Baldur's Gate : The Sword Coast Chronicles : NWN2 Persistent World

cosmic ray wrote:

Deathgrowl wrote:

cosmic ray wrote: Or you could leave them as they are, which makes it even easier for players to metagame them by their height difference.

Metagaming?

If you meet an unusually short and generally slim person in an area surrounded by trolls, ogres, undeads, bugbears and various other dangerous beings, is it more likely it's a preteen human, or a magically and/or martially competent drow?

Excessively thin dwarf, maybe?

Very, very tall gnome!

It can only be a drow, since:

- everyone can tell PCs apart from NPCs by checking the player list;
- we know which races are playable on BGtSCC;
- we know drow are the only race from that list with that particular height and limb proportion.

Therefore, it can't be anything else contained in any of the myriad D&D manuals.

But it isn't metagaming.

Any metagaming should be reported to the dms. Whether it is the actual drow character metagaming, or others.

kleomenes wrote:That drow is stepping forward doing a lunge. Its only the perspective making it look shorter.

#drowsuperiority = better fitness regime

Hidden: show

This might not be a serious post

#DrowAreGold

mrm3ntalist wrote: Any metagaming should be reported to the dms. Whether it is the actual drow character metagaming, or others.

One also can just forfeit roleplay with someone he does not like.

mrm3ntalist wrote:

cosmic ray wrote:

Deathgrowl wrote: Metagaming?

If you meet an unusually short and generally slim person in an area surrounded by trolls, ogres, undeads, bugbears and various other dangerous beings, is it more likely it's a preteen human, or a magically and/or martially competent drow?

Excessively thin dwarf, maybe?

Very, very tall gnome!

It can only be a drow, since:

- everyone can tell PCs apart from NPCs by checking the player list;
- we know which races are playable on BGtSCC;
- we know drow are the only race from that list with that particular height and limb proportion.

Therefore, it can't be anything else contained in any of the myriad D&D manuals.

But it isn't metagaming.

Any metagaming should be reported to the dms. Whether it is the actual drow character metagaming, or others.


#DrowAreGold

I play a moon elf.

She's minimum height, width and has pinkish-blue skin and white hair.

All of those are natural aspects of being a moon elf. They're in the natural chargen without any mods and are also on both the wiki and the various campaign settings.

There even exists fan art placing a moon elf of similar description next to drow.
Notice how (not) similar they are.

However, whenever I play Atria I have at least one person confuse her for a drow IC or OOC. IC from some low int half-orc hearing about the drow scare I could understand, but from a fellow moon elf? And OOC is even more ridiculous.

It got to the point that the first paragraph of her description has a line saying "Obviously a moon elf". Character also never wears hoods or masks, and dresses in bright and cheerful colors.

Still gets people going "Is your char a drow" in tells or ICly accuse of it. I'm waiting to be PvP'd with the pretense of "Looked like a drow."
People metagame drow, and not even do it right. I'm pretty sure I can blame Elder Scrolls for most of this, since dunmer ARE blue skinned.



Seriously: Walks around happily in bright daylight wearing bright happy clothes and no attempts to hide identity and people ask if drow.

Hoihe wrote:Seriously: Walks around happily in bright daylight wearing bright happy clothes and no attempts to hide identity and people ask if drow.

*Points finger and shouts.* THAT MAKES YOU A LITERAL DRIZZT CLONE!

People metagame drow, and not even do it right. I'm pretty sure I can blame Elder Scrolls for most of this, since dunmer ARE blue skinned.

I think there are other factors to it too. With the Surface/Underdark split the drow have become a lot less present on the surface and therefore there exists a smaller frame of reference to distinguish one. Especially if you are not playing in the underdark. Additionally we should not forget that it is possible to make a 'moon elf' looking drow, as it is possible to make a 'drow' looking moon elf in the default game, and our server has added custom heads that make the distinction even more difficult to make. I could adjust sliders and cherry pick colours to the extent where you too would have hard time telling the two apart.

Now, another thing to consider is the effect of Lord of the Rings movies have had in the perception of elves. The appearance of Middle Earth elves is something in between the appearance of Sun and Wood elves of the Forgotten Realms. Not to mention that if you think of old D&D games like Baldur's Gate, elves were just a singular race without subraces. While the colour palette tended to create mostly Sun and Wood Elves if my memory serves me right.

Then we could look at the Forgotten Realms novels that have not exactly pronounced the subrace appearances beyond the obvious distinction between drow and non-drow.

And there is this picture:
The moon elf on the right almost looks like an albino drow to me. It kind of makes me think that the drow were a clan of moon elves.



Edit: And Hoihe, I was 100% sure the icon you used here on the forum was for a Green Eyed Drow...

There are three male drow heads that have a lighter blue skin and five female heads. If drow are wandering around the surface as often as they do currently and may have lighter skin tones, and white hair then it is no surprise that some people may mistake your blue skinned white haired elf for being a drow. I mean I would never make that mistake but then again everyone has different monitors and GPU's putting out different colors. Also some people are color blind IRL. No reason to get upset at them oocly.

Hoihe wrote: I play a moon elf.

She's minimum height, width and has pinkish-blue skin and white hair.

All of those are natural aspects of being a moon elf. They're in the natural chargen without any mods and are also on both the wiki and the various campaign settings.

There even exists fan art placing a moon elf of similar description next to drow.

Hidden: show

Notice how (not) similar they are.

However, whenever I play Atria I have at least one person confuse her for a drow IC or OOC. IC from some low int half-orc hearing about the drow scare I could understand, but from a fellow moon elf? And OOC is even more ridiculous.

It got to the point that the first paragraph of her description has a line saying "Obviously a moon elf". Character also never wears hoods or masks, and dresses in bright and cheerful colors.

Still gets people going "Is your char a drow" in tells or ICly accuse of it. I'm waiting to be PvP'd with the pretense of "Looked like a drow."

Hidden: show

Even in a dark place, she looks nothing like a drow.
]

People metagame drow, and not even do it right. I'm pretty sure I can blame Elder Scrolls for most of this, since dunmer ARE blue skinned.



Seriously: Walks around happily in bright daylight wearing bright happy clothes and no attempts to hide identity and people ask if drow.

something a drow might say... ***squints eyes suspiciously while tapping a finger on my chin***

Mistaking an undisguised member of a race for another race is a completely different kettle of fish.

Even in real life, you sometimes can't tell whether someone falls squarely within one race or another. Then there are mixed-race people too, which increases the variance and ambiguity.

It doesn't help, of course, that the racial color palettes in nwn2 aren't always entirely correct, either because they're too broad, too narrow, or contain incorrect colors.

Characters wearing full disguises is a different matter. Of course we, the players, can always tell what is in front of us just by looking at the shape of the character models. A half-orc or an orc could disguise himself all he wanted, but he wouldn't fool a player who is familiar with the game, even though, realistically speaking, a half-orc and a burly human, both wearing proper full disguises, might be undistinguishable from one another just by looking.

You can, likewise, always tell whether you have a disguised gnome or a halfling in front of you just by looking at the feet, since gnomes have incorrectly disproportionate feet which are a dead giveaway.

Going on a bit of a tangent to undisguised character models, players can always tell whether the human in front of them is really a human or a tiefling too, just by looking at the face model - provided there aren't any horns or a tail.

"Oh, but my character has seen so many tieflings by now that she REALLY REALLY can tell tieflings ALWAYS have one of these particular facial features and humans never have them LOL!"

The in-game models are always going to be "infinitely" more limited than the racial, genetic and environmental variance that would realistically be possible.

Naturally, sometimes you may be able to glean some information from factors a disguise can't hide (a disguised halfling could be a gnome, but only a fool would suspect it could be an orc), but narrowing it down to one race, with certainty, all the time, when there would be several, if not many, other suspects, is a dishonest effort based on out-of-character knowledge of nwn2 mechanics. Contrary to full character disguises, metagaming under a thin disguise, or a veneer of legitimate deductive skill, is always easy to spot.

Sun Wukong wrote: Edit: And Hoihe, I was 100% sure the icon you used here on the forum was for a Green Eyed Drow...

What. That isn't obsidian. That's light grey with a slight blue hue.

Deathgrowl wrote:

Sun Wukong wrote: Edit: And Hoihe, I was 100% sure the icon you used here on the forum was for a Green Eyed Drow...

What. That isn't obsidian. That's light grey with a slight blue hue.

Standard moon elf face, upper-leftmost color with clear override.

Unless you mean the profile picture. That's a moon elf with white hair I photoshopped to have a blueskin. https://imgur.com/a/ybCvZ