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.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Yes. Because alignment is crap moral framework. That's why the first thing I do when I run D&D is to remove it. It makes the game better and the world feel more real if I spent couple of minutes thinking about enemy motivations rather than just accepting that they need to be killed because they're "evil."

It is simple, odd at times and gamey. But D&D is a game. I am of two kinds on it. I find it not great when thinking in terms of real world moral system, but I think it has its uses and can be fun (I am inclined to use it half the time and to either not use it or modify it the other half of the time).

And while most of the time my campaigns run more in terms of individual motives, I don’t see anything wrong or lesser with wanting more Lord of the rings style clashing of cosmic evil and good

 

[Hussar]

Are cows finding us evil for enslaving them for the purpose of eating them? The various alignment thread shows that it's impossible to agree on what is what, and we are all looking at the things with a shared human perspective. I have no doubt another intelligent species would have a very different set of values to determine good and evil.

It's quite self-evident that there is no compromise possible with a mindflayer, but it might not be because they are evil.

And yet we just had the Shattered Obelisk module with multiple mind flayers the party can interact with and find compromise.

It’s not impossible and all it takes is a tiny (and we’re talking very shallow) bit of depth to do.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Exactly. Especially with the added bonus that mindflayers have 19-21 Int depending on their life stage, above the maximum human possible value and far above the 11 human average. They can honestly say that they are better able to make decisions that puny humans. The 19-to-11 difference is that same that the 11-to-3 difference with cows... Your average mindflayer would wonder if humans are really sentient the way we wonder what a cat actually understands... and we have no qualm castrating cats we love.

Point. All this grumbling around superstrong halflings is a strawman, to distract from the real issue, which is intelligence. At the beginning of 5e orcs had a penalty to intelligence, which meant that with rolled stats they could have an intelligence of 2 - equal to a cow. So clearly nothing morally wrong in enslaving them. Or eating them.

 

[mamba]

At the beginning of 5e orcs had a penalty to intelligence, which meant that with rolled stats they could have an intelligence of 2 - equal to a cow. So clearly nothing morally wrong in enslaving them. Or eating them.

humans could have a three if you go by the lowest possible value, so if a 2 justifies it for orcs, a 3 does for humans too

 

[KYRON45]

Point. All this grumbling around superstrong halflings is a strawman, to distract from the real issue, which is intelligence. At the beginning of 5e orcs had a penalty to intelligence, which meant that with rolled stats they could have an intelligence of 2 - equal to a cow. So clearly nothing morally wrong in enslaving them. Or eating them.

Strawman or strawhalfling? Now i'm just confused.

 

[Hussar]

humans could have a three if you go by the lowest possible value, so if a [emoji638] justifies it for orcs, a [emoji639] does for humans too

Well no actually they couldn’t. Standard human has +[emoji637] to all stats so they’re lowest Int is [emoji640]. Which is well above animal intelligence.

Variant humans couldn’t potentially have a three but they were not the default.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Point. All this grumbling around superstrong halflings is a strawman, to distract from the real issue, which is intelligence. At the beginning of 5e orcs had a penalty to intelligence, which meant that with rolled stats they could have an intelligence of 2 - equal to a cow. So clearly nothing morally wrong in enslaving them. Or eating them.

But that got removed ages ago.

And yeah, I agree that intelligence certainly is far more sensitive topic than strength. I don't really have an issue with super intelligent species such as Vulcans, but "stupid species" whilst logically consistent concept, can pretty easily come across as insensitive, so I understand why that might be best to be avoided.

One issue with how D&D 5.0e (and I think it started with 4e?) handled ability bonuses, was that humans got them. And they were floating. And as humans are the baseline, that's what everyone was compared to. So weirdly elves actually weren't more dextrous than humans, nor orcs stronger nor gnomes smarter; humans could match them in all of those areas. So this lead not having a bonus to something feeling like a penalty. I think it would work better, is the baseline was no bonus, so having a bonus would feel like actually being better than the baseline.

 

[mamba]

Well no actually they couldn’t. Standard human has +

to all stats so they’re lowest Int is

. Which is well above animal intelligence.

missing the forest for the trees… then take any of the playable species with no bonus to intelligence. The point is that basing that decision on minimum possible intelligence rather than average is hugely flawed

 

[briggart]

Point. All this grumbling around superstrong halflings is a strawman, to distract from the real issue, which is intelligence. At the beginning of 5e orcs had a penalty to intelligence, which meant that with rolled stats they could have an intelligence of 2 - equal to a cow. So clearly nothing morally wrong in enslaving them. Or eating them.

I'd only eat pasture-raised orcs. Anything else is immoral.

 

[Remathilis]

Point. All this grumbling around superstrong halflings is a strawman, to distract from the real issue, which is intelligence. At the beginning of 5e orcs had a penalty to intelligence, which meant that with rolled stats they could have an intelligence of 2 - equal to a cow. So clearly nothing morally wrong in enslaving them. Or eating them.

Are you sure you're not an Athasian halfling?