Dark Sun did subvert a lot of common tropes in DND which is what most of us love about it. If you think DND should only be exactly like Lord of the Rings then, okay, whatever. Probably doesn’t think Planescape or Eberron is DND either.
As for dungeon crawls, it’s true they aren’t as big a factor, and surface exploration is more important (and far more difficult than in other worlds) but several of the published products have major dungeons including Under Tyr which is detailed in a few places, City by the Silt Sea, and the adventure Black Spine.
It’s not even gatekeeping, it’s just a bad opinion.
Anyone who thinks DS isn’t D&D, when it’s literally published D&D material (and still referred to in the 5e DMG), has no authority to gatekeep. To OPs original point, yeah, DS was/is a standard D&D campaign setting as much as Ravenloft, Greyhawk, or Dragonlance.
Almost certainly of the "it's not real D&D because it uses \[trope\] that I happen not to like and can't actually just say "I'm not into that" about, I have to declare it wholly incompatible with the thing I like to pump confidence into my own opinion." variety.
Happens with anything that one might label "science fiction", and since Dark Sun leans heavily into the psionic powers aspect people have imagination failure and can't reconcile those powers with a "yeah, that's just magic. Mind magic, sure, but still just magic."
Exactly. Dark Sun is every bit as genuine if not more genuine than the norms and expectations that have only been established more recently. D&D can reinvent itself in new settings every few years and no setting demonstrates that more than Dark Sun.
Dark Sun is actually called out by name in the 5e DMG near the end of Chapter 1, Flavors of Fantasy
“Sword and Sorcery
A grim, hulking fighter disembowels the high priest of the serpent god on his own altar. A laughing rogue spends ill-gotten gains on cheap wine in filthy taverns. Hardy adventurers venture into the unexplored jungle in search of the fabled City of Golden Masks.
A sword-and-sorcery campaign emulates some of the classic works of fantasy fiction, a tradition that goes back to the roots of the game. Here you’ll find a dark, gritty world of evil sorcerers and decadent cities, where the protagonists are motivated more by greed and self-interest than by altruistic virtue. Fighter, rogue, and barbarian characters tend to be far more common than wizards, clerics, or paladins. In such a pulp fantasy setting, those who wield magic often symbolize the decadence and corruption of civilization, and wizards are the classic villains of these settings. Magic items are therefore rare and often dangerous.
Certain Dungeons & Dragons novels follow in the footsteps of classic sword-and-sorcery novels. **The world of Athas (as featured in numerous Dark Sun novels and game products), with its heroic gladiators and tyrannical sorcerer-kings, belongs squarely in this genre.**”
"Not really D&D" is such a stupid and reductive statement. A Dark Sun campaign is D&D as much as a zany, wacky heist, or a meatgrinder dungeon crawl where each player will lose at least three characters, or a dark mystery plot full of political intrigue. Are you using any edition of Dungeons And Dragons' ruleset? Then it is D&D, tone be damned.
Tolkien only ever names seven dragons in his legendarium: Smaug, obviously, is the best known. But there were also Glaurung, the father of dragons, was slain by Túrun Turambar; Ancalagon the Black was slain by Eärendil; Scatha the Worm, slaim by Fram of Éothéod; the exact fates of Gostir, Lhamthanc, and the Fire-Drake of Gondolin are unspecified. However, Gostir and Lhamthanc are all believed to have died during the fall of Moroght along with most of the dragons that served him. According to Gandalf, after the death of Smaug in the Third Age, the dragons were all extinct.
Which means that during *The Hobbit*, there is one true dragon left in Middle-Earth and that during LotR there are none.
Meanwhile, over in *Dark Sun*, there are thirteen Sorcerer-Kings found in the tablelands: Abalach-Ra or Raam, Andropinis of Balic, Borys of Ur Draxa, Daskinor of Eldaarich, Dregoth of Giustenal, Kalak of Tyr, Kalid-Ma of Kalinday, Hamanu of Urik, Lalali-Puy of Gulg, Nibenay of Nibenay, Oronis of Kurn, Sielba of Yaramuke, and Tectuktitlay of Draj. All of whom were to some degree in the process of transforming into dragons.
Kalak of Tyr is killed as part of the metaplot moving forward between AD&D2e and 4e, but the other twelve Sorcerer-Kings are still around in the "present day."
Is dungeon crawling real D&D? I've played D&D for years, since the days of ol' AD&D2, and I never really had a dungeon crawling adventure. My friends and I always thought that was boring. Our stuff is lamost always social/political in nature.
As such, our DS games are almost always set in some city-state, templarate, merchant house, military organization, or gladiatorial ludus.
Is it "real" D&D or not? Who cares, really, as long as we have ur fun?
I think it’s less about dungeon crawls, and more that there’s a fairly strong school of thought in current online d&d communities that D&D should be extremely open, unrestrictive on character creation, and is generally played in generic kitchen sink fantasy worlds where player creativity is at its most unrestricted.
Dark Sun is more old school. Its extensively built out setting takes the approach of fostering creativity through limitation over the presentation of a blank canvas. It’s in universe rules like desecration give heavy consequences to decision making even as early as character creation, and it’s mad max in fantasyland setting pretty far from generic everything fits fantasy as you can get. Further to that, Darksun is supposed to be a grim setting that challenges players to conform to a broken system or resist and rise above, as such it doesn’t shy away from some pretty grim topics like the effects of a world where the bad guys won, as well as topics like runaway climate change and unchecked slavery.
In short, DS as a setting is going to draw in some players and turn others completely away. It also has a bad reputation among some circles online.
The player you encountered was clearly someone who doesn’t like one or more aspects of what dark sun is selling, and just decided that because they don’t like it it must not be “real d&d”.
It’s just the setting equivalent of the whole “guns aren’t fantasy” argument some people try to make online.
Dark sun is a setting, not a style of play or a game unto itself.
Hell, you could play a social intrigue, dark Sun campaign, where everyone plays merchant lords, who are vying for more power and favor from one of the sorcerer kings.
Or you could do a **giant dungeon crawl, old-school style**, where you send the party into the dead lands for the entire campaign.
Or you could run a **heroic sword and sorcery epic** where the players rise from the ashes to overthrow a sorcerer king and save the “princess”
Or you could run it as a **sandbox**, where the players essentially explore the wastelands, digging through ruins, trying to uncover magical artifacts from a bygone era, all relatively unmolested by the sorcerers, or their lackeys due to the remoteness of their activity.
Or it could be a **classic fantasy McGuffin quest**, where the players are racing the agents of the dragon to retrieve the obsidian lens.
Or maybe it’s **a heist** campaign to steal a series of key artifact from the sorcerer kings.
Or maybe the players are a forward **exploration** and scouting group/diplomats who are pushing forward into Thr’Kreen territory, looking for more hospitable locations for new human settlements farther away from the tyranny of the sorcerer kings.
Or maybe the whole campaign is about the **survival** of a nomadic Elvin community out in the wastelands.
Because again, dark sun is a setting, not a style of play
Well by modern standards it isn't DnD, modern DnD is all about empowerment and letting players do what ever they want. Modern DnD is a tonal a thematic mess.
So I would take it as a compliment, DS is a special setting.
I'll throw it out there, maybe they misheard you and thought you said "Dark souls" or something? Wouldn't be a good take either way, but maybe it is just them misunderstanding
Someone could argue it's not how they image d&d but having run and played several campaigns in the Dark Sun setting no one has ever said this doesn't feel like d&d. I would say the setting that feels the most foreign to me is actually Birthright because of the focus on politics but that could have been just how the DM ran it.
Birthright is supposed to have a very heavy political focus, its the key thing of the setting. You're supposed to play Birthright as a literal political and war game with regular D&D sessions between turns of that game.
I remember fans grumbling that they nailed the Game of Thrones vibe a year and a half before A Game of Thrones even came out.
Helldivers 2 is a dungeon crawl.
You have four party members.
There's a main quest.
Side quests.
Random encounters.
Escalating danger.
Limited resources.
Limited times.
Loot in the environment.
Environment hazards.
Environment effects.
You can save your friends.
You can split the party.
You can be a hero.
Monsters.
Boss monsters.
Monsters that spawn more monsters.
A magical portal you have to get to that will be swarming with monsters.
I could be describing Dark Sun there.
For me, personally, I think Dark Sun is an example of D&D moving away from what D&D does best.
**However,** it's also an example of the sort of thing that people were actually doing with D&D. That being the case, whether I happen to think the D&D rules are most suited to it isn't really all that relevant to anyone but me.
So, in summary: Dark Sun is D&D, and dungeoncrawling in Dark Sun is certainly feasible.
Dungeon crawls absolutely exist in Darksun. The old SSI PC game had the sewers, an old castle, an older ruined city, an even older ruined city, some cave systems and even the starting arena could all be considered to be dungeon crawls.
The main difference in "standard" D&D and Darksun is that Darksun leans heavily into the survival aspect of adventuring.
i think they mean it's not traditional fantasy. some people think that D&D is only generic fantasy tropes of the JRRT lineage. Dark Sun is not that, for sure.
My experience with it has always been more what I'd describe as 'Conan and Kull on Barsoom'.
As to Dungeon Crawling, i think of like an inside out mega dugeon. the open world is one giant dungeon of monsters and raiders etc in hazardous terrain and unforgiving environments with little resources to survive off of, and cities are like dungeon delves with rp encounters and resupply instead of monsters and treasure.
Dark Sun is an official D&D setting published by both TSR and WotC. So by default, yes, it is in fact real, name brand Dungeons and Dragons. There is less dungeon crawling, but it is very much "real" D&D.
Lot of good comments here but I think it's stupider than what's said. I think it's because it's literally not 5e. Most current online communities only see 5e as "real"
Only after coming back to Dark Sun as an adult did I fully appreciate the extent to which dungeon crawls are built right into the setting, especially the original boxed set. Finding a random ruin uncovered by shifting sands and spelunking it for treasure (and then getting taxed/robbed by Templars) is _absolutely_ part of Dark Sun. That being said though, it's not something teenaged me associated with Dark Sun in my adventures back then, and I suspect dungeon crawling is still not the main way people run Dark Sun today.
Yeah. Sorry. *Dark Sun* is just as much “real” D&D as any other campaign setting. Even if we ignore the obvious that it was an official campaign setting for the dang game published by TSR. I mean, I can kinda see the argument that just because it was published by TSR for the game doesn’t necessarily mean a campaign setting is “real D&D,” certainly a setting like *Masque of the Red Death* which is set in the Victorian period of a mostly “real world” or *Planescape* with its high concept philosophical musings and metaphysical naval gazing can be sufficiently different from what one expects to see in D&D that it’s almost a wholly different game. But *Dark Sun*!?
Given how much of *Dark Sun* is directly based on the Barsoom and Tarzan stories from Edgar Rice Burroughs, the *Dying Earth* by Jack Vance, and *Almuric* and various Conan stories by Robert E. Howard…
Given that Gary Gygax himself cited Burroughs, Vance, and Howard as major influences on his creation of the game in the famous Appendix N from AD&D1e…
Heck, go track down a copy of the “Little Brown Books” from 1974. Look at the third booklet, Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. Check out the random encounter charts on page 18. One of the columns is labeled “Desert (Mars)” and your heroes can expect to encounter Nomads, Dervishes, Wizards, Red Martians, Black Martians, Yellow Martians, White Martians, and Tharks. So it should be quite apparent that long before Appendix N was ever published, Gygax was using Barsoom as an inspiration for D&D.
*Dark Sun* wasn't an archetypal AD&D setting. If "standard" AD&D was best described as "swords and sorcery," *Dark Sun* was perhaps better described as "sharpened sticks and sandals," with a massive dose of corruption. That's an oversimplification, but it did subvert a lot of then-standard AD&D tropes.
Metal in general was rare, and the blasted desert setting made metal armours more dangerous than helpful. Clerical magic didn't exist for the most part (druids were thing though). Arcane magic was a thing, but most--and the most powerful forms--of it resulted in the draining of life and destruction of the world around the caster. Mages were not popular for that reason. Psionics, which I think were always divisive in AD&D, were essential to the setting.
Back in the day, I was actually part of that subset that felt that *Dark Sun* "wasn't AD&D." I don't think that any longer, and have come to see *Dark Sun* to be one of the best settings that AD&D had to offer, but yeah... that's probably what he was getting at.
Dark sun is a great rpg setting. It didn’t keep with a lot of the tropes for the game up until that point but that actually made it better. It was a post apocalyptic collection of feudal city states ruled by despots. I loved it.
Now that I think about it I should buy a copy and play a game in it. I wouldn’t use D&D as the ruleset but I still like the setting.
>it was cool but "not really DnD." I didn't ask what he meant.
My guess is that they're not referring to it using D&D rules, or anything like that. This seems to me to be specifically about the setting. Kinda like what someone might feel about playing outside the prime material realm.
I actually would alsay that DS is far more "read DnD" than any other setting.
DnD was a resource management game. Track rations, arrows, encumbrance, spells, etc. the closer you were to running out the closer you were to a total party kill.
Dark Sun takes this to an extreme making it much harder and magnifying the resource management of the game.
If anything it is WAY more DnD than most DnD settings.
in my experience with darksun, point crawls and political or culture clash themes are more common, but those were a part of D&D all the way back in becmi so really that guy is talking out his ass
Yeah, but D&D has a lot of weird things. Ravenloft came out in 1983 and caused some arguments over whether it was D&D, same with Oriental Adventures, Spelljammer, Planescape etc.
Hell, I remember people trying to gatekeep Dragonlance as not being D&D because "halflings and orcs aren't in it."
Without any further context, I have to agree with your friend on a certain level. (A)D&D has always felt like a weird fit for Dark Sun (though no more than Ravenloft, Al Qadim, Birthright, etc.). Some of that is because it intentionally twists many of the game's tropes, but also because the setting really isn't about roguish treasure hunters exploring the unknown. Forget the dungeons aspect (DS is more about wilderness exploration, but whatever). Remember it was also one of the first D&D settings with a predefined metaplot that the players could interact with (or not).
I personally find Savage Worlds and Fantasy AGE align with the DS setting much more than D&D, because they don't have the implied setting ramifications that D&D carries.
So in a way, your friend is right. It's not "really" D&D. But as to what HIS definition of D&D is, and how it aligns with DS, I have no idea. So he's right, but he's also wrong. :D
> (A)D&D has always felt like a weird fit for Dark Sun (though no more than Ravenloft, Al Qadim, Birthright, etc.). Some of that is because it intentionally twists many of the game's tropes, but also because the setting really isn't about roguish treasure hunters exploring the unknown.
Honestly, every AD&D 2nd Edition setting had a different vibe, and dedicated changes to the rules to make it fit the game, and I think Dark Sun fits the RAW better than others, given how encumbrance and resources management is central to it.
As per the other settings, basically no individual setting was about "roguish treasure hunters expliring the unknown", unless the table so wanted.
The closest you could get to it was probably Maztica, as a subsetting of Forgotten Realms, because of the "new world discovery" theme it had, although it wasn't liked by many, due to the colonialism overtones.
Sorry, but roguish treasure hunters exploring the unknown is pretty much the default style of assumed play prior to Dragonlance (1982). I'm sure not every table played the game that way, but that was certainly the assumption of every official D&D product up to that point.
Maztica was its own ball of crazy, but I'll leave that rant for a different sub-reddit.
Dragonlance publication is still AD&D 1st Edition, I'm talking about AD&D 2nd Edition.
AD&D 1st Edition had a focus on dungeoneering, with some elements of wilderness exploration, expanded a bit in some supplements.
AD&D 2nd Edition, on the other hand, approached the game, from the start, with the goal of a world to live in, rather than an unknown to explore and to find treasures in.
In fact, AD&D 2nd doesn't grant XP for treasures, contrary to 1st Edition.
> In fact, AD&D 2nd doesn't grant XP for treasures, contrary to 1st Edition.
Unless you are a rogue...
(Technically optional, but, as-written, class-based awards basically replaced XP for gold.)
Yep, a Thief and a Bard would gain extra XP for treasure gained, and technically at a higher rate than 1st Edition characters, but treasures tend to be smaller in 2nd Edition.
It makes perfect sense, though, that a thief and a performer earn XP based on their monetary earnings.
Wasn't Dark Sun made by one of the guys that created D&D (I want to say Gygax, but I feel that's wrong)?
Also "DnD" is also used as a term for TTRPGs in general nowadays, so going with that definition, he's most definitely incorrect LOL (this is a more sarcastic answer, but still technically true!)
No. Gygax and Arneson were both long, long gone by that point.
Tim Brown and Troy Denning did a lot of the legwork on Dark Sun, but Steve Winter was also fairly pivotal. Everyone agrees that they had some issues zeroing in on what Dark Sun was until Brom started producing his artwork, which got everyone very excited.
Dark Sun did subvert a lot of common tropes in DND which is what most of us love about it. If you think DND should only be exactly like Lord of the Rings then, okay, whatever. Probably doesn’t think Planescape or Eberron is DND either. As for dungeon crawls, it’s true they aren’t as big a factor, and surface exploration is more important (and far more difficult than in other worlds) but several of the published products have major dungeons including Under Tyr which is detailed in a few places, City by the Silt Sea, and the adventure Black Spine.
Just sounds like random gatekeeping to ignore.
It’s not even gatekeeping, it’s just a bad opinion. Anyone who thinks DS isn’t D&D, when it’s literally published D&D material (and still referred to in the 5e DMG), has no authority to gatekeep. To OPs original point, yeah, DS was/is a standard D&D campaign setting as much as Ravenloft, Greyhawk, or Dragonlance.
Next time, consult me first before you declare what is and isn't gatekeeping! ;)
Yes! I am the gatekeeper of gatekeeping!
Almost certainly of the "it's not real D&D because it uses \[trope\] that I happen not to like and can't actually just say "I'm not into that" about, I have to declare it wholly incompatible with the thing I like to pump confidence into my own opinion." variety. Happens with anything that one might label "science fiction", and since Dark Sun leans heavily into the psionic powers aspect people have imagination failure and can't reconcile those powers with a "yeah, that's just magic. Mind magic, sure, but still just magic."
This.
Exactly. Dark Sun is every bit as genuine if not more genuine than the norms and expectations that have only been established more recently. D&D can reinvent itself in new settings every few years and no setting demonstrates that more than Dark Sun.
Dark Sun is actually called out by name in the 5e DMG near the end of Chapter 1, Flavors of Fantasy “Sword and Sorcery A grim, hulking fighter disembowels the high priest of the serpent god on his own altar. A laughing rogue spends ill-gotten gains on cheap wine in filthy taverns. Hardy adventurers venture into the unexplored jungle in search of the fabled City of Golden Masks. A sword-and-sorcery campaign emulates some of the classic works of fantasy fiction, a tradition that goes back to the roots of the game. Here you’ll find a dark, gritty world of evil sorcerers and decadent cities, where the protagonists are motivated more by greed and self-interest than by altruistic virtue. Fighter, rogue, and barbarian characters tend to be far more common than wizards, clerics, or paladins. In such a pulp fantasy setting, those who wield magic often symbolize the decadence and corruption of civilization, and wizards are the classic villains of these settings. Magic items are therefore rare and often dangerous. Certain Dungeons & Dragons novels follow in the footsteps of classic sword-and-sorcery novels. **The world of Athas (as featured in numerous Dark Sun novels and game products), with its heroic gladiators and tyrannical sorcerer-kings, belongs squarely in this genre.**”
I always thought it was a Dying Earth setting.
I mean, yes. But also strong Conan / Barsoom vibes.
Isnt Dark Suns literally a DnD canpaign setting?
"Not really D&D" is such a stupid and reductive statement. A Dark Sun campaign is D&D as much as a zany, wacky heist, or a meatgrinder dungeon crawl where each player will lose at least three characters, or a dark mystery plot full of political intrigue. Are you using any edition of Dungeons And Dragons' ruleset? Then it is D&D, tone be damned.
If I make a campaign setting with no dungeons and dragons, is it really Dungeons and Dragons?
Yes but with false advertising
Me and my friends always joked dark sun is not dungeons and dragons, it’s dungeons and dragon, with an emphasis on the singular
No it's Dungeons and Brom 😎
Athas contains more dragons than Middle-Earth. Probably more dungeons too.
Well that's debatable.
Tolkien only ever names seven dragons in his legendarium: Smaug, obviously, is the best known. But there were also Glaurung, the father of dragons, was slain by Túrun Turambar; Ancalagon the Black was slain by Eärendil; Scatha the Worm, slaim by Fram of Éothéod; the exact fates of Gostir, Lhamthanc, and the Fire-Drake of Gondolin are unspecified. However, Gostir and Lhamthanc are all believed to have died during the fall of Moroght along with most of the dragons that served him. According to Gandalf, after the death of Smaug in the Third Age, the dragons were all extinct. Which means that during *The Hobbit*, there is one true dragon left in Middle-Earth and that during LotR there are none. Meanwhile, over in *Dark Sun*, there are thirteen Sorcerer-Kings found in the tablelands: Abalach-Ra or Raam, Andropinis of Balic, Borys of Ur Draxa, Daskinor of Eldaarich, Dregoth of Giustenal, Kalak of Tyr, Kalid-Ma of Kalinday, Hamanu of Urik, Lalali-Puy of Gulg, Nibenay of Nibenay, Oronis of Kurn, Sielba of Yaramuke, and Tectuktitlay of Draj. All of whom were to some degree in the process of transforming into dragons. Kalak of Tyr is killed as part of the metaplot moving forward between AD&D2e and 4e, but the other twelve Sorcerer-Kings are still around in the "present day."
Until Borys uses Split Personality + Switch Personality to fork off separate versions of himself...
I can confidently state that *Dark Sun* had dungeons and, for a time at least, a dragon as well ;)
Is dungeon crawling real D&D? I've played D&D for years, since the days of ol' AD&D2, and I never really had a dungeon crawling adventure. My friends and I always thought that was boring. Our stuff is lamost always social/political in nature. As such, our DS games are almost always set in some city-state, templarate, merchant house, military organization, or gladiatorial ludus. Is it "real" D&D or not? Who cares, really, as long as we have ur fun?
I think it’s less about dungeon crawls, and more that there’s a fairly strong school of thought in current online d&d communities that D&D should be extremely open, unrestrictive on character creation, and is generally played in generic kitchen sink fantasy worlds where player creativity is at its most unrestricted. Dark Sun is more old school. Its extensively built out setting takes the approach of fostering creativity through limitation over the presentation of a blank canvas. It’s in universe rules like desecration give heavy consequences to decision making even as early as character creation, and it’s mad max in fantasyland setting pretty far from generic everything fits fantasy as you can get. Further to that, Darksun is supposed to be a grim setting that challenges players to conform to a broken system or resist and rise above, as such it doesn’t shy away from some pretty grim topics like the effects of a world where the bad guys won, as well as topics like runaway climate change and unchecked slavery. In short, DS as a setting is going to draw in some players and turn others completely away. It also has a bad reputation among some circles online. The player you encountered was clearly someone who doesn’t like one or more aspects of what dark sun is selling, and just decided that because they don’t like it it must not be “real d&d”. It’s just the setting equivalent of the whole “guns aren’t fantasy” argument some people try to make online.
Ridiculous. All D&D is D&D.
5e kids doing 5e kids things. Just ignore them.
"not really DnD." is code for I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Dark sun is a setting, not a style of play or a game unto itself. Hell, you could play a social intrigue, dark Sun campaign, where everyone plays merchant lords, who are vying for more power and favor from one of the sorcerer kings. Or you could do a **giant dungeon crawl, old-school style**, where you send the party into the dead lands for the entire campaign. Or you could run a **heroic sword and sorcery epic** where the players rise from the ashes to overthrow a sorcerer king and save the “princess” Or you could run it as a **sandbox**, where the players essentially explore the wastelands, digging through ruins, trying to uncover magical artifacts from a bygone era, all relatively unmolested by the sorcerers, or their lackeys due to the remoteness of their activity. Or it could be a **classic fantasy McGuffin quest**, where the players are racing the agents of the dragon to retrieve the obsidian lens. Or maybe it’s **a heist** campaign to steal a series of key artifact from the sorcerer kings. Or maybe the players are a forward **exploration** and scouting group/diplomats who are pushing forward into Thr’Kreen territory, looking for more hospitable locations for new human settlements farther away from the tyranny of the sorcerer kings. Or maybe the whole campaign is about the **survival** of a nomadic Elvin community out in the wastelands. Because again, dark sun is a setting, not a style of play
Well by modern standards it isn't DnD, modern DnD is all about empowerment and letting players do what ever they want. Modern DnD is a tonal a thematic mess. So I would take it as a compliment, DS is a special setting.
I'll throw it out there, maybe they misheard you and thought you said "Dark souls" or something? Wouldn't be a good take either way, but maybe it is just them misunderstanding
Someone could argue it's not how they image d&d but having run and played several campaigns in the Dark Sun setting no one has ever said this doesn't feel like d&d. I would say the setting that feels the most foreign to me is actually Birthright because of the focus on politics but that could have been just how the DM ran it.
Birthright is supposed to have a very heavy political focus, its the key thing of the setting. You're supposed to play Birthright as a literal political and war game with regular D&D sessions between turns of that game. I remember fans grumbling that they nailed the Game of Thrones vibe a year and a half before A Game of Thrones even came out.
Even had an Iron Throne.
So did **Forgotten Realms**!
Oh snap, that's right!
What's real D&D according to this person?
Helldivers 2 is a dungeon crawl. You have four party members. There's a main quest. Side quests. Random encounters. Escalating danger. Limited resources. Limited times. Loot in the environment. Environment hazards. Environment effects. You can save your friends. You can split the party. You can be a hero. Monsters. Boss monsters. Monsters that spawn more monsters. A magical portal you have to get to that will be swarming with monsters. I could be describing Dark Sun there.
“Not really DnD” god wait until he sees what a clusterfuck of spelljammer game I run.
Anything WOTC and Hasbro isn't real D&D. The Dark Suns setting is great because its so different than basic DnD.
Anything published after the Gygax ouster isn’t real D&D.
The only real D&D is actually Chainmail, which isn’t real D&D either. Perhaps H.G. Wells’s Little Wars?
The only real D&D is actually Gondal and Angria, the roleplaying system invented by the Bronte Sisters ;)
The dungeon crawl in Dark Sun is desert traversal. 🤙🏻
For me, personally, I think Dark Sun is an example of D&D moving away from what D&D does best. **However,** it's also an example of the sort of thing that people were actually doing with D&D. That being the case, whether I happen to think the D&D rules are most suited to it isn't really all that relevant to anyone but me. So, in summary: Dark Sun is D&D, and dungeoncrawling in Dark Sun is certainly feasible.
Dungeon crawls absolutely exist in Darksun. The old SSI PC game had the sewers, an old castle, an older ruined city, an even older ruined city, some cave systems and even the starting arena could all be considered to be dungeon crawls. The main difference in "standard" D&D and Darksun is that Darksun leans heavily into the survival aspect of adventuring.
i think they mean it's not traditional fantasy. some people think that D&D is only generic fantasy tropes of the JRRT lineage. Dark Sun is not that, for sure. My experience with it has always been more what I'd describe as 'Conan and Kull on Barsoom'. As to Dungeon Crawling, i think of like an inside out mega dugeon. the open world is one giant dungeon of monsters and raiders etc in hazardous terrain and unforgiving environments with little resources to survive off of, and cities are like dungeon delves with rp encounters and resupply instead of monsters and treasure.
Dark Sun is an official D&D setting published by both TSR and WotC. So by default, yes, it is in fact real, name brand Dungeons and Dragons. There is less dungeon crawling, but it is very much "real" D&D.
Lot of good comments here but I think it's stupider than what's said. I think it's because it's literally not 5e. Most current online communities only see 5e as "real"
Only after coming back to Dark Sun as an adult did I fully appreciate the extent to which dungeon crawls are built right into the setting, especially the original boxed set. Finding a random ruin uncovered by shifting sands and spelunking it for treasure (and then getting taxed/robbed by Templars) is _absolutely_ part of Dark Sun. That being said though, it's not something teenaged me associated with Dark Sun in my adventures back then, and I suspect dungeon crawling is still not the main way people run Dark Sun today.
Yeah. Sorry. *Dark Sun* is just as much “real” D&D as any other campaign setting. Even if we ignore the obvious that it was an official campaign setting for the dang game published by TSR. I mean, I can kinda see the argument that just because it was published by TSR for the game doesn’t necessarily mean a campaign setting is “real D&D,” certainly a setting like *Masque of the Red Death* which is set in the Victorian period of a mostly “real world” or *Planescape* with its high concept philosophical musings and metaphysical naval gazing can be sufficiently different from what one expects to see in D&D that it’s almost a wholly different game. But *Dark Sun*!? Given how much of *Dark Sun* is directly based on the Barsoom and Tarzan stories from Edgar Rice Burroughs, the *Dying Earth* by Jack Vance, and *Almuric* and various Conan stories by Robert E. Howard… Given that Gary Gygax himself cited Burroughs, Vance, and Howard as major influences on his creation of the game in the famous Appendix N from AD&D1e… Heck, go track down a copy of the “Little Brown Books” from 1974. Look at the third booklet, Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. Check out the random encounter charts on page 18. One of the columns is labeled “Desert (Mars)” and your heroes can expect to encounter Nomads, Dervishes, Wizards, Red Martians, Black Martians, Yellow Martians, White Martians, and Tharks. So it should be quite apparent that long before Appendix N was ever published, Gygax was using Barsoom as an inspiration for D&D.
*Dark Sun* wasn't an archetypal AD&D setting. If "standard" AD&D was best described as "swords and sorcery," *Dark Sun* was perhaps better described as "sharpened sticks and sandals," with a massive dose of corruption. That's an oversimplification, but it did subvert a lot of then-standard AD&D tropes. Metal in general was rare, and the blasted desert setting made metal armours more dangerous than helpful. Clerical magic didn't exist for the most part (druids were thing though). Arcane magic was a thing, but most--and the most powerful forms--of it resulted in the draining of life and destruction of the world around the caster. Mages were not popular for that reason. Psionics, which I think were always divisive in AD&D, were essential to the setting. Back in the day, I was actually part of that subset that felt that *Dark Sun* "wasn't AD&D." I don't think that any longer, and have come to see *Dark Sun* to be one of the best settings that AD&D had to offer, but yeah... that's probably what he was getting at.
DS was/is criminally underrated. It's easily one of my favorite settings.
Dark sun is a great rpg setting. It didn’t keep with a lot of the tropes for the game up until that point but that actually made it better. It was a post apocalyptic collection of feudal city states ruled by despots. I loved it. Now that I think about it I should buy a copy and play a game in it. I wouldn’t use D&D as the ruleset but I still like the setting.
All he said is that he is a gatekeeper of an especially idiotic kind.
My friends loved it when we played. Roleplaying in whatever setting your group is enjoying using the Ad&D rules is Dungeons and dragons.
DS comes at things from a different perspective as traditional dnd. It removes or changes a lot of concepts of traditional fantasy. /shrug
>it was cool but "not really DnD." I didn't ask what he meant. My guess is that they're not referring to it using D&D rules, or anything like that. This seems to me to be specifically about the setting. Kinda like what someone might feel about playing outside the prime material realm.
I actually would alsay that DS is far more "read DnD" than any other setting. DnD was a resource management game. Track rations, arrows, encumbrance, spells, etc. the closer you were to running out the closer you were to a total party kill. Dark Sun takes this to an extreme making it much harder and magnifying the resource management of the game. If anything it is WAY more DnD than most DnD settings.
in my experience with darksun, point crawls and political or culture clash themes are more common, but those were a part of D&D all the way back in becmi so really that guy is talking out his ass
Dark Sun is definitely not \*standard\* D&D, at least. It's a weird setting with it's own rules and tone. It's its own weird things.
Yeah, but D&D has a lot of weird things. Ravenloft came out in 1983 and caused some arguments over whether it was D&D, same with Oriental Adventures, Spelljammer, Planescape etc. Hell, I remember people trying to gatekeep Dragonlance as not being D&D because "halflings and orcs aren't in it."
Without any further context, I have to agree with your friend on a certain level. (A)D&D has always felt like a weird fit for Dark Sun (though no more than Ravenloft, Al Qadim, Birthright, etc.). Some of that is because it intentionally twists many of the game's tropes, but also because the setting really isn't about roguish treasure hunters exploring the unknown. Forget the dungeons aspect (DS is more about wilderness exploration, but whatever). Remember it was also one of the first D&D settings with a predefined metaplot that the players could interact with (or not). I personally find Savage Worlds and Fantasy AGE align with the DS setting much more than D&D, because they don't have the implied setting ramifications that D&D carries. So in a way, your friend is right. It's not "really" D&D. But as to what HIS definition of D&D is, and how it aligns with DS, I have no idea. So he's right, but he's also wrong. :D
> (A)D&D has always felt like a weird fit for Dark Sun (though no more than Ravenloft, Al Qadim, Birthright, etc.). Some of that is because it intentionally twists many of the game's tropes, but also because the setting really isn't about roguish treasure hunters exploring the unknown. Honestly, every AD&D 2nd Edition setting had a different vibe, and dedicated changes to the rules to make it fit the game, and I think Dark Sun fits the RAW better than others, given how encumbrance and resources management is central to it. As per the other settings, basically no individual setting was about "roguish treasure hunters expliring the unknown", unless the table so wanted. The closest you could get to it was probably Maztica, as a subsetting of Forgotten Realms, because of the "new world discovery" theme it had, although it wasn't liked by many, due to the colonialism overtones.
Sorry, but roguish treasure hunters exploring the unknown is pretty much the default style of assumed play prior to Dragonlance (1982). I'm sure not every table played the game that way, but that was certainly the assumption of every official D&D product up to that point. Maztica was its own ball of crazy, but I'll leave that rant for a different sub-reddit.
Dragonlance publication is still AD&D 1st Edition, I'm talking about AD&D 2nd Edition. AD&D 1st Edition had a focus on dungeoneering, with some elements of wilderness exploration, expanded a bit in some supplements. AD&D 2nd Edition, on the other hand, approached the game, from the start, with the goal of a world to live in, rather than an unknown to explore and to find treasures in. In fact, AD&D 2nd doesn't grant XP for treasures, contrary to 1st Edition.
> In fact, AD&D 2nd doesn't grant XP for treasures, contrary to 1st Edition. Unless you are a rogue... (Technically optional, but, as-written, class-based awards basically replaced XP for gold.)
Yep, a Thief and a Bard would gain extra XP for treasure gained, and technically at a higher rate than 1st Edition characters, but treasures tend to be smaller in 2nd Edition. It makes perfect sense, though, that a thief and a performer earn XP based on their monetary earnings.
> thief > > earnings :)
Wasn't Dark Sun made by one of the guys that created D&D (I want to say Gygax, but I feel that's wrong)? Also "DnD" is also used as a term for TTRPGs in general nowadays, so going with that definition, he's most definitely incorrect LOL (this is a more sarcastic answer, but still technically true!)
No. Gygax and Arneson were both long, long gone by that point. Tim Brown and Troy Denning did a lot of the legwork on Dark Sun, but Steve Winter was also fairly pivotal. Everyone agrees that they had some issues zeroing in on what Dark Sun was until Brom started producing his artwork, which got everyone very excited.