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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Shemeska" data-source="post: 6323162" data-attributes="member: 11697">They're 'too similar' in the same way that scrambled eggs, pancakes, and orange juice are too similar as parts of a balanced breakfast.Unless the idea of different begins and ends with statblocks and completely overlooks the flavor text, I'm truly just not seeing it.4e made a lot of noise about demons and devils being too similar, and put in place their own attempts to fix a problem its designers saw. Of course the 'loths were promptly then kludged in as demons that weren't really demons and didn't act like them in any way. I didn't see the problem as existing in the first place, and the fix was both wildly inconsistent, and was a radical break with prior D&D lore.The only thing that needed better definition versus the other two major fiend races were the yugoloths, but really only the 1e and 3e versions. The 2e versions were brilliantly expanded upon into their own conceptual niche, but 3e largely didn't pick back up on that and just made them a race of greedy mercenaries which was only half the picture from before, and then 4e seemed genuinely scattered all over the place without a clear idea of how to even handle them with some authors doing their best to ignore them, make them demons but not demons, or try to preserve some of the prior lore within the constraints imposed by the 4e cosmology. I really adore the 2e material.Pathfinder hasn't changed demons or devils. They've retained their classic nature and appearance and they didn't inexplicably remove the alignment that the latter epitomized. They did however do their best to give the NE fiends a unique conceptual niche so that like in 1e, 3e, and 4e people wouldn't be left wondering why they were a distinct race and not just there to balance out symmetry. Pathfinder couldn't use any of the 2e material of course. So while demons epitomize destruction and devils tyranny, the NE daemons epitomize mortal death/oblivion.</blockquote>

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