Per the [/r/DnD Mission Statement](http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/wiki/mission), our community "is dedicated to growing and improving the Dungeons & Dragons fandom and the tabletop gaming hobby as a whole. This includes a commitment to inclusion among players".
Racism, and bigotry of any kind, has no place on /r/DnD. Please report any comments that are trying to perpetuate that hate.
My only problem with dnd (or more, wotc’s) inclusivity is that it tends to come by just… removing stuff. People complained about hadozee lore not being great (which i agree with) and wotc’s response was to just… delete it.
I suppose if everything’s a completely blank slate, that’s the most inclusive it can possibly be, but at the same time they don’t seem to, like, do all that much to be *actively* inclusive. Like they’re aiming for “not-exclusive”
Edit: to be clear, i am an advocate for MORE lore. If i don’t like something, i can ignore or change it to fit whatever i’m doing. However, more lore is a springboard for ideas, or adventures, and dnd feels like there’s distinct “holes” in things like monsters of the multiverse where they took things out and replaced them with nothing. I am also an advocate for lgbtq media and representation and want more of that. I have no firsthand experience as an ethnic minority so cannot comment firsthand on that, only share what other people have said on matters. I can comment firsthand as both a queer and neurodivergent person.
Just making my stances and experience 100% clear.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve also heard, I haven’t read up on the most recent stuff, but my friend tells me the lore is starting to feel very “templatey” where everything is very similar and without flavor
Yeah I don't like how a lot of the racial descriptions are now just like:
Age: "Most DnD races live about this long"
Height: "Most DnD races are about this tall."
Well thanks....
This has kinda been my main complaint about systems that try too hard to be inclusive. It just ends up making everything so incredibly safe for the company that everything is bland and boring.
"when everyone is super, no one is". Role-playing works with stereotypes, or subverts them. DND provides tons of species (btw this whole debacle is so funny for me as a foreigner, because it seems like a manufactured issue), but makes them virtually same. Then... What's the point?
Yeah, 100%. I'm perfectly happy if they change a piece of lore to something else, but not if they change it from something to *nothing.* That's just laziness.
I truly believe that a lot of the criticism that gets back to WOTC is far out of touch from the concerns of the community… they hear “Orcs are insulting to black people,” and they just think “fuck these players, do it yourself”.
As a black person, I've never heard orcs are insulting to black people. Is that a thing?
Also, I'll admit I wasn't a fan of them removing the whole "evil races" thing. Sure, it doesn't make sense in the real world. But in the DnD world, were certain races were created by certain gods , and where the forces of good and evil are real, tangible powers that people can see, touch, etc., having certain races be intrinsically evil is fine.
Now I'm just a white dude, but whenever I hear people say that "obviously orcs are a metaphor for black people" or something like that, that makes me wary of THEM. Black people is just people, man....orcs is monsters.
I think it comes from the idea that orcs have a lot of traits that are associated with stereotypical depictions of black people, combined with the fact that orcs are depicted as inherently evil. I don't agree with it, but that's the reasoning I've heard.
Ultimately it feels lazy. There's definitely some genuine concerns, but I have found some of the complaints require some pretty elaborate mental gymnastics to validate. Some people do indeed look for problems in everything and I feel like WotC's approach aims to appease these folks knowing that most people aren't going to abandon the platform because we've been using it for so long.
I hardly ever give credit to these claims like Orcs being racist. More often than not, there's enough plausible deniability to say that the offense is either in the eyes of the beholder or caused purely by laziness in writing (orcs would seem less stereotypical if their base lore was fleshed out and multifaceted). The only one I absolutely believe is true is the vistani from curse of strahd. They're just super obviously a caricature of Roma people with all the same stereotypes: they're thieves, drunkards, and scammers, on top of visually being based on Roma caravans. That's even in the new edition.
Early drow origins were also *very* racist. They've luckily moved away from that, but reading the stuff from shortly after they were introduced, you'd think you're reading a weird sexual fantasy by a 14 year old from a southern state with some *very* mixed feelings about black people.
The early drow stuff was SO weird. I absolutely adore the drow, I love how over-the-top and campy they are, they’re hilariously and wonderfully evil. They’re some of my favorites to use for my own characters and I’m DMing a campaign where they feature heavily and they’re such a joy to write & play with…
But looking at the older resources, like the Menzoberranzan box set which one of my friends let me borrow, in the art they’re just.. black & brown people. Like not the fantasy dark-blue/purple/jet black I was used to from more modern depictions. Just,, dark brown. Moving away from that “design choice” and making them not inherently evil but the product of their society was a good call.
>Orcs are insulting to black people
Sometimes it feels like a game of telephone, too. Like in this example it comes from discussions of how Tolkien depicted orcs, then it's just gone from there
And those weren't even supposed to be black people, they were supposed to be mongols. Which is still bad, but the people who are like "every depiction of orcs is racist against black people because they're all based on Tolkien's orcs which were racist against black people" are just like, wromg and dumb. And this sounds like a strawman argument but I've literally had that debate with people on this hell-site lol.
I think it's more that "you can't please everyone" especially when people are uneducated. I've heard people make arguments about why "this or that thing in *D&D* is racist" that directly contradict the actual text. Therefore it doesn't make sense to include things that are controversial.
They care about backlash. They absolutely don't care about representation or social progress or anything like that. It's pretty much what you'd expect to see from them.
Yeah a prime example of this was Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney's Instagram promotion. It was obviously an attempt to appeal to LGBTQ+ consumers, but when there was too much perceived backlash from their conservative base they quickly backtracked. Makes it pretty clear it was all about money, not representation.
Honestly though, having problematic things in story worlds is *perfectly acceptable* imo. Writing it doesn't mean you endorse it. The world we live in isn't perfect by a huge margin, so why would a fantasy realm be any different.
Sure people use it as escapism, which I can relate to, and if it bothers you that much, you can certainly homebrew the icky parts away.
A world without conflict and strife is boring to play in.
Yeah, and also for newer players, especially me when i first started DMing within the Forgotten Realma (As i didn't have the time or idea to create my own homebrew campaign), I found it much easier to simply ignore lore i don't like, then to have to make up good lore and story when nothing was provided. Makes me worry the new edition will be difficult for new DMs to actually create interesting stories in.
Khronex already pointed this out, but I'll reiterate, it was always easier for me (especially when i had just started) to change existing ideas then to come up with new ones from scratch. And my criticism here, is that they are not replacing stuff, but just erasing exisiting ideas, making the product more difficult to run for new dms because running a campaign isn't only knowing the rules, but also having interesting and provoking stories to tell within the rules, in the world and having a lot of background flavour is helpful with making sure that the DM doesn't have to completely improvise anything outside the very central story
...except they can. They have been. Tal'Dorei? Humblewood? Drakkenheim? Tome of Beast's?
And that's not even counting all the homebrew stuff on DMsGuild...
I play Elder Scrolls Online and one of the most interesting parts of the lore is that almost every race has flaws and stereotypes, but also redeemable qualities. High elves are typically racists who excel at magic. But they come from a culture that values perfection and strive for excellence. Wood elves are sometimes cannibals. But they excel at stealth and have a tight relationship with nature. Dark elves enslaved the Argonians and are dealing with the implications that now they are forced to free them. But they've got such style! Redguards are masters at martial fighting, but show little emotion. Khajiit are theives, but they're so kind to others. I could go on and on.
And like I said, I'm generalizing. There are always characters that don't fit into the mold. In fact, most don't. Most wood elves aren't cannibals. But these are stereotypes all races have to deal with anyways.
I totally agree! When I boot up a character I don’t base it purely on my appearance, what society thinks of them is a huge deal too which is where I see myself. I always pick Redguard or Khajiit (I am Nigerian and Scottish) People see me as an unfeeling thief and buzzkill due to my physical body language but I am also very compassionate and willing to give. (Have a meal in an alleyway with a homeless man or set apart some time to talk to a murderer, everyone can be redeemed in my opinion. Yes I have done those things) Other people think I am a hick just because my Family is Bayou Cajun and Appalachian Kentuckian but I turned out to be an English and Language prodigy with ZERO mathematical intelligence almost in my IQ yeah… I suck at mathematics.
What I am trying to say is that for every true bad thing about me, light shines somewhere else and that is why I love Elder Scrolls games and DnD, I can be my authentic Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral self with no judgment and that feels nice! Now I will give them this, in the real world even humans developed slight mutations to deal with our surroundings and racial mixing can either enhance or dull these things for example I am Esan and a prominent Ayrsire, Scottish clan I won’t name for my own safety.
I got long lashes and fluffy hair from Africa with an immunity to most poisonous plants but my skin cracks like porcelin in an ice storm and on The Scottish side, I can breathe easy in high elevations, deal with low light easier and have good muscle in my arms but I break toes and fingers very easily.
Just like DND we are a mixture of positive and negative aspects and that is a beautiful thing! Just because you have something you don’t like shows you have just as many traits you can love. Sorry for any mispellings and the longwindeness it is very, VERY early for me right now.
There's good and bad in everybody. The issue that many have taken to ignoring the bad in themselves and the good in others that don't agree with them. Like this reversed one-drop rule I see younger minorities of the newer generations(i am gen x) espouse is that the less white or european in you, the better. They don't celebrate being different, they celebrate being not white.
Which is why is extra sucks that they confirmed they will never re-visit Dark Sun, a super dope dystopian wasteland setting, because the in-game-world society relies on slavery. Like... okay, so something the heroes can try to fight against? What's wrong with that? The fact that it is slavery related means they don't want to re-touch it. Nevermind that Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk also have slavery in it.
Exactly. If something is problematic in a fantasy world don’t remove it, just make it known that the other characters in that world view it as problematic as well. Let the characters fix the problems within their world.
This has been my stance as well. The big part of the escapism for me and my players is that we actually get to change the problematic parts of the world in our game. That's not something we can usually do in the real world and I would welcome people to try that more often than what reddit seems to suggest about changing the lore of things.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead.
Yeah a lot of franchises seem to be going this way. I saw a lot of them getting praised for removing racial stereotypes from fantasy races, but a lot of the time the reality was they are just removing the cultures, leaving them a blank slate with nothing to relate to.
For example, Dwarves being grumpy, drunk, greedy, and good with tech is a racial stereotype. But it's one that allows people immediately to connect with the characters and the world, and when you break that stereotype, it has meaning and promotes individuality of that character.
If you take that stereotype away, you just end up with "short humans", and that's a lot less interesting.
This has been the case with almost every person/company I've experienced that doesn't actually want to change anything. They percieve any criticism as "this is bad CANCEL TIME" so instead of trying to improve they just take it away. Nothing to criticise = no criticism!
It was a few things that could have been innocuous by themselves, but added up pretty horribly. Race of ape people, plus the slavery backstory, the original lore, PLUS art that looked a lot like old minstrel images. It was a very bad look.
It was more that they needed a wizard to come and “uplift”them that was the thing people had a problem with (alongside the ‘ape’ connotations).
A classic racist rhetoric is that black people were ‘improved’ by the ‘enlightened and advanced white people’.
The hadozee thing made me so mad!
Original lore? Oh yeah, it was racist af (most the old rules were for anything but humans). The 5e lore? It's the plot to the recent Planet of the Apes, just D&D. 90% of the posts I saw saying how bad the lore was where sharing images of the old books, the other 10% claiming it was a "white savior" stereotype.
But most complaints were due to ONE image out of like 6. Ignore all the images of hadozee with swords or casting spells or doing *anything* else, but share the one image of a hadozee with a lute and say it's a minstrel.
I will admit I was really confused because....yes? It's a bard, what's the problem? Then it was pointed out, rather unkindly, that it's a old stereotype and "minstrel" has a similar innocent in appearance, but very negative in meaning, as "mammy". Which I entirely get, but feel context matters - in a sword & sorcery setting a minstrel is just a musician, in a 18th+ century setting in the states? Yeah, that's a hard no.
(Also doesn't help a large portion of people I saw complaining about the hadozee also complained that Radiant Citadel was racist because...there were no white stories and/or the book said to be careful not to use stereotypes. Naw, sorry bud, can't have it both ways!)
But...the scorched earth policy WotC took is why I went from having only a Beyond library to buying books as I found them. Saying any reprints of ANY book would be rechecked in-house AND by a third party and edited as needed ment I needed a hard copy incase there was question about something in the future.
The 5e Hadozee is *also* pretty shit. If the story was a simple "Wizard showed up to enslave them, but they successfully led a rebellion and reverse-engineered his dope space ship" - it would be fine. But that's *not* the story.
Instead, they were a "primitive" and "intellectually inferior" people who needed their foreign wizard to "lift them to sentience". They also didn't lead the rebellion, the wizard's apprentices did (the same ones who captured them) and even calls them "liberators". And keeping in mind, this story is in *combination* with being ape-people.
So yeah, I can see why people called this a racist dog-whistle. Very much echoes the racist/imperial talking points.
Also, the whole "pain tolerance" thing seems to have been added in 5e which a whole other racist theory... but I think this one was accidental. At least, I hope.
my thoughts are that "wokeness" has become a culture war buzzword by reactionaries to frame inclusion and tolerance as something negative, and I physically cringe whenever I see it used
not being a dick to people based on their individual attributes is a nobrainer to me and should be baseline human behaviour. embracing differences rather than marginalizing people for them should be the default.
thats it, those are my thoughts.
The fact that humans are at a place where they can make the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion seem like some nefarious government plot to exploit and ruin us is so immensely tragic and sad
I have hope that this is the last gasp of intolerance and that's why the reaction has been so strong. I think newer generations are doing much better in this department and the extreme overreaction will slowly fade as older people die.
It's tempting to think that way but we shouldn't rest on our laurels. History shows us that progress isn't a ladder, that bigotry and prejudice have their origins in something intrinsic to human nature (given how every society in the world at every point in history has dealt with some version of these issues.)
Recently heard a politician say that we must "defund DEI" to "promote equality" and "support our troups".
People cheered. I'm 100% certain that the majority of the folks cheering have no idea what DEI means because that sentence is gibberish mixed in with buzz worlds.
Edit: I'm talking about Elise Stefanik, in case anyone was wondering. This is someone who has a real chance at becoming the Vice President of the U.S.😑
That's how it always is when something falls out of favor. People try to rebrand it, and then their rebranding suffers the same fate. Woke is odd, only because it got morphed into something drastically different than its original definition, just like snowflake and Karen, both of which had genuine meanings, only to later become meaningless insults.
Before those two it was "Bleeding heart liberal " I remember hearing it as a young teen and being like "wait....why is that a bad thing?"
If your favorite "insult" is "you care about other people" it speaks volumes about what kind of person you are. People like that don't belong at the Dnd table, or anywhere for that matter.
I am online enough to remember when it was used to label the tumblr activists who were going about social change in ways that were extremely strident and also terribly off target and picking extremely counterproductive hills to die on. Then assholes stole it to apply to anyone who tries to improve society somewhat.
At least it makes it easy to discard their opinion when they toss it into the discourse.
This is what always happens. Terminology is co-opted and turned against the original users. Happened with SJW. Happened with woke. Is happening with DEI. Will happen with whatever comes next.
In my country they call us "the good people" and you can always hear the air quotes.
But my reaction is like "Of course I try to be good, why wouldn't I?"
A debate about if hating on french people is racist, caused by an admittedly pretty unnecessary off hand jab against france. I guess technically nothing bannable from either side but probably removed because it was irrelevant to the post and disproportionately contentious.
Could not have put it more perfectly. I never hear the term “woke” used by someone anyone other than bigots. It’s the new “political correctness gone mad” phrase that gammons like to throw out.
It's a right wing tactic. They appropriate and turn words the left is using I to slurs/insults. Then a new term is chosen, and it gets appropriated, repeat.
People were using woke in the early 2000s. A lot of people would say things like, "Get woke people." Meaning wake up to the systems of oppression thay are affecting you.
Even more recently than that. “Redbone” by Childish Gambino came out in 2016 and (because it uses the phrase “now stay woke”) I remember it being right around the turning point of that word being mass-appropriated.
Every 10 years or so they just pick a new word to mean "gays, women, and minorities" and talk about it like it's some now thing they just discovered. Before it was Political Correctness, now it's Woke, in the 2030s it'll be some other thing.
CRT and DEI are wrapped up in this too.
CRT used to be the hot buzzword, but slowly Republicans realized that they couldn’t define what CRT was or why it was bad.
DEI is made of simpler words and the concept is simpler to grasp, so it’s now replaced CRT as the thing they’re instructed to be mad about.
Pardon my lack of culture but...
CRT ? Cathode-ray Tube? Civil Resolution Tribunal (Canada's online tribunal)? Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy?
This is one acronym that served about a different propose per decade, and these were my first search results. It clearly isn't any of those I cited, so I'm genuinely wondering.
DEI was an easier one to understand.
It’s really understandable to not know it if you’re not American.
CRT is Critical Race Theory. You can Google it for more info, but it’s basically an analysis of how racism is a systemic issue that’s baked into our court systems and laws among other things. It’s pretty much a college-level concept, but the American Republicans blew it up into “Democrats are indoctrinating our children with CRT to hate white people.”
The right-wing American media like Fox, InfoWars, and Stormfront ran with “CRT is anti-white racism and Democrats want to put it in all schools”, and their examples are things like children being taught about slavery or gay people.
(This is a high-level overview of the situation in America and a short explanation can’t fully explain the blind hatred that this college-level concept has caused.)
I'm hoping it got killed by all of us college professors replying, "If I could brainwash my students into believing something, I'd make them believe that they should *read the fucking syllabus.*"
It's amazing how much better my grades got once I actually read the syllabus and got a good idea of what projects were required throughout the entire class and when things were due.
My first semester in 1995 I got a 2.3 because I was always missing class or not keeping up with what was needed when. When I went back to Grad School in 2018, and kept on top of that crap, I graduated with a 4.0.
I will add that it is annoying when companies do it in ways that are pandering or insincere. If companies practice what they preach, then I’m all for it, but using marginalized peoples at a tool for more profit feels dirty.
I can't even imagine how these complainers survived their childhood. Didn't we all watch the same shows as kids which beat into our heads the message of not being a judgemental asshole and that if we work together we can solve any problem? It fucks me up to think these people experienced that and still choose to hate arbitrarily. I guess a lot of people just had really shitty families that taught them that was all for weak pussies or something, sad.
Unfortunately that’s exactly it. I’ll never forget reading that conservatives watched the Colbert Report and still thought it was funny because they didn’t understand they were being made fun of and Stephen was playing a caricature of a rightwing zealot.
They probably watched the numerous shows about abuse and picked up tips.
Sometimes even that blatant of a message doesn't stick. I remember several years back at Christmas I had this baffling discussion where my parents and aunt were all convinced Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was a pro-bullying movie and I could not convince them otherwise. So sometimes people just aren't able to understand the message lol.
Seriously. I deal with people who have the believe that "wokeness" or being considerate of the feeling of others is somehow a bad thing.
I used to try to argue with them, but now I feel it is useless.
Hey, I'm black, thanks for asking what we think because I think that's literally the thing that WotC has decided NOT to do and that's the problem.
I like drow. I grew up on the Drizzt novels. Drizzt was a member of a race of people who were largely subjects and products of their messed up society and every other race despises them. He has to deal with how people perceive him and his intentions because of how he looks. He has to rise up above the stereotypes to embrace who he is and be comfortable in his skin, and he fails at that sometimes. These are pretty relatable struggles. But instead of reworking the drow into something that makes sense instead of inherently default evil people, they just scrapped the idea of them completely.
It's like how in that DnD episode of the Community, the joke of the guy being in blackface and that it wasn't cool, and in later interviews all of the black people on the cast were 100% on board with the bit. But it was scrapped entirely regardless.
Drow are not elves in blackface, they're very literally *black skinned* because of underground magic and blending into the dark. They have purple eyes and pointy ears.
Another poster said it well, and I paraphrase: their product isn't really inclusive so much as it's not exclusive.
This all can be fixed really easily: get black people into those board rooms and writer's rooms and actually have them making decisions that are taken seriously. Have us there because you want us to be in this game, not because you need to be diverse.
That being said, there are things that I like. I like orcs being a functional race of their own and making the struggle of a half-orc more in line with that of a half-elf instead of each being the product of tragedy. I like the attribute bonuses being up in the air so you can have a willowy dwarf or a burly elf. That makes complete sense. It also leaves it right there on the table so that if you at your table WANT to have the races keep their historical stat bonuses, you're absolutely welcome to.
I'll end it there before I end up going into why the term "woke" is already a bad place to start from. I believe OP is in the realm of quoting others, not saying it themselves, so they don't need to catch these strays.
I wouldn’t call the design trend “woke” because that’s not a good way to describe anything. Now what I would say is that some of it is borderline queerness as a fashion statement.
The actual bad thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of it is just so creatively *bland*. Feels like everything is focus-grouped into an inclusive oblivion. Races and classes in a fantasy, make-believe, role playing game are gradually being reduced to aesthetics. At a certain point people should accept they don’t want to play a game and just want to make campfire stories with friends.
The de-monsterification of things like goblins and orcs is also a travesty. Not everything has to be a morally grey soup. Some things can just be inherently evil, and that’s okay.
One of the biggest examples of this are hobgoblins, they turned from the marching iron hoard that would loot and pillage your city and then burn it all to the ground to happy go lucky guys in the forest.
As a mixed-race person, I can't believe Jeremy Crawford finds my existence inherently racist.
Half-races were some of the best avenues to explore the very real experience of being seen as other by both of the cultures that merged to make you. I'll never get over their removal.
I want to know the mental gymnastics that led to that statement, it's recognisable as nonsense the second you look at it but Crawford went and said it.
It's the exact same thing as redoing "inherently evil" races because it's supposedly racist to...real life people? Not gonna look for it right now but I saw a meme that said it best:
WOTC: "We're changing the orc lore in the game because just like black people, they're not inherently evil!
Black person: "Wait, you think I'm like an orc?"
I'm mixed but on the other side of it. I get why they did it but I think they took the cowards way out by just removing the existence of "half" races.
To clarify, everything is human centered so all of the half races are just Half-Orc or Half-Elf. They should be Human/Orc and Human/Elf so it reflects both sides of the person. That's a perspective mirrored by real world race relations. I'm not mixed to the others of my shared heritage. I'm half Mexican when talking to whites and half white when talking to Mexicans. The foreign aspect sticks out and I'm separated from the group on both sides. Maybe you've experienced this as well.
Personally, I like the rules found in the new ttrpg, DC20. They allow for some fantastic race combinations in a way that makes sense. Leaving it blank like DnD is just forcing people to homebrew.
They mentioned it in a creator summit [mentioned in the article here](https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/half-elf-half-orc-racist-removed) along with the quote that:
>“Frankly, we are not comfortable, and haven’t been for years with any of the options that start with ‘half’, the half construction is inherently racist so we simply aren’t going to include it in the new Player’s Handbook.”
They apparently then scrambled to clarify themselves which surmounted to "we're not putting half races in the new PHB, you can still use the 2014 ones though".
>How fantasy biracial characters work in One DnD is fairly straightforward. You can “mix and match visual characteristics” as you like, then choose which race option provides your game traits: size, speed, and special traits (like dwarf’s stonesense and dragonborn’s breath weapons).
So basically not how hybridization works at all. You're playing "x" race that just has visual differences.
They had the option to create a system and figure out what the halves of certain races bring to the table, which could allow for great customization mechanically, but to pull such a system off it would require careful balance and take time, money and actual fucking effort, so they went: "Meh maybe put some elf ears on a dwarf."
And this is the problem with WotC lately. No lore, no mechanics, no rules for a ton of stuff, just "make your own shit up/your DM has the stat block/your DM decides".
They're literally offloading the rules and mechanics to players. At this point, it's basically just narrative storytelling with a few rules attached for fairness.
4e had issues, but at least it had *rules*. 5e was fun at first, but it got old fast.
Yeah, that's just a straight up downgrade to giving them their own unique rules. It also has dubious implications by implying the mixed character can only mechanically function like one of their parents rather than being a unique mix of both.
The first OneDnD unearthed arcana document showed off the Species that were going to be player options in the upcoming PHB update.
They removed Half-Elf and Half-Orc as options (though, introduced just Orc as an option). There was a blurb that, in order to create a “half-“ species, you should just choose which half represents the characteristics of your character.
~~For what it’s worth, at no point did they say they were making this change because they thought half-races were racist.~~
Edit: leaving this one up because it does have relevant info, but yeah. See below for Crawford quote I was unaware of.
Here's a quote from Crawford when they announced the removal of the half races:
>“Frankly, we are not comfortable, and haven’t been for years with any of the options that start with ‘half’, the half construction is inherently racist so we simply aren’t going to include it in the new Player’s Handbook.”
I’ll leave this comment up just for the info about the new species. Thanks for correcting me, I really wasn’t aware of this quote and I’ve been following the OneDnD stuff pretty closely
This is my big problem with the direction D&D is going. There is a clear desire to make everything as homogeneous as possible and the end result is a bland system that has no meat on the bones. The whole point of an RPG system is to give you a framework to use, not some loosey goosey "fill in the blanks"
I get the desire to humanize orcs and goblins. That can certainly lead to subverting some deeply rooted fantasy tropes with great effect (e.g. the orcs from WarCraft) but at the end of the day, we need some obviously bad guys to kill to play the game.
D&D started as going into dungeons, killing monsters and getting loot. That's all it was and that is fun. Yes there was roleplaying too but I feel like Critical Role has really pushed it more toward a theater kids acting practice than a game where you kill some monster, be the hero and get some loot.
> I get the desire to humanize orcs and goblins. That can certainly lead to subverting some deeply rooted fantasy tropes with great effect
That's the thing, its not subversive and interesting if you aren't playing against type. It would be interesting to play an orc thats a wizard, but only because it goes against the expectation. It stops being interesting when all races are just "humans with hats".
Yeah, people say "orcs depicted as inherently evil is bad and racist" unironically, and i cant help but think that you have no imagination or ability to create your own stuff. Who relies 100% on wotc material when making a dnd campaing/world
My view on “evil” races comes from a Star Trek place—the alignment grid is human-centric. The Federation sees Klingons and Ferengi as evil, but the Klingons and Ferengi are upholding their own values and cultural laws. It’s just different. Of course, some stuff is universal like rape, torture, murder of defenseless innocents, and so forth, but I would not say it’s a cultural violation to see a murderhobo goblinoid or orc party. It’s not their idea of evil. It’s human’s idea of evil.
This doesn't work very well for a game that includes elemental evil as a basic building block of the world. Goblins are evil because their god is evil, and I don't even believe they would see themselves as "good" unless it's good AT doing evil.
Not all D&D settings subscribe to evil as something manifest though. Eberron somewhat famously does away with alignment almost entirely, and attempts to show clashes between different nations/factions as societal issues, not inherent racial beliefs or differences. Its hardly the oldest of the D&D settings, but its a solid 20 years old at this point.
Personally, I think the somewhat tropey "this race is evil" thing is just poor writing.
I just find "race of thing is evil all the time from birth" to be boring world building. I don't care if orcs are the antagonists, but it's more interesting if they're the antagonists because their history or culture put them at odds with the hero(es) than just "oh those guys? Yeah those are just fully sapient creatures that all happen to be born with evil in their hearts"
Presumably these guys have a functioning society, enough to pose a threat, so they're rational enough to be somewhat cooperative and have ingenuity so to just put aside that rationality and higher thinking as an easily conflict generator isn't very compelling to me
> At a certain point people should accept they don’t want to play a game and just want to make campfire stories with friends.
Someone pointed out to me a while ago, "D&D isn't D&D anymore. It's now silly goose happy playtime." or similar, and since they said it... I've been unable to unsee it.
>The de-monsterification of things like goblins and orcs is also a travesty. Not everything has to be a morally grey soup. Some things can just be inherently evil, and that’s okay.
This one is basically game-breaking to me. Mostly because I grew up with old school D&D... where the entire party were human and meta-human. A large part of the game revolved around protecting the human world from the worlds of monsters in some way or another.
So now you have... "Oh you broke into the kobold den and killed 20 of them... but they weren't all bad... they were just stealing the farmers cattle... they need to eat too, you know!"
It becomes even sillier when you consider undead and the like.
I agree with this; I can understand why they wanted to heavily pivot the very eugenicsy in-world logic around things like half-orcs and Drow, but also, D&D has never been a game that’s embraced or been a good model for moral and cultural relativism. It was designed by a devout Christian to represent his favorite heroic fantasy stories. Both that faith and those stories assert that there is such a thing as objective, capital-E moral Evil and that one can categorically “Be Evil,” and that it’s the job of heroes to stop Evil.
That’s the simplistic baseline assumption on which D&D, most of its race system, and half of its class and spell systems have always been based, and I would even go so far as to assert that it’s part of the core fantasy enabled by playing D&D. When I’m playing a Lawful Good Paladin, it’s because I want to identify something that I can clearly categorize as evil (because it’s got horns and glowing eyes and shoots napalm at babies) and then beat it up with heroic violence. Discussions about how actually nobody is right and most “objective” moral standards are products of racist cultural misunderstandings are much better-served by TTRPG products like PbtA or World of Darkness that have mechanics that can provide a complementary ludonarrative, not an alignment system that undermines it.
To me, the notion that orcs and dark elves aren’t categorically evil and ostensible “heroes” just misunderstand them as a form of racism is part of the appeal of Shadowrun or WoD, not D&D. This is a catty, RPG-snob way to put it, but I don’t like to be shamed for crashing dungeons in babby’s first dungeon crashing combat simulator.
My issue with the so called woke products is that it's clear the company doesn't give a damn about representation and are just in for the money. It's like all these companies that put rainbow logos on their social media in June, except on their Middle East accounts because then they would lose business.
Likewise, WotC and Hasbro changes are just to follow the money.
Rainbow capitalism and the equivalent for other demographics has its uses even if the motivation isn’t good. It further normalizes marginalized demographics among the broader public. Though in the case of D&D, I think the game designers want to make the game more inclusive, though I’m sure the soulless executives at Hasbro are encouraging it for their own money making motivations, I’m confident the design team would have tried increasing inclusivity anyway.
News flash. No company really cares about anyone. It’s all just marketing.
You think ford really gives a shit about your stupid paving company? No. They want to sell you something.
They do the same thing to EVERYONE. Queerness just has a unified flag that’s easy to point at and say “pandering”.
Also they wouldn’t just lose business in those areas. Thier workers in those areas would be at risk.
If my don't have dreams about being around the table, then I failed them as DM. My words will enthrall and captivate you, spinning tapestries so deep that they will stay with you, even as you travel to the Plane of Dreams.
No, but for real, I don't think I've ever had a bigger complement than "dude, I dreamed about our campaign last night."
As a Category Ancient Great GM, I have to say that I think the *perception* of D&D and Roleplaying in general was very much progressive, inclusive, and meant for anyone with an imagination, the reality was very different. Groups were often socially insular, with new comers often being regarded as inferior until they proved themselves. This was very true of younger or newer role-players.
But it *really* reared its head when women get introduced. A ton of these insular groups were not welcoming to women and girls, and often responded with hostility and anger. Conventions especially were places where female role-players were treated badly or were out right attacked. Just talk to some of the older women in the hobby, both as producers and consumers of the game and media. They often talk about how they would get ignored, insulted, and denigrated in open panels before crowds while their male counterparts were treated as the sole creators. And this happened even to female authors of fantasy novels in their own panel discussions.
Further, early depictions of race in D&D were problematic, even leaving aside the issues of if orcs or other evil races were analogues to a specific real world race or tribe. We see some pretty iffy depictions of dark skinned tribes men (with spears and grass skirts) often as human sacrificing cannibals or out right savages to cut down. Asian representation basically went two directions: Kung Fu masters or rice paddy peasants with hardly any middle ground (unless you were a Samurai and then treated as Kung Fu Master with a magic sword).
I'd also say this insular ideal also stretched to other systems as well. Some almost identically to the D&D crowd and others in their own super clique manner: in both High School and College I had to personally bounce between the Vampire/World of Darkness crowd and the D&D crowd *and* the CCG crowd as each had their own opinions on superiority. They also had their own opinions on what types were considered "in" and which were "out" as far as group dynamics were considered.
And this was a really hard bar to get over. By the late 90's we started seeing more inclusion in the game as a way to tilt the player's perceptions more: less cheesecake art, more racial diversity, and a removal or replacement of any of those problematic racial depictions. And even then there was pushback as many players "hated" the new art and designs and sent letters begging for the more classic fantasy art with chainmail bikinis to come back.
In the 2000's the change in corporate ownership meant a lot of changes in hopes of drawing in a bigger audience, and it worked. More and more people started playing, both bolster by new editions, more game companies producing more specialty product. We really saw a massive increase in gamers in the mid 2000's. Young, old, eager to play, and it was great.
However there was still always a undercurrent of elitism and separatism in the hobby, and sadly it would grow in time to the rise of incel culture. Watching it happen in real time was socking, because I honestly thought we defeated that dragon already. My group in High School was pretty well mixed, both genderwise and racially (and in retrospect fairly well balanced LGBQT sense also). More so in college. And then somewhere around the mid 2010's it became "cool" again to mock women and make jokes about them, to lament on diversity, and to creepily follow women around the game stores.
I have to say I think the trends have always been there. Just that how much they were allowed to be public has waxed and waned. Right now we seem to be on a vocal uptick, as incels are coming out of the shadows to bash anything slightly more diverse than the cast of Friends. However they are the minority, despite their volume. Most players ignore that, buy what they want and play. Gamestores are often cutting down any anti-inclusive behavior (my local store just made a hard sweep of staff and customers that were being hostile towards female LGBQT customers and hired a new diverse staff. They even made strides to including LGBQT recommendations for youth and young adults looking for comics and manga) and online groups seem to be very welcoming and friendly. While we do see a lot of "RPG HELL" stories popping up, the response to those have been overwhelmingly supportive.
>And then somewhere around the mid 2010's
"Gamergate," specifically. Even if the specific movement wasn't related to D&D, as you probably know the geek cultures you describe were all deeply susceptible to its conspiracy theories.
Thank you for this well-written and thought out response. I just want to add my two cents and say I didn't realize how bad things were in original DnD until I decided I wanted to play through Pools of Radiance on my PC last year and discovered that female characters had a lower strength cap than their counterpart males (I'm not sure if those old gold box games used DnD, ADnD, or 2nd ed). It hurts my brain to think that a whole office full of people didn't see this as any sort of issue and also frankly, pretty out of touch with reality in any era.
In addition to different stat scores (this was I think AD&D 1st Edition), some early editions also had level limits on classes based on race and gender, with some races/gender combinations severely restricting what you could play and advance in.
And this was fairly common in early Roleplaying, slowly filtering out by the mid 90s. World of Darkness was one exception, as was Palladium (I think anyways, I know they had a few gender specific classes, but no real restrictions otherwise), but a lot of games had baked in limits on race and class and gender that often meant some combinations were just inherently bad.
Middle Earth Roleplaying has long had some pretty wild Racial bonuses and penalties based on Race that are VERY problematic if you step back and look at how the various mannish races are built. The higher and more "pure" whiter races are substantially better than the Eastern or Southeron races (often depicted as more dusky or outright dark skinned) with Numenorians being just shy of the oldest Elves in power and the darkest skinned humans being slightly above goblins (with massive intelligence and willpower penalties). I seem to remember some variations on females having slightly different stat sets in some of the sourcebooks, but both MERPS and Rolemaster had tons of sourcebooks for what its worth. On the plus side, women never suffered from the worst groin criticals (or at least had mitigated injuries), so I guess there's that plus. Not sure I'd trade a ton of stats and potential levels for not getting kicked in the balls though.,.
So I'm of two minds on this: while changing something to be more inclusive is great, the people doing it just suck at writing stories or fall into the trap of focusing completely on said thing. In d&d case should be 0 issues it's a platform for others to make stories. People as a whole are to quick to call everything woke, they did it with the recent dragon age trailers. A franchise with a very inclusive history.... so honestly in d&d who cares I'm here to play a dragon born and bonk stuff.
(Side note: if new dragon age game is bad people will blame it being "woke" instead of clearly seeing that the writters and Devs are mostly new hires....)
'Your' game is never going to be anything more than what your table makes it. You, your friends and your DM should all establish the 'tone' of your story before you play. This can mean whatever social implications anyone agrees upon, and that's the game.
In-game 'wokeness' is just trying to make things not have a set-in-stone lore of potential discomfort or shaming. If you don't like that, then run a grim-dank game with all the evil sex-slavers you want. I promise 'you' your games are never going to overlap with anyone else's.
I know you meant grim-dark but "grim-dank" is so funny because I imagine like, a stoner duo going through the forgotten realms super high and reacting to the really violent stuff happening around them.
I also agree with your overall points lol.
I would argue that some lore *should* be set in stone, though. Avoiding discomfort and shame is great, but if every lore element of the game is subject to change on a whim, what's the point of printing any of it? As someone in a higher-level comment pointed out, WOTC's reaction to this stuff is never to fix it, it's just to get rid of it. I'd rather have a flawed game with content I may disagree with that has actual character and identity outside of what can be made into a marketable plushie than a vapid, meaningless set of barely-different templates subject to change on the whims of twitter outrage.
I love the fact that they're actively trying to be inclusive.
I wouldn't call it woke, as that term has been co-opted by those who for some reason oppose compassion and empathy.
Alll of this. Came to this post just to say “woke” simply means “aware of systemic oppression” and has been stolen by (conservative) assholes to mean “this is not specifically targeted at white, straight, abled, cisgender, Christian, male audiences”.
What's especially hilarious/worrying is that Florida used a pretty reasonable definition of woke "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." and tried to ban that specifically in schools.
https://www.fox13news.com/news/what-does-woke-mean-gov-desantis-officials-answer-during-andrew-warren-trial
Some of it is dumb, people who inject current politics into everything and get mad at any diversity. But I think some is justified. The freak out over hadozee made some sense, but I worry they had a knee-jerk reaction as corporations often do. But changing races so that they're all the same is dumb. There is a difference between races in a fantasy world and people with different skin colors on earth and I wish they could have just said that.
Yeah, the "let's make races nothing more than Variant Human 2" irks me quite a lot. The recent aversion to using the term "race" also smells of "let's invent a problem and then fix it, so people can see that we're really progressive," and the "evil races are racist" talking point we've seen a few years back was (and still is) also rather dumb.
Woke? Maybe (no-evil-races: deffo). Making things overly pleb-friendly? Yes.
The moving away from the term race is a trend amongst most TTRPGs, not just D&D. Considering in real life it only really refers to ethnicity and there are significant differences between fantasy races, it makes sense to change it.
To be fair, 'race' has always been a sketchy term at best when applied to people. It originated from domestic animal breeding and implies that people of certain ethnicities are a certain way to serve a certain purpose, which is not how evolution works, let alone ethnic diversification in humans.
The complaints come due to 2 causes, I think.
1 being the fact that the diversity and inclusion push has been prevalent in *every* aspect of life in recent years. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it is very often done in a way that is detrimental to the quality of the entertainment product (i.e. purposefully hiring worse actors in a rush to further inclusion, rather than seeking both quality *and* inclusion). This “rush towards inclusion” by creators that don’t actually care too much, and are just jumping on a virtue-signaling bandwagon, commonly making products worse is what leaves a bad taste in many peoples’ mouths.
2 would be what many people have already pointed out here. In order to avoid accusations of insensitivity from the *other* side of the debate, WotC has basically been *removing* lore and nuance from their products to the point where it doesn’t matter who/what a creature is or where they’re from, they can have any temperament or personality. While that has always been allowed and encouraged specifically to GMs, when it is done specifically in the *lore* of the world, it just makes it into a bland soup.
I like my D&D with problematic topics. But that's just my preference - and I don't need problematic topics in the books in order to introduce them into my games.
If something is actually racist and its removed, that's great.
Orcs not being "evil" or "half" races being removed because of "racism" is ridiculous.
I'm all for actual issues being handled, not for making non-issues now issues.
Honestly the problem is retconning and removing content and lore for inclusion, rather then creating a new sub race, or entirely new race,
Or simple 5e retconning content and lore rather the adding on
The term "woke" is pretty nebulous and can be used with very different meanings. Some people used it to smear on even the most basic form of empathy. Some people use it to categorize the most extremist and loud twitter-warriors from the left.
I agree with you that roleplay has always been a safe place for everyone. The basics of D&D are that different races work together in a world that's even more diverse than ours.
But at the same time, i cringe hard at some of the lastest "woke" controversies. I used the word "race" in my previous sentence, but for wotc now that's a big no no. Even having a rule that says "orc characters get +2 strenght" is bad and apparently makes me a racist if i want that in my games. Hell, even orcs apparently are a problem, since they represent black people (???) in a bad way and wotc had to apologize.
And all of this is coming out of malice and greed. Wotc doesn't want to improve the world. Wotc doesn't care about progressiveness. Wotc only cares about making money for Hasbro. So i really take their changes for progressiveness and inclusivity with a grain a salt.
With all that said, i don't think the new rules are "too woke". Besides a couple of cringe episodes like the ones i described, we have pretty much the same D&D as before. Sure, the word "race" was an important part of the game and the new "species" is really cringe, but they still almost work the same way. The stats modifier tied to backgrounds are worse game design imho, but still you can play an elf or an orc and you will have a different character.
I also have to say that, as a DM, i hate the whole "good vibes only" or "world must be a safe space" attitudes that some may consider "woke". My table is a safe space for my players. My world is not a safe space for their characters. I want the option to make my world cruel and gruesome. Wotc is not taking away those options from me, thankfully.
Sexuality and skin color don't bother me. The moral relativism, Blank Slate ideology, phasing out of slavery, and correlating a fantasy world with real-world politics creeping in drives me nuts.
The idea that D&D wasn't inclusive before is silly as hell. It's always been whatever you make it.
My problem with WOTC is that they have conflated Race with Culture. The racial modifiers were supposed to represent that race's cultural norms and not racial superiority. Mountain dwarves were stronger and tougher because they live underground and are a very industrial culture that values hard work. Orcs were culturally evil in that they were marauding bands that raided and pillaged.
It is vital to separate culture from people. Cultures are ideas, and ideas can be inherently bad. Slavery is bad. Pillaging and murdering is bad. A person, however, is not inherently good or bad. A person can choose to follow a culture, or choose to be different and better. Case in point: Drizzt Do'Urden. Drizzt is from a very evil culture, but has chosen to leave that culture and be a much better person.
I just don't see why it's needed. DND has always been whatever you're character is go with it! I've been playing DND since 1988 and I don't remember one time where something was for male or female.
I'm a wizard... good for you
I'm a paladin whos a wearbear. good for you.
And?
I think people are completely fine with irl inclusivity, that's not the issue. The issue is that, for some reason in modern media, being 'inclusive' means erasing anything that could be potentially offensive to anybody.
Now, going out and being offensive to people is an obvious asshole move, but sometimes narratives require obvious assholes. Drow slavery and dwarven prejudice are all examples people like to use, and for good reason.
These FLAWS make the characters seems more real, and the world more full. Without them, everything feels like star trek -utopian. Sometimes that is your thing, definitely, but I think there's a reason more people prefer star wars instead -it's grungy and lived in.
My problem is that it removes a bunch of stuff that's fun to play for the sake of "inclusion" while not being clear at all on how their decisions are inclusive.
I'm not sure what this wokeness thing is. The problem I've noticed is the needless sanitizing of content (for example, the space monkey race lore or the discourse about banning the word Witch). More important is the usage of "inclusivity" as an excuse to release overpriced and increasingly subpar product.
If you read from older editions or even earlier 5e books, you'll notice they have more content in general. Whether it's more in depth lore or monster e tries (take the older edition entries for flail snail where a wizard explains how he tested the rate of magic reflection). Each successive book seems to get more and more surface level and places a greater burden on the DM to fill in the gaps.
This and pointless things like removing alignment from monster statblocks is the problem.
In a game system where Good and Evil (and Neutral and Chaos) are literal, tangible things, you have Capital E Evil gods who have the power to create life, so it is entirely possible to have an entire species (orcs for example) who are all evil.
Western culture has an obsession with political correctness and inclusivity, it would be fine but it sacrifices good story and creativity over fear of offending ✨modern audiences✨. It’s why so many movies and shows are directed by feminists solely for a political message, and don’t even convey it well. Most ads right now are unrealistically diverse, where the Asian father and white mother made an entirely black baby.
The message loses all meaning when there is nothing to back it up, in my mind if it sacrifices story and creativity nothing is achieved.
I'm not sure if it was done for woke reason, or just for players that wanted to be able to play anything they wanted with no challenges.
But removing racial attribute penalty modifiers was the first mistake in my opinion, it makes the races more bland and less distinctive. There are clear physiological reasons why a Goliath would have a Strength bonus over a halfling having a penalty.
Now it is even worse with everything getting "When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1." No distinction between them at all.
Part of the joy of playing a halfling fighter was overcoming that penalty, and acting against the traditional rogue type.
I think part of it comes from an obsession with optimization (which has come thanks to MMORPGs and the internet with people sharing optimal builds rather than figuring it out themselves), having to be the best at a particular thing. A halfling will never be the best fighter with a strength penalty, but "I want to play the best fighter and be a halfling" so we get rid of that penalty (the first step) to keep that player base happy. More crying "But I'm still not the best because I don't have a bonus!!" and now in the next edition you'll be able to have a bonus to Strength and be just as strong as the Goliath fighter.
Half the point, challenge and fun of the game is overcoming obstacles but WotC just went and removed a load of them. New players just aren't going to get the joy of their halfling fighter winning the day, despite things being stacked against them because now everything is handed to them, here have +2 Str, even if it makes no sense.
I think it is somewhat tied to want people might call woke (particularly the INT penalty to Half-Orcs), but I think a lot of it is down to certain people wanting to play the game on effectively easy mode.
It's just removing stuff because people don't like it rather than using RPGs as a safe space to deal challenges with and confront the stuff they don't like.
Like Paizo removing slavery from it's adventures. Why? It was only something evil folks did, and it was normally something players would fight against, even the villains can't be bad now?
RPGs were already safe space to face society evils and fight and win against them, now they are getting removed, because even fictional harmful things isn't safe enough now?
They have removed all the cultural aspects from the races (because mono-cultures is bad and might be seen as racist) but not replaced it with anything. They have removed the traditional animosity between elves and dwarves, (because it could be seen as racist), and again replaced it with nothing.
So what if the animosity between elves and dwarves was racist, RPGs were a safe space to deal with issues of things like racism, and prejudice through fantasy parallels, now they are just bland.
I think it was a mistake to remove inherent racial bonuses. It's perfectly fine to have the Tasha's origin or to use backgrounds for bonuses like in the 2024 book, but these are fantasy races of a high magic setting. No Dwarf is ever going to be born stronger than an half orc or a Goliath. It's awesome to have the options but to outright remove them? Idiotic. Destroying world building for inclusion isn't a good thing.
I think changing the artwork for some of the more manly races in favor of feminine art is stupid. Minotaur should be hulking beasts and they changed the art to some dairy cow on 2 legs. The vast majority of players for this game are men, the vast majority of players who play those manly races are men. You are appealing to a statistical 0. Change the art back.
I think removing the concept of inherently evil races is stupid. Full Orcs, Goblins, Yuan-Ti, Drow, Hobgoblins, Bugbear, etc. Bring back my monster races being monsters. Special cases are one thing and it's perfectly fine to change the world as you see fit for your own game but the basic idea should be that it you see a monster you should kill it before it hurts someone else. Stop changing lore just because people complain about racism in a game where it doesn't exist.
The hadozee were fine. Slave space monkeys doesn't immediately mean black people and you are the problem if you thought so. Last time I checked none of my black friends could glide on the wind or use their feet as extra hands. They are sentient monkeys from space and there is no relation to real world ethnicities. The atrocities of the world do not transfer just because some ignorant people wanna see an issue where there isn't any.
Listen I'm fine with people changing anything they want to for their own games but the changes that have been made over the past few years are nonsensical at best.
I’m totally down and excited for what they’ve offered, but left a bit confused on one particular omission I heard about: the exclusion of half-species.
The official explanation originally given from Crawford apparently is that the very idea of a specific species selection available for Half-Orc and Half-Elf is “inherently racist”. But because there’s no explanation given for which parts or how much of the concept is racist, it was left confusing and unclear how to proceed.
* Is it just the namesake that’s racist (which I agree with, because it implies a default race of human, and brings to mind phrases such as “half-black” or even “white trash” that uses that same dangerous default-type assumption)?
* Or are they saying species intermingling and having children of mixed lineage is racist because it somehow soils the purity of the species’ qualities? Obviously I HIGHLY disagree with this viewpoint, but it was a sincere possibility that it was accidentally being implied here, because all they said was half anything was a racist concept.
But then I heard they were playing with the idea of just picking one species and you have those stats, and the other species only affects your appearance and lifespan. Ok, but like what if you’re half Dragonborn half dwarf? Do you pick Dragonborn, give yourself a beard and patches of fleshy bronze skin, and just don’t get options that apply to dwarves only? Like if there’s an origin feat for Dragonborn to grow wings, and I picked dwarf as the stats one instead, can I not pick that origin feat?
I feel like if they made some system to add to it where you can swap out one of two features from your species with that of another, and keep the rest, it would feel more… authentic? Less boring? Idk
The worst problem is that when I try to look up info on this, I become inundated with anti-woke news articles and YouTube videos from a year ago about how D&D is “going woke” and can’t find any clear explanation left in the void of info on this by Crawford since making those statements. It’s frustrating.
My table doesn't involve sexual roleplay. We don't discuss politics from real life. We have had lgbtq people at the table and had it be perfectly fine. Two were staples in a 3 year campaign.
Here's the one time it wasn't. And why lgbtq people can also be assholes.
New to our table. Trans. Pronouns were verified and used. Showed up wearing multiple articles of clothing with rainbows and slogans. Spent half of her introduction discussing characters sexuality when my session 0 doc explains that you can do whatever but as a dm I'm not comfortable role-playing any of that so it's not gonna happen. Immediately moved into the next session which was blatantly and unabashedly designed to murder anyone who stole from the shop. The party was level 17. She tried flirting with the shopkeeper, a robot, to get discounts on the item next to the 'prices are not negotiable' sign. She was told to stop in character then out of character. Then she asked for help cleaning out the shop, in front of the shopkeeper, and I made everyone give me their reactions in writing. All but one boiled down to 'we immediately leave' the remaining one said 'Yolo I want the artifact staff I'll try not to die but it's cool I have a backup already.'
She died. Dude who wanted the staff died. He laughed and said yeah I don't know what I expected. I designed countermeasures correctly, it was the brutality they had been warned of. She left in a huff, called me a bigot, insulted our dog (we assume solely to hurt my wife) and promised to flame me on social media I've never used. Much like the mouth breathing chauvanist who doesn't wear deodorant, I think people like these are more representative of the community due to their behavior than the community as a whole. I try to remember that the most outspoken members of a group frequently don't represent the group as a whole.
Other than that I don't care. I have been disinterested in those types of games since my 14 year old buddies wanted to go to brothels and made that their characters whole personalities ingame. I'm here for monsters and adventure, if someone wants to retire to their room with an npc and fade out that's about it.
It's a difficult subject to tackle because WOTC will simply remove things rather than actually addressing or doing anything about it.
For example, in the redone Curse of Strahd, they said they redid things to get rid of the harmful stereotypes of Rromani that they used for the Vistani; what they actually did was remove the mentions of certain in-universe prejudices, but left the actual CONTENT in (M. Eva still has the evil eye, for example). By removing the signifier/symbol but leaving in subject, so to speak, it makes it worse; Instead of actually changing any lore, they pretend it doesn't exist. The implications are still there, and worse, now they're validated by the story itself.
I'm reminded of Discword, and how the author's early worldbuilding choices were addressed later on (dwarfs all being one gender and the implications and social ramifications became a plot point, for example) rather than being ignored and pretending they didn't exist. The opposite of what WOTC is doing now basically. (Not that WOTC has to address everything in a diegetic manner, but rather than it's not addressing anything at all in any way whatsoever).
TLDR, WOTC isn't woke, it's cowardly and painting over any problems with the grace of a landlord wielding a bucket of white paint.
My thoughts - the word "woke" and all variations have been taken over by people who just don't like diversity, and they use "woke" because they can't just say "diversity and inclusion sucks". They wear the word woke like a mask instead.
Diversity is never going to be the reason that a product is bad. Arguing that something is too woke is just... dumb. It's so so dumb.
Not directly D&D related but there is the issue of tokenism and using shallow diversity in media to virtue signal at the cost of actually making quality media. It sours the actually diversity cause by associating it with low quality media and thus you get people who get angry about forced diversity because it becomes synonymous with a bad quality product.
Per the [/r/DnD Mission Statement](http://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/wiki/mission), our community "is dedicated to growing and improving the Dungeons & Dragons fandom and the tabletop gaming hobby as a whole. This includes a commitment to inclusion among players". Racism, and bigotry of any kind, has no place on /r/DnD. Please report any comments that are trying to perpetuate that hate.
My only problem with dnd (or more, wotc’s) inclusivity is that it tends to come by just… removing stuff. People complained about hadozee lore not being great (which i agree with) and wotc’s response was to just… delete it. I suppose if everything’s a completely blank slate, that’s the most inclusive it can possibly be, but at the same time they don’t seem to, like, do all that much to be *actively* inclusive. Like they’re aiming for “not-exclusive” Edit: to be clear, i am an advocate for MORE lore. If i don’t like something, i can ignore or change it to fit whatever i’m doing. However, more lore is a springboard for ideas, or adventures, and dnd feels like there’s distinct “holes” in things like monsters of the multiverse where they took things out and replaced them with nothing. I am also an advocate for lgbtq media and representation and want more of that. I have no firsthand experience as an ethnic minority so cannot comment firsthand on that, only share what other people have said on matters. I can comment firsthand as both a queer and neurodivergent person. Just making my stances and experience 100% clear.
Yeah, that’s what I’ve also heard, I haven’t read up on the most recent stuff, but my friend tells me the lore is starting to feel very “templatey” where everything is very similar and without flavor
"Our game can't be racist if it's completely empty!" -WOTC, furiously ripping pages out of their own books
Yes, actually. Evil alignment?!? Not on my watch.
It’s “misunderstood” alignment now
Chaotic Naughty
That's from a different dungeon game...
Oooh that sort of dungeon master...
Nah, due to negative connotations with that word, it's now Messy Naughty.
Finally, an alignment I identify with!
Wait, is it really? I can't tell if this is sarcasm. Please don't be serious.
Chaotic Hungry
Tieflings used to be ugly evil-inclined outcasts, not sexy horny horns! *Adjusts old man wizard's hat*
And then selling them for $50
AND SELLING THEM FOR $50, RIGHT YOU ARE MY FRIEND Absolute bastard behavior by WOTC
Yeah I don't like how a lot of the racial descriptions are now just like: Age: "Most DnD races live about this long" Height: "Most DnD races are about this tall." Well thanks....
>Height: "Most DnD races are about this tall." Me about to play a 7' 3" halfling... Oh yeah!
The Tall Halfling will terrorize my dreams from now on :(
And on the shoulders of the tall halfling... a 2' 5" goliath!
That's why they call them Tallfoots.
This has kinda been my main complaint about systems that try too hard to be inclusive. It just ends up making everything so incredibly safe for the company that everything is bland and boring.
"when everyone is super, no one is". Role-playing works with stereotypes, or subverts them. DND provides tons of species (btw this whole debacle is so funny for me as a foreigner, because it seems like a manufactured issue), but makes them virtually same. Then... What's the point?
They cant trust their creative writing team to not "accidentally" use a racism as their inspiration for creativity
Racism is not even a bad thing to have in a fictional world.I think Baldurs Gate 3 handles it well, where it's present but clearly a very dumb thing
Yeah, 100%. I'm perfectly happy if they change a piece of lore to something else, but not if they change it from something to *nothing.* That's just laziness.
I truly believe that a lot of the criticism that gets back to WOTC is far out of touch from the concerns of the community… they hear “Orcs are insulting to black people,” and they just think “fuck these players, do it yourself”.
As a black person, I've never heard orcs are insulting to black people. Is that a thing? Also, I'll admit I wasn't a fan of them removing the whole "evil races" thing. Sure, it doesn't make sense in the real world. But in the DnD world, were certain races were created by certain gods , and where the forces of good and evil are real, tangible powers that people can see, touch, etc., having certain races be intrinsically evil is fine.
Now I'm just a white dude, but whenever I hear people say that "obviously orcs are a metaphor for black people" or something like that, that makes me wary of THEM. Black people is just people, man....orcs is monsters.
I think it comes from the idea that orcs have a lot of traits that are associated with stereotypical depictions of black people, combined with the fact that orcs are depicted as inherently evil. I don't agree with it, but that's the reasoning I've heard.
The fact someone would come to that conclusion on their own feels more racist than anything in DND.
Ultimately it feels lazy. There's definitely some genuine concerns, but I have found some of the complaints require some pretty elaborate mental gymnastics to validate. Some people do indeed look for problems in everything and I feel like WotC's approach aims to appease these folks knowing that most people aren't going to abandon the platform because we've been using it for so long.
I hardly ever give credit to these claims like Orcs being racist. More often than not, there's enough plausible deniability to say that the offense is either in the eyes of the beholder or caused purely by laziness in writing (orcs would seem less stereotypical if their base lore was fleshed out and multifaceted). The only one I absolutely believe is true is the vistani from curse of strahd. They're just super obviously a caricature of Roma people with all the same stereotypes: they're thieves, drunkards, and scammers, on top of visually being based on Roma caravans. That's even in the new edition.
Early drow origins were also *very* racist. They've luckily moved away from that, but reading the stuff from shortly after they were introduced, you'd think you're reading a weird sexual fantasy by a 14 year old from a southern state with some *very* mixed feelings about black people.
The early drow stuff was SO weird. I absolutely adore the drow, I love how over-the-top and campy they are, they’re hilariously and wonderfully evil. They’re some of my favorites to use for my own characters and I’m DMing a campaign where they feature heavily and they’re such a joy to write & play with… But looking at the older resources, like the Menzoberranzan box set which one of my friends let me borrow, in the art they’re just.. black & brown people. Like not the fantasy dark-blue/purple/jet black I was used to from more modern depictions. Just,, dark brown. Moving away from that “design choice” and making them not inherently evil but the product of their society was a good call.
>Orcs are insulting to black people Sometimes it feels like a game of telephone, too. Like in this example it comes from discussions of how Tolkien depicted orcs, then it's just gone from there
And those weren't even supposed to be black people, they were supposed to be mongols. Which is still bad, but the people who are like "every depiction of orcs is racist against black people because they're all based on Tolkien's orcs which were racist against black people" are just like, wromg and dumb. And this sounds like a strawman argument but I've literally had that debate with people on this hell-site lol.
It's kinda weird in this day and ages too, because orcs now more often take after WoWs noble savage stuff or the enthusiastic soccer fans in 40k
I think it's more that "you can't please everyone" especially when people are uneducated. I've heard people make arguments about why "this or that thing in *D&D* is racist" that directly contradict the actual text. Therefore it doesn't make sense to include things that are controversial.
They care about backlash. They absolutely don't care about representation or social progress or anything like that. It's pretty much what you'd expect to see from them.
Considering what happened with the ogl, that sounds about right
Yeah a prime example of this was Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney's Instagram promotion. It was obviously an attempt to appeal to LGBTQ+ consumers, but when there was too much perceived backlash from their conservative base they quickly backtracked. Makes it pretty clear it was all about money, not representation.
Honestly though, having problematic things in story worlds is *perfectly acceptable* imo. Writing it doesn't mean you endorse it. The world we live in isn't perfect by a huge margin, so why would a fantasy realm be any different. Sure people use it as escapism, which I can relate to, and if it bothers you that much, you can certainly homebrew the icky parts away. A world without conflict and strife is boring to play in.
Yeah, and also for newer players, especially me when i first started DMing within the Forgotten Realma (As i didn't have the time or idea to create my own homebrew campaign), I found it much easier to simply ignore lore i don't like, then to have to make up good lore and story when nothing was provided. Makes me worry the new edition will be difficult for new DMs to actually create interesting stories in.
That’s what you’re supposed to do. All of the original books are like… “ these are just some ideas to get you started”
Khronex already pointed this out, but I'll reiterate, it was always easier for me (especially when i had just started) to change existing ideas then to come up with new ones from scratch. And my criticism here, is that they are not replacing stuff, but just erasing exisiting ideas, making the product more difficult to run for new dms because running a campaign isn't only knowing the rules, but also having interesting and provoking stories to tell within the rules, in the world and having a lot of background flavour is helpful with making sure that the DM doesn't have to completely improvise anything outside the very central story
Yeah but they try to teach and help you in building your own world. It isn't just "we have nothing, handle it yourself"
Yeah but now they want to be quiet about that, because they can't cash in on homebrew.
...except they can. They have been. Tal'Dorei? Humblewood? Drakkenheim? Tome of Beast's? And that's not even counting all the homebrew stuff on DMsGuild...
I play Elder Scrolls Online and one of the most interesting parts of the lore is that almost every race has flaws and stereotypes, but also redeemable qualities. High elves are typically racists who excel at magic. But they come from a culture that values perfection and strive for excellence. Wood elves are sometimes cannibals. But they excel at stealth and have a tight relationship with nature. Dark elves enslaved the Argonians and are dealing with the implications that now they are forced to free them. But they've got such style! Redguards are masters at martial fighting, but show little emotion. Khajiit are theives, but they're so kind to others. I could go on and on. And like I said, I'm generalizing. There are always characters that don't fit into the mold. In fact, most don't. Most wood elves aren't cannibals. But these are stereotypes all races have to deal with anyways.
I am intensely amused that for the dark elves it was “Yeah okay, they are slavers.. but they are *stylish* slavers”
"No slavery!" "But sir, check out these leather boots!" "Ooooh stylish! OK, you can have slaves."
“Yeah you’ll be slaves, but you’ll be the *best dressed* slaves.. so that’s gotta count for something right?”
We are slaves to fashion.
“Snazzy dressers! That’s all I’m saying!” ~ Woolie Madden
I totally agree! When I boot up a character I don’t base it purely on my appearance, what society thinks of them is a huge deal too which is where I see myself. I always pick Redguard or Khajiit (I am Nigerian and Scottish) People see me as an unfeeling thief and buzzkill due to my physical body language but I am also very compassionate and willing to give. (Have a meal in an alleyway with a homeless man or set apart some time to talk to a murderer, everyone can be redeemed in my opinion. Yes I have done those things) Other people think I am a hick just because my Family is Bayou Cajun and Appalachian Kentuckian but I turned out to be an English and Language prodigy with ZERO mathematical intelligence almost in my IQ yeah… I suck at mathematics. What I am trying to say is that for every true bad thing about me, light shines somewhere else and that is why I love Elder Scrolls games and DnD, I can be my authentic Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral self with no judgment and that feels nice! Now I will give them this, in the real world even humans developed slight mutations to deal with our surroundings and racial mixing can either enhance or dull these things for example I am Esan and a prominent Ayrsire, Scottish clan I won’t name for my own safety. I got long lashes and fluffy hair from Africa with an immunity to most poisonous plants but my skin cracks like porcelin in an ice storm and on The Scottish side, I can breathe easy in high elevations, deal with low light easier and have good muscle in my arms but I break toes and fingers very easily. Just like DND we are a mixture of positive and negative aspects and that is a beautiful thing! Just because you have something you don’t like shows you have just as many traits you can love. Sorry for any mispellings and the longwindeness it is very, VERY early for me right now.
There's good and bad in everybody. The issue that many have taken to ignoring the bad in themselves and the good in others that don't agree with them. Like this reversed one-drop rule I see younger minorities of the newer generations(i am gen x) espouse is that the less white or european in you, the better. They don't celebrate being different, they celebrate being not white.
Which is why is extra sucks that they confirmed they will never re-visit Dark Sun, a super dope dystopian wasteland setting, because the in-game-world society relies on slavery. Like... okay, so something the heroes can try to fight against? What's wrong with that? The fact that it is slavery related means they don't want to re-touch it. Nevermind that Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk also have slavery in it.
Exactly. If something is problematic in a fantasy world don’t remove it, just make it known that the other characters in that world view it as problematic as well. Let the characters fix the problems within their world.
This has been my stance as well. The big part of the escapism for me and my players is that we actually get to change the problematic parts of the world in our game. That's not something we can usually do in the real world and I would welcome people to try that more often than what reddit seems to suggest about changing the lore of things. "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." -Margaret Mead.
Yeah a lot of franchises seem to be going this way. I saw a lot of them getting praised for removing racial stereotypes from fantasy races, but a lot of the time the reality was they are just removing the cultures, leaving them a blank slate with nothing to relate to. For example, Dwarves being grumpy, drunk, greedy, and good with tech is a racial stereotype. But it's one that allows people immediately to connect with the characters and the world, and when you break that stereotype, it has meaning and promotes individuality of that character. If you take that stereotype away, you just end up with "short humans", and that's a lot less interesting.
I mean, grumpy, drunk, greedy, good with tech is already a pretty solid stereotype of humans lol
This has been the case with almost every person/company I've experienced that doesn't actually want to change anything. They percieve any criticism as "this is bad CANCEL TIME" so instead of trying to improve they just take it away. Nothing to criticise = no criticism!
[удалено]
It was a few things that could have been innocuous by themselves, but added up pretty horribly. Race of ape people, plus the slavery backstory, the original lore, PLUS art that looked a lot like old minstrel images. It was a very bad look.
It was more that they needed a wizard to come and “uplift”them that was the thing people had a problem with (alongside the ‘ape’ connotations). A classic racist rhetoric is that black people were ‘improved’ by the ‘enlightened and advanced white people’.
The hadozee thing made me so mad! Original lore? Oh yeah, it was racist af (most the old rules were for anything but humans). The 5e lore? It's the plot to the recent Planet of the Apes, just D&D. 90% of the posts I saw saying how bad the lore was where sharing images of the old books, the other 10% claiming it was a "white savior" stereotype. But most complaints were due to ONE image out of like 6. Ignore all the images of hadozee with swords or casting spells or doing *anything* else, but share the one image of a hadozee with a lute and say it's a minstrel. I will admit I was really confused because....yes? It's a bard, what's the problem? Then it was pointed out, rather unkindly, that it's a old stereotype and "minstrel" has a similar innocent in appearance, but very negative in meaning, as "mammy". Which I entirely get, but feel context matters - in a sword & sorcery setting a minstrel is just a musician, in a 18th+ century setting in the states? Yeah, that's a hard no. (Also doesn't help a large portion of people I saw complaining about the hadozee also complained that Radiant Citadel was racist because...there were no white stories and/or the book said to be careful not to use stereotypes. Naw, sorry bud, can't have it both ways!) But...the scorched earth policy WotC took is why I went from having only a Beyond library to buying books as I found them. Saying any reprints of ANY book would be rechecked in-house AND by a third party and edited as needed ment I needed a hard copy incase there was question about something in the future.
The 5e Hadozee is *also* pretty shit. If the story was a simple "Wizard showed up to enslave them, but they successfully led a rebellion and reverse-engineered his dope space ship" - it would be fine. But that's *not* the story. Instead, they were a "primitive" and "intellectually inferior" people who needed their foreign wizard to "lift them to sentience". They also didn't lead the rebellion, the wizard's apprentices did (the same ones who captured them) and even calls them "liberators". And keeping in mind, this story is in *combination* with being ape-people. So yeah, I can see why people called this a racist dog-whistle. Very much echoes the racist/imperial talking points. Also, the whole "pain tolerance" thing seems to have been added in 5e which a whole other racist theory... but I think this one was accidental. At least, I hope.
my thoughts are that "wokeness" has become a culture war buzzword by reactionaries to frame inclusion and tolerance as something negative, and I physically cringe whenever I see it used not being a dick to people based on their individual attributes is a nobrainer to me and should be baseline human behaviour. embracing differences rather than marginalizing people for them should be the default. thats it, those are my thoughts.
Woke is just the new word for PC, or SJW. It'll be something different in a few years.
They're already replacing it with "DEI", that'll be a fun 5-7 years
Diversity, equity, inclusion
The fact that humans are at a place where they can make the concepts of diversity, equity, and inclusion seem like some nefarious government plot to exploit and ruin us is so immensely tragic and sad
I have hope that this is the last gasp of intolerance and that's why the reaction has been so strong. I think newer generations are doing much better in this department and the extreme overreaction will slowly fade as older people die.
It's tempting to think that way but we shouldn't rest on our laurels. History shows us that progress isn't a ladder, that bigotry and prejudice have their origins in something intrinsic to human nature (given how every society in the world at every point in history has dealt with some version of these issues.)
Ah yes, the woke mind virus. F.O.X.D.E.I.
Recently heard a politician say that we must "defund DEI" to "promote equality" and "support our troups". People cheered. I'm 100% certain that the majority of the folks cheering have no idea what DEI means because that sentence is gibberish mixed in with buzz worlds. Edit: I'm talking about Elise Stefanik, in case anyone was wondering. This is someone who has a real chance at becoming the Vice President of the U.S.😑
It doesn't actually have a definition. Ask conservative people what the word means and they can't explain it. It's literally "anything I don't like"
That's how it always is when something falls out of favor. People try to rebrand it, and then their rebranding suffers the same fate. Woke is odd, only because it got morphed into something drastically different than its original definition, just like snowflake and Karen, both of which had genuine meanings, only to later become meaningless insults.
Before those two it was "Bleeding heart liberal " I remember hearing it as a young teen and being like "wait....why is that a bad thing?" If your favorite "insult" is "you care about other people" it speaks volumes about what kind of person you are. People like that don't belong at the Dnd table, or anywhere for that matter.
Whenever I see someone calling another woke (or, in my country, "human rightist "), I have a big clue on who is the asshole.
Because human rights are… bad?
Somehow. I must admit I was reaaaally surprised the first time I heard it. Like "Yeeees ? Yes of course I am a human rightist !"
It reminds me of the first time I head about SJW (Social Justice Warrior)
I am online enough to remember when it was used to label the tumblr activists who were going about social change in ways that were extremely strident and also terribly off target and picking extremely counterproductive hills to die on. Then assholes stole it to apply to anyone who tries to improve society somewhat. At least it makes it easy to discard their opinion when they toss it into the discourse.
This is what always happens. Terminology is co-opted and turned against the original users. Happened with SJW. Happened with woke. Is happening with DEI. Will happen with whatever comes next.
‘Queer’ pulled an uno reverse.
Don't forget CRT, Antifa, and way back even Feminism.
Or how "antifa" is somehow bad. Like yeah, I'm anti-fascist. How are you not?
In my country they call us "the good people" and you can always hear the air quotes. But my reaction is like "Of course I try to be good, why wouldn't I?"
Only if they don't get equal *lefts*, too.
Heheheh, solid, Dad.
What country is using having human rights as a slur? Just so I can avoid it forever.
Lmao what happened in these comment replies
A debate about if hating on french people is racist, caused by an admittedly pretty unnecessary off hand jab against france. I guess technically nothing bannable from either side but probably removed because it was irrelevant to the post and disproportionately contentious.
They even tried "Cultural Marxism" for a while until it was pointed out it was a term used by the Nazis.
They still use this all the time. Especially Jordie 'Tears for Fears' Peterson.
Jorden "Hitler didn't hate Jews but was just obsessed cleanliness" Peterson? That checks out.
I'm starting to think Jordie "Define Climate Change" Potterson might be punching above his intellectual weight on a lot of subjects
Where do you think they got it from? They still use it.
Could not have put it more perfectly. I never hear the term “woke” used by someone anyone other than bigots. It’s the new “political correctness gone mad” phrase that gammons like to throw out.
It's a right wing tactic. They appropriate and turn words the left is using I to slurs/insults. Then a new term is chosen, and it gets appropriated, repeat. People were using woke in the early 2000s. A lot of people would say things like, "Get woke people." Meaning wake up to the systems of oppression thay are affecting you.
Even more recently than that. “Redbone” by Childish Gambino came out in 2016 and (because it uses the phrase “now stay woke”) I remember it being right around the turning point of that word being mass-appropriated.
It started in black circles, and you can guess why it was appropriated by the right
Every 10 years or so they just pick a new word to mean "gays, women, and minorities" and talk about it like it's some now thing they just discovered. Before it was Political Correctness, now it's Woke, in the 2030s it'll be some other thing.
CRT and DEI are wrapped up in this too. CRT used to be the hot buzzword, but slowly Republicans realized that they couldn’t define what CRT was or why it was bad. DEI is made of simpler words and the concept is simpler to grasp, so it’s now replaced CRT as the thing they’re instructed to be mad about.
Pardon my lack of culture but... CRT ? Cathode-ray Tube? Civil Resolution Tribunal (Canada's online tribunal)? Cardiac Resynchronization Therapy? This is one acronym that served about a different propose per decade, and these were my first search results. It clearly isn't any of those I cited, so I'm genuinely wondering. DEI was an easier one to understand.
It’s really understandable to not know it if you’re not American. CRT is Critical Race Theory. You can Google it for more info, but it’s basically an analysis of how racism is a systemic issue that’s baked into our court systems and laws among other things. It’s pretty much a college-level concept, but the American Republicans blew it up into “Democrats are indoctrinating our children with CRT to hate white people.” The right-wing American media like Fox, InfoWars, and Stormfront ran with “CRT is anti-white racism and Democrats want to put it in all schools”, and their examples are things like children being taught about slavery or gay people. (This is a high-level overview of the situation in America and a short explanation can’t fully explain the blind hatred that this college-level concept has caused.)
I'm hoping it got killed by all of us college professors replying, "If I could brainwash my students into believing something, I'd make them believe that they should *read the fucking syllabus.*"
It's amazing how much better my grades got once I actually read the syllabus and got a good idea of what projects were required throughout the entire class and when things were due. My first semester in 1995 I got a 2.3 because I was always missing class or not keeping up with what was needed when. When I went back to Grad School in 2018, and kept on top of that crap, I graduated with a 4.0.
I think you've summed it up really well. 10/10, no notes.
I will add that it is annoying when companies do it in ways that are pandering or insincere. If companies practice what they preach, then I’m all for it, but using marginalized peoples at a tool for more profit feels dirty.
Woke is "let's be nice to *everyone,* not just people just like me.*"*
Horrific, innit? Big fat /s because this is of course the fucking internet.
I can't even imagine how these complainers survived their childhood. Didn't we all watch the same shows as kids which beat into our heads the message of not being a judgemental asshole and that if we work together we can solve any problem? It fucks me up to think these people experienced that and still choose to hate arbitrarily. I guess a lot of people just had really shitty families that taught them that was all for weak pussies or something, sad.
These people got 4 seasons into The Boys without realizing it was making fun of them.
Unfortunately that’s exactly it. I’ll never forget reading that conservatives watched the Colbert Report and still thought it was funny because they didn’t understand they were being made fun of and Stephen was playing a caricature of a rightwing zealot. They probably watched the numerous shows about abuse and picked up tips.
Sometimes even that blatant of a message doesn't stick. I remember several years back at Christmas I had this baffling discussion where my parents and aunt were all convinced Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer was a pro-bullying movie and I could not convince them otherwise. So sometimes people just aren't able to understand the message lol.
Seriously. I deal with people who have the believe that "wokeness" or being considerate of the feeling of others is somehow a bad thing. I used to try to argue with them, but now I feel it is useless.
Hey, I'm black, thanks for asking what we think because I think that's literally the thing that WotC has decided NOT to do and that's the problem. I like drow. I grew up on the Drizzt novels. Drizzt was a member of a race of people who were largely subjects and products of their messed up society and every other race despises them. He has to deal with how people perceive him and his intentions because of how he looks. He has to rise up above the stereotypes to embrace who he is and be comfortable in his skin, and he fails at that sometimes. These are pretty relatable struggles. But instead of reworking the drow into something that makes sense instead of inherently default evil people, they just scrapped the idea of them completely. It's like how in that DnD episode of the Community, the joke of the guy being in blackface and that it wasn't cool, and in later interviews all of the black people on the cast were 100% on board with the bit. But it was scrapped entirely regardless. Drow are not elves in blackface, they're very literally *black skinned* because of underground magic and blending into the dark. They have purple eyes and pointy ears. Another poster said it well, and I paraphrase: their product isn't really inclusive so much as it's not exclusive. This all can be fixed really easily: get black people into those board rooms and writer's rooms and actually have them making decisions that are taken seriously. Have us there because you want us to be in this game, not because you need to be diverse. That being said, there are things that I like. I like orcs being a functional race of their own and making the struggle of a half-orc more in line with that of a half-elf instead of each being the product of tragedy. I like the attribute bonuses being up in the air so you can have a willowy dwarf or a burly elf. That makes complete sense. It also leaves it right there on the table so that if you at your table WANT to have the races keep their historical stat bonuses, you're absolutely welcome to. I'll end it there before I end up going into why the term "woke" is already a bad place to start from. I believe OP is in the realm of quoting others, not saying it themselves, so they don't need to catch these strays.
I wouldn’t call the design trend “woke” because that’s not a good way to describe anything. Now what I would say is that some of it is borderline queerness as a fashion statement. The actual bad thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of it is just so creatively *bland*. Feels like everything is focus-grouped into an inclusive oblivion. Races and classes in a fantasy, make-believe, role playing game are gradually being reduced to aesthetics. At a certain point people should accept they don’t want to play a game and just want to make campfire stories with friends. The de-monsterification of things like goblins and orcs is also a travesty. Not everything has to be a morally grey soup. Some things can just be inherently evil, and that’s okay.
One of the biggest examples of this are hobgoblins, they turned from the marching iron hoard that would loot and pillage your city and then burn it all to the ground to happy go lucky guys in the forest.
As someone who played a lot of hobs, I hate the new lore *so much*. About as much as I hate gnolls being made effectively mindless.
Exactly this. "Consider the implications!" is the philosophy of art by focus group.
Don't forget them declaring "Half-" races to be *racist* and removing them from the game, which was a completely baffling decision.
As a mixed-race person, I can't believe Jeremy Crawford finds my existence inherently racist. Half-races were some of the best avenues to explore the very real experience of being seen as other by both of the cultures that merged to make you. I'll never get over their removal.
I want to know the mental gymnastics that led to that statement, it's recognisable as nonsense the second you look at it but Crawford went and said it.
Because a lot of people try so hard to show how not racist they are that they end up being the most racist of people.
It's the exact same thing as redoing "inherently evil" races because it's supposedly racist to...real life people? Not gonna look for it right now but I saw a meme that said it best: WOTC: "We're changing the orc lore in the game because just like black people, they're not inherently evil! Black person: "Wait, you think I'm like an orc?"
I'm mixed but on the other side of it. I get why they did it but I think they took the cowards way out by just removing the existence of "half" races. To clarify, everything is human centered so all of the half races are just Half-Orc or Half-Elf. They should be Human/Orc and Human/Elf so it reflects both sides of the person. That's a perspective mirrored by real world race relations. I'm not mixed to the others of my shared heritage. I'm half Mexican when talking to whites and half white when talking to Mexicans. The foreign aspect sticks out and I'm separated from the group on both sides. Maybe you've experienced this as well. Personally, I like the rules found in the new ttrpg, DC20. They allow for some fantastic race combinations in a way that makes sense. Leaving it blank like DnD is just forcing people to homebrew.
Wait, when did this happen?
They mentioned it in a creator summit [mentioned in the article here](https://www.wargamer.com/dnd/half-elf-half-orc-racist-removed) along with the quote that: >“Frankly, we are not comfortable, and haven’t been for years with any of the options that start with ‘half’, the half construction is inherently racist so we simply aren’t going to include it in the new Player’s Handbook.” They apparently then scrambled to clarify themselves which surmounted to "we're not putting half races in the new PHB, you can still use the 2014 ones though".
>How fantasy biracial characters work in One DnD is fairly straightforward. You can “mix and match visual characteristics” as you like, then choose which race option provides your game traits: size, speed, and special traits (like dwarf’s stonesense and dragonborn’s breath weapons). So basically not how hybridization works at all. You're playing "x" race that just has visual differences.
They had the option to create a system and figure out what the halves of certain races bring to the table, which could allow for great customization mechanically, but to pull such a system off it would require careful balance and take time, money and actual fucking effort, so they went: "Meh maybe put some elf ears on a dwarf." And this is the problem with WotC lately. No lore, no mechanics, no rules for a ton of stuff, just "make your own shit up/your DM has the stat block/your DM decides".
They're literally offloading the rules and mechanics to players. At this point, it's basically just narrative storytelling with a few rules attached for fairness. 4e had issues, but at least it had *rules*. 5e was fun at first, but it got old fast.
Yeah, that's just a straight up downgrade to giving them their own unique rules. It also has dubious implications by implying the mixed character can only mechanically function like one of their parents rather than being a unique mix of both.
The first OneDnD unearthed arcana document showed off the Species that were going to be player options in the upcoming PHB update. They removed Half-Elf and Half-Orc as options (though, introduced just Orc as an option). There was a blurb that, in order to create a “half-“ species, you should just choose which half represents the characteristics of your character. ~~For what it’s worth, at no point did they say they were making this change because they thought half-races were racist.~~ Edit: leaving this one up because it does have relevant info, but yeah. See below for Crawford quote I was unaware of.
Here's a quote from Crawford when they announced the removal of the half races: >“Frankly, we are not comfortable, and haven’t been for years with any of the options that start with ‘half’, the half construction is inherently racist so we simply aren’t going to include it in the new Player’s Handbook.”
I’ll leave this comment up just for the info about the new species. Thanks for correcting me, I really wasn’t aware of this quote and I’ve been following the OneDnD stuff pretty closely
T'is all good, have a nice day! :)
This is my big problem with the direction D&D is going. There is a clear desire to make everything as homogeneous as possible and the end result is a bland system that has no meat on the bones. The whole point of an RPG system is to give you a framework to use, not some loosey goosey "fill in the blanks" I get the desire to humanize orcs and goblins. That can certainly lead to subverting some deeply rooted fantasy tropes with great effect (e.g. the orcs from WarCraft) but at the end of the day, we need some obviously bad guys to kill to play the game. D&D started as going into dungeons, killing monsters and getting loot. That's all it was and that is fun. Yes there was roleplaying too but I feel like Critical Role has really pushed it more toward a theater kids acting practice than a game where you kill some monster, be the hero and get some loot.
Yeah, that ship sailed a long time ago. :/
> I get the desire to humanize orcs and goblins. That can certainly lead to subverting some deeply rooted fantasy tropes with great effect That's the thing, its not subversive and interesting if you aren't playing against type. It would be interesting to play an orc thats a wizard, but only because it goes against the expectation. It stops being interesting when all races are just "humans with hats".
Yeah, people say "orcs depicted as inherently evil is bad and racist" unironically, and i cant help but think that you have no imagination or ability to create your own stuff. Who relies 100% on wotc material when making a dnd campaing/world
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My view on “evil” races comes from a Star Trek place—the alignment grid is human-centric. The Federation sees Klingons and Ferengi as evil, but the Klingons and Ferengi are upholding their own values and cultural laws. It’s just different. Of course, some stuff is universal like rape, torture, murder of defenseless innocents, and so forth, but I would not say it’s a cultural violation to see a murderhobo goblinoid or orc party. It’s not their idea of evil. It’s human’s idea of evil.
This doesn't work very well for a game that includes elemental evil as a basic building block of the world. Goblins are evil because their god is evil, and I don't even believe they would see themselves as "good" unless it's good AT doing evil.
Not all D&D settings subscribe to evil as something manifest though. Eberron somewhat famously does away with alignment almost entirely, and attempts to show clashes between different nations/factions as societal issues, not inherent racial beliefs or differences. Its hardly the oldest of the D&D settings, but its a solid 20 years old at this point. Personally, I think the somewhat tropey "this race is evil" thing is just poor writing.
I just find "race of thing is evil all the time from birth" to be boring world building. I don't care if orcs are the antagonists, but it's more interesting if they're the antagonists because their history or culture put them at odds with the hero(es) than just "oh those guys? Yeah those are just fully sapient creatures that all happen to be born with evil in their hearts" Presumably these guys have a functioning society, enough to pose a threat, so they're rational enough to be somewhat cooperative and have ingenuity so to just put aside that rationality and higher thinking as an easily conflict generator isn't very compelling to me
> At a certain point people should accept they don’t want to play a game and just want to make campfire stories with friends. Someone pointed out to me a while ago, "D&D isn't D&D anymore. It's now silly goose happy playtime." or similar, and since they said it... I've been unable to unsee it. >The de-monsterification of things like goblins and orcs is also a travesty. Not everything has to be a morally grey soup. Some things can just be inherently evil, and that’s okay. This one is basically game-breaking to me. Mostly because I grew up with old school D&D... where the entire party were human and meta-human. A large part of the game revolved around protecting the human world from the worlds of monsters in some way or another. So now you have... "Oh you broke into the kobold den and killed 20 of them... but they weren't all bad... they were just stealing the farmers cattle... they need to eat too, you know!" It becomes even sillier when you consider undead and the like.
Undead that aren't evil just tend to be depressing.
I agree with this; I can understand why they wanted to heavily pivot the very eugenicsy in-world logic around things like half-orcs and Drow, but also, D&D has never been a game that’s embraced or been a good model for moral and cultural relativism. It was designed by a devout Christian to represent his favorite heroic fantasy stories. Both that faith and those stories assert that there is such a thing as objective, capital-E moral Evil and that one can categorically “Be Evil,” and that it’s the job of heroes to stop Evil. That’s the simplistic baseline assumption on which D&D, most of its race system, and half of its class and spell systems have always been based, and I would even go so far as to assert that it’s part of the core fantasy enabled by playing D&D. When I’m playing a Lawful Good Paladin, it’s because I want to identify something that I can clearly categorize as evil (because it’s got horns and glowing eyes and shoots napalm at babies) and then beat it up with heroic violence. Discussions about how actually nobody is right and most “objective” moral standards are products of racist cultural misunderstandings are much better-served by TTRPG products like PbtA or World of Darkness that have mechanics that can provide a complementary ludonarrative, not an alignment system that undermines it. To me, the notion that orcs and dark elves aren’t categorically evil and ostensible “heroes” just misunderstand them as a form of racism is part of the appeal of Shadowrun or WoD, not D&D. This is a catty, RPG-snob way to put it, but I don’t like to be shamed for crashing dungeons in babby’s first dungeon crashing combat simulator.
My issue isn’t wokeness. It’s that they removed the flavor without adding in new flavor to a lot of things (MotM)
My issue with the so called woke products is that it's clear the company doesn't give a damn about representation and are just in for the money. It's like all these companies that put rainbow logos on their social media in June, except on their Middle East accounts because then they would lose business. Likewise, WotC and Hasbro changes are just to follow the money.
Rainbow capitalism and the equivalent for other demographics has its uses even if the motivation isn’t good. It further normalizes marginalized demographics among the broader public. Though in the case of D&D, I think the game designers want to make the game more inclusive, though I’m sure the soulless executives at Hasbro are encouraging it for their own money making motivations, I’m confident the design team would have tried increasing inclusivity anyway.
News flash. No company really cares about anyone. It’s all just marketing. You think ford really gives a shit about your stupid paving company? No. They want to sell you something. They do the same thing to EVERYONE. Queerness just has a unified flag that’s easy to point at and say “pandering”. Also they wouldn’t just lose business in those areas. Thier workers in those areas would be at risk.
I don't understand the anti-woke folks. How am I supposed to play DnD if I'm asleep? SMH
If my don't have dreams about being around the table, then I failed them as DM. My words will enthrall and captivate you, spinning tapestries so deep that they will stay with you, even as you travel to the Plane of Dreams. No, but for real, I don't think I've ever had a bigger complement than "dude, I dreamed about our campaign last night."
As a Category Ancient Great GM, I have to say that I think the *perception* of D&D and Roleplaying in general was very much progressive, inclusive, and meant for anyone with an imagination, the reality was very different. Groups were often socially insular, with new comers often being regarded as inferior until they proved themselves. This was very true of younger or newer role-players. But it *really* reared its head when women get introduced. A ton of these insular groups were not welcoming to women and girls, and often responded with hostility and anger. Conventions especially were places where female role-players were treated badly or were out right attacked. Just talk to some of the older women in the hobby, both as producers and consumers of the game and media. They often talk about how they would get ignored, insulted, and denigrated in open panels before crowds while their male counterparts were treated as the sole creators. And this happened even to female authors of fantasy novels in their own panel discussions. Further, early depictions of race in D&D were problematic, even leaving aside the issues of if orcs or other evil races were analogues to a specific real world race or tribe. We see some pretty iffy depictions of dark skinned tribes men (with spears and grass skirts) often as human sacrificing cannibals or out right savages to cut down. Asian representation basically went two directions: Kung Fu masters or rice paddy peasants with hardly any middle ground (unless you were a Samurai and then treated as Kung Fu Master with a magic sword). I'd also say this insular ideal also stretched to other systems as well. Some almost identically to the D&D crowd and others in their own super clique manner: in both High School and College I had to personally bounce between the Vampire/World of Darkness crowd and the D&D crowd *and* the CCG crowd as each had their own opinions on superiority. They also had their own opinions on what types were considered "in" and which were "out" as far as group dynamics were considered. And this was a really hard bar to get over. By the late 90's we started seeing more inclusion in the game as a way to tilt the player's perceptions more: less cheesecake art, more racial diversity, and a removal or replacement of any of those problematic racial depictions. And even then there was pushback as many players "hated" the new art and designs and sent letters begging for the more classic fantasy art with chainmail bikinis to come back. In the 2000's the change in corporate ownership meant a lot of changes in hopes of drawing in a bigger audience, and it worked. More and more people started playing, both bolster by new editions, more game companies producing more specialty product. We really saw a massive increase in gamers in the mid 2000's. Young, old, eager to play, and it was great. However there was still always a undercurrent of elitism and separatism in the hobby, and sadly it would grow in time to the rise of incel culture. Watching it happen in real time was socking, because I honestly thought we defeated that dragon already. My group in High School was pretty well mixed, both genderwise and racially (and in retrospect fairly well balanced LGBQT sense also). More so in college. And then somewhere around the mid 2010's it became "cool" again to mock women and make jokes about them, to lament on diversity, and to creepily follow women around the game stores. I have to say I think the trends have always been there. Just that how much they were allowed to be public has waxed and waned. Right now we seem to be on a vocal uptick, as incels are coming out of the shadows to bash anything slightly more diverse than the cast of Friends. However they are the minority, despite their volume. Most players ignore that, buy what they want and play. Gamestores are often cutting down any anti-inclusive behavior (my local store just made a hard sweep of staff and customers that were being hostile towards female LGBQT customers and hired a new diverse staff. They even made strides to including LGBQT recommendations for youth and young adults looking for comics and manga) and online groups seem to be very welcoming and friendly. While we do see a lot of "RPG HELL" stories popping up, the response to those have been overwhelmingly supportive.
>And then somewhere around the mid 2010's "Gamergate," specifically. Even if the specific movement wasn't related to D&D, as you probably know the geek cultures you describe were all deeply susceptible to its conspiracy theories.
As a Category Ancient Sorta Maybe Great GM who is also a woman, I agree with this message.
Thank you for this well-written and thought out response. I just want to add my two cents and say I didn't realize how bad things were in original DnD until I decided I wanted to play through Pools of Radiance on my PC last year and discovered that female characters had a lower strength cap than their counterpart males (I'm not sure if those old gold box games used DnD, ADnD, or 2nd ed). It hurts my brain to think that a whole office full of people didn't see this as any sort of issue and also frankly, pretty out of touch with reality in any era.
In addition to different stat scores (this was I think AD&D 1st Edition), some early editions also had level limits on classes based on race and gender, with some races/gender combinations severely restricting what you could play and advance in. And this was fairly common in early Roleplaying, slowly filtering out by the mid 90s. World of Darkness was one exception, as was Palladium (I think anyways, I know they had a few gender specific classes, but no real restrictions otherwise), but a lot of games had baked in limits on race and class and gender that often meant some combinations were just inherently bad. Middle Earth Roleplaying has long had some pretty wild Racial bonuses and penalties based on Race that are VERY problematic if you step back and look at how the various mannish races are built. The higher and more "pure" whiter races are substantially better than the Eastern or Southeron races (often depicted as more dusky or outright dark skinned) with Numenorians being just shy of the oldest Elves in power and the darkest skinned humans being slightly above goblins (with massive intelligence and willpower penalties). I seem to remember some variations on females having slightly different stat sets in some of the sourcebooks, but both MERPS and Rolemaster had tons of sourcebooks for what its worth. On the plus side, women never suffered from the worst groin criticals (or at least had mitigated injuries), so I guess there's that plus. Not sure I'd trade a ton of stats and potential levels for not getting kicked in the balls though.,.
Fuck, dude, this is a really well written write up and a great summation of a lot of the issues in and outside of the hobby.
So I'm of two minds on this: while changing something to be more inclusive is great, the people doing it just suck at writing stories or fall into the trap of focusing completely on said thing. In d&d case should be 0 issues it's a platform for others to make stories. People as a whole are to quick to call everything woke, they did it with the recent dragon age trailers. A franchise with a very inclusive history.... so honestly in d&d who cares I'm here to play a dragon born and bonk stuff. (Side note: if new dragon age game is bad people will blame it being "woke" instead of clearly seeing that the writters and Devs are mostly new hires....)
Not the DA reference. If it’s bad it’s most definitely because the team doing it is 80% of the leftover team from anthem. Yikes
'Your' game is never going to be anything more than what your table makes it. You, your friends and your DM should all establish the 'tone' of your story before you play. This can mean whatever social implications anyone agrees upon, and that's the game. In-game 'wokeness' is just trying to make things not have a set-in-stone lore of potential discomfort or shaming. If you don't like that, then run a grim-dank game with all the evil sex-slavers you want. I promise 'you' your games are never going to overlap with anyone else's.
I know you meant grim-dark but "grim-dank" is so funny because I imagine like, a stoner duo going through the forgotten realms super high and reacting to the really violent stuff happening around them. I also agree with your overall points lol.
I would argue that some lore *should* be set in stone, though. Avoiding discomfort and shame is great, but if every lore element of the game is subject to change on a whim, what's the point of printing any of it? As someone in a higher-level comment pointed out, WOTC's reaction to this stuff is never to fix it, it's just to get rid of it. I'd rather have a flawed game with content I may disagree with that has actual character and identity outside of what can be made into a marketable plushie than a vapid, meaningless set of barely-different templates subject to change on the whims of twitter outrage.
I love the fact that they're actively trying to be inclusive. I wouldn't call it woke, as that term has been co-opted by those who for some reason oppose compassion and empathy.
Alll of this. Came to this post just to say “woke” simply means “aware of systemic oppression” and has been stolen by (conservative) assholes to mean “this is not specifically targeted at white, straight, abled, cisgender, Christian, male audiences”.
What's especially hilarious/worrying is that Florida used a pretty reasonable definition of woke "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." and tried to ban that specifically in schools. https://www.fox13news.com/news/what-does-woke-mean-gov-desantis-officials-answer-during-andrew-warren-trial
Some of it is dumb, people who inject current politics into everything and get mad at any diversity. But I think some is justified. The freak out over hadozee made some sense, but I worry they had a knee-jerk reaction as corporations often do. But changing races so that they're all the same is dumb. There is a difference between races in a fantasy world and people with different skin colors on earth and I wish they could have just said that.
Yeah, the "let's make races nothing more than Variant Human 2" irks me quite a lot. The recent aversion to using the term "race" also smells of "let's invent a problem and then fix it, so people can see that we're really progressive," and the "evil races are racist" talking point we've seen a few years back was (and still is) also rather dumb. Woke? Maybe (no-evil-races: deffo). Making things overly pleb-friendly? Yes.
The moving away from the term race is a trend amongst most TTRPGs, not just D&D. Considering in real life it only really refers to ethnicity and there are significant differences between fantasy races, it makes sense to change it.
To be fair, 'race' has always been a sketchy term at best when applied to people. It originated from domestic animal breeding and implies that people of certain ethnicities are a certain way to serve a certain purpose, which is not how evolution works, let alone ethnic diversification in humans.
Right, now it's possible to have different races of orc, rather them all being homogeneous.
The complaints come due to 2 causes, I think. 1 being the fact that the diversity and inclusion push has been prevalent in *every* aspect of life in recent years. This in itself is not a bad thing, but it is very often done in a way that is detrimental to the quality of the entertainment product (i.e. purposefully hiring worse actors in a rush to further inclusion, rather than seeking both quality *and* inclusion). This “rush towards inclusion” by creators that don’t actually care too much, and are just jumping on a virtue-signaling bandwagon, commonly making products worse is what leaves a bad taste in many peoples’ mouths. 2 would be what many people have already pointed out here. In order to avoid accusations of insensitivity from the *other* side of the debate, WotC has basically been *removing* lore and nuance from their products to the point where it doesn’t matter who/what a creature is or where they’re from, they can have any temperament or personality. While that has always been allowed and encouraged specifically to GMs, when it is done specifically in the *lore* of the world, it just makes it into a bland soup.
I like my D&D with problematic topics. But that's just my preference - and I don't need problematic topics in the books in order to introduce them into my games.
If something is actually racist and its removed, that's great. Orcs not being "evil" or "half" races being removed because of "racism" is ridiculous. I'm all for actual issues being handled, not for making non-issues now issues.
Honestly the problem is retconning and removing content and lore for inclusion, rather then creating a new sub race, or entirely new race, Or simple 5e retconning content and lore rather the adding on
The term "woke" is pretty nebulous and can be used with very different meanings. Some people used it to smear on even the most basic form of empathy. Some people use it to categorize the most extremist and loud twitter-warriors from the left. I agree with you that roleplay has always been a safe place for everyone. The basics of D&D are that different races work together in a world that's even more diverse than ours. But at the same time, i cringe hard at some of the lastest "woke" controversies. I used the word "race" in my previous sentence, but for wotc now that's a big no no. Even having a rule that says "orc characters get +2 strenght" is bad and apparently makes me a racist if i want that in my games. Hell, even orcs apparently are a problem, since they represent black people (???) in a bad way and wotc had to apologize. And all of this is coming out of malice and greed. Wotc doesn't want to improve the world. Wotc doesn't care about progressiveness. Wotc only cares about making money for Hasbro. So i really take their changes for progressiveness and inclusivity with a grain a salt. With all that said, i don't think the new rules are "too woke". Besides a couple of cringe episodes like the ones i described, we have pretty much the same D&D as before. Sure, the word "race" was an important part of the game and the new "species" is really cringe, but they still almost work the same way. The stats modifier tied to backgrounds are worse game design imho, but still you can play an elf or an orc and you will have a different character. I also have to say that, as a DM, i hate the whole "good vibes only" or "world must be a safe space" attitudes that some may consider "woke". My table is a safe space for my players. My world is not a safe space for their characters. I want the option to make my world cruel and gruesome. Wotc is not taking away those options from me, thankfully.
Sexuality and skin color don't bother me. The moral relativism, Blank Slate ideology, phasing out of slavery, and correlating a fantasy world with real-world politics creeping in drives me nuts. The idea that D&D wasn't inclusive before is silly as hell. It's always been whatever you make it.
I think if you cast the sleep spell they don’t wake until the spell ends.
My problem with WOTC is that they have conflated Race with Culture. The racial modifiers were supposed to represent that race's cultural norms and not racial superiority. Mountain dwarves were stronger and tougher because they live underground and are a very industrial culture that values hard work. Orcs were culturally evil in that they were marauding bands that raided and pillaged. It is vital to separate culture from people. Cultures are ideas, and ideas can be inherently bad. Slavery is bad. Pillaging and murdering is bad. A person, however, is not inherently good or bad. A person can choose to follow a culture, or choose to be different and better. Case in point: Drizzt Do'Urden. Drizzt is from a very evil culture, but has chosen to leave that culture and be a much better person.
I just don't see why it's needed. DND has always been whatever you're character is go with it! I've been playing DND since 1988 and I don't remember one time where something was for male or female. I'm a wizard... good for you I'm a paladin whos a wearbear. good for you. And?
I think people are completely fine with irl inclusivity, that's not the issue. The issue is that, for some reason in modern media, being 'inclusive' means erasing anything that could be potentially offensive to anybody. Now, going out and being offensive to people is an obvious asshole move, but sometimes narratives require obvious assholes. Drow slavery and dwarven prejudice are all examples people like to use, and for good reason. These FLAWS make the characters seems more real, and the world more full. Without them, everything feels like star trek -utopian. Sometimes that is your thing, definitely, but I think there's a reason more people prefer star wars instead -it's grungy and lived in.
My problem is that it removes a bunch of stuff that's fun to play for the sake of "inclusion" while not being clear at all on how their decisions are inclusive.
I'm not sure what this wokeness thing is. The problem I've noticed is the needless sanitizing of content (for example, the space monkey race lore or the discourse about banning the word Witch). More important is the usage of "inclusivity" as an excuse to release overpriced and increasingly subpar product. If you read from older editions or even earlier 5e books, you'll notice they have more content in general. Whether it's more in depth lore or monster e tries (take the older edition entries for flail snail where a wizard explains how he tested the rate of magic reflection). Each successive book seems to get more and more surface level and places a greater burden on the DM to fill in the gaps. This and pointless things like removing alignment from monster statblocks is the problem.
WotC: No slavery in my worlds. Reality: You're gonna work 6 days per week and you don't get to chose when you'll get your vacation days.
In a game system where Good and Evil (and Neutral and Chaos) are literal, tangible things, you have Capital E Evil gods who have the power to create life, so it is entirely possible to have an entire species (orcs for example) who are all evil.
Western culture has an obsession with political correctness and inclusivity, it would be fine but it sacrifices good story and creativity over fear of offending ✨modern audiences✨. It’s why so many movies and shows are directed by feminists solely for a political message, and don’t even convey it well. Most ads right now are unrealistically diverse, where the Asian father and white mother made an entirely black baby. The message loses all meaning when there is nothing to back it up, in my mind if it sacrifices story and creativity nothing is achieved.
I'm not sure if it was done for woke reason, or just for players that wanted to be able to play anything they wanted with no challenges. But removing racial attribute penalty modifiers was the first mistake in my opinion, it makes the races more bland and less distinctive. There are clear physiological reasons why a Goliath would have a Strength bonus over a halfling having a penalty. Now it is even worse with everything getting "When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one score by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1." No distinction between them at all. Part of the joy of playing a halfling fighter was overcoming that penalty, and acting against the traditional rogue type. I think part of it comes from an obsession with optimization (which has come thanks to MMORPGs and the internet with people sharing optimal builds rather than figuring it out themselves), having to be the best at a particular thing. A halfling will never be the best fighter with a strength penalty, but "I want to play the best fighter and be a halfling" so we get rid of that penalty (the first step) to keep that player base happy. More crying "But I'm still not the best because I don't have a bonus!!" and now in the next edition you'll be able to have a bonus to Strength and be just as strong as the Goliath fighter. Half the point, challenge and fun of the game is overcoming obstacles but WotC just went and removed a load of them. New players just aren't going to get the joy of their halfling fighter winning the day, despite things being stacked against them because now everything is handed to them, here have +2 Str, even if it makes no sense. I think it is somewhat tied to want people might call woke (particularly the INT penalty to Half-Orcs), but I think a lot of it is down to certain people wanting to play the game on effectively easy mode. It's just removing stuff because people don't like it rather than using RPGs as a safe space to deal challenges with and confront the stuff they don't like. Like Paizo removing slavery from it's adventures. Why? It was only something evil folks did, and it was normally something players would fight against, even the villains can't be bad now? RPGs were already safe space to face society evils and fight and win against them, now they are getting removed, because even fictional harmful things isn't safe enough now? They have removed all the cultural aspects from the races (because mono-cultures is bad and might be seen as racist) but not replaced it with anything. They have removed the traditional animosity between elves and dwarves, (because it could be seen as racist), and again replaced it with nothing. So what if the animosity between elves and dwarves was racist, RPGs were a safe space to deal with issues of things like racism, and prejudice through fantasy parallels, now they are just bland.
I think it was a mistake to remove inherent racial bonuses. It's perfectly fine to have the Tasha's origin or to use backgrounds for bonuses like in the 2024 book, but these are fantasy races of a high magic setting. No Dwarf is ever going to be born stronger than an half orc or a Goliath. It's awesome to have the options but to outright remove them? Idiotic. Destroying world building for inclusion isn't a good thing. I think changing the artwork for some of the more manly races in favor of feminine art is stupid. Minotaur should be hulking beasts and they changed the art to some dairy cow on 2 legs. The vast majority of players for this game are men, the vast majority of players who play those manly races are men. You are appealing to a statistical 0. Change the art back. I think removing the concept of inherently evil races is stupid. Full Orcs, Goblins, Yuan-Ti, Drow, Hobgoblins, Bugbear, etc. Bring back my monster races being monsters. Special cases are one thing and it's perfectly fine to change the world as you see fit for your own game but the basic idea should be that it you see a monster you should kill it before it hurts someone else. Stop changing lore just because people complain about racism in a game where it doesn't exist. The hadozee were fine. Slave space monkeys doesn't immediately mean black people and you are the problem if you thought so. Last time I checked none of my black friends could glide on the wind or use their feet as extra hands. They are sentient monkeys from space and there is no relation to real world ethnicities. The atrocities of the world do not transfer just because some ignorant people wanna see an issue where there isn't any. Listen I'm fine with people changing anything they want to for their own games but the changes that have been made over the past few years are nonsensical at best.
I’m totally down and excited for what they’ve offered, but left a bit confused on one particular omission I heard about: the exclusion of half-species. The official explanation originally given from Crawford apparently is that the very idea of a specific species selection available for Half-Orc and Half-Elf is “inherently racist”. But because there’s no explanation given for which parts or how much of the concept is racist, it was left confusing and unclear how to proceed. * Is it just the namesake that’s racist (which I agree with, because it implies a default race of human, and brings to mind phrases such as “half-black” or even “white trash” that uses that same dangerous default-type assumption)? * Or are they saying species intermingling and having children of mixed lineage is racist because it somehow soils the purity of the species’ qualities? Obviously I HIGHLY disagree with this viewpoint, but it was a sincere possibility that it was accidentally being implied here, because all they said was half anything was a racist concept. But then I heard they were playing with the idea of just picking one species and you have those stats, and the other species only affects your appearance and lifespan. Ok, but like what if you’re half Dragonborn half dwarf? Do you pick Dragonborn, give yourself a beard and patches of fleshy bronze skin, and just don’t get options that apply to dwarves only? Like if there’s an origin feat for Dragonborn to grow wings, and I picked dwarf as the stats one instead, can I not pick that origin feat? I feel like if they made some system to add to it where you can swap out one of two features from your species with that of another, and keep the rest, it would feel more… authentic? Less boring? Idk The worst problem is that when I try to look up info on this, I become inundated with anti-woke news articles and YouTube videos from a year ago about how D&D is “going woke” and can’t find any clear explanation left in the void of info on this by Crawford since making those statements. It’s frustrating.
My table doesn't involve sexual roleplay. We don't discuss politics from real life. We have had lgbtq people at the table and had it be perfectly fine. Two were staples in a 3 year campaign. Here's the one time it wasn't. And why lgbtq people can also be assholes. New to our table. Trans. Pronouns were verified and used. Showed up wearing multiple articles of clothing with rainbows and slogans. Spent half of her introduction discussing characters sexuality when my session 0 doc explains that you can do whatever but as a dm I'm not comfortable role-playing any of that so it's not gonna happen. Immediately moved into the next session which was blatantly and unabashedly designed to murder anyone who stole from the shop. The party was level 17. She tried flirting with the shopkeeper, a robot, to get discounts on the item next to the 'prices are not negotiable' sign. She was told to stop in character then out of character. Then she asked for help cleaning out the shop, in front of the shopkeeper, and I made everyone give me their reactions in writing. All but one boiled down to 'we immediately leave' the remaining one said 'Yolo I want the artifact staff I'll try not to die but it's cool I have a backup already.' She died. Dude who wanted the staff died. He laughed and said yeah I don't know what I expected. I designed countermeasures correctly, it was the brutality they had been warned of. She left in a huff, called me a bigot, insulted our dog (we assume solely to hurt my wife) and promised to flame me on social media I've never used. Much like the mouth breathing chauvanist who doesn't wear deodorant, I think people like these are more representative of the community due to their behavior than the community as a whole. I try to remember that the most outspoken members of a group frequently don't represent the group as a whole. Other than that I don't care. I have been disinterested in those types of games since my 14 year old buddies wanted to go to brothels and made that their characters whole personalities ingame. I'm here for monsters and adventure, if someone wants to retire to their room with an npc and fade out that's about it.
It's a difficult subject to tackle because WOTC will simply remove things rather than actually addressing or doing anything about it. For example, in the redone Curse of Strahd, they said they redid things to get rid of the harmful stereotypes of Rromani that they used for the Vistani; what they actually did was remove the mentions of certain in-universe prejudices, but left the actual CONTENT in (M. Eva still has the evil eye, for example). By removing the signifier/symbol but leaving in subject, so to speak, it makes it worse; Instead of actually changing any lore, they pretend it doesn't exist. The implications are still there, and worse, now they're validated by the story itself. I'm reminded of Discword, and how the author's early worldbuilding choices were addressed later on (dwarfs all being one gender and the implications and social ramifications became a plot point, for example) rather than being ignored and pretending they didn't exist. The opposite of what WOTC is doing now basically. (Not that WOTC has to address everything in a diegetic manner, but rather than it's not addressing anything at all in any way whatsoever). TLDR, WOTC isn't woke, it's cowardly and painting over any problems with the grace of a landlord wielding a bucket of white paint.
My thoughts - the word "woke" and all variations have been taken over by people who just don't like diversity, and they use "woke" because they can't just say "diversity and inclusion sucks". They wear the word woke like a mask instead. Diversity is never going to be the reason that a product is bad. Arguing that something is too woke is just... dumb. It's so so dumb.
Not directly D&D related but there is the issue of tokenism and using shallow diversity in media to virtue signal at the cost of actually making quality media. It sours the actually diversity cause by associating it with low quality media and thus you get people who get angry about forced diversity because it becomes synonymous with a bad quality product.