2E Tiefling or 4E Tiefling?
Vitor
Member Posts: 288
Wich design do you prefere for tieflings? The original design from Planescape (2nd Edition), that remained until 3.5 edition, or the new look from 4th and 5th edition?
- 2E Tiefling or 4E Tiefling?74 votes
- 2E Tiefling87.84%
- 4E Tiefling12.16%
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Comments
On a side note, I noticed that "rogue" is the favored class for tieflings in Icewind Dale 2. I guess you could call them thieflings.
Planescape Campaign Setting (AD&D 2nd Edition)
"Part human and part something else, tieflings are the orphans of the planes. They can be described as humans who’ve been plane-touched. A shadow of knife-edge in their face, a little too much fire in their eyes, a scent of ash in their presence - all these things and more describe a tiefling. No planar would mistake a tiefling for a human, and most primes make the mistake only once."
Races of Faerun (D&D 3.5)
"Tieflings look human except for one or two distinguishing features related to their unusual ancestor. Some examples of these features (and the ancestors that cause them) are:
small horns on head (demon, devil, night hag)
fangs or pointed teeth
forked tongue (demon, devil)
glowing red eyes (demon, devil, night hag)
cat eyes (rakshasa)
more or less than 5 fingers (demon, devil)
goatlike legs (devil)
hooves (devil)
non-prehensile tail (demon, devil)
furry, leathery, or scaly skin (demon, devil, rakshasa)
red skin (demon, devil)
bruised blue skin (night hag)
casts no shadow (demon, devil)
throws no reflection (demon, devil)
skin is hot to the touch (demon, devil)
smell of brimstone (demon, devil)"
Player's Handbook (4th Edition)
"Tieflings’ appearance testifies to their infernal bloodline. They have large horns; thick, nonprehensile tails that range in length from 4 to 5 feet; sharply pointed teeth; and eyes that are solid orbs of black, red, white, silver, or gold. Their skin color covers the whole human range and also extends to reds, from a ruddy tan to a brick red. Their hair, cascading down from behind their horns, is as likely to be dark blue, red, or purple as more common human colors."
Variety is the spice of life and all that, so 2E tieflings get my vote hands down.
The 4 edition ones are nothing but ugly Cambions on steriods to me.
Give us back the Tiefling's ancestral diversity, damnit WotC!
4th Ed threw away all those possibilities, and not only that, they settled on the most boring, overdone, and unsubtle action stereotype ever. They did the same with the elementally planetouched Genasi (except minus the "settling on a stereotype" thing). Want to play a mostly human person with a subtle trait or two revealing his ancestry? Nope, not any more! Subtlety is for suckers anyway!
That 4th edition one looks horribly generic. Besides the impractical armor she is wearing I'm also left wondering if that is supposed to be a scythe sword or if she is just holding a scimitar backwards. Plus all those random sharp points and blades around its handle just seem like they would make it awkward if you had to move your sword around to finish someone on the ground off. I get the limited hand protection having a blade there might provide, but it still just seems that the artist just wanted to put extra blades on the sword for the heck of it.
Also based on the descriptions provided here about what they actually are I do really like the 2nd edition one since it doesn't say for instance that you must have certain features (horns for instance).
Oh no, all tieflings need to look like wingless gargoyles.
In 3.5E (not sure about 2nd) you could make a tiefling that looked like a human but perhaps had disturbingly slitted eyes or only pointy teeth.
In 4E all tieflings look the same as if they are a true race, being born from a family of tieflings in a town of tieflings, like elves.
@FinneousPJ - Hey, you made your option raise with 400%. That's a job damn well done indeed!
That picture with the two white haired ones, especially the one on the left, is how I'd love to design a teifling of my own. S/he just looks completely lost in the blood taint, it's great.
No treatments of other settings in 4E, be it Forgotten Realms, Planescape, or Dark Sun, even mentions this, thus more or less allowing you to customize your tiefling as you will. Of course, it's not as if you couldn't do it in Core by simply flavoring your tiefling as another form of mixed demon/devil/mortal heritage. Like any other edition of D&D, the flavor is entirely flexible depending on the DM. As if there aren't plenty of ridiculous drawings and designs in 2E and earlier.
I think the important thing here is that pre-4e, Tieflings didn't necessarily 'breed true', and they weren't all (or even mostly) connected to Asmodeus. You could have a *rakshasa* descended Tiefling for crying out loud!
There were already subraces that filled the niche Tieflings were made to occupy in 4e in the way of Tannarukk and Fey'ri, so IMO they didn't really bring anything new to the table, but rather took away from the richness of it, by homogenizing Tieflings into fitting into one factory standard mold.
Besides, if one really, *really* wants to play a 4e-lookalike Tiefling...they already existed prior to 4e, because all of their traits (red skin, horns, tails, etc etc) existed among the traits that Tieflings could manifest.
And, again, Turathi tieflings are not mentioned in FR, Dark Sun, or pseudo-Planescape materials, the three non-core settings that 4E primarily dealt with. If you don't like it, you can just not use it. In fact, Dark Sun didn't even have tieflings before 4E. 4E's Dark Sun guide gives a completely different series of ambiguous origin stories, because nobody in-universe knows for sure, for the tiefling race in order to allow players to use that race in Dark Sun.
Tieflings in 4e are de-facto homogenized in practice, by virtue of the Turathi types being virtually the only form of tiefling really referenced. I'd be impressed if you could find a picture of a 4e Tiefling that *wasn't* one of the spawn of Asmodeus. Neither the Player's Handbook Races supplement nor the Players handbook even reference non-infernal Tieflings.
Heck, even the Forgotten Realms players handbook says this about them: "Tieflings’ tails and horns,
not to mention their reddish skin and sharp teeth, suggest evil progenitors." That line is literally all that the 4e FR player's Handbook has to say on the appearance of Tieflings. So it's pretty clear that the '4e' style Tiefling effectively sidelined the pre 4e tieflings, if they exist at all in 4e FR.
So no, non-Tulrathi style Tieflings are not really much of a thing in 4e. Outside of homebrewing things, which isn't really the point of this thread.
And no matter what layer of the hells you decide to tie your 4e Tiefling to, it's not going to give them fur, or antlers or feathers instead of hair or whatever-4e Tieflings have significantly fewer ways in which their heritage may manifest, no matter what way you cut it.
"If they exist at all in 4E FR..."
So, because FR briefly refers to horns and tails, all novels and campaign modules with tieflings or half-fiends that don't fit the Turathi mold suddenly don't exist? That's what you're attempting to assert that the 4E FR handbook is putting forth? Never mind that Bael Turath has never existed in FR, and therefore the Turathi-style, true-breeding tieflings cannot exist in FR, even if that were the intent. The obvious intent would be to gloss over tieflings briefly and thus not shoehorn anything on the players aside from keeping the edition's materials at least vaguely consistent. Newcomers would find sudden references to other features confusing, and "tails and horns, [etc.]" could easily be read with a wink and a nudge by any veterans of D&D/FR who are just going to play as they see fit, anyway.
Non-Turathi tieflings are definitely a thing in 4E, especially given that it has both FR and pseudo-Planechase materials. There's no rule in those materials that say you have to be a Turathi-style tiefling, because Turathi-style tieflings depend on the existence of a Bael Turath. There's no reason to follow the Core lore regarding tieflings if you're not playing a Core-related campaign, in the same way that core 2E lore has little bearing on a 2E Dark Sun or Planescape game's lore beyond the barest of shared details.
If we applied your logic to other aspects of the game, we'd have to supersede 4E Core Bane or Corellon over FR Bane or Corellon because the books have more to say about the former.
http://img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20070124023606/wowwiki/images/4/46/Draenei_female_uncorrupted.jpg
That blurb about tails, red skin etc is the *only* description that the FR players handbook gives.
Neither 4e player's handbook, the Players Handbook races supplement that deals *exclusively* with Tieflings, nor even the FR Players handbook contain any descriptions, rules, pictures, or even *reference* anything other than the stock 4e Tiefling.
As of Asmodeus's ascension, all Tieflings breed true in Forgotten Realms. That's canon (Brimstone Angels series).
So yes, the Turathi-styled Tieflings definitely seem designed to replace the older styles, even in FR. They have almost completely sidelined the old styled ones. I don't even know why this is open for debate, because all of this should be immediately evident to one who has cracked open a 4e book.
I have heard that backlash from this means that 5e Tieflings might be distinctly split into the 4e types and pre 4e types, treating them both more or less equally. So there's hope at least that the old ones might come back into prominence.
Literally none of that prevents somebody from playing non-Turathi. Any pushing of Turathi-tieflings is an obvious move for product consistency that in no way forces anything upon the player. Asmodeus becoming a god wouldn't somehow obliterate other kinds of tieflings. Even if it did, he's a devil, so his ascension would have ZERO effect on demon or daemon tieflings.
Player's Handbook is about Core 4E Tieflings. That's why its lore references Bael Turath, which again, DOES NOT EXIST IN FR.
There isn't a need for a table of randomized racial features, because that's simply not what races in general are supposed to do in 4E. The game doesn't have a balancing mechanism for characters with scales that give them natural armor bonuses or whatever sort of racial features you might want. That's what feats are for in 4E.
To be honest, I probably shouldn't have voted at all, because I don't like either design. Maybe the poll needed a 3rd option called "They're both fugly!"