So what made Dark Sun so good? I'm thinking of running it to provide something different

So what made Dark Sun so good? I'm thinking of running it to provide something different.

The race variety and desolation is what made people like it, but that doesn't mean it was ever "good".

The post-apocalyptic survival-desolation aspects were the best, and some of the unusual inversion of typical fantasy tropes (eg, Dragon Kings are actual dragons, halflings are cannibals, elves are less advanced, etc.)

What made it not good?

The thing that stands out the most for me is that while you're still in danger of being stabbed in the back in an alley, the city-states are actually safe, but once you step outside the gates, you could be attacked by a giant beetle or a 30-foot snake or a cloud of fire at any time. The world is a lot more hungry and malevolent than your typical Greyhawk or FR.

The art was better

loved their alternate take on the Dwarves

The Mul are half-dwarves: Human/Dwarf offspring. Cool idea, but it can come across as "new race for the sake of introducing a new race."

>that fucking dude on the right

The leather club's two blocks down.

Left. I don't know directions.

Fuck you

2e and Dark Sun had meat grinder mechanics, which really fit the post-apocalyptic struggle to survive setting.

"Leather clubs" should be burnt to the ground with the degenerates inside them.

Mostly AD&D 2e bullshit rules, like how wizardry philosophy changes your character class, and half-giants always get a d12 for HP no matter the class, just weird stuff like that. The 3.5 update from Dragon Magazine was okay, but everything was at least LA +1, and the 4e update made things a lot easier by ironically making magic item bonuses intrinsic to your PCs instead of gear. If you’re going to run it, use one of the later systems.

They mixed up the races and created an interesting setting in a few pages. You could have a unique experience without reading a shitton of lore.

The world is shit, everything in it is shit and wants to murder you, but you CAN be a hero, and if you go far enough, you CAN make it a better place. You can kill the sorcerer kings, free the trees of life, and reverse the damage that arcane defilement has wrought. But only if you survive

This is Veeky Forums
I think you misclicked on your way to /pol/

>making magic item bonuses intrinsic to your PCs
Why was this not standard for 4e in the first place? It would've been such an improvement, we could've gotten fun magic items again!

I dunno. A club can be made of mostly treated leather without ceasing to serve as an effective blunt instrument.

It was an option rule that everyone soon adopted.

It does have the unfortunate side effect of buffing what was already the most powerful striker class in the game, and nerfing sorcerers

But nothing that can't be handled

Always ignore /pol/tards.

noted

Everything good about Dark Sun as a setting is immediately ruined by DnD. Survival aspects are irrelevant when you can just take a Water cleric, and you can guarantee someone will be one. Low resources doesn't mean shit when the entire party are spellcasters, which they will be so they don't have to fuck about with obsidian or bone weapons. Oh, what's that? Magic users have to deal with having a bad rep? Players don't care, they'll just kill any witnesses and move on.

>just say they can't be full casters
Enjoy dealing with the manbaby tears if you try that.

You should try actually playing Dark Sun. It's __fun__.

>be defiler wizard
>no plant life around
>all PCs lose hit points every time you cast a spell
>but players don't care

Many would argue that achieving any of that is against the spirit of Dark Sun and that there was noticeable decline in the setting narrative when those things happened

Love the setting, but I do kinda think that D&D isn't very well suited for the themes present. If I were to run a game of it, I'd probably use Mythras. That system's very good for that gritty, Iron Age feel.

>there was noticeable decline in the setting narrative when those things happened
The problem was that those things didn't happen because of player characters. Some characters in novels went around removing the setting's conflicts, then the idiots at TSR made it canon.

>You can kill the sorcerer kings, free the trees of life, and reverse the damage that arcane defilement has wrought
What the fuck
That's as likely as unbombing the world in Fallout.

So does anybody here have a link for the PDFs of the game ?

Can one play a Dark Sun campaign by basing it on 5e, and taking some stuff from the 4e iteration material when it comes to the basic rules? I only know 5e but I'm sick and tired of the Forgotten Realms high fantasy bullshit.

a better goal, in my opinion, is to find a way to escape Arthas. But only a couple exist

Check out the OSR general trove.

Don't know the first thing about 4e but I don't think it would be too much work to adapt the setting to 5e.

Just skimmed the rulebook, huh? Never actually played or run the game in AD&D?

Thanks dude ! Will check it out !

>>making magic item bonuses intrinsic to your PCs
>Why was this not standard for 4e in the first place? It would've been such an improvement, we could've gotten fun magic items again!

Explain in detail or post a pdf please? This sounds interesting.

>Can one play a Dark Sun campaign by basing it on 5e

Sure, there is nothing stopping you from using the lore, however you may be a bit stumped when it comes to races
There are no Muls or Half-Giants in 5e, and the Thri-Kreen are not playable

Dark Sun was one of DnD's high points. That said, I wouldn't mind seeing the original setting rebooted under another, better system.

As of DS and later reprinted in DMG2, certain bonuses characters were expected to get from items, were hard-wired into level progression, with a subsequent removal of a set number of magic items to prevent doubling up.

It was hailed as a return to a less item-based economy and made for a more personal game. where the character was more important the the stuff he carried.

If you're coming from 3.5 or 5e, it's important to note that 4e magic items were relatively low power to begin with; they usually provided slight buffs to things your character could already do (slide targets 1 extra square, change damage type to cold, +xdx to crits, etc) or provided a once a day power that was handy but usually not critical. Stuff like belts that change your stats or staves stuffed full of free spells simply didn't exist. The only invaluable aspect of 4e items were the general scaling bonuses they provided (+1/2/3 etc to hit, AC, fort/ref/will). A character's personal abilities were always more important than their gear, it's just the DS material made the scaling bonus intrinsic so it became possible to ignore items altogether.

I wouldn't really call it a "return", because as far as I'm aware the TSR editions still had totally hax items that would make or break a character, but having never played them maybe I'm full of shit.

The original release, the Tyr sourcebook, the merchant caravans sourcebook, and maybe the one on elves.

AND NOTHING ELSE ABOUT IT.

Especially not the revised edition or Mindlords. If you include those, then you are playing Dark Sun incorrectly and having the wrong kind of fun.

>he doesn't have a Thri-Kreen with the Surfing NWP

I gotta admit that the Thri-Kreen stuff woulda been pretty good, if it had not been coupled with the idiotic expansion of the setting that the revised setting introduced, which ruined the entire story by trying to define all the mysteries and turn it from an awesome setting of brutal immediacy into a wow-magic-midgets piece of shit.

How about the 4e rerelease, that was pretty much the orginal setting with the best bits of the revised, with all the stupid cut out.

You could use Goliaths as stand ins for Half giants

It was a great continent to add to a different setting. I always used it as Australia, with the Dreamtime being the Blue Age and most of the population now living in a desolate waste as hunter-gatherers.

Most D&D settings are too small for a whole world IMO, better to just use them as very fleshed out locations.

No idea. That was published by WotC, and I play Dungeons and Dragons. So the two really don't have anything to do with one another.

pedantic grongard faggot.

Which is actually what they did in 4e, since the Half-Giant's "schtick" was that, apart from being the Half-Orc's replacement as the Big Dumb Bruiser Race, they were a Chaotic Stupid race of emotionally unstable man-children.

So, 4e just dumped the eternally shifting personas crap and said "Goliaths exist in Athas, and because they descend from ancient sorcerer-king breeding experiments between humans and giants, they're commonly called Half-Giants".

Whatever makes you happy, user. OP asked about Dark Sun and things that are good. So I talked about them.

Sorry that those things don't include WotC but, as someone who doesn't play WotC? Not really my problem.

It didn't get down on its knees and slobber all over Tolkien's dick. It stayed true to its Vancian roots. Dnd takes all of its arcane magic from The Dying Earth and mixing it with Tolkien esque fantasy only ruins it.

Maybe you and I should settle this right here in the ring, if you think you're so tough

I literally cut this out of the DMG2 for my players in our dark sun game

That's cool. Apathy breeds acceptance. Just look at the faggots.

>One of the best parts of 4th was how weapons gave us bigger numbers sometimes.

Jesus and I thought 3rd was garbage.

Op here, I only was interested in the setting cause it was supported for 4e (the best edition of D&D).

Thanks, I'll make sure to use that.

Good HEAVENS are you a cunt

It's very grim and violent, and very weird. It is kind of like Morrowind in that way, where it feels different from the standard European fantasy stuff because it has a more alien setting.

You *can*, but I don't think it would be a good fit. 5e is too magical, IMO. It would require a lot of work making everything and everyone more mundane, adding proper psionics and porting stuff.

But the 4e version (allegedly) worked, and 4e was full of anime-tier bullshit, so why not?

The 2e rules are great. Half giants are pretty well balanced if you understand what you're dealing with; they effectively pass up on a whole class (2 instead of 3) and generally more class/level limits, plus vulnerable to certain attacks.

The wizard preserver/defiler split is actually a fuckin huge part of the setting, don't know why you'd have a problem.

>and that there was noticeable decline in the setting narrative when those things happened

because DMPCs did it, and more importantly they did it without any effort or stress and got massive amounts of unearned power, as it was written by people who had no knowledge of D&D. Sorcerer Kings are routinely killed off with no effort at all.

>That's as likely as unbombing the world in Fallout.

Not really, its a high magic, high heroism setting by design and that sort of possibility is there in core.

Killing the Sorcerer Kings isn't an unambiguous good thing, they are partly responsible for blowing up the world (but only partly; most of the damage was done by Borys after he went on autopilot) but also for saving it. Notably, the trees of life are mostly made by the Sorcerer Kings. The Sorcerer Kings are "meanies" but they hand out the miracles needed to preserve civilization. It is much better to reach an accord with them than to kill them. It would be like nuking a country to glass because you don't like the president.

>5e is too magical,
Dark Sun is supposed to be an extremely high magic setting where everything is dialed up to eleven and everything is EBIN, I don't see a problem.

The metaplot advanced with published adventures so ostensibly your party was supposed to be playing those events.

They screwed in releasing the 2nd boxed set which made the novel characters into very concrete world-shaking celebrities instead of vaguely referencing the events of the adventures. Also much of the aftermath of the modules/novels were tonally dissonant with the stone age brutality of the setting which was part of the appeal.

I feel basically the opposite. In the 90s heroic fantasy with sweeping story arcs was all the rage and AD&D was wildly unsuited to those settings and games due to how the game was bound around unforgiving, dice driven results. Dark Sun's default assumptions really steered D&D players back into desiring a mode of play for which the game was actually built but was out of fashion at the time. Athas was practically a planet-wide 'dungeon' and AD&D is wildly better suited to that milieu than it is delivering the experiences advertised by the fantasy novels supporting TSR's IPs.

Dark Sun in AD&D did have a different stat generation method which resulted in higher average and total possible starting stats, as well as psionic wild talents making characters overall more powerful which compensated for less loot. Magic items in AD&D were potentially game breaking in general though, and having a great one was more like winning the lottery rather than being part of a 'build'. There were really few non-random ways of acquiring magic items.

AD&D was basically operating under the opposite assumptions in regards to balance and magic items than d20/3.x which attempted to make accumulation of a kit of magical gear a normal part of progression so everyone got that experience every time. Unfortunately the corollary to this design philosophy is that your magical kit is mandatory to be at base level of competence.

You do realize you can be right without becoming a mass-murdering serial-rapist, right?

Basically everything was fucked and about to fall down anyway, so GMs didn't have to worry about darling NPC stues being attacked and murdered by players or PCs destroying key locations like in other settings, and the PCs all got psionic powers so everyone was a caster so the caster/martial imbalance was solved.

That D&D is designed around exploring and surviving a harsh environment, and they created a setting which not only emphasized those elements but had phenomenal writing and art direction.

>Darksun
>magic-depleted postapoc setting
>high magic
>high heroism
found the snowflake

>4e (the best edition of D&D)

that's not how you spell 2e, and it doesn't even remotely look like you were trying to type 0d&d, so what the actual fuck?

Use the 4e sourcebooks and the original box set (only the original) for setting info, and Mythras as the actual system. Runequest is basically perfect for a game of this type. The two versions of D&D the game was originally made for each have fundamental issues with damage the experience and don't match the tone of the setting, so conversion is your best bet.

I agree with you but i don't think you get the joke, so uh how bout we do this greco roman style?

>Dark Sun in AD&D did have a different stat generation method which resulted in higher average and total possible starting stats, as well as psionic wild talents making characters overall more powerful which compensated for less loot.

DS also introduced themes into 4e, which add some extra abilities to characters (most of the themes were psionic in the DS book IIRC).

...

>magic-depleted

the first expansion book for Dark Sun covers ebin level PCs, ebin level spells and how to become a benevolent demigod, and even by the core book's standards PCs are cranked up far beyond the normal power level

sorry you're not familiar with Dark Sun

If you don’t understand the context, then you’re a bigger cuck than I thought

Because defiling is something everyone can do, in-lore. It’s what made arcane magic so malevolent, regardless of what the actual practitioners did. There was always a threat a friendly wizard could leech the life out of an oasis for momentary gain, but whereas 3rd and 4e allowed this as an option, 2e made it into class specialization, undercutting the morality of corruption.

I think they were roughly 50% psionic. I know there was one for being an elemental priest (Who got unique access to a paragon path that allowed them to do the utter insanity of Create Rain. I am not kidding, they played up exactly how fucking amazing in-setting that is) and an ex-slave one.

It was a knock-off Barsoom. When you start with something great, the legally-distinct second-rate clone is still going to be good.

Of course everyone could do it in 2e, and it will eventually make it so you can't stop.

Arcane magic, however, isn't malevolent; its despised and subject to (in-setting) revisionist history... thanks to the arch defilers that ruined the planet. Defiling magic is harmful, sure, but trees of life, and optionally elemental clerics, can be tapped to ration out the power usage. There's still the question of taking too much, and a defiler probably has 1 or 2 other classes, meaning he has plenty of options.

>morality of corruption

Eh. In 3e, defiling is simultaneously a truly insane influx of power, not something that you can reverse or shield an area from, so if you try to kill a wizard because he *might* harm the area you'll probably, at best, force him to turn the area into a crater as he sucks up pretty much *everything* with no real way to stop him. Well sure, that's "tempting" I guess, but I think of defilers more as "that guy's going to destroy our farmlands unless we drive him out in the next few days!" and not "that guy's going to vacuum cleaner up the entire settlement in a single fireball if we piss him off, so lets piss him off!"

In 4e, to make defiling remotely worthwhile, you have to intensely, intensely focus on it -- in other words, you have to be a dedicated defiler to make it at all worthwhile.

Elves are better with defiling magic because its easier, more powerful, and they're nomads with only contempt for the rubes who stay in one place so its a cultural element as well.

As such 2e's system captures the temptation of defiling vastly better than later editions did, which are either way too fucking tryhard (3e) or barely worth it even if it didn't hurt the party (4e).

Eh, D&D in general has a lot of Barsoom influences (drow and four armed monkeys for starters). Dark Sun takes a lot of post apoc feels associated with sci fi and puts it to magic instead of radiation.

Yeah, I liked the 4e way of handling it. Where it was just a thing that any arcane spellcaster could do (But at the same time, it hurt your allies as well as the environment to give the other players a bit more of a kick to really dislike you using defiling beyond the environmental concerns)

Well, ok. There was one way you could lock yourself out of using it but that was en Epic Destiny about being the incarnation of Preservation and turning into one of those odd insect angels so at that point it makes sense.

>In 4e, to make defiling remotely worthwhile, you have to intensely, intensely focus on it -- in other words, you have to be a dedicated defiler to make it at all worthwhile.

Eh, getting a reroll on a missed daily power was kinda fucking fantastic as an option. Though specialising in it could make it better, yeah.

If you even roll one and done to hit with your arcane dailies to begin with.