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

[Misanthrope Prime]

You're gonna have to explain to me how these two things are related

I spend a lot of time on the toilet thinking, as do most professionals in the science fiction and fantasy industries

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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

I think I'd have to muster a lot more enthusiasm for psionics than I have to really make the setting fun for my players. (I do like the ecological destruction being caused by magic and the rapacious sorcerer-kings, though.)

If my players were pining for Dark Sun, they should have a more enthusiastic DM for it.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Dark Sun is largely about survival in a harsh world

I think you are missing something. Remember Dark Sun was largely based on the John Carter stories. John Carter was a largely heroic figure who fought bad guys and won. No reason you can’t play Dark Sun that way.

 

[earthsea_wizard]

I think you are missing something. Remember Dark Sun was largely based on the John Carter stories. John Carter was a largely heroic figure who fought bad guys and won. No reason you can’t play Dark Sun that way.

This is true, and characters are described as such in the setting materials. I think the "count every drop of water and food along the way" thing got blow out of proportion somewhere along the way. To hear the creators talk about it, this wasn't to be the primary focus of the setting.

 

[Desdichado]

I probably wouldn't run one just because I want to use my own stuff too much. But I recall (vaguely) seeing some developer thinking that when he was younger, he considered his Dark Sun games to be Dark Sun rather than D&D, even though of course they used the D&D rules. How much a game can vary from the mold and still be considered a valid D&D is, of course, a subjective question, but I got the point. It's really got very different themes than "generic D&D" and doesn't feel very much like it anymore. That's not a problem if you like Dark Sun for what it is, but you have to acknowledge that it's pretty different.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I probably wouldn't run one just because I want to use my own stuff too much. But I recall (vaguely) seeing some developer thinking that when he was younger, he considered his Dark Sun games to be Dark Sun rather than D&D, even though of course they used the D&D rules. How much a game can vary from the mold and still be considered a valid D&D is, of course, a subjective question, but I got the point. It's really got very different themes than "generic D&D" and doesn't feel very much like it anymore. That's not a problem if you like Dark Sun for what it is, but you have to acknowledge that it's pretty different.

I think D&D has been drifting from being focused on dungeon-crawling since the moment Dragonlance hit the streets. 2E accelerated that quite a bit -- Dark Sun, Spelljammer and Planescape all tackle adventures that would have been impossible to imagine back in 1974.

Now, Dark Sun might be better with a bespoke system, but it's definitely within the realm of what D&D consists of, especially by this point.

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

 

[Clint_L]

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.

TSR's attempt to publish a bunch of different versions of D&D for different settings is ultimately what killed the company, though, as reported in Slaying the Dragon, per WotC's forensic accounting. I agree with your point, but I think different settings are best handled by 3PP, as they mostly are now with the rules in the Creative Commons. You don't want to split your own user base and become your own c competitor.