D&D General Why wouldn't you run a Dark Sun game?

[aco175]

I've always liked it. It's a fairly classic swords-and-sorcery setting with some signature themes, such as a ecology, the remoteness of the gods, and metal poverty. It has that mid-20th century fantasy-with-a-sci-fi-accent thing going on. I see no reason it couldn't be done under various editions of D&D, not to mention other game systems.

Finally someone mentions that stupid play of starting off with a bone weapon and breaking it. Never getting a steel sword, but you might one day get a bone shield and a rock club. And you start at 3rd level since things are sooo harsh and only seasoned adventurers can hop to survive- with a tooth dagger.

 

[ECMO3]

(And, ironically, if I wanted a more focused dungeon crawling experience, I wouldn't be using 5E D&D for that.)

5E works pretty well for classic dungeon crawling.

We just finished replaying a series of ancient 1E adventures from 1-20 redone with 5E rules, starting with Temple of Elemental Evil and ending with the Queen of the Demonweb pits.

It was great, every bit as good as when I played those adventures some 40+ years ago.

 

[ECMO3]

While it may have been a bad idea, is there data to show that an alterante approach would have saved the company?

It seems to me, from what I remember people saying from shortly after the 3e release, people had largely moved on to systems that had more cohesive and throught through mechanics, rather than being extrapolations of war games, which the rules still were as late as 1999 unless you incorporated combat and tactics (and that can only help so much, and brings its own issues). 2e was supposed to be a much larger overhaul, but Zeb was ordered to make it completely backwards compatible with 1e, so he couldn't change much in the end.

Meanwhile, games like Runequest, GURPS, Pendragon, Rolemaster, Shadowrun and so forth were letting people do what they wanted to do with their character and adventures in a way that made sense and was easy to pull off without the cracks showing too much. No amount of OSR charm can change the fact that in the 90s AD&D was just not it for a lot of people. I very much remember large swaths of people online saying they came back to D&D with 3rd edition precisely because it shared so much DNA with those other games.

Splintering things may have been the nail in the coffin, but the game system looking not dissimilar in 1997 to how it did in 1977 wasn't helping anyone, with 20 years of high quality, interesting games coming out in between.

I think quality problems killed 2E more than the rules did. The TSR products during that era were terrible, other than some of the hardcovers.

1E had very well developed, thought through and in most cases playtested (often in tournaments) modules. 2E had content that it seemed like someone put together with no logic or forethought. Then there was the egregious printing/shipping errors. The Chult adventure for example shipped without the DM numbered map due to an error at the printers, despite the fact it was referenced numerous times in the book. The response from TSR was oh well, keep printing we will mail the map to anyone that asks us about it

 

[Celebrim]

I never particularly liked the archetype nor did I particularly like the over the top power creep when the setting was first introduced. It didn't really see how it could play interestingly and the "Mad Max but Fantasy" vibe went together for me like chocolate and broccoli. I love both of them, but not together.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

I can enjoy DS like a reader of the novels but I create a new campaign I want total freedom about player options, monsters or factions. I will not respect the canon or metaplot

 

[Clint_L]

While it may have been a bad idea, is there data to show that an alterante approach would have saved the company?

Well, you can't really prove a hypothetical, but what the data does show is that, again per Slaying the Dragon, WotC's review of the TSR accounts showed that almost all those setting books, including Dark Sun, were not profitable and never could have been profitable because of their cost and their appeal to only a small part of the game's overall user base. They were more of an excuse to keep getting more of the book advances that were basically a scam keeping TSR afloat.

So while you can't prove that "another approach would have saved the company," you can be pretty confident that selling product that cannot be profitable is a bad strategy in the long run. Which is probably why WotC is much more disciplined about publications that TSR was. Particularly in the 5e era, which has been profitable, if not as much as they would like.

 

[TheHand]

I’d run it again if I had interest from any of my players, but I don’t think any of my current groups are all that into the setting beyond maybe a really short one-shot type campaign.

I played it once back in the AD&D era, but it was just a one-off. I later ran it for the same 90’s group, but we wanted to make it grittier, so we hacked the Stormbringer rpg and it really gave us that sword and sorcery feel. We played 1 story with it and never went back, though.

I also ran it once for a curious group using the 4e version. That game ended in a TPK largely due to a couple miscalculations by the PCs and some angry dice gods. We actually thought it was pretty hilarious that we managed to TPK in 4e! (And I’m no killer GM).

If anyone in my circles wanted to play Darksun again I’d happily run it, but I’d probably want to adapt something like Dragonbane rules for it because I have fond memories of our Stormbringer hack.

As a final note, my long running Planescape group suggested Darksun actually be one of the orb-worlds of Carceri, with the idea the original world’s “death” actually Planeshifted it.