When did good and evil outsiders become so mundane and boring?

[Spore]

I speak strictly in the sense of D&D and its surrounding pop culture. Heroes seem to never be afraid of these which is weird since even angels are described as scary not because they are winged super beings but because their form is so incredible it makes the human mind race. After all we fear what we cannot understand. Demons too. Most demon summoners in RPGs know what they are dealing with, and usually villains are also "too cool to show emotion" when they are not undead liches, half-fiends or some sort of angel-demon hybrid thingie.

Often it is even a hard sell on DMs when the monsters explicitly have a fear aura surrounding them to portray to the players that they should be afraid unless they are immune to fear. The barbarian is like "it can bleed so I can kill it." The rogue is cold and calculating, the wizard probably prepared a banishment spell and the cleric thinks this guy is playing for OUR team. Yet all of them are subjected to an Archon's aura of menace. Come on you could emote at least a little bit.

I get that D&D is about empowerment, especially for people who should rightfully be afraid of even a simple knife attack IRL (heck even special forces prefer to avoid knife combat) but part of the emotional journey of a RPG game is imho to meet insurmountable odds that you can later overcome. The dragon that burns down your hometown that you can kill in the prelude to the finale of overthrowing the villain. The orc raider king that stole all of your belongings and you don't duel him to death but into submission, lending your forces their strength to attack the villain's citadel.

Back to the topic at hand. the last years transformed demons from surreal creatures of nightmares to basically hunky beefcakes (ignoring succubi who are popular for obvious reasons).

And I get desensitizing due to overexposure of (online and televised) media as well as different genres. But D&D is as mainstream as it gets, and tieflings and aasimars, while special in lore and fluff, in practice, no one bats an eye after these.

[jintoya]

They became boring when D&D became more about winning than playing a character or escapism.

[Pleh]

Making Tieflings and Aasimars core races definitely drops a lot of the mystique behind the angels and demons.

"Beware! Mephistopheles is coming!"

"Oh, Uncle Meph? I'll call gradmother in hell and see if she can talk to him for us."

Some of that otherwordly horror has gotten shifted to almost exclusively Lovecraftian horror elements. You don't see the Half Shoggoth as a core playable race, do you?

Kind of the same problem with Dragonborn. Dragons used to be invincible terrors, they were made intelligent to add a new layer of horror to their might, and then they got sympathetic and relatable, and now we have a whole race and class born out of mixed marriages with dragons.

We tend to Domesticate scary stuff over time, as we become familiar with it.

[jintoya]

Making Tieflings and Aasimars core races definitely drops a lot of the mystique behind the angels and demons.

"Beware! Mephistopheles is coming!"

"Oh, Uncle Meph? I'll call gradmother in hell and see if she can talk to him for us."

Some of that otherwordly horror has gotten shifted to almost exclusively Lovecraftian horror elements. You don't see the Half Shoggoth as a core playable race, do you?

Kind of the same problem with Dragonborn. Dragons used to be invincible terrors, they were made intelligent to add a new layer of horror to their might, and then they got sympathetic and relatable, and now we have a whole race and class born out of mixed marriages with dragons.

We tend to Domesticate scary stuff over time, as we become familiar with it.

This I is why I'm not allowed to play as otherworldly horrors, because they get scarier when I do...I once ate my party when asked to be the "secret villain"

[Spore]

We tend to Domesticate scary stuff over time, as we become familiar with it.

You make a fair point.

Spoiler: Skynet has no chance!

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[MoiMagnus]

The problem is not linked to outsiders.
Goblins are a joke instead of being vicious and dangerous.
Orcs are more stupid than dangerous.
Dragon are yet another creature to hunt for its loot.
Vampire are ... well, what modern media made from them.

Modern vision or D&D universe, on top of being influenced by videogames and films, is highly influenced by parodies and other humouristic variations of the universe.

I'm not convinced that's a bad thing, as it clearly answer a need for peoples not only to escape reality (trough fantasy), but also to escape serious subjects (trough 2nd degree, 4th wall breaking, ...)

But I have to agree it does make it more difficult to build a universe astonishing and/or frightening.

[Kaptin Keen]

They always were. You just got older.

[Archpaladin Zousha]

I think the Game of Thrones has some influence too, since there's so much in that series about the gross evil ordinary people do that fantastical evil beings seem a little tame and well-behaved.

[Spore]

They always were. You just got older.

[Tvtyrant]

Basically because what makes supernatural stuff scary is the inability to deal with it, and D&D is about dealing with things. Imagine The Exorcist if Conan Stevens became so angry he punched the demon out of the girl.

[AceOfFools]

They always were. You just got older.

"It has stats, so we can kill it," has been a meme since at least 2nd edition (i.e. before I was born).

There were discussions on the best way to beat gods based on their published stats on the usenet forums that were precursors to the modern internet.

[Kaptin Keen]

No, I'm serious. They have been 2-dimensional, boring enemies since time out of memory. But when I was a teenager, outsiders seemed awesome! Only they weren't. I was just a teenager, and easily impressed.

[Tvtyrant]

Or your tastes have just changed and are not any more objectively good now then they were then.

[Malphegor]

if you stat it...

Yeah they kinda lose their edge by RAW application. My DM seems to like making them truly unknowable- we’ve met some devil... guy... thing... we think... who basically plucked a fireball in mid flight and without effort recharged someone’s spell slots. That’s silly powerful, and I for one was spooked by the casual display of ‘hah your rules are meaningless to me’.

But even there, I got the sense that if the forces of evil are keeping an eye on us, that means we’re rattling cages. They’re afraid. We’re a threat.

Which suggests we can take them on. Eventually.

And that turns survival horror into a butt whupping action movie. The Xenomorph isn’t in the ship ventilation, it’s in the open in the snow, and it is fleeing whilst we come for it. The devil’s deals have been rejected, and we are coming for him.

We were weak, but in their flame of antagonism, we are tempered. And we are coming.

D&D makes horror hard to cultivate without having statless beings of plot and DM fiat. Because if it has mechanical things, it can be taken down. Everything dies with sufficient application of magic at sufficient velocity.

Sometimes one needs to remember the dungeon is usually built to keep the adventurers out, and rarely the monsters in. One of these things is more feared than the other.

[Kaptin Keen]

Or your tastes have just changed and are not any more objectively good now then they were then.

Oh come on! There is no objectively good, or bad ... at all. They're social constructs. But! Aging and growing incrementally smarter over time is a real thing (mostly - there is solid evidence that some percentage has the exact opposite progression), and my experience is a possible explanation for Sporeegg's ditto.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Or your tastes have just changed and are not any more objectively good now then they were then.

Yeah. I see a lot of players who have become jaded. The things they're experiencing haven't changed, but the players have.

It's one reason I like playing with new people. Seeing their reactions to things rekindles the flame of wonder in me.

[Xuc Xac]

They became boring when D&D became more about winning than playing a character or escapism.

That's how D&D started. It was a wargame where you controlled one guy instead of a whole army. It was like making a first person shooter based on units from Warcraft. The idea of acting like the character was a real person instead of a pawn the player used to solve the GM’s puzzles came much later.

Demons first appeared in 1976 in the "Eldritch Wizardry" supplement. They were called "Type I Demon", "Type II Demon", and so on up to Type VI. Giving them actual names with character and personality was introduced later.

[Kaptin Keen]

It's one reason I like playing with new people.

Playing with a bunch of 12-14 year olds is an absolute joy! They can still be scared witless by a darkness spell =D

It does feel like I'm cheating tho =)

[Conradine]

In my opinion, Extract Drug is very very popular between adventurers.

[Yora]

Planescape.

Which I say as a huge fan of Planescape. The thing with Planescape is that it has strong elements of subversion, caricature, and satire. This works really well for that setting, but being the corner of D&D where the planes and their native creatures were described in the greatest detail, it kind of became the standard reference frame for what they are in D&D in general.

And for pretty much any setting that isn't Planescape, this approach doesn't really fit.

"It has stats, so we can kill it," has been a meme since at least 2nd edition (i.e. before I was born).

There were discussions on the best way to beat gods based on their published stats on the usenet forums that were precursors to the modern internet.

I think this goes back specifically to Deities and Demigods for 1st edition in 1980.

[Lord Raziere]

eh.

such things tend to lose their mundanity when you stop making them able to talk to you in a normal conversation.

angels and demons have their own languages. you want languages to start meaning something, enforce it by making that comprehend languages spell isn't there and then make them only speak their language. lack of common language does wonders to make things unclear. now make their actions more inscrutable and have a completely different view about alignment and morality than you, maybe make it so that even speaking causes them to hurt mortals a bit, and you got a much less mundane outsider.

[Particle_Man]

I remember scaring my players just by role playing the standard drow prisoner they had as if he was the Heath Ledger version of the Joker. Stats on paper can’t scare players. DMs can.

[Spore]

angels and demons have their own languages. you want languages to start meaning something, enforce it by making that comprehend languages spell isn't there and then make them only speak their language. lack of common language does wonders to make things unclear. now make their actions more inscrutable and have a completely different view about alignment and morality than you, maybe make it so that even speaking causes them to hurt mortals a bit, and you got a much less mundane outsider.

I mean even if this is some sort of "alignment language" stuff from D&D 1 or so, I feel the intent is much less the understanding and more the fact that they both wouldnt even TALK to a mortal if it can be helped and secondly the fact that there are now celestials and fiends statted down to even CR 1-2 even though this means you fight a single flipping soldier from the Blood War which is both expendable and probably instantly ressurrectable.

And while I like the idea of celestial 'Good' is not morally good (so angels would destroy an orphanage if the resulting explosion would kill a powerful demon) and fiendish 'Evil' has its merits (as emotions give the mortals agency over their own fate), I would much rather see them as alien and detached creatures from other worlds that demand servitude, sacrifice and honorification.

[Pleh]

They always were. You just got older.

Possible, but it seems needlessly reductive.

It's not like we haven't seen the whole culture and community likewise shift. Your point is probably valid, but is likely not the complete solution.

I remember scaring my players just by role playing the standard drow prisoner they had as if he was the Heath Ledger version of the Joker. Stats on paper can’t scare players. DMs can.

This. The scariness of Angels and Demons really is about how you play your cards.

Players too familiar with their stats? Modify them. Too familiar with the fluff? Take it up a notch. Familiarity breeds contempt. Always find new ways to breathe new terror into your monsters.

[NichG]

Numerical stats, spell lists, and visual descriptions are incapable of supporting fear and awe on their own. To get that reaction and sustain it, a creature has to cause players to doubt their approach to the world by its very existence.

An example would be Pact's depiction of demons, where the protagonist encounters one that causes other people to forget their existence when it lands a blow. No save, no mix of people who remember and people who forget. Facing something like that invites a particular doubt - have we fought this thing before, has it killed a former party member already? It seems impossible in a tabletop context where players live outside of the mechanics, but if you drop hints that something like that did happen, you can feed the doubt.

A creature that gains power over those who know its name changes the usual dynamics of play in that more knowledge becomes worse, not better. A creature where agreeing with it in conversation is binding, and who can look like anyone, means you always have to watch what you say. Etc. Things where, if you knew they existed, your standard operating procedure would have to change even if you never meet one.

[Max_Killjoy]

The D&D approach to worlds and monsters is quite good at stripping them of both wonder and terror.

These outsiders, good, evil, otherwise, are all named, categorized, analyzed, codified. They have standardized abilities and weaknesses, all neat and clean and to be dealt with formulaicly.

Just like all the Alignment-coded, color-coded "planes" they reside in.

[Constructman]

The D&D approach to worlds and monsters is quite good at stripping them of both wonder and terror.

These outsiders, good, evil, otherwise, are all named, categorized, analyzed, codified. They have standardized abilities and weaknesses, all neat and clean and to be dealt with formulaicly.

Just like all the Alignment-coded, color-coded "planes" they reside in.

If you want your players to fight them, they need to have a set of abilities and attributes and not be able to pull new ones put of their asses, lest you get accused of just making **** up as you go.

The question is, do you want your players to fight them?

The Mafia boss is much more intimidating than a simple thug, even if one is rarely seen and the other is about to break your nose. As soon as the boss has to take matters into his own hands and do the dirty work himself, his credibility decreases. However, as long as he is in the shadows, manipulating things behind the scenes, he remains a fearsome figure even if he never personally lays a finger on his enemies. The same applies to RPG enemies, Archfiends included. If they have to confront the party directly, something has gone terribly wrong with their plan and their credibility and intimidation factor decreases appropriately. But as long as the party never sees them, but knows that they're there and are actively working to make their life miserable, then they can retain some shred of scariness.

[Mechalich]

If you want your players to fight them, they need to have a set of abilities and attributes and not be able to pull new ones put of their asses, lest you get accused of just making **** up as you go.

The question is, do you want your players to fight them?

The Mafia boss is much more intimidating than a simple thug, even if one is rarely seen and the other is about to break your nose. As soon as the boss has to take matters into his own hands and do the dirty work himself, his credibility decreases. However, as long as he is in the shadows, manipulating things behind the scenes, he remains a fearsome figure even if he never personally lays a finger on his enemies. The same applies to RPG enemies, Archfiends included. If they have to confront the party directly, something has gone terribly wrong with their plan and their credibility and intimidation factor decreases appropriately. But as long as the party never sees them, but knows that they're there and are actively working to make their life miserable, then they can retain some shred of scariness.

To this I'd add that, because RPGs in general and D&D in particular have very bad mechanics for running away, the minute you put something on the playmat at all it has to be reduced to within a certain statistical range or the GM might as well just say 'rocks fall...' and move on. This is particularly bad in higher-level D&D with scry and die tactics where the implication is that the moment your characters become any sort of significant threat to the demon lord in any way whatsoever he dials up his high-powered inter-dimensional kill squad and ends them.

D&D, by its very nature, can't play seriously past a certain power point (where this is located varies by editions, and in some forms of 5e may not be exceeded at all), which makes pretty much all enemies mundane and boring unless they can be bizarre and weird. Nothing is intimidating because nothing is serious, gameplay is low immersion, and the cheese is omnipresent. Planescape, wherein the modern versions of most fiends were more or less developed into their present forms (there has been some tinkering about the edges since, the Eryines for instance, but it's pretty modest) understood this, and created outsiders that were wacky and weird and bizarre, not primordial and scary, because that fit with its thematic approach of jaded self-aware cynicism - an approach that is quite common across the fandom, as can be seen in OOTS and various other portrayals of D&D-type tabletop play.

[Inchhighguy]

This is really a ''how you play the game" sort of thing. Anything in the game is what you make of it.

You can make outsiders strange and weird and unique beings.....or you can have then be carboard cuts outs for the PCs to kill.

The same is true of anything else...dragons, undead, drow....whatever.

[The Insanity]

I don't know. When did you start playing them as mundane and boring?