Mercule
Adventurer
I read R&C yesterday. It was actually pretty cool.
I seriously doubt I'll ever be a huge fan of dragonborn, but the idea of "we had 27 lizard and draconian PC races, all of which were lacking in one way or another, so we merged the best ideas into one race that we're going to try to make coherent" is quite reasonable. I'm still not too sure about letting a PC get innate breath weapons and wings, but it might work. It sounds like WotC has put some thought into these guys. I can also buy that lizardy protagonists are more common in modern fantasy. It really isn't that for out of bounds.
So, I'm now okay with dragonborn in the PHB. That's something of a surprise. I'll probably even find a place for them, IMC.
Then I read the tiefling section. Wow. Just wow. Talk about crappy. The whole while I was reading it, I felt myself getting less and less interested in this race. Most of the essay on tieflings reads like "sometimes people want to go emo, and here's a race to do that with." The history is bland, the descriptions are bland, the personality is lacking. When people are talking about the over-use of the word "cool" (at least in spirit), this is the section they're talking about. Tieflings are emo-goth-cool in a suicide-by-mascara sort of way. Heck, the essay pretty much explicitly says that tieflings are in and aasimars are out of the PHB because evil is cool and good is boring.
Once again, a surprise. I had finally come to warm up to tieflings over the past month or so and was starting to think of ways I could work them into a campaign. If the final PHB flavor matches the R&C flavor, there's not a chance. I'm sure they'll be mechanically sound, so I may use the stats for classic-style tieflings or if some alternate flavor springs to mind. We'll see.
I seriously doubt I'll ever be a huge fan of dragonborn, but the idea of "we had 27 lizard and draconian PC races, all of which were lacking in one way or another, so we merged the best ideas into one race that we're going to try to make coherent" is quite reasonable. I'm still not too sure about letting a PC get innate breath weapons and wings, but it might work. It sounds like WotC has put some thought into these guys. I can also buy that lizardy protagonists are more common in modern fantasy. It really isn't that for out of bounds.
So, I'm now okay with dragonborn in the PHB. That's something of a surprise. I'll probably even find a place for them, IMC.
Then I read the tiefling section. Wow. Just wow. Talk about crappy. The whole while I was reading it, I felt myself getting less and less interested in this race. Most of the essay on tieflings reads like "sometimes people want to go emo, and here's a race to do that with." The history is bland, the descriptions are bland, the personality is lacking. When people are talking about the over-use of the word "cool" (at least in spirit), this is the section they're talking about. Tieflings are emo-goth-cool in a suicide-by-mascara sort of way. Heck, the essay pretty much explicitly says that tieflings are in and aasimars are out of the PHB because evil is cool and good is boring.
Once again, a surprise. I had finally come to warm up to tieflings over the past month or so and was starting to think of ways I could work them into a campaign. If the final PHB flavor matches the R&C flavor, there's not a chance. I'm sure they'll be mechanically sound, so I may use the stats for classic-style tieflings or if some alternate flavor springs to mind. We'll see.
