Recent content by occam

It's worth noting that it hasn't always been this way. In 3e, elves and half-elves had low-light vision (normal vision in dim light, none in darkness), while dwarves and half-orcs had darkvision; while in 4e, all (or essentially all) PC races had low-light vision at best. The two 5e rulesets for...

Yeah, all the Sigil minis that I know of have been offered for free.

Can you source that? What I recall is one instance of a WotC representative using the word "monetization", which some interpreted without evidence to be about online microtransactions, in an address to investors. No customer-directed communication about it, and nothing specifically about...

I get what you're saying, wanting to align narrative and mechanics. But my point was that players already felt the narrative, to the point that many of them misremember the actual mechanics. Why would that be any different now? What would be interesting is if we had player statistics from 2e...

Except that, as demonstrated by numerous posts in this thread, it clearly did. The Dark Sun mechanical baseline, i.e. the thing that worked like normal D&D magic, was preserving magic. Defiling magic has always provided some advantage, or at least a gamble for advantage, over baseline magic. And...

I think the narrative (that arcane magic always defiled, even if you tried your best to minimize that) was so compelling, that over time people's memories have prioritized it over the actual mechanics. Which I get; it's a cool narrative, which twists the usual D&D assumptions, and has become...

Ah, I didn't interpret that to apply to the on-the-fly Method Two, but now I see how one could; thanks for pointing that out. Although... looking at it again, it's only a choice for the first spell cast in a day, so it's still not a choice you make for every spell cast. And the result's pretty...

I still don't see where it lays out an option for a Preserver Wizard to defile on-the-fly when casting, or what the consequences would be if choosing to do so. Using "Method Two" described on p. 14 of Defilers and Preservers, only defilers use the defiling mechanic (Int check on the Gathering...

No, that isn't describing a choice made when casting a spell, it's made when preparing spells for the day. The choice to defile at the time of spellcasting was novel to 4e, unless there's something I missed.

No; it's the same tone. The baseline mechanics for Arcane spellcasting in every edition/revision of Dark Sun have been Preserving magic. Defiling magic has always been the mechanical outlier in some way. If 5e Dark Sun operates similarly, it'll be exactly in keeping with every previous incarnation.

It's exactly the same as the original Dark Sun. You had to CHOOSE, when creating a character, whether to be a Defiler. The ONLY way to cast Defiling magic was to be a Defiler Wizard. The narrative of Dark Sun has been that Defiling is the normal way that Arcane magic works. But the mechanics...

This has never been how defiling worked.

This was exactly the situation in the original Dark Sun boxed set: only members of the Defiler wizard subclass used defiling magic. Making whether to defile a choice when casting a spell is something that 4e Dark Sun introduced. So I assume that you were a fan of 4e Dark Sun, and would...

How's the adventure in the Starter Set? I don't feel a need for the physical set, but might very well buy it digitally for the adventure.

I'll third the recommendation for Kingdom (link provided because it can be hard to search for such a generic title), which is fantastic if you want to see medieval Korea on the screen and also enjoy zombie horror. I really wish it were still going. (For modern-day Korean zombie fun, there is, of...