The recent release of the Player’s Handbook 2024 has had a mixed reception on a number of fronts, but the rules for species (formerly races) are a particularly contentious one for many players. This is because some species from the 2014 rules are no longer included, while other species have been added, and all have been reworked in some way. Let’s look at what’s different, what’s good, what’s bad, and what’s disappointing.
Removed Species
The species included in the 2014 rules included half-elves and half-orcs. Both of these species have been removed, with no option of creating half-species characters. Many players have thought the assumed half-human element to these species left little room for inventiveness throughout the editions. If you wanted to play a half-gnome/half-dwarf, there were no special stats for that combination. These days, the only way to play a half-species character is to choose one of the 10 available species and just use its features but describe your character in a way that reflects your heritage.
Added Species
Three new species have been added to the 2024 version of the Player’s Handbook (when compared to the 2014 version). Orc, Aasimar, and Goliath have been added, bringing the playable races up from 9 to 10 after the removed half-species. Each of these species have powerful features and lots of flavor. They are also fan-favorites from the many editions and ancillary materials, so it’s nice to have them under the umbrella of the Core Rulebooks.
Good
Several species were re-worked to offer powerful, interesting, or unique utility. Goliaths can choose an Ancestry which gives them a unique power such as teleportation, damage mitigation, or damage dealt. Aasimar and Dragonborn have unique options, including the ability to periodically sprout wings to gain a flight speed. Several species have meaningful sub-species options which give them additional flavor, including Dragonborn, Elf, and Tiefling. And for all of the Human fans out there, Humans have much more choice in their character creation, allowing you to select a proficiency and an origin feat at level 1.
Speeds have been more streamlined, with all species having a speed of 30 except for the Goliath and Wood Elf species, which have a speed of 35. This means that playing a small species is no longer a non-starter for certain classes or builds, and the only species-based increase caps out at an additional 5-foot step per round.
All of these options mean that character creation got a shake-up, and the decisions about how to create your character using these species are much more meaningful. Since species no longer dictates which class you’re going to be good at (through ability score increases), choosing your character’s species is much more agency-driven than it was in the previous version.
Bad
While some species got new options and their choices became more meaningful, other species lost out. Dwarf and Halfling lost all of their subraces from the 2014 rules. The new features of these species are fine, sure, but you can no longer get armor proficiency as a Mountain Dwarf, and all Dwarves have the Hill Dwarf hit point increase. Halflings lose access to Poison Resistance in lieu of Naturally Stealthy, which wasn’t taken very often, but could have been improved rather than scrapped. What’s worse, some of the most interesting options playing a Dwarf granted (namely Dwarven Combat Training and Tool Proficiency) have been stripped from the base species, making the remaining features distinctly lackluster for Dwarf fans.
Perhaps most disappointing for this writer is the continued exclusion of “monstrous” species from the PHB. Goblinoids, Kobolds, Tabaxi, Bugbears, Minotaurs, Tortle, Harengon, Aarakocra, and Shifters are all part of the core D&D world, and truly deserve to be presented with full rules alongside the traditional “human-like” species. These species would bring more variety, depth, and meaningful choice to character creation beyond the standard array of species which can be mistaken for Humans. Most of the species in the PHB 2024 are human-like variations.
To illustrate the problem here, let’s look at how similar the species included in the 2024 rules are. Three species are explicitly of human descent (Aasimar, Human, and Tiefling), and most others have lost enough flavor to effectively be tall humans (Goliaths and Orcs), short humans (Dwarves, Halflings, and Gnomes), or skinny humans (Elves). The only race that is distinctive enough to not be confused for human variants are the Dragonborn. This leaves the overall palette of character creation a bit, well, flat for a game celebrating 10 years in the same edition. This writer would have loved to see 1-3 of the more unusual races included just for the spark of imagination that could be offered to players beyond what various takes on humans can offer between themselves.
That said, some species are understandable to leave out if they are explicitly extraplanar, such as owlins, loxodin, leonin, changelings, warforged, and the fae, which don’t show up in the Monster Manual 2014 or in adventures as species one is likely to encounter in a basic D&D setting like the Forgotten Realms.
I do have to acknowledge that not every species could receive a glow-up and dedicated pages in the PHB, which is already much larger than its 2014 counterpart, but there are definite sections of the book—such as the Background section—which could have been made more efficient to free up a few pages for more species options.
Hope for the Future
Players are already discussing what they hope will change with further rules releases. Explicit guidance for half-species, a return of the custom lineage (formerly in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything, and not compatible with 2024 species), and sub-species for several species would certainly be welcome. Perhaps more desirable would be updates to the Free Rules over time, adding more species to the default options. There is little in the history of Fifth Edition to indicate this is a strong possibility, but with D&D being more popular than ever before, there is always room for some novel approaches to releases going forward. Otherwise, we’re looking at a lot of species which are made obsolete (some for a second time) since their release, requiring yet another release (and purchase) to bring them up to the current standards, which feels really cruddy for players who have bought up to 18 separate resources already to unlock these species.
TL;DR:
Overall, the state of species in the Player’s Handbook 2024 rules is improved when compared to the 2014 version, but Halflings and Dwarves lost some functionality which wasn’t replaced. The biggest successes can be attributed to Aasimar, Dragonborn, Elf, and Tiefling species. The biggest failing comes in the form of re-hashing the same human-like species instead of including some of the more iconic “monstrous” species, such as Goblinoids, Kobolds, and Bugbears. There is a real opportunity for the team at D&D to alleviate some of the friction caused by rendering species obsolete with the update through errata, or additions to the free rules for the species previously released.
