Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6332291" data-attributes="member: 2067">Well, maybe you are. Maybe as a Turathi tiefling that sin still defines you. They do make good infernal warlocks, after all -- maybe your character is one of those, and has no issue with engaging in the family business. Maybe the same sin that your ancestors are guilty of, you are too. So maybe when the dragonborn needs to take you down, too. Which is what I imagined that question to mean (as opposed to your more literal take, I guess). Or maybe not. That's something that you can play with as a Turathi tiefling. This is just an overly-literal response to an argument no one is actually making. That reason frames the narrative differently, it makes it a different story. My claim of distinction is not one of exclusivity, of course. But I don't see how the "generally assumed to be lower-planar" bit of the PS tiefling contradicts the fact that they are largely ahistorical. PS focuses on urban centers because PS antagonists are primarily other civilized people, so places where lots of civilized people come together make up many of its points of interested, which means that if you're someone who doesn't fit into those civilizations because your nature makes people uneasy, it gives a particular tone to that conflict that otherwise wouldn't exist. Which is one of the ways it's a little different from, say, drow in FR. Drizzt goes and hangs out in the wilderness with his cat and it's cool, he can have adventures out there, nobody judges him, he gets away from being the outcast. PS concentrates on people and politics and philosophies, all of which involve interacting with those hostile folks, and usually in ways that don't involve simply beating them into submission. But on a much grander scale, given the planar metropoli.And, again, not saying it's better or worse than the Turathi tiefling, just saying it's distinct. These stories are not the same stories. "I am an outcast in this world" is not the same story as "My people come from a fallen empire." So your proposition is that the Turathi tiefling is simply a *better version* of the PS tiefling and that this should thus be acceptable to every rational person who liked the PS tiefling? Or am I misconstruing your claim that the Turathi tiefling hits my raised points better than the original did? A lot more sense than you might think, really. ESPECIALLY with the ambiguous history. Knowledg eis power Don't know facts about someone, can't control them, that's scary. Clear parentage, clear history, that's reassuring. You always know where you stand with a vrock, but a tiefling could be hiding anything beneath that face -- and that's intimidating. Plus, there's the whole Dickensian vibe where being a tiefling is the fantasy version of being born with a deformity or handicap that makes you instantly one of the dregs of society. PS tieflings aren't the entierty of tieflings, but they are the original tiefling and their story is one I like to play out in my D&D. Turathi tieflings I'm not as interested in personally (too many Proper Nouns gives me a headache). They're there because they reinforce a lot of the ideas that the Planescape setting plays with (identity, morality, social division, questions of authority). If we are only basing what fantasy races we have on necessity, then we needn't have any. The race mechanic in D&D is a way to describe these plane-touched unfortunates, and it's a way I don't really have much of a problem with. You could probably do it in other ways, too, if you wanted, but I don't see any compelling reason to mess with it aside from just messing with it. *shrug*. I'm not here to convince you that one is better than the other. I'm merely saying that they are different. One is not the same as the other. I find them both totally acceptable player races, but they should be distinguished, because the play experience of one is different than the play experience of the other.</blockquote>

Verification