D&D General Why wouldn't you run a Dark Sun game?

pawsplay said:

I've always liked it. It's a fairly classic swords-and-sorcery setting with some signature themes, such as a ecology, the remoteness of the gods, and metal poverty. It has that mid-20th century fantasy-with-a-sci-fi-accent thing going on. I see no reason it couldn't be done under various editions of D&D, not to mention other game systems.

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Finally someone mentions that stupid play of starting off with a bone weapon and breaking it. Never getting a steel sword, but you might one day get a bone shield and a rock club. And you start at 3rd level since things are sooo harsh and only seasoned adventurers can hop to survive- with a tooth dagger.

Whizbang Dustyboots said:

(And, ironically, if I wanted a more focused dungeon crawling experience, I wouldn't be using 5E D&D for that.)

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5E works pretty well for classic dungeon crawling.

We just finished replaying a series of ancient 1E adventures from 1-20 redone with 5E rules, starting with Temple of Elemental Evil and ending with the Queen of the Demonweb pits.

It was great, every bit as good as when I played those adventures some 40+ years ago.

earthsea_wizard said:

While it may have been a bad idea, is there data to show that an alterante approach would have saved the company?

It seems to me, from what I remember people saying from shortly after the 3e release, people had largely moved on to systems that had more cohesive and throught through mechanics, rather than being extrapolations of war games, which the rules still were as late as 1999 unless you incorporated combat and tactics (and that can only help so much, and brings its own issues). 2e was supposed to be a much larger overhaul, but Zeb was ordered to make it completely backwards compatible with 1e, so he couldn't change much in the end.

Meanwhile, games like Runequest, GURPS, Pendragon, Rolemaster, Shadowrun and so forth were letting people do what they wanted to do with their character and adventures in a way that made sense and was easy to pull off without the cracks showing too much. No amount of OSR charm can change the fact that in the 90s AD&D was just not it for a lot of people. I very much remember large swaths of people online saying they came back to D&D with 3rd edition precisely because it shared so much DNA with those other games.

Splintering things may have been the nail in the coffin, but the game system looking not dissimilar in 1997 to how it did in 1977 wasn't helping anyone, with 20 years of high quality, interesting games coming out in between.

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I think quality problems killed 2E more than the rules did. The TSR products during that era were terrible, other than some of the hardcovers.

1E had very well developed, thought through and in most cases playtested (often in tournaments) modules. 2E had content that it seemed like someone put together with no logic or forethought. Then there was the egregious printing/shipping errors. The Chult adventure for example shipped without the DM numbered map due to an error at the printers, despite the fact it was referenced numerous times in the book. The response from TSR was oh well, keep printing we will mail the map to anyone that asks us about it

I never particularly liked the archetype nor did I particularly like the over the top power creep when the setting was first introduced. It didn't really see how it could play interestingly and the "Mad Max but Fantasy" vibe went together for me like chocolate and broccoli. I love both of them, but not together.

I can enjoy DS like a reader of the novels but I create a new campaign I want total freedom about player options, monsters or factions. I will not respect the canon or metaplot

earthsea_wizard said:

While it may have been a bad idea, is there data to show that an alterante approach would have saved the company?

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Well, you can't really prove a hypothetical, but what the data does show is that, again per Slaying the Dragon, WotC's review of the TSR accounts showed that almost all those setting books, including Dark Sun, were not profitable and never could have been profitable because of their cost and their appeal to only a small part of the game's overall user base. They were more of an excuse to keep getting more of the book advances that were basically a scam keeping TSR afloat.

So while you can't prove that "another approach would have saved the company," you can be pretty confident that selling product that cannot be profitable is a bad strategy in the long run. Which is probably why WotC is much more disciplined about publications that TSR was. Particularly in the 5e era, which has been profitable, if not as much as they would like.

I’d run it again if I had interest from any of my players, but I don’t think any of my current groups are all that into the setting beyond maybe a really short one-shot type campaign.

I played it once back in the AD&D era, but it was just a one-off. I later ran it for the same 90’s group, but we wanted to make it grittier, so we hacked the Stormbringer rpg and it really gave us that sword and sorcery feel. We played 1 story with it and never went back, though.

I also ran it once for a curious group using the 4e version. That game ended in a TPK largely due to a couple miscalculations by the PCs and some angry dice gods. We actually thought it was pretty hilarious that we managed to TPK in 4e! (And I’m no killer GM).

If anyone in my circles wanted to play Darksun again I’d happily run it, but I’d probably want to adapt something like Dragonbane rules for it because I have fond memories of our Stormbringer hack.

As a final note, my long running Planescape group suggested Darksun actually be one of the orb-worlds of Carceri, with the idea the original world’s “death” actually Planeshifted it.

Clint_L said:

to only a small part of the game's overall user base.

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Which was only a problem because the user base was so small. So it's just as true to say TSR failed because they failed to sufficiently expand their user base.

When 2E is discussed today people are most likely to praise its gonzo settings above anything else, but for me they were a big part of why I lost interest in D&D in the 90’s. I liked the B/X “Known World” and Greyhawk, but mostly because they were the settings that got me started with D&D. I never really liked Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, or any of the outlandish 2E settings like Dark Sun and Spelljammer. The only 2E setting I really liked was Al-Qadim, but I never got to play or run it. I missed the Mystara gazetteers, Planescape, and Birthright completely.

So I would not run it because I never liked it in the first place. I disike grimdark or post-apocalyptic settings in general, and never cared much for the pulp sword & planet or sword & sorcery stories that inspired it.

earthsea_wizard said:

I'm on a setting kick and there seems to be serious talk of Dark Sun being revived for 5e.

Whenever Dark Sun comes up it gets a lot of praise. It's one of those settings where even people who have never run or played it so that they wish they had or could.

The setting also of course falls under the spotlight for many of its thematic issues.

I'm curious about people who never liked it as a setting to run their games in and why? Complaints about morality etc. are valid (though explored in great depth in many a thread), but I am also (if not more-so) curious about the mechanical/philisophical bent of the setting that makes you find it not suitable for a long running campaign. Something as simple as "I would grow extremely tired of the geography" works, or I know some people complain about a lot of the inconsistencies of the setting that show up pretty quickly (population size vs how many people are sacrificed to the dragon etc).

So for all of the love that Dark Sun gets, why did it never appeal to you?

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Three key reasons.

1. Tone, not morality
You've mentioned the moral element, but tonality is separate from morality. I have found Dark Sun, especially as its most ardent fans describe it, to be unrelentingly joyless in its tone. I get--very much--the need for darkness in a setting in order for it to cohere, to feel like it makes sense. Dark Sun comes across as enforcing a dark tone in every possible nook and cranny, no matter how insignificant. I guess some folks see that as "it's only REAL heroism if it's a sacrifice", but that's not a thesis I really agree with, and thus the incessant joylessness of the setting can be a real turn-off for me.
2. Restrictive environment
Less the geography per se, and more that because of the setting conceits, there can't be bodies of water, there's only one true forest as I understand it, there emphatically can't be snow or even alpine territory, etc. It would get a bit monotonous for me. I run a game set in an arid-to-desert region, but it has jungles to the north, forests to the south, steppe beyond the mountains, and a vast ocean teeming with all sorts of environments. The aridity is the main setting, but I have the option of alternatives. Dark Sun doesn't really allow that.
3. Defiling vs Preserving -- the eternal problem
Every version of DS I've seen has, per its own fans, failed to truly make the defile/preserve dichotomy actually work. Usually, it's either that defiling is so overwhelmingly strong, and preserving actively harmful, so most people either just don't get involved or always defile, which leads to uninteresting experiences with it; or defiling is so nasty for so little reward, while preserving is not really that hard, so essentially ONLY the most evil twisted wicked folks would do it. Both of those are...bad. And I don't know how to make it not-bad, where preserving is viable but still weaker, while defiling is stronger but not overwhelmingly better with barely any downside. Finding that sweet spot seems to be really, really important for actually nailing the feeling of playing Dark Sun, and I have yet to see rules that would achieve that while still producing fun gameplay.