Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="smiteworks" data-source="post: 7739848" data-attributes="member: 87795">I liked the idea of magic powering a ship via the helm, but not at the expense of spell slots. You already lose a wizard because they are focused on flying the ship. Don't make the wizard useless when they finally step away from the helm too.I liked the idea of the phlogiston connecting multiple crystal spheres. When I ran my campaign for a few years, I had players start out in a homebrew world and enter a phlogiston that constantly shifted. With that houserule, I was able to bring them to new homebrew worlds if I wanted or back into the standard worlds of D&D. The unpredictability of it opened up lots of great adventuring arcs. I would have liked ship-to-ship combat to be a bit more cinematic until the boarding phase. Not every one of the players was interested in a tactical wargame simulation and how some games assign multiple roles to players is a good way to make it fun and exciting for everyone. Ship chases and escapes can also be boring if both ships have the same speed. A system that incorporates everyone in the party working together to either pull away, close the gap, etc. is more exciting.Trading became a big part of the campaign for my players. They wanted to buy cheap and sell high from one planet to another. The problem was with how to manage this. Tracking tons of lumber, ore, food, etc was boring and required a spreadsheet. This should be abstracted as well and rely upon some combination of skill checks and randomness based on the distance traveled and other modifiers.Salvage was another area where players wanted to exploit. They ended up collecting ships of defeated foes and hauling them back to port to sell. I mostly was able to keep this in check by inventing a bunch of salvage laws and fees. Instead of getting the full purchase price or trade-in price of salvaged helms and ships, they received a bounty. They had a license that allowed them to operate like this without being branded a pirate and hunted by the authorities - often ships of elves in powerful Man o' Wars or small fleets of humans in Hammerheads.When making landfall, most landbound communities knew nothing of Spelljamming. I presented it mostly like Vampire the Masquerade where if the news leaked out, the players were likely to be assaulted by other powerful empires, orc clans, etc. who wanted the powerful ships and technology for themselves.</blockquote>

Verification