| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
The best thing about PF2 for my money is that it's very transparent what effects "give people twice as many feats" or "give people two heritages" is going to have. So everybody should feel free to mutate the rules to make them work however they need to work for a given game.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
The best thing about PF2 for my money is that it's very transparent what effects "give people twice as many feats" or "give people two heritages" is going to have. So everybody should feel free to mutate the rules to make them work however they need to work for a given game.
Sure, but I think folks would appreciate the ability for Drow Tieflings to exist in the lore and in Society play.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I would like drow to exist as a separate ancestry for the reasons Keftiu states, so you could make drow with versatile heritages. Demonic drow are cool.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I would like drow to exist as a separate ancestry for the reasons Keftiu states, so you could make drow with versatile heritages. Demonic drow are cool.
Hard to say if this post will be considered on or off-topic....
Honestly, when a High Seas book comes, Aquatic Elves should be a separate thing as well so you can have separate heritages for them rather than a single one added to the landlubbers... and also versatile... Maybe even including a Darklands Aquatic Elf heritage for Aquatic Drow.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
I'd be intrigued to see "Drow" become an ancestry archetype like the undead ones. That makes the most sense to me and fits the lore of Drow being able to be something you can become AND something you're born into. Make it able to use the level 1 ancestry feat, but otherwise its up to you when you opt in, or not.
You can also introduce stronger ancestry options using class feats instead of ancestry feats.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'd say have it be a heritage, but then give them a 1st-level ancestry feat that lets them take a 2nd heritage. I think that would balance everything out quite nicely.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
My job is to amplify what Paizo has made today, so I'd say, as others have above, that drow could be made with the cavern elf heritage and Otherworldly Magic feat.
Or the tiefling versatile heritage. Elven low-light vision would then become darkvision.
It would be easy enough to give either of these light sensitivity.
Additionally the drow of old were always more powerful than other 1st level characters, so I hypothesize that the drow people want is a bit out of balance for Pathfinder now. I think using the ancestry paragon, free archetype, or even dual class rules from the Gamemastery Guide would be worthy of consideration—perhaps sorcerer or sorcerer dedication.
That said, if/when Paizo makes a drow ancestry, as James described, I'd be fascinated to see it. He painted quite a picture.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I just don’t think most Elf feats would apply to Drow characters, and I think the Drow could easily have a full Ancestry’s worth of feats to themselves that wouldn’t fit Elves.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'd be intrigued to see "Drow" become an ancestry archetype like the undead ones. That makes the most sense to me and fits the lore of Drow being able to be something you can become AND something you're born into. Make it able to use the level 1 ancestry feat, but otherwise its up to you when you opt in, or not.
You can also introduce stronger ancestry options using class feats instead of ancestry feats.
Yes, have an Ancestry Archetype so that low-level Drow actually have iconic Drow abilities. It'd be kinda odd to run an Underdark campaign where the PCs are all defective compared to average kin. I mean, they'll still be behind the curve, but at least closer.
I'm not a fan of Dual-Class, but if a pseudo-version did provide the PC Drow (and other Underdark Ancestries) to blossom faster, I'd be open to that, being the exceptional case that it is. It wouldn't balance with normal games, but the AP could be somewhat like Wrath of the Righteous where that's the normal for that particular story arc.
Of course, that might open the door to the more popular races all getting faux "classes" too, for certain types of games. Not sure the interest level as it's inherently unbalancing in a system where balance is a major draw.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Additionally the drow of old were always more powerful than other 1st level characters, so I hypothesize that the drow people want is a bit out of balance for Pathfinder now.
I don't think this is actually true looking at the PF1 drow and ARG lists them as 14 points, which puts them in the same category as aasimar, tieflings, androids and dhampir: in fact, aasimar and android clock in costing MORE points so if they can be made, I don't see how drow would be an issue especially with spell resistance taken out of the equation [even though it's a double edged sword as it took an action to drop it for friendly spells].
Now if we're going back farther than 3.5 d&d wasn't substantially different from PF1. Further than that, unless you're talking about the nobles the most overpowered part was the ability to use 2 weapons for additional attacks with no penalty.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
My prediction for a Drow Ancestry would be:
Rare
Hit Points: 6
Size: Medium
Speed: 30
Boosts: Dex, Cha, Free
Flaws: Con
Languages: Undercommon, Elven, Additional based on Int
Greater Darkvision, Light Blindness.
As with all ancestries, most of the mechanics lie in heritages and feats.
Creative Director
|
| 11 people marked this as a favorite. |
I played a drow PC (Shensen) for a few years in Jason Nelson's campaign a while back, using the ARG rules, and the experience grew more frustrating the higher level I got. The fact that I had to earn more experience points than other PCs meant that I kinda lagged behind the other PCs, so the more high level things got, the more I really felt that throttling on my character level. Add to that the fact that as you get higher level, the bulk of the benefits of being a drow began to diminish. Ability score boosts got less impactful at higher level, for example, and the spell-like abilities were generally too low-level to be much use. The BIG benefit of spell resistance was nice when we fought a spellcasting foe... but at higher levels that got to be more of a disadvantage, because not every monster cast magic—and in fact, the most often that my spell resistance came into play was against other players. More often than not, in the middle of combat when I didn't have the luxury of deliberately lowering my spell resistance, I'd end up missing out on group buff spells... or worse, missed out on healing. Shensen died at least once because she was unconscious and bleeding out and thus couldn't take an action to lower her spell resistance and no one in the party was able to get through my spell resistance with their healing magic (and of course potions, which are minimum level effects, were pretty much useless).
AKA: I really REALLY love how 2nd edition's Ancestry Feats allow for those sorts of elements to be part of your character that don't work against you and remain viable at high level, all of which means I'm 100% on team drow ancestry rather than "fake it" with a heritage. Plus, yeah... aasimar and tiefling drow are the bomb.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
For what it’s worth, I think I’d vote for the Drow ancestry being Rare by default, and not include light sensitivity (unless it is part of a heritage).
As far as the elf/elf debate goes, rather than ask why Drow are a separate ancestry from Elf, I’d argue the opposite direction for adding more Core-adjacent ancestries to an Darklands sourcebook.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I feel like all the Darklands ancestries are going to be rare for the simple reason that "people don't usually leave the Darklands to go live on the Surface, which is where the huge majority of games are set". It's not punitive any more than making Automatons, Fleshwarps, or Shisk rare. There probably aren't more Drow active on the surface than there are Anadi or Sprites.
You can, after all, change the rarity of ancestries to fit better in a specific campaign or setting. Like Blood Lords lists "Skeleton" as "Strongly Recommended" and that's a rare option too. I would expect if we get a Darklands AP all of the Darklands ancestries would likewise be strongly recommended.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
I played a drow PC (Shensen) for a few years in Jason Nelson's campaign a while back, using the ARG rules, and the experience grew more frustrating the higher level I got. The fact that I had to earn more experience points than other PCs meant that I kinda lagged behind the other PCs
I feel I have to point out that this doesn't follow the APG rules: the level adjustment on page 219 of the ARG is for the entire group taking the average Racial points of the group into account and also the level of the party level adjustment was reduced or removed every 5 levels. So if you were going by ARG, you should have never been behind because of a level adjustment. That and the chart starts at 20 Racial Points and Drow only have 14 so even a whole party of them doesn't trigger an adjustment [now a noble... that's 41 RP!]. Now if we were talking about a 3.5 d&d drow, they had an individual Level Adjustment of +2 so that seems closer to what you're talking about. Or it might be some kind of mix and match 3.5 and pf1 maybe?
I'm mainly pointing this out to supplement my point on Aaron Shanks post, that the last drow for pathfinder isn't a powerhouse or out of place with the races we already have. I think background and their place in pathfinder lore is much bigger impediment that their racial abilities from PF1 [or 5e d&d]: I don't think we have to worry about disappointment on the power level of an PF2 drow unless they are comparing it to a noble or a much earlier version of the game.
|
Creative Director
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I played a drow PC (Shensen) for a few years in Jason Nelson's campaign a while back, using the ARG rules, and the experience grew more frustrating the higher level I got. The fact that I had to earn more experience points than other PCs meant that I kinda lagged behind the other PCsI feel I have to point out that this doesn't follow the APG rules: the level adjustment on page 219 of the ARG is for the entire group taking the average Racial points of the group into account and also the level of the party level adjustment was reduced or removed every 5 levels. So if you were going by ARG, you should have never been behind because of a level adjustment. That and the chart starts at 20 Racial Points and Drow only have 14 so even a whole party of them doesn't trigger an adjustment [now a noble... that's 41 RP!]. Now if we were talking about a 3.5 d&d drow, they had an individual Level Adjustment of +2 so that seems closer to what you're talking about. Or it might be some kind of mix and match 3.5 and pf1 maybe?
I'm mainly pointing this out to supplement my point on Aaron Shanks post, that the last drow for pathfinder isn't a powerhouse or out of place with the races we already have. I think background and their place in pathfinder lore is much bigger impediment that their racial abilities from PF1 [or 5e d&d]: I don't think we have to worry about disappointment on the power level of an PF2 drow unless they are comparing it to a noble or a much earlier version of the game.
This wasn't a Pathfinder game; sorry for the confusion. We were using 3.5 rules for level adjustments and the like, several years before Pathfinder came along; wasn't the Advanced Race Guide but D&D's Savage Species that we were using.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Having been a fan of the Drow since ADnD’s D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth and subsequent writeups in D3 Vault of the Drow and the Fiend Folio I can attest to the allure of the hidden, deep dark elves. The “rakes” of Erelhei-Cinlu wandering in drunken shambles ready to shank unwelcome of just easy marks, the martial societies, the matriarchal world with male subjugation for the sole reason of being less beloved of Lolth, the power plays between the vying houses, the primacy of the clerics with their strange rods and the general technology of the dark irradiated arms and armor/hand crossbows; and most of all the slow burn of their reveal from T1 Village of Hommlet or the Slavelords campaign which you could entirely stitch together to make a T/A/G/D/Q 1-15! 15 adventures of maddeningly evil murderous fun. And through it all, the dark elves manipulating and masterminding/matriarchminding the surface world.
Lolth was always a big drawcard, a multiplanar meddler as revealed in Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits served by aberrant pseudopoddy yochlol handmaidens aboard what was essentially a vessel for plying the stars, planes, dimensions or space.
I’ve not really enjoyed the later iterations of Forgotten Realmy Menzoberranzan; PF1’s Dark Elf AP left me cold with a plot that seemed off-kilter and didn’t scratch a similar itch to the old-skool. Which is fine, times and tastes change.
As for what or who I would make with playable Drow in PF2? I guess this is less about the mechanics, because I’ll work with whatever is presented. There is nothing else to be done. I would prefer an ancestry, because the drow have always felt distinct enough from their surface cousins. Obviously, being the gonzo I am, feats for becoming a drider would be most welcome. I played a drider gladiatrix here on the Play by Post forums that also used some bent PF1 performance rules, it was a lot of fun playing a tortured soul who yearned for the half remembered/twisted memories of art and poetry of her regal/rich upbringing and who had to contend with viciousness and horror both in and out of the arena. The caste society of the both the drow and their servitors is a fascinating milieu ripe for intrigue and adventure. I can’t remember if she was the result of fleshwarping, or even if that is the origin of driders in Golarion but it makes a lot of sense. I did love the ADnD concept of driders being male adherents sent to a special test they always failed…so of course I made a female drider, not knowing they weren’t outre…
Beyond driders, I would agree that tiefling and aasimar drow are a favorite of mine. Mostly the tiefling variety, as the Cambions (half devils) of ADnD also made a significant impact on my young and febrile mind. What better than a Cambion Drow?*
So: drow Fiendish and Aberrant summoners write themselves. Witches and Swashbucklers also. Fungal, Insectile or Reptilian Druids haunt the stalagmites. Rangers on long scouts, barbarians as reavers on dark seas. Clerics warring internecine. Fighters of supreme prowess. Monks of ancient patterns and rituals. Rogues of a lavender bent, either of high agency or low cunning. A drow thaumaturge would be so incredibly fun to explore, the mix of ancient sunken lore and occult and martial might a continuing joy. A drow psychic? Sure. Kineticist? Absolutely. Wizards? Of course. Sorcerors of arachnid power? Yes please. Mighty magus wielding dark arts? Yup. And, given their pop-cultural fascination for hand-crossbows, I guess they would love gunnes. Especially beast guns.
It’s all informed by decades of enjoyment of the concept, and might not wedge in 100% with Golarion, but it all works for me. Any of these can appear in a strict evil darklands campaign, or on the surface, as rebels of law and goodness (so there, yes, Champions I guess!) or agents of evil and chaos. It isn’t the power level of previous rulesets I barely played, nor the mechanics, but the enigma of the dark, underground elves, who made their own way down and away, broke with their kin, forged anew, loved new lands, ways, and technologies and made a world with a strange yet familiar society and culture for all of us to draw from and be inspired by. In Golarion, James Jacob’s note on Blackstrand reminds me the most of Gygax’s fevered writings of Greyhawk’s Erelhei-Cinlu and the depraved pleasure city of Far Parathra sounds fascinating.
Though now that I think of it, some mechanics I can think of that would be very apt are the aftermath and deviant feats. They have so much potential for fleshwarpy, radiation filled exploration!
*
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
To James Jacobs - OK, that makes a lot more sense. I'll agree with you on the level adjustment for 3.5: when dealing with that, I always advocated for the use of the Unearthed Arcana rules for eliminating the adjustment as you leveled. For the drow that would ne removing 1 adjustment at 6th and the second at 9th [when you hit three times the level adjustment, the level adjustment is eligible to be decreased by 1].
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Having been a fan of the Drow since ADnD’s D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth and subsequent writeups in D3 Vault of the Drow and the Fiend Folio I can attest to the allure of the hidden, deep dark elves. The “rakes” of Erelhei-Cinlu wandering in drunken shambles ready to shank unwelcome of just easy marks, the martial societies, the matriarchal world with male subjugation for the sole reason of being less beloved of Lolth, the power plays between the vying houses, the primacy of the clerics with their strange rods and the general technology of the dark irradiated arms and armor/hand crossbows; and most of all the slow burn of their reveal from T1 Village of Hommlet or the Slavelords campaign which you could entirely stitch together to make a T/A/G/D/Q 1-15! 15 adventures of maddeningly evil murderous fun. And through it all, the dark elves manipulating and masterminding/matriarchminding the surface world.
Yes, yes, you can, and I have. :-)
Those are the Drow that I want, and which I agree have been watered down by other versions since. Jacobs and Mona have described themselves as Gygaxian way back when, and their Greyhawk Castle adventure shows a deep appreciation for Greyhawk lore, so hopefully we'll see an old school option which is probably only possible if balanced against Dual Classing.(Grognard reminiscing to follow...)
Used 3.0 rules, and at the very first encounter against the giant frogs one of the players joked how gross they were, but at least they weren't spiders...which grognards might recognize as the second encounter. I thought it'd be great to have actual fear of spiders at the table, but it turned out she had severe arachnophobia; couldn't function well with a faux spider on the battlemat. Oh, boy, had to do some replanning there and run-of-the-mill spiders all became poisonous beetles (that sometimes spun webs. Lolth wouldn't be prominent for a long while so I'd had time to rethink things.
Or not. We ended the campaign after defeating the fire giants (and three attempts to finally kill the dragon!). After twice fighting waves of giants in the earlier modules, we played the fire giant one more diplomatically (as frankly it'd take forever and have an inevitable outcome). The elf wizard failed his knowledge check on Drow so happily visited when Eclavdra beckoned him to come talk to her. That was bloody, but he survived the first round and escaped. :-)
I can't resist sharing the first encounter with the infamous dragon. The PCs had holed up outdoors in the token small hideaway. I rolled a 1 on a d20 for random encounters, then figured the odds were so low I'd roll again, getting another 1 so I guess at 1/400 something must have wandered in, maybe tracked them back. So I rolled again for the enemy's approximate power level, getting a 20, and yeah, it made sense to have the dragon respond to the events in the caverns. So it did, dispelling their protections which thankfully woke them all up in a most extreme panic. The PCs who needed to make the saving throw to survive the breath weapon did so, while many of the others failed (it was a large group w/ Leadership too). The players already had escape tactics, having fought together I believe 15 levels? Team A converged on one caster and Team B on another, with the casters readying actions to teleport out (or Dim Door depending). So poof, before the end of round one they'd hightailed it away w/o casualties.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Do you guys think it'd make more sense to gain Drow Noble abilities as ancestry feats, or have Drow Noble become an archetype? I imagine they'd probably be implemented as feats because IIRC Paizo has said they want to move away from ancestry-specific archetypes, but making it an archetype would also open up much more powerful options for that true noble feel.
Either way I hope the ability to become a noble follows the possible inclusion of drow. Playing a noble who was exiled, or fled as their powes matured to escape the knives of political rivals, sounds like a lot of fun.
Drow Noble stuff just feels like high level Ancestry Feats and just broadly being high level, IMO.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
It seems like it's almost more of a mixing the streams thing. Like, there are archetypes out there that have both class feats and skill feats. Should we have ancestries that accept class feats?
The real question isn't "archetype or not" - that's just dressing. The real question is whether an ancestry should represent a level of potential that cannot properly be fulfilled with ancestry feats and actually requires you to take from the class feat budget to make it happen.
Pro: the world of Golarion does have some intelligent ancestries that simply are more powerful than others. For a trivial example, there's no way to get anything resembling a satisfying "frost giant" out of just ancestry feats - not that making Frost Giants specifically into a viable ancestry is even remotely doable, but just to point out that the range is there. Asserting that we won't be dipping into any pool other than your ancestry feats means that we have three choices for any creatures that clock in as "naturally more powerful than humans". Either we don't let people play them at all, we retcon things so that they're at pretty much the same power level as everyone else, or we twist things so that PCs with those ancestries get a kind of anemic, unsatisfying version. Allowing the player to feed in class feats opens up potential for a significantly more powerful heritage, for those players who want to play such a character.
Con: Some folks might not like the narratives it suggests. Past that, any such ancestries would be uncommon, and probably rare. There's a real danger that those feats (if not deliberately made anemic themselves) would wind up being particularly useful for one or more builds, at which point half the fighters in Golarion suddenly decide they want to be Drow (or whatever the combination is) and stuff gets weird. From a balance perspective, it's a notable effort on behalf of an option that, hopefully, is pretty niche... and it continues to be part of the balance math from then on.
Basically, the amount of effort to make Drow (or whatever) Totally Awesome as a niche ancestry with their own bespoke set of superpowers is quite a lot more than the amount necessary to make them a functional ancestry with more or less the same rough power level as everyone else's ancestry, and the payoff isn't a lot higher. Making Drow Nobles specifically have their own set of crazy superpowers they can buy into is almost exactly as much effort as twisting the concept a bit and making that archetype available to a much larger chunk of potential characters, and the payoff is a lot higher.
I mean, I can see the costs of doing things the way Paizo has chosen to do them... but I can also totally see why they're choosing to do things this way.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Nocticula's dedicated followers in Zirnakaynin are, interestingly enough, very well-suited for being hidden and on the back foot; House Misraria's areas of expertise are assassins and spies! If they needed to hide the change in their faith (or start purging the unredeemable elements of the city), there's almost no one better suited to the task.
It does, conveniently, allow me to clamor for Drow Inquisitors of Nocticula, which is about as indulgent a character concept as I can manage.
EDIT: Does Lozardyn have any real published canon on it? Abomination Vaults doesn't say much.
|
Creative Director
|
| 11 people marked this as a favorite. |
Nocticula's dedicated followers in Zirnakaynin are, interestingly enough, very well-suited for being hidden and on the back foot; House Misraria's areas of expertise are assassins and spies! If they needed to hide the change in their faith (or start purging the unredeemable elements of the city), there's almost no one better suited to the task.
It does, conveniently, allow me to clamor for Drow Inquisitors of Nocticula, which is about as indulgent a character concept as I can manage.
EDIT: Does Lozardyn have any real published canon on it? Abomination Vaults doesn't say much.
That's new content.
I wanted to start exploring stuff like this, and Abomination Vaults was the handiest place for me to get this content out there quickly, so when Ron and I were working on the Advenure Path's outline and I was creating the maps, we baked this stuff into the outline for the other authors (Vanessa and Stephen) to work with.
As for House Misraria... my suspicion is that Nocticula's change probably threw that house into utter chaos, with most of those drow being stubborn and unwilling to stop being evil and feeling betrayed by their faith and lashing out, and if I were to explore Zirnakaynin today, it'd be a city in serious uproar/upheaval with this chaos being a spark that lit a metaphorical powder keg that would be the event that would fuel much of an upcoming rebalancing to the way the drow presence in the Darklands functions on a whole. It'd be a great "in" for a group of Nocticulan-themed PCs to come in and start making waves—I'd rather that sort of thing come from outside Zirnakaynin rather than from within, since that gives players more agency in helping to shape the city's future.
I see this sort of event as being a great "Why now" reason for why we waited this long to do something with the Darklands.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Nocticula's dedicated followers in Zirnakaynin are, interestingly enough, very well-suited for being hidden and on the back foot; House Misraria's areas of expertise are assassins and spies! If they needed to hide the change in their faith (or start purging the unredeemable elements of the city), there's almost no one better suited to the task.
It does, conveniently, allow me to clamor for Drow Inquisitors of Nocticula, which is about as indulgent a character concept as I can manage.
As for House Misraria... my suspicion is that Nocticula's change probably threw that house into utter chaos, with most of those drow being stubborn and unwilling to stop being evil and feeling betrayed by their faith and lashing out, and if I were to explore Zirnakaynin today, it'd be a city in serious uproar/upheaval with this chaos being a spark that lit a metaphorical powder keg that would be the event that would fuel much of an upcoming rebalancing to the way the drow presence in the Darklands functions on a whole. It'd be a great "in" for a group of Nocticulan-themed PCs to come in and start making waves—I'd rather that sort of thing come from outside Zirnakaynin rather than from within, since that gives players more agency in helping to shape the city's future.
I see this sort of event as being a great "Why now" reason for why we waited this long to do something with the Darklands.
Happy to hear my sketching at what such a PC would look like is pretty close to the intent, then! I'd love to see that story whenever you all can get to it.
Thanks for all the great replies, James! I really appreciate the time spent in this thread.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
Golarion Drow lore was something I had largely skipped. Because drow in general always seemed iffy to me. I had started to look a bit into it in recent months but this post has got me really excited to look into the lore more and look forward to seeing whatever lore is added as 2e grows.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
Nocticula's dedicated followers in Zirnakaynin are, interestingly enough, very well-suited for being hidden and on the back foot; House Misraria's areas of expertise are assassins and spies! If they needed to hide the change in their faith (or start purging the unredeemable elements of the city), there's almost no one better suited to the task.
It does, conveniently, allow me to clamor for Drow Inquisitors of Nocticula, which is about as indulgent a character concept as I can manage.
EDIT: Does Lozardyn have any real published canon on it? Abomination Vaults doesn't say much.
Haven't always shared your love for the inquisitor but I'm sold now. THE PEOPLE DEMAND THE INQUISITOR!
|
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is going to be quite the balancing act because if they're going to bring them forward to PF2 in any even remotely feasible and balanced manner they are going to HAVE to not only undo decades of established norms for them by bringing them down from the pedestal they currently reside on whereby they are just... BETTER in just about EVERY way than nearly all other humanoids with basically one drawback (light blindness/sensitivity) that isn't even hard to bypass.
How they do it without destroying just about everything that people like about them and keeps them feeling special, I have no idea but I don't envy the task, even if they are made Rare this is still a contradiction to their explicitly stated goal that Rarity is never supposed to be a yardstick for how powerful a given open is supposed to be.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I feel like people who are fond of an ancestry primarily because it's more powerful than the other ones are generally people whose opinions you ought to discount when you are doing game design.
There's no more problem in making PC Drow not conspicuously more powerful than every other ancestry than there is in making PC Strix not conspicuously more powerful than every ancestry (by keeping their ability to fly within the established level limits.)
In fact PF2s structure of "you get ancestry feats throughout your entire adventuring career" lets you spread out the "powerful Drow Abilities" to show up at 9th, 13th, and 17th while still leaving them as what defines the ancestry.
Drow are likely to be rare because all Darklands specific ancestries are rare. People on the surface are generally unaware of the Darklands, a thing that requires "there's not a lot of Duergar running around in Absalom" to be the case.
The next big test for "keeping all ancestries at the same baseline" is not "these folks had lots of SLAs" but the aquatic ancestries who ought to be able to breathe water without as big of a downside as the Azarketi "you have to bathe every day" rule.
| 5 people marked this as a favorite. |
How they do it without destroying just about everything that people like about them and keeps them feeling special, I have no idea but I don't envy the task, even if they are made Rare this is still a contradiction to their explicitly stated goal that Rarity is never supposed to be a yardstick for how powerful a given open is supposed to be.
I would not describe above-par mechanics as "everything people like about" Drow, speaking as someone who got into tabletop games because of Drizzt novels who couldn't care less about that. Plenty of folks like their for their place in the lore, whether as flawed reflections of the elves, demonic masters of the underworld, or misunderstood survivors seeking redemption.
No story I want to tell with the Drow hinges on them being better by RAW than a Dwarf or Nagaji. They're just cool!
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
There’s plenty of precedent for commoners in higher-level cities to be higher-level themselves.
The Darklands are a dangerous place. Most cities are medium to high level. So sure, most average Drow are higher level than an average commoner elsewhere.
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
There’s plenty of precedent for commoners in higher-level cities to be higher-level themselves.
The Darklands are a dangerous place. Most cities are medium to high level. So sure, most average Drow are higher level than an average commoner elsewhere.
By that logic, wouldn't commoners from Absalom be stronger than your average drow? Absalom is a Level 20 settlement, after all.
|
|
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
This is going to be quite the balancing act because if they're going to bring them forward to PF2 in any even remotely feasible and balanced manner they are going to HAVE to not only undo decades of established norms for them by bringing them down from the pedestal they currently reside on whereby they are just... BETTER in just about EVERY way than nearly all other humanoids with basically one drawback (light blindness/sensitivity) that isn't even hard to bypass.
How they do it without destroying just about everything that people like about them and keeps them feeling special, I have no idea but I don't envy the task, even if they are made Rare this is still a contradiction to their explicitly stated goal that Rarity is never supposed to be a yardstick for how powerful a given open is supposed to be.
I doubt drow are going to be mechanically stronger than most other ancestries (probably weaker if they still have a CON flaw.) In 1E, aasimars and fetchlings had more Race Points, and they both have balanced 2E versions.
|
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Haven't always shared your love for the inquisitor but I'm sold now. THE PEOPLE DEMAND THE INQUISITOR!
They'll appear when nobody expects them.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
By that logic, wouldn't commoners from Absalom be stronger than your average drow? Absalom is a Level 20 settlement, after all.There’s plenty of precedent for commoners in higher-level cities to be higher-level themselves.
The Darklands are a dangerous place. Most cities are medium to high level. So sure, most average Drow are higher level than an average commoner elsewhere.
Ansalon is a much safer city.
For reference, see Promise, from Broken Promises, Age of Ashes.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Drow are, along with other Darklands ancestries and sthenos, on top of ancestry wishlist. And while I will wait for their release before really starting to think about a drow character, I do have some vague character concepts in mind, that I want to share here, together with some general thoughts on drow.
First would be a drow, who left the Darklands after Nocticula's ascension to divinity and sought shelter in Eurythnia. Obviously it would be fitting if they were also an artist, so a bard would be good choice. But a cleric or champion of Nocticula would probably work just as well.
In general I thinkEurythnia would be a perfect place for a smal surface drow community, in particular because of Nocticula's past connection with them as a former demon lord and the themes of her areas concern as a goddess and this part of New Thassilon.
This one came to my mind while reading Book of the Dead. I wasn't actually that hyped about the undead archetypes, when they were announced, simply cause playing an undead character isn't something I'm particular interested in. Or at least I thought so, until I remembered Shraen, a city full of undead drow. I would really love a campaign centered in Shraen, but since my best chances for this campaign to happen are writing and running it myself, I actually haven't put much thought into a PC concept for this. But playing a drow vampire sorcerer or wizard would be cool!
Last, but not least, a very situational concept, but if I had a character die in certain parts of Abomination Vaults in my opinion it would be a better fit to join the party with a drow, than to bring a new character from somewhere else.
Being a huge fan of drow, since I started to read the novels about a certain drow ranger as a teenager, having them as a playable ancestry is among the things I miss the most in PF2. Personally I would hugely prefer them to be an regular, most likely rare ancestry, seperate from elves. Other proposed ways of bringing them to this edition, like them being a heritage or a lineage for elves, just feel inadequate to me.
| 3 people marked this as a favorite. |
Base Elf + drow lineage feat
I'm not sure how much page space you save with this. Like the Elf Ancestry in the CRB is 2.25 pages before you get to the ancestry feats, and there's probably going to be as many "Drow Feats" printed either way. The actual rules content of an ancestry fits in a sidebar, so the rest of those ~2 pages are about "telling you what these people are like" which is a thing you do either way.
I think moreover you want to build really good darkvision and light sensitivity into the ancestry at the base level. Probably change that INT bonus to a CHA bonus too, but otherwise they should be very similar to elves.
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
Haven't always shared your love for the inquisitor but I'm sold now. THE PEOPLE DEMAND THE INQUISITOR!They'll appear when nobody expects them.
Treasure Vault. Calling it now.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I do hope though, that if we see a drow ancestry thats basically the elf block with darkvis and light blindness that we'd see a removal of light blindness as a level 1 ancestry feat and not heritage.
The heritage would lock out a lot of concepts, while a feat tracks with the pattern of level 1 "boost you light level vision one step" feats. I think a greater darkvisions feat at later levels would also be cool.
As far as stats, I actually kinda thing Id like to see something that isn't +dex, cha, free, -con, but I won't be upset if it is
| 4 people marked this as a favorite. |
I do hope though, that if we see a drow ancestry thats basically the elf block with darkvis and light blindness that we'd see a removal of light blindness as a level 1 ancestry feat and not heritage.
I think the "remove light blindness" option has to be a heritage since it's also going to come with "be less good at darkvision." Like the Azarketi heritage that makes you less dependent on being submerged in water once a day, but also reduces your swim speed.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I do hope though, that if we see a drow ancestry thats basically the elf block with darkvis and light blindness that we'd see a removal of light blindness as a level 1 ancestry feat and not heritage.I think the "remove light blindness" option has to be a heritage since it's also going to come with "be less good at darkvision." Like the Azarketi heritage that makes you less dependent on being submerged in water once a day, but also reduces your swim speed.
Why woudl you do that? "Bump one notch in darkvision" (base to low-light, or low-light to darkvision) is worth a single feat or a heritage slot. If we count light sensitivity as a single anti-feat, and cost them as if they had low-light vision for the base, then why not make it a feat?
I mean, otherwise you get silliness like "drow tieflings cannot escape light sensitivity" and whatnot. Really, it's better to just make it something that some of them can do.
Alternately, if you're *really* sold on the idea that non-light-sensitive drow shouldn't have darkvision, then... well, how does that mean that it shoudln't be a feat? You just have to add something else to the feat to balance it back out again. I know that they generally haven't have feats with packaged disadvantages, but that's not to say that such a thing could not possibly exist.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I think the principle is just that if an ancestry comes with a build in downside to balance one of its advantages, removing that downside also has to come with reducing that advantage.
Like let's look at Duergar for a second as a parallel ancestry to the Drow. Duergar have basically three beneficial traits: really good at darkvision, really hard to poison, really hard to fool with illusions. They also have light blindness. Dwarves already have Darkvision, so it makes sense that "Duergar get better darkvision than normal" to balance out the light blindness.
It's probably a good idea if most Darklands ancestries normally have light blindness, since it goes a long way to explain why they almost never go to the surface.
| 1 person marked this as a favorite. |
Oh, I agree! I just think that "spend a feat to reduce and/or remove a disad (that you use to pay for an extra benefit) is just as valid as "spend a feat to get a benefit". The only question at that point is if the disad is a one-feat disad, or if you have to pony up something else as well.
| 2 people marked this as a favorite. |
…
This one came to my mind while reading Book of the Dead. I wasn't actually that hyped about the undead archetypes, when they were announced, simply cause playing an undead character isn't something I'm particular interested in. Or at least I thought so, until I remembered Shraen, a city full of undead drow. I would really love a campaign centered in Shraen, but since my best chances for this campaign to happen are writing and running it myself, I actually haven't put much thought into a PC concept for this. But playing a drow vampire sorcerer or wizard would be cool!
Just read up on House Shraen and their exile and city. Some hardcore survivors there. Undead drow would definitely be a blast.
And also came across the bit where Aroden stole 5 suns/aeon orbs from the Darklands so humans could use them better than the xulgath et al? Huh. What a complete villain. A genocidal, superiorist prannit.
