D&D 5E Dark Sun doesn't actually need Psionics

[Bacon Bits]

These are good questions -- does the setting change? I'd argue changing races is probably not much of a big deal, so long as replacements are suitably post-apoc. The themes shown by the races aren't specific to the races, but more that they changed existing races to fit a post-apoc theme and outlawed a few races that they felt didn't fit. There's no reason you can't fit them in, and no reason you should. Still, no one I know says things like "WotC needs to come up with a better Mul for Dark Sun!" They say that for psionics. My question is -- what does psionics actually do for the themes of Dark Sun outside of just being psionics?

Yeah, and I'm saying that question is nonsense on it's face. It's like asking, "How do you define a noun without referencing an object?" You don't because nouns are objects.

"What does magic do for the themes in Greyhawk outside of just being magic?" What it does is be magic. It's not mundane. It's job is to be fantastic.

"What does psionics do for the themes in Dark Sun outside of just being psionics?" What it does is be psionics. It's not mundane and not magic. It's job is to be fantastic and not magic.

That's really as complicated as it needs to be.

Slippery slope arguments aren't terribly convincing. Sure, at some point if you replace enough stuff you end up asking Ship of Theseus questions. I'm not asking people to defend everything, or suggesting nothing matters, I'm asking specifically why psionics matters. This argument is just chaff that doesn't address why psionics is important.

That's not a slippery slope argument. At best, it's a composition fallacy. And it's not mine. It's yours.

Your whole question boils down to, "Why is this element of Dark Sun essential to Dark Sun?" My question is, "Why wouldn't it be?" I'm asking your own question back to you and you're saying it's a fallacious argument? By asking the question, you're asserting that psionics is not essential to Dark Sun. You have to entertain that notion to even ask the question. Now you're complaining that I'm asking you to defend the assertion buried in your own question. Sorry, it's your implication. Just because it's a premise hidden by a cleverly phrased question doesn't mean you don't have to defend it.

You need a purpose behind making a change. If you don't want to make a change, then what are you asking for? There's no discussion in that case. If you do want to make a change, then state your reasoning. You must have some or else the question wouldn't present itself in the first place. You want people to defend the counter argument without needing to state your argument. If you're not going to answer why you want to make the change, then why would I keep discussing? If I challenge your unstated assertions you say that you don't have to defend them. Or, that that's not what you're saying... but you still won't say what you are saying. You just repeat the same question over and over, ad nauseam.

So, what's your point in even asking?

This is a reasonable argument, thanks. However, I think it starts too strong by saying that psionics is the only righteous path. This ignores that everyone uses it, and, in Athas, most of those people/things are using psionics for evil or selfish reasons.

Any tool can be used for evil. A sword can defend as well as betray. Athasian magic is unique in that the tool itself is evil. It's a deal with a devil. If you want to do something supernatural, and in a high fantasy RPG where you're going to be facing Templar and Sorcerer-Kings you probably do, you need to offer a solution. If you want a tool to fight against god-like magicians and that can't be magic... well, what do you use?

Why not use psionics? That already exists. It's been around almost as long as magic, just not as signficant.

And, there's lots of other righteous paths available that don't require psionics. So, to boil this down to nuts and bolts, what you're saying is that psionics is the only way to use magic that isn't tainted by defiling. Sure, no argument, I pointed that out above in my last response to you that it's a pretty decent argument that some kind of magic system is important for a D&D game and, since DS has so strongly tainted arcane magic and nearly eliminated divine magic, that psionics is the answer. I can follow that. The moral arguments your making, though, don't hold much water without the argument that some form of non-evil magic has to exist. I'm not sure, though, that the latter is really a true statement.

No, that's a nihilistic argument. That's what's bothering you about it. You don't need anything in any setting by this logic.

Nothing has to exist in any setting. The point is that, with psionics in Dark Sun, it does exist and there's a point to it being there in the form that it is. It doesn't need to be psionics to make the point it's making, but that doesn't mean it has to defend itself for being psionics, either.

I also think that Dark Sun is absolutely NOT High Fantasy. It's tropes do not align with high fantasy. Still, if you're arguing from the position that it is high fantasy, and therefore needs a non-evil magic system, that's, by far, the best argument I've see for psionics in Dark Sun yet. Kudos.

I would still qualify Dark Sun as a setting as high fantasy. It's dying earth and that warps it pretty heavily, but it's still high fantasy.

1. It takes place on Athas, not Earth. Classically, this alone is actually enough to qualify the setting as high fantasy in literary terms.

2. It's focused on good vs evil and morality. Perhaps more explicitly than any other setting. The Sorcerer-Kings, Rajaat, defiling magic, slavery, templars, etc. represent very classic high fantasy explicitly evil foes. Maybe it fits more in gray-vs-black because of how bleak it is, but you still always have a choice of doing something explicitly evil or doing what you have to. Good is kind of not good because life is just that hard, but the evil is really really evil. You have to choose between letting some innocent people die, or selling entire tribes of free people into brutal chattel slavery.

3. Victory against evil is almost never through force of arms (otherwise it would be heroic fantasy). Because you can't fight evil directly on Athas. At the end of the day The Dragon is too strong. Heck, the Sorcerer-Kings are too strong. The Templars when they work together are too strong.

4. The scale of the adventure is almost always the end of the world. Or, rather, the end of the world being even sooner rather than somewhat later. Still, the PCs are typically saving the world, such as it is. At least in the adventures that I remember. It might just be the destruction of Tyr, but when Tyr is the last Shining City on the Hill in a world of dying embers, that means a lot. This isn't Greyhawk where there's hope for other nations to endure if the city falls, or for life to endure if civilization collapses.

 

[Todd Roybark]

In Dark Sun, magic is evil. The books never come out and say it plainly, but it's actually just evil. Visibly, tangibly evil. The more evil you are, the more magic you get. And it's so, so much worse because you could do basically the exact same things with psionics... and psionics doesn't destroy the planet to accomplish it's goals! It's just harder to do that

That is an accurate description of Defiler magic, not how Preserver's worked magic.
Dark Sun was written in the 1990's, Preserver Magic was Ecologically sustainable, and indeed was themed to be trying to heal the planet. It was A Magic recycling program!

Magic was not ALL EVIL, rather arcane magic in Dark Sun is divided into Good Magic and Evil Magic.

Psionics was presented as the Neutral alignment option.

Dark Sun needs psionics, but it does not need 2e style psionics.

It needs a Psionic system that works. I love 2e Complete Psioncist, but in the small window of time that existed from when CP existed alone before Dark Sun got published, we crashed two separate campaigns testing out the rules... again before Dark Sun.

The longest running Dark Sun games didn't have Psioncists in them

Cantrips/Spell Slot balance is battle tested, so there is no need to change it.

Dark Sun God Kings are perfect Warlock Patrons.

Any Psioncist class is going to fill a 5e cleric role.

The setting will be great in 5e, if people accept that the setting expectations have to shift.

I personally could care less about Setting plot points from Books.
Novels dictating gameplay was the Low Point of D&D.

Publish the setting, and get out of the way and let the players play.

To me Dark Sun became a bait and switch retail scheme. It was advertised as a bleeding edge D&D setting, but quickly became an excuse to advertise plot points from the novels in the RPG product.

As a consumer I found that, loathsome.

 

[Iry]

I think psychic powers, while not strictly necessary to the themes of Dark Sun, are important for setting it’s tone. Dark Sun has elements of Weird fiction that I think it would feel lacking without. That said, I don’t think psionics, with all the baggage that term carries, is (are? Psionics is/are so inconsistent about when it/they is/are linguistically singular or plural) necessary. You can capture the Weird fiction tone without a dedicated psionics subsystem. You can have monsters, subclasses, feats, etc. with bespoke psychic-themed abilities and it will work just fine.

I think this is a great solution. Everyone gets their weird fiction, without a dedicated psionics system or classes. Granted, I have nothing against Psionic Classes existing in a general sense, and perhaps Dark Sun is as good a place as any to put them. But if something has to be cut, I would much rather see rules for Defilers, Preservers, Clerics, Druids, etc.

 

[Eltab]

If I were to create a campaign set 1000 years after a dinosaur-killer asteroid hit my imagined civilized world, it would have many Dark Sun themes (relics of civilization, brutal natural conditions). I would pitch it as "a Dark Sun -like setting."
But it would not BE Dark Sun. The Boiling Sea evokes but does not replace the Sea of Silt. This world's ruin was not caused by arcane Defilers pursuing wars of extermination.

Psionics is not just 'moar kewl powrz', it is an expression of reaching within oneself for the strength (and talents) to face challenges and overcome and survive. On Athas, it is the tool (mutation?) to which Life turned as Defiling threatened extinction.

 

[Ovinomancer]

I won't be replying to Aldarc again in this thread. Unpleasant PMs were sent

Yeah, and I'm saying that question is nonsense on it's face. It's like asking, "How do you define a noun without referencing an object?" You don't because nouns are objects.

"What does magic do for the themes in Greyhawk outside of just being magic?" What it does is be magic. It's not mundane. It's job is to be fantastic.

"What does psionics do for the themes in Dark Sun outside of just being psionics?" What it does is be psionics. It's not mundane and not magic. It's job is to be fantastic and not magic.

That's really as complicated as it needs to be.



That's not a slippery slope argument. At best, it's a composition fallacy. And it's not mine. It's yours.

Your whole question boils down to, "Why is this element of Dark Sun essential to Dark Sun?" My question is, "Why wouldn't it be?" I'm asking your own question back to you and you're saying it's a fallacious argument? By asking the question, you're asserting that psionics is not essential to Dark Sun. You have to entertain that notion to even ask the question. Now you're complaining that I'm asking you to defend the assertion buried in your own question. Sorry, it's your implication. Just because it's a premise hidden by a cleverly phrased question doesn't mean you don't have to defend it.

You need a purpose behind making a change. If you don't want to make a change, then what are you asking for? There's no discussion in that case. If you do want to make a change, then state your reasoning. You must have some or else the question wouldn't present itself in the first place. You want people to defend the counter argument without needing to state your argument. If you're not going to answer why you want to make the change, then why would I keep discussing? If I challenge your unstated assertions you say that you don't have to defend them. Or, that that's not what you're saying... but you still won't say what you are saying. You just repeat the same question over and over, ad nauseam.

So, what's your point in even asking?



Any tool can be used for evil. A sword can defend as well as betray. Athasian magic is unique in that the tool itself is evil. It's a deal with a devil. If you want to do something supernatural, and in a high fantasy RPG where you're going to be facing Templar and Sorcerer-Kings you probably do, you need to offer a solution. If you want a tool to fight against god-like magicians and that can't be magic... well, what do you use?

Why not use psionics? That already exists. It's been around almost as long as magic, just not as signficant.



No, that's a nihilistic argument. That's what's bothering you about it. You don't need anything in any setting by this logic.

Nothing has to exist in any setting. The point is that, with psionics in Dark Sun, it does exist and there's a point to it being there in the form that it is. It doesn't need to be psionics to make the point it's making, but that doesn't mean it has to defend itself for being psionics, either.

No, that's not my argument at all. My point is that psionics is orthogonal to most of the rest of the themes and tropes in Dark Sun. You can see this because when is was published for 4e, the thing that changed was psionics and pretty much nothing else. Psionics in 4e doesn't work at all like in 2e, and it was magic-transparent. The only thing that was kept was that it was a different "source" than other magic -- arcane or divine.

If a thing can be changed almost entire and there's no impact, then it's very orthogonal to the system and can be severed without interfering with the rest of the system. Saying this doesn't mean you should, or that thing improve if you do (your appendix isn't necessary to you, frex, but I wouldn't recommend removing it on a lark). It just means that psionics isn't integral to the other themes and tropes of Dark Sun -- it sits by itself. If you love that thing (and the other things), then awesome, you don't WANT to remove it, and, frankly, I support you. But that doesn't mean it cannot be removed or that the removal won't really do much at all to the rest of the system. Sure, you can't have psions, but most characters in DS weren't psions and the game went fine. Heck, in 2e, you were randomly assigned a few powers which, often enough, were more dangerous to you than not having them. Having a power that you had little to no chance of successfully activating and that didn't aid you in what you did but that opened you to psionic combat and meant you had zero defense against said psionic combat was frustrating, not impowering in the setting. You're talking in big strokes, as if psionics was a central part and focus of play -- the only way to defeat the evils, is seems. But, in play, it wasn't. It was a maybe a useful extra button that didn't define your character and was randomly assigned, in 2e. In 4e, you had control of every aspect of your psionics and it never made you suck, but it also was one of those 'separate from magic because we say it is, but not really" things.

Taking this into 5e, right now it looks very much like the ways psionics will be implemented is using the exact same system as other spellcasters, but with the psionic fluff. This is another big change to how psionics works, and, if 5e Dark Suns is a thing, this is how at least some, if not all, psionics will work there. This blurs the thematic difference down to zero -- it's literally only a fluff sentence difference from magic. If that works, then it's pretty clear that psionics as a concept isn't the important part, it's a non-defiling, non-divine magic systems, a third system as it were. If we can plug anything into Dark Sun, so long as we call it psionics, and it doesn't perturb the setting otherwise, then it's not really something foundational to the rest of the setting. Things that are integral can't be swapped that easily.

I would still qualify Dark Sun as a setting as high fantasy. It's dying earth and that warps it pretty heavily, but it's still high fantasy.

1. It takes place on Athas, not Earth. Classically, this alone is actually enough to qualify the setting as high fantasy in literary terms.

2. It's focused on good vs evil and morality. Perhaps more explicitly than any other setting. The Sorcerer-Kings, Rajaat, defiling magic, slavery, templars, etc. represent very classic high fantasy explicitly evil foes. Maybe it fits more in gray-vs-black because of how bleak it is, but you still always have a choice of doing something explicitly evil or doing what you have to. Good is kind of not good because life is just that hard, but the evil is really really evil. You have to choose between letting some innocent people die, or selling entire tribes of free people into brutal chattel slavery.

3. Victory against evil is almost never through force of arms (otherwise it would be heroic fantasy). Because you can't fight evil directly on Athas. At the end of the day The Dragon is too strong. Heck, the Sorcerer-Kings are too strong. The Templars when they work together are too strong.

4. The scale of the adventure is almost always the end of the world. Or, rather, the end of the world being even sooner rather than somewhat later. Still, the PCs are typically saving the world, such as it is. At least in the adventures that I remember. It might just be the destruction of Tyr, but when Tyr is the last Shining City on the Hill in a world of dying embers, that means a lot. This isn't Greyhawk where there's hope for other nations to endure if the city falls, or for life to endure if civilization collapses.

I'm not sure where you're pulling your genre definitions from, but I'm real sketch on these. Your 1, for instance, is necessary but it's not sufficient (despite you claiming it is "classically"). Your 2 fits a lot of genre definitions, but I'll grant it is also necessary for high fantasy. 3 is just flat out weirdly wrong -- there's nothing in high fantasy that prevents force of arms from prevailing, nor does it's presence require a work to be heroic fantasy. The key part in High Fantasy is the struggle, not the method. This ties to 4 -- apocalypse is not a feature of High Fantasy. Dark Sun doesn't feature any published adventures that actually address defeating Dragon Kings, or even close to it. The stakes in the game as published are much lower than that. If you did this in your own campaigns, consider that this feature is one you brought to the setting -- it's not integral to the setting itself.

Dark Sun is a brutish, often amoral setting where evil won and there's almost no hope for good. The play is in what's left -- in surviving. Defeating the Dragon Kings wasn't really in the purview of the printed materials, although it did feature in the novels. I don't think that Dark Sun can be called a good vs evil setting at all. It's too Mad Maxian for that, and, besides, evil already won.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Ironically enough, what I think Dark Sun needs much more than psionics is:

A) A clear definition of "Arcane Magic"

and

B) For all Arcane Magic to be Defiling by default, and have to take some kind of effort/downgrade/penalty (however minor) to not Defile.

That's one of the things that pushes the main theme in Dark Sun - that Arcane Magic, the powerhouse that allows so much wonderful stuff in normal D&D, is actually slowly destroying the world. Obviously this was not exactly a subtle reference to man-made climate change, and how as wonderful as our stuff is, it's not that great if it destroys the world, so maybe we should cut back a bit, just like Preservers.

Psionics pushed two important things for Dark Sun:

1) It let you have supernatural powers that were neither Arcane nor Divine, nor derived from the Sorcerer-Lords.

2) It pushed the "weird fantasy" theme really hard. People often overlook this second factor, but it was actually pretty major. All the worst Dark Sun stuff has been when people forgot the "weird fantasy" angle and just turned it into Planetary Romance.

 

[cbwjm]

Dark Sun doesn't need psionics, but it would be a shame to have the setting without them. It's been a cornerstone of the setting since it was created, to just release it without them would be a little sad and wouldn't quite have that dark sun feeling for me.

 

[Umbran]

I don't think there's a meaningful difference to these questions.

Imagine there are two chefs, eating sandwiches. The questions "Does this sandwich need swiss cheese?" and "Should we remove the swiss cheese?" are not the same - and they should be able to discuss the former without anyone feeling threatened, getting defensive, or snarky as if there was some legitimate threat that anyone was going to remove the cheese form the sandwich forevermore.

 

[Umbran]

Obviously this was not exactly a subtle reference to man-made climate change, and how as wonderful as our stuff is, it's not that great if it destroys the world, so maybe we should cut back a bit, just like Preservers.

Hm. So, who wonders if maybe they won't just rehash this, but double down on it, given current realities?

 

[ChaosOS]

I actually fully agree with the thesis that Psionics don't add to the most important theme in Dark Sun, which is the environment. In fact, I think having an alternate power source that doesn't clearly have downsides in either effect or raw power level weakens those themes. At the same time, the tension around defiling is not the only part of the setting and Dark Sun as "weird fantasy" is very well served by the presence of psionics.

What does this mean mechanically? I honestly think getting "Defiling vs. Preserving" right is still more fundamentally important than psionics. At the same time, for psionics to hit that "weird fantasy" it actually needs that mechanically reinforced - I think you could get that done through subclasses, but I'm not totally certain.