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.

 

[DarkCrisis]

But don't be surprised when you don't see anything but orc barbarians, elf wizards, and tiefling warlocks.

Sounds awesome. I'll take a tropey Orc Barbarian over a "lol look how different I am" Elf Barbarian any day.

 

[Corinnguard]

If every species is equal, then there is no type.

Except that they aren't really equal because no two players will play the same species in the same exact way. If @Remathilis and I were playing the same species in an adventure together, we would be role-playing our characters quite differently based on the classes, feats, gear, etc. we picked for them. It's the same story if we were playing two different species because we would be looking at their species traits and wondering how to creatively employ those traits in a game session.

 

[mamba]

Elimination of one species by another is common. We're probably, as humans, one of the worst offenders: we remove around 150 species each day

as a species, we definitely are the worst offender ever in that regard, we are the equivalent of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.

I still do not think that in any way justifies the ‘we are allowed to kill and eat anything that is slightly less intelligent than us’ argument

 

[Hussar]

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

But that gets even worse because now your saying that orcs are biologically less intelligent than all other species (well, any that don’t have an int penalty) which has some serious ick factor.

 

[Belen]

But that gets even worse because now your saying that orcs are biologically less intelligent than all other species (well, any that don’t have an int penalty) which has some serious ick factor.

I go back to what someone earlier said that this is an issue because Orc is a player species. I do not think it should be a core player species. I felt the same about the half-orc.

I do not see folks arguing about goblins, gnolls, kobolds, etc in the same way that they are making the arguments for the Orc.

 

[Stefan Huddleston]

View attachment 390759

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.

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.

Its not odd that the mainstream press didn't pick this up sooner. Despite increased popularity D&D is still rather niche. For example, when you dig into the oft quoted 40 million players number it's not current players but over time. Even when though popular media has raised awareness of D&D the number of people who play is far smaller and within that subset the number who follow D&D news regularly is even smaller. Those who do follow D&D news can get a skewed perception of how much people know about what's happening related to D&D. While the data on D&D is scant there are countless studies on the way news can skew people's perceptions of how prevalent certian events, like crimes are. A simple Google Scholar search will yield many such studies. I suspect a similar thing here in regards to any shock over it taking the mainstream time to get ahold of this story when it's been known by those who follow D&D news for months.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

as a species, we definitely are the worst offender ever in that regard, we are the equivalent of the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs.

I still do not think that in any way justifies the ‘we are allowed to kill and eat anything that is slightly less intelligent than us’ argument

The difference is 19 (mindflayer) to 11 (humans), which is around the same as the difference between cows (2) and humans (11). Even if we consider that the value for NPC is an average, it is still a large difference (and I doubt a significant part of the human population has mastiff-level intelligence, so I don't agree with you few that the NPC stat block is just representative of an average). The argument was that mindflayers might have as little respect for us, or for orcs, as we do for cow-level intelligence species.

The argument was also that we don't need any intelligence-based difference to eliminate other species. Sure, we're the only intelligent one remaining, but we usually don't care a lot of about other species. So if someone wanted to have a species of orcs seeing humans as we saw wolves in the middle ages, or humans who saw orcs as wolves, ie, living creatures that must be removed because they are competing with us for our sheeps, I wouldn't find that totally unrealistic. Hey, we're fighting over sheeps even inside our own species.

 

[Remathilis]

Sounds awesome. I'll take a tropey Orc Barbarian over a "lol look how different I am" Elf Barbarian any day.

Cut the middleman and bring back the elf, dwarf and halfling classes then.

 

[mamba]

But that gets even worse because now your saying that orcs are biologically less intelligent than all other species (well, any that don’t have an int penalty) which has some serious ick factor.

not all species are equally intelligent, I have no problem with that at a theoretical level, just like not all are equally strong or charismatic (I have more of a problem with the latter, because what one finds charismatic is heavily species dependent, so there is no one value that applies for every case / species you interact with, STR and INT are more objective metrics)

Also, a -1 is near indistinguishable in reality if you applied that to human intelligence.

None of this is the case I was making however, so not sure why you keep on going off on tangents. The case is that I disagree with the ‘orcs have a minimum Intelligence of 2 means it is ok to treat them like cattle’ argument. If you want to base it on INT at all, it should be the average one

 

[mamba]

The difference is 19 (mindflayer) to 11 (humans), which is around the same as the difference between cows (2) and humans (11).

yes, but the original argument was the -1 INT of orcs justified humans to treat orcs like cattle.

I have no problems with the mindflayers doing that to humans, there the average distance is big enough to ‘justify’ it. Notice that I said ‘slightly less intelligent’, mindflayers are drastically more intelligent

we're the only intelligent one remaining, but we usually don't care a lot of about other species.

no we are not, we just have a difficult time measuring intelligence in other species. Elephants and Dolphins might not be that far off from us, but their physical limitations (no hands) made it hard for them to conquer the world