There are drow that have abandoned Lolth and chosen to follow Eilistraee instead, definitely... but that's a personal, moral, social and/or religious choice... is should not, under any circumstance ever imply that it is something irreversibly determined by your race - which is what the game currently does.
No worries on abrasiveness here -- unless you are finalist for a job at Larian in which case good luck, they need you
I don't have a problem with saying 99 percent of race (species) X is evil. Orcs are evil. Goblins are evil. And every so often a Drizzit or Liriel Baenre breaks the mold. I want there to be a mold in place and for players to have the ability to break it.
It's a choice, not a thing of race or subrace, and part of the entire difficulty that surface drow face is *Precisely* that surface-dwellers have no real way of distinguishing them from the kinds of drow that would enslave and torture them... because they're All Just Drow.
Yes, mostly. But I still like the the 1st through 3rd edition way of dealing with this. Good gods made servants, evil gods made slaves. Drow are born with evil entwined in their very souls. If you are lucky to grow up in the high forest the slave's collar is broken -- if you are born in the underdark you are taught to forge the links of the chain that binds you to Lolth.
They don't HAVE a neat little get out of gaol free card that lets people identify on sight the fact that they're the "nice good safe drow, and not those nasty bad evil drow", because there is no such identifier; they are just people making a personal choice.
Well said. People can't see your soul. Perhaps they can see a holy symbol you are wearing -- in which case it would be nice to have holy / unholy symbols in the game and to have NPCs react to them.
This is a large part of the whole point of what it is to be a surface drow trying to be good, and BG3's racial distinction here is completely obliterating it like a tactless, ignorant wrecking ball, as well as reinforcing and making tangible the concept of racially distinct "good drow" and "evil drow", which is, frankly, absolutely disgusting.
Larian needs to put alignment in the game. WotC is letting them get away with everything else, they can get away with this as well. I don't have have a problem with fantasy races being inherently evil. What I do dislike is when fantasy races are used as stand-ins for real world peoples. (looking at you Tracy Hickman) And I don't think the drow -- sophisticated, effete, intelligent, charcoal skinned, treacherous and cruel -- fit the stereotype for any single real-world culture and so the "inherently good" / "inherently evil" is not something that bothers me.
Othering by eye colour is one of the most common racial slurs that exist at cultural levels, and generally the derogatory comes from an existing trend, however in cases like this, that racist epithet is just that - it's not real or accurate, and while that kind of language, judgement and behaviour may (and does) exist in the world space between characters, it should absolutely not be enforced as a legitimate racial difference when creating characters.
Race doesn't mean the same thing in the Forgotten Realms that it does in our world. Or rather what is fantasy in our world is real in this fantasy world. Dwarves and gnomes are different races. Americans, Swedes and Koreans are all the same 'race', all members of the same species.
Yes; As a surface drow, unless you're dealing with people who already know you, it would be common for people to be extremely cautious of you, and to perhaps assume before they learn otherwise that you have come from the underdark... that is what you must expect as a surface drow; it's part of your struggle.
Well said.
I really don't care about what's "easier for coders", overly much. To address some other posters here; that's entirely irrelevant. What matters is the presentation to the players; the job of the designers and coders is to make it work.
Agreed. At the same time I think Larian struggling to figure out what do now that WotC has made the bonehead-stupid move of confusing fantasy race with real world racism. Were I at WotC I would have dealt with the crisis by putting someone with an understanding of real world racism in charge of approving art. In the past, there has been art of drow that almost certainly used black models as templates -- that was a stupid move. There is one book cover that looks like it was taken from a Tarzan novel and the leapard print swimsuits replaced with spider web themed swimwear. Dumb move. Worst move since inventing Matizca (which will be a dissertation one day)
Larian needs to remove the Seldarine / Lolth-sworn distinction and replace with deity and alignment.
Now the art in Mordenkainen and Tasha's is great. It's perfect. Stick to that and
