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Why are tieflings so popular? How did they manage to outcompete all the other wacky races to win their place in mainstream D&D?
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<blockquote data-quote="Aaron Litz" data-source="post: 7602959" data-attributes="member: 6907485"><p>I have to say I actually really liked the original Tieflings, before they transformed them all into a uniform race of gaudy red-skinned, horned, and tailed "devil-people." Back when they were individual humans with a fiendish taint somewhere in their ancestry that left them some kind of individual deformity and a whiff of infernal or abyssal magic they were genuinely interesting, but now they're just way too blatant and gauche and I seriously can't stand them anymore, especially since they were included as a main PC race in the Player's Handbook.</p><p></p><p>In short, they've become the new Drow (so passé and '90s); an entire race of "exotic" misunderstood noble rebels struggling to overcome the burden of being judged for the misdeeds of their (conveniently off-screen) evil kin. Players nowadays are more likely to encounter Good-Aligned "rebels" of either race than they are the supposed Evil majority of their kin. (One wonders if there are actually any Evil Drow left at all, or if all Drow PCs are actually just edgy adolescents and all their talk of the "evil culture" they are "rebelling" against is really just a smokescreen because they're embarrassed of the fact that they actually just come from a society of moderately staid, well-to-do underground merchants.) </p><p></p><p>Plus, I seriously prefer some restraint in my fantasy; when devil-people and dragon-people are apparently as "rare" as Gnomes and Half-Elves it robs them of any kind of specialness and renders them mundane. When magic is commonplace it is robbed of its exotic mystery, rendering it mundane and boring. "Familiarity breeds contempt" isn't just an empty cliche.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Aaron Litz, post: 7602959, member: 6907485"] I have to say I actually really liked the original Tieflings, before they transformed them all into a uniform race of gaudy red-skinned, horned, and tailed "devil-people." Back when they were individual humans with a fiendish taint somewhere in their ancestry that left them some kind of individual deformity and a whiff of infernal or abyssal magic they were genuinely interesting, but now they're just way too blatant and gauche and I seriously can't stand them anymore, especially since they were included as a main PC race in the Player's Handbook. In short, they've become the new Drow (so passé and '90s); an entire race of "exotic" misunderstood noble rebels struggling to overcome the burden of being judged for the misdeeds of their (conveniently off-screen) evil kin. Players nowadays are more likely to encounter Good-Aligned "rebels" of either race than they are the supposed Evil majority of their kin. (One wonders if there are actually any Evil Drow left at all, or if all Drow PCs are actually just edgy adolescents and all their talk of the "evil culture" they are "rebelling" against is really just a smokescreen because they're embarrassed of the fact that they actually just come from a society of moderately staid, well-to-do underground merchants.) Plus, I seriously prefer some restraint in my fantasy; when devil-people and dragon-people are apparently as "rare" as Gnomes and Half-Elves it robs them of any kind of specialness and renders them mundane. When magic is commonplace it is robbed of its exotic mystery, rendering it mundane and boring. "Familiarity breeds contempt" isn't just an empty cliche. [/QUOTE]
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Community
General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
Why are tieflings so popular? How did they manage to outcompete all the other wacky races to win their place in mainstream D&D?
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