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D&D Looks To Cut Down On Racial Differences Going Forward
Races and classes have been the central aspects of character creation since the beginning of Dungeons & Dragons – well, not quite the beginning, since Elf used to be a class in original D&D. However, based on a twitter thread by D&D's Jeremy Crawford, it looks like Wizards of the Coast will be moving toward less drastic racial mechanics, especially in regard to races traditionally considered "monster races."
Crawford pointed out the differences between the orcs found in Volo's Guide to Monsters and those found in the Exandria and Eberron settings, saying that the latter reflects the direction that the D&D team is headed in regard to monsters. The Exandria and Eberron orcs lack the -2 penalty to Intelligence and the required evil alignment. This reflects the fact that in these settings orcs are mostly considered another type of people – with all the varieties in personality and temperament that come with that – rather than fodder for player characters to fight.
[...] It is worth noting that this comes on the heels of a Twitter discussion on the racist history of orcs, initially spawned by a screenshot of the description of orcs in Volo's Guide to Monsters. Tolkien initially portrayed orcs as caricatures of Mongolians, and orcs have been racial stereotypes of other races over and over (see World of Warcraft or Bright). Dungeons & Dragons is not immune to this – even outside of the orc issue, races like the Vistani appear as Romani stereotypes.
Diversity and Dungeons & Dragons
Throughout the 50-year history of D&D, some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated. That's just not right, and it's not something we believe in. Despite our conscious efforts to the contrary, we have allowed some of those old descriptions to reappear in the game. We recognize that to live our values, we have to do an even better job in handling these issues. If we make mistakes, our priority is to make things right.
See also: Dungeons & Dragons Designers Clarify How Gnolls Differ From Other D&D Creatures
Related: Gender and Appearance Stereotypes Travel to World of Warcraft
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Booga1 on Saturday June 20 2020, @10:42PM (14 children)
Huh, it's almost as if being classified as evil has something to do with what you do almost as much as why you do it.
Did your party slay the goblins because the goblins were planning on slaughtering villagers, or did the party slay them because they saw the goblins as loot containers and XP?
When your party gets to town and some drunk in the tavern spills their beer on them, do they stay calm and brush it off so they don't draw attention to themselves, or do they go full on murder hobo mode and kill everyone that joins in the fight that ensues?
--
As for drow and orcs: When a society is entirely devoted to warfare and slaughters everyone who dares enter their territory or gets in their way, it seems reasonable to classify that society as "evil."
However, the converse is that there can be nuance in individuals in any society. Should someone be classified as evil just because they were raised in that society? What if they hate everything about the evil stuff they do, but haven't been able to get out of it because the rest of the world will kill them if they try to move into a different neighborhood? They're drow, or orc, or whatever and the rest of the world knows how dangerous and evil they are. This individual will probably be mistrusted and possibly attacked simply because of their race.
D&D is a game system. It doesn't have to be realistic or cater to the whims of social mores, but it doesn't have to be rigid and dogmatic by clinging to their origins either. I think they're simply considering the question, "Can we find a better way to handle the complexities of the individual characters in the game?"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Saturday June 20 2020, @10:56PM (7 children)
What you describe is more or less the story of Drizzt, as I recall it from memory. I think it was his father that grew to hate their, matriarchal, society -- not cause of the female power leadership or the giant demonic spider creatures but due to the constant scheming, backstabbing (both literal and figuratively), assassinations and it just generally being brutal and not fun. All other elves life semi-peaceful lives for eons and the Drow are just to busy slaughtering and sacrificing anything and everything that just crosses their path. But he is more or less the exception so the society is still what it is. He then instill these thoughts and feelings in Drizzt -- who then sort of takes it perhaps a few steps to far for, or being compliant with, Drow society.
A lot of it probably goes back to that D&D and similar games are usually hero tales, the player characters are literally heroes. Which sort of requires a villain and follow fairly traditional heroic story patterns. So you get the usual hero good, villain evil.
The funny thing is that I don't recall that the murder hobo scenario started to happen until computer games came around. It was never something I think we really engaged in as players. But something that sort of came about when you played the games on your own. I recall the summer that the Balder's gate computer game was released. We dragged computers to a friends flat and spent quite a few days there playing it from start to finish. That was probably the first time we actually started to go around towns and just steal everything that you just could -- oh look a chest, mine. Something else you could take, mine. That never really happened in the pen and paper version.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Saturday June 20 2020, @11:03PM (4 children)
(edit, in lack of an actual edit function). But it was also I think the early computer rpg's that sort of brought about the whole murder hobo thing. Almost all encounters were and could only be resolved by force. There was few exceptions and lack of programming options or what have you sort of made it like that. If anything that might then later have flowed back into the pen and paper versions. But as I mentioned I don't recall that being the case to start out with. But different experiences for different players perhaps.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Booga1 on Saturday June 20 2020, @11:27PM (3 children)
It's come full circle in some computer RPGs. Consider Planescape: Torment, where you can not only negotiate your way out of fights, but you can gain new allies as well. Fail to negotiate what SHOULD have been a simple transaction and be forced to slog through a nasty sewer for less reward than you would have gotten if you had just talked your way through the situation. I never finished it, but I should probably try again. It was pretty awesome.
Another one I haven't played through, but similar: I hear Undertale has options for both pacifist and genocide runs in the game with different endings depending on what you've done.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by loonycyborg on Sunday June 21 2020, @10:49AM
Such games are still extremely rare since just spamming combat for rewards with diminishing returns just to waste people's time is more economically efficient from "business" standpoint. That is it results in more play time in exchange for less developer/writer/voice-actor time. And having inherently "evil" races is necessary for such content factories because it saves time on writing and lets you hire cheaper writers.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday June 21 2020, @02:20PM
I remember Planescape: Torment it was sort of a game changer when it came out, so many games before had included text and dialogue but it was quite frankly optional and most people just didn't bother with it since it always more or less ended in the same -- go out and slay something evil and then return to me. In PT you had to read, so you could pick the right dialogue options -- if you picked wrong it might be combat time and you would have a very high risk of dying and as noted for worse rewards. This might be why it wasn't as popular as say Balder's Gate or Icewind Dale since both of those was more about following the now standardized computer RPG formula of killing monsters to gain loot and xp to become more powerful so you could slay more monster for more rewards and better loot (repeat).
I recall some of the first like remakes of (A)D&D games for the computers from SSI/TSR such as Pool of Radiance where the programmers was very lazy. So they had just consulted the monster manual and I recall some fights got ridiculous as it would spawn in things like 1d4 x 100 critters (and Gnolls and such) and such -- so much so that sometime the game would just crash or the fight would take forever and due to designs of how the magic system worked you would quickly run out of spells and then it was just a matter of if the warrior would survive long enough. Champions / Deathknights of Krynn (and the other "Gold box" games) and a few others was probably a core reason why me, and many of my friends, upgraded our A500 machines with 512kb of extra RAM cause it was a requirement of to just run the game.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Kalas on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:39PM
I wholeheartedly recommend Undertale to any fan of RPGs. I can't think of any other game where I can't find anything to nitpick about, and believe me, I love to complain even about things I like. Without writing a whole wall of text about what's to love about it, I will say that is true and more. The true pacifist ending (best possible ending, not obtainable on first playthrough) and genocide get the most attention, but there's a wide range of neutral endings ranging from pacifist to "killed most people in fights you couldn't flee" each with different end results for the player and/or monsters of the underground. And I just adore how the game subverts your expectations of a typical classic RPG in so many ways. Because of that I don't think anyone could fully appreciate it if it was their first RPG experience.
And if you like that there's Deltarune, not as a sequel but more as a re-imagining of the setting and characters, with a different message I'm not quite sure of because I only played Chapter 1. The main thing I got out of it so far is that Ralsei is the cutest fluffball ever to cast a spell.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @05:58PM (1 child)
But it was definitely the one that non-nerd society remembers.
Wasteland which was a decade earlier had children in-game that you could murder. It was how you drew out the (something) Ranger, who had the Red Ryder BB Gun, which was one of the best and earliest weapons you could get, if you played your cards right and set up an ambush for him. I also remember some other games of that era allowed it, although many made towns combat free zones and many others still discourage thievery within town in other ways unless it was quest related. Rogue-likes as a class often allowed that however, game balance issues willing.
After Baldur's Gate quite a few games started allowing it more, although in most cases they simply had everyone ganging up on you, even though in a real bar fight it's very likely some would ignore it, some would fight you, and others would take advantage of the chaos. Maybe even one or two really powerful guys would ignore it until they were personally disturbed and then end all fighting either with their commanding presence or by KOing people until the situation is under control. KOs being something almost every game omits, even though many players might want to try less violent approaches than are the norm.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:42PM
Didn't Fallout, or was it Fallout 2, also allow it -- killing kids plus you could get a career as a post-apocalyptical-pornstar.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 20 2020, @11:36PM
Sexy orc and goblin girls are chaotic good.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by krishnoid on Saturday June 20 2020, @11:52PM (4 children)
Sounds like the Klingons. Or maybe the Romulans?
How about if a huge part of income taxes are applied to the military, the military is sent out on excursions rather than defending existing borders, and you cage trespassers at the border instead?
That's probably less evil, but now that you mention it, the alignment system vectors only have orientation, but no magnitude.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Username on Sunday June 21 2020, @06:23PM
I can see Romulans being Drow and Vulcans being other Elves. Klingons, idk, I see them more like Dwarves. They seems to have more dimension to them than just fighting. Clans and honor and whatnot. I see Orcs more like that one Dominion race that was genetically modified to fight and obey the founders. They always need some other race to lead them.
Hum. That does describe the federation. The do like their occasional excursions into the Romulan DMZ, and the unofficial sponsorship of the Maquis violence against Cardassia.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Mykl on Sunday June 21 2020, @10:25PM (2 children)
This raises a really interesting question for me.
A strong case can be made for several countries IRL to be considered "Evil" (e.g. North Korea, Ceaucescu's Romania, Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, the USA as it pertains to their foreign policy in South America, Asia and the Middle East), however what we're really talking about there is the leadership. The individuals living in those countries are often good and can be just as much a victim of the leadership.
in D&D terms, if a society is evil, but most of the individuals within that society are not, is it OK to attack them on sight?
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Sunday June 21 2020, @11:04PM
Ask your party's cleric about jihad.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @02:45AM
Evil is just a matter of perspective. It's all subjective, so arguing as if these are concrete terms is unproductive. I've met people who think owning animals is evil, so are Greenpeace terrorists or freedom fighters?
Why did Afghanis keep joining Al Qaeda until we finally gave up and surrendered the country to them last week? I'm sure plenty of people on this site would consider then evil terrorists, but they view Americans the same way, I'd bet.