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

[Zardnaar]

Fair! It is fully supported for 3.5 as well though, moreso than 4e. Definitely still 3.5e and PF players out there (my group never moved on from 3.5).

If you print out the 3E materials I suppose.
Still not user friendly unless everyone has laptops (that run out of batteries).

 

[jdrakeh]

I'm not a fan of Dark Sun. It feels, to me, and I could be wrong, that the entire design edict behind Dark Sun was "take everything AD&D and do the exact opposite" (again, I could be wrong, but that's how it feels to me). It's an interesting idea, but in actual play, it always felt very shallow to me. Still does.

 

[earthsea_wizard]

I'm not a fan of Dark Sun. It feels, to me, and I could be wrong, that the entire design edict behind Dark Sun was "take everything AD&D and do the exact opposite" (again, I could be wrong, but that's how it feels to me). It's an interesting idea, but in actual play, it always felt very shallow to me. Still does.

Depsite thinking it is a cool setting on the surface, part of my hesitation to ever wanting to run it long term is the fact that the traditional Monster Manual is nearly useless. Over time that would grate on me. I like some subversion in D&D and trying new thing, but when I play D&D I still want D&D to be the chassis. Dark Sun does step pretty far away from that. Further than Eberron and maybe even further than Planescape.

 

[jdrakeh]

I suppose that's part of it for me, too. When I play D&D, I want it to feel like D&D. Even Eberron and Planescape still feel like D&D to me. Dark Sun does not.

 

[SableWyvern]

I'm not a fan of Dark Sun. It feels, to me, and I could be wrong, that the entire design edict behind Dark Sun was "take everything AD&D and do the exact opposite" (again, I could be wrong, but that's how it feels to me). It's an interesting idea, but in actual play, it always felt very shallow to me. Still does.

There is certainly a bit of that. I'm not sure as to the truth of it, but I've heard it said the authors didn't want to include the traditional races at all. When management ruled that they must, the results we got were a form of malicious compliance.

Whether that particular story is accurate or not, though, I think it's pretty clear that there was a strong push to be distinctly different from existing D&D settings, and many accepted features were intentional inverted or warped.

 

[earthsea_wizard]

There is certainly a bit of that. I'm not sure as to the truth of it, but I've heard it said the authors didn't want to include the traditional races at all. When management ruled that they must, the results we got were a form of malicious compliance.

Whether that particular story is accurate or not, though, I think it's pretty clear that there was a strong push to be distinctly different from existing D&D settings, and many accepted features were intentional inverted or warped.

It's true, one of the three creators talks about exactly that on the Stone, Bone and Obsidian podcast. The races were originally more akin to Dune and Barsoom (he cites both of those specifically). He also said that while there was nobody saying they couldn't do this or that, the marketing team strongly suggested at least keeping the familiar races. He does say the inversions were a bit of a screw you to that, but the truth is the only way to keep those races in such a setting is to totally invert them, so it seems they did the best they could have.

 

[GM Lent]

Dark Sun was the first D&D campaign setting I ever played in, back in 1994, and those games were just colossal and awesome. I honestly can't remember if I ever ran a DS game myself (my wheelhouse was Dragonlance and Al-Qadim and Spelljammer, with a hefty dose of homebrew weirdness), but I played in the campaigns all the time. This was back in high school, and we'd have 3-4 campaigns running at once, with a mix of a sizeable group of people, and since my best friend and I collaborated on basically everything it's hard to remember which stuff was mine and which was his.

I wouldn't run a Dark Sun campaign now because it's so enmeshed in my mind with being in high school, having a bunch of friends right nearby, discovering D&D/TTRPGs, and feeling like everything was so new and exciting, that there's no way any campaign I ran or tried to run now, using any system, could possiby be the same. I would just end up comparing them and I don't think anyone invoved would enjoy it. Especially me.

 

[ECMO3]

So for all of the love that Dark Sun gets, why did it never appeal to you?

I am playing in a 5E Darksun reboot. It is my second Darksun campaign since 2024 came out.

I would say it is "ok" but not great. The things I don't like are the absence of a lot of the D&D Tropes (classic Dragons, classic fantasy races, Fey, Bladesingers etc) and the fact it is low magic. Generally I prefer a high-fantasy type campaign in Greyhawk, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms or a custom world that is more traditional.

The morality "problems" don't really bother me and it has nothing to do with that. The character I am playing right now is a Halfling Dance Bard/Ranger/Fighter and she is a canabal. She ate some of a Sorcerer King's Children as part of her backstory. The characters in the first campaign all started out as slaves (mandatory).

 

[Clint_L]

For my fantsy RPGs I strongly prefer high fantasy, and my least favourite is grimdark. I find it depressing. And I also hate psionics. So...not for me.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'm not a fan of Dark Sun. It feels, to me, and I could be wrong, that the entire design edict behind Dark Sun was "take everything AD&D and do the exact opposite" (again, I could be wrong, but that's how it feels to me). It's an interesting idea, but in actual play, it always felt very shallow to me. Still does.

That was the point - TSR felt the D&D chassis could do much more than generic fantasy. If you look at the very early D&D stuff there was a lot of stuff from from John Carter in particular, which they had to remove for copyright reasons. Dark Sun was, as first conceived, John Carter with the numbers filed off.

Personally, I think TSR were right, I think it’s a shame D&D became locked in generic fantasy, and we didn’t see even more extreme variations on D&D. I suspect it was the failure of Spelljammer that killed that. At least Ravenloft survived.

To answer the original post, I will happily run Dark Sun.