Native Outsider?

Planetouched, like tiefers, are still considered humanoids. Therefore, they can be affected by all the standard ressurrection spells. Depending on which plane they were born on, they will be subject to banishment and circle against alignment spells on all other planes besides their birth plane, including the Prime (unless they were born there).

Sigil, however, is a different story. Thanks to the eternal efforts of The Lady, all teleportation (that includes banishment) effects work only inside Sigil, but do not go from outside in or from inside out. So you can't banish anybody from Sigil, even a dretch, and you can't teleport in. The only way to get in or out of Sigil is through portals, and that's only if you're not a deity.

So here's a question I've wondered from time to time. If someone banishes a creature in Sigil that is extraplanar there, what does happen? Does it fizzle, or do they get bumped somewhere else in Sigil, or something else?

Creatures are native outsiders if the Monster Manual says they are. Tieflings, half-fiends, half-celestials, and aasimar are native outsiders no matter what plane they were born on.

If an outsider has the "native" subtype, it means they can be raised or resurrected and have to eat and drink the same as a humanoid does due to their mortal blood. This isn't something that changes because you were born somewhere else.

The native subtype doesn't affect banishment spells or the like. That's what the extraplanar subtype is for. Whether or not you have the extraplanar subtype depends on where you currently are in the multiverse and where you're from. It changes, while the native subtype does not.

You can banish any character that's currently extraplanar (not just outsiders!), as long as they're in a place that permits that kind of spell to work. In Sigil, you can only get in or out through a portal, so banishment doesn't work there.

You noticed that, huh? WotC and Planescape are not good bedfellows, although they slowly seem to be drifting together. WotC has begun to mention planes more often, especially with books like Fiendish Codex, and adding plane-of-origin information in the 3.5 update. However, a lot of their information is about as exact as a clueless blood studying the planes through ancient books. The names are there, but the meaning is skewed.

Here's a hint: Banishment is just like Plane Shift, but offensive.

An elf can be targeted by a sleep spell, it will just do nothing. That's because elves are a special race who have a reason to be immune to sleep effects. Just like a dwarf is special and can see in the dark. Just like it makes sense that genasi resist their elements better.

The elf rebuttal is off the mark, because I argued neither that races shouldn't get abilities, nor did I argue for disallowing races that had bad mechanics. What I said is that the traits for aasimar and tieflings are based on metagame data. That is to say, the only reason that we encounter these problems is because they were assigned a creature type which was not meant for mortal, nearly-human PC races.

Making aasimar and tieflings outsiders and not humanoids adds a whole lot of problems, and really doesn't add much of anything to help the game.
Because they're outsiders, they automatically get darkvision (along with nearly every other planar race, but that's another rant). They get their own subtype invented to cover up the more egregious over-assuming traits (no sleep, no eating, no souls). They even get automatic proficiency in martial weapons! Yes, that's right. Even (native) outsiders are proficient. It's so enormously ridiculous that everyone ignores the rule without even realizing it.

It's just these strange little head-scratching moments around the table where the game stops and everyone has to say, "What? Lemme see that" that really break down the game. A tiefling is only distantly related to an outsider. The rest of his family is probably human. He could easily be a sudden emergence of fiendish blood in the family, born to human parents.

And let me point out that genasi originally appeared in Monsters of Faerun as outsiders. They appear in the PSCS as humanoids. It's easy and painless to make the change. Even obvious and intuitive, at least to me. I definitely run my campaign with all planetouched this way.

So... what we're doing is taking the Outsider type, and then applying to it a subtype that strips away most of what that subtype means, reducing it pretty closely to a humanoid. Actually, thematically, a native outsider is a humanoid.

Honestly, Planetouched are a remnant of an older version of D&D that have never really been properly adjusted to fit rules changes and shifts in what the game can and can't do. If they were made today (and WotC was even vaguely competent), I think Planetouched would be organized into templates. Half-fiend is a template, Fiendish is a template, Fiendish bloodlines are a weird (and sucky) variant on templates, and all these can be taken by practically any race, so why are Tieflings automatically just humans with horns (and pointy teeth, hooves, menacing auras, etc)? What if you want to play a dwarf who's a quarter Demonic?

That said, they shouldn't be Outsiders. I know it's their most powerful abillity, and it's pretty much the only reason they qualify for the +1 (Lesser Tieflings and Aasimar are just the originals without the Outsider type and the level adjustment, and most people agree that they're at most slightly more powerful than the average Dwarf), but really they should be humanoids. If you think they should still be stuck with the LA (which in the case of Zenythri and Chaonds isn't so bad), give them a humanoid hit die instead, because Level Adjustment is one of those things in the game that breaks down more often than it works.

Really, Aasimar and Tieflings suck even with the Outsider type, so taking it off and getting rid of their crippling level adjustment at the same time is just good sense. Oh, and a good variant rule is that creatures don't gain abillities (proficiencies in particular) granted by creature type unless they have at least one racial hit die. This is a good way to keep random crap out of the hands of the players while still giving it to most monsters.

By the way, my friend and I are making a full list of templated Planetouched that are balance and actually worth playing for a campaign I'm going to be starting soon (quite probably on these very boards if anyone's interested), and I'll post the templates when they're done.

The problem with Level Adjustement is you lose a full hit die, your skills, saves, and attack bonus are permanently behind, and any class abillity based on levels (all spellcasting for instance) is permanently behind with no way to get it back. People think that after a few levels that won't matter anymore, but it does. At first and second level it sucks because you can't hold up in combat that way people without level adjustments can, but at least you have nifty abillities.

The thing is though, after about level five or six you may no longer be totally outgunned, but your abillites aren't worth nearly as much. Spell-like abillities like Darkness just really don't get used that often, and really aren't great in the first place (Again, Zenythri and Chaonds don't count, because they are actually worth their LA's). A +2 stat bonus doesn't make a huge difference once you can afford decent magic items, and things like resistances and immunities still come up, but more and more your enemies will have a way around them. On the other hand, you're still behind in levels. Everyone around you will be a little bit better at what they do than you are. This can be totally crippling for casters, but even for casters it means that they'll usually lose in a mirror match with a human of the same ECL/CR and the same equipment, and it gets worse as you level So yeah, I'd say it is a little bit crippling.

Getting back to your original point, this isn't a problem at all for an NPC. NPC's are generally a bit weaker than PC's of the same level anyway (they are supposed to be) if you want your NPC to be more of a challenge, all you have to do is give it better equipment or a higher level. Don't sweat it.

Regarding things like banishment and stuff, just remember that you can't be banished or teleported from Sigil (although the jury is still out on whether or not extra-demensional spaces should work), but anyone can be banished from a plane they aren't native to, regardless of whether they are humanoids, Ousiders, or Outsider (native)'s. Also, regarding the proficiencies, I don't think anyone intended to give them those on purpose, so it might be best to just pretend they aren't there.