4e Dark Sun: What went wrong?

4e Dark Sun was the best thing to have happened to Dark Sun ins a while. It really got to the spirit of the setting. I can't believe they actually outright banned Divine classes.

Also, Inherent Bonuses were one of the best things to happen in 4e and I used them in every campaign.

>It didn't even include a map in the book, it came on a separate sheet of paper.

Out of curiosity, how the dangers of survival were handled? I heard is something with the surges?

Also, how was defiling handled?

>Survival
Hard to write in short format, but, in a nutshell, they created an abstract "currency" called "survival days", which abstractifies the food, water, protective clothing, skin balm, salts and other essentials you need to keep you alive through the parching day and the freezing night. If you run out of survival days, your options are foraging with Nature (which ain't so easy), or becoming vulnerable to sun sickness, a very hard-to-resist and nasty "disease" mechanic that sucks out your healing surges, penalizes attacks & defenses, and ultimately kills you. Or, you can hide from the sun and travel at night, but the cold can sap a healing surge from you every 8 hours if you can't pass the requisite Constitution checks.

>Defiling
Every Arcane class can choose to Defile when they use an Arcane Daily Power; this lets them reroll either the attack roll or the damage roll, their choice, but sucks the life from all allies within 20 squares of you (that's 100 cubic feet), causing them to take Necrotic damage equal to half their Healing Surge value.

The Master Defiler paragon path amplifies their aptitude for defiling, including being able to drain health from enemies when defiling.

Using defiling still kills off all plant life within that 20 square radius, but that's just flavor text, there's no rules specifically tied into how fertile the land is.

Nobody liked the Prism Pentad.

Thanks user. I see defiling is kinda left to the narrative.
How do you get survival days? Feats? Class (like Ranger?) skills?

Multiple methods:
1 - Buy them; a single survival day costs the Athasian equivalent of 5 gold pieces.
2 - In places where you can gather food & water via foraging, a half-gallon of water and sufficient food for the day equates to 1 survival day.
3 - You can find survival days as loot of the appropriate value (so, 100gp of loot can instead be replaced by 20 survival days).
4 - You can receive survival days instead of (or in addition) cash or other valuable type rewards for completing quests, doing jobs, etc.

The fact you post best boy as well as this blatant horseshit disgusts me on a physical level.

Thanks again.

>4e Dark Sun: What went wrong?

"No Brom. Have some Wayne Reynolds instead."

Actually that's the best bit. The Prism Pentad killed some of the villains, changed a huge amount of the setting, and turned a neat place to adventure into a giant rainstorm.

As for the others, Sorcerer Kings being killable makes sense, now they're not all killed already by the book characters, Mind Lords of the Last Sea had a bunch of issues, but we don't know if the last sea's still around because it's so fucking far away. It probably is though.
And halflings probably are still responsible for fucking up the blue age, given Rajaat's still around in 4e, and he got imprisoned for favouring the halflings.

Given his description in the Prism Pentad, he'd probably make a good primordial.

The only complaint I recall is not delving into the importance of power sources.

The loss of Clerics was mostly impossible in 2nd Edition because there simply was no real replacement. 4e this was no longer an issue.

Oh, and rolling back the timeline with a few adjustments was one of the best parts. Those novels basically ruined the setting.

Overall 4e Dark Sun was, like most of 4e, superior to previous (and so far future) versions of D&D.

>I can't believe they actually outright banned Divine classes.

Well, they DID include a sidebar for 'So someone REALLY wants to play a divine class...' (Which mostly was about refluffing it to be Primal rather than divine)

Surprised by the vast outpouring of sympathy for 4e's take on Dark Sun.

What about Templars? They went from an evil pseudo-Paladin in AD&D to a theme and a pact for Warlocks in 4e - did that honestly bug anybody?

Seriously?

They were never "evil pseudo-paladins". They were members of a Sorcerer-King's hierarchy who gained power through their loyalty to him. It being a warlock pact made so much sense, it was perfect and matched the fluff probably better than the original mechanics.

In so many ways 4e's mechanics just fit the world better.

Yeah, even Eladrin fit dark sun. Fucking Eladrin!

Elaborate on this pls

Didn't mind the mechanics for Dark Sun 4e, but the old art was wicked.

Eladrin in 4e hail from The Lands Within The Wind, a parallel plane that was once a paradise, but which defiling has utterly annihilated, reducing to a few extradimensional oases that the eladrin guard with their lives, willing to kill and/or render insane anyone who comes too close.

It's a few things, such as several elven ruins that fit the theme of Eladrin. As well as the ones listed in the 4e book, there's also:
>The City of White Marble on Shault.
>Old Kurn.

The second one is quite interesting, because it's also where the repentant Sorcerer King Oronis dwells. The New Kurn he's been transferring his people to may not just be a regular city, but the extraplanar city located in the Lands Within the Wind.

My guess is the city of Korbnor from Dark Sun Shattered Lands may be another Eladrin city, ruined by the Psurlons rather than by Albeorn.

And of course there's the ghost elves of the last sea. Utterly unlike normal elves, they're pale skinned, blond hair, and blue eyes. They're isolationist and rather concerned with their heritage.

That screams Eladrin to me.

True enough, I really wish they'd kept the 2e look for Dray. They're far too chubby for an athasian dragon.

Semi-related.

I am going to run Dark Sun in 2E, and I bought a bunch of boxed sets and adventures. I'm very tempted to try and convert the core mechanics (saving throws, DC for skill checks, , etc...) to 5E but pretty much keep other stuff the same. Is this a fool's errand and should I just deal with all the frustrating idiosyncrasies of 2E? I am fine with how everything works in regards to class, race, spells, etc... my players just can't stand never knowing what die to roll and if high or low numbers are good.

Another related question for anyone with experience. Should I use Psionic rules from the boxed set/Complete Psionics Handbook or the Player's Option/Expanded and Revised box set? They seem quite complicated either way.

So what should I be reading if I want to run old school dark sun?

I got all the osr stuff but wondering where to start.

The original boxed sets, then 4e. That's it.

Maybe the revised guide if you what metaplot and backstory.

For 5e?

Stel the wild talents from 4e and find the lastest UA: Mystic

>retconning the awful novels and the retarded halflings shit is bad

I hope a Templar beats you to death.

Dark Sun and 4e go together magnificently. OP's just too much of a faggot realize that.

But... Veeky Forums hates D&D 4e. Why is 4e Dark Sun getting so much love?

Give everyone the Magic Initiate feat, and make a special wild talent cantrip list.

This is a good idea

Steal the wild talents from 4th edition or the box set

Because somehow it works.

It's something that really shouldn't have made sense, taking things that didn't fit and bodging them together.

But Dark Sun provides interesting twists on the more boring 4e stuff, and 4e provides reasonable bases for the more gonzo Dark Sun stuff.

It's like you could turn the Rhulisti life-shapers into messing with the far plane. Things like the Dark Lens, the Psionatrix, and the Planar Gate may be fragments of the Living Gate which connected the far plane to the world.
Aberrations usually connected with the far plane could instead be life-shaped creatures gone feral.

And of course the Messenger is the name of two comets. The Athasian one which was going to be revealed as a spaceship full of Rhulisti; and Ulban, a far realm entity.

4e Dark Sun was like playing a 1980's pulp fantasy B-movie, and it was fantastic. Was it the same genre/feels that 2e Dark Sun did? Nope... and that's a good thing. First, because 4e wouldn't do that genre/feels justice, and second because there's already a system that DOES do that genre/feels perfectly: it's called 2e. Why do something that's already been done poorly, when you can use old materials to do something new well?

Because Veeky Forums isn't one person. We 4e lovers lurk in the shadows, only gathering together to quietly whisper our appreciation for Skill Challenges when the occasional 4e-friendly thread comes around.

>Changed Defiling from a Wizard Variant into a temptation for all arcanists.
You know there's only one 'arcane' caster class in 2e, right?

Skill Challenges were the worst part of 4e.

>lurk in the shadows
>quietly whisper
>occasional 4e-friendly thread

That's funny, I've seen no less than five threads in the past two days that got wrecked by edition wars bullshit involving 4e lovers.

4e feels like it was a system specifically designed to be the best possible system for Eberron and Dark Sun

Skill challenges fill a valuable niche because they make it easier to adjudicate situations that are somewhere between.

"Ok, he rolled a single skill check. problem solved."
and
"don't bother rolling"

If you have ever as a DM been in a situation where you made a player roll again for some sort of extended effort, you have already used a less shitty version of skill challenges in spirit. Skill challenges also make using skills to influence the world feel less swingy. Combat isn't decided by a single d20 roll.

Skill challenges also make traps much more interactive. Without skill challenges, adding traps to a campaign just makes everybody poke things with poles all of the time instead of traps contributing to the danger of an action scene.

I've been running 4e for years and I can count on my balls the times I've wanted to go out of my way to run a skill challenge as a main encounter, but they do help patch a few flaws with how skill checks work as obstacles. You can't force everything to be a single-roll obstacle, and excessively using them doesn't interact well with the action economy.

So for someone who hasn't put any stock or time into 4e, tell me what they are and how they work. I feel like there's a way to adapt them widely. I love the idea of traps being multi-stage, so hit me.

4e players would reply to less bait if it was called out better. A bait that's repeated often enough becomes meme, which begets bait.

A basic skill challenge is 4 successes before 3 failures, and it's used for situations that should be more complex than a single roll.

Let's say for example my players want to bait some dire wolves instead of fighting them. Solving an encounter with a single high animal handling roll is shittt gameplay, then again, saying no just devalues the skill altogether. After all, what is the skill good for if you can't use it here? Use your creativity to think about how baiting an animal could require multiple steps.

Skill challenges also add a social combat element. Killing something is going to take about 4 attacks, which gives opportunity for time to pass, ups and downs, multiple rolls, and tension. Skill challenges give this gameplay to non-combat situations. After all, a d20 system needs multiple rolls in order to really show how good a character is at doing something.

Traps work in 4e like monsters kind of. The way you attack them is by attempting to disarm them. Usually this is thievery, but magic traps could use arcana. This is an opportunity to be creative as a DM or a player. This means that a party can seamlessly contribute to combat either by directly fighting, or by using their skills.

"walk 5ft and poke with pole" is often not a fun use of traps, but if traps are interesting in combat, you can use them as defensive structures in combat where other monsters create a sense of urgency. This has the added benefit of completely solving the problem of "I failed thievery. ok, I just try again."

This mindset extends to a lot of obstacles. A door that takes a str check to break down is boring by itself. They either try again, or you tell them they can't. Instead, put the breakable door in an action scene that creates dramatic tension.

>"walk 5ft and poke with pole" is often not a fun use of traps, but if traps are interesting in combat, you can use them as defensive structures in combat

Think of how turrets work in RTS games. The gameplay of a turret by itself vs a single army man is shitty, but they work great when they exist as part of a fight between creatures. For example, you can lay out a dungeon room such that there is a very good position, but its covered by a trap. This gives the players a real reason to run into it, and it makes the rogue feel awesome when lockpicking suddenly becomes a way to win fights.

Another benefit is if you condition your players that traps are used strategically and not in random locations as a gotcha, then players get less paranoid about random hallways and think more about strategy. This also makes it so that you don't have to justify a world where it makes sense for monster dwellings to randomly have maintained mechanical traps. Seriously, a world where traps are mass produced and left lying around while nobody has a wristwatch makes no damn sense.

This sounds cool. This also sounds like it's just smartly written in 4e and can be used in literally any system with a good DM. Duly noted.

Because it was actually good.
Also, Veeky Forums only has memes against 4e. They can't stand actual arguments.

Quite a selective reading you have there user. Or is just that the mere existence of someone liking a game you don't like flusters your butt?

Skill challenge-like mechanics have begun to appear in more games. Chronicles of Darkness has a social combat system that's very similar. Unknown Armies 3e has the gridiron. Heck, Fate even calls them challenges. They might not be exactly the same, but the concept is similar - ways to structure scenes around multiple skill rolls that are tracked towards an end goal.
The problem here is that they're in 4e, so for autists they're bad regardless.

Another thing worth mentioning is that skill challenges work even more smooth if you just don't tell the players you are running one.

You could even entirely replace dungeons with skill challenges, if you wanted, now that I think about it (or at least sections of it).

One important thing doesn't quite mention is that the situation should change with each roll. A successful roll is advancement toward the completion of the larger goal. A failed roll might cause a new problem, lock off some particular path to the goal, or simply being a punishment (for instance, healing surge losses for failed Endurance checks when traveling in harsh conditions).

My biggest issue with Dark Sun 4e is that the fluff around arcane magic is that it's stronger than other magic, unless you're preserving in which case it's weaker. Obviously in 4e balance takes paramount, so that wasn't an actual option, and thus I found the defiling quite lack-luster.
You have no mechanical disadvantage to preserving, unless it's a daily, and then you reroll keep-second even if it's lower? That's trash. My group uses a houserule where you declare it beforehand, it gives you reroll one attack keep either, and steals a surge from allies within 5, and deals 10/tier damage to non-minion enemies within 5. (Getting a damage bonus if applicable equal to the number of enemies hit to boot)
The downside being completely party and fluff, giving an actual hard choice of 'do I fuck my party up, and piss off both the veiled alliance we work with, and the shaman party member just to make this daily hit extra hard?'

Part of the issue is that as they were printed in the first DMG, they didn't work. The 'lower' difficulty skill challenges were easier to fail because the number of failures allowed was 2 or even 1. That was in addition to the already frequently screwy math of 4E

Yeah, this is fair. I often forget how crap defiling was in the face of everything else being so good.

I'm not sure I ever thought of or saw a suggestion how to fix it I liked.

Not a bad suggestion about defiling... with the right group mind you.

Not but only because people are actually dressed

Talk shit get hit

It's biggest 'flaw' was that it made it accessible to people once again, denying the oldfags and edgelords of their hipsterdom.

>a 1980's pulp fantasy B-movie

How much did 4E Dark Sun change the stuff from 2E version? Because when I think of a film to describe Dark Sun, I think of Mad Max II, not Deathstalker. Instead of petrol and shotgun shells and post-nuclear gangers, it's water and food and cannibal halflings.

Although I would love to see how Dark Sun would do honour to the greatest sword of 1980s sword and sorcery movies, and possibly the greatest cinema sword ever.

4e, because it was 4e, took all the emphasis off of survival and the terrible things that scarcity does to people, both the haves and have-nots. It's always trivially easy to get all the food, water, and sunscreen (they added fucking sunscreen) you'll ever need, so much so that they abstracted everything into cheap packages of "supply days." Metal no linger had any appeal because to make the 4e math work you had to be able to treat any worthless stick as a magic weapon, with the only drawback being that it breaks on a critical hit and you instantly replace it with a new worthless stick. It even lightened up the oppressive politics that defined the settings, with the sorcerer-kings not only killable in an afternoon but with the most important of them actually dead already. Because the hub city is free now, most players have absolutely no contact with anything that might trigger them.

Yes, it could be abused if my party was just murderhobo-ing their way through Athas, but I like to feel that their choices matter. And through 6 levels so far, and three arcane characters, they have only used AD once, and it was against a big bone golem thing when the party felt it was going to die anyway.

>Because the hub city is free now,
Tyr was always a free city in the game material, because everything was set after the bit of Prism Pentad 1 where the guy dies.

All'I'm hearing is "it's bad because it's different".
4e abstracted a lot of things, and it never was a survival system to begin with. It stands to reason that there were limits to what could be done for DS while keeping within the framework. The solutions they found are elegant and contribute to the feeling of the setting, making it very different from any other 4e setting, even if they obviously aren't a straight copy of the 2E rules.

4e was never a survival setting to begin with, that's true. But Dark Sun is THE survival setting. If you're not turning CE because you're thirsty or killing your best friend over a piece of pig iron, you're doing it wrong.

So how much of this is hyperbole and how much isn't?
I'm reading a lot of standard grog bitching in the undertone.

That never happened in an actual AD&D 2E game, and you know it.

Whoa, I never realised they changed it that much. Also, now I'm sad, because I'm not aware of any RPG that can do justice to the 80s sword and sorcery films, where heroes are buff and oiled, women are hot and topless, and wizards are evil and look like Michael Berryman.

Hello it's me, the Conan RPGs.

Don't fall for the memes, user.

Those all suck, especially 2d20. Play Barbarians of Lemuria or maybe Iron Heroes

I've thought of the various Conans, but they feel too serious for the kind of fun-hearted romp through faceless goons, spitting camels and 50p special effects to save Princess Tittia from the clutches of Michael Berryman.

I'm going to have to look into Barbarians of Lemuria.

>a whiny baby complains about a setting he never played in but now hates because it gets associated with 4E

>survival days
...that actually sounds brilliant. I don't think I've seen a game streamline the dangers of surviving in a hostile wasteland that beautifully before. Might actually pick up the book to see about looting that for Shadow of the Demon Lord. Thanks, user. 4E did so much that was pretty ballsy and interesting mechanically, it's a pity that grognards couldn't be assed to do anything but autistically screech about 'not muh true DnD.'

>Veeky Forums hates D&D 4e
>he believes the memes

Survival days might have worked in a humans-only setting, but a lot of the Dark Sun races were absolutely defined by needing different amounts of different resources. Thri-kreen need less water in relation to everything else and half-giants need more. But not in 4e because it'd make people worry too much.

And, this is the critical part, abstract supply days encourage you to think less about survival, which is the opposite of what Dark Sun is all about. Everything about the 4e rules screams "don't worry about it."

Here you go user.

Did you actually play DS in 2e?

>autism posts

Why?
Dark Sun in 4e is one of the things that was fucking outstanding in all of D&D because of how well mechanics worked with lore, on top of undoing some of the dumb shit from the "novels".
It's really only shitposters like that try to harp on it, and they generally fail on the singular premise that their ideas of what the game is do not in any way match up to practical mechanics.
They like the idea of the setting, not actually playing in it.

Spot on. Newfags who have only heard about Dark Sun from second-hand tales on Veeky Forums have wildly exaggerated assumptions, and compound them with the usual memes.

For example, nobody ever remembers that on the deadly Dark Sun all characters rolled 4d4+4 for stats and started at 3rd level.

You really shouldn't be.

While Veeky Forums isn't one monolithic entity with only one opinion, there's actually a massive degree of support for 4E on Veeky Forums, particularly in the wake of the line ending. It had a lot of really interesting ideas and you can see that in the amount of impact that it's had on other games in its wake, from the direct knock-offs like Strike to games like 13th Age, even to games like Shadow of the Demon Lord which is really possible because of the Healing Surge system that it borrowed. Hell, even DnD Next was something that a lot of people were interested in because of its fusion of various older systems and has led to 5E getting a decent amount of flak and contempt even among people that play it for axing so many things that existed in 4E simply because they were in 4E.

And at the end of the day, the only real arguments that get mustered against it are usually just a matter of personal taste. The tired old memes of "4E is WoW! MMO DnD, lmao," and bitching about it "not feeling like DnD," are as irrelevant as they were at launch. The fucked up monster math from MM1 and 2 were corrected and everyone that still plays it just typically uses Vault math, the bloat was more manageable than ever before due to a free online index, and most of the real issues were errata'd away on their up-to-date compendium that generally one person in a group had access to which made books more of a luxury than a necessity. And it still was the best version of DnD made as far as making things enjoyable and simple for DMs through encounter building, monster-building, skill challenges, and the downright magical DMG2 which gets recommended to fledgling DMs regardless of what game they are running.

It also didn’t help that, IIRC, they were pesented as distinct events, like “okay guys, skill challenge time, start rolling them skills.” They work best when woven into the scene subtly. PCs shouldn’t necessarily know if they’re in a skill challenge they way they’d know they were in combat.

At least, that’s how I and my group read it. We totally treated skill challenges as explicit scenes, and they really really suffered for it.

I always run them explicitly, and never had a problem. I know secret skill challenges are common, they are one of the most repeated advice in the generals, but I really don't see how that would matter. I mean, players who are not blind should get that if everybody is rolling skills and the GM is taking notes it's a skill challenge.

My biggest problem with the dream of "secretly skill challenge" is that many times players either steal the show completely, leaving the fighter to do his one athletics check, or are completely silent, letting the skill-monkey take over everything.
What I end up doing usually is giving the players an obvious goal (like escape the collapsing ruin, or solve the ancient magic puzzle, or find the halfling hideout) and let them say how they want to do it, the restriction being everyone has to do something before anyone can go again. The order doesn't matter, just that everyone at least tries.

I don't think there's any problem with the players realizing it's a skill challenge, there's just no reason to say AND NOW FOR A SKILL CHALLENGE or anything of the sort. There's no need for there to be a transition, so I don't see the benefit to explicitly defining one.

Yeah, it's sort of how the DM I had for Shadowrun tended to handle things. We'd be presented with a problem at hand, and then everyone contributed one skill to help out. It was pretty obvious we were doing a Skill Challenge, but it's not like there was confetti and balloons to announce its arrival.

I get where you're coming from, but I also think that marking the start of the sequence has its benefits. It gives a hint that some resources can be used, signals to all players to think about how they are interacting instead of just going "I pass" or "I help him", and marks the scene as important.
Maybe we're more used to that kind of division because we also play storygames.

This.
Making sure everyone is on the same page is an important thing as a GM.

Not in the original boxed set, it wasn't. Though the first published adventure covers Kalack's assassination, so it doesn't stay that way long.

In retrospect, I think I just realized what the real issue was. I remember actually giving them the list of skills that they should have rolled from. I don’t think I had realized that it was supposed to be more open-ended. There was no narrative flow, no creativity involved, just rolling skills off a predetermined list and trying to get 4 successes before getting 3 losses.

Yeah that was probably it. Christ, I was a bad GM in high school.

>high school
found your problem. everyone is terrible in high school