Dark Immolation wrote:
What exactly does the team mean between "UD" and "Surface" drow? As in, where the PC spends a majority of its in-game time or where it lives off-screen?
The thing that historically kills "traditional" Drow RP(in my experience) is isolation and lack of interaction with any other groups. I would hate to see any misunderstanding feed into the idea that drow in the Underdark should only be interacting with other things in the Underdark.
I've played it all before, and I agree with you on that.
Ultrinnan, Edonil, Nec'Perya. Underport. L'Obsul. I've had characters in all five, and not all of them Drow. I've seen the flaws in the "Amian traditional way," and its no secret that I'm very vocal about my opinion of said ways. Underdark, by the book, is isolationist and evil: every race hates each other and most of them hate themselves. Its fantastic for a PnP session using such evil and selfish races as the villains. As a persistent world server, unless the entire server goes all in or nothing, the traditional way doesn't work.
In saying that, substantial effort has been made by the players over the last 12 months to include the Underdark into the wider server narrative, specifically to target and avoid that old habit of becoming "a server within a server." The DM team are onboard with this in their own way as well: the Underdark is now linked with Chalkcliff and its plotlines for example, and is getting more non-Drow foot traffic through L'Obsul. If this course continues, then "staying in the Underdark" is not necessarily a negative: our actions in the greater narrative impact the surface, just as the surface indirectly impacts us.
As for the shaming of surface-based Drow, they -should- feel bad in a tongue-in-cheek way. They gave up everything that makes them Drow to be surface elves. By all accounts they should be a separate subrace because their link with the Faerzress is broken: no spell resistance, no supernatural abilities, no light sensitivity etc. Only the ability bonuses from generations of selective breeding and Darwinism on Steroids. [edit]: (lets hope it doesn't come to that. Common sense should kick in at some point as to the difference.)