Spelljammer Good way to do a pirate game in spelljammer?

[Shades of Eternity]

The concept feels awesome, but unsure how you would get the right feel.

1. how would you have a feel for distance that is both awesome, but comprehensible?
2. what do you need for a location? Do you pick a crystal sphere or location or do you essentially create "piratespace"?
3. whom do you raid?
4. Whom is on your case?

anything else you can think of.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

1. It would probably be worth making the setting large enough that it would take days to cross from world to world, if only to allow for downtime between locations.
2. A good initial starting location would probably be a single wildspace system, with potential to expand to others and the Astral Sea.
3. Raiding targets could be corrupt merchants, the ships of an evil empire, other pirates, derelicts, bases for invaders to the system, etc.
4. The party could be agents of organizations they've attacked, mercenaries, someone looking for an item they've pilfered, etc.

 

[Stormonu]

If you don't want to haul out the likes of The War Captain's Companion, I'd go with the following for ranges:

Out of Range
Ship Weapon Long Range
Ship Weapon Short Range/Missile Weapon Long Range
Missile/Spell Weapon Short Range
Boarding

On #2, plan to be travelling between different Crystal Spheres. I'd treat a single Crystal sphere like a cluster of islands; Rock of Braal is the Tortuga of Spelljamming, and moving to a different Crystal Sphere is like moving to another sea.

On #3, probably a mix of raiding lone merchant ships and planetside raids for plunder;

On #4, Spelljammer was originally set up with Astral Elves akin to the British seagoing empire, and they ruthlessly stalked pirates and wannabe pirates. Other enemies would be Beholder ships, Neogi slavers and Illithid ships on the prowl for slaves and prisoners (victims) to power their mindjammers. The Giff also have a space-faring empire and have a mix of privateers, outright pirates and pirate hunters.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Even for a D&D game, I would snag a copy of Pirate Borg, which has an astounding number of useful tables that let you roll up treasures, locations, pirates, etc., all on the fly. Change "island" to "asteroid" and you're most of the way there for Spelljammer. It even has good ship-to-ship combat rules.

There are supplements that break out the ship combat rules and the bestiaries for 5E, but you can get pretty far with Pirate Borg alone.

 

[bloodtide]

The concept feels awesome, but unsure how you would get the right feel.

1.Make everything big.
2.I've done both. The use the classic Crystal Spheres works fine. My "piratespace" was a big red giant star and a warm 'tropical' Sphere with lots of resources and outposts...kind of like "The Caribbean".
3.Everyone. Mostly treasure ships.
4.The Law.

To get the right feel you need the right setting. You can pirate anywhere/anytime...well, except for the "fun game fiction" you want it to be cool. You could pirate ships full of grain...but that is not exactly "cool fun".

In general, you want a far away sphere with a rich resource that the pirates can plunger off ships.