The idea of race has been faraway from Dungeons & Dragons’ new Player’s Handbook (2024). The favored role-playing sport now makes use of the extra scientific idea of species as an alternative. It’s one thing that has been in the works for years now, considered one of many modifications to the character creation part in the newly revised PHB, which has been formed by gamers’ character creation information, the industrial success of Baldur’s Gate 3, and the use of sensitivity readers throughout manufacturing. Builders at Wizards of the Coast inform Polygon they’re not carried out but, and people guidelines will proceed to evolve because it releases extra setting books highlighting totally different elements of the sport’s multiverse in the years to return.
The linguistic shift to describing elves, dwarves, and people as totally different species somewhat than totally different races was formally introduced in late 2022. That’s the identical 12 months that Wizards printed Spelljammer: Adventures in Area, a extremely anticipated reboot of a Eighties-era setting. Sadly, that ebook contained textual content and pictures describing a gaggle of primate-like creatures that many considered as reinforcing dangerous stereotypes. The incident led Wizards to concern an apology, a promise to change digital copies and future printings of the module, and an announcement that exterior cultural consultants would overview each phrase, illustration, and map earlier than publication to keep away from future missteps.
A type of consultants engaged on the new Player’s Handbook was James Mendez Hodes, who wrote a pair of articles in 2019 criticizing D&D for perpetuating racist stereotypes. In his work, Hodes clearly laid out how these stereotypes date again to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, portraying orcs as savage and monstrous. He not too long ago shared a picture of his title in the ebook’s credit, announcing playfully that “every time you play D&D and no one is racist, it was me. You’re welcome.”
Dungeons & Dragons lead designer Jeremy Crawford informed Polygon that the change to Wizards’ course of has been a welcome one.
“We consult with these professionals early on in the process, then midway through the process, then again later in the process, making sure that we’re bringing joy and not unwelcome surprises in how something is presented, and I think that has been a very fruitful collaboration,” he mentioned.
That is the first Player’s Handbook in the sport’s 50-year historical past to incorporate guidelines for enjoying as orcs, with the fifth version mechanics for enjoying them beforehand relegated to Volo’s Information to Monsters and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. Whereas 2016’s Volo’s described them as “savage,” “aggressive,” and “primal,” the Player’s Handbook (2024) makes use of the revised 2022 skills from Monsters of the Multiverse to painting them as a tricky and decided individuals given presents by the god Gruumsh to assist them wander the world.
“Orcs over the game’s history have migrated from the monster side of the game to being playable people, and we wanted to make sure their story reflected that migration,” Crawford mentioned. “Rather than having kind of a villainous tinge, which they had originally half a century ago, we really emphasize player choice in your character’s personality and moral outlook.”
That very same shift has taken place with drow, the dark-skinned elves which have primarily been portrayed in the previous as evil. The Player’s Handbook (2024) depicts elves as formed by the atmosphere in ways in which imbue them with magic and change their look, with wooden elves typically having inexperienced pores and skin and feeling at residence in forests whereas excessive elves wield the magics of the Feywild. Drow are described as being marked by the Underdark with out essentially being aligned with the evil deity Lolth in the new PHB, which additionally attracts consideration to the rainforest-dwelling drow discovered in the Eberron marketing campaign setting.
Lacking from the new PHB are half-elves and half-orcs, although they can still be played with the 2014 guidelines together with legacy subclasses. Of their place, the angelic aasimar and hulking goliaths have been welcomed into the fold as core playable characters. The basic Tolkien alliance of people, elves, dwarves, and halflings was considered as important to the sport’s custom, but in the new PHB, different selections have been made based mostly on finding out many years of statistics gleaned from gamers’ selections in character creation and from contemplating features of the D&D settings the designers needed to emphasise.
Dragonborn have been a core character possibility since 4th version, permitting gamers to connect with D&D’s namesake monsters. But as books like Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants and the journey Storm King’s Thunder have aimed to make giants simply as iconic, goliaths are serving the identical function by letting characters hint their ancestry to giantkind. Tieflings have been additionally a core character possibility in 4th version and the 2014 model of the PHB, and the sport designers felt it was time to provide their celestial cousins the identical prominence.
“It didn’t hurt that aasimar featured prominently in Baldur’s Gate 3, and that game did a good job of showing how awesome aasimar and tieflings are,” Crawford mentioned.
The new PHB builds on the guidelines first introduced in the 2020 ebook Tasha’s Cauldron of Every thing, stripping away the organic determinism baked into tying a participant character’s stats to their species. As an alternative, means rating boosts are actually assigned by a personality’s background, like farmer or acolyte. Species descriptions are a lot shorter than they have been in the Player’s Handbook (2014), but gamers can look forward to finding extra info in future books, similar to the unnamed Forgotten Realms participant information being launched in late 2025.
“We feel that particular campaign settings are the best places for us to dig into the stories of various peoples because there is so much variance from one world to another,” Crawford mentioned. “We find it’s best for the Player’s Handbook to have a light touch and basically just say what’s generally true for the multiverse, and then leave the nitty-gritty details to particular settings where they can really dive into the story of this particular group of people in this world and this culture relative to another culture.”
