Unpopular Opinion: Tieflings Are a Terrible PC Race

[Cameo]

So I get everyone likes to play the edgy demon-people.

Here's the problem.

If you know anything about how people actually are, with regards to fear and prejudice, you'd know what I know, which is that a tiefling would have an extremely difficult time surviving anywhere. Outside a very narrow, limited scope of possibilities (isolating under the protection of certain dark cults, living among evil intelligent species such as drow or orcs, or simply going full Les Stroud in the wilderness), actually having a life - even a wandering, adventurer's life - on the Prime Material Plane as a tiefling is only slightly safer than barebacking a two-copper berserking Rashemi prostitute.

If you strut around most places in the Prime as a tiefling, it's really, realistically, only a matter of time until you end up burned at the stake...especially if we're talking about these really deformed, flashy, obviously non-human tieflings as portrayed in Baldur's Gate 3. Magic I can suspend my disbelief for. Dragons, sure. But the fact that A LITERAL HORNED DEVIL PERSON is walking around and no one is even mentioning it is ridiculous. You'd be rounded up and burned alive at the stake faster than you can say "B-b-b-but my +2 to Charisma??!"

I can hear it now. "Oh but what if people are used to tieflings? All it means is they have some infernal lineage in their blood." Oh, really, is that all it means? You mean they're only *literally* descended from demons and devils? At various times in history, wild claims and accusations were made against certain ethnic and cultural groups to justify the extermination of entire communities, and THOSE accused people looked like everyone else. How much more severe would that hammer fall on tieflings?

"But this isn't Earth, this is Fae'run." Yeah, I know. But you need verisimilitude in order to make any fantasy setting believable. That's the whole point. You have to *believe* this is a place that could actually exist. People as a rule tend to be very savage. Dwarves? Forget about it; they'd be most retrograde, prejudiced, stuck in their ways race imaginable. Elves? Read the old German fairy tales about just some of the things traditional legends say the fae and their ilk are capable of. Hobb--sorry, Halflings? They care about their families and communities more than anything, they'd be running you off and shutting doors on you so fast it'd make your little horned head spin.

And humans, well, we all know what we're like. We are a tribal species that is literally terrifying when it comes to anything different, especially something that *looks* different.

This is all to say that Baldur's Gate 3, and 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons in general, made a huge blunder when they included tieflings as a base playable race. It's just not believable. You would be exterminated as a threat in two seconds.

But, so would any drow elf. Same situation.

[Aldaris]

Agsmfhpjsfdgbnj původně napsal:

Hobocop původně napsal:

Incorrect. The original release was published by Interplay and had nothing to do with Bethesda. Particularly when it came to the development of their content.

I don't think there's much else to talk about if you're going to imply that Bethesda re-releasing Fallout 1 & 2 somehow taints their status as cRPG staples.

Oh, so it is.

That's not what I'm implying. I'm saying verisimilitude is critical to the suspension of disbelief, which is required for immersion, the single most important component to role-playing. Any setting that causes such sharp cognitive dissonance in the player as to shock them out of the experience, to break the suspension of disbelief, is committing an error.

For you maybe. Most people can come up with roleplaying reasons why it exists. The game shouldn't remove options just because it bothers you.

Also, this the game is implementing PHB races. Tiefling is in there. Yeah,you mentioed that, but take that up with WoTC, not Larian.

Lastly you say what humans are like, we're tribal, but you miss the actual point of humans, whether in D&D or real life. Humans aren't any one single thing. We're chaotic. You'll find tribal humans, you'll find accepting humans. Hell, every PHB I can remember for awhile tells us humans show the greatest variations, size, weight, temperament and morals.

[a.out]

Who are you even raging at?

[Yojo0o]

My understanding is that tieflings WERE widely distrusted, and were also much rarer, in earlier editions. By this point in the Faerun timeline, they've been kicking around these parts long enough that people are just generally used to it.

Tribalism is certainly a thing, but there are plenty of sentient races/species far more dangerous. Why spend your time being racist against tieflings when there's a goblin horde besieging your settlement?

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

I agree 100% with the OP.

Furthermore, I'd point out that even in the PHB, Tieflings don't all have horns, tails, and red skin. Their "fiendish" traits are mostly supposed to be more subtle than that.

[Targonis]

One thing that most GAMES fail at is in addressing the issue raised by the topic starter(OP, original poster for those who don't know the acronym), is that they ignore the negatives that come with character choice/selection. For all the people defending the tiefling addition as a playable race, you have to think in terms of the game world, and not just limited to what players have learned from playing the Baldur's Gate series and other games.

Remember seeing tieflings all over the game world in the original games? Sure, there were areas they showed up in, but they weren't EVERYWHERE. Linked to the lower planes, normal above-ground society doesn't trust or even welcome them. You didn't even see them all over the place in Baldurs Gate the city, did you? Even several hundred years later, expecting to see tiefling traders or this or that...not really something I'd expect, or you would see them get the sort of treatment a Drow would, no matter how they behave.

Planescape: Torment was a game where you could expect tieflings, due to how many different planes came in to the City of Doors, but to expect them to be common on the prime material plane, just wandering around, and for people to trust anything linked to the lower planes? Really? Some might be willing to give them a chance, but most commoners would view them as very dangerous, to be avoided, and as beings to be avoided if at all possible.

This is where the background of the CHARACTERS shouldn't be ignored. Mages might get more education, so will know more about different types of people/beings, but if they come from some small town at the edge of a nation, they would know more about orcs, half-orcs, and things of that sort than about anything not from the prime material plane. The old days of the D&D boxed sets, and first edition AD&D had the stage for stuff more in lines with Lord of the Rings/Middle Earth. Even magic was something most small town people viewed with suspicion. Cities had magic being more visible/accepted, but if it isn't something they understand, they don't like it.

[dulany67]

The simple answer is that after 50 years or so people get tired of the same old races. Providing new content to keep the IP fresh across 2 generations becomes a driving force irrespective of logic.

[a.out]

It would be pretty cool to experience how a being from the lower planes would be treated and perceived .. They already showed that it is possible (albeit still not to the extend I would like to see) with the drow. Though, I don't think seeing so many Tieflings is a problem, as it is just part of the plot. They are refugees after all. The player can also tell, that there is some tension between the druids and the 'outsiders' although perhaps it is not portrayed dramatically enough.

[Lλmbdλ]

Agsmfhpjsfdgbnj původně napsal:

So I get everyone likes to play the edgy demon-people.

Here's the problem.

If you know anything about how people actually are, with regards to fear and prejudice, you'd know what I know, which is that a tiefling would have an extremely difficult time surviving anywhere. Outside a very narrow, limited scope of possibilities (isolating under the protection of certain dark cults, living among evil intelligent species such as drow or orcs, or simply going full Les Stroud in the wilderness), actually having a life - even a wandering, adventurer's life - on the Prime Material Plane as a tiefling is only slightly safer than barebacking a two-copper berserking Rashemi prostitute.

If you strut around most places in the Prime as a tiefling, it's really, realistically, only a matter of time until you end up burned at the stake...especially if we're talking about these really deformed, flashy, obviously non-human tieflings as portrayed in Baldur's Gate 3. Magic I can suspend my disbelief for. Dragons, sure. But the fact that A LITERAL HORNED DEVIL PERSON is walking around and no one is even mentioning it is ridiculous. You'd be rounded up and burned alive at the stake faster than you can say "B-b-b-but my +2 to Charisma??!"

I can hear it now. "Oh but what if people are used to tieflings? All it means is they have some infernal lineage in their blood." Oh, really, is that all it means? You mean they're only *literally* descended from demons and devils? At various times in history, wild claims and accusations were made against certain ethnic and cultural groups to justify the extermination of entire communities, and THOSE accused people looked like everyone else. How much more severe would that hammer fall on tieflings?

"But this isn't Earth, this is Fae'run." Yeah, I know. But you need verisimilitude in order to make any fantasy setting believable. That's the whole point. You have to *believe* this is a place that could actually exist. People as a rule tend to be very savage. Dwarves? Forget about it; they'd be most retrograde, prejudiced, stuck in their ways race imaginable. Elves? Read the old German fairy tales about just some of the things traditional legends say the fae and their ilk are capable of. Hobb--sorry, Halflings? They care about their families and communities more than anything, they'd be running you off and shutting doors on you so fast it'd make your little horned head spin.

And humans, well, we all know what we're like. We are a tribal species that is literally terrifying when it comes to anything different, especially something that *looks* different.

This is all to say that Baldur's Gate 3, and 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons in general, made a huge blunder when they included tieflings as a base playable race. It's just not believable. You would be exterminated as a threat in two seconds.

But, so would any drow elf. Same situation.

Well
That's why they are outcast in BG3 and forced to flee the city they live in
But I get your point

[Irish Android]

Someone mentioned Planescape earlier, and it reminds me of my days playing AD&D in the 90s. I remember when Tieflings were introduced *in* the Planescape campaign setting, and they were more accepted because this was a city where you could literally walk down the street and encounter their demonic or devilish ancestors casually strutting about. So they became popular and ended up in other campaign settings, but now you had to explain how a race with evil outer planar origins was living unmolested in worlds where random wormholes didn't open and force everyone to integrate. A little bit of suspension of disbelief and a little bit of logical prejudice from less open minded societies. That's fine for most campaign settings.

But this is the Forgotten Realms. Has anyone ever actually cracked open the campaign setting and read the list of racial languages? And I don't mean just dialects. It's comically large. There's like three full, fat paragraphs just listing singular words that're different races, and all these beings are crammed onto the same planet. So with all these exotic races with their different physical traits wandering around, many of whom possess their own tails and claws and horns, it feels silly to me that people can single tieflings out for having them, because it's not like the average commoner can just look at them and know they're outer planar in origin. Tieflings would just look like any one of the literally hundred or so other beings that resemble them they may've heard about or actually seen. FR is a menagerie. Any tiefling wanting to lie about their demonic origins could just pick a race and say their great uncle was a lizard man or .. y'know .. a dragonborn .. and who would know the difference? Because even if you ignore the laundry list of races, both PC and not, as options rather than canon, there are still a vast number of creatures an average tiefling could pass themselves off as being related to. If FR was a little less populated, I'd say the OP argument holds water.

So this angle that a 'horned devil person is walking around' and would realistically be burned at the stake after a certain amount of time falls a little flat to me if you step back and examine the world as a whole. If tieflings were accepted anywhere besides Sigil, in my opinion, it would be Abeir-Toril.

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

There used to be this idea that non-human races (even Elfs and Dwarfs and Halfdinks) were rare, or at least somewhat uncommon. Players were given the option to play them so they could recreate Tolien-esque fantasies, but within the world itself even an Elf would receive stares of wonder and curiosity when walking about in a typical city or village. They were the stuff of legends, whether a playable 'race' or not.

Over the years D&D became increasingly dilute. People were not satisfied with just playing the traditional Tolkien-esque races, and they added more and more "half this" and "half that" until you could play anything and everything and the world just turned into a zoo of every possible combination of races and classes.

Magic used to be fairly uncommon as well, a Wizard was something that might be whispered about by the locals, regardless of whether the players could all be Wizards or not.

The Forgotten Realms have, in fact, become a little more like the Outer Planes in that the place is crawling with every kind of half-breed and Outlander now. Seeing an Elf or a Dwarf isn't mysterious and no one bats an eye, Half-Orcs walk down the promenade unmolested, and half-breed devil/demon children have about as much stigma attached to them as Half-Elfs used to (and Half-Elfs are now accepted and as common as anyone else).

Basically the game became more dilute to be more 'inclusive' and no one really bothers to have a proper fantasy world anymore where this kind of thing would stared at mouth agape by the local human peasants. People try to make it too much like the real, modern world, instead of the brutal, medieval like fantasy world it used to be, where the vast majority of civilization was human, and other wondrous races and people's were only hinted at.

It is what it is now, for better or worse.

[Steve (Dawn's Hubby)]

For me Sci-Fi is about what could happen (believable) and Fantasy is about what could not happen (not believable). I get things should make sense to a certain extent, but Fantasy is never believable for me and that's why I play it and watch it. Dungeons and Dragons has always been customize-able so if you don't like them, don't include them. If they are in a game then I guess you are kind of stuck, but I would not let the race ruin the game for me. Is there more to it than just the ascetics of the race that make you dislike them so much?

[Pan Darius Cassandra]

The idea of a half human, half fiend is a cool one - Merlin was said to be such a creature (I forget whether it was his mother or father that was rumored to be a demon).

The issue I have with it is how trivialized these things have become in the modern D&D setting.

They've removed the mystery from such things. They've removed the sense of awe. Everything is common, everything is trivial.

[God King 069]

Agsmfhpjsfdgbnj původně napsal:

Hobocop původně napsal:

Incorrect. The original release was published by Interplay and had nothing to do with Bethesda. Particularly when it came to the development of their content.

I don't think there's much else to talk about if you're going to imply that Bethesda re-releasing Fallout 1 & 2 somehow taints their status as cRPG staples.

Oh, so it is.

That's not what I'm implying. I'm saying verisimilitude is critical to the suspension of disbelief, which is required for immersion, the single most important component to role-playing. Any setting that causes such sharp cognitive dissonance in the player as to shock them out of the experience, to break the suspension of disbelief, is committing an error.

Thank you! One because I love that someone used the words cognitive dissonance which could describe the mentality of so many it seems in this community, but secondly you are absolutely correct sir!

[God King 069]

pandariuskairos původně napsal:

The idea of a half human, half fiend is a cool one - Merlin was said to be such a creature (I forget whether it was his mother or father that was rumored to be a demon).

The issue I have with it is how trivialized these things have become in the modern D&D setting.

They've removed the mystery from such things. They've removed the sense of awe. Everything is common, everything is trivial.

Would be his father (incubus). Not sure what your expecting though as everything becomes trivialized. So by you're own mention what do you think would be awe inspiring? And then what would be the point since it too would become trivial.

The first problem is that almost everything in these settings has human like features. Until we get away from that at least it's going to continue to be old and stale.

[Laina]

I stopped taking it serious when you compared them to demons. There is a difference between devils and demons. Tieflings are Hells-tinged (the place of devils), not Abyss-tinged (the place of demons). As of 5E, it has become accepted on Swordcoast that tieflings are mostly just the unfortunate offspring of someone who got tempted by a devil and some people may feel nervous and make holy hand gestures over their chest, but they try to understand what the tiefling wants before jumping the sword. Read the player's handbook and maybe Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes about tieflings. Or maybe you don't care about 5E as a tabletop game as the basis of BG3 and just want a video game experience?