So ... i would say, to just tune your words a bit:
"There's two racially distinct species of Drow and one SOCIETY is EVIL and the other SOCIETY is GOOD, and you can TELL beause of their EYES!!"
That seem a little closer.
It dont say anything about your *character* it says all you need to know about *standard people between wich your character was born, and raised* ...
It also affect if your character will have "racial" dialogue options more tuned toward good, or evil ... since that is society s/he is from.
That's fair, I'll pay that. It's still a problematic issue as long as the visual racial distinction and eye-marking-god-claiming stuff is left in, however... because it still runs utterly against the established lore and undermines a massive portion of it substantially...
I'm not ignoring Larian's permissiveness in terms of dialogue agency... I'm just not impressed by it. Far too many inappropriate things are gated behind race, in terms of dialogue. Certain lines that literally anyone should have access to and should be allowed to offer if it suites their character, are locked away behind specific race tags, and that's just deeply unpleasant, and a poor way to handle it. It's creating and perpetuating gross racial stereotypes and baking them into a statement of 'actually that's real', at a player level, when it shouldn't, and it's disgusting.
By all means there should be race-locked dialogue options, but they should be comments related to
history,
culture and
knowledge... right now they aren't; right now, they're things like "You can only threaten to eviscerate this cretin if you happen to be one of those "Racially Evil Drow!"", "You can only plead for people to clam down and not get into a fight if you're one of those "Racially Pacifistic Halflings"" and "You can only be incredulous about space travel if you're a "Racially Bumpkin-like Halfling""... no-one else is allowed to suggest those things, when ANYONE should be able to, regardless of their race!
Funnily enough, if they actually re-worked the character creation screen so that it was all individual sub-race picks, without the stepped category or race and sub-race, a lot of this issue would be less of a problem... If your choices were simply one level of race choice, listing "Lightfoot Halfling", "Stoutheart Halfling", "Wood-elf", "Sun-Elf", "Drow", "Rock Gnome", "Forest Gnome", etc... then there would be no game-level declaration of Drow as separate racially from elves, and the choice of whether you socially follow lolth and her culture, or don't, could just be a drow choice within that pick, and not a classification of race or subrace... If it were set up like that (and they dropped the lolth-marked eyes rubbish), I may not have even made this thread... It wouldn't be an ideal fix, but it would be very close to an acceptable one...
I don't have an inscription about eyes in game in my language. I am not familiar with DnD, and for first time I defined it as "There are Drow who worship a Goddess", later I learned that Lolth is an evil goddess. And there are Drow who have given up on this and taken other side.
That's how I understood it, not that "red-eyed drow are evil." Later, I began to delve into the specifics of the race outside the game to better understand it. But I believe there is no indication in Drow description that they are evil because of the color of their eyes... I don't think that the limited choice of eye color is a problem. Also you can easily "turn on all colors" if it annoys you so much.
Out of curiosity, what language do you play in? I ask because in the english client, there is very definitely a textual indication that lolth marks the eyes of one particular 'sub-race' of drow, at a racial level.
