How exciting! Take a look at that screenshot from the preview video for the Dungeons & Dragons 2024 Players Handbook (PHB)! They’re showing a picture of a character in a wheelchair and talking about new ways to customize your character!

I told my family and friends. I said, when we launched Limitless Heroics, that this is a movement, that we’re showing the industry that people care about disability, neurodiversity, and mental illness representation. Wizards of the Coast (WotC) hired a fantastic consultant to talk to them about the importance of authentic representation. They showed us what was coming in that video. Even if our work wasn’t an impetus for this change, it’s a Divine Smite against ableism!

So I talked to some of my friends who got advance copies and asked them how the 2024 PHB handled disability inclusion! “There’s nothing there.” Is there maybe a wheelchair in the equipment section?! “No, nothing like that.”

Really?

Today, I looked for myself to see whether they missed something. I searched the D&D Beyond version for anything that might reveal an overlooked section. Nothing. That video was poorly planned at best and completely misleading at worst.

Roll for Racism

But it doesn’t stop there. Because WotC (admirably) wanted to remove terms like half-elf and half-orc due to problematic racist connotations, they removed all rules for creating any character of mixed ancestry. They could have included an adapted variation of the custom lineages from Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything as a paragraph or two instead, but they didn’t, so the 2024 core rules allow only pureblood people groups, effectively gamifying miscegenation laws.

Then, by refusing to follow the distinction between biology and culture as begun with the excellent Ancestry and Culture that nearly every 5e variant since has emulated, they doubled down on the bioessentialism that they attempted to avoid. Contrast that with PJ Coffey’s excellent Homebrew and Hacking: Crafting Heritages and Cultures, which not only offers an infinite variety while distinguishing between biology and culture but also offers a Creative Commons licensed SRD including a digital braille version for accessibility!

GM: “A Hadozee and Tanis Pureblood-Elven walk into the tavern….”

OK, but what about neurodivergence?

Neurodiversity gets even less authentic representation than physical disabilities in games and other media, but WotC showed their (one-time) commitment to this by introducing Asteria in the Book of Many Things, their first autistic character. But sadly, their ADHD representation wasn’t as accurate.

With ability scores, the PHB suggests, “Once you’ve assigned your ability scores, give some thought to what those scores might say about your character’s appearance and personality.” It includes suggestions for high and low scores, but the only remotely neurodivergent trait included, “Fidgety,” is listed under High Dexterity. I can tell you as a fidgety guy with ADHD, Dexterity is my dump stat. Clumsiness is a common trait for ADHD, so if that was an attempt at subtle inclusion, they did not hit the necessary DC for a success.

But not a critical fail

That said, they did make some improvements.

The artwork includes a vast range of demographics, showing far more diversity than ever, although still no body differences like face differences, body proportion differences, or pigmentation varieties such as vitiligo. The inclusion of disabled characters in the artwork is commendable, even if it’s a picture that lacks 1000 words that should explain them.

Common Sign Language has been added to the common languages list.

The physical version has a larger font for better readability than before but still no braille, not even electronic braille, even though WotC promised this back in 2020.

The Best Improvement

But if I could get them to include one subtle change, one Limited Wish, it would be the inclusion of this sentence, which does appear in the 2024 PHB:

Many effects impose a condition, a temporary state that alters the recipient’s capabilities.

Conditions like Blinded, Deafened, and Paralyzed have often been used to represent the permanent experiences of blindness, deafness, and paralysis, but we have argued that conditions in 5e, in spite of the problematic images in the 2014 PHB (Thanks for removing those!), are designed to represent temporary circumstances, not the permanent disabilities we encounter and experience in the real world. WotC finally codified that.

This is a critical inclusion. This clarifies that disabilities are more complex than rolling with disadvantage. It hints that disabilities are nonbinary spectrums. It removes the insinuation that people can’t learn to adapt to their disabilities and even thrive with them.

Yeah, I’m probably reading too much into that, but we’ll take our victories where we can get them and use them to ascend yet another step in an inaccessible world.

We are still in Initiative, and it’s our turn.

January 2023 was a rough year for the TTRPG industry. 5e developers found ourselves dividing our time between protesting and planning for a nebulous future. When WotC finally waved the CC-BY white flag, we celebrated like the end of Return of the Jedi. But experience doesn’t make you wiser. It makes you older. Learning from experience makes you wiser. So how can we gain XP from this experience to level up?

D&D is HUGE

If this had happened fifteen years ago, nobody would have noticed, and nobody would have cared. In fact, it did when WotC released D&D 4th Edition with a GSL instead of an OGL in 2008. That led to the release of Pathfinder. But nobody outside the TTRPG community had any idea. But thanks to the success of Fifth Edition, D&D has firmly entrenched itself in the mainstream consciousness. As a result, mainstream news and financial analysts took notice, and the final nail in the OGL 1.2 coffin may have come from Alta Fox Capital, Hasbro’s largest investors, who recognize the size and value of the fanbase. The upcoming movie and TV show could never have had their big budgets without the size of the 5e fanbase. We are legion.

D&D ≠ WotC

I’ve said it often. Mike Shae says it so often, he should trademark it. And it’s 100% true. WotC isn’t D&D. WotC owns the D&D trademark, but they don’t own the game. D&D is more than a fancy ampersand — it’s a global community of 50 million TTRPG players who play 5e more than anything else, but we also play many other systems. But even in the 5e community, we don’t need WotC. We can either start with the free Basic Rules or another 5e-based game and develop our own content for it or purchase high quality content from over 8500 options.

But even at the height of these shenanigans, we knew that they couldn’t take our books away, and no matter what changes they make in the future, we’ll just keep on playing what we want to play. And if they intend to replace book releases with microtransaction-based digital content and slap the ampersand on it, they can do that, but they don’t get to define what D&D is. Every table, whether stone, formica, or VTT, decides what D&D is for them, even if there’s no ampersand to be found on any of your resources. And you don’t have to buy their latest products or update to new editions if you don’t want to!

The players are heroes too, not just the characters

When the community learned of the plot to wipe out other 5e creators, we rolled initiative. In 8 hours, a Discord assembling to defend the OGL had 500 members, and at its peak, it had about 1700 sharing information, writing letters to Hasbro, WotC, the EFF, the FTC, and more. 77,407 people signed a petition. YouTube and every social media platform came alive with reports and shared information so powerful, it crashed D&D Beyond with a flood of 40,000 unsubscriptions. OSR and 5e fans set aside their edition preferences to take up arms together. We fought. We fought hard. It was exhausting. But we won. You don’t just play a hero. You are a hero. Don’t ever think you’re not.

Trust the action economy

According to the cliché, it’s always darkest right before the dawn, and in this case, that was true. Many believed the battle was lost, and we all planned our contingencies, when WotC suddenly dropped their treasure and fled. They made the mistake of trying to slip legal shenanigans past Rules Lawyers, a group of people who scrutinize word usage as a hobby. They presented a seemingly unstoppable force to people who strategize ways to overcome impossible odds for a living.

We challenge the schemes of dragons and archdevils for fun! WotC, did you really think you were more powerful than that?!

No single player had the power to defeat this BBEG ourselves. But the most powerful among us, bards like Linda Codega, Ginny Di, and Indestructoboy, were only as powerful as those they inspired. The true power came from the action economy, the 5e principle that multiple weaker actors can defeat a more powerful being based on the number of actions each can take in a given round, which is why multiple monsters multiply the XP in an encounter. We continued to act while they struggled to move.

5e is the final version of D&D

OneD&D was already touted as the final unifying version of D&D, which seems like a bold claim, but this event may have solidified that, yet not in the way WotC intended. Instead of unifying around WotC products, including their online strategy, by releasing SRD 5.1 into Creative Commons, an entire industry of creators can keep making 5e content forever, modifying, tweaking, expanding, or pantomiming, and while system overhauls are inevitable, the 5e flywheel’s momentum is seemingly unstoppable.

Unless we have a reason to unite against it.