Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Steampunkette" data-source="post: 8306037" data-attributes="member: 6796468">So for dark sun... There are a lot of people who like the absolute murder death kill of it. The more difficult enemies, the brutal conditions of the environment, Even the player character churn. I actually never played it that way.Oh I still had players start off at higher levels and use the dark sun stat generation method, but I wasn't as brutal with the setting as DMs are supposed to be.I was very brutal with the environment, I would buy bags of those little glass beads that you put in the bottom of a fish tank and hand them out to people to physically represent their water.And every day that they adventured I would take multiple tokens from them to show them how close they were getting to being out of water at any given time. I would even have enemies specifically trying to take their water rather than kill them. With the idea that the desert would kill them as long as they didn't have water.Mostly this wound up leading to a tense game of survival. And there were occasionally times where party in fighting occurred because some player was hiding their water tokens in order to make sure the rest of the party didn't know how much water they had. Like they had five water tokens visible and two or three that were under their elbow or hidden behind a bag of chips.It created a very different environment from standard dungeons and dragons at the time. Both in player character interaction, and in the sort of stories I felt more free to tell. Where most of the NPCs were either hostile or outright afraid of the player characters. Even though the players were often good people, or neutral people at worst, it helped to foster a sense of distrust.Which made all sorts of political intrigues and narrative flourishes into something more powerful than they otherwise might have been.And I will always love the setting because of that.I just never did the heavily one-sided battle smush that some people loved to do with that system. My characters and players were still heroic, it was just heroic in a very different setting in a very different style. More Conan the Barbarian less Galahad.</blockquote>

Verification