Dark Sun returns

[schpeelah]

According to WoWWiki blood elves don't teleport. It's just the looks.
Blood elf and 4e Eladrin name the differences.

[mandrake]

I'll see yours and raise you some 3.5
Also, I'll throw in this for obvious reasons.

[Data Vampire]

I thought that 4E Eladrin where 3E Gray Elves with a different name.
I don't know where they pulled that teleport ability from though.

[CatharzGodfoot]

I thought that 4E Eladrin where 3E Gray Elves with a different name.
I don't know where they pulled that teleport ability from though.

All 3e eladrin get teleport at will. That might have something to do with it.

[Psychic Robot]

TD, you make it extremely difficult to be polite to you. When you say things, I kind of want to hit my face against my desk. I mean, I hate 4e, and RC2 will defend it occasionally, and I don’t want to cause myself permanent brain damage from his posts, so I think you must be doing something wrong.

The reason why paladins had to be LG or lose their powers wasn't because that was what the audience wanted but because the designers didn't know what they were doing. This isn't a change in target audience - this is the original designers not actually knowing what their audience wanted. Hell, the dark, evil knight archetype is not exactly novel - death knights have been around since at least the 1980s, and the idea of playing a "holy" character who isn't LG isn't exactly new either.

Paladins in AD&D must be LG. Your arrogance in asserting that the 3e designers didn’t know what they were doing because they kept in that legacy item is one of those face-desky things. You might disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t know what they were doing.

To put it bluntly, D&D has always targeted the audience it targets today. And that audience isn't "13-year-old WoW crowd". The 13 year olds WoW crowd is a part of the target audience but, guess what? It was back in 2000 too. And in 1989.

Please tell me World of Warcraft’s release date and I will explain to you why you’re wrong. D&D might have always targeted teenagers—something that irritates me to no end, as I want to play a fantasy game that’s not “family friendly”—but they weren’t the WoW crowd back then. Generations change, TD. The kids today are different from the kids back in 1989. There might have been some similarities, but we can see that D&D has progressively become more like a videogame with the growing popularity of videogames.

There’s a reason for that.

And I'll tell you with a straight face that they aren't draeni and blood elves. Why? Because WoW is based on D&D. Tieflings predate draeni and blood elves. Eladrin are an ancient archetype which predates Dungeons & Dragons.

Like I said to mandrake: compare 3e tieflings and eladrin to 4e tieflings and eladrin. They’re draenei and blood elves now. Before, they were just humans with a drop of demonic blood in their veins/CG outsiders. Now they’re all giant horns and tails and blond elves that wear red armor.

Sirlin is a professional game designer and also an extremely skilled competitive fighting game player. He's one of the best in the world at Super Street Fighter Turbo - not the best, but he's very good, and that was his original claim to fame. If you've heard people talking about playing to win, and throwing around terminology like "scrub", there is a good chance they're referring to Sirlin's work. He published a book on the subject which is now available for free on his website.

And as for the idea that namedropping is irrelevant - no, it isn't. You're fucking wrong. If I say something, and leaders in a field agree with me, there's a much better chance that I'm right than if they disagree with me. This is not to say they're always right - they aren't. But if you disagree with them, there's a good chance you're wrong. Welcome to reality!

Empirical evidence, of course, beats authority every single time. But when you're talking about abstract things, people are less likely to agree on the empirical evidence.

Face-desky. If your argument is strong, it will stand on its own. Your namedropping adds nothing in the way of actual support—in fact, it increases the likelihood that I’m going to doubt the veracity of your statements because you’re mixing your arguments with smoke and mirrors. You then go on to contradict yourself by saying:

Thing is, if you said that 8 years ago, that would carry some weight.

But that was eight years ago, and since then, the 3e devs have admitted that the CR system was pulled out of their asses (which was pretty obvious), and that SoDs are crap. Back then, empirical evidence would be needed to overcome the common wisdom of the day.

See, I’m having more face-desky moments right now. You just admitted that your ideas aren’t actually absolute (as your claims imply) because the 3e developers included SODs. By your reasoning, the developer mindset of “SODs are awesome” would be more likely to be correct because the developers believed so. Similarly, if the developers said that D&D would be better served by being about assfucking one’s way through 13th century Bavaria alongside gay ponies, your reasoning says that they would be more likely to be right.

That’s completely wrong. Utterly and completely wrong. It’s incredibly stupid, too.

Oh, and then you go on to say that you’d need “empirical evidence” to support the idea that SODs are bad. That’s not possible. SODs being bad are really a matter of opinion and design goals. Some people like high-lethality games, you know.

Oh, and Edward is sooo romantic. Yeah. That’s the kind of thinking you support. (14 million retarded fangirls can’t be wrong!)

This is the dumbest analogy possible. You know why?

Because D&D 4e has pistols, M-16s, and rocket launchers. They're called at-will, encounter, and daily powers. Indeed, the analogy is quite accurate - pistols are not as good as M-16s or rocket launchers, just as at-will powers are worse than encounter and daily powers. However, pistols are not useless, because you do run out of ammo with the big guns, and moreover, there are situations in which using a smaller, lighter gun is superior to using one of the bigger guns - you are more mobile while carrying a 3 lb pistol than while toting around a 50 lb bazooka, and you don't always want to use a bazooka or M-16 because the firepower is excessive or the gun is too noisy. This is true in 4th edition as well - sometimes, your at-will power is better than the encounter or daily power for these reasons. And also because, sometimes, it does something your other powers doesn't do.

Before you use an analogy, perhaps you should put some thought into it.

For someone who claims to be completely awesome at the vidyagames, you sure don’t seem to know a lot about them. First off, most FPS games are designed so that you can have lots of ammo for your main gun (namely, an M-16 or uzi or whatever). Secondly, the pistol is strictly a back-up weapon that you use when you’re out of ammo. Full stop. There are no instances in which the pistol is the superior choice of weapon. Do you know why? Because the games aren’t designed that way. Pistols have poor range and low damage, and a pistol isn’t magically 1,000 decibels quieter than a machine gun. If you want more mobility, you use a submachine gun, not a pistol. Why? Because pistols are weak.

They’re not balanced with the rest of the system. And they’re not meant to be—they’re supposed to be a back-up weapon.

Oh, and I’d like to see you respond to this:

I will provide another video game example: MUME, or Multi-Users of Middle-Earth. It's a MUD, and it's all about doing things like killing orcs. In fact, the orcs are a playable faction, as are trolls and black Númenóreans. The thing is, all of the dark races have severe disadvantages--they all have weaker stats, orcs are crippled in the sunlight and have junk magic, black Númenóreans are really only good as mages and they suffer from depression (which lowers their mana supply), and trolls permanently die in the sunlight. But there are plenty of people who play the underlings and try to kill the good races.

Please stop picking and choosing which points to respond to. It indicates an inability to formulate a counter-argument.

You are absolutely wrong. Spotlight balance has everything to do with the ability to do things which occupy the spotlight. Combat prowess is one of them. Out of combat prowess is another. It doesn't matter how much play-acting you enjoy if I can cast charm person and make them do what I want them to do. I will still have the spotlight, because I mattered.

You make grand statements like this and you prove that you don’t understand what you’re talking about. Spotlight time matters and combat prowess doesn’t. If 95% of the game is spent lavishing praise on the Pretty Pretty Princess while Angry Wizard stands around doing nothing, then when Angry Wizard explodes the dragon in three rounds, it doesn’t matter.

It's not balance that counts. It's the people you play with. If you're playing in an extremely combat-heavy game, balance counts. I'll be the first to admit that never hitting in combat is frustrating. However, once you're out of minis-mode and back to role-playing, balance is put on the back burner. And what happens if you're playing in a game where you spend about half an hour every session doing combat? How much does it matter then if the wizard can end the fight in three rounds?

Face it: it doesn't matter much at all. It's the spotlight that counts. If the spotlight is on everyone fairly equally, then combat balance doesn't mean a damn thing.

The fact is, when I cast haste in 3e, the party gets more awesome. They all get a lot of use out of haste while I, the wizard, do not. They end up doing more than me because they can make extra attacks and move faster. My one spell, though, is what can turn the tide of battle. Yet, I receive no spotlight time because of it.

Skills aren't nonmagical. I'm not sure where you got that idea from. You can make an arcana check to detect magic, which is definitely a magical ability, at least by our standards. You can also make an athletics check to jump 50 feet.

Face-desky. Diplomacy and Bluff are not magical. Athletics is not magical, no matter how far you’re jumping. (Now, you might use magic to make a longer jump, but that’s an entirely different story.)

Okay, let me get this straight:

The entire point of playing a summoner is to summon things and have them do things for you.

In 4th edition, you summon something. And then, you have it do things for you.

What about this violates the fantasy trope? That's right, nothing. There is nothing in the trope of the summoner which says "this generates action advantage". And indeed, usually summons do no such thing.

Take final fantasy X for example. In that, when you summon an Aeon, it replaces the party with the summon. In FFXII, you replace the other two characters with the summon. In pokemon, the player has their summon do all the fighting for them. This is a very common way for summons to function - oftentimes controlling the summon is what the summoner DOES, and the summoner themselves sucks at combat, which is why they summon crap to fight for them.

Can you do it in Core 4e? (Again, 3e definition.) No, you can’t. And that’s the entire point. Not to mention that we were talking about summons having independent actions from the summoner (and, again, I’m fine with that.)

Also:

Yes, [a mind-control spell] does grant someone the equivalent of multiple characters, and I'm okay with that. Not to the extent with which 3e did it, mind you, but I am okay with enchanters having extra characters. Why? Because it's their schtick--they go around and use their magic to get other people to do what they want.

You just said exactly why it obsoletes Diplomacy - its more likely to succeed with less effort.

Are you here to debate or are you here to troll?

Charm person doesn't obsolete the Diplomacy skill at all. How could it? You have to wave your hands around and chant and look like a total goober and then if the target fails his save--then and only then does it replace the Diplomacy skill. What happens if the save fails? And what are people going to say when they see you trying to cast charm person on someone else? And what happens when the spell wears off?

Respond in an intelligent fashion or admit that you’re wrong.

Then let's move on to skill challenges. They're broken. Completely. Frank did an accurate analysis of them that highlights their flaws, one of them most crippling being that it encourages dice spam. The reasoning is simple: you have a pool of successes and failures. Every time someone fails, you grow closer to failing the entire skill challenge. That means that only the people who are likely to succeed are encouraged to participate, since anyone who screws up has the chance of screwing it up for the entire party.

I’m waiting for your answer.

[Username17]

Please stop picking and choosing which points to respond to. It indicates an inability to formulate a counter-argument.

Most of your argument i decently strong, but I'm signaling this out because it is bullshit. If everyone responds to everyone's points, then the number of points will increase by doubling every time there is a response. That's totally unacceptable and would collapse everything.

This wall of text you got going with Titanium Dragon is illegible. I don't give a rat's ass what some dude who was good at Street Fighter happens to care about some subject or another and neither does anyone else. You do the world a huge favor by not dignifying that shit with a response! Actually talking about the opinions of some dude who isn't part of this community or the D&D design community is puzzling and time wasting. That Titanium Dragon continues to fill his posts will irrelevant crap like that makes his bullshit hard to read. When you quote his inane garbage about Street Fighter II Alpha Starforce or whatever, it makes your posts hard to read too.

Giant walls of text about crap no one cares about is not clever or good. When people write meaningless drivel that does not deserve to be read, it does not deserve a response either. Respond to actual points not Titanium Dragon's fanfic and amateur poetry about how he is totally going to fuck a dude who was really good with Ryu.

Of course, this cuts both ways. Reduce the conversation to people making actual points and it will be much more compelling. Titanium Dragon should cut his posts down until they are actually on topic, and that means that he should only address those points of yours that he feels will fit into each persuasive essay that he happens to write. It's totally OK for him to get to one of the points you made later on or even never if it happens to be a rather minor point. I for example, don't give a rat's ass about middle earth MUDs, or any MUDs, so I would be fine with letting that point drop like a stone in a pond. It's not that it isn't a point, it's that it's kind of off topic and people only need to jump on that if there's some rhetorical reason for them to. Sometimes it's best to ignore many tangent points if you think you can find something that is at the heart of the matter. So for example, Mandrake doesn't have any points at all, so it's best to just put him on ignore.

-Username17

[Nihlin]

...so, yeah, lots of interest in Dark Sun, I guess? I left for a conference when the thread was only 1 page.

[Avoraciopoctules]

From what I've skimmed through, it's mostly tangents.

Personally, I view the prospect of new Dark Sun material as a positive thing. Even if the mechanics turn out horrible, I'll still have more art and story ideas to loot. It should be entertaining comparing the athas.org system with whatever WotC comes up with.

[MartinHarper]

Diplomacy and Bluff are not magical.

Absolutely. Diplomacy represents, per the PHB, "tact, subtlety, and social grace", no more, no less. Frank therefore has a terrible Diplomacy score and can never, ever, "change opinions" or "negotiate a deal in good faith". True story.

Alternatively, Diplomacy is a vague and woolly skill with DCs pulled out of thin air, and it works fine if one character is tactful and subtle and another is honest and forthright and a third uses a charm cantrip.

In addition, take FPS games. How is the pistol balanced with the rest of the guns? Well, it's not.

First we need to define terms. I'll use Sirlin's definition:

Definition: What Is Balance?
A multiplayer game is balanced if a reasonably large number of options available to the player are viable--especially, but not limited to, during high level play by expert players.

http://www.sirlin.net/storage/articles/ ... ndout6.pdf

A pistol can be balanced in these terms. In some games, high level players occasionally use pistols, because that is a viable option in some circumstances. In other games, high level players never use pistols, because they are never a viable option.

[mandrake]

Paladins in AD&D must be LG. Your arrogance in asserting that the 3e designers didn’t know what they were doing because they kept in that legacy item is one of those face-desky things. You might disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t know what they were doing.

No, I think he has a point. Less with 3e which had a sort of base setting, D&D has no base setting, so to say that across all settings paladins should always be LG has always been a limiting factor. If you want to make a setting where it's true in 4e, there's nothing stopping you. The idea is that these are archetypes, which can work in any setting with whatever setting flavor you want to add to them.

Like I said to mandrake: compare 3e tieflings and eladrin to 4e tieflings and eladrin. They’re draenei and blood elves now. Before, they were just humans with a drop of demonic blood in their veins/CG outsiders. Now they’re all giant horns and tails and blond elves that wear red armor.

Well, they've toned down the hips somewhat.

[Data Vampire]

Wow, Hartman Hips. The 3E iconic tiefling has a tail, horns, and cloven feet. However, the horns and tail where not as pronounced as 4E tieflings.

Here's the pic.

Damn, if I didn't use the wrong tags.

[Thymos]

Frank: it is annoying when the selectively pick among your points in order to misquote you. I've had that happen; I wanted to punch the asshole who selectively misquoted me as to completely miss-state my point.

On some of the tangents:

Blood Elves actually are high elves that became addicted to their magic and when it was taken away went all corrupt or whatever. They used to be the high mages of Warcraft.

Tiefling fluff is incredibly bad. The new 4e tiefling fluff paints them all as... well basically drizzt. They come from bad backgrounds, but they aren't evil and are just misunderstood. Their paragraph of fluff in the preview book basically said "hey whiny kid who thinks everyone hates him and is misunderstood, we made a race for you."

Not to mention if you really look much into tieflings in 3.x at all you find out that it doesn't stand for a single race, it's just a catchall term like aasimar. There were ork tieflings and such. They redefined them as a single unified race that happens to look just like draenai with red skin for 4e (it actually pissed me off that the WoW draenai look nothing like the WC3 draenai, but that's another thing).

Oh, and it seems like Warcraft stole a hell of a lot more from Warhammer than DnD. I mean blood elves from the fluff sound like they were their own creation, but their high elves sound like the Warhammer ones (I mean hell, they have woodnight elves and high elves in the base fluff).

[Lago PARANOIA]

Frank: it is annoying when the selectively pick among your points in order to misquote you. I've had that happen; I wanted to punch the asshole who selectively misquoted me as to completely miss-state my point.

If this happens then just re-assert your post that you want answered.

[Fuchs]

I don't get the "3E NPCs need so much time" reference... I just run up one of the NPC generators, and run it a few times until I have something I like, Won't be perfect, even after some modding, but good enough.

[Quantumboost]

Oh, and it seems like Warcraft stole a hell of a lot more from Warhammer than DnD. I mean blood elves from the fluff sound like they were their own creation, but their high elves sound like the Warhammer ones (I mean hell, they have woodnight elves and high elves in the base fluff).

Yes, yes they did. The original Warcraft: Orcs & Humans was actually supposed to be a Warhammer game, but they ended up not doing that due to licensing issues. Same for Starcraft - the Zerg are Tyranids, the Protoss are Eldar, and the Terrans are Imperium. It's not as GRIM AND DARK due to the lack of all kinds of other cosmic horrors, but the Warcraft/Starcraft are based more on Warhammer than... any other property.

[Titanium Dragon]

Paladins in AD&D must be LG. Your arrogance in asserting that the 3e designers didn’t know what they were doing because they kept in that legacy item is one of those face-desky things. You might disagree with their decision, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t know what they were doing.

I'm well aware that they had to be LG in AD&D, seeing as I have played it. Guess what?

It was a mistake back then too. Oftentimes, bad design decisions get grandfathered into new editions or new versions of games, and stick around until someone grows a pair and says "This is retarded" and fixes it.

Please tell me World of Warcraft’s release date and I will explain to you why you’re wrong. D&D might have always targeted teenagers—something that irritates me to no end, as I want to play a fantasy game that’s not “family friendly”—but they weren’t the WoW crowd back then. Generations change, TD. The kids today are different from the kids back in 1989. There might have been some similarities, but we can see that D&D has progressively become more like a videogame with the growing popularity of videogames.

Early videogames were too primitive to replicate D&D well. They've gotten a lot better at it. D&D is a major influence on video games, and WoW is incredibly heavily influenced by it.

The similarities are natural. And true, some advancements have occurred in both - but that's because people have gotten better at designing games over time, particularly complicated ones, and the massive growth in the videogame industry has led to a surge in interest in game design, as well as a surge in the technology of game design - games are much better designed today than they were twenty years ago.

Face-desky. If your argument is strong, it will stand on its own. Your namedropping adds nothing in the way of actual support—in fact, it increases the likelihood that I’m going to doubt the veracity of your statements because you’re mixing your arguments with smoke and mirrors. You then go on to contradict yourself by saying:

I already explained why you cite your sources.

See, I’m having more face-desky moments right now. You just admitted that your ideas aren’t actually absolute (as your claims imply) because the 3e developers included SODs. By your reasoning, the developer mindset of “SODs are awesome” would be more likely to be correct because the developers believed so. Similarly, if the developers said that D&D would be better served by being about assfucking one’s way through 13th century Bavaria alongside gay ponies, your reasoning says that they would be more likely to be right.

Are you fucking stupid?

Oh, wait, yes you are. Nevermind.

Empirical evidence, of course, beats authority every single time. But when you're talking about abstract things, people are less likely to agree on the empirical evidence.

You obviously do not understand what the word "likely" means. Likely means exactly that. It does not mean certain.

And you obviously do not understand informal logic. While in formal logic, the originator of an argument does not affect its veracity, that's actually untrue in what we call "the real world", where the truth value of a proposition is inherently questionable. When someone who got paid 5 million dollars last year by the oil industry says that global warming isn't real, you aren't going to say "Its their data that matters, not the originator!" Well, you might, but you'd be stupid. In the real world, data is corrupted by human hands, so if someone has a vested interest in something, you can trust them less. Conversely, if someone has had empirical success in a field, you lend more credence to their words and work in that field.

Therefore, when we are arguing over the truth value of a proposition, it is in fact unreasonable to whine about saying "these people agree with me", that does indeed increase the likelihood of me being correct. And given that you have presented NO epirical evidence, its the only real way to get at the truth value of a proposition.

Tl; dr Stephen Hawking understands physics better than you do.

Oh, and then you go on to say that you’d need “empirical evidence” to support the idea that SODs are bad. That’s not possible. SODs being bad are really a matter of opinion and design goals. Some people like high-lethality games, you know.

Ah, but you see, there is a way to determine this - you look at the target population.

Oh, and Edward is sooo romantic. Yeah. That’s the kind of thinking you support. (14 million retarded fangirls can’t be wrong!)

Harry Potter being poorly written doesn't change the fact that she made a billion dollars off of it. Garfield being a generally mediocre to crappy comic doesn't mean that it hasn't made money. Why is this?

I know you're jealous of the vampire not getting laid, and the fact that you don't sparkle in the sunshine means you're having more trouble seducing 14-year old girls, but Twilight's success, the same as Harry Potter's, isn't accidental. It isn't the result of them being particularly well-written, either. They're not challenging and they got good, free marketing from the media, which combined with good timing made them a lot of money.

For someone who claims to be completely awesome at the vidyagames, you sure don’t seem to know a lot about them. First off, most FPS games are designed so that you can have lots of ammo for your main gun (namely, an M-16 or uzi or whatever). Secondly, the pistol is strictly a back-up weapon that you use when you’re out of ammo. Full stop. There are no instances in which the pistol is the superior choice of weapon. Do you know why? Because the games aren’t designed that way. Pistols have poor range and low damage, and a pistol isn’t magically 1,000 decibels quieter than a machine gun. If you want more mobility, you use a submachine gun, not a pistol. Why? Because pistols are weak.

In a large number of games with guns, there are silenced pistols but few, if any, other silenced weapons. As such, oftentimes when you want to be stealthy you do indeed use the pistol, despite it being an inferior weapon, because it has a silencer and the AKA 47 you pulled off the guard you killed doesn't.

Not all FPSs include stealth elements, but in those which do (and which aren't so laughably easy that you can just run through the level with your machine gun blazing anyway), pistols often play a very important role for that very reason. Indeed, many characters have pistols as their signature weapon, such as James Bond and Joanna Dark.

And in games like counterstrike, if you use certain weapons, you often resort to using your pistol in close quarters combat because your sniper rifle is crap for it.

Please stop picking and choosing which points to respond to. It indicates an inability to formulate a counter-argument.

It could indicate that.

Or it could indicate that I detected either a crank or a troll. In your case, its the latter.

You make grand statements like this and you prove that you don’t understand what you’re talking about. Spotlight time matters and combat prowess doesn’t. If 95% of the game is spent lavishing praise on the Pretty Pretty Princess while Angry Wizard stands around doing nothing, then when Angry Wizard explodes the dragon in three rounds, it doesn’t matter.

The two are very strongly correlated in a game like D&D, because 95% of the game isn't spent lavishing praise on Pretty Pretty Princess.

Respond in an intelligent fashion or admit that you’re wrong.

So you're saying you cede the argument already?

Sweet! I guess I can delete this whole response then...

[Titanium Dragon]

Sorry, Vampy.

[Maj]

Wrong thread.

[Thymos]

Well, you could play them that way, but the fluff states they are the decedents of the formally human royalty of Bael Trrath that have been tainted by the pact with Devils that the leaders made.

Eh, most of the Tiefling hatred I have stems from the 4e preview book that came out before it was released. Just reading the Tiefling fluff in the book store was enough for me to hate 4e Tieflings forever. They actually had some kind of designers note saying that Tieflings are for people who want to be badass because everyone hates them and they aren't really evil, they just look it or some shit like that.

I mean, they had their "we're descended from decadent and evil empire" thingy there too, but that was so forgettable I didn't bother mentioning it.

They where a single race in 3.5. Other races that reproduced with fiends lead to races other than tieflings. Fey'ri for instance are the elven version of tieflings. Tanna'ruk are the orc version. See planetouched for the human version.

I mean I know they had a single stat block in 3.x, but I assumed that it was for just the generic tiefling. The Fey'ri and Tanna'ruk were both under the heading Tiefling in their book if I remember correctly, making me think that Tiefling just stood for demonic ancestry and that there were separate Tieflings for every race, see Fey'ri and Tanna'ruk.

[MGuy]

They were under the "Plane touched" heading.

[Data Vampire]

I mean I know they had a single stat block in 3.x, but I assumed that it was for just the generic tiefling. The Fey'ri and Tanna'ruk were both under the heading Tiefling in their book if I remember correctly, making me think that Tiefling just stood for demonic ancestry and that there were separate Tieflings for every race, see Fey'ri and Tanna'ruk.

It may have been true in a previous edition, as wikipedia list all three as tieflings.

[Leress]

@TD: Fix your quote tags

[qutoe]See, I’m having more face-desky moments right now. You just admitted that your ideas aren’t actually absolute (as your claims imply) because the 3e developers included SODs. By your reasoning, the developer mindset of “SODs are awesome” would be more likely to be correct because the developers believed so. Similarly, if the developers said that D&D would be better served by being about assfucking one’s way through 13th century Bavaria alongside gay ponies, your reasoning says that they would be more likely to be right.

[Thymos]

I mean I know they had a single stat block in 3.x, but I assumed that it was for just the generic tiefling. The Fey'ri and Tanna'ruk were both under the heading Tiefling in their book if I remember correctly, making me think that Tiefling just stood for demonic ancestry and that there were separate Tieflings for every race, see Fey'ri and Tanna'ruk.

It may have been true in a previous edition, as wikipedia list all three as tieflings.

I may have worded that wierd, but that's what I was saying. I thought tieflings, Tanna'ruk, and Fey'ri were all Tieflings, and that the Tanna'ruk and Fey'ri were variations.

I'm very confused about all this now.

[violence in the media]

As an alternative to the players simply being dicks, them diving off the rails might just mean that your adventure is stupid.

Well, there are really a few possibilities:

1) You didn't make it clear what the objectives were/your plot hook didn't engage them.
2) You screwed up the adventure and made it so they could skip most of it (though this isn't necessarily a bad thing; many of my adventures are prepared with at least a couple non-overlapping branches, though they meet back up, and if they skip a lot of it because they figure out it was Colonel Mustard with the wrench in the conservatory during act 2, rather than in act 5, that's okay as long as they figured it out in an interesting way).
3) The players are being dicks and deliberately avoiding your adventure, wasting your time (and everyone else's, too, most likely)
4) You are being a dick and railroading people too much.

Ok, re-reading what I wrote I realize that I made that sound more deliberately adversarial than I intended, primarily as a refutation to RC's assertion that any players not following the trail of breadcrumbs were merely being dicks. RC's initial point about the players being dicks made no concessions for your #1, #2, and #4 scenarios. If the players were going off the rails, they were being dicks, end of story.

Now, here is the point where I am going to disagree with you. I do not agree with your assumption that the players treating the world as a sandbox, for whatever reason, is always passive-aggressive behavior. (Nor do I agree that a direct declaration of grievances is the universal best solution, nor that such an approach is incapable of being passive-aggressive behavior. But that's an entirely separate argument.) Your entire scenario #3 is predicated on the notion that the players are under some obligation to interact with whatever material the DM spent time on. That simply isn't my play experience. In my experiences (on both sides of the screen), if you want to GM then you need to either be good at improv or willing to light 75% of your prep work on fire.

The group of people sitting down to play D&D together may be participating in a cooperative activity, but they are all still independent agents acting in their own (perceived) best interests. Coordinating the potentially conflicting desires of multiple people into a workable compromise is a completely different animal from one (or all) of the players deciding to sabotage the endeavour.

TL;DR--The players are going to go off the rails. Hard. And it isn't necessarily going to be deliberate or intentional.

Question for you: If the players inadvertently go off the rails and enjoy the direction they've taken, is their active resistance to the DM's efforts to reacquaint them with his prep work (put them back on the rails) justified or not?

You know, for all the prep time you're supposedly putting into these adventures, maybe you could spare a few minutes to write in an amulet of nondetection or some wonderous architecture or something.

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Again, this is going back to RC's 10 hours of NPCs. If you're going to spend that much time on something, write in some fucking defenses. And it isn't about totally negating a player's abilities, as you state; it's about thinking in the context of the world and player perceptions.

Anyone that matters is going to do their level-best to protect themselves from as much of the bullshit ass-raping that occurs in the game world. The players should assume this and take that into consideration when employing their abilities. The problem is when the Venn diagram of People you want to use ability X on overlaps too much with People who are likely to be protected from ability X. No matter how small that group is in relation to the general population, there will be frustration until the player internalizes the realization that there is no good reason to expect that he'd be able to Scry-and-Die on the arch-wizard. Ideally, as I said before, you want these counters to be reasonable and available.

[FatR]

Well, you could play them that way, but the fluff states they are the decedents of the formally human royalty of Bael Trrath that have been tainted by the pact with Devils that the leaders made.

How this in any way contradicts their "my stupid rubber forehead makes me misunderstood, and hated, and angsty" theme? Which is, again, their one and only defining trait.