Oh, y'know... that's a pretty good solution... But what about...
You get half the normal allotment of spell points, and your spell points recover on a Short or Long rest.
But you can also choose spend an action to defile and recover spell points based on your level. And when you take the Defile action you can also cast a spell with the same action.
That way you can be a "Fairly Weak" preserver who can't cast as many big spells in one fight as a Defiler can, but you make up the loss by getting spell points when you short rest. And then if you Defile you get to circumvent the limits and go beyond what a traditional A5e caster can do?
Defiling/Preserving is always going to be an area where you have to make Choices, and where the original fluff and crunch are sometimes at odds, and also where they are also internally inconsistent between the original and revised boxes.
In the original box, preservers were mechanically regular wizards. There were some modifications to the spells available (both in terms of some spells being nixed entirely, and some having slightly different effects), but they were basically the same. Defilers were "wizard plus". They had a much faster XP table that generally put them at an average of half a level or so over an equal-XP preserver, and they drained the life out of nearby vegetation whenever they cast a spell. This was a binary choice made at character creation. This is borne out in the world description, where wizards are one or the other, and it's mentioned that e.g. desert tribes often have wizards either in leadership positions or in senior advisor positions, and each tribe only has one of the kinds – usually raiding tribes have defilers and more sedentary tribes have preservers, because raiders usually don't cast magic at home so there is little immediate cost to defiling.
But in the novels, one of the main characters is a wizard who is taught as a preserver, but flirts a little with defiling when in a crisis situation. That's an interesting situational choice, but goes against previously established material.
Then we get Dragon's Crown, a high-level adventure where the PCs, among other things, explore some ruins from the Cleansing Wars where they find some documents from that time. These are written from the perspective of a preserver who at first can't understand how their foes have magic that's so strong, but eventually experiments with it with disastrous results. This tells me that preserving and defiling use
different techniques. This is supported by the origin of magic: Rajaat originally taught preserving magic (or just magic, as defiling wasn't a thing at the time) fairly widely, and then taught defiling magic to a select few with exceptional talent and the will to go along with his genocides.
This then leads to the Revised boxed set, which makes a major change to defilers: they now defile when memorizing (preparing in modern parlance) spells, rather than when they cast them. They also needed to make some sort of roll based on the available vegetation, with a good roll meaning they got more spells that day and a bad roll meaning they got less. I really didn't like this for lore reasons, primarily that it makes raiding defilers useless because they now poop where they eat, rather than where they hunt.
Anyhow, the point of all of this is that defiling is inconsistent in the original material. But it seems important that it's mostly a one-time choice or at best, a Dark Side kind of thing you could occasionally use but doing robs you of the ability to Preserve.
Weren't 'priests' in Dark Sun not even the kind of priest people typically pretend needs to the only kind of priest? As in, no gods needed, you just believe in something really, really hard?
Also, they're like... 'elemental' priests; basically wizards with the healing D&D grudgingly admits it needs even in the survival setting.
Athasian clerics were lore-wise more like 5e warlocks: they made actual pacts with powerful elemental beings in exchange for elemental magic. They still cast priest spells, with minor access (spell level 1-3) to almost every priest spell that wasn't shoehorned into a different element, but major access (level 4-7 – 2e priest spells only went to level 7) only to their own element which was a very limited list.
Yup, gonna drop the bomb here.
People ask me why I hated Dark Sun. This is why. It's a setting that is so small, so insular and so high on its own farts that people think nothing but what existed in the Original Box Sets can ever exist in it. (People do this also with Dragonlance, Greyhawk and Ravenloft too, but Dark Sun fans are far and away the worst about it). An official D&D setting should support the D&D game as it exists in the most current form, and if there is a conflict between established lore and modern rules, the lore should lose 98% of the time.
I see your point, but I think it depends on the setting. For something like Eberron that's designed to provide a space for everything D&D, albeit often with a twist? Yeah, sure. Eberron should make room for most things. But Dark Sun was deliberately designed to provide a different experience. The original boxed set excluded a whole lot of things that were around in "normal" AD&D at the time, and I think those things should stay excluded, and one should be careful about what things you add to it. Other settings are at different points along that sliding scale. For example, Greyhawk included pretty much everything that was part of D&D at the time of its original publication, so that seems like a fine tradition to follow. But Dragonlance deliberately excluded some things like orcs, and they should keep doing that.
A setting is not just geography and history. It is also a selection of what things to include. You don't walk into a Chinese restaurant and ask for pizza, and you don't play Dark Sun expecting to play a gnome.
And that's not just from a PC perspective. For example, mammals are rare in Dark Sun. The OG box has a list of things from the Monstrous Compendium and the MC2 appendix that are around in Dark Sun, and the only mammalian animals on the list are bats, cats, and rats. No bears, wolves, or horses. No birds really either (which in retrospect makes the inclusion of aarakocra seem weird). You have arthropods and reptiles aplenty, but most mammals and birds are gone.
Where it becomes interesting is whether to include
new things in the setting, and there one has to make a call about whether something fits in, and whether it needs to be altered to fit better. For example, OG Dark Sun was cut off from divine influence, so you probably shouldn't add in a new type of divine caster. I also don't like the idea of allowing paladins, even the more self-powered paladins of 5e, as I don't think that providing direct powerups because of idealism fits into Dark Sun. People can certainly be idealists, and receive internal satisfaction from it, but it should not grant them magic powers.
Other things seem like they might fit, but could have bad cascading effects on the world. Take Warlocks for example. Making pacts for arcane power seems like it should be up Dark Sun's alley. But doing so provides an additional path to arcane power beyond defiling and preserving, and that's a thing that should be center stage in Dark Sun. I could definitely see templars being warlocks instead of cleric-types, however, but beyond that it should be rare to non-existent.
I mean, I understand why at a gamist level. I was more curious about an in-depth justification at the cosmological and narrative layers.
Well, going beyond Dark Sun here, but with the 4e and 5.5e interpretations of divine magic the gods don't have much of an active hand in providing divine magic. It's more that the cleric can access a generic divine pool of power, with a bit of flavoring from their patron in the form of a domain, but it's not like Thor personally approves every casting of
cure wounds.
