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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8094379" data-attributes="member: 16814">More like the devestated landscape, fighting over extremely limited resources for survival, and warlords.  Psionics can be part of post apoc settings, sure, but it's not a necessary nor sufficient part.  Maybe I'm in a minority, but when someone says, "Hey, I want to try this post-apocalyptic setting/game," I don't immediately go, "cool, I love psionics!"Okay.  That says to me that, for you, any setting that has a psionic system is good for you (caveat: psionic system that you like).  I say that because nothing in Dark Sun relies on psionics to exist except psionics, so primarily liking psionics suggests that the rest of the setting is just a vehicle for you.I mean, we can disagree about this again, but I haven't seen a convincing argument for this yet.  It's mostly just 'but it's flavored differently so that makes it totally different' or 'it uses different mechanics to do the magic stuff,' and, fundamentally, those don't make it not another magic system.Question, then, did Dark Sun have psionics because it was thematically important for the Dragon Kings to weild psionics in addition to defiling magic and Dragon magic, or were Dragon Kings powerful psionists because psionics were included in Dark Sun and they needed to be formidable even against the new magic system?My vote is the latter.  The Dragon Kings are just as terrifying and powerful if no psionics exist.  Their place in Athas has pretty much nothing to do with psionics.  This goes to the root of my OP question.And, we have plenty of weird alien creatures in D&D without psionics.  Psionics is just another way to make things weird and alien, it's neither necessary nor sufficient to do so, though.Nice strawman -- of course you do not.  But the defiling nature of arcane magic is rooted deep into Dark Sun, is a primary point of contention in the setting, and is a primary point of contention with the PCs.  Psionics is none of this with regards to DS.Was it false?  I mean, that's the opposition the setting creates intentionally.  Or is it that you think psionics is part of that equation?For what it's worth, I find fisking to be intentionally rude and a rhetorical trick to place things out of their surrounding context and attack them as isolated statements rather than supporting arguments.</blockquote>

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