The new Dungeon & Dragons Player's Handbook: 2024's most significant event (and a story about 'woke')

'Woke’ hasn’t gone away but I suspect we might see 2024 as the turning point when people were able again to focus on being kind and respectful rather than on a rigid adherence to a set of rules

This is Verity, halfling mastermind rogue and

As you do at this time of year, I set to thinking about the most important events of 2024. After all what with the crushing of the Tories in July and the re-election of Donald Trump in November it has been a year to remember - or forget. The French and German governments have collapsed while their economies spiral into chaos. Canada’s government would have crashed too had one opposition leader not waited until the Christmas recess to call for no confidence in Justin Trudeau (I assume so as not to spoil the lad’s birthday).

But the first event of 2024 that popped into my head wasn’t any of these things. Nor was it David Moyes leaving West Ham or two Yorkshiremen sharing a 454 run partnership for England against Pakistan. The first event I recalled was the publication, on 17th September, of the revised Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook. Something that, I suspect, passed most of you by. I’m now, however, going to tell you why it was significant.

I’ve written before about Dungeons & Dragons because it was, without question, the most important innovation in games since the creation of the board game in the 19th century:

“Up to this point, other than children’s imaginative playground play, games had always involved a contest between the players and an end. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) introduced a game where the players cooperate in a contest with the game itself rather than with each other.”

The 2024 Player’s Handbook represents an update on the 2014 5th Edition rules which saw (how much of this is down to the rules is moot) a huge expansion in people playing the game including millions watching other people play on you-tube. Critical Role, the biggest of these online games, says they had 188 million views in the year to May 2024. Add other hugely successful live play campaigns like Dimension 20, Dungeons & Daddies and High Rollers and you can see that D&D is a big game, with its publisher claiming over 50 million people have played and that there are around 13.7m active players today.

The problem is that, to play the game, players don’t need to spend any money with the publisher once they’ve bought the core books. The publishing strategy became focused on providing extensive settings, modules and, most importantly, new character classes, races and subclasses. The 2024 publication has to be seen in the context of this strategy and, with the contribution to earnings from computer game Baldur’s Gate 3 (BG3) coming to an end, declining income. Some suggested that the rewrite of rules result from the ‘woke mind virus’ made necessary by the ominous fact that Wizards of the Coast, the publisher, are based in California. But the cold hard truth is that the rules rewrite comes about because the game's playability was compromised by rules for play being spread across a dozen or more books. And by the need to sustain revenues. Meaning that the wokest aren’t happy.

Now it is true that the new rule books provide some guidance on being inclusive, that character races have become character ‘species’ and racial advantages (extra strength for half-orcs or extra constitution for dwarves) get replaced by a set of general options on increased ability scores. Plus the assumption that orcs and goblins (as players) are evil is removed. But the striking thing isn’t that the game became ‘woke’ but that it sought to accommodate some players’ expectation of social behaviour without prescribing a particular style or approach. Suggestions about trigger warnings can be helpful (I remember a game where we put a paper cup over the spider mini to ease one player’s anxiety) but can also act to be exclusionary. But this is down to the person running the game not to the set of rules. If I tell you this is a setting based on the ‘Masque of the Red Death’ it is reasonable to expect plague and horror themes. In the end players, regardless of sex, race or gender, are heroic adventurers in a fantasy setting. The game is still about exploring dungeons and, occasionally, slaying dragons. Plus the basic rules are free online.

I appreciate that this is probably enough about the new rules to a game most of you don’t play (although I am always up for a new campaign if you are) but it is a reminder of how, in the end, business imperative trumps the culture wars. Unlike some other businesses, not all based in California, Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast dodged the ‘woke’ bullet by allowing players to choose whether or not they are ‘woke’. So your campaign can still have marauding bands of evil orcs and evil dragon spawn because the game doesn’t stop you doing this. Indeed, players don’t have to opt for only the new rules because the ‘legacy’ races and subclasses are (almost) entirely compatible with the new rules.

One of the lessons of 2024 is that companies discovered that being too right-on isn’t a great strategy even when the target audience is younger people. People want to be inclusive and respectful but they want to do this in their own way not as prescribed by the writers of rules (or the human resources department). The great innovation of Dungeons & Dragons was that the rules provided a framework for players to create their own adventure and the success came from the pleasure of role play and the making of a story (albeit one littered with dead orcs and dragons) not from winning a battle with other players. With that other big event in the USA this year, it is likely that we’ll see an easing back on culture war memes in advertising and marketing. This relaxation of ‘wokeness’ won’t please the extremes on either side (we should remember that it isn’t anti-woke to be gratuitously offensive to minorities just as much as it isn’t respectful to police other people’s language in search of offence or to insist on defining everyone by their ‘pronouns’) but it will make life a little easier for most of the rest of us.

‘Woke’ hasn’t gone away but I suspect we might see 2024 as the turning point when people were able again to focus on being kind and respectful rather than on a rigid adherence to a set of rules imposed on us by DEI executives, critical theory activists and the worst kind of politician. Dungeons & Dragons got this right by failing to please both the woke and the antiwoke thereby allowing regular folk who just want to play a game to get on with doing that without the word and behaviour police hovering over them. I’m sure lots of other, more important, things happened in 2024 but the release of the new D&D Player’s Handbook, for me at least, was a sign that years to come will be less woke and less angry at the existence of woke. And, since most D&D players are young people, the new rule book treated them like grown ups who can manage their own relationships without imposed rules of behaviour.