Darksun Teasers

[Amphimir Míriel]

Twitter from the Dark Sun playtests says a player was bloodied by defiling magic!

"Hah! I just got bloodied by an ally's defiling magic. Potentially the first time that has happened in official 4th Edition."

Heh, cue the people screaming "they changed it, now it sucks!"

 

[Helena Real]

Long time hater of DS (out-of-the-blue, actually), usually a lurker here at EN World. Still sitting on the fence regarding 4E. Having recently read 11 pages of discussion regarding an eleven-month away CS.

What do I have to say to all of you? That you made it. I want to give 4E another try. I do want to try DS for the first time in my life. I'd love to read and play the material of something that I didn't like previously (and haven't seen yet) simply because there's so much passion about it here. I think that's what EN World (and communities in general) are all about: giving gamers and/or readers a sense of the importance of what is out there waiting for any of us who hasn't tasted yet to just make the jump... and give it a try.

Perhaps that's the reason why D&D is still alive and rolling after so much time. Because there's love and passion going through every gamer's fiber regarding everything they like (and hate).

Best regards to all of you,

Felipe.

 

[Wik]

I wonder if this means that it was the defiling that pushed into bloodied, or the effect of the spell that did it. I'm not sure how I like PC's defiling affecting non-plant life. Feels like a mood changer. Good or bad? Not sure yet.

From the original Dark Sun rules book:

Effects on Living Creatures: Though only plants are destroyed within the radius, living creatures are caused great pain. ANy being in the radius of a defiler's magic suffers an immediate initiative modifier penalty equal to the level of the defiler spell cast. No matter how high the resulting initiate [sp] roll, though, the pain can never keep a character from performing an action in the round. The initiative penalty only postpones when the action occurs.

IN addition, there is art of defilers turning people to ash with their magic.

So, I don't really think it's a mood changer. Actually, I think 4e will probably do a better job reflecting it. Because HP damage was too big a penalty in 2e (since PCs tended to have fewer HP)... 4e characters are more able to take it. Just hope you can't use defiling as a minion-popper.

And Felipe - thanks a lot! Us DSers are pretty hardcore people that love the setting to death.

 

[Korgoth]

To try to keep this thread on the topic of DS teasers (belive it or not, the thread is not actually about WotC forum screen appearance ...

Twitter from the Dark Sun playtests says a player was bloodied by defiling magic!

"Hah! I just got bloodied by an ally's defiling magic. Potentially the first time that has happened in official 4th Edition."

Interesting.

 

[ProfessorCirno]

Heh, cue the people screaming "they changed it, now it sucks!"

Well, nobody screamed that, for starters.

And secondly, they didn't change anything to begin with.

So uh, enjoy desperately trying to get reactions out of people, I suppose?

 

[RodneyThompson]

From the original Dark Sun rules book:

IN addition, there is art of defilers turning people to ash with their magic.

So, I don't really think it's a mood changer. Actually, I think 4e will probably do a better job reflecting it. Because HP damage was too big a penalty in 2e (since PCs tended to have fewer HP)... 4e characters are more able to take it. Just hope you can't use defiling as a minion-popper.

Hey, glad someone else does their research.

Though everything I will say will be interpreted as corporate shilling, I speak now as a Dark Sun fan. There are some things that I think 4E just does better for Dark Sun thanks to the basis of the mechanics. I think defiling is going to be one of them, but there are some others I think will pleasantly surprise people with how smoothly they work.

Also: keep an eye on my Twitter feed on Sundays. That's when the Dark Sun playtest game I'm in is running, and I plan to tweet at least a couple of times per session.

 

[Wik]

Hey, glad someone else does their research.

Though everything I will say will be interpreted as corporate shilling, I speak now as a Dark Sun fan. There are some things that I think 4E just does better for Dark Sun thanks to the basis of the mechanics. I think defiling is going to be one of them, but there are some others I think will pleasantly surprise people with how smoothly they work.

Also: keep an eye on my Twitter feed on Sundays. That's when the Dark Sun playtest game I'm in is running, and I plan to tweet at least a couple of times per session.

Yeah. I think a lot of people skipped that rule back in the day (it was pretty annoying), and the fact that defiling drained all life (instead of just plant life) was sort of forgotten.

There's a picture of a guy getting destroyed by a sorcerer king's spell in one of the books. It always bugged me that the game never really reflected that in 2e. I'm curious to see how it goes in 4e.

As I've said a couple times (here and in other places), I'm not really worried about how 4e handles defiling. I think things like economy and equipment are my big concerns.

 

[abyssaldeath]

There's a picture of a guy getting destroyed by a sorcerer king's spell in one of the books. It always bugged me that the game never really reflected that in 2e. I'm curious to see how it goes in 4e.

Only the most powerful Defilers(Sorcerer-Kings and other Dragons) were supposed to be able to do that.

 

[kilamanjaro]

Only the most powerful Defilers(Sorcerer-Kings and other Dragons) were supposed to be able to do that.

The Dragon Kings hardback had rules for high level defilers doing damage to living creatures with their spells.

 

[SSquirrel]

I was talking about my impressions at the time, I suspect they both were feeding off the dark edge running through geek culture post Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen.

Both of which came out in 1986. They certainly cast long shadows and helped instill a harder edge in the comics industry.

Also, remember that Dark Sun was designed during the fall of the U.S.S.R. and the Cold War was foremost on everyone's minds (what if the Soviets release their missiles, knowing they have nothing to lose?). All of the designers grew up in a time where the threat of nuclear fallout/post-apocalypse was a possibility - it would make sense to see that reflected in their game, because it would be something on everyone's minds around 1990. Just look at a lot of the movies of that era.

And ecological collapse, in the wake of things like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, provides easy inspiration for game designers tryign to do new things for D&D.

Movies like Mad Max, The Day After and Blade Runner all showed various levels of ecological destruction. Blade Runner is less a blasted wilderness than Mad Max is, but most people do what they can to minimize the effects of the acid rain and wear masks to keep the poor air out of their bodies. The Day After is, of course, nuclear devastation, and Dark Sun was certainly something we could imagine as a future earth post-nuke.

What do I have to say to all of you? That you made it. I want to give 4E another try. I do want to try DS for the first time in my life. I'd love to read and play the material of something that I didn't like previously (and haven't seen yet) simply because there's so much passion about it here. I think that's what EN World (and communities in general) are all about: giving gamers and/or readers a sense of the importance of what is out there waiting for any of us who hasn't tasted yet to just make the jump... and give it a try.

That's awesome man. It's always great to see people's eyes get opened to new things. I hope you have only positive experiences with both 4E and Dark Sun. I definitely prefer the original boxed set to the revised, that is definitely the place to start if you decide to look back at the original. If for no other reason than that gives you all the class and race information as well as all the basics of the area.