Is 4e Dark Sun any good?
Is 4e Dark Sun any good?
Joseph Baker
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Carson Wright
Pretty good. It implements most of the new stuff from 4e very well (save for dragonborn, which I find a little out of sorts with Dark Sun's setting seeing as becoming even a half-dragon in that is a big and bad deal), has a lot of fun enemies, and brings a lot of interesting backgrounds to choose from.
Jaxon Rodriguez
Awesome. I can just, like, not have Dragonborns, right?
Aaron Bennett
Hell yeah nigga, it's Athas.
Hudson Brown
No Dary are a vital part of the established Canon and to remove them would be to be unfaithful to the original editions.
Carson Lewis
>Dray
Mason Roberts
I'm a big fan of how they use Surges to track the exhaustion and deprivation of travelling in the desert. It's a lot easier to just take them off than it is to manage a bunch of floating modifiers, and it has a huge effect on how you play the game.
The dragonborn are different from the dray, for some reason. Personally, I chuck out the dragonborn and eladrin and bring back the pterrans, elans and aarakocra. Making races is super easy in 4e, and I'm not beholden to shoving every bit of 4e into every setting.
John Hall
The best. It introduced inherent bonuses to 4e, and you can actually remove divine/arcane classes without the game suffering for it. It also handles exhaustion pretty well (as long as someone doesn't absolutely powergame nature).
The Despoiling mechanics are a bit bad though.
Aiden Wilson
>The Despoiling mechanics are a bit bad though.
Could you expand on that a bit?
Aaron Harris
Defiling takes HP away from allies for a very minor boost in your spell potency, and the defiling based content just plain sucks compared to what Preservers get.
William Smith
The answer to this question is the same regardless of system: As good as the players and GM make it.
Blake Hernandez
>and the defiling based content just plain sucks compared to what Preservers get
So it's the opposite of how it was in 2E... great.
The point of making defiler magic "better" than preserver magic was that the player was choosing to actively make the world more awful for a temporary gain.
Andrew Price
Does anyone have pdfs of all Dark Sun content, 2e and 4e?
Luke Foster
In the game I was in, we houseruled Defilers to eat surges from their allies and increase a general "background count" for using defiling multiple times in an area to gradually draw worse things there, reduce natural healing and access to food/clean water, etc.
Ryan Morgan
I mean, there's still a temporary gain, and you still make the world more awful... it's just that the gain is small compared to what awfulness you bring.
It wouldn't be hard to buff a bit, and could use it.
That sounds fair, but it makes defiling an even worse option, if not accompanied by some buffs.
Eli Carter
The benefit was being able to increase your "effective level" for scaling abilities above maximum, regain powers, use metamagic, etc.
Jeremiah Ward
The AD&D Dark Sun stuff can be found in the main PDF thread's links - it'll be under the TSR stuff.
Not sure if there's a repository for 4e stuff at all - which is a shame as 4e is the one with most "you need all the books to make sense of it" problems.
Cooper Gutierrez
This site here seems to have all of the AD&D and 4e stuff you could hope for, including those relating to Dark Sun.
Easton Perez
But defiling is something any arcane character can do with no investment whatsoever, from level 1 for your entire adventuring career. And it lets you reroll a Daily power. Think about how clever that is as design in 4e, assuming you didn't decide to go Bioware-style "I'm going to max out my dickhead points" with your character concept. You don't want to be a Defiler, because of course you don't want to kill the world, that'd be stupid. But you just rolled your Daily power and missed. Are you SURE you don't want to defile? Just this once? What would it hurt? Surely winning this fight is more important than a few plants...
And that's why the world turned to sand. It's basically perfect as a mechanic that is representative of the setting.
I agree, though, the lightsider Epic Destiny is more interesting than the darksider one.
...
If you have at least one arcane daily attack power,
you gain the arcane defiling power.
Arcane Defiling
Arcane Feature
You draw upon the vitality of nearby lift to fuel your magic,
heedless of the harm you cause to the land and your allies.
At-Will + Arcane, Necrotic
Free Action Personal
Trigger: You make an attack roll or a damage roll as part of
an arcane daily attack power.
Effect: You can reroll the triggering roll but must use the
second result. In addition, each ally (willing or unwilling)
within 20 squares of you takes necrotic damage equal to
half his or her healing surge value. This damage ignores
immunities and cannot be reduced in any way.
Special: You can use this effect once for any arcane daily
attack power you use, affecting any single attack roll or the
damage roll for that power.
Nathaniel Myers
But mechanically it's a non-issue, and that takes away from the appeal. Defiling was powerful, and it had no heavy drawbacks to the characters past the death of the world. Something that magic itself makes non-issue for the Defilers in question sometimes. When you can survive by virtue of arcane might, who gives a fuck about a dying world? That was the whole point. It wasn't a 'once wouldn't hurt it' sort of thing. It was a 'it's already dead, so what do I give a shit' thing. You don't care enough to take the disadvantage of Preserving if you Defiled.
No one in a 4e Dark Sun game would play Defiling as presented, because it fucks the team more than the setting. It's a clear drawback that's not worth using, no matter how important that Daily that just missed is. Like reroll powers and feats don't fall out of the ass of characters life and right in 4e anyways.
Elijah Brooks
I prefer 7e Gamma World for my post-apocalyptic campaigns if just for the omega tech shenanigans that everyone in my group like a lot.
Dark Sun is of course different but I don't like the thematic of Sword and Sorcery too much for ye olde fantasy.
Ryan Miller
A demo game in Dark Suns is probably the only time I liked playing 4e. I really wish they would do a 5e conversion; the setting was brutal enough to make you think things through, especially when fighting alongside mages.