Friday, August 19, 2022

I Hear You're (Not) a Racist Now, Father

The first playtest materials for Dungeons & Dragons sixth edition have arrived!

(They are calling it One D&D for some reason, perhaps because they are learning how numbering "works" from the X-Box.)

The first materials concern character backgrounds; for those of you that don't follow D&D, there's been some controversy in the past couple of years over the game's treatment of character ethnicity and species. There are a few main issues:

  • The word "race" is something of a loaded term, and there's a feeling that a better word could be used to describe whether a character is human, elf, orc, or whatever.
  • Saying that, for example, all high elves have a higher Dexterity and Intelligence than other characters is problematic. In fairness, D&D5 doesn't penalise any characters, as previous editions did -- characters only get characteristic increases -- but it's still uncomfortable.
  • From a game design perspective, if all halflings have the same characteristic bonuses, that does tend to channel halfling characters towards certain abilities and skills, and it can make things a bit samey. Oh look! Another high elf wizard!

The D&D6 solution is to remove characteristic increases from the character species, and instead apply them to their background, so now a high elf is only more intelligent than her dwarfish friend if she, for example, trained as a sage before her life of adventure. This does solve the problem. Sort of. Ish.

But:
  • They are still using the word "race". "A character's Race represents ancestry" the playtest document says. So, er, why not just use "ancestry"? For what it's worth, both 13th Age and Pathfinder are using "ancestry" now. For D&D6 to try to have its cake and eat it is baffling.
  • Shifting the characteristic bonuses to backgrounds is less offensive, but "all sages are the same" is still a weird concept.
  • The character channelling problem still exists, it's just been shifted along one column. Now, instead of elves tending to be wizards, it will be sages. Loading feats into the backgrounds is only going to exacerbate the issue.

It's not difficult to fix. Choose your ancestry, then add +2 to one characteristic of your choice, and +1 to another. Job done, problem solved.

You can sign up for the playtest documents here.

Update (01/12/2022): Wizards has decided to drop the word "race" in favour of "species". It's an odd statement, that acknowledges that they've been trying to move away from the term since before the D&D6 playtest, so it's a bit weird that the change is happening now. Oh well. Better late than never?

2 comments:

  1. I'm just going to carry on playing with 5E thanks. I feel no need at all to pay Wotc large sums of cash just so they can flog me a slightly different version of D&D. Those days are long gone.

    For the record I have no difficultywith "race" at all. I don't think many gamers have a "problem" with that term at all. Personally I have beeter, more importantthings to worry about - such as actual injustices done to real people in the real world. This isn't a criticism of you per se but I seriously doubt that 95%+ of gamers have any problem at all with the usage of "race" in an rpg.

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    1. Well, I'm a British white man, so I was taken by surprise when this became a thing over the past couple of years, but I suppose that's part of the point. It's not as much of a loaded term for me because of my background, but perhaps it should be?

      I don't know. It's a complex issue, but at the end of the day, if D&D's treatment and use of the term "race" is hurting people, then I have no problem with them changing it.

      (And as I say, both 13th Age and Pathfinder have changed to "ancestry" so it clearly is bothering a significant number of people.)

      If D&D6 had stuck with "race" then I probably wouldn't have noticed. I just found it funny/sad that D&D6 goes to a certain amount of trouble to fix things, but seems to get in its own way.

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