumanizing propaganda". Oddly enough a lot of these extra traits were added in an attempt to flesh out their profile, proud warrior tropes, beads and feathers on Warcraft orcs, anti-orc sentiment being a part of casual racism by "wrong" npcs

When orcs were porcine and green and just kind of THERE there wasn't a problem, but the creature they were based on in Tolkien's fiction was described as "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" in a letter by the author, and that carries momentum with it.

Drow being purple is a less problematic but they still veer into dark-skinned evil version of a race territory. I'm sure the original idea was simply that underdark creatures would be dark-skinned to camouflage better in the gloom, with their descriptions being of ask gray (duergar) and deep purples, but after a while everyone got washed out to actual human pigmentation again

Drow and gnolls (and minotaurs which somehow get a pass when this is discussed) being demon worshippers is part of the old pulp stand-by of the villains worshiping a god who is 100% okay to disrespect and destroy the sacred places of. It's fine, they worship a demon, go ahead. And that, like the rest, is fine if you're trying to get that old Conan/Indiana Jones feel going.

There isn't anything wrong with having an "okay to kill" enemy. And there are several in D&D without ever touching humanoid races. Aberrations, undead and outsiders I'd say are fine to draw a line and say "no, we don't need to consider if social prejudice makes us treat them unfairly".

In setting explanations are good for why a race is evil, better than nothing, but "drow/gnolls/orcs are evil because Lolth/Yeenogu/Gruumsh is evil" is such a basic statement that is AMAZINGLY filled with potential for deeper exploration. The 3.5 PHB notes even good half-orcs might worship Gruumsh as a god of strength and power. Why? Assume that's true in setting, that's a character interaction worth really examining. Drizz't (and the entire faith of Eilistraee) shows that drow CAN break away from Lolth, but are chained by their society and its societal momentum.

At least one divine origin for the orcs places Gruusmh as the cheated party in a division of land between him and the other racial gods, where Corellon (and we can assume his consort Araushnee/Lolth), Moradin, Garl Glittergold and Yondalla snatched up the choice lands and left the barrens to Gruumsh's people. This narrative of a divine grift (itself possibly a fabrication or embellishment on Gruumsh's part) can really help anchor the orcs as not just one of many "savage" people in the wilds, but give them either A) a reason to oppose the party which adds colour to simple "kill the dungeon" adventures, or B) a path to the party affecting actual change in their environment, but using modern material methods to correct divine injustice (the other gods AND Gruumsh's) by improving things for both sides.

I don't care what they do with D&D because I haven't played it since about 1980. My game of choice is Call of Cthulhu which has its own problems with its original source, but has been shifting for several years to try to be more inclusive and tolerant.

From my very first D&D campaigns 40-odd years ago, I tried to make my "evil sentients" more varied than just thugs devoted to genocide and pillage. I think it's good that WOTC are making moves in that direction. Hopefully, it will inspire the writers and DMs to put more thought and, well, humanity into their work.

I gave up on D&D ages ago, because I didn't like the constraints of the system (their class & level character progression, their overly-simplified alignment system, their overwhelming focus--at the time--on killing monsters and collecting stuff to advance your character).  I was introduced to other games that did a better job of giving me what I wanted from my gaming experience.

Now, all that said, I can remember many a time looking through the Monster Manual and thinking, "That could make a really cool character...if only there were ANY kind of rules for making a playable character out of it."  One of the things I liked about Palladium's fantasy world was that, while there were races that could be considered 'monsters' or 'evil', you could still create a very playable Troll, or Wolfen, or Troglodyte, etc, that could integrate into any group...I really enjoyed that West End Games left the whole question of alignment completely out of their Star Wars rules and just left it to the players to decide how good or bad their characters were.

I'm not up to speed on everything that WOTC is changing...but it certainly sounds, to me, like they're expanding the playability of their worlds and giving their players more leeway in how they want their games to run.

I don't know either but from what I've read they're just taking an editorial pass to pull orcs away from the perception of "savage mongols/moors" and giving them a distinct flavor and deeper system of beliefs beyond "always evil". The other thing is it sounds like they're looking at a more flexible attribute system to avoid statements like "Dwarves are always grumpy" or "orcs are always stupid".

It's way past time. Not just in a sense of social progression, but simply storytelling complexity. Monolithic races are dumb; they don't match real-world reference points and are not good for nuance. The only time it's remotely acceptable is if like an entire race had been created or controlled by some godlike force, but even then, the idea of throwing off the yoke of the gods or powers that would control you is a staple of myth and fantasy.

Injecting some actual nuance into these races, while jettisoning some of the problematic real world racially-charged elements, is a fantastic idea that will only make the game better.

I am going to play what is probably considered devil's advocate here, but we are trying to fix perceived racism due to the words used to describe a fictional species by injecting more realism into it? Doesn't that seem counter productive? For me at least, playing DND or any roleplaying game is that the rules are different, right and wrong aren't shades of gray. There is a spell that can tell me if you are evil or not, and at the end of the day if I put down a few goblins/orcs/drow then that saved lives.

As an aside; I was raised to believe that words have the power we give them. I had a lot of bullies growing up, and if I believed every terrible thing they said about me I am sure I would not be around today.

And so, with the spell to determine alignment in play we don't actually need to assume all members of an orc tribe are evil and their culture would be richer and more varied due to actually working on it?

So killing orcs wouldn't necessarily be a absolute good thing at the end of the day then?

There's a few camps of people who want this change that are rolled up in the "Diversity in D&D" banner:

-people outside the perceived narrow group D&D is designed for, BIPOC, women, LGBTQ people, etc, who don't like aspects of their group they identify with being used as shorthand, especially for evil creatures. That want to sit and play a game, just like you want to, and have fun without seeing people that resemble them killed or played as criminals or stereotypes

-people who find the shallow nature of the races in D&D limiting or boring. That orcs, goblins, drow and other groups are fairly one-note and need to be fleshed out, and this comes with treating them like people with cultures, not standees to be shot with an air rifle.

There's not a total overlap of "people who think orcs should maybe be less savage and evil for the sake of it" and "people who find Chult/Olman/Kara-Tur/Al-Qadim offensive" and it's important to address EACH issue differently. But under all that is the combat-based D&D's need to vilify something so you can fight it without issue. And that doesn't need to be creatures with cultures, families and the ability for free will.

Actually, I sse it as incredibly productive.  A lot of racism revolves around unrealistic stereotypes of race and culture...oversimplified conceptions of what these "others" are like.  One of the best cures for racism is actual interaction with other races, so they stop being perceived as whatever stereotype was being held in mind and start being seen for the very real people that they are.

So adding dimensionality to something like D&D helps break the notion that "all <insert racial type here> are <insert corresponding stereotype>" and they are, in fact, just another collection of individuals with an array of strengths, flaws, tastes, dreams, and needs...just like anyone else.

In reply to facemaker329 (msg # 24):

Yes but my issue here is that I have never stopped an orc/drow/goblin from sitting down at my gaming table, mostly because they are fictitious. I have also never looked at the words savage, tribal, 'beaded hair' etc in the depictions of orcs/drow/goblins and said, "Hey they are talking about 'x' ethnicity".

I get that others don't see things the way that I see them, but to me this looks like projection. I am going to play extremist here, and I want everyone that reads this to know that I am in no way shape or form advocating the behavior I am about to describe, I am saying this merely as a form of conversation to depict an outcome. With that said, if everything that was created during a time when humans were less 'woke' could hold a racist undertone, and we are allowed to assign that belief based on anyone's thoughts or feelings, then when do we all stop wearing cotton clothing? Do we need to assign genre's of music to specific a ethnicity only?

Any description be it real or fictional of person or collection of persons is by necessity finite.

It is not the job of a game manual to go into the nuances and logical implications of the state of sentient creatures which exist in a fictional game world.  Rather, it is the job of the manual to establish the typical role of these creatures in the game.  Some creatures will by necessity have to get more nuance and fleshing out than others.  Even if the lore is expanded, not everything can be addressed fully.  Under such constraints it is better to be simple and to the point than to try to address all possible manifestations, possibilities, and logical implications of the existence of the creature.

That's not to say there is no room for expression or allegory of real phenomena, and by all means cleverly written settings can parallel reality even in unpleasant ways to make the fiction more rich and meaningful.  Themes and ideas of sectarian violence, racism and oppression can certainly be worked into fiction and a nuanced presentation of a sentient race of creatures can make a setting interesting.  However I'd argue this has no place in the PHB, Monster Manual or DM's Guide but rather in the fictional settings and other materials that define the world.

Some people are playing a small unit tactics war game with miniatures and dice, and other people are telling dramatic character stories with themes, motifs and arcs.  That sheer flexibility is part of the appeal.

And then there's published settings which take these core elements and do different things with them.  Ravenloft and the Forgotten Realms are very different despite using the same basic core.  The core itself must therefore be simplified.

It's okay to make a game that starts further along the spectrum and a lot of great games do that, but they're not Dungeons and Dragons.  Dungeons and Dragons should give the players the basic outlines of creatures and simple interpretations thereof and let them build on it from there.

What's more this is old as dirt, it's been done before and it's been done better and well received for a very long time, so the very premise of the article is faulty.  Even the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons had cooperative, kind and coherent members of "monster" races.  For pity's sake the most famous character from a DnD setting is a drow who completely defies the mores of the culture he originates from, in fact it was so successful the joke is now that it's an entire race of good-aligned rebels.  Another example is the Eberron setting which does something with these ideas that not all black dragons are evil and so on.

It can be done cleverly and well, but the idea that such themes as real life problems of such serious nature are owed lip service by the mechanics of a game is a dubious one.  What's not going to impress anyone though is making a clumsy mash up of mechanics and core reference materials that don't accomplish their purpose.

It is a game first and foremost and the priority should be on functioning as a game over any other considerations.

I have never thought that having racial (or, rather, species) modifications to Attributes was a bad idea.  Gorillas are bigger and stronger than chimpanzees, but not as agile or as fast at climbing.  Monkeys are far weaker, but much faster and better than either at climbing.  Babboons and mandrills are more aggressive, with large canine teeth, but that does not make them evil necessarily compared to the other primates.  It is just a matter of the niche each fills in nature.

That applies mostly to physical traits. Social and mental are a lot iffier. Gruff warrior types might have less charisma to some, but their own people, and those who identify with them, or even respect their abilities (as neighbors/enemies might) certainly aren't going to see them that way.

Mentally, once you're to the point of being intelligent enough to use tools, build civilizations, and have advanced languages, you're all pretty much on the same level. Everyone else builds on what came before. It's more about what resources you have and what few exceptional individuals have developed new ways of thinking, and this occurs from many different cultures and perspectives. Entire cultures and "races" in the real world aren't separated by some hard intelligence-measurement thing. Homo sapiens in the Western hemisphere are not any more or less intelligent than those elsewhere. America might be the most advanced country in the world, or so we claim, but the average American isn't more intelligent than the average citizen in a third-world country. The average American didn't harness electricity, or figure out the physics of proper boat-making, or even necessarily has the capacity for such. Not any more than the average third world country's citizen does.

What maybe separates people in disparate cultures is simply resources. Access to knowledge, materials, etc. Everyone has that, and a homo sapiens is a homo sapiens. Heck, you can take one from thousands of years ago, put them next to a modern human, and barring language barriers, they are similarly equal.

Physical qualities don't really differ much between humans, either. Not like they do with other forms of distantly-related primates; another flaw in your comparison. If gorillas and chimpanzees were members of the same species but there was a lot more variance between the species, sure. You see that in the animal kingdom all the time. Humans not so much, not to that degree.

Fantasy races are all pretty generic "humanoids" who, while their individual traits may differ some, typically are a lot more similar to each other than, say, a gorilla is to a human. So the comparison doesn't work well even for physical characteristics, really, but it works better for that than social or mental ones.

So, if a race has a negative modifier to Charisma, then amongst their own people they don't.  Kind of like the 3rd/3.5 edition AC modifier for size only counted against larger creatures.

But, as an example, humans and orcs are different "species". That's one of the biggest problems with D&D, the fact that they used the term "race" vice "species". So yes, a homo sapiens is a homo sapiens, but an orc is NOT a homo sapiens. And given that, they absolutely can have a lower, or higher, natural intelligence than a human. Just as they might be stronger or have a higher constitution, based on having a different physiology.

The differences are not just cultural, but also speciel (not a real word but it's in urban dictionary). Dogs behave differently from cats, not just because they look different and have different cultures, but because they are inherently different creatures. Can a dog be taught to bathe itself and use a litter box? Sure, but it's not a natural tendency. Cats are carnivores, dogs are omnivores, etc.

Perhaps violence is the natural tendency for the orc species. Perhaps there is an anthropological reason for it, or perhaps a particular hormone in higher concentrations than in the other species. Could an individual orc be taught to fight/supress it? Sure. Maybe even there are orcs who are born with unusually low levels of said hormone and thus aren't as violent and as a result tend to think things through more intellectually. But the "average" orc has violent tendencies because of their species' physiological traits, which might be amplified by their culture.

By trying to treat orcs as simply humans with sharp teeth, you're actually anthropomorphizing them in a way that might be inappropriate.

If we're trying to be "realistic," every tribe in every race would have Charisma penalties anywhere but their own region. Some gentrified country royalty old money is going to suffer penalties among loutish New Yorkers, and vice versa.

If we don't want to go that crazy, better to jettison the archaic concept which never really fit the rules well in the first place.
This message was last edited by the user at 23:07, Tue 30 June 2020.

Well, in 5e they have mostly gotten rid of minuses to attributes.