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

[I'm A Banana]

I legitimately don't think that there are any 5e rules for living plants that aren't also animated creatures that can kill you like a treant or vegepygmy. RAW there is absolutely zero difference between a living tree and lumber, they're both objects. Having some way of "defiling" and getting a bonus would require WotC to create a whole new system, and limiting defiling player options to only working on plant-type monsters is naughty word hilarious.

I think that developing a system would be over-complicating it.

My solution for 4e Dark Sun was that magic was defiling by default and you needed to expend your Bonus Action to avoid it. This reflected the extra effort needed and give a mechanical temptation to do defiling when you really needed to use your Bonus Action for something else.

Could be viable! "Defile within 5 feet of you/spell level when you cast a spell unless you use a Bonus Action"...kind of aesthetic, but I'm OK with this happening more in the story than in deep mechanics. "Defile" here means killing bugs and vegetation and killing the soil maybe even causing some mild discomfort for creatures (a sudden dehydration, a reeling nausea, a nosebleed, etc.). It's the kind of thing that'll be obvious. All that's missing is a sense of preserving being a "lost art" -- it should cost a bit for your character to know how to preserve. Maybe as little as costing one of your known Cantrips, or a skill proficiency or something. Alternately, we could go big and have preserving be a whole FEAT that gives some bonuses in addition to letting you preserve. Could even be an origin feat, letting it be a little weaker than other feats but still something that requires a pro-active investment.

One of my main concerns with a 5e Dark Sun is that it’s likely to have the same problems. Goodberry make wilderness survival trivial, and Create Water is a trivial option to fill your water skins at 1st level too. WotC have been supremely unwilling to disallow spells on a setting by setting basis so far, but you simply can’t make hunger and thirst a challenge when basically every party has access to these two spells. Similarly, the whole old-school ‘arcane magic is rare and hidden’ thing is hard to manage when every spellcaster has at-will cantrips, and probably well over 50% of the published MARTIAL subclasses have flashy magical abilities.

Dark Sun was written around a different set of assumptions as to magic availability than modern D&D uses.

There's a few ways to deal with environmental hazards, and you could probably apply them all:

• You create custom spell lists for Dark Sun characters that exclude those spells. If you're playing DS, you use the DS-specific spell lists.
• You ramp up what the environment consumes (ie: on Athas you need to drink 2 gallons of water and eat 2 lbs of food/day, so each thing only counts for half as much)
• You design the environmental challenges to take into account those mitigating effects (for instance, Goodberry doesn't help you if travel on a road in Dark Sun's harsh environment simply gives you Exhaustion every day as part the rules for exploration on Dark Sun; Create Water won't prevent the fire/radiant damage done if you're exposed to the sun during high noon)

The key thing is to imagine the environment as part of the challenge that any group must overcome. The wilderness IS the boss battle, and I want to be making tactical decisions about how to get from Point A to Point B and dying in the wilderness if I get those decisions wrong or roll low on some dice.

I also want, as part of my wizard play experience, to have to hide what I'm doing, or to use my power/influence to get away with it.

As much as the wilderness can be a boss battle, Not Being Evil is also a fun boss battle, where I can make choices to avoid it, but it's a challenge, and I can lose (in the moment, anyway, choosing the expedient, but destructively wicked option). This is kind of where the slavery comes in, but I don't think you NEED slavery for this conflict. It is a big easy way to highlight it, perhaps -- that you can own hirelings, and your Bastion might be built by exploited bricklayers.

In a good version of Dark Sun, I am fighting monsters, and I am exploring dungeons, and I am fighting myself (against convenient evil), and I am fighting The Frickin' Sun Itself. I can imagine that in 5e without a whole revolution, If WotC is smart and finds the same kind of fun in DS that I do. A version that suffers from the same issues that 4e DS suffers from would still be "fine," probably. The character and villain options are quite charismatic.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

I think that developing a system would be over-complicating it.

Rules and mechanics require systems. There's a reason class features related to wealth and money tie into the well-defined gold piece standard, for instance.

As far as the game's logic goes, "plants" are defined solely as a creature type, and a relatively rare one at that.

 

[mamba]

As far as the game's logic goes, "plants" are defined solely as a creature type, and a relatively rare one at that.

so in your world there is no grass on the hills, flowers in the meadows, trees in forests, etc., or do you call those something other than plants?

 

[I'm A Banana]

Rules and mechanics require systems. There's a reason class features related to wealth and money tie into the well-defined gold piece standard, for instance.

As far as the game's logic goes, "plants" are defined solely as a creature type, and a relatively rare one at that.

Personally, I don't need to know how much hp a blade of grass or a nearby ant or mycelium has in order to get the gist of "I suck life from nearby to power my magic." I don't need to add decision points or tactical positioning or strategic resource management. I just need to know that when I use spells, I am making the world a little more dead near me, and that if I don't want to make the world a little more dead near me, I'm going to have to expend some effort to avoid that. The decision point there is: Do I do the easy thing that destroys the world, or the harder thing that doesn't? Which is a HUGE character point in a setting based on environmental catastrophe, because it mirrors in a heightened world of fantasy the decision I make every time I drive to the store instead of biking to it.

As long as defiling focuses on that decision and doesn't bog me down in exactly how many bacterium I must slay to cast magic missile, it'll be doing the job I want it to do.

4e's defiling mechanic was simple, which is wonderful, but it was also opt-in, which made it a problem from the standpoint of that character decision (it wasn't the easy thing to do, it was harder to do, as a player, than not to do).

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

so in your world there is no grass on the hills, flowers in the meadows, trees in forests, etc., or do you call those something other than plants?

"Objects."

The game does not differentiate between grass in the hills and hay in bales; RAW there are no living organisms in 5e rules that aren't also "creatures", "monsters" or "NPCs."

I suppose a small number of fungi like brown mold are considered hazards, traps or magical contagions.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

Personally, I don't need to know how much hp a blade of grass or a nearby ant or mycelium has in order to get the gist of "I suck life from nearby to power my magic." I don't need to add decision points or tactical positioning or strategic resource management. I just need to know that when I use spells, I am making the world a little more dead near me, and that if I don't want to make the world a little more dead near me, I'm going to have to expend some effort to avoid that. The decision point there is: Do I do the easy thing that destroys the world, or the harder thing that doesn't? Which is a HUGE character point in a setting based on environmental catastrophe, because it mirrors in a heightened world of fantasy the decision I make every time I drive to the store instead of biking to it.

As long as defiling focuses on that decision and doesn't bog me down in exactly how many bacterium I must slay to cast magic missile, it'll be doing the job I want it to do.

4e's defiling mechanic was simple, which is wonderful, but it was also opt-in, which made it a problem from the standpoint of that character decision (it wasn't the easy thing to do, it was harder to do, as a player, than not to do).

The thing is, we need to have a mechanical and mathematical understanding of "living grass" if you're going to convert that living grass into some mechanical advantage for your character, be it extra spell slots of enhancement to your abilities, whatever. It should logically follow that a single blade of grass and a multi-ton oak would give you different amounts of power if defiled, but as of now there is no way for the logic of the game to differentiate between the two.

You can say "when I cast spells the plants around me die", but that's a ribbon and there's nothing stopping you from saying that right now with any spellcasting class, we don't need a whole defiling subclass for a cosmetic change.

The decision point there is: Do I do the easy thing that destroys the world, or the harder thing that doesn't?

What I'm trying to express here is that RAW, right now, there is no way to quantify the "easy" or "hard" decision; we would have to introduce a new system of logic to the game in order to have players be able to make those choices.

If we want players to have to choose between "flargunnow" and "sloobydoop", we must first define flargunnow and sloobydoop, and in so doing, we will have created a dichotomous system of flargunnowness and sloobydoopitude. Likewise, we must first define "living plant" and "dead plant" (or "preserved" and "defiled") in D&D, and once we create those definitions, the system will be assembled from what we define that they are, and are not.

 

[crazy_cat]

The thing is, we need to have a mechanical and mathematical understanding of "living grass" if you're going to convert......

No, we really don't.

 

[Misanthrope Prime]

No, we really don't.

Have you ever heard the parable of the blind men and the elephant?

 

[mamba]

The game does not differentiate between grass in the hills and hay in bales; RAW there are no living organisms in 5e rules that aren't also "creatures", "monsters" or "NPCs."

I'd still call a tree a plant. That it does not appear in the MM is due to the fact that people so rarely get beaten up by scrubs and trees that they are not worth mentioning - we do have tree blights and treants for the rare cases this happens

 

[mamba]

The thing is, we need to have a mechanical and mathematical understanding of "living grass" if you're going to convert that living grass into some mechanical advantage for your character, be it extra spell slots of enhancement to your abilities, whatever. It should logically follow that a single blade of grass and a multi-ton oak would give you different amounts of power if defiled, but as of now there is no way for the logic of the game to differentiate between the two.

I am not going to count the number of blades of grass or leaves on a tree I need to defile for a fireball. The knowledge that it happens is sufficient, mechanics make this tedious

we don't need a whole defiling subclass for a cosmetic change.

I agree insofar as it should not be a subclass