I'm on a setting kick and there seems to be serious talk of Dark Sun being revived for 5e.
Whenever Dark Sun comes up it gets a lot of praise. It's one of those settings where even people who have never run or played it so that they wish they had or could.
The setting also of course falls under the spotlight for many of its thematic issues.
I'm curious about people who never liked it as a setting to run their games in and why? Complaints about morality etc. are valid (though explored in great depth in many a thread), but I am also (if not more-so) curious about the mechanical/philisophical bent of the setting that makes you find it not suitable for a long running campaign. Something as simple as "I would grow extremely tired of the geography" works, or I know some people complain about a lot of the inconsistencies of the setting that show up pretty quickly (population size vs how many people are sacrificed to the dragon etc).
So for all of the love that Dark Sun gets, why did it never appeal to you?
Three key reasons.
1. Tone, not morality
You've mentioned the moral element, but tonality is separate from morality. I have found Dark Sun, especially as its most ardent fans describe it, to be
unrelentingly joyless in its tone. I get--very much--the need for darkness in a setting in order for it to cohere, to
feel like it makes sense. Dark Sun comes across as enforcing a dark tone in every possible nook and cranny, no matter how insignificant. I guess some folks see that as "it's only REAL heroism if it's a sacrifice", but that's not a thesis I really agree with, and thus the incessant joylessness of the setting can be a real turn-off for me.
2. Restrictive environment
Less the geography per se, and more that because of the setting conceits, there can't be bodies of water, there's only one true forest as I understand it, there emphatically can't be snow or even alpine territory, etc. It would get a bit monotonous for me. I run a game set in an arid-to-desert region, but it has jungles to the north, forests to the south, steppe beyond the mountains, and a vast ocean teeming with all sorts of environments. The aridity is the main setting, but I have the
option of alternatives. Dark Sun doesn't really allow that.
3. Defiling vs Preserving -- the eternal problem
Every version of DS I've seen has, per its own fans, failed to truly make the defile/preserve dichotomy actually
work. Usually, it's either that defiling is so overwhelmingly strong, and preserving actively harmful, so most people either just don't get involved or always defile, which leads to uninteresting experiences with it;
or defiling is so nasty for so little reward, while preserving is not really that hard, so essentially ONLY the most evil twisted wicked folks would do it. Both of those are...bad. And I don't know how to make it not-bad, where preserving is viable but still weaker, while defiling is stronger but not overwhelmingly better with barely any downside. Finding that sweet spot seems to be really, really important for actually nailing the
feeling of playing Dark Sun, and I have yet to see rules that would achieve that while still producing fun gameplay.