D&D 4E How would you re-envision Darksun with 4e?

[I'm A Banana]

I think that's a bit of a crazy assumption.

I dunno, since 3e began development, balance has always been a very high priority for the devs, so I think that, since WotC knows their audience pretty well, it'd be important for most of their audience, too.

Blatantly making one choice more powerful than the others and then penalizing it by a role-playing restriction is pretty weak sauce.

Similarly, making players unable to access it is pretty weak sauce (makes them unable to do the whole "fall to the dark side" thing).

Making EVERYTHING more powerful isn't bad, but it has some (perhaps mild) ramifications when bringing in outside things.

But I don't really think Dark Sun is about having big numbers. It's about being a tough SOB, honed by generations spent barely surviving on an unforgiving land, but I don't think they necessarily need to do more damage with a fireball or a melee attack to reflect that.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Defiling isn't a, hm, "natural progression", it's something specifically nasty, and screwy to Athas.

Defilers are not sorcerors, nope, not ever, specifically stated they are wizards, they have to learn spells etc (in the 1st boxed setit states they "gain spells faster", where as sorcerors gain spells slower than wizards!).

Another possibility is just giving defilers extra matamagic feats., But I think the flavour is much better served by defilers automatically getting metamagic feat-effects on any spell cast...but require life energy to do so.
No life, no spells, and the life drain kills life, including people (depending on spell level, person's health etc, so tie spell level, or caster level, to damage in hit points)

Defilers are just more powerful, because of defiling. Go read the boxed set, guys, admit it, live with it, love it, make rules for it, and slaughter PC defilers toot sweet

Dark Sun, 1st boxed set, Rules Book, page 26-27, and chapter 7 magic for defiling rules.

Defiler-"Compared to a preserver, a defiler advances through levels very quickly, but his very existance destroys the life around him".

Defilers drain life to power spells, preservers don't. So, make it that Defilers can't cast spells if there is no life to suck out! This doesn't bother preservers at all.

Making defilers drain animal health (hit points) makes them able to use spells in desert, but at a cost (slaves, animals etc). Also works great for RP: imagine a defiler, with a bodyguard, herding slaves....

And WOTC do make mistakes

Think outside the box, enjoy Athas being different, don't try and make it fit the metagame, make the game fit the setting.

 

[Klaus]

Defiling isn't "more powerful" than Preserving. It's "easier". That's why the XP table for defilers was faster.

It's like the Force: if you let go and give in to power, you'll be the bad guy. If you use self-control and caution, you'll on the up and up.

 

[Staffan]

Defiling isn't "more powerful" than Preserving. It's "easier". That's why the XP table for defilers was faster.

Also, it wasn't that much faster. A defiler at the midpoint of 5th level (21k) would still be 5th level as a preserver. A defiler at the midpoint of 10th level (225k) would be 9th level as a preserver. At the midpoint of 15th level (1,485k), they'd be 13th level - that's where we start to see some real difference. Even at the start of 20th level (2.7M), the preserver is only three levels behind.

Back when I was attempting to write my own 3e Dark Sun rules, I just had defilers gain an additional caster level at level 1, 6, 11, and 16, or something like that (don't remember the exact levels). That's pretty powerful, and matches their 2e advantage reasonably well.

 

[BendBars/LiftGates]

What about this? (Sorry if someone has already suggested it)

Powers from the Arcane power source may be used as defiler magic. The effects of this are the usual bit, turning a certain radius around you to dust, based on the level of the power you use. But, if you're defiling, you immediately get a Recharge ( ) attempt for encounter powers and a Recharge ( ) attempt for daily powers. Sure, you won't see cool defiling effects when the enemy wizard is throwing around his at-will spells, but with incentives like this, defilers will be making very liberal use of their big guns.

Or, to make things really tough against defilers, you could give a Recharge roll to daily powers, but automatically recharge encounter powers. I don't like this option because you'd never see at-will powers in action.

Then just make it a template. Say that NPC defilers count as 1 or 2 levels higher. PC defilers need some kind of balancing effect, though. The mere threat of lynching doesn't seem like enough.

This seems in keeping with the fluff: Preservers must be conservative with their use of magic, but defilers are free to power their magic all day long. I like that this rewards defilers for defiling every time they cast their spells, rather than over time with faster level progression. Defilers want rewards now. Spell recharges are immediate gratification. And, even better, they have to then leave the radius of terrain they just defiled and go find some new life to consume for their next spell. Mobility is encouraged.

 

[Hawke]

It's interesting thing to look into... I never ran my games with PC Defilers so the RP element was enough to make them enemies. In 4E, when you're having player characters I think the best bet would be causing random penalties to your allies or yourself as your power sucks energy away. The flip side to balance the potential penalty of Defilers vs. Preservers could be free metamagic feats to defilers that allow them to expand and enhance their powers. Not sure how the balance would work, but I'm sure you could zero in on a medium that doesn't necessarily make Defilers "better" but those that play with fire and can easily outpace a preserver but could get burned as a result. The debate would be whether or not you want Defilers to be a separate class with separate powers or what I'd probably prefer, a template you apply to a Wizard/Warlock. Example penalties could include:

You could even make a critical failure a miss and do necrotic damage to an ally or yourself.

You could make any encounter/daily powers automatically destroy any food or water that your party or the enemies have. While that might not be a huge thing in normal D&D, in the tablelands that could spell certain death.

Other ideas here would work well, I think. For instance if BB/LG's recharge idea could be applied giving Defilers a high recharge at a penalty of potentially causing bad things to happen. Epic level Defilers could have paths or feats that would begin negating/controlling the defiler stuff just as the feats existed to do so in Athas.org 3.5 Dark Sun version.

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Elemental Clerics will be pretty cool... probably a separate class. With the removal of domains it makes it a bit rougher, but you could always just allow extra powers and disallow other powers, but it just seems like completely redoing it might be better off. It might even make sense to change them from Leaders to strikers or controllers to differentiate them from their Pelor loving cousins.

Warlords are very similar to Gladiators in my mind... in fact we're finishing the current arc and shelving DS in my current game. I'm playing the last few adventures with hybrid 4E created 1st level characters and I simply copied the Warlord for the Gladiator PC. We'll switch to a new setting come June.

Races should be pretty awesome... Thri-kreen, Pterran, Aaracokra, Mul racial abilities should all work out really well. I can't wait to see the Thri-Kreen, with the racial powers I think you can make them seem really unique without having to hide it through hours of obscure math. I'm curious if they'll try and fit Tieflings, Eladrin, and Dragonborn into the core classes or not. Dragonborn would be the easiest, and some easy fudging could get Eladrin in but their connection to the feywild seems out of place with DS while Elves seem to fit better to their DS counterparts than in 3.5. Tieflings - gosh, I don't know. I can't see them being a super common race in the tablelands but perhaps a few from far off or I could see a Tiefling Queen of some small fotress well away from any of the city-states that would gobble her up? I'd love to hear some thoughts about this...

Things I haven't worked out yet: How to best handle a system that really wares the players down due to heat and other elemental problems in post-apocalyptic fantasy. Some sort of fatigue system that causes players to temporarily lose daily powers or lessen the effect of encounter powers based on supplies, fatigue, heat, slavery, etc. would be interesting. The no-metal weapons or heavy armor kind of loses some flair because 1/2 level is added all over the place which is designed to make regular D&D easier to run but requires some further tweaking to make DS have the crunch-feel that the fluff-feel so wants... though one thing that would really work well is your Weapon or Implement breaking and suddenly half your powers are no longer functional - that's a 4E addition that potentially has stronger effects than the counterparts in 3.5.

Skill challenges: oh gosh, I can't wait to run some endurance/survival challenges. It seems perfect for a long trek/chase, trying to simply survive being in a city where templars are looking out to get you for any reason, to keep away from templars in Gulg trying to scan your mind, to deal with the difficulties of slavery. All of these could have some of the negative effects above if failed.

 

[Staffan]

The debate would be whether or not you want Defilers to be a separate class with separate powers or what I'd probably prefer, a template you apply to a Wizard/Warlock.

Given the world's backstory (assuming you don't ignore that totally), I think defiling ought to be a separate discipline, not just a quick-and-dirty version of spellcasting. It might be possible to switch, but it should require some training to do so.

When Rajaat introduced arcane magic to Athas, he only taught people preserving magic at first. It wasn't until later that he taught some people defiling magic in secret. If defiling was just "draw magic faster", that wouldn't have worked out the way it did.

Warlords are very similar to Gladiators in my mind...

What? Warlords are OK at fighting on their own, but their main thing is to buff the rest of the party up with their tactical insight and/or inspiring presence. Gladiators are all about the up-close-and-personal fighting. I think (hope) you mean that 4e Warlords = DS Fighters, who were more soldiery, and got abilities like building fortifications.

 

[Hawke]

Given the world's backstory (assuming you don't ignore that totally), I think defiling ought to be a separate discipline, not just a quick-and-dirty version of spellcasting. It might be possible to switch, but it should require some training to do so.

Good point about the backstory, my only thought is that I'd like for Defilers/Preservers to have access to similar spells. Even if there are Defiler or Preserver only spells for their discipline, a common overlap could work out. With the full on Vancian casting this seemed to work easier than it will with the power system... but I'm sure some clever things could be done. Maybe make it work like multiclassing but with the free ability of a Defiler to pick the Multiclass Power Feat without having to take the root class multiclass feat?

What? Warlords are OK at fighting on their own, but their main thing is to buff the rest of the party up with their tactical insight and/or inspiring presence. Gladiators are all about the up-close-and-personal fighting. I think (hope) you mean that 4e Warlords = DS Fighters, who were more soldiery, and got abilities like building fortifications.

Ah, correct. Good points and I think fits well into the world. It seems like Fighter = Gladiator, but I think it would be more of a stretch to do Barbarian = Gladiator (as many 3.5 conversions based) with the 4E Primal power source. I wonder how much creating a "gladiator" vs. "fighter" might be about adding powers / builds to the Fighter class rather than recreating a completely different class. Same thing for all other classes, I guess... Athasian Soldier build for the Warlord etc. I guess the full rules will let us see how easy this sort of stuff will be to create and then the campaign settings will show how much they want to change to the core classes.

 

[BendBars/LiftGates]

Yes, an alternative might be to make Defiling and Preserving be power sources.

 

[Hawke]

Getting really specific here, how would you create Thri-kreen as a 4E race given what you know now? I think I might create one just for fun for the next game and would like some input to try and get them right.