It may be worth weighing in here. Warning: optional overly complex character overanalysis follows. Read at your own peril.
[sblock]Dranko's initial personality is based on one of my best friends in high school. This was a guy with an astonishingly fast mind who was adopted into a family that didn't entirely know how to cope with him. For my friend, doing poorly in school was a form of rebellion because class was so easy for him; why should he try, if it was more fun to be disruptive? He knew he could do the work and saw no reason to prove it to anyone. But fundamentally he was insecure, and he took that weakness and made it into a wall to keep other people out.
And thus, Dranko: rejected by family and reviled for being a half-orc, he took all that anger and turned it into a spiral of self-destruction. He'd disobey, the scarbearers would punish him with their torture in an attempt to bring him closer to God, and he'd disobey again just to stubborningly prove to the Scarbearers that they couldn't get to him. When he became of age and took to the streets, he was a big mass of streetwise anger hiding some crippling loneliness that he wouldn't even acknowledge. Most of the things he'd do were done not to impress others, but to reassure himself that he could somehow matter in the world, that he wasn't the inconsequential loser that he had been labeled for twelve years. More than anything else, Dranko wanted to
matter, and he didn't care what he tossed into the pond just so long as he made waves. He could just as easily have been recruited by Sagiro and the sharshun, with no moral qualms whatsoever.
Enter Abernathy and the Company, the first real family he'd ever experienced. Ernie's influences (among others) gave Dranko something of a moral compass, and he gradually turned from neutral to neutral good roughly two years into the campaign. Nowadays he's still plenty shallow -- there's nothing that a good treasure bath or ass-kicking can't improve -- but he's developed a very strong set of ethics and morals. They just happen to be sort of flexible in areas like the possession of individual property. He's developed far more empathy for other people, and the surprising result is that he no longer fears death in a good cause. Deflecting the marilith's scorn was almost a reflex to him; he's been harangued by the best, and had no doubt that Step would do the same for him as well.
Luckily for all of us, he's still not especially bright. Aravis's cat reminds him of this on almost a weekly basis.
I think of it this way. Originally, Dranko was like strolling across a beach knee-deep in the surf: shallow, with some sharp stuff you might step on because you couldn't see it. Nowadays he's still like that, but you have a chance of stepping into the hidden depths of a sinkhole and briefly getting dunked over your head. That doesn't mean the rest of the water isn't shallow, just that you have some areas you'll want to watch out for.[/sblock]
