Originally Posted by Evil_it_Self

Magic Resistance
Drow had tremendous resistance to magic.[9][8] During infancy, it fluctuated between almost non-existent and youth-level, and stabilized as they grew up. It increased again when they reached adulthood, and could be trained even further.[83]

The fluctuations of resistance against magic in drow infants was a lethal danger, leading to the development of the potion of magic resistance to stabilize it.[83]

Even when a drow's magic resistance was overcome, they could handle magical attacks quite well and had a better chance than other races at resisting them,[83] especially spells that attempted to bend their will.[9]

Sunlight
Drow had a weakness against light in general. For example, a common or untrained drow could neither use nor maintain their innate abilities under the effect of light that was as bright as, or brighter than, sunlight. Noble drow could use up to one innate ability in bright light. However, the drow developed a method to defend themselves against light through the use of the hand of darkness spell.[83] Before the 1360s DR, the drow had used to gradually lose their base and mature powers as well as their defenses against magic, if exposed to sunlight.[112] However, during the 1360s DR, Liriel Baenre, guided by Eilistraee,[113] carved her rune in the Child of the Yggdrasil with the intent of preserving her own drow magic away from the Underdark,[114] but the act ended up allowing all drow to keep their powers on the surface.[115] Despite Eilistraee guiding Liriel, speculations were that Lolth also had a hand in the matter.[115]
It took a drow about ten years of exposure to get used to the sunlight and to use their infravision and normal vision simultaneously. Initial exposure to sunlight was dangerous for a drow and cause of heavy sunburns. Even after getting used to the sunlight, drow had a strong tendency to cover their skin and head.[116]
Besides physical effects, bright light also limited drow activity, for they could not do anything effectively during daytime.[92]

so the disadvantage(sunlight sensitivity) still persisted even after the event of 1360s and even if the drow is exposed to 10 years of sunlight .
before it was impossible for them to walk on the surface(except with a magic amulet/spell , name it smile ), now the can walk and fight, but with a disadvantage.



The stuff I posted was just a dump of the particular lore regarding drow on the surface. Because several people were saying drow are extremely rare on the surface and that's just flat not true and hasn't been for around 30 years in real-time. Drow are uncommon to rare on the surface depending on where you are. (which again, makes Drizzt's plights seem a little off... because he's hardly the only drow in the surface...Eilistraee's worship is actually strong around Silverymoon...though I suppose most of those worshippers are humans, moon elves, and half-elves.)

I think you missed the part where I noted that I think a lot of those drow should mechanically be statted as Wood Elves or High Elves specifically because in a lot of cases it's been generations since they had constant exposure to the Underdark.

I was not discussing the mechanics side of sunlight sensitivity at all. Though, to be fair, while most of the time I think disadvantages and complications are some of the most narratively interesting parts of character building...D&D handles disadvantages fairly poorly from a mechanical standpoint and wouldn't be sad to see it just go away on the PC side.

I am uncertain why a general magic resistance was dumped from drow despite being included on the yuan-ti (which I think should be removed there as well, it's fine as a monster thing, but feels a bit bleh and boring as a PC trait) but I'm not one of the developers.

Part of me was thinking "oh, hey, they finally learned that a PC version of the species shouldn't be a copy-pasted version of the Monster Manual entry....but then they basically copy-pasted yuan-ti purebloods, so nope, that lesson wasn't learned.

Underdark born drow should certainly follow the stats for drow in the PHB.

That said...I'm fine with them avoiding this particular layer for the sake of simplicity. To us it feels like an easy enough thing to do, but day/night cycles seem to have a reputation in game development cycles and I don't blame people for just avoiding them entirely.

Last edited by Thrythlind; 06/11/20 06:44 PM.