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.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Games are not stories.

Again.

Everything is a story. My ordinary life is a story. A pretty dull one, but it’s still a story.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So it's basically class and race choice but with extra steps?

You're welcome to see it however you like. Use whatever cute pictures you think make your point better too.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Everything is a story. My ordinary life is a story. A pretty dull one, but it’s still a story.

I would say it isn’t a story. It is just your history. You might construct a story from it later. But real life doesn’t follow genre conventions or literary conventions

 

[Micah Sweet]

Everything is a story. My ordinary life is a story. A pretty dull one, but it’s still a story.

I'm not litigating this again. We disagree.

 

[Michael Blackett]

I think this has been reasonably covered elsewhere. Merely Fox News jumped on the bandwagon and the ripples have reached the New York Times.

 

[Remathilis]

You're welcome to see it however you like. Use whatever cute pictures you think make your point better too.

It just proves my point. Race as class is always going to be a failure because people don't want all elves to be the same. And every OSR game leans that eventually and either separates them or creates dozens of slight variants to replicate it. It sounds good in theory, but fails the moment someone wants their dwarf to be anything other than a fighter.

But hey, B/X did it that way, so it has to be superior to whatever we're doing now, right?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I would say it isn’t a story. It is just your history.

History is made of stories.

You might construct a story from it later.

I doubt I will, because later I plan on being dead.

But real life doesn’t follow genre conventions or literary conventions

It doesn’t follow fantasy conventions. Real life has its own conventions. I would find it odd if D&D followed real life conventions and not fantasy conventions.

 

[CreamCloud0]

You don't need just one "elf" class for race as class to work.

be that as it may, we can't ever let them hear us admiting in any circumstance that 'we need more elves', i don't know how many hundreds more elf species they would create as a result.

 

[Remathilis]

History is made of stories

I doubt I will, because later I plan on being dead.

It doesn’t follow fantasy conventions. Real life has its own conventions. I would find it odd if D&D followed real life conventions and not fantasy conventions.

"We are all stories in the end, just make it a good one eh?"
The Doctor (Matt Smith)

 

[Micah Sweet]

It just proves my point. Race as class is always going to be a failure because people don't want all elves to be the same. And every OSR game leans that eventually and either separates them or creates dozens of slight variants to replicate it. It sounds good in theory, but fails the moment someone wants their dwarf to be anything other than a fighter.

But hey, B/X did it that way, so it has to be superior to whatever we're doing now, right?

I like it just fine, and I have no problem with multiple race as class options. Literally all you are saying is that you don't like it, and you're trying to dress it up so that your personal opinion means more than it does.