I know it's weird right it's like WOTC is reinforcing there own belief that all lore is bad lore so they don't have to do as much work next time... if only they'd actually get diverse peoples to proof read it first
I know it's weird right it's like WOTC is reinforcing there own belief that all lore is bad lore so they don't have to do as much work next time... if only they'd actually get diverse peoples to proof read it first
So long as they're actually diverse and not just random black American, if you're going to have a culture based off of Africans for example I want an expert on African culture not an African American who grew up in America which is what so many people think makes a cultural expert. I want people from these actual cultures to speak on it not people that grew up in America with very little ties to their ancestral culture.
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If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
I know it's weird right it's like WOTC is reinforcing there own belief that all lore is bad lore so they don't have to do as much work next time... if only they'd actually get diverse peoples to proof read it first
So long as they're actually diverse and not just random black American, if you're going to have a culture based off of Africans for example I want an expert on African culture not an African American who grew up in America which is what so many people think makes a cultural expert. I want people from these actual cultures to speak on it not people that grew up in America with very little ties to their ancestral culture.
I'd argue that having a more comprehensive set of rules for running content in space is well... Let me put it this way.
A jack knife and a swiss army knife both have a folding knife which is the principal thing that people will use them for and tthere are people who will laugh at how the latter will have a screwdriver, a file, a can opener, a bottle opener, and a signal light built into them... right up until they find themselves in a situation where you need them and don't actually have them.
And yes you could run saltmarsh without ever having to do any of the ship related stuff. But for a lot of GM's and players who were looking for more comprehensive rules for it they were a great addition, and given that spelljammer is ~once again~ a book about boats in space there isn't really a good excuse for not having comprehensive rules for this particularly since you're going to have players who are going to want to own and operate such a vessel as opposed to simply being passengers.
I'd argue that having a more comprehensive set of rules for running content in space is well... Let me put it this way.
A jack knife and a swiss army knife both have a folding knife which is the principal thing that people will use them for and tthere are people who will laugh at how the latter will have a screwdriver, a file, a can opener, a bottle opener, and a signal light built into them... right up until they find themselves in a situation where you need them and don't actually have them.
Okay, but we did want them, and we used them.
Edit: To follow your analogy, we busted out the screwdriver, and it was a battery powered screwdriver, and we didn't have the batteries, so we took the batteries out of the signal light and used those, but it was all kinda floppy and awkward, so we just went back to the knife and used that to turn the screw.
I'd argue that having a more comprehensive set of rules for running content in space is well... Let me put it this way.
A jack knife and a swiss army knife both have a folding knife which is the principal thing that people will use them for and tthere are people who will laugh at how the latter will have a screwdriver, a file, a can opener, a bottle opener, and a signal light built into them... right up until they find themselves in a situation where you need them and don't actually have them.
Okay, but we did want them, and we used them.
Edit: To follow your analogy, we busted out the screwdriver, and it was a battery powered screwdriver, and we didn't have the batteries, so we took the batteries out of the signal light and used those, but it was all kinda floppy and awkward, so we just went back to the knife and used that to turn the screw.
Which is why we wanted more comprehensive and tested rules for how to make this work.
Because heres the thing about spelljammer right now: as a setting it's pointless. There is nothing compelling or interesting about space or space combat or space travel because it's pretty much just a big empty void with monsters in it. Like I can not think of anything other then races (which are free with the UA pdf) and the monster manual that would be worth using outside of the rinky dink campaign.
Having actual guides for designing star systems, phenomenon, hazards and ship-to-ship combat would have given this actual legs for campaigns for years.
Instead I'm we have a situation where players might as well just use portals to hop from one world to another.
Given how they ripped the deckplans from the 2e books I'm surprised they didn't also rip the charts for designing crystal spheres, planets, etc... and just replace terms that no longer matter like crystal sphere portals... Oh wait they didn't even do that with the deckplans as several of the ships still mention Jettisons....
Although they probably didn't bother to do that since conversations for those things can already be found online and they probably didn't want to risk legal issues if those homebrew conversations ended up looking identical to the new tables and someone claimed they stole someone else's work... silly that everything would still be based on their old tables from the 2e books...but they might have feared that in this day where insane court filings seem to be the norm...and I am not talking about political stuff just oddities like would be burglar tries to break into a woman's home through the kitchen...he manages to bungle things up and ends up stabbed with a kitchen knife then sues over his technicality self inflicted injury....
Given how they ripped the deckplans from the 2e books I'm surprised they didn't also rip the charts for designing crystal spheres, planets, etc... and just replace terms that no longer matter like crystal sphere portals... Oh wait they didn't even do that with the deckplans as several of the ships still mention Jettisons....
Although they probably didn't bother to do that since conversations for those things can already be found online and they probably didn't want to risk legal issues if those homebrew conversations ended up looking identical to the new tables and someone claimed they stole someone else's work... silly that everything would still be based on their old tables from the 2e books...but they might have feared that in this day where insane court filings seem to be the norm...and I am not talking about political stuff just oddities like would be burglar tries to break into a woman's home through the kitchen...he manages to bungle things up and ends up stabbed with a kitchen knife then sues over his technicality self inflicted injury....
You can preetty much blame it on how they seeemed obsessed with the 64 age count which... is frankly inadequate for the volume of material that they needed to cover the module and the player options.
And the other thing with the player's materials is that if they only have 64 pages to work with and can't go past that then as much as it pains me to say it they could have gotten it by
cutting a third of the art
removing 3 spelljammers.
If they'd done that, they probably could have gotten another 10 pages to cover mechanics. Heck if they ditched the rock of bral they could have gotten another 6! It's stupid that they were in a position where this was a thing but really as good as the art is (and it's indeed great!) and as useful an example as the Rock is I'd rather have the mechanics to make Spelljamming a compelling component of the D&D multiverse then have stuff that doesn't really help me with running a campaign.
Given how they ripped the deckplans from the 2e books I'm surprised they didn't also rip the charts for designing crystal spheres, planets, etc... and just replace terms that no longer matter like crystal sphere portals... Oh wait they didn't even do that with the deckplans as several of the ships still mention Jettisons....
Although they probably didn't bother to do that since conversations for those things can already be found online and they probably didn't want to risk legal issues if those homebrew conversations ended up looking identical to the new tables and someone claimed they stole someone else's work... silly that everything would still be based on their old tables from the 2e books...but they might have feared that in this day where insane court filings seem to be the norm...and I am not talking about political stuff just oddities like would be burglar tries to break into a woman's home through the kitchen...he manages to bungle things up and ends up stabbed with a kitchen knife then sues over his technicality self inflicted injury....
You can preetty much blame it on how they seeemed obsessed with the 64 age count which... is frankly inadequate for the volume of material that they needed to cover the module and the player options.
And the other thing with the player's materials is that if they only have 64 pages to work with and can't go past that then as much as it pains me to say it they could have gotten it by
cutting a third of the art
removing 3 spelljammers.
If they'd done that, they probably could have gotten another 10 pages to cover mechanics. Heck if they ditched the rock of bral they could have gotten another 6! It's stupid that they were in a position where this was a thing but really as good as the art is (and it's indeed great!) and as useful an example as the Rock is I'd rather have the mechanics to make Spelljamming a compelling component of the D&D multiverse then have stuff that doesn't really help me with running a campaign.
I completely agree, as much as I love the artwork... I wish we had the basic tools to build storylines with instead of pull it make up whatever you want and use best judgement... If I wanted to do that, I could have used the free online posted 5e homebrew spelljammer conversions that have been around for at least the last 6 years and have probably been around for the last decade...
Personally, I think they should have added 8 pages to each of the 3 books and added more material/lore table tools to build stuff alluded to but not mentioned. And then they could also have added in even more great artwork... I'm sure they had to cut some of the art they have for spelljammer. But I can understand how the additional cost may not have been worth it to them even if they could have used it as a publicity stunt to say we came up with so much good stuff we made the book bigger, I know a lot of Kickstarters have done that.
The thing is with "the additional cost" they were already gouging us; Like I'm sure it's much cheaper in the states or for purely digital materials, but I picked up the physical materials here in london ontario and this cost me $91 before tax as compare to Guide to ravenloft which cost me $65 for a 250+ page book.
Been watching this thread for a bit and pondering my own thoughts and now, finally, I'm going to give my two cents. I'll only be speaking to the Astral Adventure's Guide in specifics, as I have not read the other two books of this set because I will not be DMing and thus have no desire to spoil myself on the included adventure and want to leave the monsters a bit of an unknown for now. With that out of the way.. this good is not good. It has objectively bad content in both the simple process of proper editing and in the actual rules and mechanics presented within. If this were some indie publisher's third party product I'd be more forgiving, but this is Wizards of the Coast and their premier RPG that they've been producing content for and publishing (at least in the current iteration) for, what, 8 years now? It's not their first rodeo here, they should be held to a higher standard.
For Bad Editing we need only look to the page on gravity planes wherein the last paragraph of the Gravity Planes section is used up in introducing what happens to something falling in a gravity plane. Glance over to the next column.. glance downwards.. yes. See that there. A section explicitly labeled 'Falling' wherein we get the exact same rules, using admittedly different phrasing, but it's the same. Any editor worth paying any amount of money for should have seen that and gone 'Maybe we only need to tell people one time what happens when they fall on the span of a single page'. So we have either sloppy editing not catching that.. or it was purposefully left in to pad out the content of a page already not using two and a half inches of space at the bottom of column two.
Bad Rules and Mechanics: We have incomplete, contradictory, and logically inconsistent rules and mechanics, some of which were changed from the UA versions in what I can only assume was an effort to make them clearer and more concise, but leaves me with more questions than I originally had to begin with in some regards.
Falling in a Gravity Plane: "An object that falls off the side of a ship can end up oscillating back and forth across the gravity plane. It drops in one direction until it crosses the plane, then reverses direction back toward the plane again, continuing until something causes it to stop." I regard this as incomplete mainly because of the variety of questions that now arise based on the vagueness of wording and how this rule interacts with the more general rules of falling in 5e. The questions I now have is, does this oscillation ever stop barring something getting in the way? How far into the opposite side of the gravity plane does the object drop before it gets pulled in the other direction to cross the plane again? The only guidance we have for this would be to look at the actual Falling rules from 5e and to extrapolate an answer from them. Assuming we use Xanathar's rules for falling rates, a creature that is 'falling' instantly descends 500ft at the end of it's turn. Using the nautiloid diagram for air envelops and gravity planes as a baseline it's air envelope is 360ft from top to other top. So if someone pierces the top of the air envelope comes under the influence of the gravity plane and starts to fall, and assuming that this unfortunate creature was on a trajectory that wouldn't impact the ship itself, at the end of its turn would it.. just shoot straight through all 360ft of the air envelope because it instantly drops 500ft? If that's the case then there's only 2 ships in the book where any oscillation might be possible, the hammer head and the squid ship which both have 250ft lengths and would there for have 500ft up-other-up air envelopes, in which case the person would just ping pong back and forth from the extreme top to the other top without ever quite shooting straight through the air envelope. Imagine it we.. I don't know.. got rid of one of the repeated rules on this topic and filled it with rules to explain how it mechanically works instead of what happens from a vague narrative standpoint.
Drifting: Contradictory, but assuming it's from sloppy editing rather than actual rules intent. From the Falling section we know that 'A floating creature that enters the air envelope of a larger body is immediately affected by the larger body's gravity or gravity plane. The creature falls. Let's look just above that section to drifting: "However, an unanchored creature or object floating in a ship's air envelope is weightless and drifts toward the edge of the air envelope at a speed of 10 feet per minute. For example an unconscious sailor or crate that falls off the deck of a Spelljamming ship would begin drifting away from the ship along its gravity plane toward the edge of the ships' air envelope." Wait. What? Does gravity only affect creatures that are consciously aware that it should be affecting them? Because we know that if a creature floats into the air envelope of something large, gravity affects it, but this clearly states that things can be weightless in an air envelope and that poor unconscious sailor is gonna drift right out of it. This can't possibly be the intent, so we have to look to the original source material of 2E Spelljammer: "There is a problem for unrestrained objects resting on the plane of gravity of another large object, however. Along the plane an object is weightless, but it is pushed slowly out toward the edge of the gravity field. Therefore, a man overboard would eventually come to rest at the ship's plane of gravity, then begin drifting away from the ship along that plane toward the edge of the air envelope. On reaching the end of the gravity plane he is pushed outside the air envelope and then left behind as the ship moves away." So bad editing not catching onto air envelope really meaning 'on the gravity plane' but it's what got printed.. so we're left with weirdly illogical and contradictory rule as written.
Bad Mechanics: Hadozee: Original Glide, well known that it was fairly unclear in function and might be incredibly, they had all the time between the UA and release to fix it.. an instead made it worse.. by going from might be broken to definitely is broken and then overcorrected and nerfed the ability into a state of 'meh'.
Possibly Contradictory Mechanics and Rules Made Worse: Ahh.. the Thri-Kreen and their Secondary Arms. From the UA: Secondary Arms. You have two slightly smaller secondary arms below your primary pair of arms. "The secondary arms function like your primary arms, with the following exceptions: • You can use a secondary arm to wield a weapon that has the light property, but you can’t use a secondary arm to wield other kinds of weapons. • You can’t wield a shield with a secondary arm." This is incredibly clear cut and I'm not left with many questions that aren't explicitly answered with the text. Can I.. double hand a great sword with a regular arm and a secondary arm? No! I can't, it's not light and these secondary arms are only for light items! Can I.. use my secondary arms for sign language? Can you use your regular ones for it? Yes? Then yes! Can I.. pick up a scimitar with them and then wield it? Can you pick up a scimitar with your regular arms? Yes. Can you wield a light weapon with your secondary arms which would include a scimitar? Then yes! We went from that to the release iteration: "You have two slightly smaller secondary arms below your primary pair of arms. The secondary arms can manipulate an object, open or close a door or container, pick up or set down a Tiny object, or wield a weapon that has the light property." Now I have so many more questions that are not answered explicitly by the text or are left up to the GM's ruling. Can I.. pick up a scimitar and wield it. Well I can definitely wield it.. but picking it up.. is it a tiny object? Tiny Objects are like a lock or a bottle, small objects are like a lute or a chest, which means.. probably not, so I have weapons that I can wield that I cannot pick up with the arms that are meant to be able to wield them. Can I sheath and unsheath a scimitar with secondary arms? Does that count and picking up and setting down? Sign language? Not explicitly allowed. Write a letter? Maybe.. that could count as manipulating an object to use a pen on paper.. so probably. Can I cast a spell using somatic gestures with secondary arms? As written, it's not explicitly allowed. Can I cast a spell using a material component? Probably.. maybe.. if using an arcane focus, spell component pouch or component itself comes under 'manipulate an object', that's a freebie part of casting a spell. This is the problem from going from these are the exceptions to the rules to what these arms can do, to simplifying the rule to these are the only things the rules allow the arms to do, you create more questions for the DM to answer via on the spot rulings.
Things like this.. in what I expect to be a professionally put out quality product from the publishers of a longstanding line of products make this single 64 page book which is a third of the over all book content of this set a bad release beyond the complaints of others about lack of lore and DM tools to actually help run interesting adventures In space instead of just using space to connect other settings.
Things like this.. in what I expect to be a professionally put out quality product from the publishers of a longstanding line of products make this single 64 page book which is a third of the over all book content of this set a bad release beyond the complaints of others about lack of lore and DM tools to actually help run interesting adventures In space instead of just using space to connect other settings.
I could not agree more. Not only are we missing content, but the content we have is full of glaring holes.
I mean, just navigating wild space leaves questions; Like we know how fast ships go, but we don't know how big the average wildspace system is; Like is it 500 million miles? 5 billion? 50 million?
Like the reason this is important is because the air envelope apparently lasts for 4 months and so questions begin to arise about just how long we're supposed to be up there and if the systems are comparatively small then having such massive reserves seems moot.
Lets discuss what you liked and didn't like about the new Spelljammer: Adventures in Space box set
Ok. How to say this.
I had two favorite settings in AD&D in the 90s, Dark Sun & Spelljammer. (Treasure Planet is IMO the best Disney Film).
My favorite Dark Sun race the Thri-kreen mostly because they were not another flavor of Human.
So the new "Spelljammer is coming" Treasure Planet-esq teaser trailer. Thri-kreen will be included with all the classic SJ races. I'm hyped, I'm over the top, the only announce that would have been better would be the Return of Darksun. (never liked Dragon-Lance).
So get the books. They are light, way too light.
Space battle... it's not really there. Helm controls... not there. Most of the rules that made Spelljammer a setting are missing, no planet creator, no system creator, all missing, no real maps either. Literally can't run a Treasure Planet campaign using the material given. Then I start reading the race rules. WTF, they took a race that was a bit insensitive but designed with good intentions, and made it into a racist parody. I mean you can't accidently do that, that was some intentional racist BS. Sure they fixed it yesterday, in a way that left no one happy.
So my thoughts. I'm disappointed, seriously disappointed. Not going to buy Dragon Lance, which had big time racist BS originally so not looking forward to that disaster.
I'm figuring a lot of people are going to be wary of preordering future WotC books for this reason.
They could try to address this with some free pdfs like monstrous compendium volume one to try and address issues... But at this point I doubt they will since they are going they got our money so next product they'll probably look at spelljammer again in another decade...and let 3rd parties in DMGuild crank out attempts to fix the product.
But if this is the new approach to stuff by WotC, why buy the WotC products and not just wait for the 3rd party pdfs made to fix and use the material which will be a lot cheaper...
Seems like if WotC doesn't bother to address this issue it could severely harm their profits in the long run...so maybe they will address it... Maybe they won't...
Since they were quick to remove Hadozee artwork... If they don't even bother to replace it then we'll have our answer that they won't address these problems. How we as consumers respond to that decision may not be one WotC likes if they want people to buy their books and not just skip them due to the belief they are near useless and then rely on other sources.... A campaign setting that says to the DM make it all up as you wish isn't a campaign setting or even rules it's a lazy practice that is almost a fraudulent claim...how can you claim it is truly a WotC spelljammer campaign when the DMs have to homebrew/houseruling everything... At that point it's just a custom homebrew setting with lots of house rules... Not truly WorC spelljammer even if it has spelljaming ships in it...those ships have been teased in other adventures... Doesn't make those adventures spelljaming campaigns...
Also D&D isn't the only gaming system out there... pathfinder 2.0 is one alternative....WotC needs to realize they don't have a monopoly on these games and that if they want to compete they need to be viewed as producing quality and complete products... Not just cranking out blatant cash grabs that lure people in with great artwork and those people end up with content that looks like rough drafts of actual rules/adventures/whatever instead of the finished product that the contents of the book need to be.
Unfortunately I have to agree with Smklei06 on this one. The simple fact is there's only a few explanations for the consistent decline in quality books from WotC: Seplljammer was NOT an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination; I've recently been doing a read-through of some of the adventure books I've bought and well... I'd have to do so much homebrewing and making things up to fill in the blanks that I might as well not bother and just make it all up myself. None of the potential explanations are good from a consumer standpoint:
- Complacency - Being "the big thing" and 5E's popularity with mainstream audiences has bread an attitude that "oh anything will sell", thus the decline in quality, because when a large enough group will put down money for anything sight unseen why put in the extra effort?
- Pandering - WotC is attempting to please the phantom audience of Twitter where all the outrage noise happens; thus sucking all the setting lore out of their books and as a consequence making them harder to use for DMs and players.
- No audience focus - WotC is attempting to please too many divergent audiences, IE: the people who actually play TTRPGs on a regular basis versus the "new audience" that they've been courting of late. The problem is: there comes a point when "making things simple" backfires. The big example here is vehicle combat rules as I've outlined earlier in this very thread. As the old saying goes; attempt to please everyone and you succeed in pleasing no one.
None of those are good signs honestly, and I have to wonder if 5E's own success might have dealt it a blow here. Because 5E being king of the hill is largely due to the popularity that outside forces brought it; and like any trend, it will end some time. The pattern for trends is: massive boom, hit their max ordinate, and then crash; anyone thought about Furbys or Tomagachis, or Beanie Babies recently? No; didn't think so. There are other games out there, and the popularity of Critical Role will pass as all things do; if WotC convinces itself (as the whole "One D&D" thing makes me think they might have) that they'll rule the roost forever on name recognition alone and not having to produce a quality product to go with it... then well: I'm afraid they'll follow the same pattern of all the other franchises that made (and are making) that particular mistake.
See, the biggest issue for me is that WotC is attempting to go all in on homebrewers/nouveau crowd; people who only got into the game in the last few years, don't really respect the game's history or how it's done world building. And that's a problem because you get people coming in who look at the lore and make snap judgements without taking in the context of it or being able to seperate real world races from fantasy races which leads to them screaming about how WotC should be ashamed for promoting raacism (Because drow and orcs are both apparently references to african americans.)
The result from this has been WotC effectively jettisoning lore as hard and fast as possible because they're scared of offending anyone which led us to Multiverse where they have 33 races and they're all so... indescribably bland; It's like comparing as many diet cola's that have gone flat and trying to clearly ascribe the differences between them. Hell, I dug up a copy of 4e essentials to read the section on *humans* and there was richer and deeper lore there then there was in any of the races presented even though it was mostly just "yeah humans are like, super diverse".
Really this whole thing reminds me of the satanic panic from the 80s wherein D&D became the next subject of the great othering, and TSR relented to their efforts by getting rid of demons and devils... and replacing them with Taanari and Baatzu... who were functionally the exact same thing. Some years went by, TSR got bought by Wizards and they went back to being called Demons and devils. That was before the internet was really a thing though, and unlike the soccer mom's chanting deus vult in hobby stores, this crowd is liable to not forget or allow D&D to become rich or interesting again.
As such ~and it truly pains me to suggest this~ I'm of the mind that going forward I'm going to need to resort to pdf's aquired by... less then then ethical means to properly review materials before I put down money for any new products from WotC. I am loathe to do so but after spelljammer I can't justify giving money to a company that put out a product that is so bereft of substance or vision and especially not if it encourages more of this.
I have very little hope for Dragonlance at this juncture, but it's possible that planescape can still be saved.
See, the biggest issue for me is that WotC is attempting to go all in on homebrewers/nouveau crowd; people who only got into the game in the last few years, don't really respect the game's history or how it's done world building.
I mean, the Hadozee lore being discussed here was brand new, purpose built for 5e. That has nothing to do with the game's history.
Also have to agree with Kotath. If we're talking historically, then D&D as a game highly accessible to homebrewers has always been the case. This isn't Pathfinder where they make most of their money on adventures and setting books. D&D has always been rules forward and lore supplemental (and often shuffled into novels or games that are only loosely connected to D&D itself. Nearly all of Forgotten Realms was built this way).
The problem is: there comes a point when "making things simple" backfires.
Maybe, but "making things simple" was literally 5e's market pitch and why it is what it is today.
If anything, what we've seen from things like Tasha's and OneD&D is the opposite and has been making the game more complex, not less. The base game, as it exists in the MM/PHB/DMG as intended to be played, is by far the simplest version of 5e you can play.
The problem is: there comes a point when "making things simple" backfires.
Maybe, but "making things simple" was literally 5e's market pitch and why it is what it is today.
Attempting to make creature/personal-scale combat rules apply to vehicular combat rules for the sake of "simplicity" is also why 5e's vehicular combat (Spelljammer included) is such a train-wreck.
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I know it's weird right it's like WOTC is reinforcing there own belief that all lore is bad lore so they don't have to do as much work next time... if only they'd actually get diverse peoples to proof read it first
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So long as they're actually diverse and not just random black American, if you're going to have a culture based off of Africans for example I want an expert on African culture not an African American who grew up in America which is what so many people think makes a cultural expert. I want people from these actual cultures to speak on it not people that grew up in America with very little ties to their ancestral culture.
If I can't say something nice, I try to not say anything at all. So if I suddenly stop participating in a topic that's probably why.
Yeah that's more than fair too
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I'd argue that having a more comprehensive set of rules for running content in space is well... Let me put it this way.
A jack knife and a swiss army knife both have a folding knife which is the principal thing that people will use them for and tthere are people who will laugh at how the latter will have a screwdriver, a file, a can opener, a bottle opener, and a signal light built into them... right up until they find themselves in a situation where you need them and don't actually have them.
And yes you could run saltmarsh without ever having to do any of the ship related stuff. But for a lot of GM's and players who were looking for more comprehensive rules for it they were a great addition, and given that spelljammer is ~once again~ a book about boats in space there isn't really a good excuse for not having comprehensive rules for this particularly since you're going to have players who are going to want to own and operate such a vessel as opposed to simply being passengers.
aarrrrrhhhhh. I just got finish creating and printing Hadozee bard pregens yesterday. Thanks.
No Gaming is Better than Bad Gaming.
Okay, but we did want them, and we used them.
Edit: To follow your analogy, we busted out the screwdriver, and it was a battery powered screwdriver, and we didn't have the batteries, so we took the batteries out of the signal light and used those, but it was all kinda floppy and awkward, so we just went back to the knife and used that to turn the screw.
Which is why we wanted more comprehensive and tested rules for how to make this work.
Because heres the thing about spelljammer right now: as a setting it's pointless. There is nothing compelling or interesting about space or space combat or space travel because it's pretty much just a big empty void with monsters in it. Like I can not think of anything other then races (which are free with the UA pdf) and the monster manual that would be worth using outside of the rinky dink campaign.
Having actual guides for designing star systems, phenomenon, hazards and ship-to-ship combat would have given this actual legs for campaigns for years.
Instead I'm we have a situation where players might as well just use portals to hop from one world to another.
Given how they ripped the deckplans from the 2e books I'm surprised they didn't also rip the charts for designing crystal spheres, planets, etc... and just replace terms that no longer matter like crystal sphere portals... Oh wait they didn't even do that with the deckplans as several of the ships still mention Jettisons....
Although they probably didn't bother to do that since conversations for those things can already be found online and they probably didn't want to risk legal issues if those homebrew conversations ended up looking identical to the new tables and someone claimed they stole someone else's work... silly that everything would still be based on their old tables from the 2e books...but they might have feared that in this day where insane court filings seem to be the norm...and I am not talking about political stuff just oddities like would be burglar tries to break into a woman's home through the kitchen...he manages to bungle things up and ends up stabbed with a kitchen knife then sues over his technicality self inflicted injury....
You can preetty much blame it on how they seeemed obsessed with the 64 age count which... is frankly inadequate for the volume of material that they needed to cover the module and the player options.
And the other thing with the player's materials is that if they only have 64 pages to work with and can't go past that then as much as it pains me to say it they could have gotten it by
If they'd done that, they probably could have gotten another 10 pages to cover mechanics. Heck if they ditched the rock of bral they could have gotten another 6! It's stupid that they were in a position where this was a thing but really as good as the art is (and it's indeed great!) and as useful an example as the Rock is I'd rather have the mechanics to make Spelljamming a compelling component of the D&D multiverse then have stuff that doesn't really help me with running a campaign.
I completely agree, as much as I love the artwork... I wish we had the basic tools to build storylines with instead of pull it make up whatever you want and use best judgement... If I wanted to do that, I could have used the free online posted 5e homebrew spelljammer conversions that have been around for at least the last 6 years and have probably been around for the last decade...
Personally, I think they should have added 8 pages to each of the 3 books and added more material/lore table tools to build stuff alluded to but not mentioned. And then they could also have added in even more great artwork... I'm sure they had to cut some of the art they have for spelljammer. But I can understand how the additional cost may not have been worth it to them even if they could have used it as a publicity stunt to say we came up with so much good stuff we made the book bigger, I know a lot of Kickstarters have done that.
The thing is with "the additional cost" they were already gouging us; Like I'm sure it's much cheaper in the states or for purely digital materials, but I picked up the physical materials here in london ontario and this cost me $91 before tax as compare to Guide to ravenloft which cost me $65 for a 250+ page book.
Been watching this thread for a bit and pondering my own thoughts and now, finally, I'm going to give my two cents. I'll only be speaking to the Astral Adventure's Guide in specifics, as I have not read the other two books of this set because I will not be DMing and thus have no desire to spoil myself on the included adventure and want to leave the monsters a bit of an unknown for now. With that out of the way.. this good is not good. It has objectively bad content in both the simple process of proper editing and in the actual rules and mechanics presented within. If this were some indie publisher's third party product I'd be more forgiving, but this is Wizards of the Coast and their premier RPG that they've been producing content for and publishing (at least in the current iteration) for, what, 8 years now? It's not their first rodeo here, they should be held to a higher standard.
For Bad Editing we need only look to the page on gravity planes wherein the last paragraph of the Gravity Planes section is used up in introducing what happens to something falling in a gravity plane. Glance over to the next column.. glance downwards.. yes. See that there. A section explicitly labeled 'Falling' wherein we get the exact same rules, using admittedly different phrasing, but it's the same. Any editor worth paying any amount of money for should have seen that and gone 'Maybe we only need to tell people one time what happens when they fall on the span of a single page'. So we have either sloppy editing not catching that.. or it was purposefully left in to pad out the content of a page already not using two and a half inches of space at the bottom of column two.
Bad Rules and Mechanics: We have incomplete, contradictory, and logically inconsistent rules and mechanics, some of which were changed from the UA versions in what I can only assume was an effort to make them clearer and more concise, but leaves me with more questions than I originally had to begin with in some regards.
Falling in a Gravity Plane: "An object that falls off the side of a ship can end up oscillating back and forth across the gravity plane. It drops in one direction until it crosses the plane, then reverses direction back toward the plane again, continuing until something causes it to stop." I regard this as incomplete mainly because of the variety of questions that now arise based on the vagueness of wording and how this rule interacts with the more general rules of falling in 5e. The questions I now have is, does this oscillation ever stop barring something getting in the way? How far into the opposite side of the gravity plane does the object drop before it gets pulled in the other direction to cross the plane again? The only guidance we have for this would be to look at the actual Falling rules from 5e and to extrapolate an answer from them. Assuming we use Xanathar's rules for falling rates, a creature that is 'falling' instantly descends 500ft at the end of it's turn. Using the nautiloid diagram for air envelops and gravity planes as a baseline it's air envelope is 360ft from top to other top. So if someone pierces the top of the air envelope comes under the influence of the gravity plane and starts to fall, and assuming that this unfortunate creature was on a trajectory that wouldn't impact the ship itself, at the end of its turn would it.. just shoot straight through all 360ft of the air envelope because it instantly drops 500ft? If that's the case then there's only 2 ships in the book where any oscillation might be possible, the hammer head and the squid ship which both have 250ft lengths and would there for have 500ft up-other-up air envelopes, in which case the person would just ping pong back and forth from the extreme top to the other top without ever quite shooting straight through the air envelope. Imagine it we.. I don't know.. got rid of one of the repeated rules on this topic and filled it with rules to explain how it mechanically works instead of what happens from a vague narrative standpoint.
Drifting: Contradictory, but assuming it's from sloppy editing rather than actual rules intent. From the Falling section we know that 'A floating creature that enters the air envelope of a larger body is immediately affected by the larger body's gravity or gravity plane. The creature falls. Let's look just above that section to drifting: "However, an unanchored creature or object floating in a ship's air envelope is weightless and drifts toward the edge of the air envelope at a speed of 10 feet per minute. For example an unconscious sailor or crate that falls off the deck of a Spelljamming ship would begin drifting away from the ship along its gravity plane toward the edge of the ships' air envelope." Wait. What? Does gravity only affect creatures that are consciously aware that it should be affecting them? Because we know that if a creature floats into the air envelope of something large, gravity affects it, but this clearly states that things can be weightless in an air envelope and that poor unconscious sailor is gonna drift right out of it. This can't possibly be the intent, so we have to look to the original source material of 2E Spelljammer: "There is a problem for unrestrained objects resting on the plane of gravity of another large object, however. Along the plane an object is weightless, but it is pushed slowly
out toward the edge of the gravity field. Therefore, a man overboard would eventually come to rest at the ship's plane of gravity, then begin drifting away from the ship along that plane toward the edge of the air envelope. On reaching the end of the gravity plane he is pushed outside the air envelope and then left behind as the ship moves away." So bad editing not catching onto air envelope really meaning 'on the gravity plane' but it's what got printed.. so we're left with weirdly illogical and contradictory rule as written.
Bad Mechanics: Hadozee: Original Glide, well known that it was fairly unclear in function and might be incredibly, they had all the time between the UA and release to fix it.. an instead made it worse.. by going from might be broken to definitely is broken and then overcorrected and nerfed the ability into a state of 'meh'.
Possibly Contradictory Mechanics and Rules Made Worse: Ahh.. the Thri-Kreen and their Secondary Arms. From the UA: Secondary Arms. You have two slightly smaller secondary arms below your primary pair of arms. "The secondary arms function like your primary arms, with the following exceptions: • You can use a secondary arm to wield a weapon that has the light property, but you can’t use a secondary arm to wield other kinds of weapons. • You can’t wield a shield with a secondary arm." This is incredibly clear cut and I'm not left with many questions that aren't explicitly answered with the text. Can I.. double hand a great sword with a regular arm and a secondary arm? No! I can't, it's not light and these secondary arms are only for light items! Can I.. use my secondary arms for sign language? Can you use your regular ones for it? Yes? Then yes! Can I.. pick up a scimitar with them and then wield it? Can you pick up a scimitar with your regular arms? Yes. Can you wield a light weapon with your secondary arms which would include a scimitar? Then yes! We went from that to the release iteration: "You have two slightly smaller secondary arms below your primary pair of arms. The secondary arms can manipulate an object, open or close a door or container, pick up or set down a Tiny object, or wield a weapon that has the light property." Now I have so many more questions that are not answered explicitly by the text or are left up to the GM's ruling. Can I.. pick up a scimitar and wield it. Well I can definitely wield it.. but picking it up.. is it a tiny object? Tiny Objects are like a lock or a bottle, small objects are like a lute or a chest, which means.. probably not, so I have weapons that I can wield that I cannot pick up with the arms that are meant to be able to wield them. Can I sheath and unsheath a scimitar with secondary arms? Does that count and picking up and setting down? Sign language? Not explicitly allowed. Write a letter? Maybe.. that could count as manipulating an object to use a pen on paper.. so probably. Can I cast a spell using somatic gestures with secondary arms? As written, it's not explicitly allowed. Can I cast a spell using a material component? Probably.. maybe.. if using an arcane focus, spell component pouch or component itself comes under 'manipulate an object', that's a freebie part of casting a spell. This is the problem from going from these are the exceptions to the rules to what these arms can do, to simplifying the rule to these are the only things the rules allow the arms to do, you create more questions for the DM to answer via on the spot rulings.
Things like this.. in what I expect to be a professionally put out quality product from the publishers of a longstanding line of products make this single 64 page book which is a third of the over all book content of this set a bad release beyond the complaints of others about lack of lore and DM tools to actually help run interesting adventures In space instead of just using space to connect other settings.
I could not agree more. Not only are we missing content, but the content we have is full of glaring holes.
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HERE.I mean, just navigating wild space leaves questions; Like we know how fast ships go, but we don't know how big the average wildspace system is; Like is it 500 million miles? 5 billion? 50 million?
Like the reason this is important is because the air envelope apparently lasts for 4 months and so questions begin to arise about just how long we're supposed to be up there and if the systems are comparatively small then having such massive reserves seems moot.
Ok. How to say this.
I had two favorite settings in AD&D in the 90s, Dark Sun & Spelljammer. (Treasure Planet is IMO the best Disney Film).
My favorite Dark Sun race the Thri-kreen mostly because they were not another flavor of Human.
So the new "Spelljammer is coming" Treasure Planet-esq teaser trailer. Thri-kreen will be included with all the classic SJ races. I'm hyped, I'm over the top, the only announce that would have been better would be the Return of Darksun. (never liked Dragon-Lance).
So get the books. They are light, way too light.
Space battle... it's not really there. Helm controls... not there. Most of the rules that made Spelljammer a setting are missing, no planet creator, no system creator, all missing, no real maps either. Literally can't run a Treasure Planet campaign using the material given. Then I start reading the race rules. WTF, they took a race that was a bit insensitive but designed with good intentions, and made it into a racist parody. I mean you can't accidently do that, that was some intentional racist BS. Sure they fixed it yesterday, in a way that left no one happy.
So my thoughts. I'm disappointed, seriously disappointed. Not going to buy Dragon Lance, which had big time racist BS originally so not looking forward to that disaster.
I'm figuring a lot of people are going to be wary of preordering future WotC books for this reason.
They could try to address this with some free pdfs like monstrous compendium volume one to try and address issues... But at this point I doubt they will since they are going they got our money so next product they'll probably look at spelljammer again in another decade...and let 3rd parties in DMGuild crank out attempts to fix the product.
But if this is the new approach to stuff by WotC, why buy the WotC products and not just wait for the 3rd party pdfs made to fix and use the material which will be a lot cheaper...
Seems like if WotC doesn't bother to address this issue it could severely harm their profits in the long run...so maybe they will address it... Maybe they won't...
Since they were quick to remove Hadozee artwork... If they don't even bother to replace it then we'll have our answer that they won't address these problems. How we as consumers respond to that decision may not be one WotC likes if they want people to buy their books and not just skip them due to the belief they are near useless and then rely on other sources.... A campaign setting that says to the DM make it all up as you wish isn't a campaign setting or even rules it's a lazy practice that is almost a fraudulent claim...how can you claim it is truly a WotC spelljammer campaign when the DMs have to homebrew/houseruling everything... At that point it's just a custom homebrew setting with lots of house rules... Not truly WorC spelljammer even if it has spelljaming ships in it...those ships have been teased in other adventures... Doesn't make those adventures spelljaming campaigns...
Also D&D isn't the only gaming system out there... pathfinder 2.0 is one alternative....WotC needs to realize they don't have a monopoly on these games and that if they want to compete they need to be viewed as producing quality and complete products... Not just cranking out blatant cash grabs that lure people in with great artwork and those people end up with content that looks like rough drafts of actual rules/adventures/whatever instead of the finished product that the contents of the book need to be.
Unfortunately I have to agree with Smklei06 on this one. The simple fact is there's only a few explanations for the consistent decline in quality books from WotC: Seplljammer was NOT an isolated incident by any stretch of the imagination; I've recently been doing a read-through of some of the adventure books I've bought and well... I'd have to do so much homebrewing and making things up to fill in the blanks that I might as well not bother and just make it all up myself. None of the potential explanations are good from a consumer standpoint:
- Complacency - Being "the big thing" and 5E's popularity with mainstream audiences has bread an attitude that "oh anything will sell", thus the decline in quality, because when a large enough group will put down money for anything sight unseen why put in the extra effort?
- Pandering - WotC is attempting to please the phantom audience of Twitter where all the outrage noise happens; thus sucking all the setting lore out of their books and as a consequence making them harder to use for DMs and players.
- No audience focus - WotC is attempting to please too many divergent audiences, IE: the people who actually play TTRPGs on a regular basis versus the "new audience" that they've been courting of late. The problem is: there comes a point when "making things simple" backfires. The big example here is vehicle combat rules as I've outlined earlier in this very thread. As the old saying goes; attempt to please everyone and you succeed in pleasing no one.
None of those are good signs honestly, and I have to wonder if 5E's own success might have dealt it a blow here. Because 5E being king of the hill is largely due to the popularity that outside forces brought it; and like any trend, it will end some time. The pattern for trends is: massive boom, hit their max ordinate, and then crash; anyone thought about Furbys or Tomagachis, or Beanie Babies recently? No; didn't think so. There are other games out there, and the popularity of Critical Role will pass as all things do; if WotC convinces itself (as the whole "One D&D" thing makes me think they might have) that they'll rule the roost forever on name recognition alone and not having to produce a quality product to go with it... then well: I'm afraid they'll follow the same pattern of all the other franchises that made (and are making) that particular mistake.
See, the biggest issue for me is that WotC is attempting to go all in on homebrewers/nouveau crowd; people who only got into the game in the last few years, don't really respect the game's history or how it's done world building. And that's a problem because you get people coming in who look at the lore and make snap judgements without taking in the context of it or being able to seperate real world races from fantasy races which leads to them screaming about how WotC should be ashamed for promoting raacism (Because drow and orcs are both apparently references to african americans.)
The result from this has been WotC effectively jettisoning lore as hard and fast as possible because they're scared of offending anyone which led us to Multiverse where they have 33 races and they're all so... indescribably bland; It's like comparing as many diet cola's that have gone flat and trying to clearly ascribe the differences between them. Hell, I dug up a copy of 4e essentials to read the section on *humans* and there was richer and deeper lore there then there was in any of the races presented even though it was mostly just "yeah humans are like, super diverse".
Really this whole thing reminds me of the satanic panic from the 80s wherein D&D became the next subject of the great othering, and TSR relented to their efforts by getting rid of demons and devils... and replacing them with Taanari and Baatzu... who were functionally the exact same thing. Some years went by, TSR got bought by Wizards and they went back to being called Demons and devils. That was before the internet was really a thing though, and unlike the soccer mom's chanting deus vult in hobby stores, this crowd is liable to not forget or allow D&D to become rich or interesting again.
As such ~and it truly pains me to suggest this~ I'm of the mind that going forward I'm going to need to resort to pdf's aquired by... less then then ethical means to properly review materials before I put down money for any new products from WotC. I am loathe to do so but after spelljammer I can't justify giving money to a company that put out a product that is so bereft of substance or vision and especially not if it encourages more of this.
I have very little hope for Dragonlance at this juncture, but it's possible that planescape can still be saved.
I mean, the Hadozee lore being discussed here was brand new, purpose built for 5e. That has nothing to do with the game's history.
Also have to agree with Kotath. If we're talking historically, then D&D as a game highly accessible to homebrewers has always been the case. This isn't Pathfinder where they make most of their money on adventures and setting books. D&D has always been rules forward and lore supplemental (and often shuffled into novels or games that are only loosely connected to D&D itself. Nearly all of Forgotten Realms was built this way).
Maybe, but "making things simple" was literally 5e's market pitch and why it is what it is today.
If anything, what we've seen from things like Tasha's and OneD&D is the opposite and has been making the game more complex, not less. The base game, as it exists in the MM/PHB/DMG as intended to be played, is by far the simplest version of 5e you can play.
Attempting to make creature/personal-scale combat rules apply to vehicular combat rules for the sake of "simplicity" is also why 5e's vehicular combat (Spelljammer included) is such a train-wreck.