D&D 5E 5e Tieflings and Dragonborn

[GX.Sigma]

As of the past playtest packet:

"Tieflings" are the 4e Tieflings. The Planescape-style ones are namechecked as "planetouched."

Dragonborn are hatched from dragon eggs that don't receive an official blessing from Tiamat or Bahamut. Their scales and breath weapon are directly related to what kind of dragon they are.

I'm not super thrilled about (but could live with) the tiefling thing; I'm pretty sure WotC realized everyone hates the dragonborn thing.

 

[doctorhook]

I wouldn't be surprised if, rather than do a pure 3e/4e split, they couch them a bit into the lore.

TIEFLING
- Hellborn: You are descended of a pact made with devils long ago. You have the fires of Hell in your veins, and your devilish features (red skin, horns and tail) are easy to notice.
- Pitspawned: You are descended from some ill-fated pairing of demonic forces and mortal parents. Perhaps a cambion, succubus, or worse sits in your family tree. Regardless, you bear some trace of this ancestor's appearance (cloven hooves, small horns, vestigial wings, or a whiff of brimstone) and their power.

DRAGONBORN
- Dragonspawn: Your ancestry contains chromatic blood in your veins. Divided and leaderless, your appearance (and breath weapon) takes on the form of one of the mighty red, white, blue, black or green dragons.
- Brightscale: You once claimed kinship with the powerful metallic dragons. Once, your people lived in vast far-away empires, but today you wander in collective groups. Your scales hold a metallic sheen, and your noble purpose seems driven by the ancient dragons of yore.

If they go your way, I could get behind it.

 

[Kobold Stew]

While the speculation on sub races may be true, I think it is likely that "two sub races" won't be a hard-and-fast rule.

Something to note is that each race supposedly has at least two subraces.

Elves will exceed this (as was to be expected, for better or ill), and almost certainly half-elves and half-orcs will not be presented as two sub races of a single species, but as single-option races, without subspecies differentiation.

I would love to be wrong on half-elves and half-orcs, but I don't expect to be.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I wouldn't be surprised if, rather than do a pure 3e/4e split, they couch them a bit into the lore.

TIEFLING
- Hellborn: You are descended of a pact made with devils long ago. You have the fires of Hell in your veins, and your devilish features (red skin, horns and tail) are easy to notice.
- Pitspawned: You are descended from some ill-fated pairing of demonic forces and mortal parents. Perhaps a cambion, succubus, or worse sits in your family tree. Regardless, you bear some trace of this ancestor's appearance (cloven hooves, small horns, vestigial wings, or a whiff of brimstone) and their power.

DRAGONBORN
- Dragonspawn: Your ancestry contains chromatic blood in your veins. Divided and leaderless, your appearance (and breath weapon) takes on the form of one of the mighty red, white, blue, black or green dragons.
- Brightscale: You once claimed kinship with the powerful metallic dragons. Once, your people lived in vast far-away empires, but today you wander in collective groups. Your scales hold a metallic sheen, and your noble purpose seems driven by the ancient dragons of yore.

Seems reasonable, though honestly I'd dump the 3E DBs, not of spite, but seriously they're at Illumian levels of obscure and unpopular, and replace them with a more flashy draconic race - Draconians or some such (in 4E Draconians are optionally a sub-race for Dragonborn anyway).

 

[Mistwell]

While the speculation on sub races may be true, I think it is likely that "two sub races" won't be a hard-and-fast rule.



Elves will exceed this (as was to be expected, for better or ill), and almost certainly half-elves and half-orcs will not be presented as two sub races of a single species, but as single-option races, without subspecies differentiation.

I would love to be wrong on half-elves and half-orcs, but I don't expect to be.

Could be subraces of human

 

[Kobold Stew]

Could be subraces of human

I'd be fine with that!

 

[shadow]

I may be in the minority here, but I never liked the 4e Dragonborn. (Of course, I didn't like the 3e Dragonborn much either.) Maybe it's the artwork in the 4e books, but I always thought that the Dragonborn looked more like giant lizard men or snake men. If there's a draconic player race that I prefer, it would be the Dracha from Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

+1 to that.

 

[Savage Wombat]

If I'm going to have a race in a game I run, I want it to be a species, not a subset of transformed humans. No 3E dragonborn, please.

 

[Shemeska]

The difference between the 2e and 3e tieflings and the 4e "tieflings" is so radically divergent that I'll be honest, I don't really see the 4e as being the same race except in name. While I'm not completely averse to the 4e creatures sticking around as a possible subtype, IMO it would be a genuine loss for D&D to see the wild variety that was an inherent hallmark for tieflings from their 2e Planescape roots through 3.x end up being stripped away and the race be beholden to something so completely different that shares neither the conceptual niche nor the same rich lore that the 2e/3e tieflings possess.

If they end up stripping tieflings of their name, calling them planetouched (which as a term includes more races than just tieflings in the 2e/3e usage), and hijacking the name in favor of the 4e creatures, it would strike me as disrespectful to the original material that has a longer history within D&D.

As for dragonborn, I don't think many people really remember the 3.x version, and the 4e version seems both popular and has more material out than the fairly obscure 3.x race even if they don't have much in common besides the name. I actually rather like the 4e version, so color me in favor of keeping them around.

One thing that really needs to go away however is the design ethos of removing something from the game, then turning around and making a new monster and giving it the name of the one that got removed. It makes a hash of in-setting continuity, it's needlessly confusing to players, and it's lazy design.