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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8094634" data-attributes="member: 16814">I won't be replying to Aldarc again in this thread.  Unpleasant PMs were sentNo, 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'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.</blockquote>

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