D&D 5E Tiefling´s horns & tail

[Arkhail]

Appearance≠Charisma

 

[graves3141]

Anyone know why tieflings suddenly started having such big horns in 4th and 5th edition?

I know you can have them look however you want in your games but I much prefer the smaller horned versions in the artwork of 2nd and 3rd edition. I had hoped that 5E would return to the original way tieflings looked but then I saw them in the players handbook and realized it wasn't meant to be. It's a small thing really but it still bothers me a little.

 

[Shemeska]

Anyone know why tieflings suddenly started having such big horns in 4th and 5th edition?

I know you can have them look however you want in your games but I much prefer the smaller horned versions in the artwork of 2nd and 3rd edition. I had hoped that 5E would return to the original way tieflings looked but then I saw them in the players handbook and realized it wasn't meant to be. It's a small thing really but it still bothers me a little.

4e seems to have based the homogenous 4e tiefling appearance on artwork of the iconic tiefling character that appeared in the very late 3.x 'Age of Worms' AP in Dungeon magazine. The 5e tiefling being almost exactly the same as in 4e and now exclusively devil-blooded by default seems to be entirely because of the devil-blooded tiefling protagonist in Erin Evan's 4e FR novels (who the 5e PHB tiefling writeup features and seems to focus around to the exclusion of any other type).

As to the 'why' behind the decision in 4e or to remain with that radically less diverse option in 5e (even when returning to a version of the classic Great Wheel) I can't say. I suspect that the radical diversity of 2e/3e tieflings made it difficult to "brand" from a marketing perspective. That it comes at the expense of possibly my favorite element in the game is IMO unfortunate given the game's rich history that 5e is trying to pay tribute towards. Maybe in the future however 5e will give us some actual Planescape-style tieflings in all their crazy planar mutt diversity.

 

[jgsugden]

If you point out to your DM that you have easy access to weapons of similar efficiency, you may be able to get him to allow you to use the horns as a weapon. Many DMs will let players do pretty much anything for flavor as long as it doesn't give them much, if any, advantage.

 

[Parmandur]

5E kept the 4E style so as not to rock the boat for 4E fans, while 4E was trying to increase brand ability, yeah.

Old school Tieflings came back in 4E as a Theme, which doesn't seem to be something they are doing for 5E moving forward.

I would think that a Fiendish bloodline for Sorcerer might include the old Tiefling look, but who knows if they will go back to that at all.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Anyone know why tieflings suddenly started having such big horns in 4th and 5th edition?

I know you can have them look however you want in your games but I much prefer the smaller horned versions in the artwork of 2nd and 3rd edition. I had hoped that 5E would return to the original way tieflings looked but then I saw them in the players handbook and realized it wasn't meant to be. It's a small thing really but it still bothers me a little.

I am in pretty much the same boat.

While there isn't an explicit reason from WotC about this specific change, many of the 4e changes likely had to do with a rebranding effort. Like a lot of rebranding, this was likely guided by a few major principles, and some of those are to differentiation from competitors or to become more meaningful to consumers or to signify a change in direction (all of which were, presumably, going concerns in D&D land circa 2006-2008 or so).

What's that got to do with tieflings? Well, giving tieflings a unified appearance and a single story (The Fall of Bael Turath), they made tieflings something that other companies couldn't do - they weren't just any half-fiend whatevers, they were specific to D&D-land and D&D lore and D&D Intellectual Property. The concept of a fiend-spawn wasn't new, but the specific story about a pact with Asmodedus leading to the Fall or Bael Turath in a war with Dragonborn - that's not something that any other company can come along and claim. A unified appearance goes hand in hand with this - a distinctive, recognizable look that they could slap on the cover of a book or into digital form that would instantly mean this thing was D&D-branded in the minds of customers, not just some random fiendling. The diversity and vagueness of the old tiefling's look and story wasn't as easily marketable.

In the 4e run-up, the fact that this would annoy people who liked the old tiefling was apparently not really a concern. Folks would like the new story BETTER, probably, one would assume.

That's my working hypothesis, anyway. I find it's a theoretical framework that explains kind of a lot about 4e in a way that seems simple and reasonable, if perhaps debatably a bit misguided.

5e tries to split the difference - 4e aesthetics and Asmodeus origin, but no Bael Turath and more of an "outcast" reputation than a pulpy, sword-and-sorcery "evil fallen empire of dark magic" vibe.

This still doesn't work great for folks who liked the old tiefling because of its diversity. But 5e is less precious - the DNA of the tiefling is easy to replicate into a more diverse race more akin to the old-school tiefling as a planetouched orphan whose strange mutations might manifest in any number of ways.

For that, there's the Planetouched: +2 Cha, +1 to any one ability score, darkvision, one kind of resistance, one exotic language, a cantrip at 1st, a 1st level spell at 3rd, and a 2nd level spell at 5th. Mix and match, roll on a chart, make your own.

 

[Mephista]

5e tries to split the difference - 4e aesthetics and Asmodeus origin, but no Bael Turath and more of an "outcast" reputation than a pulpy, sword-and-sorcery "evil fallen empire of dark magic" vibe.

5e actually took Erin M. Evans version of the Forgotten Realms tiefling. Tieflings, in her books (and thus, the Realms), are basically outcasts fiendlings tied to another culture - human, elven, dwarven, dragonborn, you name it. She took the story of Bael Turath, and made a different one for the Realms, where old abyssal-blooded tieflings made a pact with Asmodeus and transformed all the old tielfings into the new version, but without a separate culture or history of their own. Just one witch (okay, 13 witches) from 100 years ago re-cursing already cursed bloodlines.

So, its not quite a "split the difference" since the 5e tieflings already existed in the books long before NEXT was announced. I suppose you could say its still splitting the difference because so much of Evan's story involves drawing on the continual lore of Faerun, instead of just handwaving it away. Its an evolution of the 2e and 3e FR tiefling into something like the 4e tiefling.

This still doesn't work great for folks who liked the old tiefling because of its diversity. But 5e is less precious - the DNA of the tiefling is easy to replicate into a more diverse race more akin to the old-school tiefling as a planetouched orphan whose strange mutations might manifest in any number of ways.

For that, there's the Planetouched: +2 Cha, +1 to any one ability score, darkvision, one kind of resistance, one exotic language, a cantrip at 1st, a 1st level spell at 3rd, and a 2nd level spell at 5th. Mix and match, roll on a chart, make your own.

This. Its what they did to make the Aasimar in the DMG, and I suspect that's what the implication is for making any other aasimar or tiefling character you want in the game. I've flat out told my players to use this model for all tieflings-style planetouched.

 

[I'm A Banana]

5e actually took Erin M. Evans version of the Forgotten Realms tiefling. Tieflings, in her books (and thus, the Realms), are basically outcasts fiendlings tied to another culture - human, elven, dwarven, dragonborn, you name it. She took the story of Bael Turath, and made a different one for the Realms, where old abyssal-blooded tieflings made a pact with Asmodeus and transformed all the old tielfings into the new version, but without a separate culture or history of their own. Just one witch (okay, 13 witches) from 100 years ago re-cursing already cursed bloodlines.

Not being a fan of the FR novels, I didn't know this bit of lore - that FR tieflings are a group of pre-4e tieflings that did the thing that made the 4e tieflings. It's interesting that the Asmodeus-linked tieflings are explicitly old-school tieflings who did a specific thing in a specific world. That has some ramifications for how they might address this in future material.

Like, it would totally be consistent for a PS-style sourcebook on planar adventurers to, at some point, say something like

Rubes from the Prime might think that all tielfings look the same and all are sworn to some lord of the nine or whatever, but that's just one of the many reasons not to trust rubes from the Prime. That might be the only story they're familiar with, but anyone who knows the planes knows there's more types of tieflings (or aasimar or genasi or whatever) than there are blades of grass in Arborea. If anyone imagines they all know how what a tiefling looks like or what it's story is, they're in for a rude awakening and a quick mugging when they wind up in Sigil.​

....or whatever. And using that particular story lets them do that.

 

[miniaturehoarder]

Anyone know why tieflings suddenly started having such big horns in 4th and 5th edition?

I know you can have them look however you want in your games but I much prefer the smaller horned versions in the artwork of 2nd and 3rd edition. I had hoped that 5E would return to the original way tieflings looked but then I saw them in the players handbook and realized it wasn't meant to be. It's a small thing really but it still bothers me a little.

I'd assume the enormous horns, meaty tail and garish skin tone were bones thrown to returning 4E players. But it's the DM's game, If they don't want the 4E tiefling in the setting, just remove them. I kept tieflings for my campaign to the more varied appearance of previous editions with the same stipulation I use for PC half orcs, PCs are assumed to be among the few who can pass for human without great difficulty. I also changed dragonborn to be closer to human weight, not to have dangly meat-dreads and to have heads like draconians rather than the wide & fat heads the wotc art game them.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I think the primary reason for this style of tiefling is the same reason we have dragonborn--they were in the 4e PHB. Everything else is details.

Personally, no tieflings in my multiverse look like that, nor do they have that backstory. I use the 2e/3e style tieflings, just using the stats from the PHB. The one problem that I have is that WotC won't officially "validate" that methodology. Even a sentence in the DMG to the effect that "not all tieflings in the multiverse are descendants of...blah blah blah...it's all about Asmodeus!...blah blah blah. Other tielfings have a variety of different forms and their fiendish heritage is less overt, usually having only a couple fiendish features."

Would that have been so hard to include? Then (almost) everyone could have been happy.

Yes, I'm doing it in my world that way, but there is something real and meaningful about saying to your players, "I'm using this variant from the DMG" rather than "here is my houserule."