xiphumor
Hero
It seems to me that although it was lore-appropriate, making the Planetouched into a single heritage distinguished by gifts significantly limited the creative potential available to players and designers. Here’s my case:
1. It’s impossible to mechanically represent heritage from multiple planes. Imagine the story possibilities with mixed Aasimar-Tiefling heritage! That’s not currently possible to represent going by RAW.
2. There will inevitably be a Plane of Fire planetouched, and they will be nearly identical to Tieflings. Fire resistance is an obvious must-have for a Fire Planetouched, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for making interesting new character options that are noticeably different from what Tieflings already provide.
3. Making Tieflings and Aasimar sub-races removes the possibility of doing what O5e had a lot of fun with, which was making lots of variants on the theme of angels and demons rather than generically heavenly/hellish.
4. Immortal Legacy and Darkvision are fine traits, but they don’t seem particularly appropriate for all of the planes. In addition, it makes the planes all seem somewhat uniform compared to each other when they should feel radically different, especially those that are dedicated to exact opposites of each other.
I love A5e and have the utmost respect and admiration for the design team, but I think they’ve written themselves into a bit of a corner here. There may be some possible solutions though. One option is to have a category of heritages which come directly from the planes rather than merely influenced by them which are more diverse (perhaps called “Denizens”). Another is to restrict the Planetouched to the moral planes and leave the field open for other planar-heritages. A third is to just backtrack a bit like O5e did with Tieflings when they added sub-races, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
I’d love to hear counter-arguments about the advantages of how things are at present, but I want it to be clear that I’m not writing to complain. I’m writing because I want to see A5e flourish and explode with creative potential, and I think that this point currently stands in the way of that happening as fully as possible.
1. It’s impossible to mechanically represent heritage from multiple planes. Imagine the story possibilities with mixed Aasimar-Tiefling heritage! That’s not currently possible to represent going by RAW.
2. There will inevitably be a Plane of Fire planetouched, and they will be nearly identical to Tieflings. Fire resistance is an obvious must-have for a Fire Planetouched, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for making interesting new character options that are noticeably different from what Tieflings already provide.
3. Making Tieflings and Aasimar sub-races removes the possibility of doing what O5e had a lot of fun with, which was making lots of variants on the theme of angels and demons rather than generically heavenly/hellish.
4. Immortal Legacy and Darkvision are fine traits, but they don’t seem particularly appropriate for all of the planes. In addition, it makes the planes all seem somewhat uniform compared to each other when they should feel radically different, especially those that are dedicated to exact opposites of each other.
I love A5e and have the utmost respect and admiration for the design team, but I think they’ve written themselves into a bit of a corner here. There may be some possible solutions though. One option is to have a category of heritages which come directly from the planes rather than merely influenced by them which are more diverse (perhaps called “Denizens”). Another is to restrict the Planetouched to the moral planes and leave the field open for other planar-heritages. A third is to just backtrack a bit like O5e did with Tieflings when they added sub-races, which wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.
I’d love to hear counter-arguments about the advantages of how things are at present, but I want it to be clear that I’m not writing to complain. I’m writing because I want to see A5e flourish and explode with creative potential, and I think that this point currently stands in the way of that happening as fully as possible.