Everyone talks about how brutal Dark Sun is. Low resources, deadly combat, barren wastelands, etc.
At the same time, we are trying to run a game here, hopefully a game that lasts many sessions and builds up characters and their history and story. We dont want to just slaughter every character. So there is a fine line between getting the feel of Dark Sun across, and actually starving your group in the desert or killing them in the first combat.
---
I've been running a dark sun game (first link in sig). A couple tricks to make it seem brutal:
1) Ration out the extended rests. Separate "extended rest" from "sleeping every night". I only allow extended rests in safe zones like a city. Doing this is pretty crucial to a good 4e game anyway. It also makes healing surge expenditure and other resource management (dailies, magic items) more meaningful.
For example, my players traveled from Urik to Silver Springs, I told them ahead of time that travel would be difficult and they could only truly rest when they reach civilization at Silver Springs. A week passed, during which they and their mounts consumed 'survival day' rations every day. We had 2 fights and 2 skill challenges before they finally got to rest in town. If they got an extended rest every night, resources expended in one encounter would have returned before the next, letting them blow dailies every fight or not care about surges lost in a skill challenge.
If your party spends a week in a city but they are stressed in some way, like being attacked in the night or doing magical research, then say they can rest after they are done and things have calmed down. Basically let them extended rest when you are ready, and not before.
2) The elements. I use starvation and thirst as more a story-pacing item than a true threat. Starving someone to death is boring and a crappy way to lose a character, but threatening to starve them causes drama. It's easy to drop just enough supplies to the party to keep them going, but keep the sense that the world is harsh and goods are sparse.
The players should think "Oh crap, we only have enough supplies for 3 more days, and it's 5 days to the city! We are screwed!" That's the Dark Sun feel you are trying to evoke, even if you secretly know the next fight will give them 5 more supplies to string them along for another day.
3) Encounters. Keep monster level near or below the PC level, but keep encounter difficulty above group level. Use MM3, Dark Sun Creature Catalog and Monster Vault monsters. You end up with large battles in which everyone can hit each other, lots of monster death, and lots of healing surge attrition on players. Solos are fine if you use newer ones. The new Dark Sun solos are excellent.
Be nasty, use readied actions, delaying, flanking and other advanced tactics. Players have extremely high survivability in this edition, don't be scared to knock them into negative hitpoints. Do the math first and coup-de-grace anyone that will survive it, it will scare them crap out of them. If you unintentionally overpower them, a round or two of 'poor decisions' on the part of the monsters will let the players catch up again.
4) Skill Challenges. Give a way to use Healing Surges for a skill bonus. "You put a little extra effort in and succeed." It makes things exciting and depletes resources the players may need for a later fight.
Coup de Graceing people who will survive it is basically self-stunning your monsters.
Right, and at the same time getting that oh **** look from the target. Nothing worries players more than when a DM says "coup de grace". It's a way to make combat seem lethal without actually finishing them off.
Coup de Graceing people who will survive it is basically self-stunning your monsters.
Also going for bloodied players really ups the fear factor. When characters know they're about to get focus fired by blood thristy predators.
I've also used a few creatures that will literally eat the players alive, biting to do damage while healing themselves.
Players might not have all the equipment a character in a core setting might possess, but Dark Sun characters should be able to get out of any circumstance given the minimal number of tools and the right creativity. And sometimes, sacrificing a single PC to save the group makes for an excellent story!!
I've also used a few creatures that will literally eat the players alive, biting to do damage while healing themselves.
I always hate monsters that self-healed - when I'm a player that is - and tended to concentrate fire on those buggers.
I agree one must capture the feel of DS above all.
Coup de Graceing people who will survive it is basically self-stunning your monsters.
Not if you gave it an AP to do it...
The Arcane Puzzle Box I gave them(holds a defiler or preserver artifact inside it) is meant to be open, but they are so afraid of dying that they won't open it. In fact they were going to bury it in the desert and forget about it. Which after writting it now it makes me feel better about how they are in the world. They are actually afraid of the idea of arcane magic, even the Wizard. The only reason they still carry it is because they get paid for its safe return.
I also highly recommend modifying rituals as suggested in the DS Campaign Guide. Rituals are really easy to rename and reflavor and who care's if they're in a character builder or not.
3) Encounters. Keep monster level near or below the PC level, but keep encounter difficulty above group level. Use MM3, Dark Sun Creature Catalog and Monster Vault monsters. You end up with large battles in which everyone can hit each other, lots of monster death, and lots of healing surge attrition on players. Solos are fine if you use newer ones. The new Dark Sun solos are excellent.
Be nasty, use readied actions, delaying, flanking and other advanced tactics. Players have extremely high survivability in this edition, don't be scared to knock them into negative hitpoints. Do the math first and coup-de-grace anyone that will survive it, it will scare them crap out of them. If you unintentionally overpower them, a round or two of 'poor decisions' on the part of the monsters will let the players catch up again.
The game math assumes PCs hit 60% of the time, and the Monsters hit 50% of the time.
You give the players a (-1) or you give the monsters a +1, and it gets scary for the PCs.
You can take it further ... evil grin.
Raise Dead ritual was part of the PHB, right ?!
Potions don't have to be almost useless, now do they ?
**
Coup-de-grace ... as an encounter is rather more difficult to pull off.
Surpise Round ... Solo Thief stabs sleeping PC
1st round ............. Roll initiative (etc)
vs.
Surpise Round ... team Thief stabs sleeping PC , team Helper teleports him out of there
1st round ............. all the PCs fail the Perception check to hear "team" running away
Such as:
Your being followed, they will gain ground on you.
There's no safe location to sleep
You can't sleep on your mounts or in the desert because your exposed to the elements.
The only location they might be safe in is a cave, or a full caravan(wooden carriage). Basically as long as they can stay out of the elements they can take an extended rest.
I posted this over on the "What's a DM to do?" forum in responce to a new DM asking about the setting, but the dark sun regulars here may find it useful and add your own thoughts to it.
Everyone talks about how brutal Dark Sun is. Low resources, deadly combat, barren wastelands, etc.
At the same time, we are trying to run a game here, hopefully a game that lasts many sessions and builds up characters and their history and story. We dont want to just slaughter every character. So there is a fine line between getting the feel of Dark Sun across, and actually starving your group in the desert or killing them in the first combat.
Thank you for this post! This is exactly the sort of feel I want to go for.
I actually did such a good job, pre-game, of scaring one of my players into fearing the harshness of Dark Sun, that he decided to play Revanant with the "I'm really an undead!" feat. I'm kinda disappointed that he'll be trivializing some of the "challenge" of the desert, but at the same time he paid a feat for it. *shrug* As far as I can tell, his body can still overheat (and contract sun sickness), he simply doesn't have to worry about survival days.
How would you feel about your players attempting an extended rest IF they were prepared for it (supplies and such) and if one of them had a ritual or feat that helped conceal the camp? I'd think if the stealth check of the group were able to beat the perception check of a group of enemies, I'd let them take an extended rest.
About the rests. I'm pretty biased against players that try to metagame their way out of poor decisions. If they are trying to extended rest because they blew all their dailies on the first fight of the day, and want to avoid a difficult fight with no dailies, too damn bad. I would expect characters to do all the "camp defense" anyway, as part of every night in the desert.
Ultimately rests are a pacing decision by the DM. If you give extra extended rests, you have to throw harder challenges at the party because they are stronger as a result. I ran a gladiator campaign where the players got an extended rest between every match. They knew it in advance, and were expected to use everything they had every fight. So you had high-difficulty matches with a lot of dailies being thrown around, every fight. Barely saw an at-will. It was fun but basically turned daily powers into encounter powers, it got stale.
Now that guy making a revenant just to avoid eating, I would shoot that down pretty quickly. The alternative is "Great, the campaign just became centered on hiding/explaining/balancing out your undead character." No thanks. Dark Sun has plenty of awesome iconic races, I prefer to stick with those.
Haven't had to deal with a Revenant/Shardmind/Warforged and lack of eating, but the other party members have to eat anyways. One PC who doesn't require survival days probably isn't a big deal. Undead, Living Constructs, and Immortals still have their own set of drawbacks that can be used as challenges once in a while, though the story has to be particularly good for those characters in my book.
I'm using the Inherent Bonuses but i'm still giving some woundrous itens but with few diferences:
i've given the party some Wheatstones, but they aren't wheatstones they are small bugs that produce a substance that makes edges sharper (i even said that Gnolls and Tareks often chew this bugs as manhood rituals in a Nature check).
Since they are living beings they must care for the bugs if they wanna "save them for later" and if they leave a bug in a "prepared slot" if you go bloodied the bug goes berseker and starts to eat through your flesh dealing onging 2 damage, save ends. (besides losing the wheatstone property)
I'm about to give the party membres a bracer that produces +2 daggers, but its not really a bracer. Its a defiling device created by an SK long-ago that produces bone daggers out of your living tissue and bones, so every dagger you produce this way comes with excruciating pain, 1/2 the user level in life loss and a gruesome display. Of course this daggers don't last long.
Every magical iten i'm giving the party comes with a tow or a gruesome way of telling them "if you want power, theres a price to be paid"
Itens i've already given:
Prison of Salzacas, the Prison containing salzacas its a metal bug with a green jewel, when a character activited it the bug started moving, got into his flesh (like the movie The Mummy) and got to his brain. That caused terror and trauma (1healing surge short for a week) but he understood the iten's purpose and can now summon the spirit within the jewel and they just found out its a Pyreen spirit, filled with plot hooks, explanations and cool information about the ages before.
Edge Bugs (AKA Enhancement Wheatstones), explained before.
Rending Bone Longsword, its enhancement bonus its equivalent to the inherent Bonus
TongueWorm, this i've given to the fighter so he can mark more often, it already has a Darksunny feel (a vicious worm lacthing to one's throat to parasite it)
FireHeart Tattoo, they knew an NPC that loved tattoos and the party helped him, in return he tattooed one of them with a magical ink.
All of those weird magical itens aligned with roleplaying and the tips already given in this thread can sum up to a good DarkSun feel, where everything is dangerous (or at least, painful)
Another option is that instead of losing healing surges from challanges, the maximum number of surges each character has drops by one. so if they super f'd up a challenge, then suddenly the battlemind has only 9 surges, not 13-14.
These drastically changes the mind set of the PC's and how they feel about barrelling through things w/o consequences.
Also, I've almost completely removed the raise dead ritual, and just assume that it happens automatically, i.e. the character didn't really die. After the combat he/she's been wounded (exactly as the ritual penalty would show) and secretly the group loses treasure awards equal to the cost of the ritual.
I actually did such a good job, pre-game, of scaring one of my players into fearing the harshness of Dark Sun, that he decided to play Revanant with the "I'm really an undead!" feat. I'm kinda disappointed that he'll be trivializing some of the "challenge" of the desert, but at the same time he paid a feat for it. *shrug* As far as I can tell, his body can still overheat (and contract sun sickness), he simply doesn't have to worry about survival days.
Sure he doesn't need to worry about the whole survival days, but he now gets to learn another aspect of Athas. He's dead, his character is officially dead right? As in he's a reanimated corpse.
The answer is simple. If you EVER find yourself in a town, if somebody actually figures out that he's dead, what do you think will be the first thought?
Yup "Oh ****! It's magic! Call the Templars!"
He may be decent at surviving in the desert, but once you reach civilisation, he's going to have a tougher time surviving than the rest of the party.
He should give off some smell that attracts creatures that they go up against.