D&D 5E (2024) Unconfirmed Dark Sun World Book

[I'm A Banana]

Neither side thinks that the concept is inherently a problem, while the hypothetical third side that's actively demanding for all references to slavery to be dropped from fiction due to their offensiveness are nowhere to be seen.

I think that the slavery is inherently a problem, but it's not a problem that can't be handled.

One of the key play experiences for Dark Sun to me is the temptation to do the easy thing that makes the world a worse place. Defiling is the vanguard example: cast a spell, kill the world. You can avoid defiling by putting in some work.

Slavery is within that context: build a castle, dehumanize someone. By metaphor, you can avoid slavery by putting in some work. Maybe your castle takes longer to build, maybe it's more expensive, maybe both.

But, whenever you put the temptation in a game to dehumanize someone in the game, you're entering "this is a problem" territory. Real people are dehumanized in brutal ways, both historically and currently, and using that as fuel for magic wizard fun times is pretty disrespectful, even if it's Clearly Evil Villain Stuff.

...And if you add the dimension that this Clearly Evil Villain Stuff, in a Dark Sun game, is at its most compelling when it's a good option for a PC to accomplish their goals, that you want to kind of encourage people to do the Clearly Evil Villain Stuff, that you want to make avoiding that kind of HARD...it gets to be a bigger problem.

Is it OK to run an evil character in Dark Sun who uses the expedient method to achieve their goals? Is it OK to play a ruthless defiler who slays all her rivals and tips the world to ash in the process? Is that a story that's on the table? If so, is it OK to play a brutal slave merchant who does the same?

I think we can all agree that this is Kind Of a Problem.

There are some possible solutions, but nothing that's a clear win. Exclude these options and now we don't really have a struggle in play between doing good and doing evil. Include them, and then when the 13 year old who plays the brutal slave merchant starts quoting from the Bell Curve on X The Everything App....things get messy.

I think my favorite solution is probably some kind of mature content warning, combined with some good DM advice on how to treat the Clearly Evil Villain Stuff your PC's might do in play, but that's not perfect (that edgelord 13 year old won't be stopped, and let's be honest, that edgelord 40 year old will be even worse; it also kind of messes with your D&D target audience, since it rules out a lot of high school kids).

The easier solution is just to rule out PC's doing Clearly Evil Villain Stuff. Every mage is a Preserver, no Bastion is ever built with slave labor, etc. Weaker for the game, but understandable, at least.

 

[Superchunk77]

Is it OK to run an evil character in Dark Sun who uses the expedient method to achieve their goals? Is it OK to play a ruthless defiler who slays all her rivals and tips the world to ash in the process? Is that a story that's on the table? If so, is it OK to play a brutal slave merchant who does the same?

I think we can all agree that this is Kind Of a Problem.

It's only a problem if someone at your table thinks it is. This comes across as very "I have a problem with this in my game so I think it should be removed from the setting entirely."

 

[SableWyvern]

The easier solution is just to rule out PC's doing Clearly Evil Villain Stuff. Every mage is a Preserver, no Bastion is ever built with slave labor, etc. Weaker for the game, but understandable, at least.

You can write a rule saying it isn't allowed to be done, but you can't actually stop if from happening. As far as I'm concerned, completely unenforceable strictures about how a game is allowed to be played don't belong in RPG rulebooks. Individuals will do what they want with the rules and the authors have no means to control how their game is used.

If you want people to treat Dark Sun as a game where you fight against evil rather than promoting it (which, as far as I'm concerned, is the whole point of Dark Sun and what makes it worth playing, so I do think playing good guys should absolutely be encouraged and the default assumption), then you do so by showing people how to run a compelling game where the PCs fight against evil, not by telling the reader EVIL PCs AND EVIL BEHAVIOUR ARE ABSOLUTELY NOT ALLOWED.

 

[Phantom_Miria]

I think that the slavery is inherently a problem, but it's not a problem that can't be handled.

One of the key play experiences for Dark Sun to me is the temptation to do the easy thing that makes the world a worse place. Defiling is the vanguard example: cast a spell, kill the world. You can avoid defiling by putting in some work.

Slavery is within that context: build a castle, dehumanize someone. By metaphor, you can avoid slavery by putting in some work. Maybe your castle takes longer to build, maybe it's more expensive, maybe both.

But, whenever you put the temptation in a game to dehumanize someone in the game, you're entering "this is a problem" territory. Real people are dehumanized in brutal ways, both historically and currently, and using that as fuel for magic wizard fun times is pretty disrespectful, even if it's Clearly Evil Villain Stuff.

...And if you add the dimension that this Clearly Evil Villain Stuff, in a Dark Sun game, is at its most compelling when it's a good option for a PC to accomplish their goals, that you want to kind of encourage people to do the Clearly Evil Villain Stuff, that you want to make avoiding that kind of HARD...it gets to be a bigger problem.

Is it OK to run an evil character in Dark Sun who uses the expedient method to achieve their goals? Is it OK to play a ruthless defiler who slays all her rivals and tips the world to ash in the process? Is that a story that's on the table? If so, is it OK to play a brutal slave merchant who does the same?

I think we can all agree that this is Kind Of a Problem.

There are some possible solutions, but nothing that's a clear win. Exclude these options and now we don't really have a struggle in play between doing good and doing evil. Include them, and then when the 13 year old who plays the brutal slave merchant starts quoting from the Bell Curve on X The Everything App....things get messy.

I think my favorite solution is probably some kind of mature content warning, combined with some good DM advice on how to treat the Clearly Evil Villain Stuff your PC's might do in play, but that's not perfect (that edgelord 13 year old won't be stopped, and let's be honest, that edgelord 40 year old will be even worse; it also kind of messes with your D&D target audience, since it rules out a lot of high school kids).

The easier solution is just to rule out PC's doing Clearly Evil Villain Stuff. Every mage is a Preserver, no Bastion is ever built with slave labor, etc. Weaker for the game, but understandable, at least.

I don't really think that's kind of a problem, actually.

You can't control what players will ultimately do when they run their games, whether they'll play as the good guys and follow the "intended" reading of the game, or use homebrew instead of official material, or just decide to play as total jerks who run a sex slavery ring for edgelord points. I mean this very literally: there is no way to control what people do at their tables and in their homes, no matter what's written in the books or what people say about it on Twitter or Youtube. They're out of public's reach and that's actually a good thing when you stop and think about it.

Frankly, I find more problematic the idea that we should be concerned about the fact that everyone everywhere is playing "properly", even if they're doing their reprehensible fictional stuff as consenting adults freely deciding to do so, than the fictional reprehensible stuff itself.
I mean, if someone picks up Dark Sun to run a slave harem they're pretty much disregarding the entire theme of the setting to play a fetish game, and that's clearly not the intended message of the setting nor the expected gameplay, but at the same time who the hell am I to tell people that they're not allowed to play their fetish games in the privacy of their homes if that's how they like to spend their time? It's not like rewriting the setting is gonna deter them anyway, they were never taking their biggest inspiration out of Dark Sun specific lore. The edgy 13 year old will always quote the Bell Curve, no matter what you do to make him stop, he's just looking for excuses and if he doesn't find one he'll do without it.

To me it seems not just pointless, but actually self-harming, if not downright counter-productive, to start sanitizing our fictional settings and remove those very elements that you yourself say fit perfectly well with the themes of the world (taking the easy and wrong way out rather than the longer and just one, defilement as opposed to preservation, slavery as opposed to treating people like they're people), all in order to dissuade a minority of eternal edgelords who never bothered to read the material to begin with, who will continue to ignore the material and keep doing what they planned to do anyway, and leaving us with a worse setting that reads like a parody and the people who like to play slavers being possibly further emboldened now that their favourite topic is treated like a forbidden fruit.

 

[I'm A Banana]

It's only a problem if someone at your table thinks it is. This comes across as very "I have a problem with this in my game so I think it should be removed from the setting entirely."

Kind of a problem for WotC in designing and publishing, because over millions of tables, it will definitely be a problem at some of them. Do they ignore it? Deal with it? Design around it? These are all choices with consequences.

Not a problem for my home game, but I'm not the publisher of the vanguard TTRPG, either.

As far as I'm concerned, completely unenforceable strictures about how a game is allowed to be played don't belong in RPG rulebooks. Individuals will do what they want with the rules and the authors have no means to control how their game is used.

The idea that there is someone out there trying to control your home game is a bogeyman. But, the designers do have decisions to make. Like, they could just not include defiling rules and never mention slavery and say the assumption is that everyone is a hero who fights against bad things.

OR, they could include options for PC's to do Clearly Evil Villain Stuff, and thus encourage it.

You can't control what players will ultimately do when they run their games,

There's no such thing as control. Published game rules set expectations, though. And I'd expect a Dark Sun game to be designed with the expectation that players were sometimes choosing between an easy evil option and a hard good option. That might be a bad idea, though.

 

[SableWyvern]

The idea that there is someone out there trying to control your home game is a bogeyman.

There are a small number of publishers sometimes making absolute statements in their games about how their games are allowed to be played. I have also seen people state that if Dark Sun was rereleased then WotC must tell people that certain things are absolutely not allowed to be included in their game when they run it. It's not a huge issue and it's certainly not a bogeyman, but it is something that some people try and do and that others encourage. It's certainly nothing to be afraid of, because it's completely unenforceable. I mostly just think it's silly and a little arrogant.

But, the designers do have decisions to make. Like, they could just not include defiling rules and never mention slavery and say the assumption is that everyone is a hero who fights against bad things.

I can understand that some people want slavery removed from Dark Sun. However, I find it very hard to believe that someone pitching Dark Sun without defiling actually cares about or wants Dark Sun at all.

If you want all the bad stuff to be undefined and just "something bad people do, but PCs can't even be tempted by it and there's no mechanism or possible way for them to use it because no one even knows how it functions" ... well, people are going to want to know how defiling works if it's there and they will just go invent their own rules for it if necessary. Leaving those rules out because of a fear that PCs will defile makes zero sense to me at all. If this is really considered a valid concern, then I genuinely believe that only sensible approach is to just not release new Dark Sun material at all.

OR, they could include options for PC's to do Clearly Evil Villain Stuff, and thus encourage it.

I don't agree that something being possible in a game means that PCs are automatically encouraged to engage in that thing, in any meaningful sense.

In my last Dark Sun game, the PCs found out that were complicit in slave trading and they weren't able to immediately do anything about it. I can assure you, this didn't make them villains and the fact that they could have decided it was all in good fun did not in any way encourage them to believe this was OK. They were, in fact, extremely angry about it. As with much of Dark Sun, this event was a Call to Action for them to start thinking about how they can bring about change.

 

[Scribe]

Kind of a problem for WotC in designing and publishing

Last I checked, you can play an Evil Aligned PC, right out of the 5.5 PHB.

 

[Superchunk77]

Kind of a problem for WotC in designing and publishing, because over millions of tables, it will definitely be a problem at some of them. Do they ignore it? Deal with it? Design around it? These are all choices with consequences.

Not a problem for my home game, but I'm not the publisher of the vanguard TTRPG, either.

It's not WotC's problem either. But they sure do seem to want to make it their problem.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Last I checked, you can play an Evil Aligned PC, right out of the 5.5 PHB.

My copy says this:

D&D assumes that player characters aren't of an evil alignment. Check with your DM before making an evil character.

If that logic extends to Dark Sun, it would be consistent if they just excluded defilers and slave-built Bastions as PC options and left defilers and slavers you could fight, but none you could play as.

However, I find it very hard to believe that someone pitching Dark Sun without defiling actually cares about or wants Dark Sun at all.

Dark Sun without PC defiling isn't the same thing as Dark Sun without defiling. It's just the assumption that your characters will be heroic - defilers are for slaying.

I don't agree that something being possible in a game means that PCs are automatically encouraged to engage in that thing, in any meaningful sense.

If you don't want PCs to be doing Clearly Evil Villain Stuff on the regular, you shouldn't make the rules for doing Clearly Evil Villain Stuff -- waste of time & space & design resources.

 

[overgeeked]

Dark Sun without PC defiling isn't the same thing as Dark Sun without defiling. It's just the assumption that your characters will be heroic - defilers are for slaying.

I think defiling should be a PC option. But not as a separate class, rather as an option for any arcane caster while they’re casting. But something tempting. Like the Dark Side of the Force. It exists in games specifically to temp players and their PCs. If they use it too often there will be severe consequences beyond destroying nature. The normal folks will try to kill you, good aligned NPCs will try to kill you, the Veiled Alliance will try to kill you, templars will try to arrest you or kill you, etc.