D&D 5E Assuming Dark Sun is on the horizon, what are your worries?

[Tony Vargas]

I can remember the mechanic differently maybe this is a 2e / 4e thing?
Preservers were in fact giving back by casting, and it was the default.
I cannot tell you atm how defiling gave you another advantage than faster XP progression at the cost of ruined vegetation and local population organizing pitchfork hunts on you and making you veilled alliance KOS target.

I can't say I recall all of it in detail, either. I was just brainstorming, really.
IIRC, arcane magic, in general, was torches & pitchfork time, as the preserver thing was not widely known or recognized.
No?

 

[Coroc]

I can't say I recall all of it in detail, either. I was just brainstorming, really.
IIRC, arcane magic, in general, was torches & pitchfork time, as the preserver thing was not widely known or recognized.
No?

Yes, basically the only arcane casters safe fro ma mob were sorcerer kings themselves and maybe some of their lackeys when they had their halfgiant bodyguards with them.
The templars did hunt all independant wizards, so as a wizard you should best have (leave) no witness when casting a spell.
What if found a bit odd back then was how normal folks could not distinct between defiling and preserving, but could tell the difference to a clerical spell cast (Which could be very flashy also with elemental clerics), or psionics, whereas the later was easyer to conceal and maybe some of the normal folks had wild talents also and were aware of it

 

[Remathilis]

Well make them fighters and call them barbarians. Barbarians are fitting thematically no doubt, but their game mechanics make things to easy in darksun that is the problem. Especially their unarmored defense is problematic. Also their damage resistances partially.
With monks it is even more extreme.
These two classes would be unbalanced compared to other classes in a setting where armor is nonmetal mostly and rare and gives other disadvantages if you are lucky enough to find a metal armor (heatstroke).

It's partially not perfect because all those classes i marked in red do not have a place in a Darksun campaign.
Ok almost, bards do exist by name only but translated to 5e they are rogues with the assasin subclass and poisoner profession.

These two quotes perfectly illustrate why Dark Sun needs to either be to be its own game related to D&D but not beholden to the PHB OR will need to be changed like the 4e version did. There is no way to sell an official D&D setting with 3/4ths the PHB classes unavailable.

 

[Bitbrain]

These two quotes perfectly illustrate why Dark Sun needs to either be to be its own game related to D&D but not beholden to the PHB OR will need to be changed like the 4e version did. There is no way to sell an official D&D setting with 3/4ths the PHB classes unavailable.

Which is why I believe they will try to find some way to incorporate as many of the base 5e classes into Dark Sun as possible.

 

[Coroc]

These two quotes perfectly illustrate why Dark Sun needs to either be to be its own game related to D&D but not beholden to the PHB OR will need to be changed like the 4e version did. There is no way to sell an official D&D setting with 3/4ths the PHB classes unavailable.

I see you did not change your mind on this @Remathilis

Well i did my homebrew conversion of the rules so far that i honestly would not need a new official product and would prefer soemthing other would be published instaed if they do not do it old school style.

I made soem thread about it if you want to crossread it, although i believe it is not to your taste.

 

[Remathilis]

I see you did not change your mind on this @Remathilis

Well i did my homebrew conversion of the rules so far that i honestly would not need a new official product and would prefer soemthing other would be published instaed if they do not do it old school style.

I made soem thread about it if you want to crossread it, although i believe it is not to your taste.

Never found a reason to change. Eberron has more or less confirmed my suspicions.

That said, I've always drawn the difference between a home-brewed version of a setting and the potential published version that WotC may produce. Being the pragmatist that I am, I just know that any setting that radically deviates from the successful formula they have on hand is a non-starter. They are afraid to make psionics different from magic now, I don't see them rewriting the bard for one setting (for example).

That doesn't mean you have to accept that, of course. You can do what you want with your version of Athas. I'm just reading the tea leaves and pointing out that WotC is going to try to make as much of the core rules fit in DS as humanly possible.

Maybe that's why they are going the "magic is psionics", to hide all the spellcasters as psionics and wild talents.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'd be tempted to say that any wizard defiles but preservers do it slowly and less vigorously so that it does not kill plants or cause (no game affect nausea).

That's literally the lore

However it should take an effort to be a Preserver, not just be mildly advantageous in COMBAT to be a Defiler. That's what every rules-thing I've seen for Defiling for 5E just doesn't get. They make Defiling smart in life-or-death combat. But that's totally against the lore and history of Athas. Defiling was the norm - not just in combat - everywhere. So either Preserving has to be less effective period (lot of ways to do that), or Defiling has to be more effective period - and in a way that makes the risk ALWAYS worth it. And really Defiling should be just "casting as normal", and Preserving something special - that's what speaks to the metaphor. It's easy to throw out the trash, it's harder to recycle properly.

EDIT - Bitbrain's first attempt upthread is in the right direction at least!

 

[Tony Vargas]

There is no way to sell an official D&D setting with 3/4ths the PHB classes unavailable.

That's a depressing thought. 3/4 of the PHB classes could be pretty superfluous to most settings, anyway. The Barabrian & Monk are cultural, so's the Druid in a less overt way, the Paladin is awfully knight-in-shining-armor, many settings could do with at most one of the four full-arcane-casters. The rogue & ranger aren't exactly niche-protected anymore, with backgrounds able to minimally cover their traditional functions. Not all settings have gods, or even magic...

Aside from the Fighter, no class seems so ubiquitous that it must exist in literally all settings (or virtually all conceivable settings - one could conceive of an utterly pacifistic setting without them, I suppose).

Obviously, at least one 'support' class is indispensable - the play dynamics won't work without one - and that fighter is going to need some help out of combat...

 

[Remathilis]

That's a depressing thought. 3/4 of the PHB classes could be pretty superfluous to most settings, anyway. The Barabrian & Monk are cultural, so's the Druid in a less overt way, the Paladin is awfully knight-in-shining-armor, many settings could do with at most one of the four full-arcane-casters. The rogue & ranger aren't exactly niche-protected anymore, with backgrounds able to minimally cover their traditional functions. Not all settings have gods, or even magic...

Aside from the Fighter, no class seems so ubiquitous that it must exist in literally all settings.

Obviously, at least one 'support' class is indispensable. And that fighter is going to need some help out of combat...

We could debate what classes are or aren't needed (that's a rabbit hole I don't intend to get lost in) but I maintain that WotC is going to go for the widest tent possible and the best way to get as many people as possible interested is to not remove large swaths of options, esp when you're not replacing them with new options. I mean, Ravnica was the perfect place to test limiting a few class options from the setting and they opted to include them all.

WotC has embraced the notion that the multiverse of D&D more or less contains the stuff from the PHB, though some exclusions on race seems to be ok. I expect the 5e Dark Sun will find the somewhere for the 12 PHB classes and most of the PHB races (save for drow, gnome and half-orc).

 

[Benjamin Olson]

I'm worried about having to listen to how WotC ruined the setting because they gave people permission to use it in whatever way was fun for them.