Prerequisite: Tiefling
Fiendish blood runs strong in you, unlocking a resilience akin to that possessed by some fiends. You gain the following benefits:
Increase your Constitution score by 1, up to a maximum of 20.
You have resistance to cold damage and poison damage.
You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned.
Infernal Constitution: Rasputin Tough
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
You know, every racial feat can’t be a winner. Infernal Constitution is one such feat. You get a +1 Constitution, potentially offering you some extra hit points and a +1 to Con saves if you bump your modifier up, resistance to cold and poison damage, and advantage on saves against being poisoned. All of these words are fine, but none of them are exciting or particularly powerful. This isn’t a feat you can really take an expect to use regularly. That makes it a feat I don’t want to take.
Resistance to damage types matters a lot when you’re dealing with huge pools of dice of that specific type. The best resistance effects in the game typically target any or all damage types, giving you a way to ensure they’ll be good regardless of fight. Totem warrior barbarians rocking the bear totem know this feeling well. Specific resistances feel incidental, and are often forgotten about entirely until they randomly pop up. When you go to face down the white dragon in its lair, sure, cold damage is going to be a part of that. When you move past that adventure and journey off to fight yuan-ti performing a ritual to summon a giant serpent lord to eat the sun, yes, poison may come up there, but it isn’t necessarily going to be a central fixture of the environment. Heading to mechanus to fight modrons, or dealing with some tyrannical overlord and his army of ogres and orcs? Neither damage type is probably showing up.
All of this stacks on top of it being a feat that just gives you passive benefits to factors entirely out of your control. When I take a feat, I need it to give me a passive benefit that helps me do exactly what I want to do better, or unlock new tools to engage the world with. This does neither. These aren’t tools anyone can actively decide to use, they aren’t empowering a specific play style in any consistent way. Advantage on saves against being poisoned can be handy, as it's a common enough condition thrown around by evil spellcasters and a handful of monsters, but it certainly doesn’t justify taking a feat for it.
What makes matters worse is tiefling characters specifically aren’t normally aimed at benefiting from this. While diverse, many end up going towards bards, sorcerers, and warlocks to expand their spell repertoire and revel in their charisma score bonus. Infernal Constitution wants to be on frontline characters taking the brunt of things. Tieflings make great paladins, sure, but outside of that the other martial classes like fighters and barbarians typically don’t use the tiefling race. You normally want a solid strength, dexterity, and constitution to make those classes shine. When you’re only getting Con from tiefling, it's just not that appealing.
Tieflings are beloved for many reasons. If you love your tiefling dearly, you probably should invest in better feats for them than Infernal Constitution. While situationally quite good, the majority of the time you can read this feat as “Increase your Constitution score by 1”, and at that point, you should just be taking an ability score improvement.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
