D&D 5E How would you wish WOTC to do Dark Sun

[Micah Sweet]

Alternatives for religious diversity and many other things are in the DMG, as I've said several times. You should be working with your DM when you make your character anyway.

 

[Remathilis]

I care about religious inclusivity in D&D core rules. I said what I said.



I also care about the focal topic of this thread:

How do you want 5e to do Dark Sun?



The discussion about religious inclusivity arose because of the following question.

Are the core rules of the Players Handbook flexible enough and customizable enough to use for a setting that is different from Forgotten Realms?

For many, the answer is, No.



Some forumers argued that a 5e Dark Sun needs a setting book that rewrites the Players Handbook with the flavor and options that are appropriate for the Dark Sun setting.

Dark Sun lacks gods, but has religions.

Officially, Dark Sun has at least three religions.

• A kind of monism that reveres each of the four elements as sacred.

• A kind of animism that reveres nature spirits, with an ethical ideal to preserve plant life and thereby all life.

• A kind of divine-king worship analogous to worshiping Caesar or worshiping Pharaoh.



The Players Handbook Cleric can more inclusively offer various religious possibilities, so the Cleric is already suitable for other kinds of settings. Xanathars mentions Clerics of a "cosmic force", which would include substantive elementalism, but also concepts, such as an ideal. Additionally, it is worth mentioning animism, ancestor reverence, and other forms of human religiosity.

Ok, let's take the argument back to DS.

As you said, there are three types of religions, and coincidentally there are three classes that get power from supernatural outside forces to represent them: cleric, druid, warlock. Seems doable under the 5e PHB with a few subclasses added for flavor. Unless you are a die-hard who feels clerics and warlocks shouldn't exist or need to be totally rewritten so as not to break the established cannon. Then you need a new DS PHB.

As for the core rules, I feel the Xanathar sidebar should have been in the PHB and that's a missed opportunity, but nothing else needs fixing there. The core rules are good enough to support Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Eberron, Ravenloft, Ravnica, Theros, Exandria, Spelljammer, Planescape and Mystara with minimal racial changes and few additional new options. There is only ONE setting that bucks that trend and demands large radical changes to the core rules and assumptions. Guess which one.

Which is why I go back to a and b options; Dark Sun needs to behave like all the other D&D settings and be a genre augment to the larger game OR it needs to stop calling itself D&D and unshackle itself from the expectations of the game and do it's own thing. It needs to be either like Theros or like Adventures in Middle Earth.

 

[dave2008]

By the way, I know reallife people who worship some of these gods that the Cleric class mentions in the Players Handbook.

So, to claim that "theyre not real" is factually false. They are reallife religions.

Moreover, the same polytheistic god can go by any number of names, so whether a particular name is historical or idiosyncratic is moot. The polytheism itself is the prohibition.

Maybe i am missing something as I've been a DM for the past 20+ years: does the PHB do something that excludes Monotheism or (more importantly to me) Atheism? The DMG clearly discuss alternate religions, so it seems pretty inclusive to me. What do you feel the PHB does to over-rule the DMG?

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Lords of the Rings and Chronicles of Narnia are example of fantasy worlds with "monotheism".

Other matter is d20 lines set in the "real world", for example Gamma World, Dark*Matter or the Mask of the Red Death. Maybe in a homebred setting a Christian priest can't cast divine spells as the rest of clerics, but he is a fabout spell-breaker and buff-breaker, or a nerfer against unholy monsters.

Crystal Dragon Jesus - TV Tropes

Any fictional religion, such as those found in a Medieval European Fantasy world, which possesses attributes stereotypically associated with Christianity (especially Roman Catholicism) â such as priestly vestments, nuns and …

tvtropes.org

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* Shouldn't the tari (ratfolk) to be a playable race?

* The time travel is canon in DS, isn't it? Could this cause a "reboot"?

History

darksun.fandom.com

66th King's Age (-9.569 to -9.549)

• Wind's Defiance (-9.659): Mareet, ruler of Saragar, is visited by a time-traveler from the future. He tells the king an appending doom to Athas before disappearing. Obsessed with the warning, Mareet orders his most powerful psionicists to breach the time stream and determine the nature of the warning. They are later joined by a third psionicist.
• Desert's Slumber (-9.459): The psionicists breach the time barrier and learn of the impending Cleansing Wars, Rajaat, and Defiling Magic. Mareet wants to warn all of Athas, but the psionicists disagree and take control of their leader. The three use their formidable powers to shield Saragar from the rest of the world. The Mind Lords are born

* If the lifeshape tech is canon in DS, why not to create a class like the "biohacker" of Starfinder? but with other name, for example haruspex.

 

[dmgorgon]

After reading this thread, I think it's clear that Dark Sun would not go over well with WotC. They would need to "FIX" it all for being too offensive.

I think it's best left untouched. It's perfect the way it is. A 5e conversion document is all that is needed.

Let WotC focus on Dragonlance or something like that.

 

[Micah Sweet]

After reading this thread, I think it's clear that Dark Sun would not go over well with WotC. They would need to "FIX" it all for being too offensive.

I think it's best left untouched. It's perfect the way it is. A 5e conversion document is all that is needed.

Let WotC focus on Dragonlance or something like that.

Yup. Explorer's Guide to Athas on the DMs Guild would get the job done. I'd be happy with a good third party option if WotC pulled the trigger.

 

[Eltab]

After reading this thread, I think it's clear that Dark Sun would not go over well with WotC. They would need to "FIX" it all for being too offensive.

I think it's best left untouched.

Sadly, I agree.
Athas is "the world where Evil has almost completely won".
There are too many people who would rush for the social media flamethrowers because of the evils, rather than wrap their head around the Starting Conditions or discern the potential 'drive Evil back' campaign stories available.

 

[Mecheon]

There are too many people who would rush for the social media flamethrowers because of the evils, rather than wrap their head around the Starting Conditions or discern the potential 'drive Evil back' campaign stories available.

I mean, hardly?

Its blatently "Here's this dark evil world. You're against it and can do some good". People love that.

I think you're misunderstanding what the social media complaints are about on a fundamental level.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

This is why my preference is a separate PHB; unless you're going the 4e route, you are cutting or rewriting 50% or more of the PHB.

When 2e released Dark Sun, the PHB had 6 races and 9 classes. The classes were simpler and had related features, which is why removing paladin for munchk I mean gladiator was easy, as was removing the bards half-caster ability.

5e is a different beast. There are 9 races and 12 classes now, with each class being more mechanically complex and harder to rip apart and resew cleanly. Depending on how much of a purist you are, we could be talking of a lot of class bans and rewrites, on top of new subclasses to replace those that aren't allowed (and to give classes more than one subclass option per class). Lather rinse and repeat for races, backgrounds, equipment, magic, psionics, etc. You could fill a whole book just in changes to the PCs and never discuss anything else!

That leaves two options: a "true" DS experience needs it's own compatible core rules books to be a clean break from all the stuff that isn't allowed or a 4e style setting guide that tries to refluff and reuse as much of the stuff in the PHB as possible. Because any supplement that says "ignore most of the core rules and everything that came after" ain't gonna cut it.

I largely disagree with this. IMO, all you really need to do to run DS as it is in 2E is to have the new DS-specific character options, and a blurb saying "These are the character options from the PHB or XGtE that are also good without alteration for DS."

In addition, there should be a revamping of the magic system to explain the costs of using preserver/defiling magic, the psionics spells, and a list of DS-approved spells (and new ones that are DS specific).

This doesn't feel like it requires an entirely new book to do, and feels fairly consistent with the content of the recent Eberron book, which is quite large. I especially loathe the idea that DS requires some "parallel rules" in order to function properly.

IMO, there shouldn't be a "proper way" in how to play DS. Yes there should be rules, and boxes, explaing how a DM can run it much like 2E was, but there shouldn't be some entirely new PHB just to lock other players out of porting their wizards into DS. If they want to do that fine, that's not "bad wrong fun."

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Also I'm very confused why the past couple of pages have devolved into some debate about religion...