An exploration of how the recent changes to Dungeons & Dragons' rule book, aiming to promote diversity and inclusion, have sparked debate and offer a valuable case study on tackling issues of race and ethnicity.
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”.
DIVERSITY INCLUSION Dungeons & Dragons ELON MUSK RACE
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