Mainstream News Discovers D&D's Species Terminology Change

Several mainstream news sites have discovered that Dungeons & Dragons now refers to a character's species instead of race. The New York Times ended 2024 with a profile on Dungeons & Dragons, with a specific focus on the 2024 Player's Handbook's changes on character creation, the in-game terminology change from race to species, and the removal of Ability Score Increases tied to a character's species. The article included quotes by Robert J. Kuntz and John Stavropoulos and also referenced Elon Musk's outrage over Jason Tondro's forward in The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons.

The piece sparked additional commentary on a variety of sites, including Fox News and The Telegraph, most of which focused on how the changes were "woke." Around the same time, Wargamer.com published a more nuanced piece about the presentation of orcs in the 2024 Player's Handbook, although its headline noted that the changes were "doomed" because players would inevitably replace the orc's traditional role as aggressor against civilization with some other monstrous group whose motivations and sentience would need to be ignored in order for adventurers to properly bash their heads in.

[Update--the Guardian has joined in also, now.]

Generally speaking, the mainstream news pieces failed to address the non-"culture war" reasons for many of these changes - namely that Dungeons & Dragons has gradually evolved from a game that promoted a specific traditional fantasy story to a more generalized system meant to capture any kind of fantasy story. Although some campaign settings and stories certainly have and still do lean into traditional fantasy roles, the kinds that work well with Ability Score Increases tied to a character's species/race, many other D&D campaigns lean away from these aspects or ignore them entirely. From a pragmatic standpoint, uncoupling Ability Score Increases from species not only removes the problematic bioessentialism from the game, it also makes the game more marketable to a wider variety of players.

Of course, the timing of many of these pieces is a bit odd, given that the 2024 Player's Handbook came out months ago and Wizards of the Coast announced plans to make these changes back in 2022. It's likely that mainstream news is slow to pick up on these types of stories. However, it's a bit surprising that some intrepid reporter didn't discover these changes for four months given the increased pervasiveness of Dungeons & Dragons in mainstream culture.

We'll add that EN World has covered the D&D species/race terminology changes as they developed and looks forward to covering new developments and news about Dungeons & Dragons in 2025 and beyond.

 

[delericho]

Replacing 'race' is a good move. 'Species' was the wrong choice for something that includes creatures like Warforged, but I'm not sure there were any options that weren't wrong choices.

The article is probably correct about the move being doomed because of the need to insert another generic eeeevil species, though - I'd guess gnolls are about to become the new orcs.

In any case, whether it's a race, or a religion, or just a set of individuals, it's problematic to lazily label someone as 'evil' so that you can casually slaughter them. That sort of dehumanisation has been all too serious an issue historically. Not to mention that the PCs are very seldom acting in any sort of official capacity, meaning that they're meteing out vigilante justice at best, most of which should be more properly labelled 'murder'.

To an extent, that's an inherent problem with scratching the surface on these issues - underneath there's just another surface. At some point, you basically need to either wave the issues away, or stop playing. Which is not to argue for doing nothing, of course - some issues are more troubling than others.

It's quite clear that a huge proportion of the community (and even many official WotC staff themselves) views them like irl human ethnicities

Indeed. They don't seem to have considered, though, that if they are indeed just irl human ethnicities, then depicting them as anything other than human is itself a problem.

And Orcs as the bad guy was basically doomed once 1/2 Orcs became a PC thing.

Half-orcs were a PC option right back in 1st edition.

 

[Dragonhelm]

My only irk with the change was that "species" comes off as too scientific/sci-fi for my tastes. Ancestry makes the most sense to me, but I'd also have been cool with Kin, People, etc.

Every time I think of ancestry, I think of genealogy, particularly with Ancestry.com.

Other terms I've heard are kindred, lineages, and heritages. The last two just don't gel with me.

My rule of thumb is that whatever term is used needs to replace "race" or "racial" in a sentence.

My only beef with the changes is that there is no way a halfling (or kender) is as strong as a minotaur. I would have rather had one ability score boosted by race, one by background, and maybe the third by class.

Overall, I just feel like I'm over it. Is this worth getting upset about? Not for me, it isn't. As someone else mentioned earlier in the thread, maybe we ought to focus our outrage on real-world issues (i.e. poverty).

 

[Nicholas Reed]

I have never once in all my years of D&D had issues at my table over ASI being tied to race, orcs as pillaging monsters and minions of insert Dark Lord here, etc, nor any issues with heroic orcs and their stories. I honestly think this kind of thing is just conjured up by people who meme about the game and don't play it, and because of social media it's easier for us to scream at each other about this illusion of an issue. We're playing a game about hero's and mythological/fantasy archetypes, I don't want to write an essay on the real world Industrial Revolution's impact on how orcs are perceived in fiction or whatever started this mess that actively (in my not-worth-much-opinion) made the game worse.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I have never once in all my years of D&D had issues at my table over ASI being tied to race, orcs as pillaging monsters and minions of insert Dark Lord here, etc, nor any issues with heroic orcs and their stories. I honestly think this kind of thing is just conjured up by people who meme about the game and don't play it, and because of social media it's easier for us to scream at each other about this illusion of an issue. We're playing a game about hero's and mythological/fantasy archetypes, I don't want to write an essay on the real world Industrial Revolution's impact on how orcs are perceived in fiction or whatever started this mess that actively (in my not-worth-much-opinion) made the game worse.

I have never had any of these issues in a real game (or any in-person discussion about gaming) either, but that doesn't mean that people other than you or me don't have these experiences. It just makes it harder for us to understand them.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

I have never once in all my years of D&D had issues at my table over ASI being tied to race, orcs as pillaging monsters and minions of insert Dark Lord here, etc, nor any issues with heroic orcs and their stories.

I feel a lot of the issue with species ASI's isn't the with there being a problem with the concept itself, but rather 5e's bounded accuracy and minimum expectations of starting primary stats.

It essentially resulted in your character not being functional if you chose the 'wrong' species for the class. If you picked a character without a positive modifier, or god forbid a negative, you would statistically be missing most turns at level 1. Which combined with level 1 characters not having much beyond that, resulted in players rolling once, missing, and getting back onto scrolling their phone for multiple turns in a row.

 

[Corinnguard]

a bit late off the mark for this topic mainstream news...

Well, it took them a while to succeed their Perception check.

The Telegraph article is hysterical. They clearly aren't sure what a TTRPG is and talk about players being able to "close the game" lol absolute morons talking about something they are completely and totally ignorant of. Incredible that they don't have any writers or editors who have played D&D or any TTRPG or even know what they are, when I know like six journalists who play just off the top of my head.

It sounds like they failed their Insight check.

Every time somebody in the media gets mad at D&D you can guarantee it gets a few more thousand units sold.

An example of the Streisand Effect?

My only beef with the changes is that there is no way a halfling (or kender) is as strong as a minotaur. I would have rather had one ability score boosted by race, one by background, and maybe the third by class.

Pathfinder 2nd edition sort of did this.

At 1st level you gained two fixed ability score boosts (a +2), a fixed ability score flaw (-2) and a free ability score boost (which could be added to any of the ability scores not covered by the two fixed ability score boosts. You could even use it to negate the ability score flaw if you wanted to) from your Ancestry. The Backgrounds gave you one fixed and one floating ability score boost. Your character class gave you an ability score boost. Lastly, you were also given four free ability score boosts. 1st level characters initially had an ability score cap at 18 and all ability scores started at 10.

 

[evied83]

I’m old enough to remember when society generally got outraged about actual social ills like war, crime, and poverty rather than game rules. Nobody got up in arms when they retired the wheelbarrow token in Monopoly! I feel like everyone just wants to be mad about everything all the time anymore.

It's fake outrage my dude. Nobody actually really cares as it's imaginary and each group that plays will put their own unique spin on the races and world. News outlets farm us for controversy that doesn't exist.

 

[Weiley31]

THEY WHAT!!!

My Top Hat and Scotty Dog send their condolences.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I feel a lot of the issue with species ASI's isn't the with there being a problem with the concept itself, but rather 5e's bounded accuracy and minimum expectations of starting primary stats.

It essentially resulted in your character not being functional if you chose the 'wrong' species for the class. If you picked a character without a positive modifier, or god forbid a negative, you would statistically be missing most turns at level 1. Which combined with level 1 characters not having much beyond that, resulted in players rolling once, missing, and getting back onto scrolling their phone for multiple turns in a row.

rather than ASI i feel like species strengths ought to be represented more by things like direct modifier traits, innate skill advantages or bonus dice, things that scale off or exist parallel to your stats rather than directly affecting them.

powerful build makes goliaths 'stronger' but it doesn't actually increase their STR.
(BG3) naturally stealthy makes any given halfling better at stealth than another species of equal skill.
deductive intuition provides a small random bump to the result of any investigation or insight check a mark of detection H-elf makes without making them smarter in unassociated areas.

 

[Cergorach]

The Telegraph article is hysterical. They clearly aren't sure what a TTRPG is and talk about players being able to "close the game" lol absolute morons talking about something they are completely and totally ignorant of. Incredible that they don't have any writers or editors who have played D&D or any TTRPG or even know what they are, when I know like six journalists who play just off the top of my head.

Or all the people that did play D&D didn't want to touch this with a ten-foot pole, kept their mouths shut and quietly left the room...

Half-orcs were a PC option right back in 1st edition.

Yeah, but the reason why they existed was different. It wasn't because mommy human and daddy orc loved each other very much...

We also had a Humanoids/Monsters book in 2E and 3E, never did the Ogre Mage become mainstream... I think it's how things are handled/changed over the last 25 years. With 3E half-orcs their source was more like the 1E half-orcs then the flower-power half-orcs of 5.5E. I pretty certain that things started to drastically change with 4E, which took a LOT of inspiration from the WoW MMO, traditional 'bad' monsters were played by human players (Alliance vs Horde). When WoW became mainstream many people loved playing a Troll or Orc, but they never saw themselves as 'bad folk'. When 4E came with non-standard fantastical races and overly magical classes, that kinda stopped feeling like our traditional D&D and why many long time D&D players/DMs didn't play 4E. With 5E WotC didn't just want to recapture the 2E/3E crowd but also retain the 4E fans. We always had options for non-standard species/races/folk/kin/monsters as player characters, they didn't come standard with the PHB like they do now. And WotC/Hasbro is in such a place where telling the half-orc players that their existence is probably the consequence of rape, just isn't an option. Thus you either have to remove those species from the PHB or make their parentage on both sides more palatable. Just like how the origin of tieflings changed from 2E/3E to 4E/5E. All changes to make cool character options more palatable and less offensive to the mainstream. And imho something is lost...

Exploring as a group what is evil, how monsters are people too, etc. Was something that was inherent to roleplaying (D&D) for us. Other RPGs did other perspectives way better then D&D could and would. Vampire: The masquerade where humans became utter monsters (vampires). Or Shadowrun where trolls and orcs were just changed average humans from all classes, races, countries, etc. WotC/Hasbro now tries to make D&D be everything for everyone and not succeding for anyone.