D&D 5E 5e has everything it needs for Dark Sun

[Laurefindel]

One of the greatest obstacles I see with 5e Dark Sun (which, I believe, is why we haven't seen a DS setting so far) isn't so much about what's missing; it's about all the stuff that doesn't fit-in. Dark Sun, more than any other D&D setting ever published, is defined by what it isn't just as much as what it is.

In every setting and adventure released so far, you can make a character out of the PHB - any character - and there's a place for it somewhere in the world/setting/adventure. Maybe you can't make an Eberron-specific character fit in all D&D settings, but any "vanilla" character can fit in Eberron in one way or another. It's actually one of the setting's call card; "if it exist in D&D, there is a place for it in Eberron".

Not so much in Dark Sun

I never paid attention to 4e Dark Sun, but I wonder what they did with gnome characters. I'm sure they weren't your typical PHB tinker gnome, if they existed at all. But that's what's so attractive and simultaneously off-putting about Dark Sun, nothing is your typical PHB _____. It would almost require a rewrite of the Part I of the PHB, keeping the crunch and replacing all the fluff with Dark Sun goodness.

 

[SkidAce]

The elemental clerics would need new domains.

I've been waiting for actual Air, Earth, Fire, Water, domains.

Although there are some decent 3rd party ones out there. World of Farland may have some too.

 

[Maxperson]

Too late, people are really stuck on them being crappier sparkly wizards who never went to school.

All they really need is spell points and alt casting stats.

They need more than that. They also need to completely lose V, S, M for their powers, and they would need the psionic disciplines, which are different from the schools. So you'd need at a minimum, 6 new subclasses(Kineticist, Nomad, etc.) and enough powers in each discipline to cover 20 levels.

In short, you need a Psion.

 

[Maxperson]

Yeah, I still disagree.

Psionics existed, sure, but all real power was in the hands of the sorcerer-kings and their minions, and the psionic powers of the former were largely offstage in any event. Heck, the setting later wound up with that all-controlling Order added specifically to make sure there weren't any powerful pure-psionicists running around being influential. Psionics as experienced outside the hands of a psionicist-class PC (which plenty of us never played) was either monster powers or wild talents.

The Sorcerer-Kings were all 20th level psions and 20th level sorcerers, plus dragon. And plenty of us did play psionicists in 2e Darksun.

 

[Rikka66]

One of the greatest obstacles I see with 5e Dark Sun (which, I believe, is why we haven't seen a DS setting so far) isn't so much about what's missing; it's about all the stuff that doesn't fit-in. Dark Sun, more than any other D&D setting ever published, is defined by what it isn't just as much as what it is.

In every setting and adventure released so far, you can make a character out of the PHB - any character - and there's a place for it somewhere in the world/setting/adventure. Maybe you can't make an Eberron-specific character fit in all D&D settings, but any "vanilla" character can fit in Eberron in one way or another. It's actually one of the setting's call card; "if it exist in D&D, there is a place for it in Eberron".

Not so much in Dark Sun

I never paid attention to 4e Dark Sun, but I wonder what they did with gnome characters. I'm sure they weren't your typical PHB tinker gnome, if they existed at all. But that's what's so attractive and simultaneously off-putting about Dark Sun, nothing is your typical PHB _____. It would almost require a rewrite of the Part I of the PHB, keeping the crunch and replacing all the fluff with Dark Sun goodness.

4e banned gnomes, half-orcs, and every divine class (cleric, paladin, invoker, avenger). It did try to carve out space for a bunch of new races (eladrin, tieflings, genasi, ECT) so your mileage may vary overall.

 

[Remathilis]

The elemental clerics would need new domains.

They could make a generic "Elemental" domain that has some variance for air/earth/fire/water akin the Genie Pact.

 

[Steampunkette]

Yeah, I still disagree.

Psionics existed, sure, but all real power was in the hands of the sorcerer-kings and their minions, and the psionic powers of the former were largely offstage in any event. Heck, the setting later wound up with that all-controlling Order added specifically to make sure there weren't any powerful pure-psionicists running around being influential. Psionics as experienced outside the hands of a psionicist-class PC (which plenty of us never played) was either monster powers or wild talents.

We already have assassins in 5e, and instead of calling them bards to fit into long-dead TSR Code of Conduct rules, they're just called assassins. 5e Bards don't need to be reworked to fit into Dark Sun, they can just be marked "not available in this setting".

No, it didn't.

And it took defilers exactly as long. Don't believe me? Let me quote the Dark Sun Campaign Setting boxed set's Rules Book, p.59, emphasis added:

The only initiative effect of defiling was the pain penalty inflicted on other characters in the defiling radius (and oh, man, would it be insane to try to adopt that directly into 5e initiative rules), there was no rule making defiling casting faster than preserving casting.

"Faster" in my post was "Not longer". With the implication that Preservers took longer. Though that may just be my household misremembering how Preserving works. But we do recall preserving increasing the initiative count time before a spell goes off. Having not played Dark Sun 2e since... oh... 1997ish, I acknowledge my memory is probably at fault, here. Or it may have just been a house rule at the tables we were at.

And yeah. Lots of players never played the Psionicist class. Doesn't change that it was a big part of what set the setting apart from other settings. The Will and the Way and Dark Sun itself were released the -same- year in order to make sure psionics were a part of the setting.

"Well I didn't play with it, and neither did a nebulous anecdotal number of other players!" doesn't really mean anything about whether or not Psionics, including the psionicist class from the PHBR5, were a major part of Dark Sun.

 

[Remathilis]

They're not going to do that for Dark Sun, though. Why? 'Cause there's no need to heighten the "Nightmare Logic" aspect of the setting in order to make it more oriented toward Action-Horror. But as I've noted in a different thread... they might make it more "Mad Max: Fury Road" than "Conan the Barbarian Enters the Thunderdome". More Action-Survival than previous editions. Maybe they'll focus on threats to survival beyond combat like they did describing each type of Horror and assign different survival threats to regions?

You didn't read 4e Dark Sun, did you?

Dark Sun in 2e was D&D that felt like a teenager embarrassed to be D&D. So, it tried hard to rewrite AD&D 2e to fit its "not D&D" aesthetic. It wasn't just removing a few races or such, it was a total rewrite of every class, race, and PC option. Even ability scores were differently done. So, Dark Sun might have used spell slots and Thac0, but it was largely incompletable with other AD&D supplements.

4e took a different tack. They didn't include some races and divine classes, but the vast majority of 4e's PH options were allowed mostly unchanged and fitted into the setting. Things like tieflings, warlocks, spellcasting bards, monks, and other options were canonized into the setting, and some 4e Dark Sun options (Drey, Half-giants) became reskins of existing races (dragonborn, goliath). It was a major break from the 2e version of the setting (and in the process also reset the timeline back to the original era) and it got a lot of praise and hatred for it. (sounds familiar...)

The core of the setting still existed: psionics, defiling, survival and brutal landscapes are all there. But it isn't going to be the 2e Box Set redone like how VGR isn't the 2e Box set redone.

 

[Mecheon]

some 4e Dark Sun options (Drey, Half-giants) became reskins of existing races (dragonborn, goliath)

Mind, Goliaths being reskinned into Half Giants has been going on for a fair while. Ol' 3E was the first to start it, as Half Giants in 3E are basically just "Goliaths but with psionics"

 

[Maxperson]

You didn't read 4e Dark Sun, did you?

Dark Sun in 2e was D&D that felt like a teenager embarrassed to be D&D. So, it tried hard to rewrite AD&D 2e to fit its "not D&D" aesthetic. It wasn't just removing a few races or such, it was a total rewrite of every class, race, and PC option. Even ability scores were differently done. So, Dark Sun might have used spell slots and Thac0, but it was largely incompletable with other AD&D supplements.

Except it was compatible. Stats rolled differently are still stats that still interact with the core system in the same way. So what if it was 5d4 instead of 3d6-L. That 16 Con gave you the same +2 hit points with the same system shock and survival rates. Same with the races and classes. They were just different classes and races, but the rules for them still interacted with the 2e core system just fine.

4e took a different tack. They didn't include some races and divine classes, but the vast majority of 4e's PH options were allowed mostly unchanged and fitted into the setting. Things like tieflings, warlocks, spellcasting bards, monks, and other options were canonized into the setting, and some 4e Dark Sun options (Drey, Half-giants) became reskins of existing races (dragonborn, goliath). It was a major break from the 2e version of the setting (and in the process also reset the timeline back to the original era) and it got a lot of praise and hatred for it. (sounds familiar...)

I'm glad I never had the opportunity to play and be disappointed by it.

 

[Remathilis]

Except it was compatible. Stats rolled differently are still stats that still interact with the core system in the same way. So what if it was 5d4 instead of 3d6-L. That 16 Con gave you the same +2 hit points with the same system shock and survival rates. Same with the races and classes. They were just different classes and races, but the rules for them still interacted with the 2e core system just fine.

"largely incompatible" meant the options designed for Dark Sun were grossly overpowered compared other settings, and often times couldn't be intermixed freely. Say what you like about 5e, a Dhampir undead warlock, a Simic Hybrid Order cleric, a warforged alchemist artificer and a leonin glory paladin are by and large roughly the same power level and can be mixed freely. That was not true of a Half-giant gladiator, a sun elf cleric of Mystra, a half-vistani avenger, and a PHB hill dwarf fighter.

 

[Steampunkette]

You didn't read 4e Dark Sun, did you?

Dark Sun in 2e was D&D that felt like a teenager embarrassed to be D&D. So, it tried hard to rewrite AD&D 2e to fit its "not D&D" aesthetic. It wasn't just removing a few races or such, it was a total rewrite of every class, race, and PC option. Even ability scores were differently done. So, Dark Sun might have used spell slots and Thac0, but it was largely incompletable with other AD&D supplements.

4e took a different tack. They didn't include some races and divine classes, but the vast majority of 4e's PH options were allowed mostly unchanged and fitted into the setting. Things like tieflings, warlocks, spellcasting bards, monks, and other options were canonized into the setting, and some 4e Dark Sun options (Drey, Half-giants) became reskins of existing races (dragonborn, goliath). It was a major break from the 2e version of the setting (and in the process also reset the timeline back to the original era) and it got a lot of praise and hatred for it. (sounds familiar...)

The core of the setting still existed: psionics, defiling, survival and brutal landscapes are all there. But it isn't going to be the 2e Box Set redone like how VGR isn't the 2e Box set redone.

I'm certain that that's how you felt 2e Dark Sun was designed. I had a significantly different impression. Probably because of the amount of Captain Planet and 1980-90s Postapocalyptica flicks I devoured because they were often as close to Fantasy as I could get because my parents didn't let me watch most of the Fantasy Flicks from that era 'cause they all had heaping gouts of nudity.

And yes. I don't expect to see the 2e box set updated for 5e if they choose to make Dark Sun a 5e setting. But I don't expect it to be "Stripped to the Studs" and completely redesigned as you've suggested. Probably because I disagree with that estimation of what happened to Ravenloft.

 

[Maxperson]

"largely incompatible" meant the options designed for Dark Sun were grossly overpowered compared other settings, and often times couldn't be intermixed freely. Say what you like about 5e, a Dhampir undead warlock, a Simic Hybrid Order cleric, a warforged alchemist artificer and a leonin glory paladin are by and large roughly the same power level and can be mixed freely. That was not true of a Half-giant gladiator, a sun elf cleric of Mystra, a half-vistani avenger, and a PHB hill dwarf fighter.

Okay. Overpowered is very different from incompatible. I was taking incompatible for what it meant and that's where the confusion was. Whether you could intermix it or not was purely preference. A lot of us didn't mind varying levels of power within a single group. Yes, Dark Sun was overpowered compared to other settings, because of the danger inherent to the setting. At least until the 2e Skills and Powers came out. Then things were broken all over.

 

[Remathilis]

Okay. Overpowered is very different from incompatible. I was taking incompatible for what it meant and that's where the confusion was. Whether you could intermix it or not was purely preference. A lot of us didn't mind varying levels of power within a single group. Yes, Dark Sun was overpowered compared to other settings, because of the danger inherent to the setting. At least until the 2e Skills and Powers came out. Then things were broken all over.

Yeah, I meant incompatible in the sense that a DM couldn't pull, say, The Complete Gladiator's Handbook off the shelf and use it as is without wildly upsetting the balance of the game. Dark Sun bordered on the edge of powergaming, while something like Ravenloft languished far into nerfed territoy. It fit the settings they were designed for, but the fact they were both called "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" should have implied at least a base-level inter-usability that didn't exist. To be fair though, even Core AD&D was all over the map in terms of power-level (S&P vis Complete Priests Handbook?) but has attempted to be ironed out through the various editions. I just don't want to go back the point where I can't look at using Dark Sun material in a different setting because of how broken it could make things.

(As an aside, I hated Kalidnay as a domain of dread. Being the Dark Sun island meant either you sent your poor Ravenloft PCs there to their doom OR you created native PCs who could never leave because they would wreck any other domain they went to. What was the point?)

 

[Minigiant]

One of the greatest obstacles I see with 5e Dark Sun (which, I believe, is why we haven't seen a DS setting so far) isn't so much about what's missing; it's about all the stuff that doesn't fit-in. Dark Sun, more than any other D&D setting ever published, is defined by what it isn't just as much as what it is.

This to me is it.

Dark Sun requires more variant rules and additions than all the ones in every current 5e setting book combined. And bigger ones.

 

[Remathilis]

And yes. I don't expect to see the 2e box set updated for 5e if they choose to make Dark Sun a 5e setting. But I don't expect it to be "Stripped to the Studs" and completely redesigned as you've suggested. Probably because I disagree with that estimation of what happened to Ravenloft.

Ravenloft and Dark Sun were effectively rebooted to thier original dates, the character design rules jettisoned for "as near to the PHB as possible" and much of the unique mechanics either toned down or removed. In its place, far more friendly and better designed material was inserted.

I love 5e Ravenloft; I might have done a few things different, but I'm utterly pleased with the changes it made. If you had asked me what I thought a 5e Ravenloft setting would look like, I'd describe this. But I don't believe this was anything less than a re-envisioning of the setting to better fit what WotC views D&D settings to be. It certainly nods to the past and captures the essence of the setting, but it is its own take on the same ideas as well. Dark Sun 4e was a similar re-imagining, and I don't see WotC changing that for 5e.

Anyway, if 5e Ravenloft is an omen for the direction they take 5e Dark Sun, you might be able to convince me to buy it.

 

[cbwjm]

One of the greatest obstacles I see with 5e Dark Sun (which, I believe, is why we haven't seen a DS setting so far) isn't so much about what's missing; it's about all the stuff that doesn't fit-in. Dark Sun, more than any other D&D setting ever published, is defined by what it isn't just as much as what it is.

In every setting and adventure released so far, you can make a character out of the PHB - any character - and there's a place for it somewhere in the world/setting/adventure. Maybe you can't make an Eberron-specific character fit in all D&D settings, but any "vanilla" character can fit in Eberron in one way or another. It's actually one of the setting's call card; "if it exist in D&D, there is a place for it in Eberron".

Not so much in Dark Sun

I never paid attention to 4e Dark Sun, but I wonder what they did with gnome characters. I'm sure they weren't your typical PHB tinker gnome, if they existed at all. But that's what's so attractive and simultaneously off-putting about Dark Sun, nothing is your typical PHB _____. It would almost require a rewrite of the Part I of the PHB, keeping the crunch and replacing all the fluff with Dark Sun goodness.

Both the Theros and Ravnica books defined which races were available to the setting, without requiring arrival from another world. Dark Sun could, and I think would, easily follow suit.

 

[Minigiant]

Both the Theros and Ravnica books defined which races were available to the setting, without requiring arrival from another world. Dark Sun could, and I think would, easily follow suit.

Races is the easy part. Getting the classes, equipment, and magic diverge greatly from base D&D. Filling that in a whole Dark Sun book with new backgrounds, a whole adventure, monsters, and all the lore and keeping the same page space and making a worthwhile book would be tough.

It's like converting 5e to Star Wars. Sure you could do it with was we have today but it'll be a shallow ugly book.

 

[Sithlord]

Yeah, I meant incompatible in the sense that a DM couldn't pull, say, The Complete Gladiator's Handbook off the shelf and use it as is without wildly upsetting the balance of the game. Dark Sun bordered on the edge of powergaming, while something like Ravenloft languished far into nerfed territoy. It fit the settings they were designed for, but the fact they were both called "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" should have implied at least a base-level inter-usability that didn't exist. To be fair though, even Core AD&D was all over the map in terms of power-level (S&P vis Complete Priests Handbook?) but has attempted to be ironed out through the various editions. I just don't want to go back the point where I can't look at using Dark Sun material in a different setting because of how broken it could make things.

Races is the easy part. Getting the classes, equipment, and magic diverge greatly from base D&D. Filling that in a whole Dark Sun book with new backgrounds, a whole adventure, monsters, and all the lore and keeping the same page space and making a worthwhile book would be tough.

It's like converting 5e to Star Wars. Sure you could do it with was we have today but it'll be a shallow ugly book.

Love WEG Star Wars. D&d does it better mechanically

 

[Steampunkette]

One big thing a Dark Sun book would have going for it?

The setting is actually REALLY LIGHT.

The set dressing was always the big thing for Dark Sun. But the number of actual settlements, locations, and threats were fairly limited. They'd take up less of a book than Ravenloft's many domains, for example.