Players responded tepidly to the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 2008, when the game was more punchline than blockbuster movie premise. The Big Bang Theory was not yet television’s highest-rated comedy, and the cultural phenomenon of Stranger Things, whose 1980s characters are fluent in D&D jargon, was years away.
“The D&D audience was shrinking,” said Jeremy Crawford, the game’s lead rules designer. “The game was becoming so tailored to just one way of playing that it was not feeling as inviting as we knew the game could be.”
The multi-sided dice used in Dungeons & Dragons.Credit: New York Times
Players desired greater leeway in creating their characters, Wizards of the Coast executives said in defence of the new rules. The 2024 player’s handbook is the fastest-selling publication in company history, executives said, and its new guide for dungeon masters is already in reprints.
In addition to its species, each character in Dungeons & Dragons is assigned a class such as bard, druid, rogue or wizard. During quests, characters’ abilities and corresponding skills manifest in ways that can complement or undermine one another.
A bard typically has a leg up when it comes to charisma, one of the game’s core ability scores. When his party finds itself negotiating with a roving gang of mercenaries, the bonus points he can add to the roll of a 20-sided die – thanks to his gift of gab – can win the mercenaries’ allegiance.
The extended improvisation of players relies on their characters’ limits. When Melissa Campbell, a manager of Labyrinth Games & Puzzles in Washington, DC, runs sessions for children, she explains why this tension in Dungeons & Dragons is important.
Longtime player Devin Cutler lamented that “all the species are becoming humans with decorations”.Credit: New York Times
“I tell them it’s like a game of make-believe, but the rules are what actually make it fun,” she said. “If you just win all the time and defeat every monster, that is not fun.”
After two years of play-testing with the help of fans, the extremely popular fifth edition of Dungeons & Dragons was released in 2014. Through intermediate reference books such as Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, this version of the game evolved further over the past decade to give players more flexibility.
“People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice,” Crawford said. “They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
Players who are frustrated by the recent revisions argue that the innate characteristics of a species gave the game part of its allure.
A game of Dungeons & Dragons in mid-play. Credit: New York Times
“All the species are becoming humans with decorations,” lamented Devin Cutler, a self-described “grognard”, or veteran gamer, who plays alongside Lessard at the Boards & Brews bar in Manchester, New Hampshire.
Cutler acknowledged that the game’s orcs – the malevolent, dark-skinned creatures developed by J.R.R. Tolkien – have been associated with negative racial tropes in the real world. But he said their innate traits, however fictional, have accrued authentic meaning over the decades.
This month, Cutler and others gathered at a house outside Manchester for a Friendsgiving meal of turkey and sides before getting down to business: the 39th weekly session of their campaign. The fantastical characters that made up their adventuring party included a tiefling — a human-demon combination — and a human monk from the region of Shou Lung.
There was also a tabaxi, a creature with the feline appearance and night vision that one would expect of a species created by the Cat Lord.
Megan Charest (left) and Nicole Parrish play a game led by Nicole’s husband.Credit: New York Times
“He’s a tabaxi adopted into an elven family,” said Kyle Smith, who created the character, Uldreyin Alma Salamar Daelamin the Fifth, for this campaign. “He’s also a sorcerer — the magic is innate to that. He’s deciding between who he is and what he was raised in.”
Smith added, “If being a tabaxi didn’t matter, then who cares?”
“He’d just be a fuzzy elf,” Cutler said.
Dana Ebert, a co-founder of the gaming-centred pub TPK Brewing in Portland, Oregon, said she sensed that a majority of Dungeons & Dragons players were responding positively to the changes.
‘All the species are becoming humans with decorations.’
Player Devin Cutler on the changes to Dungeons & Dragons
Wizards of the Coast was catching up to its competitors, said Ebert, who has freelanced for Pathfinder, the role-playing game by the company Paizo that has spoken of “ancestry” and “heritage” instead of “race” for several years. As early as 2020, the independent Arcanist Press published Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e, a proposal to use those words instead of “race” in Dungeons & Dragons.
Two years ago, an account called “DND staff” wrote on an official game website that new nomenclature was planned. “We understand ‘race’ is a problematic term that has had prejudiced links between real-world people and the fantasy peoples of D&D worlds,” the account wrote.
Critics of the new terminology think it reflects a concession by Wizards of the Coast to changing cultural norms at the expense of authenticity to Dungeons & Dragons’ history.
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Some players objected to the preface of a book about the game’s early years, published by Wizards of the Coast this year, that addressed the insensitive tropes involved in developing a role-playing game in the 1970s.
“I just don’t take those critiques seriously even now,” Jason Tondro, the Dungeons & Dragons designer who wrote the preface, said in an online post. “I consider those people not worth listening to, so I didn’t anticipate their ‘outrage’.”
In response to the comment, Musk posted “How much is Hasbro?” on his social platform, X. (Musk did not respond to a request for comment about Dungeons & Dragons.)
Wizards of the Coast has pressed forward in its push toward a more inclusive game.
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The company now suggests that extended Dungeons & Dragons campaigns begin with a session in which players discuss their expectations and list topics to avoid, which could include sexual assault or drug use. Dungeon masters are encouraged to establish a signal that allows players to articulate their distress with any subject and automatically overrule the dungeon master’s storyline.
“The signal shouldn’t trigger a debate or discussion: Thank the player for being honest about their needs, set the scene right and move on,” states the 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide.
When Kyle Mann, editor-in-chief of the right-wing satirical site The Babylon Bee, highlighted that passage online, it prompted incredulity online from Musk.
Kuntz said that while some topics ought to be considered off-limits, it was a mistake to interfere with the implicit social contract that has sustained Dungeons & Dragons for decades. But Akshay Arora, a software engineer and avid gamer who play-tested the new rules, defended the policy.
“You’re doing something for pleasure,” Arora said. “This isn’t a place you need to be forced to experience something you don’t want to go through.”
The popularity of the new rules will ultimately be determined at Dungeons & Dragons sessions, where players vote with their feet.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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