Why is it ok to have a good Drow but not a good Mindflayer?

Both are okay, one is just much harder to write well.

>>713161851 (OP)
Yeah, because the drow are not inherently evil, they just follow a crazy goddess. And that's not even all of them. A quarter of them follows a nice, wholesome goddess.
Illithids are like vampires. They have to kill other beings in order to survive. They are also a hivemind. The rare ones that aren't are actively hunted down.

different things are different

>>713162104
You mean they have to kill "other sentient beings", not simply "other beings" you disingenuous prick.

>>713162104
The rare ones are also a glitch in the hivemind and can easily fall back under its influence, so they are not trustworthy either

>>713161851 (OP)
One's a wacky elf, the other is a puppet-corpse that eats brains and is enslaved to giant nerds. Writing that well is hard.

>>713161851 (OP)
drow are bad due to culture and religion, mindflayers are bad at a biological level
like anything both can have exceptions, but the latter is much harder to do right and BG3 does not do it right

>>713162346
No?
>wants juicy brains
>knows juiciest brains are in other illithids, not the lesser races which are essentially cats and dogs
>proceeds to be evil to other illithids, ignores/cares for/empathises with/whatever everyone else

>>713161851 (OP)
Same reason it's possible to have tamed predators but not tamed parasites?
Fuck all Illithids by the way, fuck Lolth too.

>>713162469
The issue is that illithids are VERY tough to kill. And they are a hivemind. So the second you kill one, somehow, you have an entire army of mindflayers on your ass.

>>713161851 (OP)
Why can't some fantasy races just be ontologically evil?

>>713161851 (OP)
Isn't omeluum literally a good mindflayer though?

>>713161851 (OP)
It is boring for every single race to be le complex multilayered morally grey chungus. Having inherently evil individuals/groups can be an interesting addition to a world.

>>713161851 (OP)
Gaider was writing a paladin illithid for a cancelled Beamdog project, wouldn't be surprised if it returns for something else

>>713162268
You either don't know what disingenuous means or are so terminally autistic that you completely failed to grasp the tone of the post you are replying to.

>>713161851 (OP)
racists see a monster i see a future lawyer, doctor and civil rights activist

>>713161851 (OP)
>good mindflayer
Even if you have one, you'll have every hive mind under sun and then some on your ass at a near constant as they either try to recapture the escaped one or kill it. They don't like when their kind go rogue

>>713163028
Wasn't that literally the Emperor?

>>713162957
that's racist

>>713162957
because now everything needs to be inverse to "subvert expecations"
except that it has become so commonplace that it is the default expectation and no one thinks you can play things straight anymore

>>713161851 (OP)
One is raised in a shitty culture, the other is a brain eating monster?

Eh, the good-aligned drow still worked, because even if you were the most kind-hearted and loving follower of Eilistraee, surface people still hated you by default, because drow. So you had this dichtomy of trying to help people that actively chase you down with torches and pitchforks.
5e turned everything into kumbaya land where everybody is accepted no matter what and any strife is verboten.

>>713161851 (OP)
they live by consuming brains and are subserviant to a hive mind superbrain that wants to dominate and enslave everything that isn't them
that very mindflayer you see once consumed someone elses brain and then nourished itself on their memories until it grew up and became a mindless automaton repeating the same process
the fact it escaped and somehow managed to form a consciousness of its own is pretty retarded, it would consume its own memories and brain out of hunger and then go feral unless it kept eating other brains pretty often
if you want a "good" mindflayer then you're in the same territory as execution being "not good" so they juxtapose each other pretty badly, you can't have a "good" thing and then pretend that execution, required to feed said "good" thing, isn't "bad"
on top of all of that mindflayers would be aggressively searching and calling it back constantly so it would be like a ticking time bomb ready to wipe out and dominate everyone around them at the drop of a needle, and the longer it lives the more powerful it will become
the only saving grace is the order that was keeping the mindflayer as part of their group is as retarded and incompetent as can be, so it goes hand in hand they'd try to recruit a "tame" mindflayer
this is the same game that tries to portray the harpers in a positive light so yeah

>>713161851 (OP)
There's a book series about one.

>>713164619
What, good illithid?

>>713162957
because the antiracists subconsciously associate them with niggers

>>713162957
There are "ontologically evil" races in DnD. See fiends: Demons, devils, yugoloths. Yugoloths especially are irredeemably evil.

>>713163875
New sincerity is a failed art movement (just look at its outputs), so subverting expectations is still the way to go for a narrative. It's just that subversion has been so overdone and the bar has been raised so high with audiences now expecting subversion at every corner that writers need to go through insane hoops to successfully subvert expectations at this point.

>>713161851 (OP)
The circumstances of their creation are objectively evil, anon.

>>713161851 (OP)
Sexy Donkey Kong. I want sex with Donkey Kong. I want to have his huge Donkey Cock in my mouth

>>713164745
I thought Orcs were meant to be niggers, now it's Illithids? Next you're gonna tell me Beholders are nigger analogues.

>>713161851 (OP)
drow aren't part of an evil hivemind

>>713161851 (OP)
Any mods to make this fag a woman with tits and a female voice yet?

>>713163001
He is not. He is a Giga autist that cares more about the pursuit of knowledge but he is not an empathetic individual he's just evil in a convenient way. You can still be ""friends"" with pure evil characters under certain conditions and with the understanding that if those conditions ever fall through they will, unquestionably, stab you in the back.

>>713162346
>the other is a puppet-corpse that eats brains and is enslaved to giant nerds
so it's an argonian?

>>713166096
The drow were first. Because they are literally black.
I like how ineptly WotC has handled it, by the way. Greenwood in his foresight introduced Eilistraee, so you couldn't just declare drow racist for being always chaotic evil. WotC removed Eilistraee for no reason, and they got immediately accused of being racist. So they tried to introduce some new lore for the good-aligned drow that actually made things even worse. While the fans were just baffled why WotC removed Eilistraee in the first place.
WotC have a knack for slamming their head against the wall when trying to fix the problem they themselves created for no reason.

>>713166414
Baffling that black people have to be represented by non-humans, aren't there literal black people in the setting?

>>713166534
There are, but twitter declared that racist. It was funny.

>>713166218
No.

>>713166534
Sure, but that's not how it works. If there is an evil race that does a bunch of evil shit, they're obviously niggers. Why? Uuuuh, whitey racist. Or something. Because a bunch of violent faggots obviously have to be niggers. Just take orcs as an example. The powers that be declared that they're actually niggers because they're big and violent. So now they're nice and wholesome. They're not niggers anymore, now they're more or less literally Mexicans. This is obviously better. Right? Right?

>>713166775
>low taper cut
Every fucking time

>>713166775
...is that from that new 5e PHB?
Jesus fucking Christ. We've lost half-orcs for this?

>>713167043
Yes.
Yes.

>>713166775
Those are half orcs thoughverebeit. No matter how they try, they will still fuck up when it comes to details.

>>713166775
Reminder that these things follow the current "discourse" from about five years behind since they're in the works for a long time, so the new 5e books represent 2020's "discourse" rather than today's. It will take about five more years for the "vibe shift" to reflect to it.
I feel nauseated using these words earnestly. But alas, cultural analysis of the cattle masses requires it.

>>713167227
Half-orcs and half-elves no longer exist because they are racist. Those are now full-blooded orcs.
...WotC literally introduced a one drop rule for the half-races and then they were surprised everybody told them to fuck off.
>b-but how are half-orcs racist?
I DUNNO, ASK JEREMY CRAWFORD.

>>713166096
>Next you're gonna tell me Beholders are nigger analogues.
Beholders are xenophobic narcissists so no but being seen a nazi balloon isn't much better. I heard they got their lore purged which is incredibly funny to me.

>>713167413
If that carries over to eberron that's gonna be hilarious to justify. 4e had to walk back gnomes being monster only since that fucked up too much. Then again they've been ignoring the one setting they bought outright hard enough to make me wonder if they even remember they own it.
Does this extend to half-dragons?

>>713167251
>2020 was 5 years ago
Haha...

>>713167413
I don't know, maybe because it's mostly humans who can breed half-whatevers with other races or something. This has an icky colonizer vibe. Probably.
If anything I would have expanded it to all player races. So you'd get retarded mutts like dwalves or something. Just pick one racial bonus from both races and one malus. Maybe two mali, if you wanted some balance, because players would metafag the shit out of it, but you can't do that in 2025, hybrid vigor not being real would go against the science™.
Of course, the question is, what would you do with quarter-mutts, that would make things even more complicated, but whatever.

>>713167760
>Of course, the question is, what would you do with quarter-mutts, that would make things even more complicated, but whatever.
Since time immemorial quadroons were just mechanically considered "half-elves" for simplicity and that's it.
Now we have this retarded system where you mechanically play as a human but can LARP as a half-gnome and shit like that.

>>713162104
>the drow are not inherently evil

Okay, the mind flayers aren't inherently evil either. It's just as much of a retcon.

>Illithids are like vampires.

'good vampire' is a common trope

>>713161851 (OP)
Illithids are alien monsters outside of human morality (and human gods). BUT because D&Dogshit applies this morality to everything the aliens are evil because they don't care about the suffering they cause, they just operate.

>>713170521
Literally aliens, Minds don't work the way humanoids of this planet work. They biologically cannot function the same way a human or elfs would.