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.

 

[KYRON45]

What do you think the difference is?

Does this "history is not a story" thing count at cognitive dissonance?
I'm asking because I don't know not because i'm deriding other people.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

history really happened

Clearly not a historian.

History is the stories people tell about what they think happened.

 

[Remathilis]

Clearly not a historian.

History is the stories people tell about what they think happened.

There is a reason they say "History is written by the victors".

 

[Bedrockgames]

Clearly not a historian.

History is the stories people tell about what they think happened.

I majored in history. The discipline is the study of the past. Constructing a narrative of past events is just one part of doing history (and even then I think the term story is very misleading when you are talking about a historical narrative because that is more about putting events into chronological order). There is more to it than that but 'what is history' is a very massive topic. But I didn't think we meant it in the sense of the discipline of history. I was using history more broadly to mean what happened, and in particular what happened to you as an individual (because we were talking about whether peoples remembered deeds or their inner monologues made them who they are)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Constructing a narrative of past events is just one part of doing history

You construct the narrative out of stories. Stories are your raw material from which you try to gain some insight into past events.

I was using history more broadly to mean what happened

Which is fundamentally unknowable. Even eye witness accounts (I.e. stories) are unreliable because human memory is unreliable.

in particular what happened to you as an individual

It’s called autobiography. A popular type of story that people buy from bookshops. Have to confess I’ve only read one: At My Mother’s Knee And Other Low Joints, but my partner likes them.

 

[Corinnguard]

Sounds good. I like race as class. Expand it with more options, certainly, but I think it works.

If races were treated as classes, then each subrace should become a subclass/archetype. So, the Elf class would have the following subclasses- High, Wood, Drow, Eladrin, Sea Elf, Shadar-Kai. The Dragonborn, I think, would have 15 subclasses for the 5 Chromatic, 5 Metallic and 5 Gem Dragonborn.

I could go for that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

The PHB does say to determine your stat using "any of the following three methods", and the methods are listed as:

1. Standard array
2. Roll
3. Point buy.

The Standard array is the first method explained, even if there is no "default" explicitly.

Well, I'll still be rolling for my part.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Clearly not a historian.

History is the stories people tell about what they think happened.

This is why we always have to be ready to consider new historical records and archeological evidence as we discover them.

 

[Bedrockgames]

You construct the narrative out of stories. Stories are your raw material from which you try to gain some insight into past events.

No, your sources are any written records. Some of these might be classified as stories, depending on on how you define that (and obviously some sources will be literature as well). Some sources will be legal documents, contracts, accounting books, ship manifests, birth records, medical records, correspondence, etc. And some historians have more expansive ideas of what qualifies as textual sources. It is more of an examination than it is telling a story

Which is fundamentally unknowable. Even eye witness accounts (I.e. stories) are unreliable because human memory is unreliable.

How knowable it is does not change that it happened. You had a life. You lived. You did things. We may never be able to reconstruct based on what records you leave behind, but those records point to something that really occurred.

It’s called autobiography. A popular type of story that people buy from bookshops. Have to confess I’ve only read one: At My Mother’s Knee And Other Low Joints, but my partner likes them.

I would disagree with this. The autobiography is something you might produce looking back on your life. I think these can be classified in many different ways, some are more in the realm of history some in literature (most of the famous ones make up a lot of stuff for effect or tell things in a distorted way to fit a narrative). But the autobiography isn't what happened to you. It isn't your life, it is a later recollection, probably not very reliable either (I have read a lot of autobiographies and many of them had stuff you could verify: for example a person talking about something that happened to them and was captured on camera, then you look at the event and see they were dramatizing it significantly).

Biographies, and to some extent autobiographies, were generally frowned upon when I was a history student. But I always liked them because even if they aren't super reliable, they make history very human and approachable. I used to devour biographies

 

[Paul Farquhar]

This is why we always have to be ready to consider new historical records and archeological evidence as we discover them.

Quite. Doing history is a process, just like doing science.

You find some rusty nails under a mound in East Anglia and you tell a story about the ship burial of a Saxon king.