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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8189086" data-attributes="member: 18">Yeah I think it was a case of unmet demand suddenly finding an actual outlet.I think there was always a bit of a demand, because being like, the son of the devil but a good guy has been a thing since what, at latest the early 1970s? Marvel had a "Son of Satan" comic back then. And I heard a lot of stories from 1E players that involved PC cambions or cambion-like beings.But then the 1990s really ratcheted that whole deal up a notch, with tons of varying levels of "seems like they'd conventionally be evil but is actually good or at least a heroic badass" comic books, whether it's Gaiman's Death or Spawn from the Image comics, and god like, the whole White Wolf World of Darkness phenomenon was huge with all sorts of scary supernatural beings suddenly being playable (indeed there are a lot of smaller RPGs with similar themes from that era). Even stuff like RIFTS had a lot of scary monsters who were actually potentially friendly (even scary psychic worms who were actually good guys!). And I think it was serving that largely unmet demand I mentioned.Planescape itself felt like a (successful) "please come back to AD&D, it's cool again now!" product for groups like mine which had largely shifted to other games, and Tieflings were certainly part of that.I think the only other race which has been remotely as successful since then has been Dragonborn, but I always wonder how much of that is down to being the only corebook race with a +2 STR bonus (I am aware some Dwarves also do in 5E).I mean, that's something actually that might impact 6E - the removal of racial ASIs is likely to shift weight from the ASIs to both theme and other abilities, but I think theme is going to be big. It'll be very interesting to see if certain races/lineages get less or more popular after that becomes standard or more common. I would expect Dragonborn to slip a bit further, because they don't nail the "dragonman" fantasy with their lack of tails or wings (and I imagine they're already drastically less popular than 2017, as so many people will now have access to other +2 STR races). Tieflings may slip or even become more popular, given they'll now be applicable to all classes. I'm particularly interested to see what happens with elves, esp. if they balance them so they don't have objectively better racials than most others.As stuff shifts around over the rest of 5E and in the 6E playtest I think we may see some different races in the PHB for 6E. I suspect we'll just see more though, because the lineage approach is potentially more compact and easier to balance.</blockquote>

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