NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9217771" data-attributes="member: 907">I was under the impression that Dark Sun was fairly successful as AD&D settings go (which admittedly is damning with faint praise). I recall seeing a survey where Dark Sun ranked third most popular behind "homebrew" and FR, although that was probably a decade or two ago, and it's really too late for me here to try to vacuum the Internet to try and find it.That said, Dark Sun has some issues, both lorewise and mechanics-wise which are hard to square with modern D&D. OG Dark Sun did not particularly care for balance, at least not in a detailed sense. It was a world hostile to wizards, who would have to keep their spellbooks hidden and camouflaged. Everyone had higher stats than in regular D&D, but this was sort of balanced by having worse gear (with metal weaponry mostly being a mid-level thing and being relegated to bone or stone before that, with all sorts of penalties, and metal armor both being prohibitively expensive and dangerous to the wearer because of overheating. You had common psionics, which had their own issues in 2e with it being fairly weak in general but with a small number of really strong things, and those things often being accessible way before a wizard could do the same thing. All of these things work against the focus on game balance in 3e forward, as well as the expressed desire of Wizards developers to make sure people can play their favorite character types all over the place, and often instructing the DM to bend over backwards to accommodate player wishes. You can't play a gnome sorcerer in Dark Sun, because there are no gnomes and sorcery for humanoids kind of break the setting and its lore.And that's before going into the lore issues of slavery, mass human(oid) sacrifice, the rulers of the setting being genocidal archmages, all authority being corrupt, and things like that.</blockquote>

Verification