Character Creation

[HoshaZilo]

When Selecting a sub race of elf in the character creation room,  there is no indication for wood elf that you are trading the traditional -2 con/+2 dex for a -2 cha/+2 dex,

The first time it happened I thought I had just messed up my build, so I made a new character and tried again, only to find out that it was because there was no indication of the change, not even something subtle like, "Wood elves due to their isolation are slightly less sociable, but In exchange have had more time to hone their skills in the woods"

It instead says something along the lines of "Wood elves have came to the realization that they must talk to the humans in order to survive in the land" which... is quite contrary to what the stats that are assigned to the subrace says

Edit: I'm not upset, and after my 3rd time rebuilding I realized that this will actually be better for my character, but it's still a hassle to go through it.

[swbf2lord]

I'd agree that it is annoying. You can find the information in sourcebooks, or in some places online, but it is a hassle to go through.

[HoshaZilo]

I even checked on the subrace portion of our forums and couldn't find it. I'm probably looking in the wrong places but it should be easy to access.

[HellsPanda]

What sort of wood elf did you make? There are differences in the various forms of Wood elf.
In Faerun what your describing is the Green/Wild elf modifiers.

[Crimson Shuriken]

It just so happens some settings have a subrace that shares a name, but they are distinct subraces.

Also:

The reason for this misconception is that there are two different Wood Elves in DnD.

The ones in the MM and the SRD are Greyhawk (generic setting) wood elves whilst the Forgotten Realms ones have different statistics (Races of Faerun). The -2 CHA applies to the FR wood elves, but not the Greyhawk ones.

They are the same modifiers as the subraces are in the DnD rules. There is no guesswork. If you choose a subrace you can expect it has the exact same ability modifiers as you'd expect.

its 3.0/3.5 so to find the racial modifiers for Half-Vistani or the Silvanesti they will in the Ravenloft Campaign Setting 3.0, for the Forgotten Realms subraces you can find them in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting 3.0 or the 'Races of Faerun' supplement or the 'Player's Guide to Faerun' supplement.  For the Dragonlance subraces they are in the Dragonlance Campaign Setting 3.0, Eberron in the Eberron Campaing Setting 3.0 etc.   

Most of the races use standard Core Rules Player's Handbook stats.

I think what confuses you and others is that the default races in NWN have the default ability modifiers.

The Moon Elf of Forgotten Realms for example get +2 DEX and -2 CON. Its the standard PHB elf mechanically so you will not see any adjustments once you are on the server.

BUT, you create any Wild, Wood, Star, Sun, Silvanesti et al out of this base elf.    So for example if you have a Wild Elf from forgotten Realms whose ability modifiers are +2 DEX and -2 INT it has to nullify the CON penalty of the standard elf and to do that it gives an increase to CON of +2 to void the previous penalty. So on your character sheet there will be a Red number in INT that is two lower than you alotted in character creation and there will be a Green number on the CON that is two higher than what you allotted.  All of it means that essentially you have +2 DEX and -2 INT and its correct.

In Forgotten Realms, the wild and wood elves are as follows:

Wood Elf -  +2 STR, +2 DEX, -2 CON -2 INT, -2 CHA  and favored class Ranger
Wild Elf -    +2 DEX,  -2 INT  and favored class Sorcerer