Your species is an integral part of defining where your character came from, with your character's background rounding out the other half of their origin. The 2024 Player’s Handbook has changed the way these aspects interact with your character, and also changed how creation works. As part of this new journey, each of the ten playable species featured in the 2024 core rules has been revisited and revamped. Some of these species were part of the 2014 core rules, and others have been added to the list.
We’ll take a look at what’s new for each and what some of the overall changes are in this article!
- Updated Species in the 2024 Player’s Handbook
- New Species in the Core Rules
- Revised Species Traits
- Ability Score Adjustments No Longer Tied to Species
- New Art to Showcase Species
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SPECIES |
WHAT'S NEW |
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Aasimar |
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Dragonborn |
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Dwarf |
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Elf |
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Gnome |
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Goliath |
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Halfling |
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Human |
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Orc |
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Tiefling |
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New Species in the Core Rules

A big change to the 2024 Player’s Handbook is the addition of some new but familiar faces. Three species that had previously been featured in other sourcebooks are now included within the core rules in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. The Aasimar, the Goliath, and the Orc have been called up to the majors, with some tweaks and updates for each.
Aasimar
Aasimar getting their Celestial Revelation trait at level 3 and as a Bonus Action was a change from Monsters of the Multiverse that has carried through to the 2024 Aasimar. An updated boost to this power for the new core rules is that an Aasimar no longer has to pick which option of this trait you want to take when you unlock it. Instead you choose which option you want to take whenever you activate it.
This means that your Celestial Revelation is now tied to your mood or emotional state when you call upon it. Are you looking to soar with your Heavenly Wings? Are you ready to be a righteous beacon with your Inner Radiance? Or are you feeling broken, crestfallen, and dour with your Necrotic Shroud?
Goliath
The 2024 Goliath leans more heavily into the Giants that they descended from. Now you get to choose the specific type of giant that is in your family line. Like Tieflings, this ancestry doesn’t have to determine your Goliath’s destiny or personality, but it does mean inheriting different gifts you can tap into.
For example, a descendant of Fire Giants can add an additional d10 Fire damage on a successful attack roll. A Goliath with Stone Giant ancestry can use a Reaction when you take damage to roll a d12, add your Constitution modifier, and reduce your damage by that amount. Each of these types of traits can be used a number of times equal to your Proficiency Bonus.
Orc
A playable species in D&D in different versions since 1993, Orcs aren’t just back on the menu, they’re now a part of the core rules. The 2024 Orc builds upon the Adrenaline Rush feature from Monsters of the Multiverse, which allows you to Dash and gain Temporary Hit Points as a Bonus Action. Now you regain all uses of the trait after completing a Short Rest. Your 2024 Orcs also get expanded Darkvision, gaining a range of 120 feet.
Revised Species Traits

Whether it’s one of the three new species in the 2024 Player’s Handbook or one of the seven returning, each of the species in the 2024 core rules has been given an overhaul.
A Boost to Effectiveness
Features for several species have been given a boost to help give them more value within the action economy of the game. Dragonborn can now choose whether their breath weapon comes out as a Cone or a Line. Gnomes now get full access to Speak With Animals. Dwarves can now use Tremorsense on stone surfaces. Traits like these and others have all been looked at and upgraded to make them more usable more often in your games.
Elves and Tieflings Get Spells
Each of the three main 2024 Elf lineages and the three new 2024 Tiefling lineages gain access to a unique spell at level 3 and level 5. For example, the Wood Elf now gains Longstrider at level 3 and Pass Without Trace at level 5. Similarly, a Chthonic Tiefling gains False Life at level 3 and Ray of Enfeeblement at level 5. The three Tiefling lineages also gain resistance to an appropriate damage type, and the Thaumaturgy cantrip. Each of the three Elf and Tiefling variants also gain a unique cantrip.
Each Species Was Shaped With an Eye Toward the Fantasy
When working on the revisions for each of the species for the 2024 Player’s Handbook, a decision was made to focus on what the fantasy of each species is. Dwarves were given enhanced Stonecunning and Darkvision to emphasize their legacy of toiling away in mountain mines and kingdoms. Goliaths lean much more heavily into their specific lineages to reflect being the descendants of Giants as we understand them in D&D. Dragonborn were given the ability to access wings because flight is absolutely one of the coolest things about dragons.
Even Humans in the 2024 Player’s Handbook were given a keen focus on their role in fantasy. The flavor text talks about the way Humans have spread throughout the multiverse much in the way humans have done to every corner of our globe. By emphasizing human resourcefulness and versatility in their traits, the 2024 core rules portray humans as they’re seen in stories like The Lord of the Rings or The Witcher, or even in sci-fi tales like Star Trek, never content to stay in one place, always eager to learn, grow, and explore.
In some cases, this means these species have been given more choice points during the creation process, such as Tieflings or Goliaths. In other cases, like Halflings or Dwarves, these choice points were streamlined to best serve their fantasy elements.
Ability Score Adjustments No Longer Tied to Species
A huge change to species in the 2024 Player’s Handbook is that your ability score adjustments will no longer be tied them. With the 2014 character creation rules, players often chose their class based on the ability score adjustments of the species, which took away from the customizability of character creation. Now you can play any species with any character class without feeling like you’re intentionally putting yourself at an ability score detriment by doing so.
Your ability score adjustments now come from your background, which also gives you proficiency in certain skills. This makes backgrounds more important to character creation as the part of your character’s history where they honed their skills and abilities.
The way ability score adjustments work for 2024 backgrounds is that each background has three ability scores tied to it. You can choose to add +2 to one of those ability scores and +1 to another, or add +1 to all three. For example, the Farmer background gives you Strength, Constitution, and Wisdom to choose from. The Wayfarer background gives you Dexterity, Wisdom, and Charisma.
Using Backgrounds from Older Books
While these ten species have seen revisions for the 2024 Player’s Handbook, you can still use species and backgrounds from previous books. A sidebar in the character creation rules chapter gives you suggestions for how to adapt backgrounds and species from older books when creating new characters for the 2024 core rules.
New Art to Showcase Species

The 2024 Player’s Handbook has art for each species. These illustrations all show a variety of versions of each species to help inspire your characters. The art specifically shows what civilian life may look like for them, too, to help you get an idea of what life may have looked like for your character before they started adventuring.
Play With the 2024 Core Rulebooks Today!
The 2024 Player’s Handbook is now available on the D&D Beyond marketplace, which means it's time to set out on new adventures with fresh or familiar characters!
The new options and revisions presented in this book are a result of a decade of lessons learned and adventures had. With updated rules and streamlined gameplay, it's never been easier to bring your stories to life.
We’re delighted to share with you the changes to fifth edition D&D that appear in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. Make sure to keep an eye out on D&D Beyond for more useful guides on using the wealth of new options, rules, and mechanics found in the 2024 Player's Handbook!

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.
This article was updated on August 13, 2024, to issue corrections or expand coverage for the following features:
- Aasimar: Corrected Inner Radiance bullet.
- Dragonborn: Clarified when you choose the shape of your Breath Weapon.
- Human: Clarified that Origin feats are granted when you choose your background.
- New Species in the Core Rules (Goliath): Clarified the attack roll has to be successful.
As someone playing a Dwarf in a campaign right now I for one am glad they did this. It actually negatively affect the whole party as my character is part of the "Meat Shields" for our group EVERYONE else needs to move slower so they stay behind me. Honestly I don't see why anyone thinks this is bad. It also causes issues when using a grid (which most groups do) and difficult terrain. 25/2 is 12.5 which is 2.5 squares. Do I move 2 squares (10') or 3 squares (15'). I guess it's only 2 because 5e rounds down but that really sucks in combat... A slower speed doesn't make a Dwarf more fun unless your some kind of sadist...
I also don't get the feels the same argument I see repeated throughout these comments. Dwarves have a limited tremor sense. Dragonborn have breath weapons, Elves and Tieflings get spells, everyone gets stuff unique to them how is this samey? It's like saying Apples and Oranges are the same just because they are fruit.
At least under Forgotten Realms context, the Ordning got broken up by the All-Father after the giants did nothing during the events of Rise of Tiamat (it was a plot point in Storm Kings Thunder as a result). So canonically in FR the Ordning no longer technically exists putting Goliaths (who were at the very bottom of said social hierarchy anyway) into a unique scenario where they could in fact dominate over even pure giants.
This was their way to cater to the guy who wants to spend hours figuring out the best combinations without tacking it on to species and being told they were promoting “fantasy Racism.” Also I believe they will have custom backgrounds again which is literally just pick what you want to tell your story. It’s funny to me how many people didn’t use that in 2014 even though it was even allowed in adventure’s league. I use to do that to get the proficiencies I wanted. Now I will use it to get the Ability scores I want.
Well with yugoloth Tieflings that's an easy one. In one of the comments here it said that back in 3rd edition Tieflings can be anywhere from the Lower Planes, including yugoloth variants. It was only with 4th and 5th editions did they hard lean to infernal only Tieflings. So now as a result they are now going back to form as they say and making Tieflings more Lower Planes related.
Dragonborn got flight because they likely wanted to mix in a few things from Fizban's but didn't want to reprint each of the 3 Dragonborn species. So they made a version that blends all 3 together, from the multiple breath range types to gem Dragonborn flight.
Goliath is just as much of a surprise to me then anything else but honestly given that we'll never get a playable Giant species because of the likely problems of playing large characters making these Giant-Kin was what they could come up with.
That's an easy one, because people didn't like Ardling. Ardling were pushed somewhat as the new Aasimar and turns out when you did some digging Asimar back during the older Planescape books Aasimar could do anything Ardlings could do in terms of appearance. You wanted to have an Aasimar with a hawk head? Congrats you have now technically created an Ardling.
Personally I thought Ardling should've been Celestial and for them to lean as hard as possible into that creature type instead of humanoid and try to create a weird combo of what is clearly a Guardinal inspired creature and turn it humanoid and therefore neuter the cool parts of being you know, a celestial.
Gotta say, pretty dissappointed that dwarves got "streamlined" while elves and tieflings get to have different subcategories. I get I can still use the old version but I was hoping for soemthing more exciting than bonus action tremor sense.
aarakocras...
It could just be in a post they've yet to relase
Species with a permanent fly speed will never be in the PHB... Nearly every DM I've ever played with didn't allow them in their campaigns.
Also older books are still valid with the new rules so if your DM allows it you can still use it.
I have always let people play characters that can fly. I think people and the community make to big a deal out of it.
lol its weird to me you'd say it appeals to powergamers, cause my experience suggests they're exactly the kind of players that would push for unlocked stat bonuses, unpenalized multiclassing, no feat prerequisites and virtually anything else that would allow them to combine as many features as possible to make the ultimate super powerful character. I would think it's the non-powergamers that would care more about the "feel" of rules rather than the mechanical implications of them, and have no problem running around with an unoptimized character cause they just play the game like a freeform RPG 90% of the time anyway.
I just want to state how much I love the tiefling art. So much variety, along with questions. Why does the one on the right have a snake? Why does the angry guy have a knife? Who's the master of the house if there's a butler? Who's casting Mage Hand? I want an entire book based on this one illustration.
The issue is that at low levels (below 5) it can trivialize many combats as the majority of low CR creatures don't have ranged attacks and therefore can't handle flying PCs. Experienced DMs will adjust the encounters to keep them challenging but inexperienced DMs don't know how to do this.
God, this is embarrassingly bad. The way they just remove everything unique or interesting about the races is gross.
Agreed. I sort of like the existing traits, and removing half of them is just mean.
Well as a bit of a powergamer who's played with hardcore powergamers since 3.5 I would disagree, but maybe I've just been around the more liberal ones.
From my point of view, superficial restrictions are bad for everyone. For example my groups virtually never used the default 2014 backgrounds and just used custom backgrounds so they could pick out the most optimal skill choices. The 2024 backgrounds have far more importance but poor flexibility, which will (potentially) limit the number of builds that can be optimized with them. So while the backstory of why the character is a folk hero or acolyte or whatever is pretty much meaningless to a powergamer, something as critical to your build as starting stat boosts and feats being tied to a single unchangable package seems awful. Like variant human has always rated extremely high on CharOP forums specifically because of it's amazing flexibility. I even remember one of the complaints at 5e's launch was about how ASIs and feats were forced to compete with each other, and that most feats that let you have an ASI forced you to take it for a specific stat. It was a shift from how prior editions did things and the powergamers I knew were throwing hissyfits over the new restrictions. This kinda seems like another repeat of that.
So to me it seems like powergamers care just as much about customization. They just don't care about RP implications of any of it and just want to make cool builds that do interesting things. Maybe there's a breed of powergamer out there that wants limited options so they can only optimize the same two builds over and over, but it doesn't sound very fun to me.
I think this one came from DM pressure. I personally know two different DMs (who don't know each other) who both HATE the background features (but allow them) because they feel it forces them to do things they didn't agree to.
One of the DMs likes to track food and water usage (boring AF if you ask me) but there are backgrounds that trivialize hunting and gathering and it drives him crazy. When I first started reading all of the Playtest documents the first question he asked me was did they get rid of those horrible background features!
It all depends on the circumstances
Unless you are an international celebrity, people may not know that you are noble, or your lineage. Or simply don't care about your nobility. Not to mention that some other nobles could be ********, or there can be a case of bad blood between your house and theirs etc.
Unless you have Wikipedia and Google downloaded to your brain with a perfect recall memory, there should be no reason for you to recognize the culture and history of every ruin in the world. The "archaeologist" aspect is represented by your skills proficiency in this case.
Im glad we now f. Ex have pure Orc as " umbrella " species. We can ourself make our classic half-orc ourself. Aka human+ orc. It all is more structured and clear Imo
And species is scientific, evolution. D&D have kiinda realistic evolution. The dragons evolved back in the day on Toril f.ex
Also if all the species were races... umm that would mean common ancestry, which they do NOT, like humans and kobolds are related, not x). Only thing I remember was that stout halflings had some dwarf blood in them barely having inter-species ( then races ) offspring
Anyhow. Example:
((Check out Dungeon Dad and also BG3 Dragonborn mods on Nexus for source/ inspiration))
Specie: Dragonborn AND in part also counts for their true dragon ancestries of known and lesser know
D.B Sub-species: Chromatic, Gem, Metallic
D.B races: Any 5++ color of Cromatic, 5++prismatic shine of Gems and 5++ shines of Metallics. Aka:
Chromatic: Red, Blue, Green, Black, White
+ = Yellow, Orange, Purple, Grey, Brown, Teal, Pink
Gem: Amethyst, Sapphire, Emerald, Topaz, Crystal
+ = Citrine, Ruby, Jacinth, Obsidian, Diamond, Opal
Metallic: Gold, Silver, Bronze, Copper, Brass
+ = Tin, Zinc, Adamantine, Platinum, Mithral, Orium
D.B sub-races: mixes of any combination of 5 in the 3 lineage groups. Say Red + Blue = Purple. Yellow ( pigment primary color ) are Imo a missing true dragon and dragonborn but you can make it still. So Yellow + Red = Orange and Blue + Yellow = Green
Drows no longer dank dwellers. We can finally walk in the sun friends