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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @06:31PM
It's an anime/manga that deals with EXACTLY this moral quandry and shows the full effects.
Basically the goblins in the fantasy world (which covers the full range of mythical beasts, although goblins are the primary villains) steal and rape human (and maybe demi-human) women in order to produce more goblins. No one has so far managed to keep a goblin good, and most of the people who tried found themselves murdered and the cause of a goblin army attacking the adjacent region.
The protagonist in this case was horribly scarred by watching his sister experience this firsthand in the process of saving him from the massacre of his village, and his sole tether to sanity is a childhood friend who narrowly avoided the same fate, ending up on her Uncles farm in a nearby village.
It's a little campy since it does some videogame style 'levelling' of some of the monsters, but the basic storyline premise is an excellent introspection into the fantasy genres ignored motivations of various monster groups and gives ways to refute people who claim they should be treated the same way as other demi-human races, despite their alien and violence fueled reproductive and lifecycles.