What’s the point of playing a non-human character in DnD? No shade if you want to play an Orc or Elf just for the vibes – the concept of non-human sentient species is packed with storytelling potential, after all – but regular Dungeons and Dragons now plays the issue of fantasy races so safe that there’s very little players can do with it.
As Wizards of the Coast noted in a blogpost on DnD Beyond in December 2022, “”race” is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds”. Narrative depictions of monstrous humanoids reproduced stereotypes about real-world cultures, while the racist concept of extreme disparity between human ethnic groups was given mechanical weight by giving each species different DnD stat bonuses.
When the DnD 2024 Player’s Handbook released, it relabelled the DnD races as ‘species’, and removed the specific stat bonuses or penalties that came with playing an Orc, Elf, or anyone else. There is now minimal mechanical difference between Humans and the other species they share the DnD universe with. Likewise their descriptions in the lore have been smoothed down to minimise any parallels with real world cultural stereotypes.
As someone who wants DnD to be welcoming to all newcomers, I’m delighted by this change. The concept of human ethnic groups having inherently different capabilities was popularized by racists long before it was imported to tabletop roleplaying games, and the move by most D20 based games to diminish it comes from laudable motives.
At the same time, the change means that the choice of species has less impact on your character build, with your pick of DnD class being ever more dominant. That makes your species materially less relevant to the mechanics of the game – which is DnD’s main engine for telling stories.
Similarly, burnishing away the uncomfortable edges of fantasy lore so it doesn’t reproduce real-world stereotypes means shrinking the space of what it’s even possible to say.
Take, for example, the trope of the ‘inherently evil’ sentient race, or at least, ‘inherently inimical’ – a species with which civilization cannot co-exist and which it is therefore a-okay to slaughter. As I argued in a recent piece on Orcs, the mechanics of DnD grew up around this assumption.
This Wild West fantasy can be a fun bit of escapism in a game, but there are real people whose family history and current economic circumstances were shaped by the same narrative being used against their ancestors. It’s a Good Thing to decouple our make-believe games from real-life ideas and language that were historically used by racists to dehumanize and dominate their fellow human beings.
And yet, an encounter with a race we fundamentally cannot co-exist with doesn’t have to result in a DnD narrative of justified murder. Done right, even problematic concepts can deliver nuanced and humanist messages. Spoilers ahead for the manga series ‘The Promised Neverland’, which I enthusiastically recommend you read – most of what I say is taken from the first chapter, but jump here if you want to avoid any plot details.
In the ‘The Promised Neverland’, the human heroes discover their happy orphanage home is actually an organic farm for the demon luxury food market. After a tense prison break thriller arc, the escapees embark on an epic fantasy journey across an inimical world.
Central to the story is the question of whether the pacifist heroine Emma can retain her commitment to hope in a world that demands blood at every turn. The demons have both cultural and physiological reasons for eating humans, and a moral system which – totally coherently – incorporates eating sentient creatures. Even at the resolution of the story – fundamentally happy and a little convenient in some ways – this tension is not resolved, but circumvented.
It’s surprisingly complex for a kids’ story. The author is not shy about having messages, principally about hope, reconciliation, institutional complicity, and breaking cycles of violence. The conflict with the demons animates those ideas, and it’s only possible because they’re different from humans in material ways – ways that, in an RPG, would appear somewhere on the character sheet.
In the Orc article I argued that “DnD’s rules aren’t designed to facilitate an honest, satisfying, or educational engagement with intercultural exchange, or peace treaties, or postwar processes of truth and reconciliation”. I think those are all great ideas for RPGs, by the way – but the DnD ruleset would not be my first pick for animating them.
Some RPGs are already built around non-human entities, from their rules to their story. Not always delicately, I should add, but at least in ways that are interesting. The World of Darkness line is almost entirely built of games that put narrative and mechanical constraints on your behaviour to make the experience feel more like being a Vampire, or a Werewolf, or a Wraith.
And even though DnD’s mechanical focus is so heavily weighted towards combat and conquistador adventuring, even the classic framework of adventures, dungeon crawls, and loot gathering can be a vehicle for exploring interesting ideas around non-humans’ subjectivities and the complexities of race, with the right framing.
Dave McGrogan’s old-school DnD-style module Yoon Suin: The Purple Land features Crab Men as a playable species. They are nonverbal and cannot become literate, cannot perform tasks that require the use of human hands, cannot use magic items, are at the bottom of the social order (and usually enslaved). They’re also naturally far, far stronger and better armored than any other character.
If you play a Crab Man, you will know about it: in social encounters, when interacting with the game environment, even when communicating with other party members. Crab Men are so unprecedented in the fantasy canon that they don’t easily map onto real-world stereotypes. But because the narrative gives them such a concrete context, there are parallels to be drawn with real world stories of oppression and emancipation if you want to explore them with your character.
Then in Geoffrey McKinney’s sword-and-scifi module Carcosa, there are multiple human species of various different colors – such as red, green, or the fantasy color “jale”. These different species were created by (now dead) snakemen sorcerers, color-coded for use as ingredients in specific rituals; rituals that the players or NPCs can find and use. This can disappear into the background of classic hex crawling – but if you want to pull on this thread, a whole system of societal stratification and exploitation could unfurl.
The stories and games given as examples in this article aren’t intended as models for how DnD could relate to the complexities of race. But they do show what authors and game designer can do with that complexity if they choose to engage with it. The results are interesting, thought-provoking, and it begs the question – why include ‘species’ as a concept at all, if it doesn’t generate any kind of friction in the narrative or gameplay?
I’ve argued elsewhere that the current DnD design studio isn’t in a good position to tackle potentially problematic topics, no matter how interesting they would be if handled with care. The team must serve up a palatable and familiar version of its game to the widest audience possible, under continual scrutiny.
If DnD previously implied unpleasant things about real world human ethnicities, its new approach tries to say as little as possible. “Do no harm” is a reasonable principle for the RPG industry’s 800 pound gorilla to observe. But if you want to play a game that makes you really feel like an Orc, you probably need to look beyond the DnD release schedule.
Source: Wargamer
