NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 4247686" data-attributes="member: 58197">Not really.  Tieflings in 4E are defined in a fairly specific way; both appearance (horns, tail, et cetera) and origin (touched by diabolical powers).  I'm not aware that Merlin was traditionally regarded as a shapeshifter, but even so, that's got nothing to do with his "real" form, the one he goes around in most of the time.And fauns have only a distant resemblance to tieflings, nor are they supposed to be humans with devilish heritage.  There are races in mythology that are kind of like tieflings, but none that match up the way elves do to the "ljosalfar" of Norse myth, or dwarves to the "dvergar."In the context of mythology and mythological origins, a "tradition" stretching back to the 1970s counts for pretty much nothing.  It's not a question of whether they're traditional in fantasy fiction but about whether they have a presence in mythology, and my point is that dragonborn and tieflings (4E-style tieflings, at least) are firmly in the "invented in the modern era" category; which makes them clash with creatures like elves and dwarves that have very strong mythological roots.*To be clear, I'm not saying that modern fantasy races are better or worse than traditional ones.  I'm saying that the two of them don't go well together.  There's a certain flavor to traditional fantasy, a pre-scientific, fairy-tale worldview; and there's a very different flavor to modern fantasy, which is much more post-Enlightenment and rational, closer to science fiction.  Blending the two is not impossible, but tricky.  D&D has tended toward the modern-fantasy flavor for most of its history, but it also has a lot of traditional elements shoehorned in so that it can try to straddle both worlds.  I'd like a little more segregation so it's easy to strip out one or the other.Actually, after some thought, I've concluded that I'd prefer to see the nonhuman races in D&D be entirely "modern fantasy," and shuffle the "traditional fantasy" races off to the Monster Manual.  My reasoning is simply that in "traditional fantasy," the protagonists are almost always human anyway; they might have a bit of nonhuman heritage, but full-blooded elves and dwarves are more plot elements than actual characters.  If one is going to create a traditional fantasy game world, it really ought to be one where the PCs are all humans.  Probably not going to happen, though.Your grognardism is showing.  D&D dwarves haven't been anti-magical since 3.0 came out.  In fact, 3.X dwarves make quite good wizards. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />*Of course, there is a third category, the "invented by Tolkien" category, which is mostly reserved for halflings and doesn't go particularly well with anything.  I don't think they go well with elves and dwarves even in Middle-Earth; but then, Tolkien's halflings were essentially stand-ins for humans, with the symbolic significance of being small people in a big world.</blockquote>

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