Grimsark
Avatar of War Slayer
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My all time favorite world, bar none.
My favorite D&D Rulebook. (pics stolen from Amazon)
My copy is lightly browned due to its frequent use as a teenager.
Dungeons & Dragons - New & Old
- Thread starter Grimsark
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My favorite D&D Rulebook. (pics stolen from Amazon)
My copy is lightly browned due to its frequent use as a teenager.
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Tranny Chaser
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I won a copy of the Dark Sun boxed set years and years ago and it looked like piles and piles of death. The conclusion of the first major storyline was just flat out taking on Lord Dregoth and even with the higher overall power level of the setting I have no idea how the fuck you do that and not get exploded. Low level encounters were also death. Everything had psionics and boy are psionics the perfect mix of OP and death.
I ended up giving it to a guy who was running a campaign. I don't know how it turned out. I'm guessing everyone died.
I ended up giving it to a guy who was running a campaign. I don't know how it turned out. I'm guessing everyone died.
OneofOne
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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What's the draw with Dark Sun? Honest question. I've played it a few times, and I really just dislike it. It's a depressing Mad Max world where if you get too powerful you'll get WTFpwned by the Dragon Kings (thinks that's them). It's like D&D: Hardcore.
Grimsark
Avatar of War Slayer
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That's a fair analysis. Something about the death at every turn, David vs. Goliath feeling just captured my imagination. That and the primary artist BROM just captured it so perfectly. He is still one of my all time favorite fantasy artists.
http://www.bromart.com/
I suppose its like anything else. A good GM/DM and group can make anything fun, but absent that, I'd say that I was drawn in by Troy Denning's novels.
Troy Denning - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Tranny Chaser
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The higher power level is a selling point and it was very different than the traditional Greyhawke/Forgotten Realms/Dragonlance high fantasy type stuff but I don't really know anyone that ran a campaign of Dark Sun, or Spelljammer, or any of the other unique settings for more than a couple weeks.
Most campaigns I've played in and even the ones I've ran usually involve a bunch of small town yokels in the backwoods nowhere that find themselves thrust into the larger world as they combat the evil that plagues their homes etc etc. Basically they all start like Secret of Mana or Star Wars. Pretty standard monomyth hero of a thousand faces stuff.
Most campaigns I've played in and even the ones I've ran usually involve a bunch of small town yokels in the backwoods nowhere that find themselves thrust into the larger world as they combat the evil that plagues their homes etc etc. Basically they all start like Secret of Mana or Star Wars. Pretty standard monomyth hero of a thousand faces stuff.
Grimsark
Avatar of War Slayer
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One of my favorite games I DM'd started with the players in the prisons of TYR, as Kalak was assassinated and the power structure of the world began to shift... They had to fight there way out of the underground power structure, to freedom, and new lives as free people without the yoke of a Dragon King and his Templar's.
Another, had them meeting each other for the first time, shortly after the end of the Novels, as they were all hired for menial labor in one of TYR's many former Templar controlled tax authorities. It had them accidentally stumbling into some activity that had them fleeing for their lives, right into the Veiled Alliance.
Etc... etc... There were so many ways to use and abuse the worlds gritty reality that it actually helped me reinvent my own ideas of what High Fantasy was. As until then, my teenage mind had done exactly the same thing... I blame the reading of to many DragonLance Novels in Jr. High.
Chanur
Shit Posting Professional
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For me it is a few things. Mul's were my favorite race, and it has the only version of Elves that doesn't look like it wants to swallow every cock it meets. The environment is a real hazard and I love the city states and sorcerer kings. My favorite thing though is the art by Brom. I am a big fan of his and have some of his giclees.
Gavinmad
Mr. Poopybutthole
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The draw with Dark Sun is the same draw that every setting that isn't Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, or Greyhawk has. It's something other than generic high fantasy.
Ravenloft was fucking fantastic if you played it as a gritty low powered horror setting instead of just undead themed high fantasy.
Ravenloft was fucking fantastic if you played it as a gritty low powered horror setting instead of just undead themed high fantasy.
OneofOne
Silver Baronet of the Realm
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I think the idea of Dark Sun is interesting, but playing in a desert world just doesn't appeal to me /shrug I've played it, FR, and Birthright, and FR is my home I guess. Though Birthright is pretty damn fun, if a tad frustrating if you play a blooded character and fight the random anwsheigh. It's like playing D&D and Risk at the same time.
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The problem was likely in making a game centered around human conflicts in an urban setting. You can't make every random NPC guard everywhere in the world level up with the players and all have max spot/listen and access to tons of detection spells. At one point I had an entire evil secret police force with access to Truesight pretty much all the time and the players called bullshit on me.
Realistically, if I had known I wanted to run a 2+ year long campaign in the first place I should have just had the players progress in experience very very slowly to keep player power in check but the system was new and a) it wasn't immediately apparent just how fast players would level using the normal 3e experience per CR rules and b) the system was new so everyone was eager to experience the whole level range on their characters.
I mean, everyone who's ever DMed will have tons of stories of how campaigns went wrong. I just wish the system kept player power in check better. 3E, as originally printed, started getting completely out of hand as early as level 7.
Running a relatively successful game for that long was definitely the most enjoyable thing I've done in a lifetime's worth of gaming, but it really was frustrating as fuck.
khalid
Unelected Mod
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My campaign in 4th edition got bogged down by incredibly long battles, with tons and tons of status effects and marks. Hope the combat is streamlined in 5th (not simplified, but made to be faster to resolve). Hell, that is what I thought 4d edition was bringing. It didn't turn out that way, at least for my group.
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Tranny Chaser
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I remember one encounter I ran early on with a couple firebats and two cave bears. The bears took fuckingforeverto kill. They had one awful encounter power, terrible damage, and 170 hp each. It was just an awful slog. I was very, very appreciative of the Monster Manual 2 and 3. The MM1 is just full of useless blood pigs.
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I liked the battle length in 3E usually, 3.5 definitely. 3E fights sometime ended in 1 round because of poor balance.
I like battlemats but not for every fight. If I ran a pathfinder or 3.5 game today I would limit myself to only 1 battlemat-worthy fight per session, maybe 2 in a rare, particularly combat-heavy session.
I like battlemats but not for every fight. If I ran a pathfinder or 3.5 game today I would limit myself to only 1 battlemat-worthy fight per session, maybe 2 in a rare, particularly combat-heavy session.
Qhue
Tranny Chaser
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Dark Sun was very much a contrast to Forgotten Realms (traditional high fantasy) and Dragonlance (big with ugly girls who wrote erotic kender fanfic). It also fully embraced psionics and postulated what a world might be like when you simply use up all the resources and burned it with too much magic. Yeah it was brutal and dark and full of horrible ways to die, but it had Thri-Kreen and cannibal halflings so what's not to like?
Himeo
Vyemm Raider
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How have you not mentioned the cannibal halflings? That's the best shit ever.
Posted to the thread without reading everything. Qhue knows what's up.
Himeo
Vyemm Raider
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Except when they stopped making Coke 2, it stopped existing. 4E will always be around.
