LA +0 drow

[Klaus]

Klaus-

Your lesser drow looks pretty good, but I have two balance questions for you to consider:
1. Rather than Weapon Proficiency for the drow-specific exotic weapons, Weapon Familiarity might be better balanced (as with dwarves, etc.) As written, classes with normally only simple weapons will get free exotic weapons, which is pretty powerful-- treating them as martial weapons will let the martial classed lesser drow use them without penalty but the caster classed lesser drow would still have to use the Weapon Proficiency feat.

2. The half-drow in PGtF did have darkvision 60 ft. even with its +0 LA, but in the Drow of the Underdark book that just came out that race was revised to lose darkvision in favor of low-light vision. I expect that the rationale behind the change was that without another balancing factor darkvision was just too good. Of course, I would guess it depends which race you use as your baseline; it is likely fine balanced against dwarf but too strong as compared to a normal half-elf, since they suck.

Thanks for the opinions.

The weapon thing was actually suggested to me by Keith Baker as a balanced replacement for proficiency in the rapier, shortsword (two martial weapons) and hand crossbow (an exotic weapon). As far as exotic weapons go, the long knife (a shortsword you can throw) and the boomerang aren't exactly powerful (specially when compared with the spiked chain, waraxe and whatnot).

I opted to keep darkvision since:
- I took away the racial bonus on Spot/Search, the auto-Search feature.
- I kept the light blindness;
- I house ruled low-light vision to halve any miss chance due to poor illumination (but not total darkness).

EDIT: Re: weapons: there's already the Drow Skirmisher feat from Races of Eberron. For a single feat you get weapon familiarity with not only the drow long knife and the Xendrik boomerang, but with the scorpion chain. In addition, you deal +1 damage if you move before you attack, and if you use an action point to improve an attack roll, you add the action dice result to the damage dealt. So these weapons aren't exactly unattainable to a Xendrik drow.