Worlds of Design: How Would You Design For Spelljammer?

delericho · Mar 27, 2018

bmfb1980 said:
Which begs the question, how much would a life force power a ship? Which spawned a fleet of undead/ghost pirate ships, each powered by a "soul sucking" helm.

Aren't those canon anyway? (Lifejammer helms)

Von Ether · Mar 27, 2018

delericho said:
I disagree. Story and setting will inevitably inform mechanics - if only because some setting elements will dictate the need for some mechanical elements (an explosive Phlogiston needs rules for how explosive it is, while a non-explosive one does not).
...

If you embrace that philosophy, odds are though, you probably won't get a 1e running 2e AD&D spelljammer game. You'll probably get a Spelljammer setting with a non D&D set of rules. Which is the opposite of the OP's desires.

The two easier ways to design for D&D is to shoehorn the setting into D&D, i.e. an "All Planets Accord" that forbids dropping rocks on huts. Or make subsystems that interact as little as possible with D&D, i.e, drop spell slots and feed the 'jammer scrolls of feather fall and such ... and then build a setting where the economics of that makes D&D sense.

Not 21st century post industrial sense; i.e. why are there cannons on only one plane of attack in a 3-D space?

Because you start to lose the sailing ship aesthetic and the related ship combat board game gets complicated.

delericho · Mar 27, 2018

Von Ether said:
If you embrace that philosophy, odds are though, you probably won't get a 1e running 2e AD&D spelljammer game.

Why would you think that? There's nothing in Spelljammer that doesn't work with AD&D - which shouldn't be a surprise, given that it is an AD&D setting. "The mechanics should flow from the setting" shouldn't be taken to imply simply throwing everything out - cut your cloth according to your desires.

an "All Planets Accord" that forbids dropping rocks on huts.

D&D has a long and glorious history of ignoring inconvenient things that PCs might do - such as striding into the throne room and killing the king. And, indeed, it has a long history of ignoring the implications of flying fortresses - in addition to the aforementioned airships in Mystara and Eberron, Dragonlance has floating citadels and the Realms (and probably Greyhawk) has flying Storm Giant castles. Spelljammers in the atmosphere would just use the same systems as those game elements.

Alternatively, if you want to properly address it, there are ways - rule that Spelljammers in the atmosphere can only move vertically (as with levitate), or posit rapid response forces in local kingdoms... or just make it far more economical to just go adventuring rather than engage in petty destruction.

Or make subsystems that interact as little as possible with D&D, i.e, drop spell slots

Why would this be necessary? I mean, I get why people don't like the "helmsmen lose their slots" thing, but I don't understand why it simply can't work for Spelljammer. After all, there's at least one piece of evidence that suggests it probably does.

Not 21st century post industrial sense; i.e. why are there cannons on only one plane of attack in a 3-D space?

Eh. That's a criticism that can be leveled at almost every sci-fi series out there. It's surprisingly rare to see ships that don't have a clearly defined 'top', 'bottom', and 'sides', and correspondingly limited fields of fire.

Basically, it's done that way because... well, because it's done that way.

Staffan · Mar 27, 2018

delericho said:
D&D has a long and glorious history of ignoring inconvenient things that PCs might do - such as striding into the throne room and killing the king. And, indeed, it has a long history of ignoring the implications of flying fortresses - in addition to the aforementioned airships in Mystara and Eberron, Dragonlance has floating citadels and the Realms (and probably Greyhawk) has flying Storm Giant castles. Spelljammers in the atmosphere would just use the same systems as those game elements.

Not sure about the other three, but Eberron airships are limited in quite a few ways:

* They require the skills of two Dragonmarked houses plus resources exclusive to two independent nations (soarwood and elemental binding) to build.
* They are a new invention, whose military applications have not been quite realized.
* They require someone with the Mark of Storm to pilot properly - those without have to engage the bound elemental in opposed Charisma checks.
* They move at 20 mph - a respectable speed, but the setting has sea-bound ships with similar speeds, and the Lightning Rail moves even faster (although limited to the, well, rail).

It's mainly the speed that keeps them from being world-breaking. A spelljammer, by comparison, can use orbital flight to get pretty much anywhere on a world the size of Al-Toril in a matter of hours: 40 minutes to get out of the planet's gravity well so it can travel at wildspace speed, some indeterminate time to maneuver to the right point (likely via some kind of triangular move, since wildspace speed only moves in a straight line, though it does so at about 100 million miles per day), and then another 40 minutes to land.

Andor · Mar 27, 2018

lewpuls said:
Many of these comments talk about story elements/setting, few about mechanisms (some say mechanics) of play. While evocative, story isn't a game, nor is a setting a game. To design a game, you must focus on mechanisms, not on story. You could use an entirely different setting with the Spelljammer rules (mechanisms), and it might well be more entertaining. But the focus of the article was on the mechanisms and their flaws.

I disagree. You want mechanics and story to support each other. If you want free wheeling, swashbuckling action then the baseline 3e system which demands fighters must turtle or lose most of their damage is a lousy system. If you grim 'n gritty low fantasy adventures then pretty much any leveled system is not for you. If you want gonzo fantasy space adventures with beholder bartenders and giant space hampsters and Giff, then you need to design for that. If your mechanics are not meeting your story goal, change the mechanics. If your mechanics, in emergent play, take things in directions you didn't expect, but you like, then change the story.

As far as the original SJ mechanics go, I think the drive mechanisms do need a rethink. As it stands your party must cripple its most powerful member or cripple their ship. In practice it's just the 10 minute adventuring day writ large. "We dropped out of Jamming Speed Captain." "Good, all crewmen to napping stations." It would be better to either dump the mechanism entirely, or at least make it more granular by spending spell slots individually.

lewpuls said:
Andor, the speed of the 'jammer isn't what's important in terrestrial situations, it's the size/carrying capacity.

How so? If you mean the terrible threat of dropping rocks from altitude that is already a threat easily created in D&D by various combinations of spells, items and monsters. A D&D kingdom will have a way to deal with that threat, or capitulate, or fall. If you mean the fed/ex issue then that is absolutely solved by speed. If your spell jammer is not significantly faster in atmosphere than a sailing ship, then why am I not simply using a fleet of cheaper sailing ships? In 5e if I desperately need to get large amounts of stuff somewhere, and have the money/magic to hire or create a spell jammer in the first place, then I also have the money/magic to use Reduce and Teleportation Circle to get my cargo anywhere with a circle in 1 minute for 50 gp in material components.

It is a simple fact that many D&D tropes don't survive contact with elements of high level play, that has been true since AD&D, and nothing has changed. The defensive value of a large pile of stone, unsupported by magic, in D&D is "Not very much" past 4th level or so. Ergo D&D castles are supported by magic, or they aren't used, or they are only in low level areas, and who is surprised that a bunch of 9th level characters can shove around a 3rd level town/princedom?

lewpuls · Mar 27, 2018

"I disagree. Story and setting will inevitably inform mechanics - if only because some setting elements will dictate the need for some mechanical elements (an explosive Phlogiston needs rules for how explosive it is, while a non-explosive one does not)."

I think you misunderstand. Almost all of my standalone games are models of some (possibly fictional) situation, whereas a great many modern board games (such as many Euros) are abstract (model of nothing) even if a story is tacked on. Modeling is essential. But if you only have story, you don't have a game. A story without mechanisms is not a game. When much of the discussion has been how to connect various realms (and which realms), you're not doing much (if anything) to specify mechanisms to model that.

Virtually every RPG has a default or background setting. D&D's was "medieval plus magic." (Though they didn't think through the consequences of that, they relied on available fiction.) That default setting is, in the long run, what's being modeled. But you can create more detailed settings and add modifications to the rules to help model that setting. Which is what Spelljammer is supposed to be, but the rules (mechanisms) do a poor job.

"The entire point of the game is to entertain."

Without accepting this entirely, as games sometimes have other aims (such as education), it's the designer's job to make it easy for the GM to entertain. In other words, the GM shouldn't have to "fix" a weak design. Otherwise, what good is the designer?

"If you mean the terrible threat of dropping rocks from altitude that is already a threat easily created in D&D by various combinations of spells, items and monsters."

No. As I said, carrying capacity. The average 'jammer can carry far more than spells-items-monsters combinations, and there are lots of 'jammers. And they can hover (very important in aiming those rocks etc.). Of course, if your world is full of magic and high-level casters and monsters (unlike mine), the contrast is less striking.

3D:

"Basically, it's done that way because... well, because it's done that way."

No, it's a matter of practicality. It's too fiddly, too complex, to model 3D space. 3D dominates tabletop games where it's done. Even computer space games, which can model 3D much better than tabletop, are sometimes 2D.

Andor · Mar 28, 2018

lewpuls said:
No. As I said, carrying capacity. The average 'jammer can carry far more than spells-items-monsters combinations, and there are lots of 'jammers. And they can hover (very important in aiming those rocks etc.). Of course, if your world is full of magic and high-level casters and monsters (unlike mine), the contrast is less striking.

Well, I think that's the disconnect. A spelljamming helm is basically a minor artifact. A spelljamming ship is a complex, expensive system somewhere between a caravel and a battleship wrapped around that artifact, and filled with dozens of crewmen including spell casters (or possibly Beholders.) It is not a part of a low magic setting, except possibly as a singular legendary threat/goal akin to a flying castle, or city on a giant turtle. If someone has a fleet of Jammers, then you are not in a low magic setting, Q.E.D.

If you have a low magic setting, and a fleet of Spell Jammers show up, then what you have done is exactly replicated Admiral Perry sailing into Edo harbor to tell the Tokugawa Shogunate that the time of isolation is over, and your players get to play through the Meiji restoration and the modernization (ramping up of magic level) of their setting. It would probably be a hell of a fun game, but it's not the standard assumption of Spelljammer.

Von Ether · Mar 28, 2018

First I mentoned that these were two easier ways to do the job. Not the only ways, so I'm confused as to the need for a rebuttal. But oddly enough, these examples support my suggestion.

delericho said:
D&D has a long and glorious history of ignoring inconvenient things that PCs might do - such as striding into the throne room and killing the king.

And ignoring the even older cliches in D&D where the bartender is secretly a high-level traveler so as not to be intimidated by jerky PCs. And as a spectator of the Eberron Regicide forum flame war. I learned that some thought it was such a scandal that Eberron's rulers were only mid-level with most of their level in NPC classes. Many GM's feared that would make them fat plumbs for high level PC. So D&D has an even longer history of doing work-arounds to avoid such inconvenient things. Hence, shoehorning D&Dism into the environment get players to behave.

delericho said:
And, indeed, it has a long history of ignoring the implications of flying fortresses - in addition to the aforementioned airships in Mystara and Eberron, Dragonlance has floating citadels and the Realms (and probably Greyhawk) has flying Storm Giant castles. Spelljammers in the atmosphere would just use the same systems as those game elements.

As things mostly under NPC, and GM control (and hence highly ignorable for the plot and the GM), giving such similar toys to players make such things much less ignorable. And if you ask players to ignore too many inconvenient things (i.e., be told "No, you can't do that. Nope, you can't do that either and nooot that either." Then players may wonder why even bother with said toys. (But that gets back to my suggestion that Spelljammer needed to focus on either swashbucking or Master and Commander.)

delericho said:
Alternatively, if you want to properly address it, there are ways - rule that Spelljammers in the atmosphere can only move vertically (as with levitate), or posit rapid response forces in local kingdoms... or just make it far more economical to just go adventuring rather than engage in petty destruction.

Yep. Adjusting parts of the setting to avoid situations that need more rules. Easy-peasy.

delericho said:
Why would this be necessary? I mean, I get why people don't like the "helmsmen lose their slots" thing, but I don't understand why it simply can't work for Spelljammer. After all, there's at least one piece of evidence that suggests it probably does.

I said it would could be the easiest fix, not saying there aren't more fixes, they'd just probably be more complicated.

delericho said:
Eh. That's a criticism that can be leveled at almost every sci-fi series out there. It's surprisingly rare to see ships that don't have a clearly defined 'top', 'bottom', and 'sides', and correspondingly limited fields of fire.

Basically, it's done that way because... well, because it's done that way.

And I'm saying that in gaming, the reason it's done that way is because doing 3-D battles are usually clunky and most designers and players find out that the added "realism" isn't worth the extra effort. This comes from about 20 years of doing starship minis combat and reading said genre's designer blogs.

As for sci-fi fiction and movies, that's a whole other discussion because Spelljammer is science fantasy about sailing ships in the stars, so we're starting to talk apples and oranges.

delericho said:
Why would you think that? There's nothing in Spelljammer that doesn't work with AD&D - which shouldn't be a surprise, given that it is an AD&D setting. "The mechanics should flow from the setting" shouldn't be taken to imply simply throwing everything out - cut your cloth according to your desires.

We can agree to disagree. For me, "mechanics should flow from the setting" imply exactly that. Design the setting first, narrow down what you want players to experience in that setting and how you want to them to experience it and figure how your rules accomplish that goal.

On the other two hands

, if you want to use D&D then it's much easier to start with embracing how D&D implies many things for your setting (zero to hero growth, niche hero protection, certain archetypes, etc.) and then tweak a setting idea to fit. It's also easier to have only a few PC skills/attribute checks to interact with a whole separate mini-game that operates in a different mode.

You can find other valid solutions, never said you couldn't.

As a side note, I ran a Spelljammer homage game for a whole year in another game system and it went pretty smooth.

The 'jammers worked off of potions and scrolls. Luckily, my players let me do the bookkeeping so I discovered any math mistake later.
There were no planets, just floating islands that mysteriously kept gravity and refreshed air (the PC solved that one to their own horror and lost a PC in the effort.)
The air currents around said "bastions" were dangerous high up and you had to find a safe "current" to sail in into harbor, otherwise the ship would be smashed by hurricane winds higher up. (No rock bombing possible)

Keep things alternating from wacky to terrifying and the players had a great time.

Shasarak · Mar 28, 2018

lewpuls said:
Virtually every RPG has a default or background setting. D&D's was "medieval plus magic." (Though they didn't think through the consequences of that, they relied on available fiction.) That default setting is, in the long run, what's being modeled. But you can create more detailed settings and add modifications to the rules to help model that setting. Which is what Spelljammer is supposed to be, but the rules (mechanisms) do a poor job.

I always thought that Spelljammer did a great job of being "Elves in Space".

Helms draining magic was one of the few mechanisms that did a poor job.

delericho · Mar 28, 2018

Von Ether said:
We can agree to disagree. For me, "mechanics should flow from the setting" imply exactly that. Design the setting first, narrow down what you want players to experience in that setting and how you want to them to experience it and figure how your rules accomplish that goal.

That would be a bad idea - as bad as focusing purely on the mechanics. Any fundamentalist position will lead to a bad experience: if you work purely from mechanics first you'll get something that will probably work but that will be no fun to actually use; if you work purely from setting first you'll get something that may look nice but is unfocused and useless.

It's a thermostat, not a light-switch. What's more, it's a thermostat with a fairly wide range of acceptable answers. My experience has been that it should be set over towards the setting-first end of the scale, but not to the exclusion of the other. You absolutely need both.

The air currents around said "bastions" were dangerous high up and you had to find a safe "current" to sail in into harbor, otherwise the ship would be smashed by hurricane winds higher up.

This, incidentally, is a great idea.