New Half Drow Rule

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GholaMan
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by GholaMan »

Okay, wow read through all of this. And I am pretty surprised the DM team keeps using 'dusky' like its a color, but its not a color, its a shade. To explain a shade is not a color but a variant of the color in question. For example blue is a color, so is red, green, yellow, brown, orange. Dusky orange would be a DARKISH orange not a dark orange but sorta dark. Its like the difference between hot and lukewarm.

The colors that you are showing as appropriate for halfdrow are not appropriate, those colors belong on drow. You keep saying dusky but you don't even understand what it is, you say that half elfs cant be dusky? Again dusky is a shade not a color, so like medium dark brown would be considered dusky, someone from chult would be considered dark, a northman would be considered pale toned. If a northman and a chultan have a kid they would be dusky, aka darkish.

And also apparently you guys cant tell the difference between almost as much as and the same. You use a quote from races of faerun. That describes how others typically view them
Races of Faerun Pg 63 on Half-Drow

In most lands, half-drow are rare. Since so
many drow are irredeemably evil, they only
mate with humans by way of rape or slavery.
The only exception are the half-drow of the land of Dambrath
in the Shining South, who arise from the centuries-old drow subjugation
of the human folk of that land.
Half-drow have dusky skin, silver or white hair, and a broad
range of eye colors. They are often just as dark-hearted as their
elven parents, but with a bitter resentment that comes from
knowing that they are considered second-class members of drow
society. In human society, half-drow are distrusted nearly as
much as their full-blooded cousins. Despite this, good half-drow
are much less rare than good drow. Whether this has to do with
the influence of their human blood, or the desire to rebel against
the drow who treat them so poorly, is difficult to tell.
Wow that's weird here it says they are considered second class members of drow society, and that in human society they are distrusted nearly as much as their full blooded cousins.

So in what world is nearly as much the same as identical to? You want to add a new rule and then claim its lore when its not is lying. This rule that you have makes NPC reactions the same for halfdrow as they do for drow is not lore accurate stop trying to sell it as lore accurate. Because the races of faerun book says they are not the same. If you want to have NPCs react appropriately to a race you don't need a new rule stating that its this way.
Storm Munin
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by Storm Munin »

Good post, but the same if not as detailed argument has hit a brick wall so far.

/M
"Drojal zhah obdoluth dorb'd streeak, Lueth dro zhah zhaunau dorb'd ogglin."
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thids
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by thids »

The information regarding this is very scarce, and honestly any call can be said to be according to the lore, from one source or another. First of all, let's define half-drow. Half-drow are those who's parents are drow and human. Exclusively. When elves and drow mate the end result is a fullblooded drow in all cases:
Evermeet - Isle of the elves wrote:And when dark elves mingle with the lighter races, the offspring invariably take after the dark parent.
Lighter races in this quote representing lighter elves.
(This is why "heretic" Vhaeraunites are so badass, but this isn't a topic about that.)

Now, in regards to actual half-drow, one doesn't have to go far to find an example of one which doesn't look much like a drow, but rather like a half elf with... dusky skin:

Kyriani Agrivar, City of Splendors: Waterdeep, page 87
Image
http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Kyriani_Agrivar

Yes she is an extreme snowflake, and yes one can claim that all the magical transformation and influence made her look less like a drow... but she is mechanically a half-drow. I would say that non-drow looking half-drow would be very rare, but would exist none the less.
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Side
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by Side »

GholaMan wrote: So in what world is nearly as much the same as identical to? You want to add a new rule and then claim its lore when its not is lying. This rule that you have makes NPC reactions the same for halfdrow as they do for drow is not lore accurate stop trying to sell it as lore accurate. Because the races of faerun book says they are not the same. If you want to have NPCs react appropriately to a race you don't need a new rule stating that its this way.
I got caught up on this when I read it the first time too. Not sure if it was just me, or if the wording was wonkey, but after reading it again they specifically state they are treated the same on the surface. To the typical surfacer they are practically the same. The distinction between the two only matters around certain PCs that care about the distinction, and to (some) underdark races.
Passiflora wrote: AS A DROW you will kill DUERGARS for like..... lvl 9 to 25. A DAMN LOT OF DUERGARS.
GholaMan
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by GholaMan »

But side you are wrong, half drow and drow are not treated the same on the surface either, the lore states so. Do say otherwise is either implementing a house rule or, ignoring it.
Side
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by Side »

In human society, half-drow are distrusted nearly as
much as their full-blooded cousins.
Side wrote:To the typical surfacer they are practically the same.
There are differences, clearly, but the average surfacer is not on the same level as a PC. They are the NPCs of the world, and their understanding of what races are is generally lacking and filled with hate and distrust.

To decide how the average surfacer will treat a half drow you have to look at where that surfacer is from. Baldur's Gate, while a generally accepting place, isn't exactly known for it's half drow. People there don't know much about them, and lack of knowledge leads down a path we should all know by now.

To top it off past RP on the server (server lore) has involved an anti-drow campaign around Baldur's Gate. I'd argue the NPCs of Baldur's Gate wouldn't just distrust the drow, they would despise them and treat them worse than the local orc population. The only good drow is a dead drow, and that goes for anything with drow blood in it's veins.

It's not just about how they are treated on the surface, it's very specifically about how they are treated in Baldur's Gate, Amn, and the other areas the server covers. Perhaps Amn is slightly different, and maybe you could get by only feeling distrust in Roaringshore, but in Baldur's Gate you're as good as dead.
Passiflora wrote: AS A DROW you will kill DUERGARS for like..... lvl 9 to 25. A DAMN LOT OF DUERGARS.
GholaMan
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by GholaMan »

Yes in human society, half-drow are distrusted nearly as much as their full-blooded cousins.

Human society includes NPC reactions, that doesn't dictate how your PC would react however, that's up to whoever plays said PC. If drow are kill on sight, or run away screaming for the hills? Then what is a halfdrow? Because it wouldn't be kill on sight, that would be the same level of distrust as a drow. You say its the same, but races of faerun, the book that we are basing our game off of, says its not the same.
Side
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by Side »

For in character purposes, Half-Drow will be viewed as and treated as legally and socially indistinct from full Drow by in character polities and NPCs of the surface
This is about NPCs. If you'd like to quote the part of the new rule that states that players have to treat half drow in a particular way I'll reconsider what you're saying, but I honestly just don't see it.

EDIT: Read your post a little wrong I think.

Baldurs Gate is a special area. It's had a full on anti-drow propaganda campaign that was rather effective. In that are in particular I could see the general idea of anything with drow blood being pure evil as an acceptable idea. It's not that far fetched.

Server lore trumps official lore after all, and has to be taken into account considering our specific setting. Doing otherwise would ignore past player RP.
Passiflora wrote: AS A DROW you will kill DUERGARS for like..... lvl 9 to 25. A DAMN LOT OF DUERGARS.
DM Dialectic
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by DM Dialectic »

Storm Munin wrote:Thank you, I am very interested by what you will say after having had a look at it.
Considering a halfelf can be darker/duskier using their default palet.
While a halfdrow is rather pale no matter what you do in comparison.

/M

Edit:
To your knowledge then I have seen plenty of OOC queries and complaints over the years regarding use of the unicolor palet between players ingame, even when such have not been used by the more or less baffled OOC target.
TBH I am actually surprised we havent had more Szarkai on the server due to it.
As we are trying to be as broad and flexible as possible with the options for default vanilla NWN2 colors that meet a "dusky" criteria, any of the green boxed colors below would be examples of "dusky" for the DM Team.
Hidden: show
Image
Whatever the Szarkai with unicolor, the DM Team has never ruled it is outlawed or anything. It's allowed until we do.
DM Dialectic
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by DM Dialectic »

GholaMan wrote:Okay, wow read through all of this. And I am pretty surprised the DM team keeps using 'dusky' like its a color, but its not a color, its a shade. To explain a shade is not a color but a variant of the color in question. For example blue is a color, so is red, green, yellow, brown, orange. Dusky orange would be a DARKISH orange not a dark orange but sorta dark. Its like the difference between hot and lukewarm.
I suspect you are assuming too much here. We understand that "dusky" is not a color semantically. Yet, in the vernacular of posting we did say things such as "a dusky color" to mean a color that is dusky. In fact, the MW definition we posted early of dusky made it rather clear it was not a single color.
GholaMan wrote:The colors that you are showing as appropriate for halfdrow are not appropriate, those colors belong on drow. You keep saying dusky but you don't even understand what it is, you say that half elfs cant be dusky? Again dusky is a shade not a color, so like medium dark brown would be considered dusky, someone from chult would be considered dark, a northman would be considered pale toned. If a northman and a chultan have a kid they would be dusky, aka darkish.
We only posted one single color example of a dusky color for Half-Drow previously as a possible example, not the only example. I am not sure where you are getting from that it was the only example of "dusky". I just posted some other possible examples, however, in the above post. Please let us know if you still have questions after looking at them.
GholaMan wrote:And also apparently you guys cant tell the difference between almost as much as and the same. You use a quote from races of faerun. That describes how others typically view them.

...

Wow that's weird here it says they are considered second class members of drow society, and that in human society they are distrusted nearly as much as their full blooded cousins.

So in what world is nearly as much the same as identical to? You want to add a new rule and then claim its lore when its not is lying. This rule that you have makes NPC reactions the same for halfdrow as they do for drow is not lore accurate stop trying to sell it as lore accurate. Because the races of faerun book says they are not the same. If you want to have NPCs react appropriately to a race you don't need a new rule stating that its this way.
We very much can tell the difference between:

"In human society, half-drow are distrusted nearly as much as their full-blooded cousins."

and

"In human society, half-drow are distrusted as much as their full-blooded cousins."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nearly

Definition of nearly

1
: in a close manner or relationship <nearly related>
Just looking at the preponderance of evidence from earlier in the thread (not going to re-quote it again) we take "nearly" to not be a material difference as a lore base for surface NPC and polity views towards Half-Drow versus full Drow. We did note it is a material difference for attempts to change the lore base for Half-Drow versus full Drow -- in the Half-Drow's favor on the surface.
DM Dialectic
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by DM Dialectic »

Thids wrote:The information regarding this is very scarce, and honestly any call can be said to be according to the lore, from one source or another. First of all, let's define half-drow. Half-drow are those who's parents are drow and human. Exclusively. When elves and drow mate the end result is a fullblooded drow in all cases:
Evermeet - Isle of the elves wrote:And when dark elves mingle with the lighter races, the offspring invariably take after the dark parent.
Lighter races in this quote representing lighter elves.
(This is why "heretic" Vhaeraunites are so badass, but this isn't a topic about that.)

Now, in regards to actual half-drow, one doesn't have to go far to find an example of one which doesn't look much like a drow, but rather like a half elf with... dusky skin:

Kyriani Agrivar, City of Splendors: Waterdeep, page 87
Image
http://forgottenrealms.wikia.com/wiki/Kyriani_Agrivar

Yes she is an extreme snowflake, and yes one can claim that all the magical transformation and influence made her look less like a drow... but she is mechanically a half-drow. I would say that non-drow looking half-drow would be very rare, but would exist none the less.
She is not the only "exotic" NPC example so to speak. There are a number of others as well that we didn't put in this thread. She would indeed have dusky skin. It may not seem obviously from her hair in the picture either, but that's fair game too given the Waterdeep description:

"Kyriani tucks up her
shimmering silverwhite
hair away from her
face"

Perhaps there are two items of outstanding confusion here that still need to be addressed:

1. Half-Drow with "dusky" skin choices in game might look very similar to half-elves or elves or even humans with "dusky" skin choices in game. We were never saying otherwise as a mechanical point. We were saying otherwise as a canon lore description point that "dusky" is the skin color description range for Half-Drow and if only for Half-Drow or not, it is still the skin color description range for Half-Drow. The issue is that we do not want anyone to metagame or god mode this in case an NPC would assume your character is Half-Drow by just looking. So, if you want to go into NPC areas on the surface where NPCs if they knew you were Half-Drow would not be happy, just have a DM available to supervise and say it is okay IC to do so without risking metagaming and god moding. Fundamentally, we don't want Half-Drow to not even be dusky at all under what we would all agree are non-dusky colors (which has happened in multiple cases, where essentially the skin color was a very light shade and not dusky). This prevents cases where it is pretty much impossible mechanically to even remotely guess visually as a PC or NPC that a Half-Drow would be Half-Drow and respond accordingly IC -- fundamentally what this ruling aims to prevent.

2. We have such a wide interpretation of what dusky could mean per the example colors we gave, it literally could mean anything from the first in game picture I posted, to the example you posted here Thids, to the example from the Races of Faerun picture. Perhaps this was not clear enough from the start either, but maybe it is more clear now with the color ranges posted. In fact, I suspect after looking at the vanilla default NWN2 color examples posted for Half-Drow, many Half-Drow players probably will not even need to RCR.

In conclusion though, as this topic has now largely been exhausted I would say, we will only be responding to this thread again if you have material questions about how to play under these new rules. If so, please post your questions (you could PM us as well). My response time may be a lot slower in any case though, as I have a number of other projects creeping up.
Storm Munin
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by Storm Munin »

So, after much claiming of godmoding the NPCs and how it has upset players we go full circle and return to the point where the supposedly too creamy skins now is perfectly fine.
I am thankful for the detailed explanation of what skin options are okay.

Ok, I sure can run with the presented options (again). :roll:


Still back to the question of how the NPC should know/suspect it is a halfdrow though, given that something like half the surface server populance run around with silvery to white hair at times and not unusually are more or less tanned while at it.

Actually it would be fun with a guardsman script kicking in to ask such if they were halfdrow, social skills to pass at some DC. Low for innocents and higher for halfdrow.
Failure meaning a chance to enjoy the local jail pending trial.
Questionable whether it would be scriptable though.

As fun as the Tolerance is treason campaign was it is now very far back in the collective past (even if a few of us playing at the time are still around).
In essence I can see only harm coming by lingering too long on what has been done earlier when it is not actively supported by player actions in the meantime and present.
The same kind of ruling would as an example mean the zhentarim guild should be forced (due to the darkhold campaign) to be friendly to one of the drow guilds forever more, I do not think anyone of us want that.


Are we to assume halfdrow players at the suggested areas (Baldur's Gate etc) need to use some sort of cover or disguise (skill) to pass NPC scrutiny?
Asking since it still would seem (from demanding DM approval to enter them) that those guardsmen possibly might spot any halfdrow at 200 paces (by vaguely expressed means).

If so would some sort of DC to pass better serve the server then forcing toons not to go along with their "friends" to those areas whenever a DM are not available?
Even if DMs are less extinct nowadays at more hours of the day, roleplay realistically will be placed on hold by the lack of such being online or busy(murphy's law).
It should not be too hard to script a DC roll triggered by race at the access (transit) points to named areas, passing means passing and failing means refusal, detainment (or worse)?
That way any more whine and sniffling concerning the race from whatever source could more easily be dismissed as humbug, instead of inviting a process such as this has proven to be.

Case in point:
Halfdrow player A begs permission to enter, DM B approves and leave the server after some time. Meanwhile halfdrow A is still in the Gate when player/dm C stumbles upon them and send in a report (after addressing no one about it).
DM B being a perfectly normal person has forgotten approval was given to anyone by the time someone has the time to look and act upon the report and a process like this evolves again.

/M
Edit:
Whatever the Szarkai with unicolor, the DM Team has never ruled it is outlawed or anything. It's allowed until we do.
See that everyone, albino drow are now allowed by the dms. Miracles happen.
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Planehopper
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by Planehopper »

Storm Munin wrote: As fun as the Tolerance is treason campaign was it is now very far back in the collective past (even if a few of us playing at the time are still around).
In essence I can see only harm coming by lingering too long on what has been done earlier when it is not actively supported by player actions in the meantime and present.
The same kind of ruling would as an example mean the zhentarim guild should be forced (due to the darkhold campaign) to be friendly to one of the drow guilds forever more, I do not think anyone of us want that.
If you want to change the existing climate, RP to have it changed. Don't try blowing off past RP that took a lot of time and effort because it doesn't suit your desired playstyle. You want tolerance, campaign for it.

We worked a long time for the existing norms to be put in place. You could at least put forth some IC effort.

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Storm Munin
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by Storm Munin »

Never said RP to support changes should not be in the picture mate.

Just argumented we shouldnt keep past DM/player actions that had a server impact indefinately and unchangeable. Well done btw.

/M
"Drojal zhah obdoluth dorb'd streeak, Lueth dro zhah zhaunau dorb'd ogglin."
"Existence is empty without chaos, Life is boring without enemies." So sayeth Lady Lolth, Queen of Chaos.

PC: Natalya, wandering enchantress.
GholaMan
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Re: New Half Drow Rule

Unread post by GholaMan »

Just looking at the preponderance of evidence from earlier in the thread (not going to re-quote it again) we take "nearly" to not be a material difference as a lore base for surface NPC and polity views towards Half-Drow versus full Drow. We did note it is a material difference for attempts to change the lore base for Half-Drow versus full Drow -- in the Half-Drow's favor on the surface.
Actually it just looks like you are making up excuses so you don't have to spend time DMing the two active halfdrow on the server if one of us ever chooses to visit the surface. You say this nearly has no material difference but there is a material difference. So coke and pepsi are the same? How about paternal twins and identical twins? How about nearly getting shot and getting shot? How about nearly died and died?

Nothing you have posted in the past has proven that halfdrow and drow should be treated the same. I cant stop the DM team from doing mental gymnastics to justify what you guys are doing. Since you pretty much don't care about the lore that is has already been written about half drow on the surface and then wont even own up to it being a houserule but insist that the creators of faerun must have meant it this way all along.

I guess if you wanted the miniscule amount of people that play halfdrow to loose respect for the DM team then congratulations.
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