Lords of Brain

Fourteen years after abandoning the Dark Sun line of products, Wizards of the Coast released a new campaign setting based on the current 4E ruleset this August.  I recently picked up the brand new books and spent a very good while reading them and rereading bits of them.  After writing about my thoughts of both the original Dark Sun world and the new 4E rules in general, this is my impression of the new Dark Sun.

New Dark Sun

Last year, Wizards announced a revival of Dark Sun retooled with their new 4E rules.  I have spent considerable time reading the books and looking at details and simultaneously remembering all of the good things I loved about Dark Sun and hating all that WotC has done with 4E.

Superficially, the setting is all there.  The harshness of the world, the sheer struggle to keep your characters alive... its almost as if I can feel the sand in my teeth as I read the description of the world of Athas.  Beautiful new maps are included with the book, more detailed than the old maps by far... but at the same time... not as charming.  The first set of Dark Sun had a nice big fold out map... printed on canvas, even had frayed edges.  Now that’s style.  The new book includes maps of each city-state.  In the old books we just had Tyr.  We had to come up with our own designs if we wanted to go to Urik or Gulg or Nibenay.  This is good.  I like maps.  And other world touches are nice.  We learn a little about the Sea of Silt.  That ever hazardous sea, filled not with water but with silt, every bit as fluid and much more dangerous.  So fine and dry that silt skimmers can sail upon it.  Why does the silt never blow out?  Why does the silt never get compacted?  Now we know.  In the heart of the Sea of Silt lives the silt kraken!  A giant para-elemental that keeps the silt pooled in the ancient sea basin and powder fresh.

See.  They make an effort to explain some of the things that we scratched our heads over in the olden days.  Very nice.

I look at the villages of Athas and the city-states and I see all manner of familiar things.  There in the Ringing Mountains high up on the Forest Ridge are the halfling tribes.  Those feral, vicious halflings that are the most ancient race on Athas... far older than elves who are the halfling’s favorite food.  But where are the details of the halfling race in this book?  Other than a cursory description (two paragraphs!) we really don’t have a feel of how to play these creatures.  Likewise the elves, aside from a few lines into their culture, it might be tempting to play an elf on this world as one might in Greyhawk.  There’s a line in the book, “Elves consider it shameful to ride an animal such as a crodlu or kank, and one does so only if ill or gravely wounded.”  This mentions the facts, but none of the tradition and culture behind it.  Elves are unfettered creatures, who love nothing more than running miles at a time.  Long and graceful they run across the dunes and sands of Athas day and night, and never creating cities or villages or even sitting down for longer than it takes to steal something.  They value freedom above all, and refuse (in the strongest possible sense) to ride another creature.  These are not your traditional elves, and the book says as much... but it leaves out all the flavor and rich culture that was built up around them in the old books.

Look in the Caravan District of Tyr and you’ll see familiar shops like Grik’s Weaponry and The Golden Inix, but where’s The Hungry, Hungry Halfling?  Where are we to go if we’re in mind for some fresh elf stew?  It’s details like this that annoy me.  It’s like... like a sanitized version of Dark Sun.  Not quite censored, but not quite there in all its glory either.

Here’s another example that got me pretty riled.  They introduced a concept called a “survival day.”  You can treat this as a kind of currency for survival.  Each “suvival day” costs 5gp and you can essentially outfit your character (there are some rules on what that 5gp gives you so you can feel like you are buying enough goods to outfit yourself), but when you’re on the road you can “spend” these “survival days” to keep yourself safe and alive in the desert.  Now, all of that is very fine in any other setting.  It saves time, really.  If you’re on a 5 day trip, you buy 25gp of gear and if you have a generous DM you arrive without any real incident.  Not a bad way to do it.  But in Dark Sun, that’s wrong.  That’s a cheat.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll keep saying it:  Dark Sun is all about player vs. environment.  The desert is your first, last, and best enemy.  Every half gallon of water your player comes by needs to be fought for.  Every meagre cactus cut open and drained needs to be accounted for.  Every z’tal killed and skewered on a spit should be considered an encounter.  “Survival days” my ass.  I might be a zealot on the subject, but you ask me, you can’t buy survival in the Athasian desert.  You earn it.  With good roleplaying and better die rolls.

So that’s my impression.  Wonderful world, but there’s nothing here worth paying a lot of money for.  You want to play in Dark Sun, go back to the old books for world description and construct a v3.5 game around the flavor.  Just don’t use any Paladins.

Fourteen years after abandoning the Dark Sun line of products, Wizards of the Coast released a new campaign setting based on the current 4E ruleset this August.  I recently picked up the brand new books and spent a very good while reading them and rereading bits of them.  Before I get into my impressions, I feel like I should put my opinion in context by writing about my thoughts of both the original Dark Sun world and the new 4E rules in general.

4E Dungeons & Dragons

In 1996, TSR went under and so did Dark Sun.  When Wizards of the Coast restarted D&D with 3rd Edition, they did not republish all the myriad campaign settings that TSR had in their stable.  Ravenloft, Dragonlance, Planescape, and Dark Sun were left behind.  This version of the game reached its pinnacle with v3.5 of the rules in 2003.  In the main, it was a popular edition.  I had been a student of the game, and collected the books, though I had no avenue of play.  Indeed, I had not played D&D of any kind since my Dark Sun based game back in 1997-8.

Fast forward to 2008, where two events shaped my experience of D&D.  The first was profound.  Gary Gygax (the creator of D&D) died, and a group of us decided to commemorate his memory with a session of v3.5 that led to a semi-regular game.  Second, a 4E version of the rules was announced by WotC later in the year.

Again, being a student of the game, I looked forward to the new edition.  I had enjoyed each successive version of the game these many years and felt that each revision both streamlined the rules and made them more flexible.  Rumors began to swirl concerning game concepts which were being removed from 4E, but I ignored them.  I did as I always do, ignored the early critics and resolved to make up my own mind in my own time.

I was able to do that after the official release and I read the new Player’s Handbook.

One of their goals was to make the game more accessible.  Easy to jump into and start playing right away without all of that messy character creation.  They succeeded because each character has been reduced to bland similarity.  The new Player’s Handbook is a testament to mindless hack and slash gaming.

You see, the old way of building a character made you think about your background as you were selecting skills and feats.  Where did the bard Rufo learn history?  How did he happen to be pick up ranks in Perform (oratory)?  Why does he speak Elven and Dwarven?  What was he doing when he picked up the Investigator feat?  These are all relevant questions and help you build a back story for the good bard.

In 4E they don’t even have bards, damn them.  What’s more a 3rd level fighter has the same skills as any other 3rd level fighter with only variations in ability scores to allow for the skill check to be more or less probable between the two.  What’s the point of arguing over who gets to intimidate the kobold prisoner if both fighters have exactly the same chance of success?

And, hey, you remember spells?  That’s all you’ll do is remember.  Now everything is a power or ritual.  And where’s the art of it when a 5th level rogue and a 5th level wizard both have the same number of powers (which are now called at-will, encounter, daily, and utility)?  Sure, they have different flavors, each can do a different thing, but the point is... rogues and wizards (and everyone else, don’t get caught up on the details!) use exactly the same mechanic for doing their stuff in combat and out.

If all you want to do is min/max your character and see how many goblins you can kill in an encounter I’m sure 4E is your favorite wet dream.  But it isn’t mine.  Oh, and every character gets healing surges?  How’s that work?  Where is the underlying logic that says a ranger can just heal himself by wanting it?  This is crap storytelling and worse roleplaying.  It tells me that they decided all the cool kids are playing World of Warcraft and they ought to make Dungeons & Dragons a little bit like it.  And then they made it a lot like it.

And so D&D has come full circle.  First it influenced countless pen and paper games and they in turn shaped a host of computer games which evolved and became inspiration to D&D.  It’s a sad cycle, if you ask me.  Predictable and soulless.

Fourteen years after abandoning the Dark Sun line of products, Wizards of the Coast released a new campaign setting based on the current 4E ruleset this August.  I recently picked up the brand new books and spent a very good while reading them and rereading bits of them.  Before I get into my impressions, I feel like I should put my opinion in context by writing about my thoughts of both the original Dark Sun world and the new 4E rules in general.

Dark Sun:  The Original

In 1991 TSR, Inc. released the original Dark Sun campaign setting, and I didn’t take any notice of it.  My first exposure was two or three years later after the setting had several supplements and a small line of strong novels written by Troy Denning.  It was a fantasy world gone wrong, incorporating all the worst elements from post-apocalyptic fiction and gritty genre bending fantasy.  By which I mean I was hooked instantly.

Dark Sun, for the uninitiated, is a violent campaign setting for the roleplaying game Dungeons & Dragons.  The entire flavor of the game turns traditional fantasy conventions on its ear and does its own thing without regard to likes of J.R.R. Tolkein, Gary Gygax, or the medieval tone of every other RPG out there.

The world of Dark Sun is called Athas.  It is a desert planet, and most of it goes generations without a single rainfall.  There are no oceans, rivers, or lakes.  Water, scarce as it is, is not quite the rarest commodity around.  Metal is gone from the world.  Only the very wealthy can afford anything made from metal.  All tools, weapons, and armor are crafted from bone, wood, and obsidian.  Ceramic pieces are traded instead of copper pieces.

It is, literally, a place of fire and sand.  The sun is huge and swollen and red, the sky is crimson and much of the surface is covered in yellow sand.  Here is the first roleplaying game where the environment was the first, last, and best enemy the player characters had to defeat.  In so many games, its easy to assume your characters are doing the sensible thing and eating and drinking enough water each day that you really don’t have to keep track of it.  In Dark Sun, there are consequences to not having enough daily rations marked on your character sheet.  A journy from one city-state to another had to be carefully planned simply because an average party couldn’t carry enough water with them to make the journey safely.  They would have to forage on the way.  This made for all manner of dastardly scenarios the DM could spring on the players.  Good times.

But not everything is as fun for the DM.  Player characters have unique advantages here that can give even a seasoned DM fits.  Observe the character creation process... roll 5d4 for the six attributes.  This allows for a character with abilities ranging from 5 to 20 points.  Additionally, there were several races that allowed for a bonus to Strength (half-giants famously gave +4 bonus).  I ran a campaign where my strongest character had a STR 22.  D&D, especially the old AD&D was so skewed in giving bonuses to Strength that this particular character threw my game balance way off.  I had to learn quickly to adjust encounters that had to be solved in ways other than combat, or if combat was the only course then it would be equally challenging to all players.  My first few combat encounters consisted of nothing more than the half-giant defeating everything while the other players simply had to stay out of the way.  I view this experience as a positive, since it forced me to be a better DM, it forced me to look at things other than just hack and slash, and the lessons I learned in that Dark Sun campaign are still useful to this day.

I loved every inch of that game.  It was so new, so different.  It was the ultimate fantasy world, in a way.  Not only was it a place I couldn’t visit, it was a place I would never want to.  But I could enjoy making characters be as wicked as I wanted them to be.  See, the whole notion of doing good for good’s sake is so alien on Athas that Paladins didn’t exist because no one, not one single person on the planet, had even the faintest concept of chivalry.  And that’s pretty wow for a fantasy roleplaying game.