Indeed, it appears the lore behind Driders has changed. This isn't 100% surprising because the lore behind some others monsters has changed, as has that of Corellon and Lolth. The new lore isn't too bad though, and does offer the ability to throw groups of Drow working in support with Driders. Seems pretty cool. I'd bet reading through the entire MM will reveal a few other creatures that have had their past altered somewhat.
Cheers! :)
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Hate to admit it, but i've been playing it this way for years. It does make sense, after all. Of course, Driders are extremely rare in Drow Cities. This would include high level Drow Clerics.
Basically, to earn your "legs," one had to pass numerous tests.
Some of those tests would include:
1...High level
2...Accomplishing something near impossible
3...I could go on, but let us just say, "DM's prerogative."
You see, high level alone wouldnt do it, for anyone can earn plenty of levels over the centuries.
All this being said, i am looking forward to seeing how similar 4.0 Driders are to my own.
Thoth-Amon
It always baffled me how this was a punishment... "Now I have tons of spell like abilities as well as my old spell-casting? Thanks Lloth!"
I always thought the Drow had misunderstood what Lolth wanted with Driders. To the Drow, being transformed into a Drider after the test was to fail the test and be cast out. I always figured that to Lolth, passing the test meant you were transformed in her likeness. She just didn't bother to inform her priestesses.
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I always thought the Drow had misunderstood what Lolth wanted with Driders. To the Drow, being transformed into a Drider after the test was to fail the test and be cast out. I always figured that to Lolth, passing the test meant you were transformed in her likeness. She just didn't bother to inform her priestesses.
I don't have the books here, but there's a scene in one of Salvatore's novels, and I think it's the first time outside of Gygax's Queen of the Demobweb Pits where we really see driders, where one of Drizzt's brothers displeases a priestess and he is turned into a drider in a ceremony and then exiled to the greater Underdark.
Someone who's recently read the first Drizzt trilogy help me out; maybe I'm making this up.
I've always really hated the old way, tell you the truth. Why would a goddess curse a failed subject to look just like her? That never made any sense. Why not just eat them, or make them erupt in boils that hatch forth a bunch of little spiders to bite them forever? Certainly THAT seems like a punishment. I'd always toyed with the idea of using driders somehow, because they were very iconic and cool. The crazy schemer who is hunted all the time and can't ever do anything gig just made it too tough. I mean has there ever been an adventure that featured a cool signature drider? I can't think of any.
Now they're the big cool drow guys leading a whole party of big cool drow guys. I gotta' say I like it a lot better.
Really a lot of the changes in story (giants, fey, demons, etc.) do two great things for me. They paint a cool new world--and they set 4e apart from 3rd edition so I can continue to play both rather than feeling like the new stuff somehow replaces the old. They feel really like two separate things now and I really dig that.
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...Really a lot of the changes in story (giants, fey, demons, etc.) do two great things for me. They paint a cool new world--and they set 4e apart from 3rd edition so I can continue to play both rather than feeling like the new stuff somehow replaces the old. They feel really like two separate things now and I really dig that.
I like that. Nicely put.
I did it the same way in Forgotten Realms, much to the chagrin of one player who really read up on that stuff.
I'm bothered by this, because it takes long established traditions, and without reason tears it apart. Also, this idea that being turned into a semblance of your god is a blessing only makes sense if your god isn't an insane demon from the abyss, from that perspective basically ANYTHING could be a curse or blessing, she's a goddess of CHAOS, her whims don't have to make sense.
That said, I do prefer the idea of driders being elite drow, I really liked it when the idea was presented in Eberron.
Some of the story changes were a burr in my saddle as well at first. But the more I think about it the more I realize that maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon about change. I think most DMs who use Drow think that Driders are pretty damn cool, but the problem with them was you couldn't use them and Drow in the same place since the Driders were supposed to be shameful outcasts. Now you can use them all together for some great encounters.
After reading through the MM and letting it digest for a while I think I'm starting to become open minded about a lot of the changes... I'm not even all that mad about Succubi anymore.
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Some of the story changes were a burr in my saddle as well at first. But the more I think about it the more I realize that maybe I'm just being a curmudgeon about change. I think most DMs who use Drow think that Driders are pretty damn cool, but the problem with them was you couldn't use them and Drow in the same place since the Driders were supposed to be shameful outcasts. Now you can use them all together for some great encounters.
After reading through the MM and letting it digest for a while I think I'm starting to become open minded about a lot of the changes... I'm not even all that mad about Succubi anymore.
I can't wait until my books get here; do you think the MM changes will completely translate over to the FRCS? When they list driders in the MM, are they FR-specific, or D&D-general? I wonder how hard it would be to keep some original FR fluff?
some of the fluff changes that I have read about have annoyed me a great deal... this is not one of them... nothing wrong with using either origin for driders (or even both in different circumstances).
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some of the fluff changes that I have read about have annoyed me a great deal... this is not one of them... nothing wrong with using either origin for driders (or even both in different circumstances).
That's what I was really asking; drow of Faerûn and drow of Eberron are very different, so I would guess it wouldn't be too hard to run them likewise (and driders) in 4e-general.
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The reason why driders were hated was because they were an imperfect form, caught half way between a drow and a spider. The drow recognizes the driders as failures in one of loths tests, therefore they are weak and should be killed. The driders feel shame and hatred towards the drow because of their transformation. The fixation with spiders is also part of why drow are insane, because they wish to emulate the spider, which is the sign of their god; which they can't do without magic. The drider is like the half completed failure to this emulation, so the drow hate them for showing that they can't accomplish the emulation of their god.
The curse I always imagined was social stigma and being thrown out of the whole power structure that is Drow society. Instead your are given a cusp of power which you are unable to effectively use to any advantage and your form simply reflect something that shoud have been seen as a blessing. A crazy ironic and poking thing to be put into after going through such promising rise.
You know, some of you guys really do scare me. Do you REALLY think that losing most of your intelligence, most of your instict, and your very soul is a fair trade to be turned into a slightly more efficient killing machine?Gods, some of you remind me of why I so dislike so many D&D players... Seriously it's the only game where such a curse would be thought of as POSITIVE character development.
Dude, check out the Drider's stats. They have a 15 Int and 16 Wis. Not exactly raving beasts. Heck, even their Cha is 16. I'm not sure where you think they're losing any intelligence, or being reduced to base instinct?
As for trading your soul for becoming a more efficient killing machine ... hell I think thats probably close to 50% or more of the evil plans PCs spend so much time foiling! :)
Contributor
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Exactly! From the beginning I wondered how this could be seen as a curse!You know, some of you guys really do scare me. Do you REALLY think that losing most of your intelligence, most of your instict, and your very soul is a fair trade to be turned into a slightly more efficient killing machine?
Gods, some of you remind me of why I so dislike so many D&D players... Seriously it's the only game where such a curse would be thought of as POSITIVE character development.
First of all, your comments are straying into the territory of personal attacks.
Second of all, most of the comments have been trying to reconcile Lolth's position of creating Driders as a curse, or the position of Drow society.
Maybe an individual drow might not like to lose their sanity, free will and intelligence, but it sounds like a perfect minion for Lolth, and a prized member of any Drow household to me.
You know, some of you guys really do scare me. Do you REALLY think that losing most of your intelligence, most of your instict, and your very soul is a fair trade to be turned into a slightly more efficient killing machine?Gods, some of you remind me of why I so dislike so many D&D players... Seriously it's the only game where such a curse would be thought of as POSITIVE character development.
Dude, check out the Drider's stats. They have a 15 Int and 16 Wis. Not exactly raving beasts. Heck, even their Cha is 16. I'm not sure where you think they're losing any intelligence, or being reduced to base instinct?
As for trading your soul for becoming a more efficient killing machine ... hell I think thats probably close to 50% or more of the evil plans PCs spend so much time foiling! :)
If anything, they got smarter and more cunning than they ever were before. Lolth can make you bigger, stronger, faster...
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Exactly! From the beginning I wondered how this could be seen as a curse!You know, some of you guys really do scare me. Do you REALLY think that losing most of your intelligence, most of your instict, and your very soul is a fair trade to be turned into a slightly more efficient killing machine?
Me? No. But if I was a dark elf, particularly a male dark elf, living in a city where I can be whipped to death in the street by any female who decides that I didn't bow deeply enough or dragged off to the temple and sacrificed because she wants to ask Lolth a question and I was the first dude she saw on the street?
[Also, statwise, they *gain* intelligence. 2 to 4 pts of Intelligence, Wisdom *and* Charisma, meaning that they are smarter, more perceptive and insightful and more self-assured and confident!]
Yeah. I'd definitely want to be a feared boogeyman that the other dark elves whisper about, instead of living my life in endless terror, waiting for some female to butcher me on a whim, and knowing that even my fellow males are only waiting for me to show a moment's weakness so that they can advance themselves by screwing me over.
As for the 'losing your soul' thing, it's D&D. *Everybody* in the game setting has already sold their soul. Some to Lolth, some to Pelor, some to Mystra. Either way, it's spoken for, and some settings, such as the Realms *require* you to pick a patron god, and have hard-and-fast rules for what horrible things happen to your soul (made into a wall of eternal suffering around the castle of bone) if you *don't* pledge it to a specific god(dess) before dying!
I'm pretty clear on the difference between reality and fantasy. Drider-hood, for Drow, is pretty darn buff, and far preferable to their day-to-day existence (unless one is fortunate enough to have born female, and managed to survive the brutal and bloody sibling rivalries that are 'childhood' to become a priestess of Lolth).
In real-life, I'm human, and being some nasty spider-thing would be pretty gross. I didn't think that anyone would so confuse reality and D&D as to think that *I* wanted to be a Drider.
I mean really, they don't appear to be anatomically correct, ifyaknowhatImean, nudge, nudge, say no more. I'm rather attached to some of the features of my lower half. :)
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RPG Superstar 2009 Top 32, 2010 Top 8
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Typing on a blackberry so bear with me.
First, vance, chill. I don't like the new 'driders are cool' vibe in 4x but that doedn't excuse hostility to posters. As others have pointed out, a lot of history has gone fwoom in 4x.
Grimcleaver, an optimistic viewpoint. To your credit I first dismissed your feelings as 4x cheerleading, but then I thought about Pathfinder gnomes vs. Tinker gnomes, or the Tolkien/2e/kender/3e halflings and realized it's not disimilar. Thank you.
As to the previous editions' cursed driders, I always saw it as a curse.
My two c-bills anyway
Yeah, its definately a curse. Look at today's day and age, or even back in the medieval times. If you were a freak of nature, you were hated by everybody. And that was just if you were missing an arm or leg maybe, or if you had a bad birthmark.
Plus, check out which portion of a drow's body gets changed to spider form. Waist down. That's gotta suck, not being able to "get with the ladies" anymore. So yeah, you are pretty badass in a fight, but unless you want to implant some eggs in somebody, you'll have one horrible case of blue balls.
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I think the main point to be made is, becoming a drider is viewed as a curse by drow society, therefore it is a curse. No matter the benefits, it is socially considered abhorrent. The same way most cultures would consider being turned to a vampire or werewolf to be a bad thing. No matter what power you gain, if you are raised to feel it is a curse, you will view it as such. Some people deviate from the social norm, but they are just that, deviant. We can sit here and go 'Hey cool, why wouldn't I want this?' because we were not raised to be disgusted and horrified at the thought.
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Also, as one poster has mentioned, in the Realms, very specific things happen to sould who have not pledged allegiance to a god - they spend a miserable life as part of a wall and then fade into nothing.
So what happens to someone who DID pledge allegiance to a goddess (Lolth) but then ticked her off so much that she CURSED them?
Yeah, great, you can kill a party of 5th level adventurers, and any number of drow because you are so powerful.
Have fun in the afterlife, whatever the heck that is for you!
"Drider's are better than drow, so how is it a curse?" Because the original creators of the subrace said it was. Changing that is a vast change for some peoples concept of the game world - too much of a change.
It would be like saying that in the Realms halflings aren't friendly, lucky hobbits, now they are manipulative kleptomaniacs...
It would be like saying that in the Realms halflings aren't friendly, lucky hobbits, now they are manipulative kleptomaniacs...
They just "luckily" happen to find YOUR stuff in THEIR bags! Hey, what are the chances your gold would end up in my pouch? Boy, I'm lucky today!
Cheers! ;)
In real-life, I'm human, and being some nasty spider-thing would be pretty gross. I didn't think that anyone would so confuse reality and D&D as to think that *I* wanted to be a Drider.
Heck, look at the new Hulk movie. How many of us would want to turn into the Abomination? But the character liked it.
Suffice to say, my chief objection was the idea that the 'stats were so cool it's worth it' while simultaneously ignoring the actual RP effects within the setting. It's a trend of Dungeons and Dragons play that I really think hurts the industry as a whole, reducing it to a numbers urinal game.
I think you found the wrong target. Especially with me. I agree with everything you're saying. Curses should not be cool combat upgrades. They should be curses. Absolutely.
Now granted, while I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the novels, I do read the monster manual entries and all the cosmology write-ups as intently as I can. The flavor text for me has always been the part of gaming that's worth keeping. Mechanics I could live with or without.
That said, I've never read any of the stuff that says that Lolth appearing in her drider form is a particularly hateful form to her. It's not a bad patch in some ways, but I think you're confounding your homebrew rationalizations for things (which aren't bad, I gotta' admit) for stuff that's actually in the setting--that we are all supposed to know.
That said, I've wrestled a long time to get driders to work in the game. They're usually painted as hateful outsiders looking to ambush people and amass power. They don't get along with drow, and can't get along with normal folk. It makes them hard to use as anything other than Rargh-school dungeon baddies. I hate that.
I'd love to see them be more like ettercaps--wretched monsterous creatures that are like boogeymen, inhuman and depraved. That's a great spin on them. In some ways, I don't know that I would hate ettercaps being used in that capacity.
That said, look at a drider. Not in stats--but in terms of art. They are beautiful, powerful creatures. I like the idea of that being spun into a kind of evil divine champion character. Certainly do not take that that I don't like vile curses or that I try to turn everything into happy sunshine or a nice combat bennie. I LOVE dark awful stuff. I love deep story and character. I'm on your side. That said, I do think the revisions of storyline in the new edition have taken things in some fun new directions. Directions that aren't just appealing in a hack and slash way--cause I absolutely HATE that crap. They're appealing in cool story ways. That is what I love.
The novels aren't the source material for driders. They're a big effort to rationalize the source material. It's like pointing to the novelization of a Star Wars movie and claiming the novel as the source material; no, the film is. Similarly, for the drider, the game is—specifically, the 1e Monster Manual II.
By the source material, the punishment for failure of Lolth's tests was outcasting combined with transformation into a more powerful creature, combining all pre-transformation abilities with those of the drider form, excepting only a reduction in magic resistance. Full intelligence was retained.
As I saw it, the things that made it clearly a punishment were 1) being outcast, and 2) becoming sterile. (If driders are created by magic transformation, they don't have baby driders. It seems unlikely they have baby drow. So failure of the test means you are forever cut off from drow society, and an end to your lineage.)
Okay, if you're being punished, why are you being transformed? Because Lolth is a goddess of chaos and evil, and driders are more effective at spreading havoc and woe among the non-drow of the Underdark than untransformed drow outcasts. She's not transforming you to punish you (except by denying you offspring), she's transforming you simply because it furthers her purposes.