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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 3815086" data-attributes="member: 32740">SpelljammerWhat hooked me:The ships.  I'd played in a 1E game where our party once had a flying ship and there were a few others floating about the game world.  It was fun though the DM eventually blew it up. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />  Digging into that boxed set and looking at all those cards with the ships on them hooked me solidly.  Despite... problems with the rules I moved a campaign I was running into Spelljammer for a while and the players loved it so much that they requested for years afterward that I run it again.What lost me:They never made it a setting of its own though it was SCREAMING to be one (and it needed to be a setting that disregarded other settings rather than connecting them).  Plastering it onto EXISTING settings like the Realms or Greyhawk just screwed up everything in those ground-based games, especially if there were already an ongoing campaign there.  They weren't built or EVER intended for the travel and communication capabilities of Spelljammers to exert their influence.  Their solution - ignore the problem.  On top of that the rules had holes - some of them quite humungous.  Gravity needed much more detailed rules, particularly when gravity fields were at angles to each other and intersecting.  The manner in which the spelljamming helms drained spellcasters was a pointlessly game-killing mechanism, and ship combat boiled down to WIN or DIE - for EVERY encounter.  The first combat you won would make you stinking rich.  Every encounter you won after that only made you richer and PC's rapidly assembled small fleets after upgrading to the largest, niftiest ship they wanted.  But the first combat you lost - you lost EVERYTHING and then it was either Deus Ex Machina to keep going or start over.  It was otherwise hell on jets.What drove me further away:The cheezy gonzo factor.  It's already a very high-concept setting with flying ships in space.  I liked the Giff because they fit the setting but penguin people and dozen VARIATIONS on Giant Hamsters?  Spelljammer became a dumping ground for EVERY utterly whacked out, drug-induced monster, humanoid race, lame-ass joke concept or funky bizzarro location that anyone cared to shovel into the latrine that they treated it as.  They couldn't even just use Orcs - no it had to be "Scro".  They should have just added the "tums" as their little assistants.  It's what derived from NOT giving it its own setting and its own concepts to FIT that setting - and ONLY that setting, not every other setting under the corporate banner plus the mushroom-influenced trash.Why I WANT to revisit it:It was just way too much fun to forget it.  It's also just way too much work for just myself to fix it and revise it for SANE play.  Maybe if I just took up hallucingenic drugs in a big way...</blockquote>

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