My issue is that new player or old, if I use what 5e gave me I have to put in craptons of work myself to make anything they mention work. Bral, ship combat, ship movement is just stupid, etc. They devote an entire 5 pages to adventuring. A whole 5 pages!!! The rest is taken up by ships and the meager 5 pages on Bral. It's worthless as a setting, giving us nearly double the pages on character options than they spend on adventuring in the "setting."
Ship combat and Ship movement is not setting material. That is mechanics. This is like saying that Faerun is a terrible setting because of the ship combat rules (since they mostly the same rules) that has nothing to do with the setting.
And, I don't see needing to put in any more work to run the Rock of Bral than I need to put in to run Waterdeep, Chult or Neolantin. Do I have to put in work? Sure. But not an unusual amount of work.
And, whether or not 5 pages (5 pages!!!) matters is how good those pages are. And they are really good. I've got a solid idea of how to run those adventures. I don't need another ten pages, I've got plenty.
And you'd get it wrong without the 2e stuff to let you know how he got his knowledge, his outlook on that knowledge and why he withholds some information.
I cannot possibly get it wrong. If I'm running him with only the 5e knowledge, then I'm running him completely fine. Because there is no right or wrong way for me to depict an NPC.
It wasn't the same information. 2e tells us a lot more about running Luigi.
Sure, it gives us a bit more insanity and pride for him, but I don't need that. And again, you are going at this as "There is a correct way, because there was an old version of the setting." Someone who has never touched or heard of 2e isn't going to be running Large Luigi and thinking "something feels off, it feels like I'm missing some massive gap about this character" . No, they are going to be running him, and they will be running him correctly for their game, because we have plenty of information.
Try and stop thinking about 2e and look at the 5e Spelljammer as if it was the first version of the setting. Because for many people? It is.
Absolutely. It makes him far more interesting.
He's a fat, friendly beholder barkeeper. He was plenty interesting without being a god of knowledge.
Nothing is needed. They could have just given you the name of the bar and let you make the innkeeper.
Correct. Would that be a bad thing? Would the setting not work just because a bar existed, but the bartender wasn't listed down explicitly?
Plenty of settings have bars with no names. PLenty of settings tell us about a country, and name a capital and never name a single bar in that country. That doesn't make them bad settings
That's the one place the 5e book mentions in any detail at all. I had to go with that since the 5e book is so sparse it makes a desert look like a rainforest. And I love how you ignored that there are 62 locations in the lower city in the 2e book, detailed NPCs to use that the 5e book doesn't even mention, many, many extra locations in the rest of the city that the 5e book doesn't mention, and more. The 2e book has depth. The 5e book is 2 dimensional.
I love how you continue refusing to engage the premise. But, let's try this. 62 locations is the minimum right?
Name 50 locations in Gondor. Middle Earth is a great setting, right? You wouldn't say Middle Earth is a two-dimensional setting with no depth, so if the Lower City of the Rock of Bral (a section of a single city) needs at least 60 locations to be functional, then Gondor should have at least 50 right?
Here, I'll make it even easier, 50 locations between Gondor and Rohan.
Yes, the book doesn't list every single location in all of Spelljammer, but do they need to? Do they actually need to detail hundreds of planets and thousands of ships, or is the fact that we know those things are out there plenty to run the setting?
