Race becomes species in D&D, but that’s not the only change in the new Player’s Handbook

The concept of race has been removed from Dungeons & Dragons’ new Player’s Handbook (2024). The popular role-playing game now makes use of the more scientific concept of species instead. It’s something that has been in the works for years now, one of many changes to the character creation section in the newly revised PHB, which has been shaped by players’ character creation data, the commercial success of Baldur’s Gate 3, and 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 highlighting different parts of the game’s multiverse in the years to come.

The linguistic shift to describing elves, dwarves, and humans as different species rather than different races was formally announced in late 2022. That’s the same year that Wizards published Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, a highly anticipated reboot of a 1980s-era setting. Unfortunately, that book contained text and images describing a group of primate-like creatures that many viewed as reinforcing harmful stereotypes. The incident led Wizards to issue an apology, a promise to alter digital copies and future printings of the module, and an announcement that outside cultural consultants would review every word, illustration, and map before publication to avoid future missteps. 

One of those consultants working 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 those stereotypes date back to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, portraying orcs as savage and monstrous. He recently shared an image of his name in the book’s credits, 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 told Polygon that the change to Wizards’ process 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 said.

This is the first Player’s Handbook in the game’s 50-year history to include rules for playing as orcs, with the 5th edition mechanics for playing them previously relegated to Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse. While 2016’s Volo’s described them as “savage,” “aggressive,” and “primal,” the Player’s Handbook (2024) uses the revised 2022 abilities from Monsters of the Multiverse to portray them as a tough and determined people given gifts by the god Gruumsh to help 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 said. “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 same shift has taken place with drow, the dark-skinned elves that have primarily been portrayed in the past as evil. The Player’s Handbook (2024) depicts elves as shaped by the environment in ways that imbue them with magic and change their appearance, with wood elves often having green skin and feeling at home in forests while high elves wield the magics of the Feywild. Drow are described as being marked by the Underdark without necessarily being aligned with the evil deity Lolth in the new PHB, which also draws attention to the rainforest-dwelling drow found in the Eberron campaign setting.

Missing from 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 hulking goliaths have been welcomed into the fold as core playable characters. The classic Tolkien alliance of humans, elves, dwarves, and halflings was viewed as essential to the game’s tradition, but in the new PHB, other choices were made based on studying decades of statistics gleaned from players’ decisions in character creation and from considering aspects of the D&D settings the designers wanted to emphasize.

Dragonborn have been a core character option since 4th edition, allowing players to connect to D&D’s namesake monsters. But as books like Bigby Presents: Glory of the Giants and the adventure Storm King’s Thunder have aimed to make giants just as iconic, goliaths are serving the same role by letting characters trace their ancestry to giantkind. Tieflings were also a core character option in 4th edition and the 2014 version of the PHB, and the game designers felt it was time to give their celestial cousins the same 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 said.

The new PHB builds on the rules first presented in the 2020 book Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, stripping away the biological determinism baked into tying a player character’s stats to their species. Instead, ability score boosts are now assigned by a character’s background, like farmer or acolyte. Species descriptions are much shorter than they were in the Player’s Handbook (2014), but players can expect to find more information in future books, such as the unnamed Forgotten Realms player guide being released 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 said. “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.”