The Race for Equality in DnD

Towards the end of last year, Wizards of the Coast (WotC), released a book called Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything. This is a supplementary rules book, with a large number of optional rules that DMs and players are free to implement in their games, or free to ignore if they don’t like them. It printed or reprinted lots of new subclasses and spells, and gave optional changes to pretty much every class.

One of the major and most hotly anticipated things the book did was introduce the idea that the racial ability modifiers which were written into the stats for each race could be customised. You can swap your +2 intelligence with a +2 strength when you make your Gnome if you want. It also removed negative modifiers, so orcs don’t have to have a -2 intelligence anymore. This optional rule was introduced as a response to the growing calls in the DnD community for wholesale changes to the way race works in DnD.

DnD has a race problem. There are numerous podcast, articles and twitter accounts which spend plenty of time discussing why, so I won’t repeat the argument in full here, but essentially the idea that all elves are intelligent or all orcs are strong is problematic, especially when you trace the history of those races to their overtly racist origins, as James Medez Hodes does in this excellent article.

This change to the rules about race was simultaneously applauded for being a good start and criticised for not being enough (with a small minority decrying it for ruining the game’s balance, as some classes get better modifiers than others). Shortly after Tasha’s was released, Jeremy Crawford said that it would take several years for the changes needed to race and other problematic issues in DnD to be fully implemented. Recently, Wired published an article highlighting that it is the players who are leading the way in changing the harmful stereotypes perpetuated in DnD, rather than WotC, and I wanted explore this a little more, because I think the response to Tasha’s and to Jeremy Crawford’s statements reveal something interesting about our relationship as players with the company that publish the game.

I think it’s really important to remember what WotC is. It is a limited company, owned by Hasbro. The company only publishes DnD books for one reason. To make a profit. Of course, the people who work for WotC are likely very passionate about the game they make, and want to make it as good as it can be, but they ultimately work for a living. They have to design and publish content that will sell, because that is the prerogative of working for a company like WotC.

The racial issues with DnD are systemic. The very foundation of the game is a tolkienian attitude to race that is deeply problematic. Writing that out of the game entirely is a long and difficult process. It would probably require an entirely new edition of the game to rewrite the lore around the different races and to change the rules around how your race impacts your character. WotC is not going to spend the time and money to write, promote and sell 6th edition DnD when there is no commercial demand for it. 5E is the most popular and successful edition of the game ever. DnD is currently booming, with the number of players higher than ever before. There is no commercial reason for ditching 5E, so they won't.

This is a harsh reality for everyone who looks at the way that Half-orcs are written in the Player's Handbook and winces at the problematic depiction of the noble savage. However, I don’t think this means that we should just throw our hands up and stop putting pressure on WotC to continue to change things. In fact, I think it means that we should only push harder. If we understand that the main obstacle in the way of progress towards a better game is capitalism, then if we the customer continue to make noise about wanting a game with less racist content, there’s a good chance that we will get it. We may just get it more slowly than we would like.

I also think that accepting that WotC is a limited company which fundamentally only cares about making money changes our attitude towards WotC and DnD. There is a temptation to think that because WotC publish official DnD content, they are the authority on all things DnD and that only content published by WotC is ‘real’ DnD. This is wrong.

WotC did not create DnD. DnD was created by Gary Gygax and his company, called TSR. By the time TSR was purchased by WotC in the late 90s, Gygax didn’t even work there anymore. DnD was picked up by WotC and largely rebuilt from the ground up for 3rd Edition, but the game existed before then. WotC don’t have any special claim to the game beyond being the current company that owns the copyright.

From the very beginning, the DM has been fundamental to DnD. It has always been the case that the DM has essentially free reign to homebrew rules and lore for their table, and that the rules as written down are open to being selectively ignored or edited to suit individual tables and games. Over time the ‘official’ rules and lore of the game has built up, but this was always in order to sell more books. None of this ‘official’ stuff is actually mandatory. The DM has the final say.

WotC extended this by creating the Open Gaming License for 3rd Edition. This allows, even encourages, 3rd parties to create and publish DnD content. It still exists for 5E. With the DMs Guild, they even host an online marketplace that allows you to sell this content. Anyone can make and publish homebrew rules and settings for DnD. It is actively encouraged.

DnD doesn’t belong to WotC. DnD belongs to the players who play it. If we want to change the lore around Goblins, or adjust the traits that come with a given race, we can and should. There is nothing stopping us from taking the ‘official’ content and adapting it to our own purposes. DnD is a very broad system where all sorts of things are possible, so we the players and DMs get to decide what we want DnD to be. We don’t have to wait for WotC to do that for us. WotC doesn’t own DnD. The players do.

Again, this does not mean we should stop calling for change. I still rely heavily on WotC published content in my games, particularly for rules - I only allow ‘official’ races and classes in my games, because I think there is a better chance that these will be reasonably balanced and play-tested. Most people’s first port of call when looking at DnD content will be the official books, especially the core books, so these are important and we should continue to call for them to be improved.

But we should align our expectations with the commercial reality. 5E isn’t going anywhere any time soon because it is still commercially successful. Once it reaches the end of its product life-cycle, hopefully we will get a new edition where the problematic elements of the game are removed. Until then, we must keep calling for change. Hopefully each new rule book and campaign setting will make incremental improvements.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of creators out there making excellent content for 5E that fixes many of these problems. There are some astonishingly cool settings using 5E as a basis which remove the problems inherent in DnD races. Use those in your games, or just straight up make it up yourself. You own DnD as much as WotC does. It’s your table, you decide.