Racial Mechanics
That doesn't have anything to do with this section, but it doesn't not have anything to do with this section.
The basic mechanics for the Drow are presented in the Monstrous Manual/Monster Manual (hell, they're even in the SRD). But because of this, the mechanics tend to get pretty...fiddly.
Greenwood's basic approach to everything is (often) small bonuses/drawbacks to (often) circumstantial situations which give creatures just a little more fuck-you power. So for example:
Wait, are there even trees in the Underdark? Wouldn't this be "prune the family web?"Greenwood wrote:Drow are rarely surprised. DMs should add the expecting attack +2 modifier to all drow surprise rolls. This is because drow always expect attack, whether in the wild Underdark or surface world, in their own cities (where rival drow may strike with a dagger, dart, or spell at any time), or even at home (where rival family members may seize an unguarded moment to prune the family tree).
The 2007 approach is full-shovelware, with more feats and prestige classes and templates and shit. Notably, stuff like the Drow Paragon is straight-up ignored...and for all that Drow qualfy for any Elf-based prestige class like Arcane Archer, you don't see that really pushed pretty much anywhere. I'm sure there's an AD&D equivalent where Drow should be able to qualify for Elf kits and that just never happens, but it's a more noticeable and egregious absence in the d20 material.
The 1991 comes out front and says in the clearest and most unanswerable fashion that Ed Greenwood absolutely gives zero fucks about “game balance” or whether the proffered mechanics “work” or any of that fucking 21st century objective game design quality criteria horseshit. He just doesn't care. It was 1991 so maybe he didn't know that was a thing people might ask him to care about, but the important part is that he absolutely doesn't and wants you and everyone in your playgroup to know it.
That's right bitches, there are racial bonuses and the author hasn't decided what they even are! He doesn't give a shit, and fuck you for even asking!Drow of the Underdark, 1991 wrote:When creating Drow characters, Dms may elect to add +1 to Intelligence score rolls, and +1 or +2 to Dexterity scores, to a maximum of 18.
The 3rd edition racial traits don't so much vary on a “DM's whim” sort of fashion as they are just different every single fucking time they are written up anywhere. I don't just mean that the Drow set of magical resistances keep getting changed, although they totally do, I mean that even just basic shit like the core stat bonuses are different in every single fucking book. In the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, Drow get different stat lines for males and females. In the 3.5 Monster Manual they get +2 Intelligence, +2 Charisma; in the Player's Guide to Faerun there's a +0 Level Adjustment Lesser Drow and fucking fuck it just goes on and on. In any case, the Drow in this book are +2 Intelligence, + 2 Charisma, +Dexterity, and -2 Constitution. Women Drow, we are told, are bigger and more muscly on average, but not enough to warrant having different stat adjustments.
One of the more important questions with drow is "what about Half-Drow?" And i don't mean just the Drowic version of Half-Elves, I mean Elves-with-Drow-heritage. So that you could have a PC elf that is half Aquatic Elf and half Drow (there was a marriage made in...well, they probably weren't married, put it that way). Despite the fact I know these are addressed...somewhere...they are not addressed in these books, which is where you would sort of expect to find them. Because fuck you.
Another major issue with the Drow is that as NPCs they come equipped with a bunch of innate spell-like abilities and magic resistance. As a PC, this would be "broken," so there are various nerfs in place...and, as with the half-drow, omissions. For example, Races of Faerun (2003) has stuff like half-drow and a bunch of drow-specific and drow-friendly feats like Arachnid Rider (skill bonus to riding spiders), Highborn Drow (unlock more spell-like abilities), Deepening Darkness (improve racial Drow spell-like ability), and Drow Eyes (let half-drow see as good as drow in the dark). Now, these are all shit feats, because most of them don't scale with level and even the ones that do are just giving you a couple utilitarian spell-like abilities in exchange for a fucking feat slot, and maybe they felt weird reprinting them since it was only four fucking years since they were first printed...but I can't even find a pointer to them in this book, which makes me think maybe the writers weren't even aware they existed.
Drow are just better than you at most adventurish activities. They are less likely to get surprised by ninjas bursting through the door, more likely to stay conscious after ingesting poison, and more likely to resist deadly magic. Further, they even have a limited number of cool magic tricks, which are of general use in specifically fighting player characters. That last bit is considered problematic because while the generic spell package of being a Drow doesn't include any spells that land knock-out punches or win major combats, there's some serious utility magic in there and normally you'd have to advance three levels in Wizard to get all that crazy crap. Which makes it hard to present these characters as remotely balanced options for player characters. Because let's face it: they obviously are not. Drow were made to get a lot of the basic shit they'd need to compete with experienced adventurers in squad based combat on the ground floor, so obviously if you take that as your base ability set instead of an ability set like “is short and fat” like lots of the other races get, and then layer real adventurer's skills and equipment on top of that, you get something unrecognizable.
The 1991 book suggests that player characters should just all forget how to use their innate Drow magic. There's not a massively satisfying explanation for how or why that would happen, but I believe it has something to do with “I'm the DM and I'm depowering your munchkin character and if you don't like it I can fucking kill your character altogether.” The 3.5 rules instead assigned a penalty where you counted as a character 2 levels higher than your actual adventurer level and you will absolutely never be any good at anything. So in either case the player reads up on all the cool things Drow get to do and then they ask to play one and they get told they can, but only if they actually don't get to do all those extra cool things. Also, go fuck yourself.
That being said, the 2nd edition version is less of a giant fuck-you to the players, and indeed the stuff they are left with is still pretty damn good. Which is of course part of why Drow characters were ubiquitous in some 2nd edition campaigns and virtually unknown in virtually every 3rd edition campaign.
There may have been another contributing factor. I guess we will never know.
Drow society is not sufficiently developed to give us a lot of good alternates to the basic character classes, beyond spider-wizard and Lolth-cleric. Now, what arguably should happen is that the Drow absolutely steal all the Elvish kits from the Master Race's Handbook and laugh like the evil bastards they are as they do edgy versions of bladesong and spellsong and prance around like evil child-stealing cousin-fuckers.
...or they could pull some stuff out of their ass. Maybe the writers just didn't want Drow to have nice things, but they went with the latter.
Part of this might be because the level caps for races was in full play in AD&D, so while Drow could multiclass, they still had limited potential for advancement. I mean, more than you would ever get through in normal play, but still limited.
The 1991 book is a 2nd edition product, so you'd think there would be a bunch of Kits, which were sort of like 3rd edition's Prestige Classes except you took them at 1st level. Technically it does have some, in that Specialty Priests are considered kits in that system. But basically the only player facing kit in the whole book is Cleric of Eilistraee. As previously noted, that kit is about as powerful as anything in 2nd edition is capable of being, so it's not like the players lose out particularly. But there isn't even a pretense that you might give a shit about what player character Drow Thieves and Fighters might be getting up to.
The 2007 version on the other hand, lives up to expectations entirely. Which is to say it has a metric fucktonne of fiddly character options of all sorts. 10 pages of feats. 4 pages of spells, 3 pages of alternate class features for Drow of various classes, 27 pages of prestige classes, and 14 pages of equipment mundane and magical. That's 58 pages of just weird shit you can write on your character sheet. There was a time when that would have been the entire length of a rules supplement – and in those days the books had less words per page.
He just looks so happy about his dumb class features.
Now the information density here is absurdly low by anything but the most decadent post-bankruptcy Whitewolf standards. Those 28 pages of prestige classes are just eight actual classes. Those ten pages of feats actually average less than 6 feats per page. It's not quite 4th edition D&D bad in terms of space wasting, but it's obviously moving in that direction. You can see how a year later the D&D design team would have gotten so Melnibonean in their decadence that they'd use up twelve thousand words describing the basic Ranger class. Honestly many of the people involved are on both projects.
We got your decadent Dark Elves right here.
The feats in the 2007 version are the perfect example of decadent bullshit filler material. Shit like Staggering Critical is in here. It's a feat that sits on top of the Improved Critical feat chain and requires a Base Attack Bonus of +12 and the result is that when you critical strike with your weapons your target gets slowed for 1 round. You could hand that ability out at 2nd level and no one would care because it would hardly ever matter. But beyond that, there's nothing particularly “Drow” about that feat. It could be in any book, and indeed probably was. There's a very real chance they printed that exact feat in a few other books. People definitely wrote up this feat with very minor alterations in 4th edition, 5th edition, and even Pathfinder (where it hands out the actual staggered condition). And no one fucking cares!
Feat bloat isn't the only sin here, but it's worth mentioning that the way D&D handed out feats and the way D&D designed feats were two entirely different things. Drow characters start out being able to cast darkness and there are feats like At Home In The Deep, Blend Into Shadows, and Fade Into Darkness, Instinctive Darkness, Intensify Darkness, Master of Shadow that either modify, enhance, or complement that ability...and none of them are worth a feat slot. Taken together, they might be worth a feat slot, but it's still just a couple tricks contingent on a single ability. Nobody in their right mind was going to take a bunch of feats so they could play with a spell-like ability of a level 2 spell.
And that's before you get to any of the feats that directly modify Spell-Like Abilities which you aren't going to take. If this were Mutants & Masterminds, and you were building a Drow from a big pool of points and feats were cheap and easy, you might well invest in some of those, because with another modifiers you could make darkness your schtick and it might be amazing. But in regular d20, you're behind the power curve a lot if you're investing in these feats. These are the kind of bullshit feats that a pedantic Mister Cavern might layer on to an NPC designed to give the PCs a hard time in a specific situation where their ability gives them a surprising advantage...and we have a term for that:
Closet trolls.
As Frank said, most of the feats don't actually require you to explicitly be a drow to take them. This is good, because it gives people a reason to buy the book, even if the feats themselves are largely shit. I'm not sure which ones you'd actually take - Poison Spell and Umbral Spell, maybe? I could see a Fighter/Mage type that specialized in touch spells use Poison Spell just for added "fuck you," and if you already have darkvision Umbral Spell might be a good way to negate magical light sources - but I'd still have made it a 0-spell level adjustment. No, I still can't say these are good feats to take.
There is some clues as to Drow material culture in the various equipment and prestige classes in the two books. The pieces do not add up to a complete picture in any meaningful way.
There is just so much fucking wrong with that. I think it starts with the fact that Ranger and Druid abilities actually work just fine in underground natural areas – and that's most of the Underdark. But also Cavestalkers suck spider dick.For the drow who pursue the life of a ranger or druid – normally impractical classes for members of a subterranean race – the existence of the cavestalker is validation for this unconventional choice.
Suck it. The Cavestalker already did, so it's not like we're making you go first.
The 1991 version goes on about various Drow swag for 26 pages. Now most of this is given to long winded rants about how radiation has makes shit special in various incoherent ways. The nominal purpose of all this is so that there will be items that the Drow strike teams can use against the players that the players won't be able to keep forever. Which is the core problem of this as far as actually having a culture that can generate role playing and storytelling opportunities, there's basically nothing there. This is all very shallowly an attempt to cover a perceived game mechanical need rather than an attempt to make anything even vaguely applicable to the world building portion of the game design.
And let's not forget: the perceived game mechanical requirement to have enemies that had equipment roughly as good as what the player characters were using without letting the player characters get extra copies of player-relevant equipment was perception. There's no particular reason why shit couldn't work like Diablo and just have swag that was slightly not as good as the rare swag you were actually using drop off of monsters constantly.
The existence of rare items means that medium level characters could actually fight enemies equipped entirely with “common” magic items all the fucking time and it wouldn't have meant shit.
Drow should have some giant fucking spider-farms. Spider-breeding should be a major occupation, the harvesting and manufacture of spider silk and items made from spider-silk should be a major Drow industry. Spidersilk to Drow should be like wool to the British. If the Drow ever had an industrial revolution, it would involve using watermills to drive looms for spidersilk socks to sell to the duergar. But nobody seems to want to write that, for reasons I don't understand.
As long as the game intends to have wealth by level be a viable gate on character power, having a prohibitive cost on poisons meant that poison of any kind simply might as well not exist. 3.5 was extremely terrible about that, and the only time players ever used poisons was when they figured out that they could mass manufacture temporary poison with creation spells. And of course, once you can do that, the existence of lower or even medium end poisons is meaningless – obviously you're going to create the baddest, nastiest, smelliest, most lethal poisons in the game using those methods.
It means that fucking no one is ever going to spend a pound of gold to get a single application of roach paste for their sword. Because roach paste is almost literally shit (it makes people sick).
Or you could get a poo stick.
Let me do a quick rundown of the prestige classes:
Arachnomancers - Gain spider magic, turn into spiders. This is a fiddly class that's technically open to arcane or divine casters, but the requirements are geared toward arcane. Also, you don't want to turn into a giant spider. It never helps.
Cavestalker - 10-level prestige class to be better at fighting in caves. Which involves negating a lot of difficulties for fighting in caves that Mister Cavern isn't going to think to apply anyway.
Demonbinder - Warlock prestige class, because D&D is still allergic to actually binding demons. Involves a new resource, Damnation Points. If this sounds a lot like Binding magic from the Tome of Magic, well...yeah, ToM came out the year before. And yet, it sucked so hard, the Demonbinder is not officially a Binder PrC! They went out of their way to not involve any ToM mechanics or references at all.
Dread Fang of Lolth - Thief PrC that gains Sudden Strike in place of Sneak Attack. So...Drow Ninja PrC? The thing about SS is all the decent feats/class feature expansions are based on Sneak Attack.
Eye of Lolth - Cleric/Thief or Cleric/Scout PrC that...gives you thief upgrades? The prerequisites for this class are insane given the actual abilities it gives you. I guess you'll be a well-rounded character by the end of it, but that's still like 14-16th level, long after you've stopped playing.
Insidious Corrupter - Wants to be a Pornomancer, is not a Pornomancer. 5 spellcasting levels in a 10-level PrC make this small in the pants.
Kinslayer - Another interminable variation on the Slayer PrC, this time aimed at elves. These all suck, avoid.
I feel like I should have more to say about all this material, because there is a lot of it. But it was almost all “player” materials that were deliberately crafted to be hard or impossible for players to use.
It would be one thing if this was all “flavor balanced” where the authors had made an elaborate castle in the sky with a fully fleshed out culture that was interesting to talk about but didn't quite have any hooks to sink into for the actual game. I totally understand why that shit happens. That's a second order game design problem. But this is just a first order game design problem. This shit is designed to be hard to use in a game, and it is. That's fucked up.
What this really points to is that while the Drow themes aren't terribly strong, they are present. They are the dicks with a spiders and shadows motif. I can imagine what a Drow bedroom looks like, which is more than I can say for Dark Ones or Xvarts or any of several dozen other bad guy races in D&D. So if I wanted to play a grim 90s hero from a monster race (and let's be honest: in the 90s I very much wanted to do that), the Drow were deeper than any of the other options on the table. Which is sad, but there we go.
And the fact that the D&D authors kept acting like people wanting to actually play Drow was some sort of personal insult was extremely weird and lame.
The lack of thought that went into the drow is kind of telling. I don't know if they thought "Evil elves" would write themselves or what, but quite clearly that is not the case here, and not just because they wouldn't actually give the drow any of the elf toys to play with (even if they never specifically denied them the right to use said toys). The 2007 version at least bends over to make the character options as "friendly to non-drow as possible," but that just means this is a sourcebook people dip into for an ill-advised feat, spell, or prestige class, not to design a drow character or figure out how drow live and function.
At this point, they should just let Drowtales write the fluff and be done with it. They've put more thought into this than any of the game designers ever have.