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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
Although he claims his mission is to settle Mars, I sometimes wonder if Elon Musk’s actual aim is to improve my productivity. His changes to X’s algorithm mean that I discover far fewer pieces to read on the social media platform, reducing the amount of time I spend sitting at my desk browsing through fascinating and esoteric articles I would never have discovered without him. And now he is becoming increasingly critical of another way I waste time, the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, since he belatedly noticed last year’s major reworking of the rule book in the name of diversity and inclusion.
A consequence of Musk’s influence, particularly on the political right, has been the spectacle of people who palpably don’t know the difference between their aasimar and their aarakocra opining at great length about how troubling all this is, presumably as many of their readers’ eyes glaze over. But this seemingly silly row about a game is in fact a useful case study in how to tackle issues of diversity, ethnicity and inclusion — both well and badly.
The changes to D&D’s 2024 rule book take two forms. First are some explicitly political changes to character creation. Talk of player “races” is out — instead orcs, elves, humans and so on are described using the term “species”. And for the most part, your character’s traits — how intelligent they are and so forth — are driven by their background and the choices you make about the life they have led, rather than their species.
Any number of ill-founded ideas about ethnic diversity — ranging from the various crackpot theories of countless bigots and the more implausible ideas of some diversity trainers — have, in my view, shared the same root: a belief that there is a real thing called “race”, when in fact labels such as “black” and “white” are more or less meaningless. As Christopher Hitchens once wrote, we should remember that divisions of race are “man-made, and can be man-unmade”. But the difference between playing as an orc or as an elf is, or should feel, meaningful. Using the term “species” is a good way of ensuring that without talking as if “races” are real. This is a small but worthwhile change.
Or, at least, it would be if the new player handbook actually made this argument explicit. As it is not, the change seems pointless. Further adding to the annoyance of players, the differences between D&D’s various species have been reduced. Describing orcs and gnomes as belonging to different “species” is a reasonable way of highlighting that their vast differences are not like human beings’ invented races. But diminishing these to the point at which they are scarcely wider than the distance between “black” and “white” undermines the whole endeavour.
The second tranche of changes to the game involves the introduction of detailed recommendations about how to run your campaign, including the stipulation that before you start playing you discuss everyone’s expectations, feelings and any no-nos they might have. That’s always been useful advice, because in the world of D&D you can tell anything from a comic, light-hearted adventure to a grimdark tale of murder and misery. As a result, I always start the campaigns I run by feeling out what type of adventure other players want and (after a disastrous incident with a spider) asking them to tell me if they have any phobias or if there are topics they’d rather not encounter.
But again, the problem here is that while there is a lot of modish language in the new handbook about comfort and accessibility, nothing in it explicitly walks players through these very real problems. This is all too typical of advice about how to improve a workplace, a voluntary organisation, or a country for that matter — too many institutions cannot explain why they are doing something or why it is valuable in plain and accessible language.
This has proved counterproductive in two ways. First because as a consequence it can seem as if change is being made for change’s sake, which almost always annoys people. Second because saying something in plain language is a good way of working out where people actually disagree. Explaining that we are using the term “species” because we don’t believe that race is real would be an argument that people could understand. “Have a meeting at the start to work out your expectations and any no-nos” is easier to comprehend and act on than more abstract language about “inclusion”.
Forcing leaders of an organisation to speak plainly is a good way of testing whether they really understand what they’re doing or if they’re merely picking up the latest fad or trend. This is true whether you’re changing the rule book of a board game or the inner workings of a company.
