Larian Banner: Baldur's Gate Patch 9
Previous Thread
Next Thread
Print Thread
Page 11 of 25 1 2 9 10 11 12 13 24 25
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
member
Offline
member
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by BuckettMonkey
Originally Posted by Eldath

Well they sure look like creatures that should be slaughtered on sight to me. Sorry. If it has horns I will cut it down.

Well, if you're playing an evil character, then why not?

That's like saying that good people should just sit back and tolerate everthing.
Good =/= tolerance, you know.

And what is so bad about the tieflings from the Sylvanus Grove, for example? Exists?
Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid.

Well, intelligence is a dump stat for a paladin.


Hello there.
Joined: Mar 2020
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Mar 2020
I think this might be a wisdom problem rather than intelligence. It sounds to me like something an immature paladin who spent his entire life in a temple reading about tieflings and never actually seen one would think and say


Larian's Biggest Oversight, what to do about it, and My personal review of BG3 EA
"74.85% of you stood with the Tieflings, and 25.15% of you sided with Minthara. Good outweighs evil, it seems."
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
member
Offline
member
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
Originally Posted by Abits
I think this might be a wisdom problem rather than intelligence. It sounds to me like something an immature paladin who spent his entire life in a temple reading about tieflings and never actually seen one would think and say

Wisdom, at least in the fifth edition, is also not very useful for paladins, well, unless they need a decent Insight score. In fact, most paladin builds only need high levels of charisma, strength, and constitution.
Come to think of it, jokes about stupid paladins did not appear out of nowhere.


Hello there.
Joined: Nov 2020
Banned
Offline
Banned
Joined: Nov 2020
Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?

You still don't get it. It doesn't matter if it's smart or stupid. What matters is whether it's immersive and authentic or not. Tieflings by and large are an overwhelmingly alien and in fact less then good race. The only difference between them and goblins is that they are a bit smarter and you like how they look. That's it.

Last edited by Eldath; 27/11/20 12:27 PM.
Joined: Oct 2020
member
Offline
member
Joined: Oct 2020
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?

You still don't get it. It doesn't matter if it's smart or stupid. What matters is whether it's immersive and authentic or not. Tieflings by and large are an overwhelmingly alien and in fact less then good race. The only difference between them and goblins is that they are a bit smarter and you like how they look. That's it.


I'm new to the franchise and must admit that how the tieflings are presented is passing strange to me? I mean just as soon as you visit the druid grove they all seem like the most normal and sweet people that one could ever meet and yet they all stem from within the Nine Hells?? The nature of the goblins make sense, but these tieflings absolutely do not to me. Now if they acted and came across like proper citizens of the hells, I believe that it would make the choice between siding with the Druid Grove or the Goblin Camp a far more interesting dilemma?

Kagha stands out as much more in line with what a tiefling persona should probably look like, and she's an elf?

Last edited by Capt.Wells; 27/11/20 03:52 PM.

“This year the utopian candy shell has melted away to expose a hard center of bizarre reality.”
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
member
Offline
member
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
Originally Posted by Capt.Wells

I'm new to the franchise and must admit that how the tieflings are presented is passing strange to me? I mean just as soon as you visit the druid grove they all seem like the most normal and sweet people that one could ever meet and yet they all stem from within the Seven Hells??

In fact, tieflings are ordinary people. Their specific appearance is due to the fact that their ancestors were somehow influenced by fiends.
Perhaps their ancestor was a warlock who took an oath to one of the fiends, maybe he was a Cambion, maybe they were subjected to planar influence in the mother womb... There are many options. In any case, a drop of fiends' blood does not make them evil.
And, one more thing, Nine Hells.
And since we are talking about Nine Hells, not all of tieflings come from baatezu. The ancestor of the tiefling can also be the yugoloth, tanar'ri, and more specific types of fiends. In the 3rd edition, tieflings were mentioned, descended from night hags. This is continues in Pathfinder, where tieflings can come from all fiends, even from qlippoth, strange fiends similar to Lovecraft monsters.

Last edited by BuckettMonkey; 27/11/20 04:13 PM.

Hello there.
Joined: Oct 2020
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Oct 2020
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?

You still don't get it. It doesn't matter if it's smart or stupid. What matters is whether it's immersive and authentic or not. Tieflings by and large are an overwhelmingly alien and in fact less then good race. The only difference between them and goblins is that they are a bit smarter and you like how they look. That's it.
presumably Tieflings have been a part of the FR world for centuries, you're characterization isn't really informed by immersion but by your own meta-narrative perspective. Even fiends and devils in FR don't typically have horns and red skin, this is actually more of an indictment of WotC for condensing their own mythology into a race with a few uniform features.

Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
member
Offline
member
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Haifa, Israel
Originally Posted by Sozz
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?

You still don't get it. It doesn't matter if it's smart or stupid. What matters is whether it's immersive and authentic or not. Tieflings by and large are an overwhelmingly alien and in fact less then good race. The only difference between them and goblins is that they are a bit smarter and you like how they look. That's it.
presumably Tieflings have been a part of the FR world for centuries, you're characterization isn't really informed by immersion but by your own meta-narrative perspective. Even fiends and devils in FR don't typically have horns and red skin, this is actually more of an indictment of WotC for condensing their own mythology into a race with a few uniform features.

Well, the fourth edition is to blame for the tieflings looking like a "horned red devil". There it is justified by the fact that tieflings come from a group of people who have concluded an agreement with Asmodeus. And in this case, their appearance is justified.
As for the fifth edition, I still don't understand how the tiefling of Asmodeus, Levistus and tanar'ri tiefling could look the same in rulebook pictures.


Hello there.
Joined: Oct 2020
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
Joined: Oct 2020
Tieflings have no leanings towards evil in this edition. But it is correct that the common populace *does* look at them with great suspicion and for all they know, a tiefling might be an actual devil.

How a character reacts to a tiefling should depend on their moral nature and how much they know about the nature of devils and tieflings. Unfortunately, BG3 currently does a poor job of introducing you to the dilemma - and an even worse job of telling you about the preceding events surrounding Elturel.


Last edited by Leuenherz; 27/11/20 02:47 PM.
Joined: Oct 2020
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Oct 2020
Originally Posted by Leuenherz
Tieflings have no leanings towards evil in this edition. But it is correct that the common populace *does* look at them with great suspicion and for all they know, a tiefling might be an actual devil.

How a character reacts to a Tiefling should depend on their moral nature and how much they know about the nature of devils and Tieflings. Unfortunately, BG3 currently does a poor job of introducing you to the dilemma - and an even worse job of telling you about the preceding events surrounding Elturel.

This makes sense, I'm sure there's Tiefling racism stemming from their infernal ancestry, but I'm not sure there's going to be any society that they're not common enough in that the kind of attitude Eldath is advocating would be considered sanctioned, Innkeepers might refuse them service, sure, but the killing one on sight, I'm not so sure.

We've seen this already in BG:3 the Tiefling refugees were all residents of Elturel that the city exiled after their misadventure in Avernus. Though the particulars are still unclear. And you'll notice that Elturel didn't just kill them all.

Last edited by Sozz; 27/11/20 02:50 PM.
Joined: Oct 2020
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
Joined: Oct 2020
Originally Posted by Sozz
Originally Posted by Leuenherz
Tieflings have no leanings towards evil in this edition. But it is correct that the common populace *does* look at them with great suspicion and for all they know, a tiefling might be an actual devil.

How a character reacts to a Tiefling should depend on their moral nature and how much they know about the nature of devils and Tieflings. Unfortunately, BG3 currently does a poor job of introducing you to the dilemma - and an even worse job of telling you about the preceding events surrounding Elturel.

This makes sense, I'm sure there's Tiefling racism stemming from their infernal ancestry, but I'm not sure there's going to be any society that they're not common enough in that the kind of attitude Eldath is advocating would be considered sanctioned, Innkeepers might refuse them service, sure, but the killing one on sight, I'm not so sure.

We've seen this already in BG:3 the Tiefling refugees were all residents of Elturel that the city exiled after their misadventure in Avernus. Though the particulars are still unclear. And you'll notice that Elturel didn't just kill them all.


Yes, tieflings will typically just be segregated and be forced into the poorer parts of a town or city, unless we are talking about particularly cosmopolitan areas like Waterdeep.

"Kill on sight" is an attitude that a tiefling *might* run into in a particularly rural area that has never seen one. Even then, a couple of village hicks are probably gonna be too afraid of the "devil" to attack it.

Last edited by Leuenherz; 27/11/20 03:10 PM.
Joined: Mar 2020
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Mar 2020
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?

You still don't get it. It doesn't matter if it's smart or stupid. What matters is whether it's immersive and authentic or not. Tieflings by and large are an overwhelmingly alien and in fact less then good race. The only difference between them and goblins is that they are a bit smarter and you like how they look. That's it.

I like how the goblin look as well but I have no delusions about their intentions. The tieflings I met are just a lot of poor people with horns. If you kill them on sight because that's your idea of immersion more power to you I guess. Again stupid, but if it makes your experience feel more immersive go for it. It doesn't make it any less silly, whether it's in universe or otherwise

Last edited by Abits; 27/11/20 04:00 PM.

Larian's Biggest Oversight, what to do about it, and My personal review of BG3 EA
"74.85% of you stood with the Tieflings, and 25.15% of you sided with Minthara. Good outweighs evil, it seems."
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Rugby, UK
Cleric of Innuendo
Offline
Cleric of Innuendo
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Rugby, UK
This is warning number two to keep things civil in this thread. This includes a strong recommendation to avoid passive-aggressive incivility and snarkiness. Look at the tone of your posts before committing them to the thread. The next step is suspensions.

If you cannot make your point without implying someone else is 'stupid' and 'wrong' in their interpretation of a fantasy, please just step away from the keyboard for a minute and compose a better way of expressing yourself. Nobody becomes a lesser being by stepping away from an argument. There are some good points being made here, so remember that other people are as invested in their gaming as you are and may not share your opinions. Communicate as you would if you were face to face with a fellow gamer.

Last edited by Sadurian; 27/11/20 03:39 PM.
Joined: Oct 2020
old hand
Offline
old hand
Joined: Oct 2020
Originally Posted by Capt.Wells
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?

You still don't get it. It doesn't matter if it's smart or stupid. What matters is whether it's immersive and authentic or not. Tieflings by and large are an overwhelmingly alien and in fact less then good race. The only difference between them and goblins is that they are a bit smarter and you like how they look. That's it.


I'm new to the franchise and must admit that how the tieflings are presented is passing strange to me? I mean just as soon as you visit the druid grove they all seem like the most normal and sweet people that one could ever meet and yet they all stem from within the Nine Hells?? The nature of the goblins make sense, but these tieflings absolutely do not to me. Now if they acted and came across like proper citizens of the hells, I believe that it would make the choice between siding with the Druid Grove or the Goblin Camp a far more interesting dilemma?

Kagha stands out as much more in line with what a tiefling persona should probably look like, and she's an elf?


This post and others in those thread explains well how WotC botched tiefling design from 4th edition and onwards.



Originally Posted by Abits
And that's why I think paladins are so stupid. Another lore question. How favourably your (supposedly) good aligned God will look upon your extermination of the druid grove?


Hey now judging all Paladins as bad as because of one Paladin is just the same as...



Originally Posted by Leuenherz

Yes, tieflings will typically just be segregated and be forced into the poorer parts of a town or city, unless we are talking about particularly cosmopolitan areas like Waterdeep.

"Kill on sight" is an attitude that a tiefling *might* run into in a particularly rural area that has never seen one. Even then, a couple of village hicks are probably gonna be too afraid of the "devil" to attack it.


I feek Tieflings are much more likely to get murdered in cities than in the countryside. Tieflings are rare. There's not enough of them to ghettify them into their own neighbourhoods -- city folks should be just as likely to never have seen one as rural folks are. And there are a lot more people in cities and mob mentality is much, much stronger.



Originally Posted by Sadurian
Communicate as you would if you were face to face with a fellow gamer.


Your "face to face" rules no longer makes sense in corona times, old man! :P


Optimistically Apocalyptic
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Rugby, UK
Cleric of Innuendo
Offline
Cleric of Innuendo
Joined: Oct 2020
Location: Rugby, UK
Originally Posted by Dexai
Your "face to face" rules no longer makes sense in corona times, old man! :P

Fair point.

Joined: Nov 2020
Banned
Offline
Banned
Joined: Nov 2020
Originally Posted by Abits
The tieflings I met are just a lot of poor people with horns.

And that is exactly what the problem is. They are not, or the very least they are not supposed to be "just ordinary people with horns". They are an entirely different species.
This over humanization of them is exactly what destroys the importance of race in this game. Elves are just humans with pointy ears, halflings are just short humans, dwarves are just miner-vikings etc.
This is not a good thing. Races should be radically different, and simply making them LOOK different is utterly meaningless. It's like reducing someone to how they look on the outside.
Race should carry more meaning than that, especially in a medieval setting where mass literacy and education isn't a thing, so people can't be expected to know that they don't stand face to face with an actual devil (because let's face it they look like devils, they are related to devils, and assuming that they are just like you is absolutely unfounded).
If you want to sell me on the idea that tieflings are "just people", then make them a subrace of humans, otherwise I'm not interested in continuing this discussion.

Also rest assured, I'm not interested in playing paladins, more of a rogue type of guy over here.

Last edited by Eldath; 27/11/20 05:47 PM.
Joined: Mar 2020
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Mar 2020
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by Abits
The tieflings I met are just a lot of poor people with horns.

And that is exactly what the problem is. They are not, or the very least they are not supposed to be "just ordinary people with horns". They are an entirely different species.
This over humanization of them is exactly what destroys the importance of race in this game. Elves are just humans with pointy ears, halflings are just short humans, dwarves are just miner-vikings etc.
This is not a good thing. Races should be radically different, and simply making them LOOK different is utterly meaningless. It's like reducing someone to how they look on the outside.
Race should carry more meaning than that, especially in a medieval setting where mass literacy and education isn't a thing, so people can't be expected to know that they don't stand face to face with an actual devil (because let's face it they look like devils, they are related to devils, and assuming that they are just like you is absolutely unfounded).
If you want to sell me on the idea that tieflings are "just people", then make them a subrace of humans, otherwise I'm not interested in continuing this discussion.

These are fine points, the question is how you deal with them. You could go head against the wall and say "I don't care about the game narrative tieflings are supposed to be evil so I'll kill them all" or you can address the ones we actually got in the game, not some hypothetical ones.

I don't know much about tieflings outside of video games, but my assumption is that there are some good some neutral and some bad. You know what, even if most of them are evil, unless it's like 90 percent I don't think the attitude of "kill them all" makes any sense, in universe and otherwise. It doesn't mean you can't create a good written character that believe it is the right choice, but I can't see supposed character as anything other than a misguided at best and villain at worst.


Larian's Biggest Oversight, what to do about it, and My personal review of BG3 EA
"74.85% of you stood with the Tieflings, and 25.15% of you sided with Minthara. Good outweighs evil, it seems."
Joined: Oct 2020
journeyman
Offline
journeyman
Joined: Oct 2020
Originally Posted by Dexai
Originally Posted by Leuenherz

Yes, tieflings will typically just be segregated and be forced into the poorer parts of a town or city, unless we are talking about particularly cosmopolitan areas like Waterdeep.

"Kill on sight" is an attitude that a tiefling *might* run into in a particularly rural area that has never seen one. Even then, a couple of village hicks are probably gonna be too afraid of the "devil" to attack it.


I feek Tieflings are much more likely to get murdered in cities than in the countryside. Tieflings are rare. There's not enough of them to ghettify them into their own neighbourhoods -- city folks should be just as likely to never have seen one as rural folks are. And there are a lot more people in cities and mob mentality is much, much stronger.


The PHB itself talks about how tieflings "subsist in small minorities found mostly in human cities or towns, often in the roughest quarters of those places". When I used the word "segregated", I did not mean to imply that they had their own districts all to themselves, but that they would be pushed to those ghettified places as a result of racial prejudice against them.

While I can see the argument that a tiefling is more likely to get murdered in the city (because an armed and organized gang is more likely to do so than a bunch of farmers), I don't think that is because city people are "as likely" to have never seen one. Tieflings are "rare" only in the sense that they will always form a very small minority where they can be found, but they're not unicorns.

Now, you might personally feel that they should be more rare, just as Eldath thinks they should be more evil, but I do not see where WotC's own official material supports that.

Last edited by Leuenherz; 27/11/20 05:53 PM.
Joined: Jun 2019
addict
Offline
addict
Joined: Jun 2019
I am not able to reconcile what D&D really means by "race", other than the tables of abilities in the player's handbook.

The basic biological taxonomy goes as follows:
kingdom,
phylum,
class,
order,
family,
genus, and
species

Then where do Tieflings branch away from humans? They seem to have a spinal cord, so the phylum "chordata" is the same. I would guess they could be considered mammals? But on the other hand, maybe they could actually be in a different class. Once again, the virtue of unknowing reveals itself.

Joined: Oct 2020
veteran
Offline
veteran
Joined: Oct 2020
Originally Posted by Eldath
Originally Posted by Abits
The tieflings I met are just a lot of poor people with horns.

And that is exactly what the problem is. They are not, or the very least they are not supposed to be "just ordinary people with horns". They are an entirely different species.
This over humanization of them is exactly what destroys the importance of race in this game. Elves are just humans with pointy ears, halflings are just short humans, dwarves are just miner-vikings etc.
This is not a good thing. Races should be radically different, and simply making them LOOK different is utterly meaningless. It's like reducing someone to how they look on the outside.
Race should carry more meaning than that, especially in a medieval setting where mass literacy and education isn't a thing, so people can't be expected to know that they don't stand face to face with an actual devil (because let's face it they look like devils, they are related to devils, and assuming that they are just like you is absolutely unfounded).
If you want to sell me on the idea that tieflings are "just people", then make them a subrace of humans, otherwise I'm not interested in continuing this discussion.

Also rest assured, I'm not interested in playing paladins, more of a rogue type of guy over here.
you want to be careful calling this a medieval setting, it's a pastiche of eras ranging from Imperial Rome to the Renaissance. There's also the question of what exactly a Tiefling is that doesn't seem to be clear anymore. I'm a 3e hack so to me they've always been normal people who through a quirk of birth have a very faint reflection of an Outsider in their blood, now that they've been made their own race I'm not really sure where Tieflings come from or where new Tieflings come from. For better or worse most areas we play in the FR are pretty cosmopolitan, even the rural areas don't think elves and demons are mythological creatures (though they might have strange ideas about them).

As for the homogenization of the near-human races, I think this is more apparent mechanically than narratively, but I hardly have my ear to the ground in terms of the standard D&D setting.

Page 11 of 25 1 2 9 10 11 12 13 24 25

Moderated by  Dom_Larian, Freddo, vometia 

Link Copied to Clipboard
Powered by UBB.threads™ PHP Forum Software 7.7.5