Survey (A5E) Level Up Surveys #2.7 & #2.8 - Orc & Tiefling

[Morrus]

These are the final two heritage surveys in the Level Up playtest process.

A couple of days ago we sent out the survey on the playtest document for our Origins system for Level Up. That was a broad overview of the chapter designed to give us a general impression.

Over the next week or so, we are also surveying each heritage individually. Because this is a particularly large chapter, we’ve broken it up into a series of smaller surveys. We won’t email you about each one, but we’ll email you at the end with links to all of them. In the meantime, you can get at them earlier by checking back here over the course of the week.

You don’t have to take them all, but the more data we get, the better our game will be!

Take the Orc survey

Take the Tiefling survey

As always, it’s OK if you don’t like things about this playtest. That’s the reason we have a playtest process, and the reason we send out these surveys. The data we get from these surveys informs the development of the game. Thank you so much to the thousands of people taking part in this process!

If you missed the Dragonborn and Dwarf surveys, they are still ongoing until 18th September, along with the Elf and Gnome surveys and the Halfling and Human surveys.

Continue reading...

 

[Faolyn]

So I wrote this in the surveys, but I have more than 1,000 words here, so:

Orcs
And as I've said before, you put too much setting in your flavor-text. The longstoic idea is interesting, even if I loathe the name with the power of a thousand suns* (just calling them "Stoic" is OK). But there's so much worldbuilding in there it's hard to use without including it. "Some orcs have managed to calm their emotional nature." No need to tie it to a specific ritual. Maybe they were raised in a monastery. Maybe they're naturally calm. Maybe they made a huge mistake while being emotional and decided "never again." Maybe they chose to embrace the teachings of Surak. Who knows?

(* I hate it in general when fantasy games does this; it's not just you. The subrace names for Eberron shifters make my skin crawl.)


Tieflings
I feel that Steam Tieflings and Carnival Tieflings feel far too setting-based. They wouldn't work in a lower-tech setting, for instance. And the Imperial Tieflings are, once again, a way to say that humans suck (thus making it weird if you decide to have a world where humans are not the dominant species and/or expansionistic). Make it a generic empire. If this long-dead empire was once run by humans, elves, fiends, or whatever--that's up to the DM.

You should make tiefs more generically planetouched. When introduced in Planescape, tieflings were descended from any sort of fiend, regardless of type, and it was only in 4e that they became all the offspring of Asmodeus and took on their now standard appearance. If you wanted your tiefling to have the blood of a geherelth, or a yugoloth, or even a barghest or night hag, you could. They also used to have a much more varied appearance; IIRC, in Planescape, there was an NPC tief who looked mostly human, but had snakes for eyes!). And they used to be descended from anything. (Ditto for aasimar; there a Planescape NPC who was an evil aasimar, Qaida, who was very clearly descended from a planatar--bald, green skin, etc. I know I'm not the only one who misses tieflings' diverse appearance.

Since you've decided to include Celestial tiefs (presumably, to replace aasimar), you should also include elemental tiefs (to replace genasi), and if possible, Axiotic and Xaotic tieds for modron and slaadi-based tiefs (or their more generic Law and Chaos OGL-compliant variants).