Arkhios
2020-11-20, 05:14 AM
I was reading the Council of Thieves Player's Guide a while ago, and the wording of a certain Campaign Trait struck as odd to me:
Infernal Bastard: You are a tiefling. You might be an escaped slave, a hidden shame, or a homeless vagabond, but whatever your upbringing, life has been particularly hard on you. You have suffered greatly, nearly starving to death one winter, nearly being beaten to death by racist sailors one summer, and so on. Whether or not these experiences have made you a bitter and cynical scoundrel or a pious and hopeful optimist is up to you, but one thing is certain—you are something less than even your tiefling kin. Perhaps it is a result of your hard life, or perhaps it is due to some fault in your fiendish heritage, but you lack a tiefling’s standard resistances to cold, electricity, and fire—instead, you merely have a +2 bonus on all saving throws made against these effects. Likewise, you do not have the ability to use darkness as a spell-like ability once per day—instead, you may choose any one 0-level spell that you can instead use at will as a spell-like ability.
If I'm reading this as written; it's a campaign trait and it doesn't say you have to be a tiefling in order to take this trait, and so as written, the trait simply states that you are a tiefling (regardless of your actual race).
In other words, it seems that you can take the trait as a member of any race, not just tiefling, and the trait means you're treated as if you were a tiefling, even though you might be, for example, a dwarf otherwise.
I couldn't find any answers regarding this particular notion. If there's been any official errata's on this trait, I'd appreciate seeing it myself from it's original source.
Infernal Bastard: You are a tiefling. You might be an escaped slave, a hidden shame, or a homeless vagabond, but whatever your upbringing, life has been particularly hard on you. You have suffered greatly, nearly starving to death one winter, nearly being beaten to death by racist sailors one summer, and so on. Whether or not these experiences have made you a bitter and cynical scoundrel or a pious and hopeful optimist is up to you, but one thing is certain—you are something less than even your tiefling kin. Perhaps it is a result of your hard life, or perhaps it is due to some fault in your fiendish heritage, but you lack a tiefling’s standard resistances to cold, electricity, and fire—instead, you merely have a +2 bonus on all saving throws made against these effects. Likewise, you do not have the ability to use darkness as a spell-like ability once per day—instead, you may choose any one 0-level spell that you can instead use at will as a spell-like ability.
If I'm reading this as written; it's a campaign trait and it doesn't say you have to be a tiefling in order to take this trait, and so as written, the trait simply states that you are a tiefling (regardless of your actual race).
In other words, it seems that you can take the trait as a member of any race, not just tiefling, and the trait means you're treated as if you were a tiefling, even though you might be, for example, a dwarf otherwise.
I couldn't find any answers regarding this particular notion. If there's been any official errata's on this trait, I'd appreciate seeing it myself from it's original source.