Why are tieflings so popular? How did they manage to outcompete all the other wacky races to win their place in mainstream D&D?

trancejeremy · Apr 25, 2019

Merlin was a tiefling. Supposedly the son of an incubus.

Paul Farquhar · Apr 25, 2019

trancejeremy said:
Merlin was a tiefling. Supposedly the son of an incubus.

Good point, and perhaps the best reason for having it as a core race in D&D.

MGibster · Apr 25, 2019

We all know about the mechanical impact but how many campaigns are there where player character race actually matters so far as the narrative is concerned? Is there a significant difference between how a tiefling would experience the Ghosts of Saltmarsh or Dragon Heist versus a dwarf or an elf?

Shardstone · Apr 25, 2019

Tieflings tell a pretty deeply elemental story about implicit evil, growing up, not having your destiny decided, and of straddling the line between what's ok morally and what's not. While Elves and Dwarves have stories that've been cultivated into valueless caricatures over time by mainstream media (not to say they are always this way and not to say they can't tell their own elemental stories) Tieflings are still pretty new and have a lot of their meaning still boiled up within them. Unlike Firbolgs, Dragonborn, Gnomes, Goliaths, Kobolds, and so on, Tieflings come pre-packaged with a story that jacks directly into the mainstream conciousness as the outsider. And unlike Aasimar, who tap into their own elemental ideas, the Tiefling has a codified aesthetic now.

Remathilis · Apr 25, 2019

MechaTarrasque said:
Has any good ever come from splitting the fighting man into the fighter and the thief/rogue? I think not.

By 1979, it was too late and you had fighter, thief, ranger, paladin, assassin and monk. You have to smother that infant in 1975, and take the druid out at the same time before that gains traction and creates a billion caster variants with it.

Remathilis · Apr 25, 2019

Leatherhead said:
Honestly, they should be re-merged into one. It would solve so many problems that "mundane" heroes face by giving them great skills and great swordsplay to compete with more magical types, and also curtail the annoying people who like the play a rogue as an excuse to be a kleptomaniac jerk.

I see no downsides to the merge.

Yes, because Bilbo and Boromir famously had the same skills in combat and stealth...

lowkey13 · Apr 25, 2019

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Leatherhead · Apr 25, 2019

Remathilis said:
Yes, because Bilbo and Boromir famously had the same skills in combat and stealth...

Bilbo famously started his first adventure with a ring of invisibility.

Staffan · Apr 25, 2019

Immortal Sun said:
Yeah I mean I think it's been pretty well covered all of the edgy reasons why Tieflings are popular.

But to give them some credit, I think it's also because so few DMs bake Tieflings into their setting as anything more than random anomalies.

I figure that's because many people use Forgotten Realms or Eberron or another oldish (3e or earlier) setting which wasn't built with tieflings in mind, and then tieflings had to be shoe-horned in somewhere.

I had a plan once to make a setting that was basically the 4e implied setting but set at the height of Bael Turath, the tiefling empire. I was kind of proud of the first line I wrote describing the setting: "Bael Turath is an empire treading the jeweled thrones of the world under its cloven feet."