Races d&d
The view from inside the company isn’t great either. “I did some limited work for WotC on a project under the vast D&D umbrella in very early 2020. I cannot talk about the project directly or my experience in depth because of a strict NDA. What I will say is that, in my limited experience working with the company, my manager on that project fought for my ideas and listened to my critiques, and in fact wanted to work with me because of my prior criticisms of the company and its products,” Austin Walker says.d&d 5e races Walker is the host of Waypoint Radio and Friends at the Table, a podcast where he plays tabletop role-playing games and discusses world-building with his good friends. “Legacy issues with D&D as a franchise and WotC as a company presented innate roadblocks towards addressing these problems, and I was often frustrated as I saw the limits of ‘reforming’ the franchise's relationship with race. Because of this, I would not choose to work with the company again in the near future.”
According to Walker, racial essentialism is built into D&D’s DNA, and its recent push for a racial reckoning is a long time coming. “Inside the space of nerd hobbies, D&D’s mainstreamification has come late,” Walker says.
Comic books are the basis for the biggest movie franchises in the world. Video games are a billion-dollar industry. Fantasy fiction like Game of Thrones dominates television. But tabletop role-playing games didn’t enter the mainstream until a few years ago. Stranger Things aired in 2016, and Critical Role, a web show where voice actors play D&D, began in 2015. These two shows, more than anything else, catapulted D&D into the mainstream. It still held on to a lot of baggage from its past when it broke big.
WotC is trying to make changes, but it often feels like lip service. Walker read the list of proposed changes and said to himself, “‘All of these are probably the right decisions, and also, I don’t think any of this is proactive or deep enough to address core fundamental problems and expectations,” he said. “It’s a difficult problem, I get it … I don’t think you can bowdlerize what was already there and say, ‘We’re gonna drop the slurs, we’re gonna make the yellow face a little less yellow.’ I don’t think you can remaster away racism. I think that’s a really difficult prospect, but it’s one that they should take head-on. But also, it’s hard to do that because you need people on the team who are as diverse as the world you want to represent.”
Other people of color have come away from working with WotC with a bad taste in their mouth. Orion Black was a freelancer who worked on contract for WotC from November 2019 until the summer of 2020. Like Walker, Black had a bad experience. Contractors at WotC are generally renewed in blocks. Even though they’d worked on several projects, they knew toward the end of summer that they weren’t coming back.
