Editing Drow (section)

==Drow vs. Tieflings: "Evil is Sexy!"==
During the 80s and 90s, drow rose to incredible popularity amongst D&D fans. Whilst their players were often derided as [[Mary Sue]]s and snowflakes, this didn't stop them from becoming loved and adored by many D&D players - drow were D&D's ''original'' "sexy bad (boys/girls)" race, and they profited from it by catapaulting into prominence. As the 2000s came along, things seemed even sweeter for them; from the flurry of splatbooks about them in 3rd edition, drow went on to truly benefit from 4th edition, which simultaneously freed them of the scourge of [[Level Adjustment]] and came up with [[Nentir Vale|a base setting]] that made their status as spooky [[Underdark]] dwellers work ''for'' them, by making it official that the average village would '''not''' greet a drow adventurer with torch-wielding mobs, simply because the average surface-dweller has no idea what a drow ''is''. It seemed like the dark star of the drow would rise ever higher...

But the mid-2000s also brought something the drow had never faced before: a challenger for their niche as "D&D's sexy bad guys". There had been other playable monstrous races in the past (to put it mildly), but none of them had ever really challenged the drow as embodying the "exil is cool and/or sexy" trope before. [[Orc]]s (and [[Half-Orc]]s)? Please; normies didn't even know that orc [[monstergirl]]s could be a ''thing'' until the [[Warcraft]] movie! [[Shadar-Kai]]? They weren't even ''playable'' when they debuted! But 4th edition finally gave them a real legitimate challenger:

[[Tiefling]]s.

The idea that tieflings could be "sexy bad guys" thanks to their [[fiend]]ish heritage wasn't ''entirely'' new - DiTerlizzi's illustration made that pretty damn obvious. But tieflings, being watered-down [[cambion]]s, lacked that association with inherent evil (and defensive pre-retaliation from all other races) which the drow had earned. They also lacked the stigma of being associated with [[Drizzt|Drizzt do'Urden]] and his annoying fanboys. And to make matters worse 4e both made tieflings a core race in the [[Player's Handbook]] (Drow were stuck in the [[Forgotten Realms]] Player's Guide, a 4e [[splatbook]]) ''and'' it actively promoted the tiefling for Bad Boy roleplayers, to the point that the Wizards Presents: Races & Classes design guide even notes that 4e tieflings were created to give the antihero/cool dark character players a race to gravitate towards.

The result was that many drow fans jumped ship to become tiefling fans instead.