Dark Sun returns in 2027 as Dungeons & Dragons' first mature rated setting

[TwoSix]

I know this is the Dark Sun thread, but watching @Jono11 try to solo clear this entire thread raid makes me feel like it should be in the WoW thread instead.

 

[Remathilis]

To be clear: you are saying it would be bad to have a version of D&D which explicitly stated that the DM was the final authority and what is and is not allowed, and which has at least two versions of everything? And you are also saying that would be different to what 5e and 5.5e currently are? Can I run a Cthulhu by Torchlight subclass in a Descent Into Avernus game? Can I run a Warforged character in a Humblewood game? If that question has more than one plausible answer, I'm afraid that the toothpaste on this issue is entirely out of the tube.

Yes I think the game should share common assumptions on what a wizard is!

Ancedote time: I've mentioned previously that 2e clerics had different spheres of influence depending on the setting and supplement being use. The PHB had the default list. The Complete Priests Handbook made you choose only a few options because it was balanced for a far-lower magic world. Domains of Dread and Faiths & Avatars (a FR supp) added additional spheres, but didn't add the SAME additional spheres, and PO: Spells and Magic rebalanced the spheres to more closely align with 1e's assumptions (IE: Reincarnate stopped being a Cleric spell and was a Druid spell again, while the PHB has that reversed). Now in my 2e days, a lot of us were both players and DMs (ah youth) and we all made different calls on what cleric was going on. I used the PO version since it was the best balanced. My friend at home used the PHB because he hated using supplements. My other friend at college was using Faiths & Avatars because he ran FR and didn't give it more thought than that. What happened is most players (we shared a number of them) couldn't keep which spells they had access to in different games straight. That lead to everyone just ended up using the PHB only anyway, regardless of what the DM was actually allowing. Trying to convince one of my players that "produce flame" is no longer a cleric spell because I'm using book X and that's different from what the PHB says lead me to realize that both extensive house ruling and multiple contradictory rules are often a waste of time because unless your players are all deep-invested in the game, they are going to use what's in the PHB anyway.

Which is why I prefer the model WotC has followed more-or-less: additive, not transformative. The PHB cleric is the cleric for all settings, barring a few choice-points like domains, they all run under the same assumptions. This idea that every setting should have customized versions of core options is madness. If your setting cannot use the overwhelming majority of the PHB as written, your setting isn't actually D&D. Its some d20 system offshoot. So anything with the D&D Brand on it, should, in theory, use the D&D core books and a player who made a dwarf cleric using just his PHB should be a viable character in Eberron, Ravenloft, Greyhawk, and Dark Sun.

Honestly, that is what is scaring me the most about Star Wars. For the first time in 20+ years, we are going to make a D&D setting that looks like the core D&D rules should not apply. The Force is not D&D spells. Dwarf clerics don't exist. Its not D&D. Its a 5e compatible d20 setting wearing D&D's name and diluting the brand name back to being the Kleenex or Xerox word for generic d20 gaming. (Hey, want to join our D&D game? Oh, I guess I forgot to mention we're using Pathfinder 2.5). Maybe it was inevitable. But we had a good run of players only needing to buy the PHB and being able to make a viable character with just that.

 

[TorgoTheWhite]

Eugenics being portrayed as working is not great because to be clear, IRL, it doesn't.

So no, you're just subconsciously buying into a false idea that eugenics is a real science that could function, rather than a dangerous fantasy that should be dispelled instantly by remembering the overall performance of the smartest, strongest, fastest and so on people you've ever met, or looking the absolute scavs who rule our own planet.

It's not endorsing, it's portraying as real, and sure it's a fantasy setting and fantasy races, but it acts like this is fairly obvious and natural, when rather than making it fantastical or weird science-y, which they very easily could have done, and indeed, I would go as far to say, making it fantastical or weird-science-y would have been the natural fit for OG DS' tone, yet they didn't go that way. In the form they used, just not an element that'd needed or beneficial, and I think you know that perfectly well. It's not a modern idea even, people were discussing it in the 1990s, and 4E DS dumped it, in a very different era.

To be clear, I don't think this means that the authors of OG DS were "up to no good" or something, I think that, as children of a certain era, 20+ years older than us, they'd internalized certain nonsense (which was, up into the 1970s and even early 1980s, being taught in some US schools and universities, and was routinely taken-as-read in 1930 through 1960s pulp sci-fi, which a lot of them read a ton of as kids - I remember how it was finding cheap fun books before the internet).

Also eugenics and slavery are different things, you seem a little confused about that, and to be conflating them. The way they used eugenics is pretty clumsy though and did damage their portrayal of slavery, moving it from "ancient Rome" into much more dangerous "antebellum South" territory.


No, we're talking about a game.

But if we just look at the writing, then the writing overall on Tyranny is only okay. It's not a masterpiece, because it's completely one-note, one-tone, beginning to end (just louder or quieter at times). The conceit is great, the plot is cool, but that's really undermined by the absolute tonal flatness of the entire game. You can't make a concert with a car-horn that you won't lay off.

Certain elements of it do "work", however, more for physical traits and over a longer timeline than previously understood.. at that point you would hit a breaking point on your genetic diversity though. The assumption that genetics is God for all traits is the primary debunking. Is an inordinately large amount of Prussia still 6'5"..yes. However, that idea again factored out so many other important things... turns out nutrition, birthing age, nurturing has a larger effect on those physical characteristics than those pseudoscientists cared to admit. I'd say access to protein fortified foods and change in sociocultural trends have been huge in stopping the (even in the 90's) - "yeah, well they are x culture they won't be big enough for.."

 

[TwoSix]

The better question is what were the writers thinking when they wrote that, because actual human beings have been put through the experience of being a "deliberately bred domestic workforce", and their descendants re mong this who might read the book.

It was a pretty messed up thing overall, and not treated super gracefully in AD&D.

I’ve never been a fan of that take, because where do you draw the boundaries of “historical terrible thing that happened to real people” and “appropriate to put in my fiction?”

I’d rather just accept that the world has always been full of cruelty, and use that to shape my fiction. Depending on the table, we can gloss over it, lean into it, or attempt to overcome it.

 

[Phantom_Miria]

Eugenics being portrayed as working is not great because to be clear, IRL, it doesn't.

I don't think that the problem with eugenics when practiced on humans or equivalents is whether it works or not.

In fact, as another poster noted, Mankind has been practicing selective breeding of plants and animals since we had agriculture and the since first wolves, boars and aurochs were domesticated. Modern grain and maize looks nothing like ancient grain and maize, just like dogs, pigs and cattle are animal species that developed under mankind's domestication. Maize in particular can't even shed its seeds without a human tearing its hard leaves apart, it has a become a plant entirely dependent on co-existence with humans.

The problem with eugenics is that you'd be inevitably treating thinking, feeling intelligent beings like they're, well, cattle and plants, to be selectively bred for ideal genes. It's brutally dehumanizing and the process involves a systemic violation of the people's free will and bodily autonomy, and this long before the results show up or not. The damage that real or fantastical eugenics does, in fantasy by creating a whole group of people who are expected to exist only to do hard labour for the local tyrant even if they're individuals who likely would prefer doing something else, and in real life with how it led to the forced sterilization and even killing of people who were arbitrarily deemed as carrier of "bad" genes, happens regardless of whether the murderous eugenic plan reaches its stated goals or not.

To me removing the eugenic aspects is removing a salient element of Dark Sun's themes that specifically showed the horrors of real life eugenic programs, which is one of the dark themes it went on treating. Nobody in their right mind looks at how a good chunk of the city states is made up of people bred for servitude and goes "well, it worked though!"
I don't think that making the process more magic involved would change that much as far as what it means either.

 

[TwoSix]

Honestly, that is what is scaring me the most about Star Wars. For the first time in 20+ years, we are going to make a D&D setting that looks like the core D&D rules should not apply. The Force is not D&D spells. Dwarf clerics don't exist. Its not D&D. Its a 5e compatible d20 setting wearing D&D's name and diluting the brand name back to being the Kleenex or Xerox word for generic d20 gaming. (Hey, want to join our D&D game? Oh, I guess I forgot to mention we're using Pathfinder 2.5). Maybe it was inevitable. But we had a good run of players only needing to buy the PHB and being able to make a viable character with just that.

Your fear, my joy, lol. D&D is finally moving into being the generic toolkit it’s supposed to be.

 

[Parmandur]

Honestly, that is what is scaring me the most about Star Wars. For the first time in 20+ years, we are going to make a D&D setting that looks like the core D&D rules should not apply. The Force is not D&D spells. Dwarf clerics don't exist. Its not D&D. Its a 5e compatible d20 setting wearing D&D's name and diluting the brand name back to being the Kleenex or Xerox word for generic d20 gaming. (Hey, want to join our D&D game? Oh, I guess I forgot to mention we're using Pathfinder 2.5). Maybe it was inevitable. But we had a good run of players only needing to buy the PHB and being able to make a viable character with just that.

Honestly, I am morally certain that you have nothing to fear on that front: the Jedi will be reskinned 5E options, probably several so a Psychic Knight Fighter or Diviner Wizard might be "Jedi" wielding a Light saber magical item.

Force powers will be Spell Slots, etc. I saw a pretty good suggestion here somewhere (maybe Ruin Explorer?) that a lot of Spell using classes will probably get their abilities reskinned as "Tech Gadgets", so a Star Wars Tanger might be skinned as a "Bounty Hunter", and their Burning Hands Spell will be a "flamethrower" with limited use.

 

[Remathilis]

It’s almost like just because things share a name they might not share a continuity.

Continuity is overrated. It gets in the way of nice things. There is a reason why we have so many different and unqiue takes on Robin Hood or Dracula; nobody bothered to hold them to continuity. Its an anchor.

 

[Remathilis]

Your fear, my joy, lol. D&D is finally moving into being the generic toolkit it’s supposed to be.

Your Joy, my Hell. I've lived though that and I don't want to do it again.

 

[TwoSix]

Your Joy, my Hell. I've lived though that and I don't want to do it again.

You’re definitely the poster where I totally agree with you like 80% of the time and violently disagree the other 20% with no middle ground.