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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8615194" data-attributes="member: 6790260">For my part, the difference lies in the degree of separation, the intensity of the divergences, and the greater potential unlocked by a truly "anything goes" attitude.A pirate game can certainly have some wild stuff in it. If my players decided to just go sail around the Sapphire Sea for a while, they'd quickly learn its Ten Thousand Isles can be REAL DAMN WEIRD. That's because I based them on the Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, with some Polynesia thrown in for fun. (The Sapphire "Sea" is actually an ocean about the size of the Pacific, but absolutely dense with islands, making trade between the faraway western land of Yuxia and the local Tarrakhuna region practical.) But the party has mostly stayed inland, so there hasn't been any need to invoke those parts.However, even with the islands allowed to be Very Weird, they'd never find an island where gravity points "outward" rather than down, because...there's no real way to make that work, physically. They won't find a Dyson sphere nor a Ringworld. They might find the odd lost culture that had some technology (they already know at least one vanished culture had some pretty crazy stuff), but they won't find replicators and holodecks, because I just don't see that kind of tech making sense on this planet. Further, they won't be able to find cultures that cannot even conceive of the idea that there is an "outside" context, because even if you live on an isolated island, the idea that there could be another island is not far fetched. But the idea that there is a whole different universe/"crystal sphere," which runs by its own very different rules? That might easily be dismissed as ridiculous.Hence: the Spelljammer setting (or something like it, an interplanetary/interplanar romance) offers things that cannot quite be reached solely by sailing on a mundane ship over mundane waters to mundane islands, even if the residents of those islands are unequivocally and significantly fantastical. "Space pirates" allows for separation between places that the ordinary ocean does not; it allows for a greater intensity of divergence and alienness than "ordinary" piratical stories can support; and it can truly go places or explore ideas that simply don't work when one is bound by the rules of "able to sail in a wooden vessel on the surface of an actual ocean."This is not to say that a "space pirates" aesthetic is strictly superior though. With greater potential variety comes the possibility that none of it ends up mattering or going anywhere, and inherently tuned up intensity can lead to desensitized audiences. The best results come from correctly leveraging your tools and knowing your audience. My players would love a space pirates game, of this I am certain, but I will not be turning my game into that, as it would detract from the things we're already busy doing. It is, however, something we could do for a "sequel" campaign, if we ever wrap the current one (unlikely even before the end of next year, purely based on our campaign's pace thus far.)</blockquote>

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