Why interview solely the grognards? Even OSE options like Shadowdark have adopted terms like ancestry over race. It sorta feels like this article is trying to create an issue where none exists.
Changing race to species has not been a concern for myself, my players, or those I know. We're more concerned with improving the mechanics and speed of gameplay, balancing martials and casters, improvements to the core books, backgrounds, bastions, and impactful changes.
We want more variety at the table, not just everyone choosing the same optimized builds from RPGBOT. I think Crawford in the article puts it well: “People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice. They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
I find this mystifying. I think of "choosing a dwarf makes you a lesser wizard" as being a pretty core part of D&D. Have they released specifics on this? If race/species is going to become purely cosmetic, have they explained what will replace it, mechanically?
That's kind of the problem with it was it was mechanically implementing something that was more setting/background cosmetics specific in the first place. Not all settings think dwarves should have a harder time becoming a wizard. Forgotten Realms, the modern "default" for D&D thinks anyone can do anything if they want, classes are just "jobs" available to anyone. Those settings that do care, including throwback settings, generally make it a story telling device about why things are the way they are ("dwarves are closer to the earth and have a hard time learning illusions") and the hardships exceptions face ("it took a lot more work and they lost access to some of their home community") and making it a mechanical disadvantage doesn't do anything more interesting than the storytelling tools already inherent in the setting.
> I think of "choosing a dwarf makes you a lesser wizard" as being a pretty core part of D&D.
I agree that you should be able to make suboptimal choices if you wish, but I think that shouldn't be the issue.
Your character will be more than just a dwarf and a wizard (otherwise the game will be too simple), in addition to those things, so if a dwarf will be more likely to have an advantage at something else that is independent of classes, then you can have that, and still be a wizard, even if a "greater wizard" lacks what your character will have.
(There might also be the possibility, that if dwarf wizards are not very common (for whatever reason; there are many possibilities, depending on the story), then someone might not expect you to be a wizard so might be possible for some surprise if you are disguised by mundane means.)
The change is a good one, and there's still abilities that differentiate species, so dwarves still have toughness, and a bunch of other abilities.
Previously a Dwarven wizard was just a really bad choice, and you'd be noticeably less powerful than say an Elven wizard so no-one ever played one.
Now an Elven Wizard for instance has a few bits and pieces that might make them a bit better, but still leave a Dwarven Wizard as a viable choice.
This makes the game far more interesting in every way: players have more interesting builds, more character choices, and can play whatever combinations that they want.
I'm kind of surprised that optimized builds even exist, at least outside competitive games.
Back in the day when I was playing tabletop RPGs, the standard GM approach was that meaningful advantages must be balanced with meaningful disadvantages. Encounters where the characters had to face their weaknesses were supposed to be common. It didn't really matter if your characters were optimized as not.
Character builds as a concept were just some video game nonsense that had no place in actual role-playing games. At least among the people I used to play with.
It depends on the complexity of your campaign. Back in the day when I played D&D, we had a DM who would throw together typical hack-and-slash-and-loot campaigns, in which you wanted to maximize your STR, CON, DEX, and INT( if you were a magic-using class ). Nobody wanted to assign points to anything else, as they would be a waste.
It takes a good DM to balance a campaign, especially for years. And I suspect most DMs are pretty bad (I'm guessing, haven't played in over a decade now).
I've been playing Grim Dawn recently, and feeling the tension between optimizing and exploring, between pre-built and puzzled out.
If you can manage to forget about the answer key lurking on every forum, the core experience of finding synergy, figuring out a build, balancing resistances is surprisingly fun.
> Why interview solely the grognards?
And, I know it's a rhetorical question, but the answer is:
> So the article can serve double duty as a Nat Geo-style jungle expedition, providing glimpses of unwashed tribespeople to intrigued middle Americans.
> Changing race to species has not been a concern for myself, my players, or those I know.
Largely the same, I acknowledge it's not being done for me and definitely doesn't impact me. Shrug (or eyeroll if so inclined) and move on.
> “People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice. They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
Ok, but IMO nobody has more fun by doing 13 damage a round instead of 10. The consequence of chasing optimality is it simply leads a DM to tune encounters appropriately.
> We want more variety at the table, not just everyone choosing the same optimized builds from RPGBOT.
So instead everyone is using the same optimised builds but with more species variety? Does that really improve the state of games in your experience?
I sort of want disparate builds, playing to aptitudes. Balancing spell lists and feats etc to make lots of viable builds is a hard problem to solve though (I've not played the 2024 rules so have no idea how well they've done?).
I think the main thing, stat-wise, that leads to un-fun is when there's imbalance within a party. It's dull to play a power fantasy game where the other players are significantly more powerful than you. Balance is the main concern.
Now, a good DM can house-rule around a lot of these things, but designing rules for balance is quite hard, as is learning new rules, which is why these systems are a thing in the first place, so ideally the rules should by default allow this kind of creativity and flexibility without creating large power imbalances, both between players and between players and monsters (also something that's more difficult than it looks, hence things like challenge ratings and pre-built adventures).
(I'd argue the fairly high variance of D&D combat also causes problems here, both for fun and balance, because it's no fun when a powerful character completely bricks in a fight against a lesser opponent because of cursed dice, and it also makes it harder for the DM to get useful feedback to balance encounters)
On one hand many people don't want to be dead weight when the dice start rolling. On the other hand it can be more fun to be the Half-Ork Wizard with 7 INT trying to role play a big dumb guy who's only love is setting things on fire with his mind and getting paid for it.
There's the age old role play vs. roll play argument. With a good DM it shouldn't matter but if you're running some prebuilt campaign then it might lead to unexpected struggles.
I will likely do some searching on this later, but I am curious how "race" ever came to be the word we use instead of "Species" in nearly every video game I know of that has a character creator (at least until recently)? I know I have struggled to not say race when I really mean species just out of many years of habit.
That being said, I don't really understand the push to remove species benefits from games (not just D&D) and instead just do a name change? It makes sense that in a fictional world that different species would have their strengths and weaknesses just for biological reasons.
Or story reasons like in Mass Effect where the Asari live to around 1000 or more (I don't remember exactly) and have a very natural benefit for biotic abilities.
I understand the concern that some of these traits were originally racially fueled, but it makes sense for there to be differences of some sort.
> how "race" ever came to be the word we use instead of "Species" in nearly every video game I know of that has a character creator
The character creator does not let you roleplay as a tree, bacterium, moss, fish, vole, etc.
It lets you roleplay as an anthropomorphised, sentient, sapient, language-using creature, with minor visual differences - a human, an almost-human that looks like a lizard, an almost-human that looks like a cat, an almost-human that looks like a bird, an almost-human with hooves and horns, a short human, a very short human, a tall human with pointy ears, a dark-skinned human, a blue-skinned human, a green-skinned human, a purple-skinned human, and so on.
If you're Commander Shepard, you're going to have sex with all of them. I suspect the progeny, if any, would be fertile. Claims that these are distinct species that all colonised different parts of the galaxy are a thin veneer. True "alien" life would be hyperintelligent shades of blue like in HHGTTG, hiveminds like in Ender's Game, or the amazing fauna in Scavengers Reign. They would not be a human actor wearing a Cornish pasty, even if you say they're Klingons.
I put it to you that your character creator choices are all the same SPECIES, and their differences are minor genetic and cultural groupings driven by geographical isolation, which we call "ethnicity" or "RACE". And all the stories you make up playing RPGs are, in fact, human dramas. You're pretending that the story tensions aren't just ethnic tensions, but that's what they are. And when you kill orcs, drow, revenants or other "baddies", you're actually just killing stand-ins for humans. Humans that your ethnicity/tribe of humans looks down on (if you fight non-sentient monsters or plants, I'll let you off with that)
In that, Tolkien was casually following traditional European usage, e.g. the "German race" versus the "English race", which didn't clearly distinguish between genetics and culture. I can appreciate the desire to get away from using "race", since it is such a loaded term. The problem with using "species", though, is that it already has a well-defined meaning incompatible with "race". In the end, I expect that convenience will win out over precision.
I think the use of the term "race" probably comes from early Dungeons & Dragons. The original D&D had dwarf, elf, gnome, and hob^H^H^H halfling as character classes. It used the term "demi-humans" for these.
In 1978, TSR produced "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", the first of many attempts to clean-up and rationalize the game's basic system. It appears to me that this is where they first factored out race (i.e., [human, half-elf, elf,...]) as a separate PC characteristic.
From my cursory search, Tolkien seems to have often referred to dwarves, elves, and whatnot as "peoples" and used the word "race" for different subgroups of those. He at some point wrote (in a letter, not in the stories) that that at least elves & men were able to interbreed on ocassion, and thus were technically the same species. But he was mainly interested in the drama around half-elves, and left open questions about dwarf/elf and hobbit/ent pairings for later explorers...
Tolkien never gave a comprehensive explanation for his position, but Robert Stuart in his Tolkien, Race, and Racism in Middle-earth (2022) argues that Tolkien consistently assumed that all the flesh-and-blood humanoids in Middle-earth were interbreedable.
One thing I like about the new rules: they let users create their own unique species/class combinations, without feeling like the game's rules are limiting you.
For example, a Barbarian gnome or Half-orc wizard can be fun choices from a role playing perspective, but suboptimal in combat or gameplay. Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.
Speaking as both a D&D DM and player, the "sub-optimal game play" makes the campaign more fun, more diverse, and offers more thoroughly enjoyable role-playing and problem solving opportunities. It doesn't make it less fun.
Not to mention that D&D rules aren't carved in stone. I've never encountered a DM or D&D group that wouldn't allow players the leeway to create a barbarian gnome or half-orc wizard with their desired stats, if that was important to them.
The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.
I disagree. Sometimes you might select such combinations because you like suboptimal combinations for a challenge or for other reasons. (The rules should not prohibit from making such selections.) However, there might sometimes be advantages as well as disadvantages to your selections.
However, I don't like class-based systems so much, and I prefer skill-based systems. Instead of selecting a character class, you can select which skills you want (including narrower skills; I think the skills in GURPS are not narrow enough) and how much of each one.
> Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.
Illogical. Without racial differences there's not such thing as a non-standard combination anymore. The entire flavour of a wizard gnome was that it was not an expected combination because it was suboptimal.
Technically "species" is also incorrect, since many D&D races can produce fertile offspring, whether half-breeds or otherwise (half-elf and half-orc have been core races for ages)
You're describing the 'mate-recognition' definition of species, which does not rule out cross breeding because memebers of each species could be geographically isolated but still compatible.
Species, like race and all other human created categorical systems have edge cases, exceptions and oddities and mostly importantly different definitions!
There are many examples where species definitions get thrown out because biology does crazy things. From the all female salamander species which interviewed with other species, to the multi organism man-of-war jelly thing floating in the ocean, biology does crazy stuff that will forever confuse us humans.
Nowadays, in my line of work I now think of nucleotide distance between individuals... But even that metric is troublesome.
My understanding is that the word's use has morphed over time and it could be used to mean ethnicity back in the day (probably still can, I'd expect "Irish race", "Scottish race" or "English race" to parsed as intended in most contexts). Given how D&D uses it the people who wrote the game interpreted "race" to mean anything basically humanoid that looked systemically different which seems like a reasonable take for the times. Then people rolled with it because we're generally talking high fantasy where science has no meaning and "race" rolls off the tongue better than "species".
> how "race" ever came to be the word we use instead of "Species" in nearly every video game
Races can interbreed, at least in most European languages. You can't have half elves if they were separate species.
Like dogs for example, the dog breeds are called races in many languages for obvious reasons. So race is something that is less different than species but still noticably different genetically.
I think the main reason is that it kind of pigeon-holed certain races and classes. There were just objectively correct choices. In a game where there should be no "correct" choice. And it was mostly benefit, very few drawbacks. And the drawbacks that existed could easily be circumvented.
Adding meaningless chaff like this to the rulebook has a near 1.0 correlation with entirely in-module railroad campaigns, avoidance of house rules and homebrewing, and by-the-book rules play. The new D&D audience only knows how to color inside the lines. Case in point: Celebration and debate over tiny rules changes any group could have made themselves.
It's nice to have a better core game. D&D is perhaps the only TTRPG known to have such sparse content that players have to fix the rules themselves to make the game playable.
I gave up learning new systems after I spent lots of money on 3.5e books and then 4e came out. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to spend money it just seemed that another big overhaul of all the rules felt like the beginning of the end for the game being anything more than cardboard and paper for sale. My imagination seemed to be able to fill in any gaps that wizards of the coast seemed intent on selling me.
D&D is so dominant it's more or less the only system you can count on any given TTRPG player knowing, and often there's a lot of resistance to learning any other system. It makes sense for it to evolve into more of a blank slate system that is flexible by default so you can add your own spin on top, and that's a lot of how it's been evolving, because it adds to the ease of playing and running a game. A really good DM barely needs a system at all, and a terrible DM will be awful even given a great system, but the ruleset makes a difference for the majority of DMs that are somewhere in between.
Getting angry about the change also makes no sense by the same logic. You can continue calling it whatever you want in your own game. It’s not like the company is sitting there policing your speech in your own house.
> 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 matter and automatically overrule the dungeon master’s own story line.
This got a lot of flak. But I can see why they did it. Many such cases of DMs, especially the game store kind, using DnD as their own sexual assault simulator. RPGHorrorStories has a lot.
I see why it gets a lot of flak too. People are becoming increasingly neurotic and fragile, and coupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise. We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session? And when does that end? Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?
> People are becoming increasingly neurotic and fragile, and coupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise.
Another way to interpret this would be that people are becoming increasingly comfortable with telling people they're not comfortable with something, and leaving when others at the table are refusing to take the feelings of others into consideration.
> We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?
D&D isn't always played with friends. Not that many of my friends play D&D, or are interested in; most of the people I've played with were strangers to me when we first began playing.
> Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?
You likely have this list in your head already for your friends; it's not necessary to explicitly rehash it because you've built a relationship with these people, and you know not to brag about your awesome trip with your dad in front of someone who's dad died last week.
But when you're meeting new people, you don't know what they've gone through. That's why it's better to be explicit at the start of this.
> We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?
First, it's not a "boardgame." It's a Role Playing Game. It's much more unbounded than a board game and you are actually playing. Not just rolling dice but acting and imagining and adding to the experience. You play your character and you decide how that character acts.
> do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?
You could have one. Generally cover strong NOs and decide on hot-topics that often make people uncomfortable:
racism/slavery, romance/sex, phobias, etc.
Then setup a system to halt if anything new comes up.
People throw around "trigger" and "safe-space" like they're above feeling anything but sometimes it's just being considerate. It's not just about language but situations.
We play D&D to have fun. For some, that means "leaving politics out of it" but for others, those "politics" impact our actual daily lives. To pretend they don't exist or to have to interact with them in a game can be just as un-fun.
> And when does that end? Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?
Now you're being facetious. You communicate like people. That's it.
If someone was recently mugged in real-life, you probably wouldn't have their character get attacked by a rogue. If someone had arachnophobia, you probably wouldn't drop down the RPG-cliche giant spider. If someone has to deal with real-life racism, you could probably understand why "knife-ears" wouldn't feel fun. OR maybe they're all okay. It's all about opt: opt-in and opt-out.
> oupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise.
I think that's a YOU-issue. My friend group is a complex group of people, and yet we find a way to have fun every week with D&D while also respecting all members of the game.
You can use whatever rules you like with your friends. When I play Monopoly with my friends we like to put fees and fines on "Free Parking," then if you land there you can take the money. We all agreed it's more fun this way.
TTRPGs are only superficially similar to board games, especially the direction that D&D has evolved (it grew out of fairly mechanics heavy wargames but has slowly moved to have a much higher emphasis on the roleplay). That makes it a) much more free-form than a board game, and b) makes the players much more emotionally invested in the story that's being told. In addition the setting is much more likely to involve more detailed focus on dark topics, death especially (not just in a 'that unit's dead' way, but 'my brother just died' way). It's far more likely that someone's going to stop enjoying themselves because of the topic in such a game than in a board game.
(Also, it's far more common that you will be doing this with a group of people you've only just met, but in general I think such games should lean more towards the lighter side)
If you're playing with close friends, you probably wouldn't railroad things to their character that would damage your friendship. If you know your friend is touchy about something traumatic do you rib them about it?
I think you're trying to force a narrative that doesn't really fit. This change isn't in response to "everything is woke now", it's in response to people playing with strangers more.
Presumably you've had different experiences, but from my personal D&D experience I've had zero people who abused the "distress signaling" and seen multiple cases where people were a bit uncomfortable and didn't really say anything other than snarky jokes (e.g. a player's backstory culminates in them graphically torturing an NPC to death while everybody else at the table is weirded out).
"Don't play with them" strikes me as impractical advice compared to communicating. If you're 6 months into a campaign as opposed to establishing a protocol to be able to say "hey this is kinda much for me, could we take the gruesome details of this offline?"
Communicating a tone for the setting early would have also helped.
Those people typically don't tell you ahead of time. I wouldn't do this with my close friend group either, we know each other. I think we can all agree on "hey this is touchy for me could we please not" and it works as a filter for people who get upset about it.
Agree, only issue is sometimes it's difficult to leave if the game runner or the players spring this type of sh** behavior on you. Especially if you're not expecting it, and then players / runner do almost nothing other than try to in some way entrap you in a miserable experience. Like noted below in a different comment, happens when you're trying to run a game also. Players do the same, trying to act out their disgusting fetishes, while forcing you to run the experience. Many horrible experiences over the years from the show runner side of the table.
May be your only social group. Usually people who are this far down in the nerd / geek hierarchy don't have that many friends anyways. It usually implies you already failed most of the ideas human society prioritizes anyways. Often means the only people to hang out with are other nerds and rejects. NY Times (frankly really mean) chart on the subject from 2008 [1]. Course, what do you expect from the company that wrote this article being discussed?
This (somewhat) less mean (although still about the same) chart [2] has approximately the same view on the situation. You're already down with people who watch children's shows and go to Ren Faires. Probably the type that sit around on New Years Day arguing about Dungeons and Dragons annoying PC rule changes rather than having friends to party with.
> > which could include sexual assault or drug use
Wouldn't any potion, including potions of healing, be considered "drug use"? Howabout excessive drinking by dwarves at a tavern in the canonical DM party formation ritual?
In the western world, a potion of healing is more akin to taking antibiotics, and imbibing alcohol has been agreed to be just a Regular Thing People Do, not a drug thing.
And in any case, yeah! This is why you talk things out in a session zero! If a player at a table is an alcoholic, they might not want to play in a campaign where other PCs regularly binge-drink. It doesn't necessarily mean the other players aren't allowed to do this, it might just mean that this isn't the right table for the player, or it might mean that the DM has to scratch out "alcoholic" as a trait for an NPC and replace it with something else.
While I'd generally expect this to be naturally rare in dnd, this isn't the case in many other games.
Monsterhearts deals with unhealthy sexual relationships at its core. Night Witches deals with sexism at its core. Bluebeard's Bride deals with straight up sexual violence at its core. These topics are heavy and its worth having some systems in place to help people navigate them.
This is especially true with con culture, where people are likely to play ttrpgs with total strangers.
It's not hard to do inadvertently, especially if you are going for a game that deals with heavy topics. Something that feels to be about the same level of seriousness to the DM may hit too close to home for a player (and one reason for X-card like systems on top of discussing stuff before the game, is that the player themselves may not realise themselves until they're in the moment)
Players do the same. Try to run a somewhat normal game, and your players will purposely try to act in some of the most reprehensible ways imaginable just to try to force you to run their disgusting fantasies.
Some people just don't understand social norms and, you know, other people's feelings, and use these sorts of games as their own personal power fantasy.
There have been a kind of gross number of threads I've seen where women join a group, make their character, and then spend the entire first session having their character abused, belittled, sexually assaulted, impregnated, etc.
Worth noting that not all D&D groups are among close friends; sometimes you get invited to a group because you're looking for people to play with and your friend group (if you have one) doesn't play. No different than joining a frisbee golf team, except with a much greater chance of a bottom-tier caliber of people.
A problem with the X-Card concept is that it can only be used within the pre-existing Overton Window of the group anyway, so you might as well ditch it in favor of normal social negotiation. For example, X-Card guidelines always tell players they can use it to block anything they're uncomfortable with. However, you'll quickly learn you can't use it to block political ideology from the DM, even if you legitimately find it triggering and distressing.
> you'll quickly learn you can't use it to block political ideology from the DM
That's like, not true at all. The X card is exactly for that purpose, the GM doesn't get a special exception from the effect of the X card.
As a GM, if a player reaches for the X card for any reason I'm obliged to stop and listen.
I'm curious what exactly you mean by "political ideology" in this context. Can you give a concrete example of the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable?
I believe you, but that's not the case everywhere. I've had DMs who have put drag shows in our game as part of tavern entertainment, for example. Even though I have no problem with them in real life, I have no desire to see them in my fantasy game because it just reminds me of contemporary culture war shenanigans. When questioned on it or asked if we could not do that, I've received nothing but pushback. Stuff like that.
I find the X-Card most useful at conventions. When I sit down at a table I have no idea where strangers' lines are. It provides a more frictionless way to let people tell you how to be courteous, without knowing them very well.
I think guidelines and an equivalent of a trigger warning is a better solution. It's really hard to modify a campaign on the fly if for example someone is uncomfortable with cults but that's the primary driver of the storyline.
It's another means of communication, ultimately. If your desires and needs for the game are incompatible with others in the group, it's not going to work out (and the more rigid this is, the smaller the set of people you're going to be able to play with).
I know a number of otherwise pleasant people who have as a political/philosophical view that it's not rude to insult certain identity groups.
I wouldn't say I find it triggering when someone says something about men, just annoying, but I can imagine someone who is more easily upset feeling that way.
That being said, if you have friends willing to say things that they know upset you, you probably need better friends, not a card.
Mostly political agendas that spill over from the real world, often surrounding themes of social justice and left-wing activism but sometimes right wing fascist themes as well. I just find it infuriating to have the DM shoehorn their extremist political views into a game. Especially with the leftist DMs, I've found that I'm usually expected to reinforce their beliefs and not question them, even with provided X-Cards or the like.
Well, we’re almost in 2025. I found it preposterously offensive that D&D was trying to tell us that a 25 Kg, 1.10 meter gnome, couldn’t be as good as a fighter as a 150 Kg, 2.20 meter Orc.
I’m glad they fixed that obvious shortcoming of the game. I’m sure too buy the new edition materials now.
Readit News
Changing race to species has not been a concern for myself, my players, or those I know. We're more concerned with improving the mechanics and speed of gameplay, balancing martials and casters, improvements to the core books, backgrounds, bastions, and impactful changes.
We want more variety at the table, not just everyone choosing the same optimized builds from RPGBOT. I think Crawford in the article puts it well: “People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice. They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
I agree that you should be able to make suboptimal choices if you wish, but I think that shouldn't be the issue.
Your character will be more than just a dwarf and a wizard (otherwise the game will be too simple), in addition to those things, so if a dwarf will be more likely to have an advantage at something else that is independent of classes, then you can have that, and still be a wizard, even if a "greater wizard" lacks what your character will have.
(There might also be the possibility, that if dwarf wizards are not very common (for whatever reason; there are many possibilities, depending on the story), then someone might not expect you to be a wizard so might be possible for some surprise if you are disguised by mundane means.)
But this is D&D in the end it's all up to the DM.
Previously a Dwarven wizard was just a really bad choice, and you'd be noticeably less powerful than say an Elven wizard so no-one ever played one.
Now an Elven Wizard for instance has a few bits and pieces that might make them a bit better, but still leave a Dwarven Wizard as a viable choice.
This makes the game far more interesting in every way: players have more interesting builds, more character choices, and can play whatever combinations that they want.
Back in the day when I was playing tabletop RPGs, the standard GM approach was that meaningful advantages must be balanced with meaningful disadvantages. Encounters where the characters had to face their weaknesses were supposed to be common. It didn't really matter if your characters were optimized as not.
Character builds as a concept were just some video game nonsense that had no place in actual role-playing games. At least among the people I used to play with.
It takes a good DM to balance a campaign, especially for years. And I suspect most DMs are pretty bad (I'm guessing, haven't played in over a decade now).
If you can manage to forget about the answer key lurking on every forum, the core experience of finding synergy, figuring out a build, balancing resistances is surprisingly fun.
> Why interview solely the grognards?
And, I know it's a rhetorical question, but the answer is:
> So the article can serve double duty as a Nat Geo-style jungle expedition, providing glimpses of unwashed tribespeople to intrigued middle Americans.
When D&D players are described as grogs, Eurotrash has won.
Largely the same, I acknowledge it's not being done for me and definitely doesn't impact me. Shrug (or eyeroll if so inclined) and move on.
> “People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice. They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
Ok, but IMO nobody has more fun by doing 13 damage a round instead of 10. The consequence of chasing optimality is it simply leads a DM to tune encounters appropriately.
> We want more variety at the table, not just everyone choosing the same optimized builds from RPGBOT.
So instead everyone is using the same optimised builds but with more species variety? Does that really improve the state of games in your experience?
I sort of want disparate builds, playing to aptitudes. Balancing spell lists and feats etc to make lots of viable builds is a hard problem to solve though (I've not played the 2024 rules so have no idea how well they've done?).
Now, a good DM can house-rule around a lot of these things, but designing rules for balance is quite hard, as is learning new rules, which is why these systems are a thing in the first place, so ideally the rules should by default allow this kind of creativity and flexibility without creating large power imbalances, both between players and between players and monsters (also something that's more difficult than it looks, hence things like challenge ratings and pre-built adventures).
(I'd argue the fairly high variance of D&D combat also causes problems here, both for fun and balance, because it's no fun when a powerful character completely bricks in a fight against a lesser opponent because of cursed dice, and it also makes it harder for the DM to get useful feedback to balance encounters)
There's the age old role play vs. roll play argument. With a good DM it shouldn't matter but if you're running some prebuilt campaign then it might lead to unexpected struggles.
Who is it being done “for” if not for the people who play this game? Don’t you have the same stake in changes to the game as anyone else?
That being said, I don't really understand the push to remove species benefits from games (not just D&D) and instead just do a name change? It makes sense that in a fictional world that different species would have their strengths and weaknesses just for biological reasons.
Or story reasons like in Mass Effect where the Asari live to around 1000 or more (I don't remember exactly) and have a very natural benefit for biotic abilities.
I understand the concern that some of these traits were originally racially fueled, but it makes sense for there to be differences of some sort.
The character creator does not let you roleplay as a tree, bacterium, moss, fish, vole, etc.
It lets you roleplay as an anthropomorphised, sentient, sapient, language-using creature, with minor visual differences - a human, an almost-human that looks like a lizard, an almost-human that looks like a cat, an almost-human that looks like a bird, an almost-human with hooves and horns, a short human, a very short human, a tall human with pointy ears, a dark-skinned human, a blue-skinned human, a green-skinned human, a purple-skinned human, and so on.
If you're Commander Shepard, you're going to have sex with all of them. I suspect the progeny, if any, would be fertile. Claims that these are distinct species that all colonised different parts of the galaxy are a thin veneer. True "alien" life would be hyperintelligent shades of blue like in HHGTTG, hiveminds like in Ender's Game, or the amazing fauna in Scavengers Reign. They would not be a human actor wearing a Cornish pasty, even if you say they're Klingons.
I put it to you that your character creator choices are all the same SPECIES, and their differences are minor genetic and cultural groupings driven by geographical isolation, which we call "ethnicity" or "RACE". And all the stories you make up playing RPGs are, in fact, human dramas. You're pretending that the story tensions aren't just ethnic tensions, but that's what they are. And when you kill orcs, drow, revenants or other "baddies", you're actually just killing stand-ins for humans. Humans that your ethnicity/tribe of humans looks down on (if you fight non-sentient monsters or plants, I'll let you off with that)
In 1978, TSR produced "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", the first of many attempts to clean-up and rationalize the game's basic system. It appears to me that this is where they first factored out race (i.e., [human, half-elf, elf,...]) as a separate PC characteristic.
From my cursory search, Tolkien seems to have often referred to dwarves, elves, and whatnot as "peoples" and used the word "race" for different subgroups of those. He at some point wrote (in a letter, not in the stories) that that at least elves & men were able to interbreed on ocassion, and thus were technically the same species. But he was mainly interested in the drama around half-elves, and left open questions about dwarf/elf and hobbit/ent pairings for later explorers...
For example, a Barbarian gnome or Half-orc wizard can be fun choices from a role playing perspective, but suboptimal in combat or gameplay. Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.
Not to mention that D&D rules aren't carved in stone. I've never encountered a DM or D&D group that wouldn't allow players the leeway to create a barbarian gnome or half-orc wizard with their desired stats, if that was important to them.
The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.
However, I don't like class-based systems so much, and I prefer skill-based systems. Instead of selecting a character class, you can select which skills you want (including narrower skills; I think the skills in GURPS are not narrow enough) and how much of each one.
But see also my other comment for other details.
Illogical. Without racial differences there's not such thing as a non-standard combination anymore. The entire flavour of a wizard gnome was that it was not an expected combination because it was suboptimal.
This change removes variety and is thus bad.
Species, like race and all other human created categorical systems have edge cases, exceptions and oddities and mostly importantly different definitions!
There are many examples where species definitions get thrown out because biology does crazy things. From the all female salamander species which interviewed with other species, to the multi organism man-of-war jelly thing floating in the ocean, biology does crazy stuff that will forever confuse us humans.
Nowadays, in my line of work I now think of nucleotide distance between individuals... But even that metric is troublesome.
Races can interbreed, at least in most European languages. You can't have half elves if they were separate species.
Like dogs for example, the dog breeds are called races in many languages for obvious reasons. So race is something that is less different than species but still noticably different genetically.
Dead Comment
Really jogs the noggin.
This got a lot of flak. But I can see why they did it. Many such cases of DMs, especially the game store kind, using DnD as their own sexual assault simulator. RPGHorrorStories has a lot.
Another way to interpret this would be that people are becoming increasingly comfortable with telling people they're not comfortable with something, and leaving when others at the table are refusing to take the feelings of others into consideration.
> We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?
D&D isn't always played with friends. Not that many of my friends play D&D, or are interested in; most of the people I've played with were strangers to me when we first began playing.
> Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?
You likely have this list in your head already for your friends; it's not necessary to explicitly rehash it because you've built a relationship with these people, and you know not to brag about your awesome trip with your dad in front of someone who's dad died last week.
But when you're meeting new people, you don't know what they've gone through. That's why it's better to be explicit at the start of this.
First, it's not a "boardgame." It's a Role Playing Game. It's much more unbounded than a board game and you are actually playing. Not just rolling dice but acting and imagining and adding to the experience. You play your character and you decide how that character acts.
> do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?
You could have one. Generally cover strong NOs and decide on hot-topics that often make people uncomfortable:
racism/slavery, romance/sex, phobias, etc.
Then setup a system to halt if anything new comes up.
People throw around "trigger" and "safe-space" like they're above feeling anything but sometimes it's just being considerate. It's not just about language but situations.
We play D&D to have fun. For some, that means "leaving politics out of it" but for others, those "politics" impact our actual daily lives. To pretend they don't exist or to have to interact with them in a game can be just as un-fun.
> And when does that end? Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?
Now you're being facetious. You communicate like people. That's it.
If someone was recently mugged in real-life, you probably wouldn't have their character get attacked by a rogue. If someone had arachnophobia, you probably wouldn't drop down the RPG-cliche giant spider. If someone has to deal with real-life racism, you could probably understand why "knife-ears" wouldn't feel fun. OR maybe they're all okay. It's all about opt: opt-in and opt-out.
> oupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise.
I think that's a YOU-issue. My friend group is a complex group of people, and yet we find a way to have fun every week with D&D while also respecting all members of the game.
(Also, it's far more common that you will be doing this with a group of people you've only just met, but in general I think such games should lean more towards the lighter side)
This is why these types of initiatives do far more harm than good. They hide problems rather than address them.
"Don't play with them" strikes me as impractical advice compared to communicating. If you're 6 months into a campaign as opposed to establishing a protocol to be able to say "hey this is kinda much for me, could we take the gruesome details of this offline?"
Communicating a tone for the setting early would have also helped.
How do these initiatives hide these problems?
D&D is supposed to be a collaborative effort, "My way or the highway" isn't how a table should be run.
May be your only social group. Usually people who are this far down in the nerd / geek hierarchy don't have that many friends anyways. It usually implies you already failed most of the ideas human society prioritizes anyways. Often means the only people to hang out with are other nerds and rejects. NY Times (frankly really mean) chart on the subject from 2008 [1]. Course, what do you expect from the company that wrote this article being discussed?
This (somewhat) less mean (although still about the same) chart [2] has approximately the same view on the situation. You're already down with people who watch children's shows and go to Ren Faires. Probably the type that sit around on New Years Day arguing about Dungeons and Dragons annoying PC rule changes rather than having friends to party with.
[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/09/opinion/09opa...
[2] https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...
Wouldn't any potion, including potions of healing, be considered "drug use"? Howabout excessive drinking by dwarves at a tavern in the canonical DM party formation ritual?
And in any case, yeah! This is why you talk things out in a session zero! If a player at a table is an alcoholic, they might not want to play in a campaign where other PCs regularly binge-drink. It doesn't necessarily mean the other players aren't allowed to do this, it might just mean that this isn't the right table for the player, or it might mean that the DM has to scratch out "alcoholic" as a trait for an NPC and replace it with something else.
Monsterhearts deals with unhealthy sexual relationships at its core. Night Witches deals with sexism at its core. Bluebeard's Bride deals with straight up sexual violence at its core. These topics are heavy and its worth having some systems in place to help people navigate them.
This is especially true with con culture, where people are likely to play ttrpgs with total strangers.
Players do the same. Try to run a somewhat normal game, and your players will purposely try to act in some of the most reprehensible ways imaginable just to try to force you to run their disgusting fantasies.
There have been a kind of gross number of threads I've seen where women join a group, make their character, and then spend the entire first session having their character abused, belittled, sexually assaulted, impregnated, etc.
Worth noting that not all D&D groups are among close friends; sometimes you get invited to a group because you're looking for people to play with and your friend group (if you have one) doesn't play. No different than joining a frisbee golf team, except with a much greater chance of a bottom-tier caliber of people.
That's like, not true at all. The X card is exactly for that purpose, the GM doesn't get a special exception from the effect of the X card.
As a GM, if a player reaches for the X card for any reason I'm obliged to stop and listen.
I'm curious what exactly you mean by "political ideology" in this context. Can you give a concrete example of the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable?
But I'm having a hard time imagining this specific example. What would be an example of political ideology from the GM that you'd want to block?
I wouldn't say I find it triggering when someone says something about men, just annoying, but I can imagine someone who is more easily upset feeling that way.
That being said, if you have friends willing to say things that they know upset you, you probably need better friends, not a card.
I’m glad they fixed that obvious shortcoming of the game. I’m sure too buy the new edition materials now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/arts/dungeons-and-dragons...