I liked SpellJammer many years ago. I thought the setting was a lot of fun and kinda weird and Wacky Space/Scifi/Fantasy.
It was hard to get people to play it though in those days at least.

I doubt I'd buy any 5E material anymore, I'm a bit over it and WotC in general really.

Quote from: I HATE THE DEMIURGE I HATE THE DEMIURGE on August 17, 2022, 06:58:18 PM
Overrated garbage that is a mile wide and a foot deep.

When I was a young lad, I thought it was the coolest shit ever. "Wowee," I thought. "A literally infinite multiverse for my players to play and romp in!" Then I realized that the massive scope is actually a detriment to storytelling. When everything is infinite in scope, then your contribution doesn't really matter as much.

When your PCs discover that the Blood War was started by a group of "Good" Gods to put Devil and Demons one against the other, and revealing this means the Literal Apocalypse - all while they are around 7th level - be assured that what they choose to do counts.

Anyway, Planescape is about beliefs and even philosophy. The level of your character and the actual agency you have are, literally, two independent concepts.

Stumbled across another video about Spelljammer 5e. The guy (named Guy) does a pretty job illustrating exactly why the book sucks.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t4tL_K9r8ps

Skip to 1:30 to get past all his shilling of his books/social media.

Quote from: Monero on August 15, 2022, 12:42:10 PM
And for some reason I always link Spelljammer and Planescape in my head even though there's no real reason for it, so the same goes for Planescape...how do you all feel about the setting overall?

I didn't like either setting in the 2E era, so both are meh reactions.

The only setting I'd like to revisit from that era is Dark Sun, and the current direction at WotC can't do it justice so I prefer they leave it dead.

Never went in for Spelljammer myself.  Just not really my bag.  Seemed like it was a gonzo idea of, 'people love fantasy, people love sci fi, let's jam 'em together because of course!"

Planescape I kind of liked.  Good concepts, etc.  I liked the concept of a nexus place connecting all but we also didn't do such a great job imagining his a truly different plane would/could be.  It was always just Prime Material Plane decorated for a a different theme.  We didn't get into different physics, etc.

If it's from WOTC, I'm not interested.  But if the two only Planescape has any appeal.

Quote from: Palleon on August 25, 2022, 11:59:49 AM

Quote from: Monero on August 15, 2022, 12:42:10 PM
And for some reason I always link Spelljammer and Planescape in my head even though there's no real reason for it, so the same goes for Planescape...how do you all feel about the setting overall?

I didn't like either setting in the 2E era, so both are meh reactions.

The only setting I'd like to revisit from that era is Dark Sun, and the current direction at WotC can't do it justice so I prefer they leave it dead.

Greetings!

I agree entirely, Palleon.

I have never been a big fan of Spelljammer or the Planescape campaigns. I also hope that WOTC leaves Dark Sun alone. WOTC would forever pollute and destroy Dark Sun if they touched it now. They would put Rainbow Hippos and Happy Carebears in Dark Sun, and pump the campaign full of syrup.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: SHARK on August 25, 2022, 12:14:58 PM

Quote from: Palleon on August 25, 2022, 11:59:49 AM

Quote from: Monero on August 15, 2022, 12:42:10 PM
And for some reason I always link Spelljammer and Planescape in my head even though there's no real reason for it, so the same goes for Planescape...how do you all feel about the setting overall?

I didn't like either setting in the 2E era, so both are meh reactions.

The only setting I'd like to revisit from that era is Dark Sun, and the current direction at WotC can't do it justice so I prefer they leave it dead.

Greetings!

I agree entirely, Palleon.

I have never been a big fan of Spelljammer or the Planescape campaigns. I also hope that WOTC leaves Dark Sun alone. WOTC would forever pollute and destroy Dark Sun if they touched it now. They would put Rainbow Hippos and Happy Carebears in Dark Sun, and pump the campaign full of syrup.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

With Dark Sun the only hope for anything not vomit-inducing to come out would be for WOTC to license that setting out to another company that was somehow also not Woke. I just don't see that happening. Especially since the nuTSR fiasco with Star Frontiers is going to make Hasbro lock down hard on their IPs.

On the other hand, I wouldn't worry about WOTC coming out with their own 5E Dark Sun. I can't see them having the stomach to even review the base material without having a mental health emergency.

Best you can do for new material is look for "off brand" Dark Sun-like material from the independent creators.

Quote from: Brooding Paladin on August 25, 2022, 12:13:00 PM
Never went in for Spelljammer myself.  Just not really my bag.  Seemed like it was a gonzo idea of, 'people love fantasy, people love sci fi, let's jam 'em together because of course!"

Planescape I kind of liked.  Good concepts, etc.  I liked the concept of a nexus place connecting all but we also didn't do such a great job imagining his a truly different plane would/could be.  It was always just Prime Material Plane decorated for a a different theme.  We didn't get into different physics, etc.

If it's from WOTC, I'm not interested.  But if the two only Planescape has any appeal.

I agree and disagree.

One of the issues with other planes is that they're often very boring and one-note. This shouldn't be surprising because they were originally invented because of nerdy OCD autism even tho this served no practical purpose. At an absolute minimum other planes need to have things like geography and civilizations to be interesting. Perhaps redecorated versions of the prime wasn't creative enough, but that's still way more interesting than "the elemental plane of water is redundant to any prime ocean." That's why I've often suggested just discarding the planes entirely if you can't justify their existence over identical prime locations. There's nothing wrong with getting rid of ideas that don't work in practice.

I think Spelljammer has a neat concept because it was basically Treasure Planet years before that was a thing. It wasn't just a literal mashup of fantasy and scifi like Dragonstar or Starfinder, the writers went the extra mile to give wildspace unique physics distinct from real/scifi space travel. It feels more like the retroscifi from the era before people understood how physics worked, and thus feels like a better fit for the physics-defying medievalesque fantasy than conventional scifi space physics. Did they need to introduce a new transitive plane in the form of the phlogiston? Probably not.

I was initially skeptical of replacing the phlogiston with the astral because the astral's planar properties are so different. But now I think it was probably better than trying to introduce yet another transitive plane, especially when astral adventures and wildspace adventures are already so aesthetically similar. It does make aesthetic sense to replace phlogiston with the astral. It even makes a kind of etymological sense: if stars are windows in crystal spheres to the astral plane, then that explains why the astral is called the astral in the first place. Astral literally means "of, connected with, or resembling the stars."

Quote from: wmarshal on August 25, 2022, 12:43:29 PM

Quote from: SHARK on August 25, 2022, 12:14:58 PM

Quote from: Palleon on August 25, 2022, 11:59:49 AM

Quote from: Monero on August 15, 2022, 12:42:10 PM
And for some reason I always link Spelljammer and Planescape in my head even though there's no real reason for it, so the same goes for Planescape...how do you all feel about the setting overall?

I didn't like either setting in the 2E era, so both are meh reactions.

The only setting I'd like to revisit from that era is Dark Sun, and the current direction at WotC can't do it justice so I prefer they leave it dead.

Greetings!

I agree entirely, Palleon.

I have never been a big fan of Spelljammer or the Planescape campaigns. I also hope that WOTC leaves Dark Sun alone. WOTC would forever pollute and destroy Dark Sun if they touched it now. They would put Rainbow Hippos and Happy Carebears in Dark Sun, and pump the campaign full of syrup.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

With Dark Sun the only hope for anything not vomit-inducing to come out would be for WOTC to license that setting out to another company that was somehow also not Woke. I just don't see that happening. Especially since the nuTSR fiasco with Star Frontiers is going to make Hasbro lock down hard on their IPs.

On the other hand, I wouldn't worry about WOTC coming out with their own 5E Dark Sun. I can't see them having the stomach to even review the base material without having a mental health emergency.

Best you can do for new material is look for "off brand" Dark Sun-like material from the independent creators.

I'm surprised, considering how popular muscle art is in the gay community. If you lookup adult fantasy art made by gay/bi men, it looks like an explicit version of Frazetta.

Quote from: Effete on August 24, 2022, 10:46:24 PM
Stumbled across another video about Spelljammer 5e. The guy (named Guy) does a pretty job illustrating exactly why the book sucks.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t4tL_K9r8ps

Skip to 1:30 to get past all his shilling of his books/social media.

That video was quite interesting to me when it popped up in my feed. I have a minor impersonal grudge against Guy Sclanders(sp?). I used to watch his videos, and the guy is ground zero for all the typical items of nu-school bad DM-ing advice (fudging dice, pre-planned character arcs, faking enemy stats, etc.) Trying to follow his advice ended up torpedoing one of my games, and I'm sure has done the same to tons of other people.

That said, I consider him to be a reasonable gauge of what the nu-school players are thinking, and if even he is fed up with the rubbish quality of WOTC releases, that might say something.

Never paid the slightest bit of attention to Spelljammer as I thought the concept was lame.  We did have some guys in college that were way into it, but they weren't part of our gaming group.

As for Planescape, I loathe it with the red hot intensity of a thousand suns.  I checked it out for the lore about the Hells & Abyss, but found it to be garbage.  I hated everything from the tone, to the writing, to the lame-ass Blood War, the baatezu and tanar'ri (which of course was 2nd edition Snowflakism), to the atrocious DiTerlizzi art.  Probably the worst "setting" ever created for any edition of D&D.

I don't play any WOTC games anyhow and never will so the latest announcements mean zero to me.  But you asked.

Quote from: Palleon on August 25, 2022, 11:59:49 AM
The only setting I'd like to revisit from that era is Dark Sun, and the current direction at WotC can't do it justice so I prefer they leave it dead.

It'll be as smooth and featureless as a stone worn down by a river.

And every bit as skippable.

Spelljammer for me was always just connecting tissue. A way for PCs that didn't have access to planar magic or portals to move between different worlds in the Prime Material.

Planescape is my second favorite setting ever (beaten only by Birthright), and to me the perfect description of a general D&D Cosmology. Zeb Cook did an amazing job on the writing and set the tone for later writers in the setting.

I also much prefer the 2E terminology for the fiends (Baatezu, Tanar'ri, Yugoloth, Gehreleth) as opposed to the far more prosaic (not to mention potentially confusing) Devil, Demon, Daemon. The Blood War is a lovely way to explain why the incredibly numerous fiends don't just simply conquer everywhere else on the planes, and the background of the Yugoloth manipulation makes it all the more interesting.

I have always quite liked both as an intellectual exercise, but they struck me as a tremendous amount of campaign material that I would ever only use a small bit of.  When writing an adventure, or even a campaign, I try to determine the area in which the players will be active, and add a lot of detail to bring it to life.  As a practical matter I could develop a campaign in Pandesmos, Avernus, or Sigil (my top 3 planescape choices) and flesh it out enough to make it interesting, but my development of the world beyond the primary campaign plane, or even outside of the developed area, as each plane is infinite, would be cursory at best.  Traveling into the undetailed areas would not be very interesting for me as a DM because I would be making it all up on the fly, and would be unsatisfying for my players as well, because I do my best work with a lot of preparation.  One could also run a Star Trek style campaign where a new location is visited every adventure, but I expect that if I were to try it, I wouldn't have enough time to develop each location much, and the settings would be shallow and not very interesting.

Quote from: ForgottenF on August 25, 2022, 07:46:24 PM

Quote from: Effete on August 24, 2022, 10:46:24 PM
Stumbled across another video about Spelljammer 5e. The guy (named Guy) does a pretty job illustrating exactly why the book sucks.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t4tL_K9r8ps

Skip to 1:30 to get past all his shilling of his books/social media.

That video was quite interesting to me when it popped up in my feed. I have a minor impersonal grudge against Guy Sclanders(sp?). I used to watch his videos, and the guy is ground zero for all the typical items of nu-school bad DM-ing advice (fudging dice, pre-planned character arcs, faking enemy stats, etc.) Trying to follow his advice ended up torpedoing one of my games, and I'm sure has done the same to tons of other people.

That said, I consider him to be a reasonable gauge of what the nu-school players are thinking, and if even he is fed up with the rubbish quality of WOTC releases, that might say something.

I never ever heard of him before. </shrug>
To be fair, though, I also never looked up any DnD 5e videos on YT before. Although it is pretty funny his channel is called "Be a better DM" if he's giving out such low-tier advice. I mean, I suppose it's "better" than being an asshole DM, but it's not "good" advice.

I checked out the video that was linked earlier in the thread and my now YT suggestions are flooded with a bunch of 5e fanboy videos, with thumbnails of soyjaks jizzing themselves in front of images of Spelljammer and Radiant Citadel.

Quote from: Effete on August 24, 2022, 10:46:24 PM
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t4tL_K9r8ps

Skip to 1:30 to get past all his shilling of his books/social media.

FYI: https://youtu.be/t4tL_K9r8ps?t=90