D&D 5E (2024) Unconfirmed Dark Sun World Book

[DEFCON 1]

The same reason people watch the news, doom scroll, or pick fights over inane subjects on niche forums.

Which is exactly why no one else (most especially WotC) should waste their own time taking their complaints seriously.

 

[Scribe]

Which is exactly why no one else (most especially WotC) should waste their own time taking their complaints seriously.

Because humans have been conditioned to seek out bad/distressing news?

 

[FitzTheRuke]

There is not a single person who wants and prefers 2E Dark Sun that should be following or concerning themselves with any information regarding a Dark Sun book for 5E24. If you are... you are basically repeatedly slamming your face into a wall right now for absolutely no reason.

You KNOW how this is going to go. You KNOW what WotC is going to produce. You KNOW you are going to hate the result. So why you are actually watching how things are progressing is beyond the realm of sanity.

There is nothing wrong with just walking away. Use your 2E Dark Sun books to create and run your own Dark Sun campaign in the style of Dark Sun you want. Do a quick google search and find a couple house rules that someone invariably has already created to update some mechanical bits to 5E if necessary. Then play the Dark Sun game you prefer using 5E and never once concern yourself with what WotC does with it. Because it is not worth your time and not worth getting all bent out of shape over what other people are going to play when they play their own version of "Dark Sun".

See: Spelljammer, Planescape, Dragonlance, Ravenloft etc. etc. etc.

I mean, you could also (if you want) use the new Dark Sun book, but if it doesn't have enough slavery (or halflings eating people, or whatever) for you, just add that stuff back in the game that you run?

I'll probably do that myself when I run it. I can't imagine that a 5e Darksun game that I run would be particularly different than the one I ran in '93, regardless of what the book tells me about the world.

Except for new stuff that I like! I will definitely use that!

If anything, I would probably run the game darker today, at least when it comes to nuance of its themes, because we didn't take much of it seriously back then, being teens.

Or not. Depends what my players want.

 

[bedir than]

People who don't buy or read modern WotC books are very insistent on what's not in them.

 

[DEFCON 1]

I mean, you could also (if you want) use the new Dark Sun book, but if it doesn't have enough slavery (or halflings eating people, or whatever) for you, just add that stuff back in the game that you run?

I'll probably do that myself when I run it. I can't imagine that a 5e Darksun game that I run would be particularly different than the one I ran in '93, regardless of what the book tells me about the world.

Except for new stuff that I like! I will definitely use that!

If anything, I would probably run the game darker today, at least when it comes to nuance of its themes, because we didn't take much of it seriously back then, being teens.

Or not. Depends what my players want.

Yeah, except that if that sort of reasonable response was going to be the norm, we wouldn't have so many people freaking out about how WotC is going to "screw it up" already.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Yeah, except that if that sort of reasonable response was going to be the norm, we wouldn't have so many people freaking out about how WotC is going to "screw it up" already.

I always marvel at how rare that attitude is. It surprises me, because we make it all up anyhow, and we generally crib our games from various sources. AND we are always encouraged to "make the game our own".

So - to me - they can't really screw up my game story-wise.

They could, as they did with Spelljammer, make such terrible ship-to-ship battle rules that I get bored running it and decide to run something else instead, though! (And I tried to find or make better rules first, which could have worked out - I just eventually decided I'd prefer to use the same time on a different campaign. I could have made it work if I'd been more motivated).

 

[Maxperson]

If anything, I would probably run the game darker today, at least when it comes to nuance of its themes, because we didn't take much of it seriously back then, being teens.

Same here. We just weren't old enough then to really take much of it seriously or think about the consequences of what the setting meant.

 

[Scribe]

If anything, I would probably run the game darker today, at least when it comes to nuance of its themes, because we didn't take much of it seriously back then, being teens.

Yeah considering the tropes and themes, it should be leaning in hard but I'll eat my hat if Wizards has the stones to do it.

 

[Kurotowa]

I always marvel at how rare that attitude is. It surprises me, because we make it all up anyhow, and we generally crib our games from various sources. AND we are always encouraged to "make the game our own".

So - to me - they can't really screw up my game story-wise.

The vibe I often get is that a lot of people feel pressure to conform to the latest books. Maybe they're not the DM making that call, maybe the rest of the group doesn't share their opinions, maybe they don't have a stable group and aren't good at selling their ideas to whatever floaters are available. But they definitely seem to have the belief that the choices are to play with the latest official books or don't play at all.

How well founded that belief is, is hard to say. Everyone has their own circumstances and we don't know them all. But I've certainly seen a lot of different dynamics with different play groups over the years.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, except that if that sort of reasonable response was going to be the norm, we wouldn't have so many people freaking out about how WotC is going to "screw it up" already.

Their concerns are not entirely unfounded. We have seen, even in 5.5e, changes that indicate that sensitive topics are still something they are willing to change. Altering the pictures and text of some creatures regarding gender, comments in the past about slavery, etc. Enough change to these topics is still present to give us pause and concern over how they will hander Dark Sun, which has the topic of slavery front and center, pervasive in Dark Sun society. I don't think we will see slavery handled in the same way, or to the degree that it was present in 2e. I also don't think it will be gone. How well they handle it, though, is a mystery.

The last three settings that I've looked at are Spelljammer, Planescape, and the new Forgotten Realms stuff. On a scale of 1 to 10, Spelljammer rated a 1. It was worthless. Planescape was handled decently, so I rate it around a 6. Not as good as I had hoped, but far better than spelljammer. The new Forgotten Realms stuff was in my opinion very good, so I rate it an 8. A 9 being fantastic and a 10 being perfect, and it wasn't either of those. So we have one crappy setting, one middle of the road setting, and one good setting. That makes predicting Dark Sun very hard. The only good "pattern"(in quotes since 2 isn't enough to establish a pattern) is that the settings seem to be going in the right direction.