Welcome everyone to the first installment of “D&D: Race Review” where we’ll be looking at what some avid D&D players have to say on the topic of race in the game. Before we get too far into it, it’s important to look at what exactly D&D is.

Dungeons and Dragons is a tabletop role-playing game where you and a number of other party members play through different scenarios, or campaigns, orchestrated by a Dungeon Master (DM). These campaigns can be premade modules, such as the Curse of Strahd, or something entirely made up by the dungeon master. There are a number of different races that one can choose from, each with bonuses to their stats. Each character can take on different classes, defining what you are in the setting of D&D. From fighters who use different melee weapons, to wizards and sorcerers who use the arcane art of magic, to rouges who sneak around doing bonus damage, the combination of classes and races is nearly limitless. As limitless as the situations that can be in whatever campaign you decide to take up. Now that we have a bit of an overview of what the game entails, let’s dive into the topic at hand: Races in D&D.

When doing these interviews, I wanted to see how players viewed the different races in the game. Particularly, I wanted to see what they thought of the stereotypical “evil races” that many DMs use in their gameplay (including orcs, gnolls, goblins and other monster races). Our first interviewee talked about their experiences in different games that they played. When asked why some people gravitate towards these “evil races” when making enemies, they commented that they’re easier to use: “It’s a lot easier for your character to go slaughter a bunch of evil goblins, you know, than it is if you get ambushed by bandits. You know, with a bunch of human bandits you might think about it for a second because they aren’t necessarily evil, or you know it’s easy to go kill a whole bunch of evil orcs that have been burning down the countryside.”

Here we get a bit of a viewpoint that many players and DMs have when playing the game. It’s certainly easier to throw yourselves at monster races, mainly because they’re almost always portrayed as evil. It’s fairly easy to throw races like goblins and orcs out and have the party fight them without thinking of them as more than enemies. As we talked more, however, our interviewee also mentioned how this shouldn’t be the case. Like in real life, “…if you look at humans… It’s a whole broad range of the whole spectrum, just like real humans, you know? You have good ones and you have people in between, and I think it should be that way for all races in Dungeons and Dragons.” At least whenever I played, it was certainly more interesting to go against more common races, as it would play against certain stereotypes you’d commonly see. It would also be a lot more thought provoking in the gameplay as characters of different races interacted with their surroundings that the DM created. Our interviewee had a certain interaction that stuck with them that they talked about. While playing as a more uncommon race, a Tortle (turtle people), the interviewee talked about how they felt almost alienated in places that they went to in the game: “And it was like, similarly with my Tortle. He was from very far away and liked to travel. And so people were… you had this setting they had never met Tortles before. And so there was a lot of, you know, ‘Who are you? What are you?’ Sort of thing, which is an uncomfortable thing to be asked. Even for an imaginary Tortle man.” Here we can see a bit of a parallel to some things in real life. Whenever someone travels, they certainly get this feeling of being alienated to some extent. There’s this tension of being seen as different compared to others around you, and how it feels when this is the case.

So we can definitely see some introspection when it comes to Dungeons and Dragons with how a character’s race can affect how people play. We also see how the race the player chooses can also affect their surroundings in the game and how they feel. What if we delve a bit deeper into that? Well, to see more, you’ll have to tune in next week for “D&D Race Review: # 2.”