Originally posted by Staffan
My main problem with the athas.org conversion is that they seem to consider the novels (especially the Prism Pentad) the authoritative source on Dark Sun rather than the game material. There's very little game material that indicates that a wizard can switch between preserving and defiling pretty much at will (basically, only a brief bit in Defilers & Preservers). Instead, it appears to be a choice made for life.[/quote]
The problem with this IMO is that those who espouse this are espousing a 2nd edition construct - in 2E, No one could multiclass in "midstream", and there were separate XP charts, so Preservers eco-damaged, yet got to advance faster. Faster advancement is right out, unless you beef up their casting ability, which is far too powerful IMO. In truth, even the prose in the Dark Sun Rules guides insinuate that Defilers are wizards who have taken a quicker path to power by abusing the way magic works in the world. So a wizard with a skill to gather energy properly is more of what Athasian preservers are. Why should a wizard be FORCED to make a choice about preserving, especially if (say) his alignment has changed to evil?
The whole Gather Energy thing also depowers wizards by quite a bit. In the game material, a wizard never has problems getting enough energy for their spells. However, because Sadira's spellcasting in the novels is obviously affected by the terrain she's in, they decided to make spellcasting harder in bad terrain and easier in good terrain.
Haven't they changed that in the most recent version of the Athas.org rules? If a preserver fails his Gather Energy check, he just defiles: it doesn't stop his spell.
A final bit that made me dislike their wizard was that they made it so defilers were pretty much like normal D&D wizards (except that they occasionally would have spell problems in bad terrain), and preservers got a disadvantage. This differs from 2e Dark Sun where preservers were the same as normal wizards and defilers were at an advantage.
Please pardon my lack of understanding, but how is this different other than in semantics? It is still harder to be a preserver than a defiler. The only difference is that defilers are the baseline instead of being above the baseline.
I myself see the disadvantage of preservers and defilers being different classes. The logic of 3E is that you are not stuck in one class, requiring obtuse methods of leaving the class behind. for the same reason one cannot be an Evoker/Transmuter in 3E (two sides of the same wizard), being a defiler/preserver should not be possible. Why can't a defiler learn to preserve? Why can't a preserver simply cast everything she knows out the window and turn to a path of evil and darkness?
A defiler will eventually become evil, if not evil at the start. In a universe such as D&D, good and evil are not flexible, they are absolute constructs. I wouldn't mind another rule for Defilers myself: As they defile, their alignment shifts toward evil by one step. They may play their character any way they wish, but all detections, NPC reactions, etc. reveal them to be evil. They could be helping stray kanks find their hives, or freeing slaves by the caravan load, and people would still detect the stink of evil on them. Only by consistently preserving could they reverse that reaction.
But that's just my warped imagination.
