agghhh!! darn those elfs and their racisim!

[LibraryOgre]

I am so angry about the fact that nobody gets suspicious or angry when you play an evil elf. But if you play a good dark elf they make all sorts of assumptions and call you a Drizz't clone. agh!

Actually, we had this situation come up in our Pathfinder game. My dwarf did not believe that the drow was good. As far as he was concerned, it was a lie by a member of an evil and manipulative race.

His evidence?

1) The drow had traveled in disguise for months, without revealing his true nature. He asks us for trust, but refused to trust us.
2) While claiming to be good, he still drew upon the dark gifts of Lolth. In our first combat, he threw a darkness spell-like ability; originally, my dwarf wrote it off as "he's a sorcerer", but when the truth came out about the drow's race, he realized what it was. If he had left behind Lolth, why was he still using her gifts?
3) Related: He's still dark. According to this world, drow are dark because of their allegiance to their dark mistress. Still dark = still evil to my dwarf's mind... if he were loyal to good gods, they would've removed that stain.
4) His favored method of dealing with a problem was to charm the enemy... to dominate their minds into doing his bidding. He attempted to befriend several evil creatures during our campaign... not just "maybe a little bit not-nice", but out and out "We hunt werebears and kidnap people to sell into the Underdark" orcs, "we're destroying human farmland in the name of goblin lebensraum" goblins and "we attack random people on the road" bandits. It is also noticeable that the paladin in the party stood up for him, and when my objections to "He doesn't show up on detect evil" were made, she refused to do the one test that would have proven it to my satisfaction (namely, using Smite Evil on him... and I would have accepted a punch, with a cleric standing by to save him from death as adequate evidence, and stated so). Obviously, the paladin was charmed.
5) Finally, he cast a spell on me, against my express wishes. He said it was healing, but it looked exactly like the magic missiles he was throwing around.

On the other hand, we have an elf who is largely not evil because he doesn't have access to high enough level spells. We're more or less ignoring this, and realizing that we're probably going to have to have him brought up on charges as a necromancer.

Why do people accept evil elves more readily than good drow? Because elves are presented as a race that, while it tends CG, have the same range of alignments as any other race, while drow are presented as being Evil... with a rare few who somehow turn out not-evil. It's not a matter of percentages in the MM; it's how they are presented, and the rationales used.

The reasons for an evil elf are usually pretty well explained... what turned him evil is known and understood. Dalamar, perhaps the prototypical evil non-drow, became evil because Silvanesti society wouldn't let a member of his House study magic, leaving him to study what he could, with people who were not morally upright (because they were willing to break the Silvanesti restrictions).

The reasons for a non-evil drow are, IME, usually not as well described. The prototypical good drow, Drizz't, doesn't really have a reason to be not-evil... there's no defining childhood experience or anything. He's just, randomly, not evil... while Zaknafien reinforces his dislike of drow society, he doesn't instill it. Drizz't was not-evil before Zaknafien. He didn't have a mystical vision of a deity. He was just an aberrant, nigh-mentally ill (in the sense that his moral values differed radically from those of the society that raised him, you could consider him psychopathic), drow. IME, non-evil drow are frequently like this. There's no reason for them to be non-evil other than their player wanted to play a drow, and so the drow in question is not evil.