Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 9103724" data-attributes="member: 6677017">2e has some better take-off and landing times on page 51 in the Concordance of Arcane Space (in the original boxed set).Translated from AD&D jargon it is:Celestial Body Diameter in Miles -> Time to Exit Gravity WellLess than 10 -> 10 minutes10 to 1,000 -> 20 minutes1K to 4K -> 30 minutes4K to 10K -> 40 minutes10K to 40K -> 1 hour40K to 100K -> 2 hours100K to 1M -> 4 hours1M to 10M -> 8 hours10M+ -> 16 hoursThe not long distance speed (whether in atmosphere or space) varied from 17 mph to 170 mph depending on how good your helm and helmsman were, but the above speed ignores that. Like long-distance Spelljamming speed, descent/ascent speed are independent of ship details.It seems like they want you to enter and drop out of spelljamming speed far enough away to get a grand panoramic view of the planet, rather than suddenly looking at a wall of earth in front of you. Interestingly, if you take the average in-atmosphere speed, and apply it to the time given for Earth-sized planets, you get a 62 mile trip. Assuming that's not a coincidence it could be interpreted multiple ways. Maybe that average speed of about 93 mph is the ascent/descent speed. Maybe they just didn't want to work out those numbers for vessels at a variety of speeds and gave an average instead.Personally, I'm not a fan of the high speed variability from Spelljammer Rating, but I don't mind the possibility of smaller speed distinctions in tactical/atmospheric mode. I'll probably stick with a unified ascent/descent speed and play with that table a bit to see if it feels good enough or calls for tweaking.The one number I'm definitely going to tweak is a 1 mile encounter distance. That makes sense when ships are going 90 mph, but not so much when they are trudging along at 4 mph. I gave up trying to find whether that 1 mile encounter distance was from the original or not, but I'll probably adjust it to work with whatever tactical/atmosphere speeds I come up with. I'll probably go with speeds somewhere between 2e and 5e.I like to figure out what the desired outcome is, and then make simple and consistent rules to achieve it, which is why I liked that table once I realized the apparent function.</blockquote>

Verification