The concept of race has been removed from the new Dungeons & Dragons Players Manual (2024). The popular role-playing game now uses the more scientific concept of species. It’s something that’s been in the works for years, one of many changes to the character creation section in the recently revised PHBwhich is shaped by players’ character creation data, the commercial success of Baldurs Gate 3and the use of sensitivity readers during production. Developers at Wizards of the Coast tell Polygon they’re not done yet, and those rules will continue to evolve as it releases more setting books that explore different parts of the game’s multiverse in the coming years.
The linguistic shift to describing elves, dwarves, and humans as different species rather than different races was formally announced in late 2022, the same year that Wizards Spelljammer: Adventures in Spacea long-awaited reboot of a 1980s setting. Unfortunately, the book contained text and images describing a group of primate-like creatures that many saw as reinforcing harmful stereotypes. The incident led to Wizards issuing an apology, promising to alter digital copies and future printings of the module, and announcing that outside cultural advisors would review every word, illustration, and card before publication to prevent future missteps.
One of the consultants working on the new Players Manual was James Mendez Hodes, who wrote a few articles in 2019 criticism of D&D for perpetuating racist stereotypes. In his work, Hodes clearly explained how those stereotypes go back to the works of JRR Tolkien The Lord of the Ringin which he depicted orcs as savage and monstrous. He recently shared an image of his name in the book’s credits, announce playfully saying that “any time you play D&D and no one is racist, it was me. You’re welcome.”
Dungeons & Dragons lead designer Jeremy Crawford told Polygon that the change in Wizards’ process is a welcome one.
“We consult with these professionals early in the process, then midway through the process, then later in the process. We make sure that we bring joy and don’t have any nasty surprises in the way that something is presented. I think that’s been a very fruitful collaboration,” he said.
This is the first Players Manual in the game’s 50 year history to include rules for playing as orcs, where the 5th edition mechanics for playing with them had previously been relegated to Volo’s Guide to Monsters And Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. While 2016 Volo’s described them as ‘wild’, ‘aggressive’ and ‘ancient’, the Players Manual (2024) uses the revised 2022 capabilities of Monsters of the Multiverse to portray them as a tough and determined people who had been given gifts by the god Gruumsh to explore the world.
“Orcs have migrated from the monster side of the game to playable humans over the course of the game’s history, and we wanted to make sure that their story reflected that migration,” Crawford said. “Rather than having a sort of villainous tone, which they originally had half a century ago, we’re really emphasizing player choice in your character’s personality and moral outlook.”
The same shift has occurred with drow, the dark-skinned elves who have historically been portrayed primarily as evil. Players Manual (2024) depicts elves as shaped by the environment in ways that imbue them with magic and alter their appearance, with wood elves often having green skin and being at home in forests, while high elves wield the magic of the Feywild. Drow are described as drawn by the Underdark without necessarily being connected to the malevolent deity Lolth in the novel PHBwhich also draws attention to the rainforest-dwelling drow from the Eberron campaign setting.
Missing in the new PHB are half-elves and half-orcs, though they can still be played with the 2014 rules along with legacy subclasses. In their place, the angelic aasimar and the massive goliaths have been welcomed into the fold as playable core characters. The classic Tolkien alliance of humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings was seen as essential to the lore of the game, but in the new PHBOther choices were made based on studying decades of statistics gleaned from players’ character creation decisions, and based on aspects of the D&D environments that the designers wanted to emphasize.
Dragonborn has been a core character option since 4th edition, allowing players to connect with D&D’s namesake monsters. But as books like Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants and the adventure Storm King’s Thunder have tried to make giants just as iconic, goliaths fulfill the same role by allowing characters to trace their ancestry back to the giant species. Tieflings were also a core character option in 4th edition and the 2014 version of the PHBand the game designers felt it was time to give their celestial cousins the same prominence.
“It didn’t hurt that aasimar played a prominent role in Baldurs Gate 3and that match really showed how great aasimar and tieflings are,” Crawford said.
The new PHB builds on the rules first presented in the 2020 book Tasha’s Cauldron of Everythingremoving the biological determinism inherent in tying a player character’s stats to their species. Instead, ability score boosts are now awarded based on a character’s background, such as farmer or acolyte. Species descriptions are much shorter than they were in the Players Manual (2014), but players can expect more information in future books, such as the untitled Forgotten Realms Player’s Guide due out in late 2025.
“We find that certain campaign settings are the best places to delve into the stories of different peoples, because there’s so much variation from one world to another,” Crawford said. “We find that it’s best for the Players Manual to take a lighthearted approach and basically just say what’s generally true across the multiverse, and then leave the specifics to specific settings where they can really dive into the story of this specific group of people in this world and this culture in relation to another culture.”