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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 9834100" data-attributes="member: 2067">The conflict is mostly for WotC's designers: do you include the moral conflict angle in your new version of Dark Sun or not?Core D&D is pretty explicit that it's only interested in non-Evil characters. The idea of a Dark Side-style "temptation" isn't really a conflict that standard D&D is interested in. Raising the dead and soul jarring aren't Clearly Evil Villain Stuff, as far as the current design of D&D is concerned. You can be neutral and make zombies.If Dark Sun continues in that vein, there's no reason to allow for defilers to be PC's. There's no neutral way to defile. Every act of defiling is canonically making the world a worse place for your own benefit. If you were never meant to become a dragon, then this is probably fine for a lot of tables.If you are designing Dark Sun and you want that to be a valid temptation for PC's, then you enter a world where you are offering an incentive to do awful things to the millions of tables of all ages and inclinations that will potentially play Dark Sun. Not a cause for panic, but definitely a place where you'd want to be very careful, as a designer/publisher, considering the diversity of your audience.You aren't paying attention to what I'm actually writing, and you're strawmanning some "notions" I've never actually articulated and do not hold. So I'll try to clarify once more:What's in tension is a design consideration for WotC: Do you want a game that encourages PC's to engage with the question of: "Do I do evil for benefit here?"Standard D&D as of this moment isn't interested in that. It's built assuming your characters won't be evil. Dark Sun could be interested in that, and I think it's more fun if it is, but if it is, and it is built without that assumption that standard D&D has, it has a bit of a problem: not every table is going to be asking that question in a way that's fun for the players. Encouraging characters to do Clearly Evil Villain Stuff opens the door to some really awful player experiences. You can deal with that problem in various ways, but that problem is real, and is difficult to solve for. Of course, the new DS game could just throw defiling in as an option and pretend like it doesn't matter. Basically what 4e did, honestly. And IMXP that led to it not mattering - it failed to be an interesting moral question. So I think that would be some bad design.</blockquote>

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