"I still have the levels and I like the extra flex, but yeah, I've got used to wizarding. Also let me have more of a repertoire before I had to go inviting things to kill me to get any better."

"There's a spontaneous divine caster in my church in Sothis and it honestly seems worse in most respects. I guess you get the element of surprise."

"I only have one second level sorcerer spell, and cantrips're cantrips, but first level I've got endure elements and comprehend languages and true strike and I like not needing to trade those off because they're useful in wildly different situations."

"Can you learn more second level spells? Or do they just come to you magically? If you bought an item for boosted charisma and it gave you an extra second level spell slot, would you learn another spell or just be able to cast the same one twice?"

"Oh, I can cast it eight times, an item could get me more. Also it's cunning not splendor because I'm a weird sorcerer. I haven't tried too hard to learn more, I think it'd slow me down on wizard progress."

"Eight!" He looks genuinely jealous. "What's your bloodline? Or are all drow sorcerers?"

"Not all, and more girls than boys - probably a similar number of boys are born sorcerers but fewer make it to the point of casting spells since that's not a main filter on 'em. My mother got it from her dad's side and didn't know a formal name for it and just called herself a cunning sorcerer."

"What do they filter the boys on -"

"...general health and vigor as infants, I guess. And not being twins. My grandmother sometimes says you should kill a boy if he gets so much as a cold before he's a year old, as a rule of thumb, unless he looks like he'll grow up real pretty."

"Wow."

"Do all drow everywhere do the female rule thing?"

"Far as I know but I haven't traveled extensively belowground."

"Just seems like as soon as someone thinks of selecting the boys the same way as the girls it'd fall apart."

"If suddenly every woman in Osirion became as smart and capable and likely to be magic and useful at work as the men, would it change anything?"

" - sure it would. Docks would hire them, they don't even care if whoever they're hiring is human. They could defend themselves, it'd be safe for them to go out whenever it's safe for men to. No one'd want to hit his wife, if she could hit him right back just as hard."

"Men sometimes hit their lovers or their husbands. Admittedly much less often."

"If every woman in Osirion suddenly became as smart as the men - but nobody announced this - how would you notice? And let's not assume they're any physically stronger. Drow men are physically stronger and that hasn't collapsed the whole business. Likelihood of being magic is confounded all to hell, I assume you've got equal numbers of sorcerers but you don't send your girls to wizard school and who knows how Abadar's picking clerics but it's actually not so skewed overseas."

"Yeah, smarter by itself wouldn't do anything."

"Not really any reason to think it's not true already."

"It's probably close. More men become wizards even in Avistan but that might be the thing that makes most adventurers men, which isn't intelligence and might be reasonably characterized as the opposite."

"The need of an Owl's to the face."

"There's a known explanation for that which comes from the most important underlying difference between men and women, actually. Uh, you know how traits are heritable -"

"Sure."

"So let's say that inclination to do risky high-return things is heritable. A man who becomes an adventurer, in Avistan, can father, what, a hundred children? They go to whorehouses constantly, they have woman lovers in every city, they leave families behind when they get bored - they're going to have lots of children with those same traits that made them like that. This isn't true for women, women adventurers probably have fewer children than women who stay at home and get married. This goes on long enough and you get men loving risk and women mostly not, both of them just doing the things their grandparents did."

"In Osirion being an adventurer doesn't much increase how many children you have."