Last month, Wizards of the Coast, publisher of Dungeons & Dragons, announced that it was making some adjustments to its depictions of "evil races" in its games. The decision comes after several streaming services removed episodes of TV shows that could be deemed offensive from their services, in light of the worldwide protests sparked earlier this year by a series of police brutality incidents in the US.
Since every played experience is unique, many players have been left wondering how exactly these changes will be manifested, the impact this decision will have on the pen-and-paper RPG, and what they can expect going forward from Dungeons & Dragons.
What Changed
Wizards of the Coast’s press release states that “some of the peoples in the game—orcs and drow being two of the prime examples—have been characterized as monstrous and evil, using descriptions that are painfully reminiscent of how real-world ethnic groups have been and continue to be denigrated.”
Based on the release, the decision will come into effect in the next printed edition of its 5th Edition books, including removing “racially insensitive” text from Tomb of Annihilation and Curse of Strahd due to the depiction of the Vistani, a group of humans based on a pop-cultural idea of the Romani which Wizards of the Coast says echoed “some stereotypes associated with the Romani people in the real world.”
Wizards of the Coast also states that it will continue a trend of presenting orcs and drow in particular in a new light, which the publisher claims to have already done in its two most recently published 5th edition books, the campaign Eberron: Rising from the Last War, and The Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount. With new a new D&D Campaign Book around the corner, the publishers continued commitment remains to be seen.
How This Affects DnD
For many players, these changes are unlikely to affect their experience of playing D&D 5e for several reasons. Outside of its D&D novels, almost all of the material published by Wizards of the Coast for Dungeons & Dragons - like the upcoming Icewind Dale adventure - is designed to be relayed to players second-hand through their Dungeon Master.
The necessary assumption of the part of the publisher is that by reducing its reliance on language which echoes real-world racial stereotypes, it will help to remove that language from played sessions, but of course, it is entirely dependent on the group playing. Considering the amount of the D&D experience which is unwritten, be it improvised moments from the DM or player responses, the degree of control that Wizards of the Coast has over the way its game is played is extremely slim compared to the video game fantasy equivalents to D&D.
Removing this type of language is a challenge which cannot be overcome simply by taking it out of the published texts, as for decades the function of racial alignments in D&D has essentially been the same role that stereotypes have played in improv-comedy, used to provide extreme short-hand and create a shared understanding of a situation which improvisation can most easily take place upon. Ethics aside, alignment's function is primarily to help players who might not be experienced in improvisation or character work get started role-playing in D&D.
One silver lining to this is that many players have long broken free the strict boundaries set out by the edition rules, such as each monster’\, including creatures like orcs, having a moral alignment listed in the Monster Manual along with its stat block. All new D&D player characters also come with a moral alignment regardless of their race, with how strictly they adhere to that alignment being entirely at the discretion of the player, just as NPC alignments are at the discretion of the DM.
Wizards of the Coast's adjustments to its language would have a bigger impact if the game it was selling was not uniquely detached from the texts they publish. Unlike a video game player, a D&D player can avoid purchasing any official Wizards of the Coast books if they know the rules to the game, with the thriving D&D home-brewing community not only adjusting those rules but creating entirely different or augmented D&D settings other than the Forgotten Realms.
Plenty of D&D players have played as and told stories involving orcs and drow that aren't evil since 1e. Even the Forgotten Realms includes Drizzt Do'Urden, one the best know characters in the game and a good aligned drow. In short, while the publisher's changes do have an effect, this effect is likely to be felt the least in the played experience of D&D groups who wanted those changes to be made, as many of them already took the liberty of making those changes themselves.
Furthermore, unlike a video game patch, all of the old versions of the printed 5e books still exist, and while the publisher states that it will make changes with each book reprinted, it is unlikely to see fundamental change until the release of D&D’s 6th edition, which is not currently in development and may not be seen for a long time. Even a DM who is buying one of the newly published campaign books will likely have an older rulebook and monster manual which include racial moral alignments unless they want to pay the non-insignificant cost of reordering the essential D&D starter books.
The change that, if properly implemented, will likely have the most concrete effect, is the claim in the D&D press release that it is “proactively seeking new, diverse talent to join our staff and our pool of freelance writers and artists." Unlike language used in game sessions, this is one of few things where the end result is measurable and within Wizards of the Coast’s control.
The Future of Fantasy
While the language changes made by Wizards of the Coast are likely to have a reduced impact on most people’s played experience of D&D due to the intermediary role of the Dungeon Master, the renewed focus the depiction of race in fantasy will likely see calls for big changes across the genre in the coming decade. Wizards of the Coast can remove racial moral alignments from its D&D campaigns and tell new stories about some of its fantasy races, but the fact remains that one of the reasons fantasy as a genre has been such fertile ground for pen-and-paper RPGs over the years is that its use of race in a way that’s supposedly decontextualized from reality provides players with a shorthand that makes experiencing a shared imaginary world easier.
If a Dungeon Master describes a dwarf, for example, there are hundreds of reference points for a player to immediately draw upon in their imagination from the dwarf’s appearance to their accent that a player can draw upon without the Dungeon Master having to explain it in exposition. Indeed, this is one of the reasons why Tolkien-style fantasy races took such deep root in the creation of D&D and similar RPGs – players were already expected to have some footing in this fantasy world through its simplified inhabitants.
Wizards of the Coast states in its press release that “human” in D&D means “everyone, not just fantasy versions of northern Europeans.” A player who wants to play as a human based on Mongolian culture in a standard D&D setting, however, will nonetheless find an immense amount of language in the standard texts echoing longstanding cultural fears of a Mongol Horde invading Europe reflected in the descriptions of the orcs. The orc tribes of Middle-earth are based in part on the Mongols in almost every fantasy appearance they make, with Tolkien himself describing orcs as resembling “the least lovely Mongol-types.”
It is possible that in the future players will see the use of the word "race" dropped from this fantasy context entirely, when in the vast majority of D&D settings what is actually means is "species". While Tolkien himself suggested elves and humans must technically be biologically identical to produce offspring, any player who suggests halflings and lizardfolk are different races of the same species would likely garner a few odd looks.
World of Warcraft, for example, which relaunched with WoW Classic last year, has trolls with fake Jamaican accents and Tauren based on Native Americans. In part, by giving each race in the game a distinct real-world culture it was based upon, the developers were able to draw on a lot of real-world sources for the design of the architecture of the game world, and to create a range of in-game cultures which didn't need a lot of time to be explained to the player dropped into the fantasy world.
It isn't only culture that is used as shorthand in fantasy either. In Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the orcs have working class British accents, relying on the association between class, intelligence, and violence. The members of the fellowship, on the other hand, have middle to upper-class accents. It is another example of the shorthand fantasy has relied upon for a long time to quickly acclimatize readers, viewers, and players to a completely foreign environment using familiar tropes and stereotypes related to our world, causing many to criticize works like Lord of the Rings for their lack of character depth.
Generic high fantasy is deeply invested in racial typology. By equating race with species at all, Wizards of the Coast and many other fantasy publishers are making the racial differences that have been claimed to exist between real life human ethnic groups into genuine fundamental physical differences from strength to skull shape to tails, regardless of the alignment or gameplay impact of these characters. This may lead to more RPGs moving from traditional fantasy settings to alternate ones, like Cyberpunk D&D campaigns.
A confrontation with the hyper-racialization underlying modern fantasy has been brewing since its inception, ever since the hobbits returned to the Shire at the end of The Lord of the Rings to find to their horror that their home has been taken over by “squint-eyed” and “halfbreed” men in their absence. It will take more than playable orcs in The Explorer's Guide to Wildemount to change this, and the plethora of other ways fantasy is invested in race and class-based stereotypes as a gameplay aid as much as a storytelling device.
While Wizards of the Coast changing its publishing guidelines for D&D might not have an immediate effect on players, it can nonetheless be seen as indicative of a growing conversation in the fantasy community that will very likely have a big impact on some of the most ingrained generic devices utilized by writers and players alike.
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