To get us a little more back on topic, one thing that i would actually love to see should they make a Dark Sun setting guide for 5e; Defilement rules for Spellcasting.
Since there is no weave of magic in Athas, all magic is drawn from life within the planet itself, but Defiler's disregard the 'give and take' of this process, permanently desecrating everything within a certain radius of themselves to overcharge their spells (essentially a messed up meta-magic that almost anyone can use). This is why most of Athas is an inhospitable desert, as the sorcerer-kings and dragon lords destroyed the world fuelling magics for their wars, and now jealously guard all that remains of it. And by extension that is the reason psionics are the most prevalent form of magic, as it is independent of this limitation.
Again though, i mostly hope we never see Athas for 5e. Not just for lore removal reasons, but also because;
They will likely find a way to shoe-horn paladins and sorcerers into it (the whole 'paladins can be empowered by their ideals' bs), where normally they can't exist in the setting.
They will probably forsake how most casting classes are limited by the setting (clerics channel the elemental planes instead of the power of gods, bards being almost exclusively poisoners and infiltrators who hide under the guise of musicians, warlocks don't exist in the traditional sense but sorcerer-kings can have 'Templars' which are conceptually similar)
Lord knows they will skimp on the psionics, instead using that 'psi-dice' junk or whatever they made up in its place (and psionics are supposed to be the most prevalent form of magic due to the difficulties of using arcane and divine magics, so that whole aspect of the lore would also probably be disregarded to allow all the 5e classes to be fully usable there).
They would be too chicken to include the rules about how armor and weapons, even magical ones, arent made of great materials in Athas and eventually break (Athas is almost devoid of metals, so equipment is mostly made of sub-par wood and leather, brittle bones and obsidian, or weathered chitin. Silver coins have the equivalent value of platinum, and gold coins are ten-fold the value of normal platinum. The most common currency is coins made from ceramic, which use 'cp' instead of copper, which have the same value gold does in other worlds, and very interestingly are designed to be physically broken and split into a smaller currency called 'bits' that have the normal value of silver coins. Fun fact, there is no equivalent of value to copper because; if your working a job that would pay copper, you arent employed, your a slave).
There are a myriad of reasons to not want to see the form Athas takes with the modern-day WotC at the helm, unfortunately.
EDIT: In terms of subclasses and races;
A warlock subclass for Templars could work as a stand-in for that class.
A rogue subclass for Dune Trader's would be cool (could work as an Artificer class if they wanted to go that route)
If they're continuing the craze of making races with different creature types, the Elan was a playable Aberration.
Athas was one of the few worlds where half-dwarves were statistically different from full blood dwarves (In most D&D worlds, dwarven genes are strong enough to completely overtake human, gnomish, and halfling genes), but by 5e standards they are very similar to half-orcs so there might not be much to gain from making them playable.
Fun Fact: Dark Sun dwarves are hairless. Ive always loved the idea of the belt of dwarvenkind being converted to dark sun and having the chance to make all your hair fall out, instead of growing a beard 🤣
I don't see the problem with paladins being empowered by their ideals. Divine magic is something that isn't as clear-cut as arcane magic, so it could come from one's own convictions or ideals, and it could conceivably work out. And there are people here who quite liked the psi-dice and wished WoTC did something more with that.
Beyond that, yes, I agree that Athas's highly specific setup might run into conflict with the more open-ended nature of 5e's design philosophy.
Let me help clarify. Alignment labels, specifically on entire peoples that are also meant to be playable character types, brush a broad stereotype on entire lineages of people even if the mitigating word "typically" is added to it. This kind of stereotyping is exactly the kind of thing that happens to some of us in real life and is a painful reminder of that kind of treatment that we would like to escape while playing D&D. It's removal is a good thing. It allows more people to play the game without depictions that do more than "offend" us, they harm us.
This is a conscious effort on the part of Wizard of the Coast to make the game more welcoming to all people, as evidenced by their Diversity and Dragons statement from a few years ago: https://dnd.wizards.com/news/diversity-and-dnd
Sincere or not, the article is still PR and damage control. It is in the best interest of any front facing company to not get cancelled, whether they believe the things they say or not.
Sincere or not? Why are you questioning the sincerity of this?
And if a setting's lore "harms" you, then don't play it that way, you don't even have to play in it at all
This is a very unwelcoming attitude, but I guess you're not an ambassador for the brand or this hobby. A company who has a vested interest in the health of the art and hobby of roleplaying has a vested interest in making the games they produce more welcoming and less hostile for all kinds of people.
Then leave the setting behind and start anew? Develop an existing setting that doesn't have the issues people take with forgotten realms?
Yeah, but when someone tells you that there is the presence of something harmful in your product, you don't just tell people not to use it, you take the harmful thing out. And like I said, it's a usable setting, it could just use some tweaks in presentation. The issues I'm talking about are problematic in any setting and it behooves a responsible content creator to create content that is not hostile to part of its audience.
I hope my above explanation clarifies why this is not so.
No, it really doesn't. People get up in arms over the races that have roots in evil, and not the ones with roots in good. Thats basic observation of outcome, regardless of motive.
Actually that's not it either, because the lineages in the PHB aren't really presented as only good. They are presented as fully realized people, with the capacity and choice to be good or evil. When an entire people has been written with the thumb on the scale for evil, that presentation takes away from their portrayal as fully realized and capable people. I would absolutely also be weirded out by a presentation of people who had an unnatural leaning toward good, as someone who has suffered from so called "positive" stereotypes myself.
I fail to see how the fake depiction of fake people in a fake game is a problem in the real world. No one has ever been able to adequately draw that line for me without resorting to faith claims.
Let me see if I can explain: The language used to describe and portray certain people in some legacy D&D content is painfully reminiscent of the kind of language used to describe and discriminate against real world people. This kind of language inflames the wounds caused by real world discrimination against people and hurts us when we encounter it in our roleplay, most especially because roleplaying is so much more immersive and interactive than other forms of media. I'm telling you this not as a faith claim, I'm telling you this as a first person source.
Racism in fantasy may or may not encourage racist attitudes outside of gaming, but that is not the most immediate harm and it is not the reason WOTC made their Diversity and Dragons Statement. The most immediate harm is the alienation of those of us who have experienced that kind of discrimination in real life because it directly mirrors it.
We know that we ourselves are not orcs or elves, that's not the point nor the contention.
Does that make sense?
I'm honestly baffled at the amount of time and energy people put into being upset by this.
There's no need to put in energy in order to be upset by something when we are literally dealing with the real world harms in real time, it's just upsetting and reasonably so, even if you don't understand it.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Sincere or not? Why are you questioning the sincerity of this?
You have missed the point of my statement entirely. I was not questioning the sincerity of it, the sincerity does not matter. The point of my statement is that it is PR and damage control. Any company in their position would say the same things.
As for the rest, I might take a page from Yurei's book and say: All I need to say has been said. Everything else you have asked, i have answered in prior replys. I could rattle off about all the times ive actively changed a campaigns lore because one of my players wanted something different, I could talk about the settings I've made where I don't have most of the lore things that people don't like about certain player races. But that would just be tooting my own horn, and i feel the well of things i can add to the conversation on race lore have run dry for now. Ill read any further critique of my dialog, and reply to any inquiries about the such that i haven't reiterated already. But for now, we talk Dark Sun i think. Yurei was also right about this not really being the place for race lore and how it hurts who's feelings anyway.
As someone who has always found the topic of human nature quite interesting, it is actually quite definable. This is neither the place nor time to delve into that topic at length, but after sifting through a lot of the miss-information on the topic, there are some very interesting studies on it.
And given that much of the content in 5e is still heavily rooted in the Forgotten Realms (and therefore 5e still isn't completely setting-agnostic yet), it's important to make that distinction, even if it means changing the old lore.
While i agree that making the distinction is important if making races setting agnostic, doing so at the cost of established lore is not something i agree with.
WotC have been shouting near and far that 2024 is the year of 5.5e, when the game is supposedly to be overhauled and the 3 core books reworked to suit their new style of balance... Yet here we are, from Tasha's onwards they have been enacting their new style of balance. If they really wanted to do this right, they would have skipped the wait and released 5.5e asap with all the overhauls theyre making now, and made them setting agnostic while they were at it. Theyve already discontinued 2 books officially and let 2 more sink quietly into the void, the fact that they continue to butcher 5e instead of just ripping off the bandaid will never not sit right with me.
Which two books did they allow to sink quietly into the void?
The two books I would think of would be Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and Volo's Guide to Monsters actually. Neither of them can be purchased on DDB and it's quite possible that those of us who bought digital copies from DDB might not even have access to them in a few years.
While I don't agree with all of Calavid's views on the alignment of humanoid races, I do agree that WotC is doing a piss-poor job of showcasing their supposedly setting agnostic revamped versions of playable ancestries. (Can we just retire the word "race" in this game already?) While I don't have a problem with removing "usually Evil" from humanoids, WotC hasn't sought to replace the lore they removed with anything remotely interesting. The Fey designation that replaces the Humanoid designation for Goblins, Hobgoblins, etc. has no justification whatsoever. To wit, none of formerly-evil goblinoids got any magic spells the way that ummm, most Elf "tribes" and Fairies have. Note that Elves are still Humanoids. They also lack the abilities tied to Fey creature themes. No charm, no disguise abilities, no hallucinogens, no time travel, no flight. But somehow, in abscence of any lore, we're just supposed to accept that goblinoids are now Fey??? The main problem, to my mind, is not that there are now fewer Usually or Always Evil humanoids for the PCs to mess with, but that we are given mere shells of ancestries that appear quite inconsistent with established lore and we are getting flavorless grey "replacements," such as the new Kenku, which was never even Evil to begin with.
Which two books did they allow to sink quietly into the void?
I was referring to SCAG and EE. Most of the content from both of them has been reprinted elsewhere, and the latter of which isn't even viewable on DDB (the content can be found in listings, but the compendium itself is inaccessible). They technically aren't "legacy" yet, but i don't expect them to stay off the chopping block for long.
Which is sad, because SCAG in particular is a great source of lore and maps.
Hmm. I bought Princes of the Apocalypse in Nov 2020 and I didn’t get the Elemental Evil Companion AFAIK.
You've been hurt by bigotry at the gaming table. That bigotry wasn't inherent to the person that hurt you but was the direct result of flavor text in one of the rulebooks.
Is that what you're saying? That the person who hurt you wouldn't have done so had they not been influenced by WotC's intellectual property?
No. But if you're actually interested in understanding, I'll try to explain. (That said, if the above is how you'd summarize my post, I have doubts about whether you actually read the whole thing.)
I have not personally been hurt by bigotry. There are people who have, who can speak for themselves if they wish (but your ignorance does not make them responsible for your education.)
Sometimes, some of those people are reminded of that pain, or even get a stress response, by encountering certain topics, certain descriptions, or certain modes of play, in the game. This is significant enough, to them, to ruin or severely limit their enjoyment of the hobby.
Some people experience direct bigotry at the gaming table, even, but that's not what I'm talking about.
There are also some writers and publishers who use their works, sometimes even ttrpg works, to spread bigotry. That is also not what I'm talking about.
WotC (and other companies) recognize this, and wish to have these people's business (and the business of their friends), and so make changes to their products to not exacerbate the issue. Similarly, they also make changes to remove (or at least partially remove) game mechanics that enforce or justify bigotry in the game itself. (This is not the same as forbidding characters from being bigots; it just means that those characters are not automatically proven "correct" by the rules of the game.)
Other people (the metaphorical "you") discount these experiences and proclaim that they will ignore the changes, or complain about the changes, or otherwise demonstrate that they don't believe there is a problem to fix. These people may not be causing the problem, but they are enabling it, by refusing to even acknowledge it or do anything about it.
This can be pithily (but poorly) summarized as "ignoring a problem does not make it go away."
Which two books did they allow to sink quietly into the void?
I was referring to SCAG and EE. Most of the content from both of them has been reprinted elsewhere, and the latter of which isn't even viewable on DDB (the content can be found in listings, but the compendium itself is inaccessible). They technically aren't "legacy" yet, but i don't expect them to stay off the chopping block for long.
Which is sad, because SCAG in particular is a great source of lore and maps.
Are you kidding? The SCAG is one of the worst books in all of D&D 5e. Compare it to literally any other setting book in 5e or the Forgotten Realms books of the past and it's easy to see how bad it is.
Storm King's Thunder is a better Sword Coast Gazetteer book than the SCAG is, and it's an adventure book.
Letting the SCAG slowly fade into the void is for the better. It's hard to find a worse book in 5e (maybe the Tyranny of Dragons books).
I don't have SCAG, but SKT's section on the Sword Coast is a disaster. They have a hundred or so locations, many of them you could have a whole sourcebook on, but instead you have a couple paragraphs on each.
Even after you read the section on a town/city/location from SKT, you just feel like you know less about it than you did when you started reading. SKT spends the majority of each place merely saying, "You can have this short encounter here," instead of actually giving information about the locations.
I'd rather have nothing on the locations than a badly written bunch of mostly useless random details that the location descriptions in SKT give.
So, you're speaking for others instead of letting them articulate their own perspectives? I believe that's referred to as "erasure".
I wonder if you saw my attempt to give a first person experience explanation to you back HERE.
And you still haven't drawn a clear line from Dungeons and Dragons material to real-world harm, aside from the idea that something in the game might remind someone of something painful.
Reminders of such can be actively painful and harmful, especially when such a reminder evinces hostile creator attitudes. Believe me, I have read D&D material, admittedly older material, which made me feel alienated from the game at large because if the writer feels this way about people like me or uses such stereotypes of people like me for cheap tropey antagonists it just sours the whole game for me. More recent attempt to make the game more welcoming and inclusive did make me feel better about the company and the game they produce, it was a welcome mat and an apology all at once. A welcome mat and an apology do not immediately fix everything, but they are a solid gesture that made me feel acknowledged and seen and when one has had the wrongs against them ignored for decades, such a gesture is a significant start.
If that's your metric, I have no idea how you expect to help these people in the first place, aside from recommending that they stay in their rooms with their doors locked, windows closed, and digital devices turned off.
This seems insensitive to those of us who have said over many years on this forum that certain portrayals of different peoples in D&D and other media have been directly harmful to us. You don't seem to be taking that seriously. Just because you don't understand how something is harmful doesn't mean it isn't harmful. You are also just dismissing any other response than to completely cut off form society, which is an extreme that many of us cannot afford to do. Do you know what microagressions are? And how we just have to learn to deal with them, even though they are still legitimately harmful and stressful?
The stakes literally could not be lower.
This is minimizing and dismissing the stress, harm, and actual costs in quality of life that these kinds of microagressions can levy. Just because you do not experience harm form something doesn't mean other people do not, and to dismiss them or minimize them is to be insensitive and callous. When someone tells you that something is harmful or hurts, the compassionate person does not look for ways to invalidate that experience.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Let me help clarify. Alignment labels, specifically on entire peoples that are also meant to be playable character types, brush a broad stereotype on entire lineages of people even if the mitigating word "typically" is added to it. This kind of stereotyping is exactly the kind of thing that happens to some of us in real life and is a painful reminder of that kind of treatment that we would like to escape while playing D&D. It's removal is a good thing. It allows more people to play the game without depictions that do more than "offend" us, they harm us.
This is a conscious effort on the part of Wizard of the Coast to make the game more welcoming to all people, as evidenced by their Diversity and Dragons statement from a few years ago: https://dnd.wizards.com/news/diversity-and-dnd
Sincere or not, the article is still PR and damage control. It is in the best interest of any front facing company to not get cancelled, whether they believe the things they say or not.
Sincere or not? Why are you questioning the sincerity of this?
Racism in fantasy may or may not encourage racist attitudes outside of gaming, but that is not the most immediate harm and it is not the reason WOTC made their Diversity and Dragons Statement. The most immediate harm is the alienation of those of us who have experienced that kind of discrimination in real life because it directly mirrors it.
(I trimmed the quotes a bit to focus on what I’m discussing, hopefully without decontextualizing the argument)
Several people, myself included, doubt Wizards of the Coast’s sincerity regarding their Diverstity Statement due to the numerous complaints of former WotC employees and contractors, most notably Orion D. Black, describing a racially toxic workplace where Black people are not respected by the company and other abuses that render the Diversity Statement hypocritical. Personally (Disclaimer: I am white, so if a PoC argues contrarily to what I say on this matter, give their argument more weight), while I do consider bigoted tropes appearing in works to be harmful, I feel that were Wizards sincere, their “Diversity and Dragons” statement would have focused on their plans to clean up their own workplace first, and then focus on making their fictional worlds reflect their new ideals*.
*A possible retort to this is “Why can’t they do both at the same time?” Well, I’m pretty sure they tried that already, and POCGamer’s contribution to Candlekeep Mysteries getting butchered by Wizards to reaffirm colonialist ideology suggests to me that it doesn’t work.
So, you're speaking for others instead of letting them articulate their own perspectives? I believe that's referred to as "erasure".
That is not what erasure means. If you want a witty insult, you would say I'm "white knighting" or somesuch. (It'd still be nonsense, but maybe funny. There, I made your discourse easier.)
They are welcome to speak up, but I'm not here to pressure them.
And you still haven't drawn a clear line from Dungeons and Dragons material to real-world harm, aside from the idea that something in the game might remind someone of something painful.
Or you're just being willfully ignorant, and me respectfully engaging with you was a mistake.
If that's your metric, I have no idea how you expect to help these people in the first place, aside from recommending that they stay in their rooms with their doors locked, windows closed, and digital devices turned off.
...or I could just listen to them and take them seriously. So could you.
Let me help clarify. Alignment labels, specifically on entire peoples that are also meant to be playable character types, brush a broad stereotype on entire lineages of people even if the mitigating word "typically" is added to it. This kind of stereotyping is exactly the kind of thing that happens to some of us in real life and is a painful reminder of that kind of treatment that we would like to escape while playing D&D. It's removal is a good thing. It allows more people to play the game without depictions that do more than "offend" us, they harm us.
This is a conscious effort on the part of Wizard of the Coast to make the game more welcoming to all people, as evidenced by their Diversity and Dragons statement from a few years ago: https://dnd.wizards.com/news/diversity-and-dnd
Sincere or not, the article is still PR and damage control. It is in the best interest of any front facing company to not get cancelled, whether they believe the things they say or not.
Sincere or not? Why are you questioning the sincerity of this?
Racism in fantasy may or may not encourage racist attitudes outside of gaming, but that is not the most immediate harm and it is not the reason WOTC made their Diversity and Dragons Statement. The most immediate harm is the alienation of those of us who have experienced that kind of discrimination in real life because it directly mirrors it.
(I trimmed the quotes a bit to focus on what I’m discussing, hopefully without decontextualizing the argument)
Several people, myself included, doubt Wizards of the Coast’s sincerity regarding their Diverstity Statement due to the numerous complaints of former WotC employees and contractors, most notably Orion D. Black, describing a racially toxic workplace where Black people are not respected by the company and other abuses that render the Diversity Statement hypocritical. Personally (Disclaimer: I am white, so if a PoC argues contrarily to what I say on this matter, give their argument more weight), while I do consider bigoted tropes appearing in works to be harmful, I feel that were Wizards sincere, their “Diversity and Dragons” statement would have focused on their plans to clean up their own workplace first, and then focus on making their fictional worlds reflect their new ideals*.
*A possible retort to this is “Why can’t they do both at the same time?” Well, I’m pretty sure they tried that already, and POCGamer’s contribution to Candlekeep Mysteries getting butchered by Wizards to reaffirm colonialist ideology suggests to me that it doesn’t work.
You're absolutely right and this is a valid criticism to level against them, but just because they didn't clean house very well before also evincing a statement of diversity doesn't mean that the statement itself was a bad thing. It also doesn't mean that it took away from efforts to clean house. All it means is that we cannot let their diversity statement paper over real flaws in their business model.
It still doesn't take away from the value of that statement, because stated values are a driver for action rather than proof that the action is already done. It's also heartening that the statement itself says "this is work that will never be done." And also let me say that as a person of color who has been hurt by older D&D material, just the existence of this statement itself as well as initiatives like Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel give me joy and hope. And don't worry, communities of color have long perfected the art of being able to both take wins where we can get them and still burn with ire for flaws still yet corrected at the same time.
Also another thing to note: You are questioning WOTC's sincerity in walking the walk and talking the talk, but Calavid's questioning of their sincerity seemed to be more along the lines of "Well they just had to say that, they don't really mean it, it was just a sop to the woke crowd" which is a very different reason for questioning sincerity than yours.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I Must know if WOTC plan on doing Dark Sun 5e... so many homebrew options out there and ive created a few of my own campaigns in the world of Athas, but i'm curious if we will ever see it get an official update to 5e. 4e is a nightmare to me, and it would be fun to see how Wizards take the update. Faerun is cool and all, don't get me wrong... sometimes you need some apocalyptic madness in your life.
It is very disheartening that it may be technical (rule) concerns that will prevent the return of Dark Sun. I was not aware that psionics was such a huge concern in 5e. In relation to the other concerns Athasian races (maybe we should use sub-species as fantasy 'races' are much more akin to denisovans and neanderthals in relation to their difference from sapiens than races in the way that it is used to describe various groups of sapiens - I think that old Shadow Run did this) already opposes stereotypes in a very interesting way and are not as essentialist as traditional fantasy race(or maybe just essentialist in a way which usurps expectations). I may just be going on now but I maintain that the invited reading of the setting is a very clear metaphor for resisting all that is considered evil in the modern context. You can't 'wokify' Dark Sun, it is already set up in that fashion. The enemies are authoritatirianism, ecological decline, slavery and simply surviving in a world where social Darwinism (and accelerated actual Darwinism) is the norm. I understand that people with trauma/intergenerational concerns may find some elements problematic (Star Wars has space fascists and you can't escape that media giant) but the negatives have never been presented as desirable. I really hope the WoTC sees this and brings back my cool Conan/Mad Max/Dune/ancient human cvilisations setting with some great new art (no cartoony stuff please) plus all of the Brom art.
Edit: To add to Athas's contemporary relevance credentials is a easily the most canonically diverse and least Eurocentric D&D setting. Diversity in settings inspired but Europe can definitely feel forced but Athas does not have this problem.
I absolutely would like to see Dark Sun brought up-to-date with 5e rules. The principal rules differences between Dark Sun as it was in 3E and 5E are substantial, though. I'm going to make a few suggestions here:
1) Take a page from the DMG's Sanity system, but tweak it so that it has more frequent impact on saving throws and ability checks.
2) Build a Psionics system based on the outline for Warlocks. The Invocation system is the most modular aspect of class-construction in D&D and plays significantly different from spellcasting as it's generally practiced in the rest of 5E. You want an ESPer who can lift and shove creatures? That's already very doable with Eldrtich Blast+Invocations. What they would need to do is create more Psi-abilities (modeled on Invocations) that apply directly to mind-control and short distance teleportation.
3) This is where we get into real controversy: Spell list changes and Spellcasting rule changes. Remove Telekinesis and most other 5E-introduced short range teleports as well as most mind-affecting spells from the Wizard, Bard, and Sorc spell lists. (I said this was going to be controversial, yeah?) This would be a necessary modification because otherwise, there's going to be too much overlap between Psionics and arcane spell-casting, which produces a jarring disconnect for people who want Psionics to feel like those abilities really impact the game world and structure of parties rather than Psionics just being a crappier version of Arcane magic. Also, anything beyond a 2nd level spell would have some likelihood of decreasing Sanity. Dark Sun is an Arcane magic-scorched land where powerful magicks have not only literally demolished civilizations, but also has made many of its practicianers certifiably insane. For this to have impact, players have to feel the direct impact on their own characters or else it's just going to get hand-waved away.
4) Druid/Ranger stuff: Some spells would need to be significantly changed, especially survival spells like Create and Destroy Water and Goodberry. Those spells are 1st level and super duper effective for a reason in typical 5E: the convenience of players who are too cheap creative to spend their plundered earned loot to buy rations. However, they trivialize some of the major challenges of living in a Mad Max-style/Dune mash-up setting. The more powerful spells (Conjure Animals, Conjure Minor Elementals) would need to be weakened, tweaked, or deal with some of the same Sanity-impact issues as Arcane spells for game balance reasons. A few spells (like Conjure Woodland Beings) wouldn't even make sense on Athas.
5) Some limitations on playable ancestries (aka "races"). While I'm sure there will be a lot of DMs that would try to make Athas a pitstop for a Spelljammer vessel and thus bring in PC ancestries that would be very strange to have on Athas (Tritons? Wood Elves? Satyrs? WTF??), the actual native species on Athas would be significantly smaller and less, ummm, "floral" than what exists in the Forgotten Realms setting. What types of playable Humanoids that are part of a particular setting is a major part of world-building. If all the same options exist for players, then Athas would just become a grittier version of Forgotten Realms minus the Feywild. (And as a side note, if Dark Sun gets updated and it even has a passing resemblance to Tolkien or C.S. Lewis fantasy realms, I swear I will buy a copy just to publicly light the thing on fire after a week's exposure to my cat's litter box.)
6) Either ban or nerf Paladins. Lay on Hands in a world where disease is fairly common and to be treated seriously is a major disconnect from the gritty survivalist aspects of Athas. Either that or the Paladin gets mobbed everywhere they go as soon as random NPC knows that so--and-so can cure a disease with one touch. Also, most Auras are Easy Mode. Does Easy Mode really belong on Athas? I don't think so.
1) I'd like to strongly agree that Dark Sun can be a powerful story for all things progressive in the world. If posed as "rock bottom" then there is nowhere to go but up, as long as the party isn't playing a character to keep the world where it is. Pick your fight, it's still progressive. Fighting overpowered jerks who limit the rights and value of others? Progressive. Saving the resource poor world? Progressive. Fighting for rights/equality? Progressive. It may be hard to stomach, but it's Clockwork Oranging its way to a better world for the players as long as the players don't turn into slavers. And I'd just like to add that "being unable to see a problem" is a benefit of privilege. Being lucky enough to not be yanked out of your escapism by something is a privilege. My favourite example of this comes from anime. There are several women who love anime who have their own version of the Beckdel test. "Does the camera creepily objectify a woman?" Is question one, and "Is there a letch scene?" Is the other. If either is a yes, they won't watch it, because watching a story is escapism, and they don't need to get yanked back to the grocery store every time they go shopping, and get oggled by random people. D&D is for fun. People who don't have to notice problems can deal with the changes. It's for the better.
2) I really want a Psionics system. Heck, I'll take more of the half-baked system we have now over nothing.
3) Why can't Athas be in Doom Space? Like, even if it already has a name, Drow aren't black anymore... why can't Athas be in Doom Space?
I'm making my own 5e brew of dark sun most of what you said is exactly what I did.
Paladin, bard and sorcerer are banned ( and artificer but that should go without saying.)
I made new versions of the usual dark sun races.
I banned good berry and the fey summoning spells, the create water spells now give MUCH less water.
For psionics I went the easy route and made the aberrant mind sorcerer the Psion class nut will let them use spell points to differentiate it a bit more from the other classes.
Two things that make a 5e DS setting difficult are both based in 5e's much further reach in mainstream play:
First, 5e players expect to reach level 20. This was not the norm in 2nd edition. You expected death from every encounter until maybe level 7. Then you felt secure enough that some mistake/poor decision wouldn't end your character. But death was an ever present danger to be guarded against. One night of sleep would not refillyour hit points. Even with a Cleric, it could take a week of game time to top off hp and stats, especially if you encountered undead back then. Part of the fine line between life and death kept D&D in the hands of hobbyists. Idk how much podcasts, live games, and internet articles kept "how to play" out of people's reach, and just how much all that helped 5e grow the way it has. The magazines "Dragon" and "Dungeon" helped numerous DMs and PCs figure stuff out back in the day, but never to 5e's rate.
Anyway, DS is waaay more brutal than 2nd edition was, and there was no built-in solution on your character sheet to help you survive. You could do EVERYTHING right, and still just die in DS. 5e players would HATE DS, because they really only know how to do what is on their character sheet. DS was built to test your morality, ingenuity, and survivability skills. 5e players will feel naked, frustrated, and quit. Death by exhaustion should be [pardon the pun] baked into expectations of playing in DS. That will not fly at most tables by most of the 5e casual player base who want a tale of heroic deeds told to them by their DM about the character they crafted. I just see vastly different table expectations today than 30 years ago.
None of those things are necessarily inherent to Dark Sun though. You can run an extremely deadly FR campaign or play Dark Sun more tame. It's more an issue of DM expectations than anything inherent to the setting.
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To get us a little more back on topic, one thing that i would actually love to see should they make a Dark Sun setting guide for 5e; Defilement rules for Spellcasting.
Since there is no weave of magic in Athas, all magic is drawn from life within the planet itself, but Defiler's disregard the 'give and take' of this process, permanently desecrating everything within a certain radius of themselves to overcharge their spells (essentially a messed up meta-magic that almost anyone can use). This is why most of Athas is an inhospitable desert, as the sorcerer-kings and dragon lords destroyed the world fuelling magics for their wars, and now jealously guard all that remains of it. And by extension that is the reason psionics are the most prevalent form of magic, as it is independent of this limitation.
Again though, i mostly hope we never see Athas for 5e. Not just for lore removal reasons, but also because;
There are a myriad of reasons to not want to see the form Athas takes with the modern-day WotC at the helm, unfortunately.
EDIT: In terms of subclasses and races;
Fun Fact: Dark Sun dwarves are hairless. Ive always loved the idea of the belt of dwarvenkind being converted to dark sun and having the chance to make all your hair fall out, instead of growing a beard 🤣
I don't see the problem with paladins being empowered by their ideals. Divine magic is something that isn't as clear-cut as arcane magic, so it could come from one's own convictions or ideals, and it could conceivably work out. And there are people here who quite liked the psi-dice and wished WoTC did something more with that.
Beyond that, yes, I agree that Athas's highly specific setup might run into conflict with the more open-ended nature of 5e's design philosophy.
Sincere or not? Why are you questioning the sincerity of this?
This is a very unwelcoming attitude, but I guess you're not an ambassador for the brand or this hobby. A company who has a vested interest in the health of the art and hobby of roleplaying has a vested interest in making the games they produce more welcoming and less hostile for all kinds of people.
Yeah, but when someone tells you that there is the presence of something harmful in your product, you don't just tell people not to use it, you take the harmful thing out. And like I said, it's a usable setting, it could just use some tweaks in presentation. The issues I'm talking about are problematic in any setting and it behooves a responsible content creator to create content that is not hostile to part of its audience.
Actually that's not it either, because the lineages in the PHB aren't really presented as only good. They are presented as fully realized people, with the capacity and choice to be good or evil. When an entire people has been written with the thumb on the scale for evil, that presentation takes away from their portrayal as fully realized and capable people. I would absolutely also be weirded out by a presentation of people who had an unnatural leaning toward good, as someone who has suffered from so called "positive" stereotypes myself.
Let me see if I can explain: The language used to describe and portray certain people in some legacy D&D content is painfully reminiscent of the kind of language used to describe and discriminate against real world people. This kind of language inflames the wounds caused by real world discrimination against people and hurts us when we encounter it in our roleplay, most especially because roleplaying is so much more immersive and interactive than other forms of media. I'm telling you this not as a faith claim, I'm telling you this as a first person source.
Racism in fantasy may or may not encourage racist attitudes outside of gaming, but that is not the most immediate harm and it is not the reason WOTC made their Diversity and Dragons Statement. The most immediate harm is the alienation of those of us who have experienced that kind of discrimination in real life because it directly mirrors it.
We know that we ourselves are not orcs or elves, that's not the point nor the contention.
Does that make sense?
There's no need to put in energy in order to be upset by something when we are literally dealing with the real world harms in real time, it's just upsetting and reasonably so, even if you don't understand it.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
You have missed the point of my statement entirely. I was not questioning the sincerity of it, the sincerity does not matter. The point of my statement is that it is PR and damage control. Any company in their position would say the same things.
As for the rest, I might take a page from Yurei's book and say: All I need to say has been said. Everything else you have asked, i have answered in prior replys. I could rattle off about all the times ive actively changed a campaigns lore because one of my players wanted something different, I could talk about the settings I've made where I don't have most of the lore things that people don't like about certain player races. But that would just be tooting my own horn, and i feel the well of things i can add to the conversation on race lore have run dry for now. Ill read any further critique of my dialog, and reply to any inquiries about the such that i haven't reiterated already. But for now, we talk Dark Sun i think. Yurei was also right about this not really being the place for race lore and how it hurts who's feelings anyway.
The two books I would think of would be Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and Volo's Guide to Monsters actually. Neither of them can be purchased on DDB and it's quite possible that those of us who bought digital copies from DDB might not even have access to them in a few years.
While I don't agree with all of Calavid's views on the alignment of humanoid races, I do agree that WotC is doing a piss-poor job of showcasing their supposedly setting agnostic revamped versions of playable ancestries. (Can we just retire the word "race" in this game already?) While I don't have a problem with removing "usually Evil" from humanoids, WotC hasn't sought to replace the lore they removed with anything remotely interesting. The Fey designation that replaces the Humanoid designation for Goblins, Hobgoblins, etc. has no justification whatsoever. To wit, none of formerly-evil goblinoids got any magic spells the way that ummm, most Elf "tribes" and Fairies have. Note that Elves are still Humanoids. They also lack the abilities tied to Fey creature themes. No charm, no disguise abilities, no hallucinogens, no time travel, no flight. But somehow, in abscence of any lore, we're just supposed to accept that goblinoids are now Fey??? The main problem, to my mind, is not that there are now fewer Usually or Always Evil humanoids for the PCs to mess with, but that we are given mere shells of ancestries that appear quite inconsistent with established lore and we are getting flavorless grey "replacements," such as the new Kenku, which was never even Evil to begin with.
The EEPC is a free resource available in PDF format: (https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/features/elementalevil_playerscompanion). All of its contents are free here on DDB.
Creating Epic Boons on DDB
DDB Buyers' Guide
Hardcovers, DDB & You
Content Troubleshooting
No. But if you're actually interested in understanding, I'll try to explain. (That said, if the above is how you'd summarize my post, I have doubts about whether you actually read the whole thing.)
This can be pithily (but poorly) summarized as "ignoring a problem does not make it go away."
I don't have SCAG, but SKT's section on the Sword Coast is a disaster. They have a hundred or so locations, many of them you could have a whole sourcebook on, but instead you have a couple paragraphs on each.
Even after you read the section on a town/city/location from SKT, you just feel like you know less about it than you did when you started reading. SKT spends the majority of each place merely saying, "You can have this short encounter here," instead of actually giving information about the locations.
I'd rather have nothing on the locations than a badly written bunch of mostly useless random details that the location descriptions in SKT give.
BoringBard's long and tedious posts somehow manage to enrapture audiences. How? Because he used Charm Person, the #1 bard spell!
He/him pronouns. Call me Bard. PROUD NERD!
Ever wanted to talk about your parties' worst mistakes? Do so HERE. What's your favorite class, why? Share & explain
HERE.I wonder if you saw my attempt to give a first person experience explanation to you back HERE.
Reminders of such can be actively painful and harmful, especially when such a reminder evinces hostile creator attitudes. Believe me, I have read D&D material, admittedly older material, which made me feel alienated from the game at large because if the writer feels this way about people like me or uses such stereotypes of people like me for cheap tropey antagonists it just sours the whole game for me. More recent attempt to make the game more welcoming and inclusive did make me feel better about the company and the game they produce, it was a welcome mat and an apology all at once. A welcome mat and an apology do not immediately fix everything, but they are a solid gesture that made me feel acknowledged and seen and when one has had the wrongs against them ignored for decades, such a gesture is a significant start.
This seems insensitive to those of us who have said over many years on this forum that certain portrayals of different peoples in D&D and other media have been directly harmful to us. You don't seem to be taking that seriously. Just because you don't understand how something is harmful doesn't mean it isn't harmful. You are also just dismissing any other response than to completely cut off form society, which is an extreme that many of us cannot afford to do. Do you know what microagressions are? And how we just have to learn to deal with them, even though they are still legitimately harmful and stressful?
This is minimizing and dismissing the stress, harm, and actual costs in quality of life that these kinds of microagressions can levy. Just because you do not experience harm form something doesn't mean other people do not, and to dismiss them or minimize them is to be insensitive and callous. When someone tells you that something is harmful or hurts, the compassionate person does not look for ways to invalidate that experience.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
(I trimmed the quotes a bit to focus on what I’m discussing, hopefully without decontextualizing the argument)
Several people, myself included, doubt Wizards of the Coast’s sincerity regarding their Diverstity Statement due to the numerous complaints of former WotC employees and contractors, most notably Orion D. Black, describing a racially toxic workplace where Black people are not respected by the company and other abuses that render the Diversity Statement hypocritical. Personally (Disclaimer: I am white, so if a PoC argues contrarily to what I say on this matter, give their argument more weight), while I do consider bigoted tropes appearing in works to be harmful, I feel that were Wizards sincere, their “Diversity and Dragons” statement would have focused on their plans to clean up their own workplace first, and then focus on making their fictional worlds reflect their new ideals*.
*A possible retort to this is “Why can’t they do both at the same time?” Well, I’m pretty sure they tried that already, and POCGamer’s contribution to Candlekeep Mysteries getting butchered by Wizards to reaffirm colonialist ideology suggests to me that it doesn’t work.
That is not what erasure means. If you want a witty insult, you would say I'm "white knighting" or somesuch. (It'd still be nonsense, but maybe funny. There, I made your discourse easier.)
They are welcome to speak up, but I'm not here to pressure them.
Or you're just being willfully ignorant, and me respectfully engaging with you was a mistake.
...or I could just listen to them and take them seriously. So could you.
Then why are you fighting?
You're absolutely right and this is a valid criticism to level against them, but just because they didn't clean house very well before also evincing a statement of diversity doesn't mean that the statement itself was a bad thing. It also doesn't mean that it took away from efforts to clean house. All it means is that we cannot let their diversity statement paper over real flaws in their business model.
It still doesn't take away from the value of that statement, because stated values are a driver for action rather than proof that the action is already done. It's also heartening that the statement itself says "this is work that will never be done." And also let me say that as a person of color who has been hurt by older D&D material, just the existence of this statement itself as well as initiatives like Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel give me joy and hope. And don't worry, communities of color have long perfected the art of being able to both take wins where we can get them and still burn with ire for flaws still yet corrected at the same time.
Also another thing to note: You are questioning WOTC's sincerity in walking the walk and talking the talk, but Calavid's questioning of their sincerity seemed to be more along the lines of "Well they just had to say that, they don't really mean it, it was just a sop to the woke crowd" which is a very different reason for questioning sincerity than yours.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I believe this^ was the original question.
7 pages later.
Updog
this is a reminder for everyone to stay on topic and be respectful of each other
In case anyone needs a reminder, the topic is the run m possibility of a return of the Dark Sun setting
Find my D&D Beyond articles here
It is very disheartening that it may be technical (rule) concerns that will prevent the return of Dark Sun. I was not aware that psionics was such a huge concern in 5e. In relation to the other concerns Athasian races (maybe we should use sub-species as fantasy 'races' are much more akin to denisovans and neanderthals in relation to their difference from sapiens than races in the way that it is used to describe various groups of sapiens - I think that old Shadow Run did this) already opposes stereotypes in a very interesting way and are not as essentialist as traditional fantasy race(or maybe just essentialist in a way which usurps expectations). I may just be going on now but I maintain that the invited reading of the setting is a very clear metaphor for resisting all that is considered evil in the modern context. You can't 'wokify' Dark Sun, it is already set up in that fashion. The enemies are authoritatirianism, ecological decline, slavery and simply surviving in a world where social Darwinism (and accelerated actual Darwinism) is the norm. I understand that people with trauma/intergenerational concerns may find some elements problematic (Star Wars has space fascists and you can't escape that media giant) but the negatives have never been presented as desirable. I really hope the WoTC sees this and brings back my cool Conan/Mad Max/Dune/ancient human cvilisations setting with some great new art (no cartoony stuff please) plus all of the Brom art.
Edit: To add to Athas's contemporary relevance credentials is a easily the most canonically diverse and least Eurocentric D&D setting. Diversity in settings inspired but Europe can definitely feel forced but Athas does not have this problem.
I absolutely would like to see Dark Sun brought up-to-date with 5e rules. The principal rules differences between Dark Sun as it was in 3E and 5E are substantial, though. I'm going to make a few suggestions here:
1) Take a page from the DMG's Sanity system, but tweak it so that it has more frequent impact on saving throws and ability checks.
2) Build a Psionics system based on the outline for Warlocks. The Invocation system is the most modular aspect of class-construction in D&D and plays significantly different from spellcasting as it's generally practiced in the rest of 5E. You want an ESPer who can lift and shove creatures? That's already very doable with Eldrtich Blast+Invocations. What they would need to do is create more Psi-abilities (modeled on Invocations) that apply directly to mind-control and short distance teleportation.
3) This is where we get into real controversy: Spell list changes and Spellcasting rule changes. Remove Telekinesis and most other 5E-introduced short range teleports as well as most mind-affecting spells from the Wizard, Bard, and Sorc spell lists. (I said this was going to be controversial, yeah?) This would be a necessary modification because otherwise, there's going to be too much overlap between Psionics and arcane spell-casting, which produces a jarring disconnect for people who want Psionics to feel like those abilities really impact the game world and structure of parties rather than Psionics just being a crappier version of Arcane magic. Also, anything beyond a 2nd level spell would have some likelihood of decreasing Sanity. Dark Sun is an Arcane magic-scorched land where powerful magicks have not only literally demolished civilizations, but also has made many of its practicianers certifiably insane. For this to have impact, players have to feel the direct impact on their own characters or else it's just going to get hand-waved away.
4) Druid/Ranger stuff: Some spells would need to be significantly changed, especially survival spells like Create and Destroy Water and Goodberry. Those spells are 1st level and super duper effective for a reason in typical 5E: the convenience of players who are too
cheapcreative to spend theirplunderedearned loot to buy rations. However, they trivialize some of the major challenges of living in a Mad Max-style/Dune mash-up setting. The more powerful spells (Conjure Animals, Conjure Minor Elementals) would need to be weakened, tweaked, or deal with some of the same Sanity-impact issues as Arcane spells for game balance reasons. A few spells (like Conjure Woodland Beings) wouldn't even make sense on Athas.5) Some limitations on playable ancestries (aka "races"). While I'm sure there will be a lot of DMs that would try to make Athas a pitstop for a Spelljammer vessel and thus bring in PC ancestries that would be very strange to have on Athas (Tritons? Wood Elves? Satyrs? WTF??), the actual native species on Athas would be significantly smaller and less, ummm, "floral" than what exists in the Forgotten Realms setting. What types of playable Humanoids that are part of a particular setting is a major part of world-building. If all the same options exist for players, then Athas would just become a grittier version of Forgotten Realms minus the Feywild. (And as a side note, if Dark Sun gets updated and it even has a passing resemblance to Tolkien or C.S. Lewis fantasy realms, I swear I will buy a copy just to publicly light the thing on fire after a week's exposure to my cat's litter box.)
6) Either ban or nerf Paladins. Lay on Hands in a world where disease is fairly common and to be treated seriously is a major disconnect from the gritty survivalist aspects of Athas. Either that or the Paladin gets mobbed everywhere they go as soon as random NPC knows that so--and-so can cure a disease with one touch. Also, most Auras are Easy Mode. Does Easy Mode really belong on Athas? I don't think so.
1) I'd like to strongly agree that Dark Sun can be a powerful story for all things progressive in the world. If posed as "rock bottom" then there is nowhere to go but up, as long as the party isn't playing a character to keep the world where it is. Pick your fight, it's still progressive. Fighting overpowered jerks who limit the rights and value of others? Progressive. Saving the resource poor world? Progressive. Fighting for rights/equality? Progressive. It may be hard to stomach, but it's Clockwork Oranging its way to a better world for the players as long as the players don't turn into slavers. And I'd just like to add that "being unable to see a problem" is a benefit of privilege. Being lucky enough to not be yanked out of your escapism by something is a privilege. My favourite example of this comes from anime. There are several women who love anime who have their own version of the Beckdel test. "Does the camera creepily objectify a woman?" Is question one, and "Is there a letch scene?" Is the other. If either is a yes, they won't watch it, because watching a story is escapism, and they don't need to get yanked back to the grocery store every time they go shopping, and get oggled by random people. D&D is for fun. People who don't have to notice problems can deal with the changes. It's for the better.
2) I really want a Psionics system. Heck, I'll take more of the half-baked system we have now over nothing.
3) Why can't Athas be in Doom Space? Like, even if it already has a name, Drow aren't black anymore... why can't Athas be in Doom Space?
I'm making my own 5e brew of dark sun most of what you said is exactly what I did.
Paladin, bard and sorcerer are banned ( and artificer but that should go without saying.)
I made new versions of the usual dark sun races.
I banned good berry and the fey summoning spells, the create water spells now give MUCH less water.
For psionics I went the easy route and made the aberrant mind sorcerer the Psion class nut will let them use spell points to differentiate it a bit more from the other classes.
Agreed!
Two things that make a 5e DS setting difficult are both based in 5e's much further reach in mainstream play:
First, 5e players expect to reach level 20. This was not the norm in 2nd edition. You expected death from every encounter until maybe level 7. Then you felt secure enough that some mistake/poor decision wouldn't end your character. But death was an ever present danger to be guarded against. One night of sleep would not refillyour hit points. Even with a Cleric, it could take a week of game time to top off hp and stats, especially if you encountered undead back then. Part of the fine line between life and death kept D&D in the hands of hobbyists. Idk how much podcasts, live games, and internet articles kept "how to play" out of people's reach, and just how much all that helped 5e grow the way it has. The magazines "Dragon" and "Dungeon" helped numerous DMs and PCs figure stuff out back in the day, but never to 5e's rate.
Anyway, DS is waaay more brutal than 2nd edition was, and there was no built-in solution on your character sheet to help you survive. You could do EVERYTHING right, and still just die in DS. 5e players would HATE DS, because they really only know how to do what is on their character sheet. DS was built to test your morality, ingenuity, and survivability skills. 5e players will feel naked, frustrated, and quit. Death by exhaustion should be [pardon the pun] baked into expectations of playing in DS. That will not fly at most tables by most of the 5e casual player base who want a tale of heroic deeds told to them by their DM about the character they crafted. I just see vastly different table expectations today than 30 years ago.
None of those things are necessarily inherent to Dark Sun though. You can run an extremely deadly FR campaign or play Dark Sun more tame. It's more an issue of DM expectations than anything inherent to the setting.