Zero Buzz on 5E...Is It Dead Out The Gate?

Night Goat · Post by **Night Goat** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:50 pm

So, Tieflings:

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:57 pm

They insist with the draenei visual for tieflings, then. I really liked when the demonic heritage was subtle for the LA 0 races.

If I want to play with a character seemingly made by Coop, I'd play a half-fiend.

Tieflings after 4E, spoilered due to naked titties (actually, naked everything. but in an artistic way).

ishy · Post by **ishy** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 9:58 pm

Race features that scale with level?
I like that.
Though they seem a bit weak.

I think their original sin part should include something about eating apples.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 10:02 pm

Oh, gag me with an emo spoon. Seriously, whatever. Two pages of twaddle, and no shits to give, aside from a beating for whoever came up with the 'virtue' names. Fear the wrath of Poetry Mcquestysorrow, the misunderstood savior of the 8th Hope of Dawn

Also your stats are good for no class's combinations and the abilities are almost certainly shit.

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 10:06 pm

Why are they keeping that ugly-ass tiefling aesthetic? World of Warcraft is no longer the next big thing in gaming, it's a has-been game coasting off of inertia. And absolutely no one else likes that bone ridge Star Trek crap on its own merits.

Seriously, though, that tiefling looks like utter garbage. She looks like my grandma posing for a soon-to-be-digitized Classic Mortal Kombat character. Who the fuck was in charge of art design?

ishy wrote:Race features that scale with level?
I like that.

I personally despise the shit out of it. Your race mattering at all levels and tiers of the game is one of the major players in enforcing shitty low-level mentalities on the higher level. When I get to level 4, the difference between an orc and an elf berserker should be minimal. When I get to level 10, the difference between a fairy berserker and a hill giant berserker should be minimal. But then, it's bounded accuracy time motherfuckers so who cares?

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 10:12 pm

Disturbing thought, with that as the baseline, what the hell is the drow entry going to look like? How bad is the special snowflake of no one understands going to be in its attempt to top its demon sibling?

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 10:19 pm

They will be so black that the light level will drop in their presence.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 10:33 pm

Not exactly NSFW, but spoilered anyway because its just that sad. It's a vampire witch tiefling sorcerer.

Parthenon · Post by **Parthenon** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 10:33 pm

They have a racial intelligence bonus of 1. An odd number. Have I forgotten something obvious or is that really weird?

Also, resistance to fire means what exactly? Does it halve fire damage or is there a lookup table based on level or something?

Fwib · Post by **Fwib** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 11:20 pm

Parthenon wrote:They have a racial intelligence bonus of 1. An odd number. Have I forgotten something obvious or is that really weird?

Also, resistance to fire means what exactly? Does it halve fire damage or is there a lookup table based on level or something?

Check http://media.wizards.com/downloads/dnd/ ... cRules.pdf

Stat bonuses no longer only come in multiples of 2 and resistance means ... half damage, IIRC...

Axebird · Post by **Axebird** » Fri Jul 11, 2014 11:32 pm

The maximum ability score you can buy is a 15, and ability score increases come in chunks of 2. So having a +1 or +2 to your primary ability score from your race means pretty much the same thing, as long as any secondary bonus applies to an ability score you could conceivably care about, like Con.

Voss · Post by **Voss** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 12:26 am

Well, to be fair, getting a 16 out of a 14 is much cheaper (and also doing it if the DM is a dick and insists on array based character creation). But yeah, Subraces so far get +1 to one stat and +2 to another, except humans, which get +1 to everything, and mountain dwarves, which get +2/+2 because fuck knows.

Which means its 4e style class/race combinations (which is to say some combinations are right and all other combinations are fucking stupid), and I can't think of any class that would give a shit about int/cha*. Maybe multiclassing, but the playtest multiclass rules were a kick to the balls to any caster that tried it.

And yes, resistance is half damage.

Con is good for everybody, Dex is good for people who can't wear heavy armor (14 max if they can wear medium), and if you're going to default to weapon attacks at all, you're going to want str or dex. Those exceptions aside, almost everyone is single stat dependent, though some, like rangers and monks will want dex more than their wisdom off-stat, and paladins will want strength more than charisma.

So, basically the good races will be dex or con + spellcasting or attack stat. Which is to say, any elf, hill dwarf, or stout halfling (and only rogue/dex fighter on that one) so far.

sarcasmoverdose · Post by **sarcasmoverdose** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 3:46 am

Where's the link to the tiefling preview?

tussock · Post by **tussock** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 4:50 am

They have a gigantic coiling heavily-muscled tail that must be their strongest limb and it does nothing. Not a free skill, not a combat option, ... oh, wait, there'll be tiefling feats, never mind, and the DM can fix it anyway.

But in general the fluff isn't (well no, it is) that bad, but what took my eye was how it's all about tiefling behaviour and how they treat everyone immediately followed by a sidebar about how that's not true and you can be whatever you want and so can all the other tieflings. It seems they were trying to say "this info block of homeland, personality, likes, and how they treat others does not apply to tieflings, but this is the format, so we can only apologise for following it."

Previn · Post by **Previn** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 5:28 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:Seriously, though, that tiefling looks like utter garbage. She looks like my grandma posing for a soon-to-be-digitized Classic Mortal Kombat character. Who the fuck was in charge of art design?

Yeah, no matter what the aesthetic they chose for the Tiefling, that art is terrible. Art sells books. You seriously cannot skimp on the art when you're giving away much of your core product for free, and the book is your flagship product to the entire IP.

nockermensch · Post by **nockermensch** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 5:31 am

Previn wrote:
Lago PARANOIA wrote:Seriously, though, that tiefling looks like utter garbage. She looks like my grandma posing for a soon-to-be-digitized Classic Mortal Kombat character. Who the fuck was in charge of art design?
Yeah, no matter what the aesthetic they chose for the Tiefling, that art is terrible. Art sells books. You seriously cannot skimp on the art when you're giving away much of your core product for free, and the book is your flagship product to the entire IP.

Then again, 3.Xe art had things like this:

(if you check the image name, you'll find wotc misspells the names of their own characters)

TiaC · Post by **TiaC** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:04 am

That's still far better than the impressionistic watercolor whose face flows into her hair that is that tiefling.

NineInchNall · Post by **NineInchNall** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:27 am

No, the Mialee picture is poorly drawn. The tiefling picture is well drawn.

That doesn't excuse the fact that it doesn't clearly depict its subject, though. Like ... It just looks like a purple lady. If I saw it without the heading, I wouldn't know it's supposed to be a tiefling.

CCarter · Post by **CCarter** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:30 am

tussock wrote:They have a gigantic coiling heavily-muscled tail that must be their strongest limb and it does nothing. Not a free skill, not a combat option, ... oh, wait, there'll be tiefling feats, never mind, and the DM can fix it anyway.

Maybe it cancels out the Balance penalty for the cloven hooves?
(OK, I can't quite tell if it actually has those, or the boots are just badly drawn).

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:38 am

That particular 3e drawing is poorly drawn but not poorly designed. The 5e tiefling is poorly designed but not poorly drawn. The 3e tiefling...

...is neither poorly designed nor poorly drawn, and is probably the most relevant comparison.

-Username17

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 6:39 am

Mialee looked awful in almost every picture in 3rd Edition artwork, though, so maybe it's just truth in advertising. And I wouldn't mind her looking so dumpy if she was dressed properly and the game didn't try to sex her up so often.

But on the whole, 3rd Edition D&D really dropped the ball with the iconics I feel. I think the only ones who didn't make me facepalm were Lidda and Tordek and I didn't even like most of their pictures. The d20 Modern iconics were better than those jokers -- how sad is that?

ED: In regards to the tiefling, I was talking more about the character design than the composition. She looks exactly like an awful Mortal Kombat filler Kombatant, from that stupid clown suit to her purple skin to those butt-ugly horns to her poofy Bohemian Bourgeois grandma hair to her faux-asskicking pose. Just enhance her breasts, digitize that shit and call her Wyldfyre or whatever the fuck.

Emerald · Post by **Emerald** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 7:49 am

Lago PARANOIA wrote:
ishy wrote:Race features that scale with level?
I like that.
I personally despise the shit out of it. Your race mattering at all levels and tiers of the game is one of the major players in enforcing shitty low-level mentalities on the higher level. When I get to level 4, the difference between an orc and an elf berserker should be minimal. When I get to level 10, the difference between a fairy berserker and a hill giant berserker should be minimal.

Is that necessarily the case, though? "Trickster fairy" and "massive giant" are concepts that would seem to be able to scale well to high levels and mesh well with multiple classes, and giving high-level abilities to elves, dwarves, halflings, etc. shouldn't be any harder than giving them to rangers, fighters, rogues, etc. (which is to say, not very, once you get past the initial Noncasters Don't Get Nice Things hurdle).

Granted, writing out lists of stuff for every race that aren't just "gain X class feature/SLA/whatever at Y level" would be a pain in the ass, but conceptually I don't see why it wouldn't be doable.

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 7:56 am

Emerald wrote:Is that necessarily the case, though? "Trickster fairy" and "massive giant" are concepts that would seem to be able to scale well to high levels and mesh well with multiple classes,

He didn't say "Trickster Fairy", he said "Fairy Berserker".

And yeah, at high levels having invested nothing in Trickster Fairy since level 0 starter character (who only invested the minimum to be "Fairy" and even less of "Trickster") and having since invested in Berserkering exclusively you damn well should be pretty damn close to a high level character of ANY race that did the same. That has no bearing on whether you can or should offer high level opt in "Trickster Fairy" archetype options they COULD have invested in. Because the given example is one where they did not do that.

and giving high-level abilities to elves, dwarves, halflings, etc. shouldn't be any harder than giving them to rangers, fighters, rogues, etc.

Well ok then basically you seem to want Racial Classes, that's totally alrigh... wait... no it isn't! Fuck off!

Emerald · Post by **Emerald** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 8:20 am

PhoneLobster wrote:He didn't say "Trickster Fairy", he said "Fairy Berserker".

I'd assumed it would be a pixie or something and have "trickster fairy" racial powers in addition to berserker class powers, as opposed to having different racial powers to go with different classes.

That has no bearing on whether you can or should offer high level opt in "Trickster Fairy" archetype options they COULD have invested in. Because the given example is one where they did not do that.

Well ok then basically you seem to want Racial Classes, that's totally alrigh... wait... no it isn't! Fuck off!

The example tiefling doesn't have to invest in or opt into anything, it just gets stuff automatically as it levels. Obviously if you have to sink berserker-ing resources into fairy-ing better as you level it's a bad tradeoff, and any version that 5e implements will most likely be shit, but you were talking as though any sort of high-level racial stuff is bad.

If everyone just gets level appropriate abilities from your race at, say, 3rd/8th/13th/18th level without setting any character resources on fire, how does that enforce low-level mentalities on high-level characters?

PhoneLobster · Post by **PhoneLobster** » Sat Jul 12, 2014 8:53 am

Emerald wrote:The example tiefling doesn't have to invest in or opt into anything, it just gets stuff automatically as it levels.

That methodology, where SOME races just get free shit late in career for whatever reason, leads to getting "stuff" that is either broken, insignificant at the level it is obtained, or that you DO actually pay for with the resource of LA or some similar broken as fuck failed methodology.

Things resourced like feats with racial requirements could theoretically work. Your option is made of fail.

Even taking it to the extreme of ...

If everyone just gets level appropriate abilities from your race at, say, 3rd/8th/13th/18th level without setting any character resources on fire, how does that enforce low-level mentalities on high-level characters?

Your methodology leads to really shitty characters where "Trickster Fairy" IS the only viable fairy option because all your late level preselected options are "Fuck you, trickster archetypes/builds or GTFO".

And that's the problem. You are describing Racial Classes. Worse Racial Classes as compulsory multiclassing that EVERYONE has to tolerate.

"I just earned my 17th level Human Power!" is a shitty solution.

It is certainly not as you imagine a solution where those abilities are free you just after all upgraded the "Race Selection" resource to have significantly greater over all value as a cost (and proportionally larger implications/limitations for builds).

It leads to well, shitty character concept limitations, it leads to shitty inflexible build "must have" combinations of class and race and instead of just doing that at low levels it attempts to renew those shitty limitations intermittently forever.