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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barasawa" data-source="post: 7739378" data-attributes="member: 44909">We had a lot of fun in Spelljammer, but never saw many of those issues you were talking about. As to ship destruction, it did sometimes occur, but was more often a boarding action once somebody realized they weren't going to win by ship abilities alone. Nobody wants to die with their ship disintegrating under them after all. The neogi weren't encountered often, they were more of the boogieman of the fringes and dark areas type. It's not that they were super powerful individually, it's that they could field a lot of ships and overwhelm an invasion target when they wanted to. Illithid and Beholder ships.  If it wasn't one they were on at least neutral terms with, the players avoided them like a genital exploding plague of demonic doom!  They weren't seen too often, and unlike the neogi, other than their specific feuds, they tended to not bother the other ships lest they become banned and hunted down. They may have had power, but they didn't have sufficient numbers to be belligerent to anyone they encountered. Dropping rocks and bombs and just plain using the cannons. Yeah, it could happen, but it wasn't done.  If it was a space location, dropping anything had to be within the gravity plain of the target to work, and range penalties do apply, even when dropping straight down. (Go to a big bridge, and try to drop a coin onto the foundation pillar from right above it. You might be surprised what happens. Don't do it if anybody is nearby, you don't want an accident.) Of course, if you use your guns, there's no reason why your would be target won't use theirs. For that matter, even space based 'ground' installations can have more and bigger guns than any ship. If it's a planet that deals with spelljammers, they know what to expect. If it's a planet that doesn't know about them, they still aren't unarmed. It is a magical universe, and lightning bolts work there too. For that matter, cities and things may have magical defenses against that kind of stuff, so you'd have to get within their fighting range to do anything anyway. After all, you don't need spelljammers to have to develop defenses against flyers. Like magic carpets, wizards, dragons, rocs, harpies, the occasional rain of stones, etc. In our campaigns, it seemed the players usually tried to avoid planets unless they had to. Not sure why, but we never really made planetfall unless we had to.As to the elves, they kind of alternated between belligerent and bossy neutrals, to snooty and overbearing allies, depending on whether they needed our help or not. Even the PC elves that came from planetside didn't like them much. Now the Giff were loved by our players, even if for the simple reason that they were a sure fire way to find guns and smokepowder when they needed them. Giff rarely had more smokepower than they could use, but they definitely knew everywhere it was possible to get more! It seems strange that happy go luck adventuring weirdos would always want to make friends and party with the victorian military style explosion freaks, but it kept happening. There were several companies of Giff that invited them over for drinks at the pub when they were both in port. They even liked my rather quiet wizard that tried to stay out of the way, apparently because they found out about his large collection of exploding boxes. Basically he tended to put everything in boxes trapped with explosive runes. It tended to cut down on the repeat thefts.</blockquote>

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