After I read the book I was waiting for this video. Hey Ted, check out the QR code that comes with the books. It takes you to a customer survey for the Spelljammer set. Tell them you want proper space combat.
Wildjammer should be used to supplement this sparse rule book as much as possible. You’re not off base. I was very disappointed with how much is not in this book. What’s there is cool but the splat book needed another 4-8 pages for crew roles and actions, ship weapons, ship customization rules and random tables for generating planets and systems. WotC is further moving away from giving us rules and instead forcing DMs to be game designers. Isn’t that what we pay them for?
if got you've Ghosts of Saltmarsh, i'd highly recommend using its ship roles and customization rules, though of course it'd been nice to see them reprinted in spelljammer itself
DnD has historically put the onus on the DM to be a game designer. Combine that with people wanting less "crunchy" rules as editions advance and it seems kind of unavoidable that they (WotC) can really only lay the foundation. Also importajnt to remember that if you are trying that hard to bend DnD into something else, then it might be more worth your time to find a system more in line with what you want.
@@cookwithsalt2577 the book about ships in space has basically no rules for ships fighting in space, for creating planets, crewing ships, etc This is objectively a problem. WoTC product quality has been declining for a few years now.
I took a quick look through saltmarsh, to be honest a lot of that ship content could be brought into Spelljammer with very little change. There is also a great deal of oldschool Spelljammer content that people are adapting to fill in the gaps. With how much there is already out in the world that could be basically copy pasted into Spelljammer, it is a little strange WoTC didn't include it or at least point players towards it for further inspiration.
I've heard the term, "slimflation" or "shrinkflation" used in some of the econ podcasts I listen to and this fits. Mostly they were talking specifically about food because it's the easiest to see, but it applies across the board. So you have a juice bottle with 20 oz. originally for 3.99. The company talks about making it "eco-friendly" and puts out this new juice container for 3.99. The bottle is shaped differently and supposedly uses less plastic. It's also now 16 oz. For 3.99. The price stays the same *or goes up* , but the volume of product sold goes down. The company has less packaging cost, and less raw material cost, but an equal or greater retail price tag. You can see why I recognized the trend in books when shown it in food and hygiene products as examples. It's infuriating when you see it. It is, literally, artificially created inflation pushed downstream, for record profits after record profits. While the companies then bitch when employees want more pay.
@@everettwatson4966 then why on earth did everyone have to pay such an exuberant price? We are paying WOTC to write the rules. It shouldn't be up to the consumer to fix a terrible product
@@everettwatson4966 I kind of assumed that the company creating content I pay for would do that for me, so I wouldn't havve to do it myself The book is a joke, don't buy it.
@@Blargaha I feel bad for everyone who wanted Spelljammer. You deserved better. The last book they released that I was mostly happy with was Van Richten’s. They have been on a losing streak and the real shame is I don’t think they care. Thanks god for 3rd party companies and DMs Guild. That’s where the best content comes from these days.
That sums up my entire relationship with 5e. I buy a book, read through it and ask myself is that it. It's like they want me to design the game myself.
@@Shade400 Yeah, that's kinda what a DM does. They give you a basic framework and then you make a game out of it. If you don't want to do that there are many premade adventures for you to choose from. In this particular setting it's Light of Xaryxis. Try running that first. I haven't bought this set yet, and I'm not sure I will, however, for the price I don't see much to complain about. It's really just one book broken into three pieces. It could have been more "book", but then it would have cost more as well. I'm still on the fence with this one.
@@lukedesmith any given 3.5 supliment has easily 5 times the amount of useable content this book had and for the same price. I want that kind of quality. for a equivilent book look at stormwrack it had more ships, the same number of races, several pages of ship rules and tons of spells, magic items, nad prestige classes. Im using it for my game and ive barely needed to do any modification. the new spelljammer book leaves so much blank it would be genuinely less work to port over ship rules from 3.5 than to try and work with what they gave
@@Shade400 This. 'Just Homebrew it' or 'you can make it up yourself!' is not an excuse for fucking lazy content and I'm getting tired of people like @Luke Desmith using it as an excuse. Also it has less pages than Theros, Eberron or Van Richten's guide for an additional $20...they could have quite easily crammed in 'more book' for the same price...
Seeing the difference between Mending and normal repairs. A recent post on the D&DNext subreddit reveals the first printing of the books refer to a 'repair object' spell which doesn't exist. This highly suggests that originally the 'Repair Objects' spell was going to be a levelled spell which gave that amount of hitpoints but it seemed to have been dumped onto the cutting room floor last minute and they just slapped it onto the Mending cantrip...
What is essitientially a cure wounds for constructs would have been a great addition by now, but instead we get this repeated bloating of the mending cantrip.
You would think by them making Spelljammer into three books we would get more stuff sadly that did not happen if it was not for the new races I would have not bothered buying Spelljammer
Kinda takes up more space with those thick covers. Those could have been filled with content instead. At least 200 pages lost to that alone. I think wotc is just messing with us at this point.
Same shit that is happening in mainstream comics is happening with WoTC... disappointing, all show and no substance... reimagine our favorite heroes/settings, but never for the better
@@pjmisley Yea Tasha was the first showing those signs. With how the term race was problematic even though in D&D the term is used correctly unlike irl. Then how they redid the Drow lore. Tasha was my last book for the subclasses. But I've been keeping an eye on D&D since I've been a player since 3.5e. I'm now playing PF2e though sure the Golarion setting feels more PC but it feels authentic than shoehorned with retcons.
100% agree. Been waiting so long for Spelljammer, Dark Sun & Planescape. Went from excited to disappointed quickly and it not just the ship to ship combat. Although that’s the most glaring issue. Now I’m a worried we are going to end up with the same issue with Planescape next year. Glad I held off buying. I can’t believe the books I’ve been waiting for goes on my do not buy right behind Strixhaven.
I’m less worried about Planescape because all of the lore is on the internet but I am still concerned. Spelljammer missed the mark because of the lack of rules.
@@theeffete3396 the reason so many people play 5e is because players and games are easy to find. Finding a group to play an OSR Planescape campaign can be a challenge if not outright impossible for some.
So I feel the same in all ways EXCEPT that once they resurrect a setting you can make DMGuild material for it. Which means I can make my Planescape Kickstarter once the official is on the table (most likely).
I just wish there was more in general. Ive been starting to shift away from official 5e products because some older edition content just gives soo soo much more. Not to mention some of the kickstarters that have been coming out in the past few years also have offered so much more.
Starfinder is a better system for fantasy in space than this. And I just prefer PF2e for generic fantasy now. A shame 5e had so much potential but they're playing it too safe in just about everything about it.
started 5e recently and kinda came to figure my character would be into crafting, very bummed at the lack of it. i found a unicorn horn and my pc knows it's pretty valuable magically, so i looked all over for what i could eventually fashion it into and the official stuff is just like, "magic dust?"
Dark Matter is a third-party 5e product from Mage Hand Press that has a lot more mechanics for their ship system, including buying upgrades and things for the ships. I think they'd be a great supplement to these rules, even though they're a bit more tech-y than the ones in Spelljammer.
I'm finding myself using AD&D 2and Edition Spelljamming mechanics to do a lot of the filling in of things this set just doesnt have...highly recommend 2e as a patch
Anyone who wants to run a Spelljammer game should also get Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It has extensive rules for ships/crew. It also has rules for ship based challenges that could be applied to Spelljamming vessels as well.
To be honest, I don't particularly feel like giving WOTC MORE money just because they made a subpar product to start with. The avernus vehicle rules are good as well but I'm not happy with having to cobble it together
I know this comment is hold but the problem with the rules from GoS is that they suck. They are not engaging for multiple players. Each player just grab a weapon and the captain dies everything else.
After seeing how little official content was included that was worth the ink it was printed with, I went and backed your sponsor from a couple days back with the space 5e Kickstarter. WotC could have added a lot more content to this by making the books softcover like they did back in the day. For the cost, and thickness of those hardcovers, they easily could have been 96 page books, each.
Ah the fabled Consitutiton Check. As for the ship combat rules, Saltmarsh has those, Treantmonk has videos going over the rules and showcasting them in action, they're actually very well made.
Which makes this all the more unjustified - they already had rules, they could have reprinted them with some small tweaks. But instead, we just don't get any rules. It would have been one thing if this book had been just an adventure perhaps... but it's supposed to be a three book box set campaign setting. It should be comprehensive, but instead it's barely adequate.
You are directly on the mark! I felt like these books were Wotc charging me $50 just to tell me I had permission to play in space. There are alot of holes where content should be, ship mechanics, upgrades, weapons, gear. It all feels lacking. As soon as I saw what what in the books I started hombrewing my own variation based on a mix of Spelljammer, Ghost of the Saltmarsh and Decent into Avernus, so far I'm pretty happy with it. I'm excited to go to space, but not because of these books.
Something tells me this might be a cart-before-the-horse scenario for WotC with 5.5e on the horizon. They're already altering how monsters, races, and backgrounds work, they could be tweaking ship-to-ship combat for the revised DMG too based on feedback from Ghosts of Saltmarsh and might be expecting us to return to the setting two years from now. I dunno, I could be totally wrong, but right now it seems like they're expecting a lot of DMs to tweak what exists in the DMG, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, the original Spelljammer, and whatever sci-fi game they can get ahold of to finish the setting for them until they can figure out how this is supposed to work.
Tbh I feel that the rules kind of work to a degree but there's so many questions that I have, how do the ships move and why can they just 180 turn on the spot? Why can a fireball deal more damage to ships than the weapons meant to attack them? What's the benefits of staying in a ship at all? I don't mind coming up with my own answers to these questions but when it almost feels like I'm expected to answer them myself then what's the point of doing it at all?
My house ruling is going to be that shipboard weapons automatically bypass the damage threshold. They were designed for attacking other ships, they should be able to do the job. This will give them a leg up on at least lower level spell attacks.
So you agree with the majority of players taking issue with the rules here. Most are not saying the rules given are bad by design but bad because they are a tenth of what they should have been. The Saltmarsh ship rules should have been tweaked and included or at least had a 'reference with these changes' bit. Have changes like the weapon range should be noted to range traveled per round I suppose you could adjust for damage threshold but I wouldn't. But think about it if a ship comes within a mile (5280 feet or 1056 grid squares) of your ship you drop to sunlight. At this point you have two "choices" try to outrun a ship that has the same speed as you (never gonna happen if they are following you) or you turn to fight them which means Roll Initiative. At 1mile if both ships "Dash" head on that I'd 160 feet a round (32 squares) or 30 rounds to get in range of the 600ft longbow 32 rounds if you want to use any other weapons. So 3 minutes of charging at each other personally I'm launching Ballista since it is point and shoot (no gravity or resistance) inertia means that if my Ballista bolt can hit 480ft in a round with gravity it should be able to do that without so if I fire 1st round it should continue until it hits something since there is no gravity to effect it. So if both ships are a mile out and one fires unless the target moves out of the line of fire in 11rounds the projectile should hit. You can do that mechanically. Due to it being the secondary range it is at disadvantage, now I would hold the roll until the striking round to avoid Meta argument but if the ship doesn't move it is treated like a normal attack if the ship moves out of the line it misses, if the ship heads tward it adjust the round it would strike and treat with normal attack rules. This makes space combat more number crunchy but also motivates for actual combat not the typical 'run up to each other and bash until one stops moving' and it would have only needed maybe 2-3 pages if the reference Saltmarsh rules.
There are actually really detailed ship rules in Ghost of Saltmarsh. I highly recommend checking them out for anyone running ship combat in Spelljammer.
Good tip. I was just going to adapt Star Wars Saga Edition space combat to the Spelljammer. With that said, WotC indirectly requiring Ghost of Saltmarsh (which I don’t own) is a fail on their part. The Spelljammer Adventurer’s guide should have everything you need in it.
@@seibervideo Agreed. Unreasonable to require both. That beings said they are shocking detailed in GoS. They are arguably some of the most detailed rules that WotC has put out ever.
I can honestly say this the last WOTC book I pre-order. The problem with WOTC is that they have good ideas but don't put the finishing touches that the DM needs to run the game. Great video like always and thank you for the honest review on the rules.
Just a slight correction on the speed, 100,000,000m/24hr is roughly 0.006% the speed of light (as we know it in our real-life universe) so not exactly warp speed, still incredibly fast.
Side Initiative is something that me and my group does all the time. We like it as we can have people go for when they want to go after or before their fellow Allies (For me I like going last after seeing what my fellow allies chose what they wanted to do for the turn.) Usually me and my friends never gang up on enemies during side initiative because there are multiple enemies to deal with, so we usually split up who we want/ need to kill, 2 people at most attacking the same monster.
The thing I hate the most about ship speed in this is that at least half of these ships travel at a brisk walking pace when they're not actually spelljamming. Speeds for a flying vehicle should be much higher than they are. Especially when you math out things like the size of the air envelope for a planet, and how it'd take you no less than 40 days to leave the Earth's atmosphere at that speed before you can actually spelljam RAW, since you have to be in space AND at least a mile away from the nearest object.
the earths atmosphere only extends 4 miles up. most ships would make that in just 1 hour, the very fast ships will mak it in just 30min. and this was exactly how 2e spelljammer was aswell. it took 1 hour to leave the atmosphere of an earth sized planet.
@@sylvnfox Scientifically, yes. But the rules for an air envelope given state the air envelope of an object is 3x the length of the object which in this case the object is a planet 7900 miles across. That means if you leave it and travel away you need to clear 7900 miles of distance not 4. They did not specify planets as being any different or give any estimate of how long it would take to exit, so you are left calculating that distance at a speed of like 4mph for most of these ships.
@sylvnfox Read it again. Page 23 under spelljamming helm says "If the ship is in space and no other objects weighing 1 ton or more are within 1 mile of it, you can use the spelljamming helm to move away..." etc etc.
It doesn't make sense for mending to "heal" a ship so much. 1) because it's clearly the *far* better option compared to have it on dry dock and 2) mending can't repair breaks or tears bigger than 1 foot, which on the context of space battle I reckon most damages are bigger than that.
They should have include a new spell for ship repair. i.e. Shipwright patchwork: 1 hour cast, VSM (5 gold worth of ship material) repair ship for 1 HP. Then make dry dock repair 1d6 + 1(20gp), 3(60gp), 5(100gp), 7(140gp) ship health per day depending how good of a shipwright the party wants to hire.
I think we all wanted more ship-to-ship combat mechanics!! I'm working on some homebrew for my players that allows them to use their Hit Dice to assist the Helmsmen in moving the ship more quickly, buffing their allies, or more quickly firing siege weapons.
I think your comparison with the Infernal War Machine was spot on Ted! Really disappointed it did not include more detailed ship to ship mechanics, but also lacked guidance for DMs on building their own world in the multiverse.
Well I guess I am going to continue using my homebrew ship combat rules some more. Some of these rules will still be useful. My favorite thing about my homebrew system was giving the ship spell slots and special armaments that required the spell slots to use. Powerful weapons, flight, making fog cover, even once effectively gave a ship a scaled up misty step.
Something that I thought would be really cool for Spelljaming would be the idea that each ship had multiple components like engines and shield generators. When fighting other ships, the players could damage these components and knock the enemy ship's systems offline.
It would be cool to have roles on the ship and what each member is in charge of while spacejamming. I'm thinking like Star Trek-ish but I guess I'll just play a Star Trek RPG if I want a ship with actual character roles.
The way I tend to treat a ship in D&D is mostly as a mobile base of operations which can also be a convenient place for a combat encounter from time to time. What I think I'll end up doing is re-purposing the rules from Acquisitions Inc. for base building and some of the vehicle rules from Avernus so the players can have something close to an x-wing to fly sorties from the main ship
Know it's for your gravity/air pocket video but there is major flaw in the rules as written over them when it comes to planets. Rules state air pocket is equal to radius of the object so 5k mile radius planet has 5k mile air pocket. Issue is whilst in an air pocket can only move at flight speed of vessel so say 4mph. 5000 / 4 = 52 days to get into orbit!!! Reality is more like earth where it is only 8miles thus only 2hrs to get into space.
On Earth, it's more like 70+ miles to space, but yeah. Spending a day flying to orbit is still a very leisurely path to orbit compared to rocketry, but not like spending nearly two months.
Im really getting tired of WOTC’s vagueness on official content, i would assume they have enough money and resources where they can give players comprehensive and fun ship to ship combat mechanics. Ive felt the same for every recent campaign setting book, they just don’t have enough stuff to set them apart mechanically from a traditional dnd adventure. Ghostfire game’s new fable series has an over 100 page pdf with lore, rules on naval travel and combat, ship customization, gathering crew, resource management, and an introductory adventure and that just on the 1st out of 6 chapters they plan on releasing.
It's not about money and resources, it's what they've learned to do from community feedback. No matter what, when they try to add rules to the base game the community freaks out. People keep pointing to ghost of saltmarsh's ship rules, but if no one remembers, those rules were almost universally panned by the community when they came out.
Keep an eye on the Abominations Vault 5e conversion coming out next month i believe. It's a PF2e adventure module that's getting an official 5e conversion by Paizo requested by Wizards. The same goes for the Kingmaker adventure module which was a PF1e module being updated to PF2e and converted to 5e as well. Paizo used to make adventure modules back during 3.5e and those are seen as some of the best modules for d&d ever outside of those made by Gygax himself. Those will be really well made since Paizo is really good at creating adventures.
@@BlackHeart1216 maybe I’m in the minority but I’ve used Saltmarsh’s ship rules in a campaign and it went pretty well. I think as people gain experience running the game they get more comfortable making up common sense rules as they go. Rarely do I feel stumped nowadays. Rules are best used as a loose guide than the gospel.
Most of the people who built 5e have moved on, or been blacklisted from the industry. WotC has been mostly taken over by progressive Seattle types with minimal (if any) game design experience. Several of the uncredited subcontractor writers for Radiant Citadel were cookbook authors. It's a company run by posers that is a shell of its former self, rather like modern Blizzard Entertainment.
as a big ebberon fan im excited to incorporate alot of the themes and rules from spelljammer into the ebberon world, im just not sure how to incorporate the idea of wildspace and travel to other worlds into ebberon or how to balance the airships with spelljamming ships in combat and things like that. any more experienced dms have any ideas?
With the mending maybe I don't understand correctly but it seems that the ship can only get healed with mending *once per hour (not day as I had previously said thanks codebracker) no matter how many casters you have. It seems it's limited by the target(ship) not the caster. Still good option though.
With the combat systems set up in 5e ship combat doesn't feel super important overall in my opinion. I plan to make a Hadozee monk who can glide around and punch stuff and honestly I couldn't care less about firing a ballista or a reflavored multi-attack crossbow as a gattling gun. Spellcasters who meticulously prune their spell lists don't wanna have to deal with putting a huge amount into dex instead of their spellcasting modifiers and for range builds you are more focused on your crazy sharpshooter hand crossbow build then you are on a random weapon you use like a quarter of the time. I think the rules are serviceable for getting into an interesting situations, where gravity fields change as you ram into a ship at a 90° angle from above and drop into the new ship, but then you are back to what really matters. The characters and their space themed builds should be more fun than a ship that you drive to the cool planets your DM makes.
1:46 Yeah, but even then, there was alot of pages without alot added. They didnt get into any informational mechanics on Elemental Ships, the Lightning Rail, or Underwater Ships; they didnt really go into detail about Elemental Binding, and the general Setting differences between Eberron and their beloved Forgettable Realms; like how Xen'drik Elves are not the same as FR Drow, with their spider fetish. Maybe im old fashion... but when a Setting book comes out, I REALLY wanna see the differences of that setting, and any and all new mechanics related to the new setting... Im my group's DM, and I did NOT want to have to jerry-rig other game mechanics (or OLDER game mechanics) into what is apparently such a widely used and accessible game! Im sick of having to homebrew mechanics for 5E D&D just to make things work, because Weasles of the Cost cant be bothered to incorporate and undate older game mechanics! And no, releasing digital erratta's isnt good enough, because not everyone WANTS all their stuff digital... and sometimes, some currencies, make buying the digital copy as expensive as the physical copy...and since I just shelled out $100AUD for this apparently worthless Spelljammer setting, im not shelling out another $100+ on "D&D Beyond" just so I might see an update to the mechanics! Which, btw, D&DB isnt working for me...all im getting is a white/blank webpage!!!
Yeah i noticed that when I got my Eberton setting book a year ago. Keith Bakers own Exploring Eberron book on the DMs guild did WAY MORE to explain the setting than the WoTC book did, heck the old 3.5e book for the setting do this beautifully. I also live in Australia and frankly spending $60 + on a single book with half the setting missing just.... isn't worth the price. Unless they release adventure books in the setting fill to in those gaps which they haven't done for anything besides Wildermont it feels.... half arsed. I would love a Van Ritctens or Yawning Portal styled book for each individual setting so even though we don't get a massive campaign like icewindale we still have ways to generate our own adventures with said settings using various locations in them.... then MAYBE it might be worth while.
I homebrew my games anyway, so the setting's adventures, per se, isn't as important to me... But... my homegame was inspired by 3 D&D Campaign settings... Eberron, Spelljammer, and Dragonlance... various picks and pieces, as it were, but suffice to say, I NEEDED the details for Elemental Ships and the Lightning Rail from Eberron, and Ship-to-Ship combat and the Spelljammer stats from Spelljammer... and I got NEITHER from WotC's lack-luster cash-grabs. But yes, Iv been resorting to PDF's of earlier stuff that I dont have (basically anything that wasn't Eberron, since Dragonlance went "bye-bye" because of WotCvMW,TH drama; so I have nothing pre-2000's)... But just the fact that I have to retrofit old game mechanics into a balanced mechanic for 5E says everything. 5E might be "accessible", but its so unwilling to incorporate any new mechanics! BTW; For anyone reading... homebrew this little idea... Use the upscaling size for weapons rule in the 5E DMG, combined with the old 3.5 magic rules (power increases by caster level, not spell slot), throw in some of that 3.5 Eberron Artificer rule (perminantly imbuing Metamagic into a crafted magic weapon)... ...Then have an Artificer make a Ballista-sized Duelling Wand with Magic Missile! The Spelljammer would need either a central "weapon helm" or a Magic User on each "Wand Lance"; but just imagine that... 7d8 Magic Missiles streaking out and impacting an enemy Spelljammer... though, Iv always preferred hunting Illithids in Wildspace and the Phlogiston with this... ...oh, my old game back in High School was WILD!
Spelljammer Ship Rules: WHAT RULES? LOL Basically WotC just said "Make up what you want" I get it but I was looking forward to more in-depth ship to ship combat rules and guidlines/rules on building new types of ships. Might as well put a Spelljamming device in a dungeon and call it a ship. I understand why WotC would want to keep it simple but this book was really disappointing. No worries I will continue to use the old rules and will write my own.
WotC's also like, "Use the old Spelljammer books. We have them up on DM's Guild with all the warnings on them. They're kind of forwards compatible, and best of all, they're already written. Give us money."
There are some rules in the Spelljammer Academy stuff, but the breakdown of ships (including rules I wasn't immediately familiar with like Damage Threshold) are in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. I *do* think they should have put it in here or released it for free somewhere, but there you go.
Hate to say it, first thing I had to do was homebrew the ship-ship combat to something more reasonable. Moved to Hex grids, 100ft movement speed as "normal". My playtesting with my playgroup resulted in a "slow start" but "worth the wait" play session. The first 2-3 rounds were getting into range, I found myself tweaking as I went, but my table atleast took the changes as "yeh, this felt like a magical spaceship fight."
ran a space battle last night. felt very similar to sea battles in saltmarsh. one thing to mention is the target can only have mending cast on it once an hour so multiple mending casters isnt helpful and the potential damage you recieve can be huge the enemy limped away but the partys ship was also limping off. still its been fun so far we've been playing the spelljammer academy chapters to get to level 5 for the core adventure
Me and my group played Spelljammer Academy module. It's fun and all, but we reaaaally was expecting something to put us in the climax. But in the end the ship combat was just: maneuver, and attack with the siege weapons.
@@everettwatson4966 lots of chasing and taking out specific things like rudders or rigging to effect the other ships monuverbility and speed, then you move in with deck clearing weapons, and finally after that you attempt to board. personally I wanted ships roles that gave bonuses or had other mechanics associated with those roles. so a captian could give order to shoot something and players would get bonuses when using deck guns and such. also wanted things like random event table and a bit more for spells and items as it is a unique setting.
I love a lot of the stuff they released for Spelljammer, but I agree I also wish there was more content, I wasn't necessarily expecting a new class or anything but space themed subclasses would've been cool, in addition Dohwar are cool and I wish they had made them playable, but most of all, actual rules for the spelljamming ships in SPELLJAMMER would be nice
There are workable one page rules that allow multi ship functional combat and earlier versions of spell jammer had such systems. There are ships there that are tanks, casters and "healers" in the ship list if you know your stuff. At the very least in the combat, they should have had a helm dodge roll that dealt with weapons fire and ramming. A foil boarding to make a boarding action miss. The problem is tat they see the ship as flying dungeons not players in a dungeons. Its easy to fix. Create a Champaign story that has each player with his or her own ship, either captain or helm with NPC helms and crew in the others cases. have them fight a battle with a foe fleet or space boss.
You make several valid points in this video. I'm doubtful but hoping that WOTC or someone will pick up on this and provide some extra content dealing with this seemingly huge oversight. However, I'm more inclined to think they may have done this with the purpose of milking the Spelljammer campaign setting so they can sell other Spelljammer content down the line when it should have been included with this set. My 2 cents. Great video, Ted!
I think most people wanted more. I learned my lesson about preordering WOTC stuff, though. And started stocking up on 2e Spelljammer stuff, because....I wanna run Spelljammer.
Okay! My idea for fixing ship combat. Astral Divers. Large sized diving suit like mechs that the players themselves can pilot which can wield the weapons of a ship individually and allow them to operate it whilst flying in the void.
I intentionally didn't watch any spelljammer content until I got my box set, I can not describe how much my heart fell when i saw how thin the books are... the cover of a book should not be anywhere close to half of the thickness of the book. Edit. I was super looking forward to having some more crunchy mechanics to try to use to balance what I have built. My campaign heavily features aorship to airship combat and because I'm not a game designer, it's not well balanced or polished. I added Ship actions and a Ship Role as a co-path in level ups with different ones giving you better access to Ship features. I added a whole movement system, turning mechanics, a bunch of cool (but most likely unbalanced) weapons that fit my setting, there are like 7 classes of ships (which the ones in the book do not even come close to covering that kind of range). Military groups (mostly for me unless my players decide to try to rank up with the military factions) etc. I really wanted something solid to help me balance my stuff, since all dnd stuff gets super heavily play tested. I guess we should have expected it since there was no revised Ship combat UA
@@darksarcasmsvideodiaries6262 I will be clear, I have nothing against Tabaxi players, I get it. But you are right. Spelljammer was a Classic setting and I really feel like they did it massive disservice. I get not everyone wants complicated ship rules, but I really need them to get that they can sell a bigger and more expensive book to a smaller section of older players who want more rules. The argument is there that there is 3rd part to fill that role, but I dont think that should be necessary.
I've heard it said that there are some great vehicle rules from DOA that could be applied to nautical or even spelljammer ship actions. may be worth checking out to deepen interactions for players.
I don't necessarily think we need a whole new set of rules for ship to ship combat, but there needs to be better guidance for DMs to run these situations when they do come up. I mean, who isn't going to want to attack other vessels and board them. What is here isn't all that helpful. And I felt the same way with the Saltmarsh material. I ended up pulling more concepts from an old BECMI gazetteer for my seafaring campaign. And in the end it was too much crunch for our campaign. So I'm not sure more rules are the answer, but guidance is certainly appreciated.
I agree that I expected a bit more on making your own ships and maybe even how to run a hijacking kind of maneuvers but ultimately I have to say that my players rarely enjoy ship sort of combat, usually one guy loves the stuff mechanically and otherwise but I believe that's the part of our brains that maybe enjoy tactic games or war games while people like my wife will participate to make it go more smoothly but ultimately don't enjoy her experience due to lack of agency. I know it's lame to basically just say close and board them, but I think this opens up a lot more creative narrative for every player... if that makes sense, sorry for the long post :/
Can anyone be specific in what they think was missing from the spelljamming mechanics? you can move the ship to different places, you can move it in combat, you can attack with it? Idk I've not ran a spelljammer before, but what was missing?
Unfortunately it doesn't matter what WotC releases, modern toxic "fans" will always rip it apart. It's not cool to like new content anymore, you've got to trash it to show others what an edgelord you are and complain about how everything was sooooo much better in the good old days.
ANY mechanics whatsoever! They gave you nothing! WOTC sucks now. Just use 2E or Wildspace or some 3rd party source. I have had to do this several times now to shore up some the crap that WOTC parts out!
@@darksarcasmsvideodiaries6262 I mean, I listed some mechanics it did give. Genuinely I'm wanting to know what is missing. Please, what mechanics is the books missing that 2e or 3rd party provide?
Another thing I don’t like is that they don’t even describe things like RealmSpace. I was expecting that, instead they give us a new “Wildspace” system. They don’t go into any of the old lore, got rid of “crystal spheres” and the phlogiston. 🤷♂️
I don't have the book, but from what you've shown, all I want for ship-vs-ship combat is there, except for what happens when you're adrift in space without a ship. I'm curious what else people would want. For building ships, I'd just use one of the premades, add/switch out weapons, & adjust the cost with the weapon prices. I'm a tad disappointed there are supposedly no rules for reinforcing the hull or adding cargo space.
I rule that if you can do it in saltmarsh you can do it in spelljammer there is various ways to upgrade and customize your ship in in saltmarsh if you add the decent Into advernes war machine upgrades and you can easily build a ship from scratch also I think there is air ships in the acquisitions Incorporated book so add though ships and upgrades too
I’ll use a bunch of the 2E rules for maneuvering abilities and construction rules. One thing I find interesting is I didn’t see a max size just a minimum size on tonnage.
2 года назад
Thanks! I’ve been asking myself why had nobody said just this! At least you can say follow saltmarsh rules for the rest of the mechanics
From a lot of the forms and groups most people are using old spell jammer books from previous editions for most of their mechanics and converting them they could have done that at least
I do agree that they should have "make your own ship" rules. Instead of just here's the 16 you got. but I don't think combat needs to be more complicated then it is.I don't want a whole new rule system for combat to teach the players, It works well enough. As for weapons on the ships. I'm just going to use spell as upgrades. So like fireball cannon that takes 3 actions to cast but deals more. Etc. Similar how they tell you to use spells as environmental hazards .
Everytime I try to come up with ideas for what they could've added my mind goes to well their's already a magic item or spell that does that Like lets go star trek and have a station in charge of beaming people on and off the ship, well then that can be handled by a helm of teleportation attuned to a guy named Scotty, and let them target allies far away Tractor beam, ring of telekinesis but change the size restrictions Lazers, wildmount has the arcane cannon, alternative cannons that are just a wand of lightning bolts or fireball reskined, mean while the dragon figure head from saltmarsh costs 3 times as much for less effect I think just give the Spell Jamming helm existing magic items reskined to be stations is cleaner then whatever Wotc would've come up with
But you can make your own ship. They state in the book that you can put a spell jammer helm on any object that weighs 1 ton or more and turn it into a spell jammer. Giant skeletons, normal boats. The party tree house. You can make custom ships it’s just up to you
lol Admittedly, was absolutely expecting to see it say: 'Spelljamming "Ship Rules" (or Lack there of) in Spelljammer...'. I do find it interesting that the DM's Screen appears to have a whole panel with rules I can't seem to find in the book. Maybe I'm just blind. At least I know I can find them on the screen. I'm really hoping that Planescape adds more rules.
Basically it is like farscape and stargate altantis use and unless you use spells that need line of sight you can place yourself on any point of the ship and cast your own spells while seated on the chair.
There is a lot of information there, as a DM i can place the ship outsid eof the Astral sea anywhere in between 1000 to 250 feet and have it fly in the rest before combat to as close as i want. Gun ranges, spells and range weapons are not impacted, only melee by weightlessness so you can target spellls, weapons that can do more than damage threshold to the ship in one attack or to a person in one attack. You have jolly boats for transport or jump across, depending on air bubble size of the ship. And you have a crew on the ship that can help with fighting. As long as there is no confliction in the rules, you can do whatever you want.
You as a player can use your own actions to fight, no one said not to use the ship weapons period, you have a crew that man the weapons and fight back, that is why its two sides, ship says how many crew it has or you hire the crew if you build your own ship and they use their actions to load, aim and fire the weapons. While you stand on deck and fire your weapons across and kill crew men because you also have a damage threshold that most normal weak weapons will not make.
No, no, no, no, if you want to build your own ship, build it, you make the plans, use the stronghold rules in downtime or boat building rules, also rules on building weapons, you need wood and and stuff. You have rules for this, just not limited for spelljammer.
I am so glad I did not run out and buy this. It is totally half-baked. If they would have included real ship rules, it would go from "no" to "probably buy" for me.
I'm kind of mixed about this! Really enjoyed the adventure and the concept of Spelljammer, and the monsters are going to be fun to run, but there's little information about making your own wildspace or spelljammer. My plan is to take the Spelljammer as a framework and take bits from Treasure Planet to fill in the gaps.
do the different ships have different maneuvering properties? otherwise seems like a case of maybe just realizing ship combat is more simple or straightforward then we might have imagined without the nitty gritty? i can't really think of what else would go into it if you know how they move and how the weapons work
@@brianzmek7272 oh wow that is kinda silly not to have caster ability matter. like, my warlock sailor should have significant built-in advantage or some mechanical bonus
As an introduction to Spelljammer the rules are totally fine. I'm not disappointed at all. It's enough to get my players into the setting, and not overload me as a DM. Additionally. I don't think the WotC are done with Spelljammer. I suspect that there will be supliment books for the setting... like a Tashas or Xanathers, that can expand on the core rules.
The issue is that they just did not give themselves enough pages so they could cover stuff. It should have been 4 booklets, The adventure and monster compendium are fine but the first book should have been split into two books, one with races, backgrounds and lore about spelljammer while the other one should have been like 2e The Concordance of Arcane Space from the box set that covered ships and combat.
3:22 100mil miles/day comes out to about 0.6% the speed of light. Not bad for interplanetary travel, but nowhere close to the FTL speeds you'd get from the likes of Star Wars or Star Trek. In terms of scale, it's a step up from the Expanse at best. To put it in perspective, at that speed, you could travel from Earth to Mars, or Earth to the Sun in ~22 hours, Earth to Pluto in ~4.5 days, and at least 3~4 months to reach the outer limits of the heliosphere (~110±10 AU from Sol). It'd take around 707 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system (~4.393 ly from Sol), so interstellar travel would not be feasible as is.
I agree there isn’t a lot for space combat, were they asssuming space battles would happen in the empty parts of space? They should have used the chase table at least, modifying it for ships. Since all you care about is space between…
I would suggest Dark Matter from the Middle Finger of Vecna. All D&D races work in it, but there are lore changes for the races presented in the book. Multiple factions, better ship mechanics including ship combat, plus space style subclasses.
I remember in an episode of Critical Role that Matt printed out a bunch of rules for players to use in nautical combat and then when they got close to a ship they one-shot it with a spell. I can understand people's frustrations with the lacking rules for ship to ship combat, and I am absolutely not a game designer, but I'm not sure how to incorporate something like that when having two wizards spam fireball every turn is just as, if not more, effective than arcane cannons or whatever. It seems like a difficult needle to thread with the power of casters as they currently are, and on top of that, if ship-to-ship combat didn't involve PC abilities then players would be frustrated that they can't use all of their cool stuff. I imagine you could get around all of this by having higher damage on-board weapons coupled with high damage thresholds for ships but that might feel a little too articificial? I don't know. I'm not sure how to do it in such a way that it doesn't just become a slog with no tactics other than ships blasting each other until one falls over.
Thats all? Really? Some time ago I wrote spaceship Rules for the cypher System by myself that are as complex as building Characters with Stats, Space combat Rules, ship artifacts and unique ship frames, classes and cores... You could built an athena class Destroyer that attracts pilgrims Or a Leviathan class Carrier that Hungers. I wrote tons of options to choose from for fun and they do this when they get paid for it? Maybe I should just convert it to spelljammer?
I can understand some folks may have wanted [good] space combat, even if it's something D&D has never needed before to be amazing. Perhaps they will even add it later. I just hope people don't pan the whole product line because of it not meeting one expectation some had. (Or worse, it becomes "cool" to hate Spelljammer... it may already be happening.) I'm already having fun in the setting!
It feels like there are rules for space combat in this book, but you have to put all the information from it together. ( which I'm doing now so I can explain it to my Players maybe)
Yep 100% correct. They needed to at least have maneuverability rules and firing arcs for weapons. Without that they effectively removed ship tactics in combat. It would literally just require 2 tables to be added to the book and would add so much to the combat system. They really dropped the ball on this one. They is no excuse for not giving us at least the basic mechanics.
whoever thought they could fit a whole-ass setting book in 64 pages... they were wrong saltmarsh's seafaring appendix alone took 30 pages, and everything in it is useful and necessary imo
A book which isn't even a campaign setting, just an adventure anthology. And weighs in at... 256 pages according to Amazon. And if not for the comments on this video, I would never have thought to look at it for these rules. I might end up begrudgingly buying a copy.
I think a good example of an rpg that has both space and ground is Star Wars 5e that has rules built in for creating your own ships, how combat works, along with the regular ground based combat
Double check the Of Ships and the Sea UA and everything published in ghost of saltmash ship rules. Will say you complain about the ship section but you forgot that the wildspace rule section are also a major part of ship battles. Have not tested encounters yet or read if their are interesting examples in the adventure, but will say players will have a funnier time thing about how a 3d environment effects ship fights, do you tray to board the ship by jump onto their underside only to be counted by space ropers attached to the hool which grab crew as it passes over, or do you weaken the ship before raming it, given your ship the bigger mass and couseing the enemies to fall overboard. Their are less hard defined actions players can take but players can have far more creative fun using 3d and unique gravity of wildspace then the grittyness of putting a exact number for when the crew will mutiny.
I agree that they left people wanting when it comes to the ship to ship space battles. As someone who DM'd back in AD&D when the original Spelljammer released, it is very disappointing. It just piles on to the continuing vagueness of the 5e rule set. It is my biggest gripe about the system.
After I read the book I was waiting for this video. Hey Ted, check out the QR code that comes with the books. It takes you to a customer survey for the Spelljammer set. Tell them you want proper space combat.
Wildjammer should be used to supplement this sparse rule book as much as possible.
You’re not off base. I was very disappointed with how much is not in this book. What’s there is cool but the splat book needed another 4-8 pages for crew roles and actions, ship weapons, ship customization rules and random tables for generating planets and systems. WotC is further moving away from giving us rules and instead forcing DMs to be game designers. Isn’t that what we pay them for?
if got you've Ghosts of Saltmarsh, i'd highly recommend using its ship roles and customization rules, though of course it'd been nice to see them reprinted in spelljammer itself
DnD has historically put the onus on the DM to be a game designer. Combine that with people wanting less "crunchy" rules as editions advance and it seems kind of unavoidable that they (WotC) can really only lay the foundation. Also importajnt to remember that if you are trying that hard to bend DnD into something else, then it might be more worth your time to find a system more in line with what you want.
@@cookwithsalt2577 the book about ships in space has basically no rules for ships fighting in space, for creating planets, crewing ships, etc
This is objectively a problem. WoTC product quality has been declining for a few years now.
Honestly, ghosts of saltmarsh has all of that you want, and you could even adapt the island creation tables to create your own planets!
@@Kuwagumo Then they should have adapted all that in this book set that they want us to buy.
I took a quick look through saltmarsh, to be honest a lot of that ship content could be brought into Spelljammer with very little change. There is also a great deal of oldschool Spelljammer content that people are adapting to fill in the gaps. With how much there is already out in the world that could be basically copy pasted into Spelljammer, it is a little strange WoTC didn't include it or at least point players towards it for further inspiration.
I've heard the term, "slimflation" or "shrinkflation" used in some of the econ podcasts I listen to and this fits. Mostly they were talking specifically about food because it's the easiest to see, but it applies across the board.
So you have a juice bottle with 20 oz. originally for 3.99. The company talks about making it "eco-friendly" and puts out this new juice container for 3.99. The bottle is shaped differently and supposedly uses less plastic. It's also now 16 oz. For 3.99.
The price stays the same *or goes up* , but the volume of product sold goes down. The company has less packaging cost, and less raw material cost, but an equal or greater retail price tag.
You can see why I recognized the trend in books when shown it in food and hygiene products as examples.
It's infuriating when you see it. It is, literally, artificially created inflation pushed downstream, for record profits after record profits. While the companies then bitch when employees want more pay.
I learned new terms for something I’ve noticed for a while. Thanks!
In particular I noticed this when buying toothpaste. 😅
All I wanted from Spelljammer was ship to ship rules.
Not hard to homebrew your own.
@@everettwatson4966 then why on earth did everyone have to pay such an exuberant price? We are paying WOTC to write the rules. It shouldn't be up to the consumer to fix a terrible product
All got was greed and excuses from the non-Gronard players.
@@everettwatson4966 I kind of assumed that the company creating content I pay for would do that for me, so I wouldn't havve to do it myself
The book is a joke, don't buy it.
@@Blargaha I feel bad for everyone who wanted Spelljammer. You deserved better. The last book they released that I was mostly happy with was Van Richten’s. They have been on a losing streak and the real shame is I don’t think they care. Thanks god for 3rd party companies and DMs Guild. That’s where the best content comes from these days.
I wish there was more rules in this book!
That sums up my entire relationship with 5e. I buy a book, read through it and ask myself is that it. It's like they want me to design the game myself.
@@Shade400 Yeah, that's kinda what a DM does. They give you a basic framework and then you make a game out of it. If you don't want to do that there are many premade adventures for you to choose from. In this particular setting it's Light of Xaryxis. Try running that first. I haven't bought this set yet, and I'm not sure I will, however, for the price I don't see much to complain about. It's really just one book broken into three pieces. It could have been more "book", but then it would have cost more as well. I'm still on the fence with this one.
@@lukedesmith any given 3.5 supliment has easily 5 times the amount of useable content this book had and for the same price. I want that kind of quality. for a equivilent book look at stormwrack it had more ships, the same number of races, several pages of ship rules and tons of spells, magic items, nad prestige classes. Im using it for my game and ive barely needed to do any modification. the new spelljammer book leaves so much blank it would be genuinely less work to port over ship rules from 3.5 than to try and work with what they gave
@@Shade400 This. 'Just Homebrew it' or 'you can make it up yourself!' is not an excuse for fucking lazy content and I'm getting tired of people like @Luke Desmith using it as an excuse. Also it has less pages than Theros, Eberron or Van Richten's guide for an additional $20...they could have quite easily crammed in 'more book' for the same price...
@@luketfer Rule 0 Fallacy: "The DM can homebrew around it ergo you aren't allowed to speak of it."
Seeing the difference between Mending and normal repairs. A recent post on the D&DNext subreddit reveals the first printing of the books refer to a 'repair object' spell which doesn't exist. This highly suggests that originally the 'Repair Objects' spell was going to be a levelled spell which gave that amount of hitpoints but it seemed to have been dumped onto the cutting room floor last minute and they just slapped it onto the Mending cantrip...
What is essitientially a cure wounds for constructs would have been a great addition by now, but instead we get this repeated bloating of the mending cantrip.
Fabricate might be a good replacement.
You would think by them making Spelljammer into three books we would get more stuff sadly that did not happen if it was not for the new races I would have not bothered buying Spelljammer
Kinda takes up more space with those thick covers. Those could have been filled with content instead. At least 200 pages lost to that alone. I think wotc is just messing with us at this point.
@@GetSwifty the thing is add up the pages of all 3 books 192 pages, that is the same page count as tasha's and xanathars
Same shit that is happening in mainstream comics is happening with WoTC... disappointing, all show and no substance... reimagine our favorite heroes/settings, but never for the better
@@sylvnfox and that's still 120 less than Eberron and 80 less than Van Richtens
@@pjmisley Yea Tasha was the first showing those signs. With how the term race was problematic even though in D&D the term is used correctly unlike irl. Then how they redid the Drow lore. Tasha was my last book for the subclasses. But I've been keeping an eye on D&D since I've been a player since 3.5e. I'm now playing PF2e though sure the Golarion setting feels more PC but it feels authentic than shoehorned with retcons.
100% agree. Been waiting so long for Spelljammer, Dark Sun & Planescape. Went from excited to disappointed quickly and it not just the ship to ship combat. Although that’s the most glaring issue.
Now I’m a worried we are going to end up with the same issue with Planescape next year.
Glad I held off buying. I can’t believe the books I’ve been waiting for goes on my do not buy right behind Strixhaven.
Just pick up an OSR retroclone of AD&D and play original Spelljammer.
I’m less worried about Planescape because all of the lore is on the internet but I am still concerned. Spelljammer missed the mark because of the lack of rules.
@@theeffete3396 the reason so many people play 5e is because players and games are easy to find. Finding a group to play an OSR Planescape campaign can be a challenge if not outright impossible for some.
So I feel the same in all ways EXCEPT that once they resurrect a setting you can make DMGuild material for it.
Which means I can make my Planescape Kickstarter once the official is on the table (most likely).
They will screw Planescape up too! Wait till the power creep hits with D&D One and destroys it totally!
I just wish there was more in general. Ive been starting to shift away from official 5e products because some older edition content just gives soo soo much more. Not to mention some of the kickstarters that have been coming out in the past few years also have offered so much more.
I recommend 3.5, it's just as moldable as 5e but actually has rules for when you wnat to do something spicific.
Check out Starfinder for a another D20 system that has deeper Spaceship rules.
Starfinder is a better system for fantasy in space than this. And I just prefer PF2e for generic fantasy now. A shame 5e had so much potential but they're playing it too safe in just about everything about it.
started 5e recently and kinda came to figure my character would be into crafting, very bummed at the lack of it. i found a unicorn horn and my pc knows it's pretty valuable magically, so i looked all over for what i could eventually fashion it into and the official stuff is just like, "magic dust?"
Dark Matter is a third-party 5e product from Mage Hand Press that has a lot more mechanics for their ship system, including buying upgrades and things for the ships. I think they'd be a great supplement to these rules, even though they're a bit more tech-y than the ones in Spelljammer.
I'm finding myself using AD&D 2and Edition Spelljamming mechanics to do a lot of the filling in of things this set just doesnt have...highly recommend 2e as a patch
It's still sad that you gotta use 2e rules to fix 5e content that should've had it to begin with...
That’s straight where I went to look. Converting the ships is pretty easy and was a good exercise looking through the old lore.
I picked up the Drive By RPG Spelljammer 2E set on a whim last year, I was definitely expecting something more like that out of this set.
Anyone who wants to run a Spelljammer game should also get Ghosts of Saltmarsh. It has extensive rules for ships/crew. It also has rules for ship based challenges that could be applied to Spelljamming vessels as well.
That's actually how I ran a 5E Spelljammer game a few years ago. Just modified some ships to work , and tried to work a third axis into the combat.
To be honest, I don't particularly feel like giving WOTC MORE money just because they made a subpar product to start with. The avernus vehicle rules are good as well but I'm not happy with having to cobble it together
I know this comment is hold but the problem with the rules from GoS is that they suck. They are not engaging for multiple players. Each player just grab a weapon and the captain dies everything else.
After seeing how little official content was included that was worth the ink it was printed with, I went and backed your sponsor from a couple days back with the space 5e Kickstarter.
WotC could have added a lot more content to this by making the books softcover like they did back in the day. For the cost, and thickness of those hardcovers, they easily could have been 96 page books, each.
If you want good space combat, I would recommend SW5e. We are using that for the space part of my spelljamming campaign and it rocks.
Ah the fabled Consitutiton Check.
As for the ship combat rules, Saltmarsh has those, Treantmonk has videos going over the rules and showcasting them in action, they're actually very well made.
Which makes this all the more unjustified - they already had rules, they could have reprinted them with some small tweaks. But instead, we just don't get any rules. It would have been one thing if this book had been just an adventure perhaps... but it's supposed to be a three book box set campaign setting. It should be comprehensive, but instead it's barely adequate.
You are directly on the mark! I felt like these books were Wotc charging me $50 just to tell me I had permission to play in space. There are alot of holes where content should be, ship mechanics, upgrades, weapons, gear. It all feels lacking. As soon as I saw what what in the books I started hombrewing my own variation based on a mix of Spelljammer, Ghost of the Saltmarsh and Decent into Avernus, so far I'm pretty happy with it. I'm excited to go to space, but not because of these books.
Something tells me this might be a cart-before-the-horse scenario for WotC with 5.5e on the horizon. They're already altering how monsters, races, and backgrounds work, they could be tweaking ship-to-ship combat for the revised DMG too based on feedback from Ghosts of Saltmarsh and might be expecting us to return to the setting two years from now. I dunno, I could be totally wrong, but right now it seems like they're expecting a lot of DMs to tweak what exists in the DMG, Ghosts of Saltmarsh, the original Spelljammer, and whatever sci-fi game they can get ahold of to finish the setting for them until they can figure out how this is supposed to work.
Tbh I feel that the rules kind of work to a degree but there's so many questions that I have, how do the ships move and why can they just 180 turn on the spot? Why can a fireball deal more damage to ships than the weapons meant to attack them? What's the benefits of staying in a ship at all? I don't mind coming up with my own answers to these questions but when it almost feels like I'm expected to answer them myself then what's the point of doing it at all?
My house ruling is going to be that shipboard weapons automatically bypass the damage threshold. They were designed for attacking other ships, they should be able to do the job. This will give them a leg up on at least lower level spell attacks.
So you agree with the majority of players taking issue with the rules here. Most are not saying the rules given are bad by design but bad because they are a tenth of what they should have been. The Saltmarsh ship rules should have been tweaked and included or at least had a 'reference with these changes' bit. Have changes like the weapon range should be noted to range traveled per round I suppose you could adjust for damage threshold but I wouldn't. But think about it if a ship comes within a mile (5280 feet or 1056 grid squares) of your ship you drop to sunlight. At this point you have two "choices" try to outrun a ship that has the same speed as you (never gonna happen if they are following you) or you turn to fight them which means Roll Initiative. At 1mile if both ships "Dash" head on that I'd 160 feet a round (32 squares) or 30 rounds to get in range of the 600ft longbow 32 rounds if you want to use any other weapons. So 3 minutes of charging at each other personally I'm launching Ballista since it is point and shoot (no gravity or resistance) inertia means that if my Ballista bolt can hit 480ft in a round with gravity it should be able to do that without so if I fire 1st round it should continue until it hits something since there is no gravity to effect it. So if both ships are a mile out and one fires unless the target moves out of the line of fire in 11rounds the projectile should hit. You can do that mechanically. Due to it being the secondary range it is at disadvantage, now I would hold the roll until the striking round to avoid Meta argument but if the ship doesn't move it is treated like a normal attack if the ship moves out of the line it misses, if the ship heads tward it adjust the round it would strike and treat with normal attack rules. This makes space combat more number crunchy but also motivates for actual combat not the typical 'run up to each other and bash until one stops moving' and it would have only needed maybe 2-3 pages if the reference Saltmarsh rules.
I'm using my original set rules. Glad I kept them and the maps.
There are actually really detailed ship rules in Ghost of Saltmarsh. I highly recommend checking them out for anyone running ship combat in Spelljammer.
Good tip. I was just going to adapt Star Wars Saga Edition space combat to the Spelljammer. With that said, WotC indirectly requiring Ghost of Saltmarsh (which I don’t own) is a fail on their part. The Spelljammer Adventurer’s guide should have everything you need in it.
@@seibervideo Agreed. Unreasonable to require both. That beings said they are shocking detailed in GoS. They are arguably some of the most detailed rules that WotC has put out ever.
I agree. Those mechanics are amazing and will easily supplement most of the details I was initially looking for in this release.
That was my first thought too. I agree that those sort of things should have been reprinted to add some more beef to the book.
@@seibervideo yeah, it would have been nice see some GoS reprinted for spelljammer
I can honestly say this the last WOTC book I pre-order. The problem with WOTC is that they have good ideas but don't put the finishing touches that the DM needs to run the game.
Great video like always and thank you for the honest review on the rules.
Just a slight correction on the speed, 100,000,000m/24hr is roughly 0.006% the speed of light (as we know it in our real-life universe) so not exactly warp speed, still incredibly fast.
Earth to mars in about 12 hours. On average
With the last few books I have been left saying “fuck wotc” and this continues the trend. They don’t deserve ownership of this game
Side Initiative is something that me and my group does all the time. We like it as we can have people go for when they want to go after or before their fellow Allies (For me I like going last after seeing what my fellow allies chose what they wanted to do for the turn.) Usually me and my friends never gang up on enemies during side initiative because there are multiple enemies to deal with, so we usually split up who we want/ need to kill, 2 people at most attacking the same monster.
Back in 1E and 2E we just called Group initiative.
@@RottenRogerDM Yep! Basically the same thing!
The thing I hate the most about ship speed in this is that at least half of these ships travel at a brisk walking pace when they're not actually spelljamming. Speeds for a flying vehicle should be much higher than they are. Especially when you math out things like the size of the air envelope for a planet, and how it'd take you no less than 40 days to leave the Earth's atmosphere at that speed before you can actually spelljam RAW, since you have to be in space AND at least a mile away from the nearest object.
the earths atmosphere only extends 4 miles up. most ships would make that in just 1 hour, the very fast ships will mak it in just 30min. and this was exactly how 2e spelljammer was aswell. it took 1 hour to leave the atmosphere of an earth sized planet.
@@sylvnfox Scientifically, yes. But the rules for an air envelope given state the air envelope of an object is 3x the length of the object which in this case the object is a planet 7900 miles across. That means if you leave it and travel away you need to clear 7900 miles of distance not 4. They did not specify planets as being any different or give any estimate of how long it would take to exit, so you are left calculating that distance at a speed of like 4mph for most of these ships.
@sylvnfox Read it again. Page 23 under spelljamming helm says "If the ship is in space and no other objects weighing 1 ton or more are within 1 mile of it, you can use the spelljamming helm to move away..." etc etc.
It doesn't make sense for mending to "heal" a ship so much. 1) because it's clearly the *far* better option compared to have it on dry dock and 2) mending can't repair breaks or tears bigger than 1 foot, which on the context of space battle I reckon most damages are bigger than that.
They should have include a new spell for ship repair.
i.e. Shipwright patchwork: 1 hour cast, VSM (5 gold worth of ship material) repair ship for 1 HP.
Then make dry dock repair 1d6 + 1(20gp), 3(60gp), 5(100gp), 7(140gp) ship health per day depending how good of a shipwright the party wants to hire.
@@martinbowyer7906 would be far better indeed
SW5E (as seen recently featured in Dimension 20: A Starstruck Odyssey) does space combat really well. Everyone go check that out
I think we all wanted more ship-to-ship combat mechanics!! I'm working on some homebrew for my players that allows them to use their Hit Dice to assist the Helmsmen in moving the ship more quickly, buffing their allies, or more quickly firing siege weapons.
I think your comparison with the Infernal War Machine was spot on Ted! Really disappointed it did not include more detailed ship to ship mechanics, but also lacked guidance for DMs on building their own world in the multiverse.
“Captains and cannons” is a good module for ship combats. It’s Like $10
Well I guess I am going to continue using my homebrew ship combat rules some more.
Some of these rules will still be useful.
My favorite thing about my homebrew system was giving the ship spell slots and special armaments that required the spell slots to use. Powerful weapons, flight, making fog cover, even once effectively gave a ship a scaled up misty step.
Something that I thought would be really cool for Spelljaming would be the idea that each ship had multiple components like engines and shield generators. When fighting other ships, the players could damage these components and knock the enemy ship's systems offline.
It would be cool to have roles on the ship and what each member is in charge of while spacejamming. I'm thinking like Star Trek-ish but I guess I'll just play a Star Trek RPG if I want a ship with actual character roles.
The way I tend to treat a ship in D&D is mostly as a mobile base of operations which can also be a convenient place for a combat encounter from time to time. What I think I'll end up doing is re-purposing the rules from Acquisitions Inc. for base building and some of the vehicle rules from Avernus so the players can have something close to an x-wing to fly sorties from the main ship
I'm glad I still have my original 2E Spelljammer boxed set.
Know it's for your gravity/air pocket video but there is major flaw in the rules as written over them when it comes to planets.
Rules state air pocket is equal to radius of the object so 5k mile radius planet has 5k mile air pocket. Issue is whilst in an air pocket can only move at flight speed of vessel so say 4mph. 5000 / 4 = 52 days to get into orbit!!!
Reality is more like earth where it is only 8miles thus only 2hrs to get into space.
On Earth, it's more like 70+ miles to space, but yeah. Spending a day flying to orbit is still a very leisurely path to orbit compared to rocketry, but not like spending nearly two months.
Well it's radius, so it would only be 2.5k, but yeah that's still way too much
I recommend Vehicles Revisited in drivethrough RPG and Spelljammer Combat Expanded on dms guild. Both are pay what you want and a ton better.
Im really getting tired of WOTC’s vagueness on official content, i would assume they have enough money and resources where they can give players comprehensive and fun ship to ship combat mechanics. Ive felt the same for every recent campaign setting book, they just don’t have enough stuff to set them apart mechanically from a traditional dnd adventure. Ghostfire game’s new fable series has an over 100 page pdf with lore, rules on naval travel and combat, ship customization, gathering crew, resource management, and an introductory adventure and that just on the 1st out of 6 chapters they plan on releasing.
It's not about money and resources, it's what they've learned to do from community feedback.
No matter what, when they try to add rules to the base game the community freaks out.
People keep pointing to ghost of saltmarsh's ship rules, but if no one remembers, those rules were almost universally panned by the community when they came out.
Keep an eye on the Abominations Vault 5e conversion coming out next month i believe. It's a PF2e adventure module that's getting an official 5e conversion by Paizo requested by Wizards. The same goes for the Kingmaker adventure module which was a PF1e module being updated to PF2e and converted to 5e as well. Paizo used to make adventure modules back during 3.5e and those are seen as some of the best modules for d&d ever outside of those made by Gygax himself. Those will be really well made since Paizo is really good at creating adventures.
@@BlackHeart1216 maybe I’m in the minority but I’ve used Saltmarsh’s ship rules in a campaign and it went pretty well. I think as people gain experience running the game they get more comfortable making up common sense rules as they go. Rarely do I feel stumped nowadays. Rules are best used as a loose guide than the gospel.
Most of the people who built 5e have moved on, or been blacklisted from the industry. WotC has been mostly taken over by progressive Seattle types with minimal (if any) game design experience. Several of the uncredited subcontractor writers for Radiant Citadel were cookbook authors. It's a company run by posers that is a shell of its former self, rather like modern Blizzard Entertainment.
@@magonus195 what does that have to do with any of this?
as a big ebberon fan im excited to incorporate alot of the themes and rules from spelljammer into the ebberon world, im just not sure how to incorporate the idea of wildspace and travel to other worlds into ebberon or how to balance the airships with spelljamming ships in combat and things like that. any more experienced dms have any ideas?
With the mending maybe I don't understand correctly but it seems that the ship can only get healed with mending *once per hour (not day as I had previously said thanks codebracker) no matter how many casters you have.
It seems it's limited by the target(ship) not the caster.
Still good option though.
Once per hour
@@codebracker thanks
With the combat systems set up in 5e ship combat doesn't feel super important overall in my opinion. I plan to make a Hadozee monk who can glide around and punch stuff and honestly I couldn't care less about firing a ballista or a reflavored multi-attack crossbow as a gattling gun. Spellcasters who meticulously prune their spell lists don't wanna have to deal with putting a huge amount into dex instead of their spellcasting modifiers and for range builds you are more focused on your crazy sharpshooter hand crossbow build then you are on a random weapon you use like a quarter of the time. I think the rules are serviceable for getting into an interesting situations, where gravity fields change as you ram into a ship at a 90° angle from above and drop into the new ship, but then you are back to what really matters. The characters and their space themed builds should be more fun than a ship that you drive to the cool planets your DM makes.
1:46 Yeah, but even then, there was alot of pages without alot added.
They didnt get into any informational mechanics on Elemental Ships, the Lightning Rail, or Underwater Ships; they didnt really go into detail about Elemental Binding, and the general Setting differences between Eberron and their beloved Forgettable Realms; like how Xen'drik Elves are not the same as FR Drow, with their spider fetish.
Maybe im old fashion... but when a Setting book comes out, I REALLY wanna see the differences of that setting, and any and all new mechanics related to the new setting...
Im my group's DM, and I did NOT want to have to jerry-rig other game mechanics (or OLDER game mechanics) into what is apparently such a widely used and accessible game! Im sick of having to homebrew mechanics for 5E D&D just to make things work, because Weasles of the Cost cant be bothered to incorporate and undate older game mechanics!
And no, releasing digital erratta's isnt good enough, because not everyone WANTS all their stuff digital... and sometimes, some currencies, make buying the digital copy as expensive as the physical copy...and since I just shelled out $100AUD for this apparently worthless Spelljammer setting, im not shelling out another $100+ on "D&D Beyond" just so I might see an update to the mechanics!
Which, btw, D&DB isnt working for me...all im getting is a white/blank webpage!!!
Yeah i noticed that when I got my Eberton setting book a year ago. Keith Bakers own Exploring Eberron book on the DMs guild did WAY MORE to explain the setting than the WoTC book did, heck the old 3.5e book for the setting do this beautifully.
I also live in Australia and frankly spending $60 + on a single book with half the setting missing just.... isn't worth the price. Unless they release adventure books in the setting fill to in those gaps which they haven't done for anything besides Wildermont it feels.... half arsed. I would love a Van Ritctens or Yawning Portal styled book for each individual setting so even though we don't get a massive campaign like icewindale we still have ways to generate our own adventures with said settings using various locations in them.... then MAYBE it might be worth while.
I homebrew my games anyway, so the setting's adventures, per se, isn't as important to me...
But... my homegame was inspired by 3 D&D Campaign settings... Eberron, Spelljammer, and Dragonlance... various picks and pieces, as it were, but suffice to say, I NEEDED the details for Elemental Ships and the Lightning Rail from Eberron, and Ship-to-Ship combat and the Spelljammer stats from Spelljammer... and I got NEITHER from WotC's lack-luster cash-grabs.
But yes, Iv been resorting to PDF's of earlier stuff that I dont have (basically anything that wasn't Eberron, since Dragonlance went "bye-bye" because of WotCvMW,TH drama; so I have nothing pre-2000's)...
But just the fact that I have to retrofit old game mechanics into a balanced mechanic for 5E says everything.
5E might be "accessible", but its so unwilling to incorporate any new mechanics!
BTW;
For anyone reading... homebrew this little idea...
Use the upscaling size for weapons rule in the 5E DMG, combined with the old 3.5 magic rules (power increases by caster level, not spell slot), throw in some of that 3.5 Eberron Artificer rule (perminantly imbuing Metamagic into a crafted magic weapon)...
...Then have an Artificer make a Ballista-sized Duelling Wand with Magic Missile!
The Spelljammer would need either a central "weapon helm" or a Magic User on each "Wand Lance"; but just imagine that... 7d8 Magic Missiles streaking out and impacting an enemy Spelljammer... though, Iv always preferred hunting Illithids in Wildspace and the Phlogiston with this...
...oh, my old game back in High School was WILD!
Spelljammer Ship Rules: WHAT RULES? LOL Basically WotC just said "Make up what you want" I get it but I was looking forward to more in-depth ship to ship combat rules and guidlines/rules on building new types of ships. Might as well put a Spelljamming device in a dungeon and call it a ship. I understand why WotC would want to keep it simple but this book was really disappointing. No worries I will continue to use the old rules and will write my own.
the rules in the book for ship to ship are set up for theater of the mind
WotC's also like, "Use the old Spelljammer books. We have them up on DM's Guild with all the warnings on them. They're kind of forwards compatible, and best of all, they're already written. Give us money."
There are some rules in the Spelljammer Academy stuff, but the breakdown of ships (including rules I wasn't immediately familiar with like Damage Threshold) are in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. I *do* think they should have put it in here or released it for free somewhere, but there you go.
Hate to say it, first thing I had to do was homebrew the ship-ship combat to something more reasonable. Moved to Hex grids, 100ft movement speed as "normal". My playtesting with my playgroup resulted in a "slow start" but "worth the wait" play session. The first 2-3 rounds were getting into range, I found myself tweaking as I went, but my table atleast took the changes as "yeh, this felt like a magical spaceship fight."
This is so much like "here is your wagon to go from one adventure spot to another".
Thank you Ted. Please continue these videos
I like that you could use these repair rules on water/land based vehicles as well.
ran a space battle last night. felt very similar to sea battles in saltmarsh.
one thing to mention is the target can only have mending cast on it once an hour so multiple mending casters isnt helpful and the potential damage you recieve can be huge the enemy limped away but the partys ship was also limping off.
still its been fun so far we've been playing the spelljammer academy chapters to get to level 5 for the core adventure
Me and my group played Spelljammer Academy module. It's fun and all, but we reaaaally was expecting something to put us in the climax. But in the end the ship combat was just: maneuver, and attack with the siege weapons.
Maybe I’m naive about this, but what more is there to ship combat than maneuver and use weapons?
@@everettwatson4966 lots of chasing and taking out specific things like rudders or rigging to effect the other ships monuverbility and speed, then you move in with deck clearing weapons, and finally after that you attempt to board. personally I wanted ships roles that gave bonuses or had other mechanics associated with those roles. so a captian could give order to shoot something and players would get bonuses when using deck guns and such. also wanted things like random event table and a bit more for spells and items as it is a unique setting.
I love a lot of the stuff they released for Spelljammer, but I agree I also wish there was more content, I wasn't necessarily expecting a new class or anything but space themed subclasses would've been cool, in addition Dohwar are cool and I wish they had made them playable, but most of all, actual rules for the spelljamming ships in SPELLJAMMER would be nice
There are workable one page rules that allow multi ship functional combat and earlier versions of spell jammer had such systems. There are ships there that are tanks, casters and "healers" in the ship list if you know your stuff. At the very least in the combat, they should have had a helm dodge roll that dealt with weapons fire and ramming. A foil boarding to make a boarding action miss. The problem is tat they see the ship as flying dungeons not players in a dungeons. Its easy to fix. Create a Champaign story that has each player with his or her own ship, either captain or helm with NPC helms and crew in the others cases. have them fight a battle with a foe fleet or space boss.
You make several valid points in this video. I'm doubtful but hoping that WOTC or someone will pick up on this and provide some extra content dealing with this seemingly huge oversight. However, I'm more inclined to think they may have done this with the purpose of milking the Spelljammer campaign setting so they can sell other Spelljammer content down the line when it should have been included with this set. My 2 cents. Great video, Ted!
I think most people wanted more. I learned my lesson about preordering WOTC stuff, though. And started stocking up on 2e Spelljammer stuff, because....I wanna run Spelljammer.
Well done sir even when you're disappointed in something you don't bash it. That's something a lot of folks can learn from
Don’t want to say too much and not get free stuff from WOTC! LOL
Okay! My idea for fixing ship combat. Astral Divers. Large sized diving suit like mechs that the players themselves can pilot which can wield the weapons of a ship individually and allow them to operate it whilst flying in the void.
I only want to pick these up so I can get the old Spelljammer books off DMs Guild and have a reference for converting them to 5e.
Saltmarsh does have some ship combat rules, IIRC. But you’d think they’d reference that if they intended for you to use that.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh does have naval combat rules
The spelljamming fight mechanics are definitely needed. Not only that but I HATE how all the ship stats are “ballista, mangonel” and that’s mostly it
I intentionally didn't watch any spelljammer content until I got my box set, I can not describe how much my heart fell when i saw how thin the books are... the cover of a book should not be anywhere close to half of the thickness of the book.
Edit. I was super looking forward to having some more crunchy mechanics to try to use to balance what I have built. My campaign heavily features aorship to airship combat and because I'm not a game designer, it's not well balanced or polished. I added Ship actions and a Ship Role as a co-path in level ups with different ones giving you better access to Ship features. I added a whole movement system, turning mechanics, a bunch of cool (but most likely unbalanced) weapons that fit my setting, there are like 7 classes of ships (which the ones in the book do not even come close to covering that kind of range). Military groups (mostly for me unless my players decide to try to rank up with the military factions) etc. I really wanted something solid to help me balance my stuff, since all dnd stuff gets super heavily play tested. I guess we should have expected it since there was no revised Ship combat UA
WOTC is catering to the lowest common denominator of player…the anime crowd who wants to play D&D as a kitty.
@@darksarcasmsvideodiaries6262 I will be clear, I have nothing against Tabaxi players, I get it. But you are right. Spelljammer was a Classic setting and I really feel like they did it massive disservice.
I get not everyone wants complicated ship rules, but I really need them to get that they can sell a bigger and more expensive book to a smaller section of older players who want more rules. The argument is there that there is 3rd part to fill that role, but I dont think that should be necessary.
I have started using DnD attack wing with Spelljammer sets. Fun!
I've heard it said that there are some great vehicle rules from DOA that could be applied to nautical or even spelljammer ship actions. may be worth checking out to deepen interactions for players.
Ghosts of Saltmarsh Ship rules and Infernal Machine Rules would probably do a lot to add on to 5E Spelljammer.
It would have been nice to have full stats for ships similar how they stated them out in the saltmarsh book
I don't necessarily think we need a whole new set of rules for ship to ship combat, but there needs to be better guidance for DMs to run these situations when they do come up. I mean, who isn't going to want to attack other vessels and board them. What is here isn't all that helpful. And I felt the same way with the Saltmarsh material. I ended up pulling more concepts from an old BECMI gazetteer for my seafaring campaign. And in the end it was too much crunch for our campaign. So I'm not sure more rules are the answer, but guidance is certainly appreciated.
I agree that I expected a bit more on making your own ships and maybe even how to run a hijacking kind of maneuvers but ultimately I have to say that my players rarely enjoy ship sort of combat, usually one guy loves the stuff mechanically and otherwise but I believe that's the part of our brains that maybe enjoy tactic games or war games while people like my wife will participate to make it go more smoothly but ultimately don't enjoy her experience due to lack of agency. I know it's lame to basically just say close and board them, but I think this opens up a lot more creative narrative for every player... if that makes sense, sorry for the long post :/
Can anyone be specific in what they think was missing from the spelljamming mechanics? you can move the ship to different places, you can move it in combat, you can attack with it? Idk I've not ran a spelljammer before, but what was missing?
Unfortunately it doesn't matter what WotC releases, modern toxic "fans" will always rip it apart. It's not cool to like new content anymore, you've got to trash it to show others what an edgelord you are and complain about how everything was sooooo much better in the good old days.
ANY mechanics whatsoever! They gave you nothing! WOTC sucks now. Just use 2E or Wildspace or some 3rd party source. I have had to do this several times now to shore up some the crap that WOTC parts out!
Toldja...
@@darksarcasmsvideodiaries6262 I mean, I listed some mechanics it did give. Genuinely I'm wanting to know what is missing. Please, what mechanics is the books missing that 2e or 3rd party provide?
You would need to get a copy of the 2E Spelljammer base set or the 2E War Captains Companion boxed set
Another thing I don’t like is that they don’t even describe things like RealmSpace. I was expecting that, instead they give us a new “Wildspace” system. They don’t go into any of the old lore, got rid of “crystal spheres” and the phlogiston.
🤷♂️
I don't have the book, but from what you've shown, all I want for ship-vs-ship combat is there, except for what happens when you're adrift in space without a ship. I'm curious what else people would want.
For building ships, I'd just use one of the premades, add/switch out weapons, & adjust the cost with the weapon prices. I'm a tad disappointed there are supposedly no rules for reinforcing the hull or adding cargo space.
I rule that if you can do it in saltmarsh you can do it in spelljammer there is various ways to upgrade and customize your ship in in saltmarsh if you add the decent Into advernes war machine upgrades and you can easily build a ship from scratch also I think there is air ships in the acquisitions Incorporated book so add though ships and upgrades too
I’ll use a bunch of the 2E rules for maneuvering abilities and construction rules. One thing I find interesting is I didn’t see a max size just a minimum size on tonnage.
Thanks! I’ve been asking myself why had nobody said just this! At least you can say follow saltmarsh rules for the rest of the mechanics
From a lot of the forms and groups most people are using old spell jammer books from previous editions for most of their mechanics and converting them they could have done that at least
I do agree that they should have "make your own ship" rules. Instead of just here's the 16 you got. but I don't think combat needs to be more complicated then it is.I don't want a whole new rule system for combat to teach the players, It works well enough.
As for weapons on the ships. I'm just going to use spell as upgrades. So like fireball cannon that takes 3 actions to cast but deals more. Etc. Similar how they tell you to use spells as environmental hazards
.
Everytime I try to come up with ideas for what they could've added my mind goes to well their's already a magic item or spell that does that
Like lets go star trek and have a station in charge of beaming people on and off the ship, well then that can be handled by a helm of teleportation attuned to a guy named Scotty, and let them target allies far away
Tractor beam, ring of telekinesis but change the size restrictions
Lazers, wildmount has the arcane cannon, alternative cannons that are just a wand of lightning bolts or fireball reskined, mean while the dragon figure head from saltmarsh costs 3 times as much for less effect
I think just give the Spell Jamming helm existing magic items reskined to be stations is cleaner then whatever Wotc would've come up with
Wonder why they didn't think it themselves...
I am considering individual initiatives and the ships tied to the pilot and the opposite crew goes together on a "monsters turn", maybe
But you can make your own ship. They state in the book that you can put a spell jammer helm on any object that weighs 1 ton or more and turn it into a spell jammer. Giant skeletons, normal boats. The party tree house. You can make custom ships it’s just up to you
lol Admittedly, was absolutely expecting to see it say: 'Spelljamming "Ship Rules" (or Lack there of) in Spelljammer...'. I do find it interesting that the DM's Screen appears to have a whole panel with rules I can't seem to find in the book. Maybe I'm just blind. At least I know I can find them on the screen.
I'm really hoping that Planescape adds more rules.
It almost had that title lol
We did get the ship combat rules in Ghosts of Saltmarsh.
Basically it is like farscape and stargate altantis use and unless you use spells that need line of sight you can place yourself on any point of the ship and cast your own spells while seated on the chair.
There is a lot of information there, as a DM i can place the ship outsid eof the Astral sea anywhere in between 1000 to 250 feet and have it fly in the rest before combat to as close as i want. Gun ranges, spells and range weapons are not impacted, only melee by weightlessness so you can target spellls, weapons that can do more than damage threshold to the ship in one attack or to a person in one attack. You have jolly boats for transport or jump across, depending on air bubble size of the ship. And you have a crew on the ship that can help with fighting. As long as there is no confliction in the rules, you can do whatever you want.
You as a player can use your own actions to fight, no one said not to use the ship weapons period, you have a crew that man the weapons and fight back, that is why its two sides, ship says how many crew it has or you hire the crew if you build your own ship and they use their actions to load, aim and fire the weapons. While you stand on deck and fire your weapons across and kill crew men because you also have a damage threshold that most normal weak weapons will not make.
No, no, no, no, if you want to build your own ship, build it, you make the plans, use the stronghold rules in downtime or boat building rules, also rules on building weapons, you need wood and and stuff. You have rules for this, just not limited for spelljammer.
I am so glad I did not run out and buy this. It is totally half-baked. If they would have included real ship rules, it would go from "no" to "probably buy" for me.
Pretty much everyone was complaining about the lack of rules for ship-to-ship combat.
I'm kind of mixed about this! Really enjoyed the adventure and the concept of Spelljammer, and the monsters are going to be fun to run, but there's little information about making your own wildspace or spelljammer.
My plan is to take the Spelljammer as a framework and take bits from Treasure Planet to fill in the gaps.
do the different ships have different maneuvering properties?
otherwise seems like a case of maybe just realizing ship combat is more simple or straightforward then we might have imagined without the nitty gritty?
i can't really think of what else would go into it if you know how they move and how the weapons work
spelljammer ship to ship combat is set up for theater of the mind.
Nope there is no maneuverability. the level of the pilot is irrelevant as well and the only crew matter for weapons.
@@brianzmek7272 oh wow that is kinda silly not to have caster ability matter. like, my warlock sailor should have significant built-in advantage or some mechanical bonus
@@laffingist218 I believe in old spelljammer your skill came.into play during ship to ship combat
As an introduction to Spelljammer the rules are totally fine. I'm not disappointed at all. It's enough to get my players into the setting, and not overload me as a DM.
Additionally. I don't think the WotC are done with Spelljammer. I suspect that there will be supliment books for the setting... like a Tashas or Xanathers, that can expand on the core rules.
The issue is that they just did not give themselves enough pages so they could cover stuff. It should have been 4 booklets, The adventure and monster compendium are fine but the first book should have been split into two books, one with races, backgrounds and lore about spelljammer while the other one should have been like 2e The Concordance of Arcane Space from the box set that covered ships and combat.
7:25 Of Ships and the Sea was published in GoSM
3:22 100mil miles/day comes out to about 0.6% the speed of light. Not bad for interplanetary travel, but nowhere close to the FTL speeds you'd get from the likes of Star Wars or Star Trek. In terms of scale, it's a step up from the Expanse at best.
To put it in perspective, at that speed, you could travel from Earth to Mars, or Earth to the Sun in ~22 hours, Earth to Pluto in ~4.5 days, and at least 3~4 months to reach the outer limits of the heliosphere (~110±10 AU from Sol).
It'd take around 707 years to reach Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system (~4.393 ly from Sol), so interstellar travel would not be feasible as is.
I agree there isn’t a lot for space combat, were they asssuming space battles would happen in the empty parts of space? They should have used the chase table at least, modifying it for ships. Since all you care about is space between…
I would suggest Dark Matter from the Middle Finger of Vecna. All D&D races work in it, but there are lore changes for the races presented in the book. Multiple factions, better ship mechanics including ship combat, plus space style subclasses.
I remember in an episode of Critical Role that Matt printed out a bunch of rules for players to use in nautical combat and then when they got close to a ship they one-shot it with a spell.
I can understand people's frustrations with the lacking rules for ship to ship combat, and I am absolutely not a game designer, but I'm not sure how to incorporate something like that when having two wizards spam fireball every turn is just as, if not more, effective than arcane cannons or whatever. It seems like a difficult needle to thread with the power of casters as they currently are, and on top of that, if ship-to-ship combat didn't involve PC abilities then players would be frustrated that they can't use all of their cool stuff.
I imagine you could get around all of this by having higher damage on-board weapons coupled with high damage thresholds for ships but that might feel a little too articificial? I don't know. I'm not sure how to do it in such a way that it doesn't just become a slog with no tactics other than ships blasting each other until one falls over.
Thats all? Really?
Some time ago I wrote spaceship Rules for the cypher System by myself that are as complex as building Characters with Stats, Space combat Rules, ship artifacts and unique ship frames, classes and cores...
You could built an athena class Destroyer that attracts pilgrims
Or a Leviathan class Carrier that Hungers.
I wrote tons of options to choose from for fun and they do this when they get paid for it?
Maybe I should just convert it to spelljammer?
I can understand some folks may have wanted [good] space combat, even if it's something D&D has never needed before to be amazing. Perhaps they will even add it later. I just hope people don't pan the whole product line because of it not meeting one expectation some had. (Or worse, it becomes "cool" to hate Spelljammer... it may already be happening.) I'm already having fun in the setting!
the problem is 2e spelljammer had space combat rules. good ones that felt like an actual naval battle.
It feels like there are rules for space combat in this book, but you have to put all the information from it together. ( which I'm doing now so I can explain it to my Players maybe)
Yep 100% correct. They needed to at least have maneuverability rules and firing arcs for weapons. Without that they effectively removed ship tactics in combat. It would literally just require 2 tables to be added to the book and would add so much to the combat system. They really dropped the ball on this one. They is no excuse for not giving us at least the basic mechanics.
whoever thought they could fit a whole-ass setting book in 64 pages... they were wrong
saltmarsh's seafaring appendix alone took 30 pages, and everything in it is useful and necessary imo
A book which isn't even a campaign setting, just an adventure anthology. And weighs in at... 256 pages according to Amazon. And if not for the comments on this video, I would never have thought to look at it for these rules. I might end up begrudgingly buying a copy.
I think a good example of an rpg that has both space and ground is Star Wars 5e that has rules built in for creating your own ships, how combat works, along with the regular ground based combat
Ghost of Saltmarsh is the spelljammer dlc for ships upgrades
Double check the Of Ships and the Sea UA and everything published in ghost of saltmash ship rules. Will say you complain about the ship section but you forgot that the wildspace rule section are also a major part of ship battles. Have not tested encounters yet or read if their are interesting examples in the adventure, but will say players will have a funnier time thing about how a 3d environment effects ship fights, do you tray to board the ship by jump onto their underside only to be counted by space ropers attached to the hool which grab crew as it passes over, or do you weaken the ship before raming it, given your ship the bigger mass and couseing the enemies to fall overboard. Their are less hard defined actions players can take but players can have far more creative fun using 3d and unique gravity of wildspace then the grittyness of putting a exact number for when the crew will mutiny.
I agree that they left people wanting when it comes to the ship to ship space battles. As someone who DM'd back in AD&D when the original Spelljammer released, it is very disappointing. It just piles on to the continuing vagueness of the 5e rule set. It is my biggest gripe about the system.