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While I'm not an enormous fan of either dragonborn or tieflings, I think it was a good idea to include them in PHB as a 'core' race, even if they're not necessarily the most populous. It was really an act of mercy, for both players and DMs.
I used to help run a freeform play-by-post website, you see. And in our setting, dragons were rare and incredibly powerful beings, and demons and angels didn't even exist. Despite this, we'd still get at least one application a week from a new player trying to play a half-demon prince, or a human with a 'strange curse' that makes him look like a dragon.
The fact is, some people just really flipping love dragons and demons, and will do incredible backflips to play them or something like them. Also, I play with a lot of really casual players, and there's something about the tiefling and dragonborn that really trips their triggers. "I can be a half-dragon? I can be a freaking devil! Awesome!"
New races seem to follow this same ideal. Shifters? They let a player play a werewolf. Deva? Half-angel. Wilden? Half-plant, baby.
By putting races like this in the PHB, I felt like WotC was saying, "People want to play to this, so you better figure out a way to deal with it, DMs." I'm of the always-say-yes school of DMing, so if you get a party consisting of one half tieflings and one half dragonborn, so be it. It's up to you as the DM to remind players that just because they picked a core race from the PHB, that doesn't mean they're common or accepted. Feel free to have primitive lizardmen cower before them as gods, or for well-meaning elves to attack the 'monsters'. Have the powers-at-be act as general, racist dinks, and have small villages to shutter up their windows when the conquering heroes breeze into town.
Just because you have a dragonborn or tiefling in your party, that doesn't mean the whole world has to like them. Heck, it doesn't even mean that you as a DM have to like them. But you do have to be able to deal with them. If the dragonbon were errata'd away into oblivion tomorrow, I think you'd still have players trying to roll up humans with scaly wings and ophidian eyes and, yes, even dragonbewbs. By having them be a standard race, the players can play their favorite 'cool race' without having it be terribly overpowered or underpowered or complicated.
Last edited by Kinneus; 4th May 2009 at 06:49 AM..
The difference is that you'll need to amend your version of the Eberron design goals.
Trivia, you're grasping at straws. They've already kitchen sinked in everything else, like some cosmology change from the great wheel is going to matter?
__________________ "They've taken all the fun out of slaying things and stealing treasure!" - Bolt
Copy, paste and redesign your way to your own ideal custom game with the Swords & Wizardry.doc file. Renovate the elf, build a rogue or thief, and make all your favourite rules and splat core.
Maybe so, but does that make it relevant to whether or not they have traction now? Is the past (whatever it may be) relevant to Dragonborn's inclusion in 4E core? I'm not convinced that it is at all.
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Originally Posted by rounser
Bollocks. It had a design goal of "everything in 3E D&D has a place here", and is the only setting designed that way (until perhaps 4E FR, who knows what they've done to that). It's kitchen sink by design, the whole competition was skewed to that artificial rule, and IMO it shows. Don't try and pretend FR has a place for everything 3E, because that's bunkum.
Bollocks indeed. You have it backwards though; Eberron does have a place to put (basically) anything from D&D, but that doesn't mean Eberron is designed to include to include everything. Instead, Eberron was designed with enough under-detailed spaces that the setting has room for whatever D&D game elements a DM could want to include.
Eberron has a handful of close-knit themes, which make it more concise than FR. FR was conceived as a setting of thinly veiled fantasy analogues of real-world historical cultures, which is at least as "kitchen sink" as Eberron. (Dramatically moreso, IMO.)
Maybe so, but does that make it relevant to whether or not they have traction now? Is the past (whatever it may be) relevant to Dragonborn's inclusion in 4E core? I'm not convinced that it is at all.
We have 4e since last year. Have you the feeling that the new races, tiefling and dragonborn, have gained the same "traction" than the good old standard D&D races (dwarf, elf, halfling...) ?
Too early to tell. All we can say with certainty is that gnomes have zero traction.
__________________ The female tiefling's horns are not 'handlebars'.
Trivia, you're grasping at straws. They've already kitchen sinked in everything else, like some cosmology change from the great wheel is going to matter?
Seriously, why have you decided to turn this discussion into an attack on Eberron? The mods already warned us once to get back on topic, so why do you insist on provoking fans (like me) in an unrelated topic?
In theory, a DM doesn't "have" to do anything, but a dodgy core game can make that mostly theoretical. Make them optional, and the players your referring to would still be catered to. Alienating the audience who doesn't want the things in every campaign, and making D&D's implied setting hokey and arbitrary doesn't make sense either.
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By having them be a standard race, the players can play their favorite 'cool race' without having it be terribly overpowered or underpowered or complicated.
False premise, because poor implementation is just poor implementation. It doesn't justify making everything compulsory so that it gets designed correctly. Get some new designers already if that's the case.
__________________ "They've taken all the fun out of slaying things and stealing treasure!" - Bolt
Copy, paste and redesign your way to your own ideal custom game with the Swords & Wizardry.doc file. Renovate the elf, build a rogue or thief, and make all your favourite rules and splat core.
Anybody think the Deva, Shifter, Goliath, or any other race is going to join the ranks of the "common races" or have any other candidates?
I think the Deva and Goliath are great additions; and the shifter pretty cool too. I think these eclectic additions to the common races make 4e pregnant with roleplaying and story potential. While I would like the game to be more overtly roleplay focused, I think the broad selection of character races sets up real backstory potential.
Just because a fantasy setting does not include Dragonborn somewhere on the map seems like a poor reason for me not to be able to play one. That sort of inflexibility would certainly be a warning sign. I have always thought that the game was best when everyone - players and DM - were creatively involved.
Don't try and pretend FR has a place for everything 3E, because that's bunkum.
Not only did 3.x FR not have a place for everything 3e (though they tried to include a lot) the 3e campaign setting had to invent rules for some of the setting's peculiarities. Level adjustments, effective character levels, epic character levels and the xp system used in the 3.5 DMG all made their first appearances in the 3e FRCG.
Seriously, why have you decided to turn this discussion into an attack on Eberron?
It's where the conversation went, and I can see a clear path from what I see as setting design problems with Eberron to problems with 4E's implied setting. From memory, Wyatt has his name on both as the main designer.
And what I said about the design goals for Eberron is AFAIK true, we saw the competition rules.
__________________ "They've taken all the fun out of slaying things and stealing treasure!" - Bolt
Copy, paste and redesign your way to your own ideal custom game with the Swords & Wizardry.doc file. Renovate the elf, build a rogue or thief, and make all your favourite rules and splat core.
Well, the way I read the OP, he's asking whether or not Dragonborns and Tieflings have traction compared to more "traditional" races like Elves, Dwarves, and Halfings; he further asks if whatever traction Dragonborn or Tiefling characters have is merely the result of mechanical benefit. For my money, I don't think the OP is asking about the history of these races, nor is the history of these races directly in relation to either question.
To elaborate, since we're discussing the amount of traction Dragonborn and Tiefling have currently, I don't think it matters much whether or not they were first published twenty years ago or last Tuesday. What does matter is whether or not they do have traction with the fandom now, even if they did first appear only last Tuesday. The way I see it, the length of time a concept has been in publication doesn't have any direct bearing upon whether or not the current fanbase thinks something is interesting or not.
Its worth pointing out that it's not clear whether Eladrin qualify as a "traditional race" or a "new race", but what is clear is that they appear to be quite widely embraced.
I've had one dragonborn and one tiefling in my 4e game. In my 3.x games, I also had a tiefling. (Different player.) I like them, they allow players a chance to play off-beat races. Of course, I like tieflings from the days of Planescape.
Well, the way I read the OP, he's asking whether or not Dragonborns and Tieflings have traction compared to more "traditional" races like Elves, Dwarves, and Halfings; he further asks if whatever traction Dragonborn or Tiefling characters have is merely the result of mechanical benefit. For my money, I don't think the OP is asking about the history of these races, nor is the history of these races directly in relation to either question.
To elaborate, since we're discussing the amount of traction Dragonborn and Tiefling have currently, I don't think it matters much whether or not they were first published twenty years ago or last Tuesday. What does matter is whether or not they do have traction with the fandom now, even if they did first appear only last Tuesday. The way I see it, the length of time a concept has been in publication doesn't have any direct bearing upon whether or not the current fanbase thinks something is interesting or not.
Its worth pointing out that it's not clear whether Eladrin qualify as a "traditional race" or a "new race", but what is clear is that they appear to be quite widely embraced.
I guess I can see how this quote -
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Or are they rather the 4e equivalent of the half-dragons or half-outsider of 3e : popular for min-max build but rather bland inside ?
- might be parsed simply for its mechanical aspect but I am not sure I think any traction they have now can be completely divorced from their seeming ancestry. Why would one want to do so?
I really don't get the playing-as-dragons obsession. I have never once had a player show any interest at all in playing as a dragon/half-dragon/dragon-themed-anything.
Also, what CRPGs are people referring to? I'm not familiar with any that used players-as-dragons/half-dragons/dragon-themed-anythings.
For me, the first time I even heard of the idea was in D&D, and the first time I ever heard of someone actually wanting to use it was when WotC went gonzo with it in the "Year of the Dragon" stuff.
__________________ 'Imaginary' universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed 'real' one.
To be fair, having fans and being integral for PCs are very different things. As in what you quoted, I do not debate that they have been around for some time as NPCs and evil beings. And for me, long timeRPGers can date back as far as 1974.
I know you've already said you've been convinced of the tradition of the Dragonborn/Half-Dragons, but I wanted to clarify. Tieflings, Dray, and Half-Dragons were all fully playable races as of 1994, in the Planescape Campaign Box Set, Dark Sun: City by the Silt Sea box set, and the Council of Wyrms box set, respectively.
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Originally Posted by rounser
Bollocks. It had a design goal of "everything in 3E D&D has a place here", and is the only setting designed that way (until perhaps 4E FR, who knows what they've done to that). It's kitchen sink by design, the whole competition was skewed to that artificial rule, and IMO it shows. Don't try and pretend FR has a place for everything 3E, because that's bunkum.
Excpet that Eberron is not the kitchen sink you imagine it is. If it were, every single elven sub-race, dwarven sub-race, halfing sub-race, gnome sub-race, etc. would be present. They're not. That shows that "everything in D&D has a place here" is false.
Quote:
Originally Posted by rounser
False premise, because poor implementation is just poor implementation. It doesn't justify making everything compulsory so that it gets designed correctly. Get some new designers already if that's the case.
Poor implementation is just your opnion, not fact.
Excpet that Eberron is not the kitchen sink you imagine it is. If it were, every single elven sub-race, dwarven sub-race, halfing sub-race, gnome sub-race, etc. would be present. They're not. That shows that "everything in D&D has a place here" is false.
FWIW, he's not making that line up. It was a phrase that was bandied about a lot in the build-up to Eberron, I think from a design interview or something.
__________________ 'Imaginary' universes are so much more beautiful than this stupidly constructed 'real' one.
FWIW, he's not making that line up. It was a phrase that was bandied about a lot in the build-up to Eberron, I think from a design interview or something.
Oh, I know that's what was said before Eberron actually came out. But it's not 100% true of the final product.
I know you've already said you've been convinced of the tradition of the Dragonborn/Half-Dragons, but I wanted to clarify. Tieflings, Dray, and Half-Dragons were all fully playable races as of 1994, in the Planescape Campaign Box Set, Dark Sun: City by the Silt Sea box set, and the Council of Wyrms box set, respectively.
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