Quote from: Shrieking Banshee on May 25, 2021, 01:15:27 AM

A neat idea I heard is that Elves naturally soak in their environments. Put elves in a swamp and in a few generations you get swamp elves. Same stuff with Deserts or even underwater. They are not so much a sub-species as a regional variant.

As such they could interbreed without distilling the species, as its dependant on location, not bloodline.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 25, 2021, 09:28:59 AM

Quote from: Torque2100 on May 25, 2021, 09:08:44 AM
*snip*

Hm. I was going to argue this, but then I remembered how some films (Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) play off that as well. It can be very jarring to find out the pretty girl is as lethal as any cobra or grizzly bear.

I think it's a weird outgrowth of the old chivalric notions, coupled with leftover 1950's and before thoughts on how women were not expected to perform the same tasks as men.

Quote from: Torque2100 on May 25, 2021, 09:57:26 AM

Quote from: Ghostmaker on May 25, 2021, 09:28:59 AM

Quote from: Torque2100 on May 25, 2021, 09:08:44 AM
*snip*

Hm. I was going to argue this, but then I remembered how some films (Fatal Attraction, The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) play off that as well. It can be very jarring to find out the pretty girl is as lethal as any cobra or grizzly bear.

I think it's a weird outgrowth of the old chivalric notions, coupled with leftover 1950's and before thoughts on how women were not expected to perform the same tasks as men.

You are absolutely right.  It seems to be an outgrowth of Victorian attitudes towards women combined with Romanticist notions that beauty and ugliness are reflections of the inner self.  "Ugly outside, ugly and sinful inside.  Beautiful outside, beautiful and virtuous inside." 

SJWs have pointed this out and I feel like it's their "broken clock" moment.  A moment they immediately undermine by leaning into and exploiting it to get their way.

Quote
Rakes roaming the streets in Erelhei-Cinlu are bands of bitter
youths, often outcasts. The band will be composed of either
Drow, Drow-elves, and half-Drow (human cross) or Drow, half-
Drow, and (1-2) half-orcs. The former sort of group is 40% likely,
the latter 60%. Drow crosses will have magic resistance equal
to their Dark Elven heritage but no spell ability. The bands with
elven-Drow members will be hostile to all they perceive as part
of the system which prevails in their world, and the Dark Elves
with them are of the few who are neither totally degenerate
nor wholly evil—they are haters of the society around them
and see no good in it.

Quote from: David Johansen on May 25, 2021, 09:48:44 AM
Alternately, the environment might be shaping itself to the elves.  They are magical after all.  Bob the elf likes frogs and snakes and reeds and the swamp grows up around him.

Quote from: Torque2100 on May 25, 2021, 09:08:44 AM
Drow have always been problematic (in the Pre-woke sense as in "causes problems") because they trigger something in the Western mind that I like to call for lack of a better term, the "White Knight Effect."

You can write a character who is male.  Describe them as ugly, handsome or beautiful, doesn't matter.  Your players will jump on a male BBEG while he's down and chop him into pieces the size of croutons without a second thought.   They will do this no matter how sympathetic the character is.  No matter how much he might have reasons for what he does. Your players recognize that anyone willing to do the things that a BBEG is capable of doing is simply too dangerous.

Make the villain an attractive woman, however and you instantly short circuit all reasoning.  No matter how vile and sociopathic this evil woman has proven herself to be, your players will tie themselves in knots to justify letting her go at best or at worst actually justifying and excusing her evil acts.  The default Drow mold: and exotic society dominated by scantily clad, dark-skinned exotic women, hits all of the White Knight buttons like a godsdamned jackhammer.

I got a wonderful demonstration of this effect firsthand in my Cyberpunk RED campaign.  My PCs were tasked with hunting a serial killer whose "work" had ended up on the XBD market.  One of the strongest leads the PCs had was this XBD of the killer's crimes. So they went to hunt down a BD seller who was rumored to have a recording of one of the serial killer's crimes.   They found the dealer to be a fat, greasy creep living out of the back of a van.  The PCs were only to happy to torture him to find out who sold him the BD.  The source of these BDs turned out to be a team of 2 sisters who had stolen trophy BDs from the killer and were editing and selling them.  Now my PCs had been only too happy to brutally murder the man, they literally mag-dumped a 10mm SMG into his chest and point-blank range.  However, the instant the criminals were young attractive women suddenly it was a moral issue.  You can't do nasty things to women, that's wrong.  Now that attractive women are involved suddenly we have to be better.

As tempting as it is to blame SJWs for this, the White Knight effect absolutely pre-dates the SJW invasion of nerd media.  This has been a specfically American hang up for a long time.  The multi-decade obsession with "redeeming" Drow and Succubi should be proof enough of this as is the contrasting treatment of men vs women villains in most media.

If SJWs can be blamed for anything, it's massively accelerating this trend. Just check out "Cruella" a movie that attempts to justify the actions of a woman who wanted to make a fur coat by skinning puppies if you need proof.

This is very much an artifact of Anglosphere culture.  I've recently been on a Manga and Eurocomics kick: reading Berserk, the Incal, the Metabarons and Pepe Moreno's Rebel.  Japanese and Spaniards do not have the same hangups, it seems.

Quote from: thedungeondelver on May 25, 2021, 10:36:13 AM
"Good" drow were already a thing. 

Quote
Rakes roaming the streets in Erelhei-Cinlu are bands of bitter
youths, often outcasts. The band will be composed of either
Drow, Drow-elves, and half-Drow (human cross) or Drow, half-
Drow, and (1-2) half-orcs. The former sort of group is 40% likely,
the latter 60%. Drow crosses will have magic resistance equal
to their Dark Elven heritage but no spell ability. The bands with
elven-Drow members will be hostile to all they perceive as part
of the system which prevails in their world, and the Dark Elves
with them are of the few who are neither totally degenerate
nor wholly evil—they are haters of the society around them
and see no good in it.

From D3 Vault of the Drow.

It's as I have discussed in my two most recent livestreams: 1e AD&D did it first, and best.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron on May 22, 2021, 12:29:20 AM
This is one of the reasons I like the incomplete games, like AD&D1e, Classic Traveller and so on - rules with no setting, or at most an implied setting. Because when you have a published setting it'll be warped by commercial (eg licensed ones, like the Firefly game which was based on the movie but not the tv series) or ideological nonsense.

But if you have your own setting then you can do whatever you want, like the Chinese bootleg toys - my favourite was the Thomas the Tank Engine Transformer. I don't want your stupid ideas, I have my own!

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 25, 2021, 08:28:22 AM
There's basically only three kinds of elves: high elves, wood elves, and dark elves. Everything else is just a variation on that.

Quote from: Shasarak on May 25, 2021, 06:49:22 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 25, 2021, 08:28:22 AM
There's basically only three kinds of elves: high elves, wood elves, and dark elves. Everything else is just a variation on that.

Basically there is just one type of Elf and that is Elf. 

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 25, 2021, 07:12:56 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on May 25, 2021, 06:49:22 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 25, 2021, 08:28:22 AM
There's basically only three kinds of elves: high elves, wood elves, and dark elves. Everything else is just a variation on that.

Basically there is just one type of Elf and that is Elf. 

You've almost bit into Tasha's poison. Just take the next step and say that there is only one type of PC "race" and you can pick a few items from a small menu of options and then cosmetically skin them to your liking.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 25, 2021, 08:57:22 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 25, 2021, 07:12:56 PM

Quote from: Shasarak on May 25, 2021, 06:49:22 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 25, 2021, 08:28:22 AM
There's basically only three kinds of elves: high elves, wood elves, and dark elves. Everything else is just a variation on that.

Basically there is just one type of Elf and that is Elf. 

You've almost bit into Tasha's poison. Just take the next step and say that there is only one type of PC "race" and you can pick a few items from a small menu of options and then cosmetically skin them to your liking.

I think There's a decent point to be made that ability bonuses discourage players from creating characters that don't fit into the standard box, and encourage special snowflake race bloat.

Quote from: Shasarak on May 26, 2021, 12:27:48 AMEvery PC is a special snowflake.  Why try and fight it?