
Dark Sun: Anyone Used C&C Attributes to Smooth Play Out?
Okay. First of all, for those unfamiliar, I have been a
Castle & Crusades geek since the
Player's Handbook second printing, and have kept up (mostly) with the current and ongoing publications, and have contributed to Kickstarters. I will state that, since '00, I've had less and less contact with and interest in Wizards of the Coast and their production lines, and that I've got absolute
zero interest in 4th Edition, and know virtually nothing about 5th Edition, aside from some points of comparison with
C&C that've been brought up on RPG.net.
That stated, one thing I'd like to get some popular feedback on: For me, Second Edition's crowning achievement was
Dark Sun. The fact that the game engine was flexible and adaptable enough to sustain such a variant concept pointed out, for me, that the
AD&D system was something that needed not much more than house rules in order to work with a host of fantasy-based world concepts.
The difficulty with
Dark Sun, for me, lay in the nature and progression of the Attributes; once an individual, PC or NPC, gets past 18, especially with Strength, things start moving from a straight linear to an exponential progression. While this is all well and good for saintly, demi-god and godlike figures, who are totally out of the PCs' hands (at least in general concepts), it rendered the stats for
Dark Sun characters getting a bit into the crazy range.
I honestly believe that
C&C's standard Attribute progression pretty much deflates this problem. With half-giants getting a maximum of 24 on Strength, this alters things from absolute killer +6 to-hit, +12 damage to a straight +6 to-hit/damage (twice the numerical bonus of 18, but still not enough, I would think, to turn the most powerful half-giant into a player-controlled monster), if the bonus progression is maintained. With the other stats similarly smoothed out, this results, I would think, in much more balanced gaming and something that the DM doesn't need to be dragging the big guns out for with every situation in order to prevent the players from doing the Big Yawn, stretching the arms, leaning back and calling out "
BOOOR-ING!"
So: Has anyone here played
Dark Sun with
C&C Attribute progression? If so, how did it turn out? I've never had the opportunity to do more than one-shots with any
Dark Sun setting, and would love to know if anyone here has tried it and met with success.
Otherwise, enjoying the heck out of the SIEGE system, love the panoply of character races and classes that
C&C offers without getting character concepts morphed into stat blocks, and hoping to see more from the Troll Lords gang as 2019 progresses.
