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.

 

[earthsea_wizard]

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.

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 (which makes sense, you've got the Combat & Tactics guy who was around from almost day 1 in Garys campaign, the Rolemaster guy and the Ars Magica guy).

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.

 

[pawsplay]

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.

 

[Zardnaar]

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.

There's some what ifs of TSR surviving.

Mist nvilve no settings, novels and a few splats.

Dump the metaplot heavy railroad adventure.

Depending on what you cut.

No lavish boxed sets after 1992. Spelljammer and Darksun may count as lavish (Al Qadim was fine, Planescape was not).

Dont use novels as a credit line.

Focus on core rules and better adventures.

Most if not all settings are cut. Ones from 1989-92 may survive.

Alot less product for the settings.

Things like that.