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Oct 3, 2012 -- 10:32AM, Arithezoo wrote:

Oct 3, 2012 -- 6:35AM, Mournblade94 wrote:

Oct 2, 2012 -- 10:36AM, cheethorne wrote:

And why are you playing in Dark Sun when you have someone that wants to play a cleric? Why, as DM, are you choosing options that your players don't want?

The answer is simple: "Because I want to run Dark Sun.  If you insist on playing a cleric, Its not valid for Darksun.  If you don't want me to run Dark Sun, then how about YOU DM and choose the world.  The world I am inspired to run is Dark Sun at the moment.  So if you won't agree to that stipulation then someone else will have to DM the game."

Again, I as a DM am just as entitled to fun as a player.  The above DM will have his fun limited by not participating in the Dark Sun world.

Yes, the DM should of course be having fun!  D&D is a game, and as such, everyone involved should be having fun; otherwise, why spend hours and hours playing, right?

And it isn't my place to tell you how to have fun.  If you are having fun and your players are having fun, great!

All I can do is talk about my own experiences.  And to me, my fun as a DM never comes in the form of things that AREN'T in the world.  They come in the form of things that ARE in the world.  For example, I like Dark Sun because of the new take on races, the strange monsters, the high level of psionics and elemental stuff, the dangerous terrain, the sorcerer-kings, etc. 

When I think about what I like about Dark Sun, I never say, "I really like how there are no divine classes in 4E Dark Sun!"  The fact that the gods are silent is a cool feature, but, as has been pointed out, the original Dark Sun campaign setting still had priests! 

And even the 4E version, which says that the default is no Divine classes, comes with a little section discussing how easy it is to add them in as an exception for PCs (page 9).  It doesn't say that the DM better add religious institutions, full pantheons, etc to the world; it just lists some clever ideas that would let a player use a divine character (complete with cool plot hooks I feel).

And this is what drives my fun as the DM.  I don't think PCs are supposed to always be typical individuals; they are also meant to be special, different, and unique.  So even if I am drawn to Dark Sun, I won't rule anything out completely.

Incidentally, I am about to begin what I am calling "Bright Sun".  It is a campaign set on Athas, but in the past before the rise of the Sorcerer-Kings and the destruction wrought by defiling magic (it has yet to be discovered).  The gods are still silent (it takes place after the conflict between the gods and primordials), the world is still quite primal and primitive (metal is very rare of course), civilization is in the form of city-states, etc.  But one of my players loves divine classes (i know this of course), and so I gave him several ideas for how to work his concept into the campaign.  He loved one of them (his character is an archaeologist who discovered an ancient holy symbol that imbued him with a spark of divinity) and we are going forward with it.  His ultimate goal is to discover what happened to the gods, and to figure out if there is any way to bring them back.  Again, I don't have to do anything to change the world.  There are still no temples, the gods are still silent, the people think they are no more than stories.  But if he is able to achieve his goal, the world could be changed for ever.  This is no different than any other grand character goal ("I want my character to become the most powerful emperor!"); it is grand in scale, and may or may not succeed. 

If you kept up with the novels and things you'd know that they hinted at one point that Dragonlance became Darksun. Though they may have retconned that one out...

Oct 3, 2012 -- 2:28PM, Vic_Ferrari wrote:

I disagree, I witnessed a big surge of "builds" and player entitlement with 3rd Ed.

It's been said by a few people that what you observed could very easily have been a consequence of there being a ton more building material available. The 2e class kits and other supplemental material didn't really add on whole new systems the way 3e's supplements did. Adding a PrC was massive compared to adding four or five kits.

Anyway it's a chicken or the egg kind of question: did people demand stuff because there was more stuff to demand or did more stuff get added because people demanded it?

Difficult to answer with any certainty, but one thing we do know is the "player vs DM" problem existed long before 3e to a point where the earlier books did level quite specific accusations at players for acting like they were entitled to do whatever they wanted.

Edit: we also know that those sorts of DM empowering diatribes vanished from most D&D publications during 3e's tenure so that could be in indicator as well. Again, not enough to draw a firm conclusion.