D&D 5E Don't make the game too weird

[Charlaquin]

What sort of confusing answers did they give? Maybe they will make more sense to someone here.

 

[overgeeked]

Strange conundrum. To me, the whole point of Spelljammer is to be "too weird"!

Yeah. It's literally a defining feature of the setting.

"Not too weird" is akin to saying "not too Spelljammer".

Either you want Spelljammer or you don't. Weird comes with as part of the package.

 

[payn]

Wow, a library posting in 2022? Glad you found a group.

Without a baseline of weirdness, its hard to say. I think your mechanical examples would bug me without any context for why they exist. Though, it doesn't seem weird.

 

[LordEntrails]

Spelljammer does not have to be a weird psychedelic trip. Maybe that's how most everyone has played it, but it's not a requirement, imo.

SJ can be boiled down to magical ships that let you visit different places (worlds). It could be as mundane as a bunch of journeys to 'standard' D&D places like Greyhawk, Waterdeep, Eberron, etc.

Just throw them regular adventures in different places and let them pick up one or two things unique to each of those settings. Maybe an artificer's device, something from Dark Sun, something from x, y, z.

 

[TheSword]

So with the talk about Spelljammer coming soon has gotten many gamers excited. In my little corner an ad was posted at the library for a 5E Spelljammer DM. I know the players, but they are not my kind of gamers. I'm Old School Hard Fun Unfair Unbalanced and they are something else. Still, after two weeks the game still had no DM. None of the younger DMs felt they knew enough about Spelljammer to run a game.

So as a Spelljammer fan, I offered to run the game. And they agreed......they even agreed to my Old School Hard Fun Unfair Unbalanced game style. the only big request was that I not make the game "too weird".

So, I'm a "weird" gamer too....I love strange and weird and crazy things in a game. But what is too much? I ask myself what would be too weird for me, and I find myself having trouble getting an answer. My only vague answer is when the GM gets so weird that we are not playing D&D, things like the space trolls are "immune to attacks" or they have a 33% chance to hit a PC and ignore all D&D rules.

The players are all younger then me, so there is a huge culture gap with our ages.
I tried to ask what was "too weird", but just go a bunch of confusing non answers. I did e-mail everyone to get what they thought was too weird....no answers yet.

So.......what do you think is "too weird"?

Just run Pirates in Space

Buy the Skull and Shackles adventure path by Paizo and set it in space.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

The comic "The sword of swashbuckler" could show a example of a no-too-weird Spelljammer.

 

[DND_Reborn]

The comic "The sword of swashbuckler" could show a example of a no-too-weird Spelljammer.

Yeah, sorry, that screams sci-fy... but not D&D, IMO.

Now, that isn't to say you can't do a d20 game in space, but not with all the iconic things that make D&D "D&D" for me. No wonder it never appealed to me.

Well, to each, their own I suppose.

 

[JThursby]

So.......what do you think is "too weird"?

Very little honestly, but deliberately nonsensical adventures approach this for me. If I never have to play another Alice in Wonderland themed game I'll be fine. I can handle the strange settings, narratives and characters as long as they are cohesive. When I'm expected to just revel in nonsense then I lose any ability to meaningfully participate in the story, as cause-and-effect are fundamentally broken and any choice I make could have any random, stupid outcome.

 

[Lidgar]

You run a game in which the characters are playing D&D, and the DM in their game is running a game in which the characters are playing as the original players.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yeah, this is....hard to grapple with.

Maybe the issue isn't, strictly, that any given thing is too weird, but that the density of weird-ness needs to be kept below a threshold, as others have said? So, you might have giff, OR green-skinned alien space babes, OR technobabble, but not giff AND technobabble AND...etc.

This could explain why you're getting a lot of vague non-answers instead of meaningful feedback. They can't give you an answer, because it's a matter of critical mass, rather than specific entities.

It may also mean that you could build up to weirdness over time, rather than throwing them headfirst into a melange of Hitchhiker's Guide, Star Wars, and Barsoom. That way, what weirdnesses there are to start with can become relatively comfortable before something new is added to the deck.