[SUGGESTION] Tieflings!!

If you haven't heard of Tieflings before, here is a pic...

(Image credit mcafee2000 / deviantart)


Tieflings are humans with an infernal heritage. Which makes them horny and awesome. Which means Card Hunter needs them.
(Note that calling them "Tiefling" could get you into trouble with WotC, so you'd need to call them something else)

So, here is my suggestion for adding them as a race.

Standard movement card: Run (like Humans)

Tiefling Skills come in several categories to represent different manifestations of their infernal heritage. I'll draft up a few example items:

Infernal Frenzy: Frenzy Aura, Blood Rage, Charge

Demonic Skin: Resistant Hide, Reliable Hide, Absorbing Block

Demonic Transformation: Resistant Hide, Infected Bite, Dash (the last one represents the goat hooves)

Gates of Hell: Dimensional Traveller, Hot Spot, Lava Pool

Burning Heritage: Fiery Fist, Flame Spit, Fire Spray

Demonic Curse: Dastardly Curse, Bad Luck, Cause Fumble

Gluttony: Festering Guts, Massive Jaws, Consuming Touch

It's no problem at all to create a wide variety of skills for them with the existing cards. It's easy to create variations of the above with slightly better or worse cards, or switching one out for the many demonic drawback cards for low-level items.

The dwarf's shtick is toughness, the elf's is movement, the human's is support skills. The tiefling is all about dealing hurt, either in debuffs or damage. Where the elf and dwarf cards are mainly from the fighter set, tiefling skills are more similar to wizard and cleric. Fire and acid fit him very well.

Tieflings should also have the occasional life-drain card, which supports parties that either don't have a cleric or one that doesn't have that much healing.

 

Infernals would be a lot of fun, and your suggestions are cool. Only real problem is that playing tieflings is very "new D&D," like, they only became a major player race in what, 4e? And while there're technically rules for playing them in 3.5 and Pathfinder, they're still fringe. Somehow, for me, and this might sound silly, I LIKE the fact that the options in Card Hunter are the archetypes of the past. The fighter-magic user-cleric trinity, humans dwarves and elves. If they're expanding their character options, I feel like I'd rather see halflings/thieves as the first additions, possibly followed by bards, gnomes, half-orcs, rangers, maybe monks... you know, things that FEEL "core." I'd like to see all that before I see tiefling/aasimar/svfirneblin/tengu samurai/ninjas/summoners/alchemists. My 2¢, purely from a flavor standpoint.

 

Walks over to game shelf, pulls out Planescape box. Here, a Tiefling. Published 1994.
Not sure what this "Pathfinder" thing is you're talking about, I stopped paying attention when TSR went bust... Now get off my lawn

Nothing against halflings, of course. However, Card Hunter already has the elf as the shifty dodgy race. This leaves little space for a Halfling to really open new strategic options. At the very least, you'd have to come up with new halfling cards like "empty their pockets" or "slingshot", which is more work because each new card requires careful balancing.

With Tieflings you can create skill items that are very different from the existing races, while still using existing cards. The major work would be limited to figurines and item icons. Aasimar would be similar, I might do them next.

 

Hey I wasn't saying they haven't been around, just that they were not a core race for most of the history of the genre.

 

"Tiefling" is trademarked by WotC.

 

Various alternatives exist - Demoniac, Demonspawn, etc. It shouldn't be too hard to come up with one.

 

One thing that might help this argument along would definitely be to prove that your proposed race existed "back in the day", since so much of this game is rooted in nostalgia. For how much I absolutely loved Planescape, I'm still not sure that this really qualifies. I'd argue that even something kooky like Spelljammer wouldn't be old enough to do a suitable caricature of in Card Hunter... not that I wouldn't love a few mind flayers, beholders, or neogi great old ones to contend with. Teiflings are a particularly hard one to consider, since I'm willing to bet that for every player who recognizes it's true heritage, there will be someone else who claims CH is ripping off Draenei from WoW. :/
I'd be much more interested in seeing this as a race if it followed more of the traditional D&D background such that Teifling wasn't synonymous with "hot devil chick with hooves, horn, and tail". There are supposed to be as many Teifling races as there are weird ways a demon can alter your bloodline, right? They're not all sexy, but quite interesting and diverse. As such, they made a great jack of all trades race because they could be heredically better or worse at just about anything compared to the average guy. They seem like the sort of thing that would be useful in this game if the devs ever wanted us to have a bit of choice in character traits during character generation. For instance, the ability to chose between normal movement, or forgoing the boot slot for a natural movement card that's 1 movement faster than other races. However, I'm not sure CH devs want to give us this much choice and it's probably not a good argument to use in this case.
Being a Tiefling was also something you were supposed to be stuck with, like a curse, and not something where you could pick your benefits at will. for that reason, I'm not sure that racial skills that could be conveniently swapped from something as diverse as fire spray to festering guts would actually give you the feeling that you're craving? Would you be satisfied with the fact that this could be altered on a whim, or would that simply destroy the racial weakness that comes with being a race of this flavor?

 

@Aldones: Aren't you overthinking this a bit? The important question here is "would Card Hunter be more fun with Tieflings in".

It's a card game and a light-hearted satire of fantasy gaming, not a historically correct reenactment. That said, we totally need Tieflings because as this is supposed to be Satan's game.

As for rippong off WOW - that's like those kids who complain that the Beatles ripped off Justin Bieber (or something like that)

 

No disrespect, but your original post is quite large. I felt that after that much work you'd have been dissatisfied if I'd simply said "No thanks, I don't think that would work as-is".

As far as being historically correct... to some extent Card Hunter really is, regardless of Satan's influence. My impression is that at least some of that is by design.

 

The post just looks large because of the huge hot Tiefling chick pic Had I known that you are a fellow Planescape fan, I'd have used a di Terlizzi pic instead, of course. At least she got everyone's attention.

I'm sure the game designers won't just add hot tiefling chicks as purchasable figurines. Can't imagine anyone forking over 80 pizza for one of those.

 

Nope. Not even a little bit.

 

I like this brainstorming over possibly new characters.
While thinking of how this and other new characters would stand out card wise to make a difference it came to me that the 3 available character types have already a vast amount of skills.
I find that they must get nerfed first to fit more into their primary field like the Wizard should have only spells and almost no physical attacks or defenses.
The Cleric plays Holy and un-Holy cards but he should be resticted to only holy cards.
That would leave a character like this Demonic (or whatever) to get all the un-holy spells.

You make nice character suggestions Martin K.
The Drow is also a good idea.
A classic D&D Thief type with Bow type cards as seen in Manticore 2 would be my favorite choice for a possible new character implementation.

 

I think that instead of copying classes directly from Planescape or D&D, BM should use more general fantasy classes based on their role game-play wise. The most obvious ones that come to mind are Rogue and Archer/Bowman. One would be light-armored, nimble, melee attacker; the other would be ranged, projectile attacker. Ot you could combine the two into one class (melee weapon + bow). This would give us a total of 4-5 classes, each with a specific role, and I'm not even sure the game needs more classes, unless they would have some kind of specific role that is absolutely needed.

I would also like to point out that using the word "Thiefling" would not get BM in any kind of legal trouble whatsoever. They could rename Card Hunter to "Adventures of Mr. Thiefling" and it would have no legal ramifications. The word "thiefling" is not trademarked to anyone, just like the word "vampire" is not trademarked to anyone.

 

I really think we could easily go to 6 class, even being restricive with something core and specific.

Rogue (melee/ranged physical)
Necroman/Daemonic (spell/unholy)
Monk/Paladin (melee physical/holy)

just a possibility amond others

 

This is indeed the most logical choice and devs have tols us that this is what we are getting. I don't know if they are going to give the Rogue any ranger/archer cards though, or if they are going to make a whole Ranger/Archer class as the 5th class.

I think the problem with these is that they are both way too close to Priest. I don't think they are unique enough for a new class.

 

i go for Bard and Monk (in a non Holy way)

 

I think that Monk is way too close to Priest for anyone who hasn't played D&D.

Bard is a great suggestion though. Inspirational songs etc. But we're going off-topic here. Start a new topic about it if you have time.

 

It occurs to me, SLG, that you may not know exactly what it is Martin's suggesting here. I point this out after noticing that you said

It's not "Thiefling", it's "Tiefling". There's no letter h in there. It's not a class he wants, but a race, which would presumably be applicable to any class just like the other races.

If my impression is way off, then I apologize, but it seemed that this thread took a totally left turn into class-suggestion land as soon as you said what you did.

 

Seeing as you're approx. my age I can't see how you think '94 is not considered new, especially compared to the "core" races, still I think it's a great idea and I love the time and thought you're putting into it, I think BM could definitely use the detailed suggestions you're putting out there.
I would like to see almost all of the different races done at some point, I'm particularly a sucker for the savage races, would love to play minotaurs or these unique beings.
Balance would be a challenge though. What could be solved in d&d through "level adjustment +x" might be harder in CH.

Bards would be AWESOME! I can already see my epic "Drums of the Jade Dragon" strike terror in the hearts of the opponent. they have a mass halt card on them
Monks not so much since traditionally they tend to gain advantages from actually not equipping stuff (no armor gives you the wisdom bonus to armor class and unarmed strikes have stun effects etc. in most d&d editions) which doesn't really fit in a game where it's all about collecting and equipping different items.
Not saying it's impossible to do, just not as excited about it as the other classes.

 

Yea, I know Tieflings from Planescape. I just failed at typing.

Ah.. ok. My bad sorry. I think I only read the title, looked at the picture, and looked at couple of the skills (which I didn't realize were racial skills).

Well, if it's a race, then oppose it based on its standard movement. I think that each race should have their own unique standard movement. That is a deal-breaker for me. If a 4th race was added, I think it should have maybe free movement or even Fly. For example:

Halfling (free movement 3 squares) (dodge type of racials)
Half-Dragon-Half-Human-Guy (Fly 3 squares) (dragon breath racials)

If Tieflings had something other than Run, then we could talk.

Yea, sorry about that.