Ship (Regular, not spell) combat has been a huge point of interest to me. I tend to lean towards the separate combat system. But this is interesting. The most important part of any system is making sure everyone can do something.
The biggest problem with ship combat in almost every game it's in is ensuring that every single player on the ship has some level of agency. Starfinder fails this one big time in my opinion: the only crew member that has any agency is the Pilot... The gunners only get to use turretted weapons or those that the pilot lined up for them, and the science officer, captain and engineer are really relegated to just giving the pilot or gunner small bonuses from time to time. It's gotten to the point where one of the players at my table just goes and gets snacks any time starship combat happens because they really can't do anything for the roughly 90 minutes starship combat takes.
I made a homebrew system, where each player takes on an officer role on the ship; Captain, first mait, helmsman, master Gunner, and shipwright. The captain gives out orders and decide in what order the officers act. On there turn, they can fully ignore the captain and perform another action if they like (this is one of the fun moments of the game). Each officer has a set of actions they can take, and some actions are acceptableto all officers. This combat is deadly. There is a small chance that an officer will get hit during combat, and the ship weapons are a lot more effective at sinking ships than in spelljammer. While this is a separate system, we still use the pc's sheets for all rolls, and it only took a few rounds for the party to get into the flow and in love with the system.
Holy heck. I think I'm now either making a Traveler campaign for DnD or shamelessly remaking my old unfinished ideas of ship building system into something like this.
I, personally, have never liked the vibe of spelljammer and the space ship combat stuff, not my cup of tea. That being said, I still sat through this entire video because your ideas are phenomenal and the amount of work that you put into these videos is truly astounding. ON TOP of the fantastic video you're always releasing content for completely free that are supplements that i would actually pay for. Hands down one of the best D&D advice channels out there, keep up the astounding work. Absolutely worth the channel membership cost.
@@Trekiros Oh awesome! You deserve it man, I've been using the legendary resistance changes since that vid dropped, and i barely plan an encounter without your CR builder at this point so I'm happy to pay back a little for all the work put in.
Spelljammer was probably the worst book in all of 5e. I’m glad there are fans who’re willing to do want the devs weren’t, make ship combat interesting.
I was SO excited for Spelljammer/Astral Sea that I started planning my first ever campaign around it before I even had my book delivered. Then I got the books and....yeah...basically an art book with some descriptions. So I started perusing the PDFs of 2e Spelljammer content and hand rolled a lot of stuff about the ships, helms, and magical stuff in this setting.
I just started DM’ing a spacejammer campaign and I wasn’t happy with how it handles space combat. I never realized how horrific it was until you did the number crunching. Thank you SO MUCH for sharing Space Unjammed, it’s perfect for what we’re looking for! You’re a hero!
Well timed video for me! About to start a space pirate adventure and was looking for rules. Was going to adapt Limithron's Rules for Naval Combat or the Naval Code, but wasn't terribly satisfied by the idea of most people spending their turns giving advantage to doing whatever the captain said.
This is a great video. I've kind of incorporated a little bit of both worlds. Onboard the ship I have two turrets and an arcane cannon. For my more martial classes I brewed up some gundam style fighters. The pilot is also the captain and they get to move the ship and can give one a command to one of the other players and the player can take that action (allowing them to effect the battlefield a bit more than just piloting. Lastly we have the engineer that controls the power systems, they have the ability to direct power to parts of the ship such as weapon systems, shields, or engines.
Cool ideas. I think you can actually mix the two flavours with half the characters using the ship and half flying into the fray on the own. Sadly this doesn't solve this for actually maritime settings, but you could enhance these with flying mounts or sea horses, maybe even small boats. Or you go for just 1-3 rounds of manouvering and gunning, after which either a vessel tries to break the engagement and flees or it comes to a boarding action. I for one think that having the option of one party actually escaping, so that apprehending them is more of an investigation than a direct chase, makes for a nice change of pace. Its not very dnd like, from what I can tell, but well maybe this is worth exploring and a gap to address
Took me a while because I planned to make a video about random tables/procedural generation, but ended up not having enough material for a full video after a couple weeks of research So that's still simmering in the background but in the meantime enjoy the space combat schenanigans!
Wow! This is great! Now I'm more interested playing Spell Jammer with this Homebrew. This just gave me some inspiration for my Sea Pirates campaign. I'm going to use the same ship battle concept but with Aquatic animals and steam punk engines as single space fighters while still using big ship battles. Thank you very much for creating this!
this is SO great. i can’t even begin to explain the leaps and bounds better this is than the 5e spelljammer source books put out by wizards. thank you for your service, truly!
So one of the things i added to my ship combat in D&D that I highly recommend for any mage-heavy party: Spellcannons. Essentially these are ship-bound spell augmentors, the primary function of them being to boost the range of any spell you cast into them to one worthy of ship-to-ship combat. (My personal homebrew boosts the range to 10x the normal range, but I'm generous and I think 5x might be more balanced if a little less fun) with more powerful versions of spellcannons doing things like adding permanent metamagic effects or boosting the level of the spell cast through it. These things do so much to add interest to space combat for both NPCs and PCs: mages can now summon monsters onto the decks of the enemy ship, cast hazards like flaming sphere onto the weapons platforms (or helm) of the enemy ship... it essentially re-incorporates all the possibilities that mages provide to D&D combat back into starship combat, which adds a lot more interest. (And yeah, I know this is spellcaster exclusive stuff and they have a lot of privilages already, but I'm working on that other thing, too)
I like how this keeps the Age of Sail feel! That's my big complaint with the solution in the second half of the video where characters go off in their own smaller ships. My only concern is over what the martial characters are doing while the spellcasters are using spellcannons. I suppose you could keep conventional cannons and mangonels on board, but that doesn't solve the problem where siege weapons make character abilities irrelevant. I'm leaning towards just making boarding far easier to achieve (spellcannon-augmented teleporting?).
@@WillHerrmann I do think for Martials the best way to handle it is to make extensive use of boarding parties and summoning spells on spellcannons. Ensure that they have *something* to do while the mages blast away. The trouble with ship's cannons and siege equipment in ship combat is that honestly there's no agency for the gunner: they just get to roll attack rolls... something that could be handled by a pilot character in addition to the maneuvering, so you need something to keep your martial characters occupied elsewhere. Hell, you could steal one from Faster than Light and have teleportation circles on your ship that you can use to teleport your melee martials directly onto the enemy's ship... just something that keeps their agency in the fight and lets them have their own micro decisions to make.
This is absolutely perfect timing! We had a session 0 last weekend where we made characters and came up with roughly how they know each other/meet each other. I'm preparing to run a Spelljammer campaign right now and we'll prob start in 1 or 2 weeks most so this is perfect since I really.. didn't like how ship combat sounded haha I'll take some liberties with stuff in the book anyways but this is so helpful. I was just gonna steal ship combat from other 5e ship combat systems but this is really helpful^^
Love this so much cause space jammer was such a fun and cool concept to me and when I got the books it was so bland and disappointing but now with this I feel a lot more confident eventually running this.
This is a great way of handling things because it makes every player directly involved in combat and it gives the players FLIGHT combat too, which is just massively fun.
I ain't going into Spelljammer stuff directly, but Spelljammer lore is tied to a decent chunk of my current homebrew work, and somewhere in the far future I had debated a mini Spelljammer-esque combat scenario involving an airship and some old-school Spelljammer units known as Spirit warriors sieging a castle. These rules will be quite useful if I ever reach that part for inspirations I'm sure!
It's an idea so good I can't believe everyone didn't think of it! HAVE THE CHARACTERS DO THE FIGHTING!!! (I've been running my own ship rules for a year, with longrange spell cannons and grapple ballista, and the players are kind of INDIFFERENT to ship battles) THANKYOU I LOVE THIS
Really well done. I appreciate your deep level of insight into how the game works, and the effort you put in to translate your ideas into a clear and high quality video without excess rambling. Thank you for creating something that looks like it may save Spelljammer for my group.
Thank you for such a paradigm-shifting take on ship combat! I made some personal tweaks and playtested the result and it worked so much better than my previous attempts at ship to ship combat.
...Huh. This is really cool! I ran something similar through sheer coincidence in Descent into Avernus - it was preceded by Waterdeep Dragon Heist, and the players were a little invested in the mansion they got, so by shenanigans I had it teleported to hell and converted into a mobile-home-slash-tank for them to find - and yeah, pretty quickly found that big vehicles vs big vehicles gets a bit boring. I ended up giving both the players and opponents smaller motorcycles to zoom around with, but I didn't think to make the big vehicles _themselves_ more interesting and specialized. I wish I'd had a chance to see this video back then!
Ain't saying no to pretty pictures on my screen! As a sidenote, I'm glad to see that I've come to pretty much your own conclusions by GM'ing Vulcania sessions at conventions xD
Appreciate this! Was looking at the SpaceFinger rules to replace the Spelljammed rules, and it really is a whole other game system, this is much improved!
Hey, man as a guy who has been playing dnd for years and has been looking in to homebrew and other things since I was a child I wanna say I love your videos, especially this one. I have been looking into ship combat forever and while I always find good videos and content they always have the same issue which you fix putting all the players on one ship takes away player agency instead of adding it. Your idea fixes all those issues and adds I whole lot more fun stuff I love your videos and keep it up. sadly I am moving away from dnd and moving toward Pathfinder 2e I wish you had something like this for pf2e and Starfinder 2e. Anyway keep it up and I want to see your channel grow I've been subscribed for a while I am now saving this video so I can find it later. I originally watched this video a long time ago. but I wanted to find it again to keep for refrence.
I'm definitely using this but reskin for Airships, normal ships, and the like! This will work amazingly for fun combat when traveling on the hex map of the world I'm making and expanded as I plan on doing lots of traveling, encounters, and whatnot
I used your supplement when I ran Spelljammer, I really enjoyed it, mainly the additional ship options. But I most definitely prefer it when Starship combat is like a "game mode" or a "subsystem" that plays around and feels different than a normal combat, I also have experienced that 5e players struggle with subsystems because every challenge seems so insignificant with how DC works that they just want to jump and do stuff themselves, even in a pirate/sea campaign they tried to do that. The negative part about Starfinder starship combat (which I really like), is that some rules are overcomplicated, some things are a high DC roll for a minor advantage, some other things require you to re-read them on the go if you don't memorize a long wall of text. Appreciate the video and great work!
This is excellent stuff! And I'm not just saying that because it's similar to how I've been trying to improve Spelljammer for my players 😋 I'll def be incorporating some of this into my game. Thank you for all the hard work!
My first planned change to the main rules is increasing ship and creature speed in Wildspace x10 so the ships actually move about properly on the scaled Battlemat. That way they get proper tactical movement, can duck in and out of cover etc rather than moving half a ships length per turn in a crawl. Next I want to make the weapon use connected to character abilities. So the player aiming who has good shooting skills with an arrow is good with the weapon. But I want that with the loader too, so each player involved with the weapon makes a roll, strength to load and something undecided (perhaps a choice of Int or Wis) for the one pulling the firing lever for the timing of the shot. A good roll gives advantage to the shot, a bad disadvantage and of course one of each cancels the other out. Though perhaps I’ll make one instead give a refill to damage instead… still considering that. That way the pilot makes the movement choices and everyone on the weapons makes a roll that matters to the attacks success or failure. And each comes from the stats of the character. The barbarian with their high strength is now making a strength roll to lift that boulder onto the mangonel fast or pulling back the powerful string of the ballista, the rogue with their high dex is aiming up that shot etc. And for bards, well sea shanties have a practical use in keeping timing and coordination with physical tasks and bardic inspiration could be given to help those weapon rolls and maybe I’d have those go into a pool per weapon where any in the weapon crew could use it. Those are my current thoughts.
Thank you for doing this! I’ve been playing Spelljammer for a few weeks now and I’ve found the space combat to be lacking. I’m gonna test out your supplement this afternoon!
What a brilliant solution!! I'll be adapting it to ship combat on the sea for my pirate campaign - using giant sharks with frickin ballistae on their heads as mounts!!
Hmm, shark-mounted ballistas, yes please. This is just my flavor of nonsense :p My pirate campaign followed roughly the One Piece formula: the map to the biggest treasure in the world was broken into 4 parts, so you'll need to go find (or steal - this is a pirate campaign after all!) those 4 parts and then go for the big one. And I made sure to hide each of them in a location that would require my players to steal some kind of super-ship to reach: one was at the bottom of the sea so you needed a submarine, another was in the elemental plane of air so you needed an airship, etc. And along the way, you'll make a lot of friends, and just as many enemies. I designed 6 factions, and each of them came with a conflict which would ask of my players, exactly what kind of pirates do you want to be? Do you want freedom (working for the revolutionaries), or power and influence (working as privateers for a colonial empire)? Do you want to be feared (being part of the pirate council), or to be off of people's radars (working for the pirate council)? etc... I'm no writer, so my adventure plots are pretty simple, but simple does the job most of the time :p
I am running planescape right now, but one of my players loves the idea of spelljammer. I have been avoiding it because of the sheer amount of work required to make it fun based on the spelljammer books he gave me for my birthday as a hint. Now he is going to feel like it is his birthday when we go spelljamming between some of the planes! Thanks for creating this for us! By the way, would you consider adding prices on the magic items so groups could have a ‘pimp my ride’ spending session where they get to pick and really customise how they want their ship to function. Talk about player buy in! If not, what would be a good way to gauge prices for this stuff?
That's really cool. I am planning a air world (the party is traveling through an air portal) and they are going to be taking a flying ship to an enemy location. I am expecting they will all remain on the ship so the battle will basically be them trying to fend off enemy as they board but I need something for the cannons and if the party tries to shoot down the incoming fire drakes who will be dropping in the bad guys. I'm gonna have to incorporate this somehow.
You literally released this when I needed it most! 😭😭 Thank you! Now I don't have to rely on the bad spelljammer rules to dictate combat for my players new flying fortress
You are one of the channels I look forward to seeing on my feed. As someone who DMed their first game in 2006, your videos have taken my games to a whole new level. Thank you so much for the work you put in.
I was planning spelljammer adventure even before 5e spelljammer books were announced and i was reading 2E rules. Then it was announced and i was happy like little kid ... and then i found out how incompetently it was done and i was sad like hell it's good that old sources will never go away since they can be still found online and it's pretty amazing that this has so many community rules DM can piece from
This sounds a lot like something I've been looking for! If I'm running D&D I want D&D-adjacent ship combat strongly connected to character stats and roles, and this seems to provide that. For running a campaign based on engaging tactical battles with a strong naval combat feel I'd instead just use a different system altogether.
Thank you so much!! It's unpopularity explains why I was able to order the new box set (for my daughter) so cheaply (under $50 including shipping). This saves me sending it back and hunting down old 2e sets cus she and her friends only began playing under 5e, and they seem happy enough with it. (I learned under OAD&D back in 1980.)
Great video as always! I've always wanted to try this out in my own eventual Spelljammer inspired game, and it's so nice having rules laid out as a foundation. I'm thinking about ever carrying these mechanics over to a more traditional nautical setting, replacing weavers with hippocamps or even sharks. A bit less familiar, but hopefully is sufficient enough to accommodate these rad mechanics
Excellent stuff. I have a feeling my next campaign is gonna be pirates, but traditional seafaring as opposed to spacefaring. I look forward to using these same ideas and rules to make some awesome pirate battles!
This is huge I just bought Spelljammer because I wanted to improve some of the aspects of the modules. This is extremely good for the Space Combat. Now if only I could find the perfect adventure for levels 1-5 for my players
Few things a dm can do with the base rules and minimal dm tampering. Range of battle starts in the AAG is just a reference based on ship weapons, but it notes that a battle could start closer if dm wants. As far as ship weapons go, it seems easy to let players use their relevant bonuses when firing them. On length of battle rounds to destroy a ship. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 10 rounds is equal to 1 minute in terms of game time, right? So, at least narratively, that doesn't seem very long. And the main thing would be getting combat rounds to go quicker. Or you could always boost the ships weapon damage. I'm still going to incorporate this vid into what I do however.
Im going to finally be a player(yay) in a nautical campaign. I havent read any ghost of saltmarsh mechanics as id like the DM to pick and choose what they want to use and rsther learn only for the game rather than read everything. But with this supplement i definitely want to give a read. Seems phenomenal second tier for the nautical campaign. Go from pirates on the high seas to planar pirates.
I love this idea, and I look forward to running it for my party! Thanks so much for sharing the pdf, too. Question about the Mounts statblocks: I noticed the Phase Squid is a higher CR than the Giant Space Roach (4 vs. 1), even though the squid has lower AC, hit points, and has no attack. Is this correct?
Very good stuff thanks! You don't explicitly explain how balista to hit values are calculated, but I assume it's like using martial weapons since that's what it says on the Balista - and the stat needed for it is Dex, I assume?
In the official rules or in the supplement I give in this video? In the official rules: you get +6, period In the supplement: it's a ranged martial weapon, so you use DEX, and you add your PB if you're proficient with martial weapons
This is really cool and I like your method vs the role based ship combat tweaks that are out there. So question. I want to run Light of Xaryxis. Would you just make up stat blocks for all the other ships in this campaign? I'm thinking like the Nautiloid and the Nightspider. Would the Nautiloid just be a space galleon with 4 ballistae a manganel and Grasping Tendrils? Thanks for all your hard work on this!
For that adventure, what I'd suggest is to use the ship stat blocks provided in the document, but then add magic items to match the abilities of the various ships For example, if you want a living ship, you could do that with a space galleon + arboreal mast. If you want a nautiloid, you could use either a space galleon or giant space hermit crab, plus a psionic nexus to let it teleport around (you can give whichever mind flayer controls the psionic nexus access to the dimension door spell for extra schenanigans) and some grasping tendrils so it can grapple other ships. Another important thing to consider is, you'll probably want to give the mind flayers and neogi some space mounts, so they can partake in the dogfighting as well. Since they capture a lot of creatures with their psionic abilities, this should be easy to justify in-universe. After that, it's up to you whether not those those ships, magic items and mounts end up in your players' hands. If you don't want to give your players the psionic nexus, you can just say it's destroyed in the battle, for example. And if you don't want your players to have 5 phase squids, you can say that after being freed from the mind flayers' psionic control, they escape into deep space, never to be seen again.
Great video. I suggest anyone interested look into the OG spelljammer resources. Mechanics aren't super useful as it's AD&D but the inspiration potential is through the roof
Which is your favorite spaceship and why is it the Thousand Sunny?
The Thousand Sunny, because it’s powered by Cola.
Cola
the going merry because emotional attachment (yes i know what happened to it)
@@parishilpi going merry wasn't a spaceship tho
@@danielwhite1890 it been to the sky though.
The amount of thought and work that you put into every video must be immense. Thank you
Ship (Regular, not spell) combat has been a huge point of interest to me. I tend to lean towards the separate combat system. But this is interesting. The most important part of any system is making sure everyone can do something.
The biggest problem with ship combat in almost every game it's in is ensuring that every single player on the ship has some level of agency. Starfinder fails this one big time in my opinion: the only crew member that has any agency is the Pilot... The gunners only get to use turretted weapons or those that the pilot lined up for them, and the science officer, captain and engineer are really relegated to just giving the pilot or gunner small bonuses from time to time. It's gotten to the point where one of the players at my table just goes and gets snacks any time starship combat happens because they really can't do anything for the roughly 90 minutes starship combat takes.
I made a homebrew system, where each player takes on an officer role on the ship; Captain, first mait, helmsman, master Gunner, and shipwright. The captain gives out orders and decide in what order the officers act. On there turn, they can fully ignore the captain and perform another action if they like (this is one of the fun moments of the game). Each officer has a set of actions they can take, and some actions are acceptableto all officers. This combat is deadly. There is a small chance that an officer will get hit during combat, and the ship weapons are a lot more effective at sinking ships than in spelljammer. While this is a separate system, we still use the pc's sheets for all rolls, and it only took a few rounds for the party to get into the flow and in love with the system.
You are a space-hero, that deserve all the space-likes!
Holy heck. I think I'm now either making a Traveler campaign for DnD or shamelessly remaking my old unfinished ideas of ship building system into something like this.
I, personally, have never liked the vibe of spelljammer and the space ship combat stuff, not my cup of tea. That being said, I still sat through this entire video because your ideas are phenomenal and the amount of work that you put into these videos is truly astounding. ON TOP of the fantastic video you're always releasing content for completely free that are supplements that i would actually pay for. Hands down one of the best D&D advice channels out there, keep up the astounding work. Absolutely worth the channel membership cost.
Oh snap, thank you, you're my first member 🙌
@@Trekiros Oh awesome! You deserve it man, I've been using the legendary resistance changes since that vid dropped, and i barely plan an encounter without your CR builder at this point so I'm happy to pay back a little for all the work put in.
I don't even play 5th edition anymore, but still watch every video here. The content is amazing, and I wish I had this when I was playing.
Spelljammer was probably the worst book in all of 5e. I’m glad there are fans who’re willing to do want the devs weren’t, make ship combat interesting.
I was SO excited for Spelljammer/Astral Sea that I started planning my first ever campaign around it before I even had my book delivered. Then I got the books and....yeah...basically an art book with some descriptions.
So I started perusing the PDFs of 2e Spelljammer content and hand rolled a lot of stuff about the ships, helms, and magical stuff in this setting.
Spelljammer 5e was the most lazy "update" from earlier editions.
Thank you! A thousand times THANK YOU for fixing Spelljammer 5e ❤
I just started DM’ing a spacejammer campaign and I wasn’t happy with how it handles space combat. I never realized how horrific it was until you did the number crunching. Thank you SO MUCH for sharing Space Unjammed, it’s perfect for what we’re looking for! You’re a hero!
Well timed video for me! About to start a space pirate adventure and was looking for rules. Was going to adapt Limithron's Rules for Naval Combat or the Naval Code, but wasn't terribly satisfied by the idea of most people spending their turns giving advantage to doing whatever the captain said.
Limithron makes real good stuff but yeah that approach didn't really work for me either
Have you made rules for naval-naval combat? About to run a pirate campaign and planning to use Limithron’s stuff.
You seem pretty interesting! liking and subscribing!
THIS IS SO GOOD
This is a great video. I've kind of incorporated a little bit of both worlds. Onboard the ship I have two turrets and an arcane cannon. For my more martial classes I brewed up some gundam style fighters. The pilot is also the captain and they get to move the ship and can give one a command to one of the other players and the player can take that action (allowing them to effect the battlefield a bit more than just piloting. Lastly we have the engineer that controls the power systems, they have the ability to direct power to parts of the ship such as weapon systems, shields, or engines.
Cool ideas. I think you can actually mix the two flavours with half the characters using the ship and half flying into the fray on the own.
Sadly this doesn't solve this for actually maritime settings, but you could enhance these with flying mounts or sea horses, maybe even small boats. Or you go for just 1-3 rounds of manouvering and gunning, after which either a vessel tries to break the engagement and flees or it comes to a boarding action.
I for one think that having the option of one party actually escaping, so that apprehending them is more of an investigation than a direct chase, makes for a nice change of pace. Its not very dnd like, from what I can tell, but well maybe this is worth exploring and a gap to address
I am in fact, easily entertained by pretty pictures, take my like.
Yesterday i checked this chanel to see if you posted a new video and here it is,
Took me a while because I planned to make a video about random tables/procedural generation, but ended up not having enough material for a full video after a couple weeks of research
So that's still simmering in the background but in the meantime enjoy the space combat schenanigans!
This is incredibly useful! Running a spell jammer campaign starting next week and it's great to have a better take on the ship battle mechanics
Wow! This is great! Now I'm more interested playing Spell Jammer with this Homebrew.
This just gave me some inspiration for my Sea Pirates campaign. I'm going to use the same ship battle concept but with Aquatic animals and steam punk engines as single space fighters while still using big ship battles.
Thank you very much for creating this!
this is SO great. i can’t even begin to explain the leaps and bounds better this is than the 5e spelljammer source books put out by wizards. thank you for your service, truly!
So one of the things i added to my ship combat in D&D that I highly recommend for any mage-heavy party: Spellcannons.
Essentially these are ship-bound spell augmentors, the primary function of them being to boost the range of any spell you cast into them to one worthy of ship-to-ship combat. (My personal homebrew boosts the range to 10x the normal range, but I'm generous and I think 5x might be more balanced if a little less fun) with more powerful versions of spellcannons doing things like adding permanent metamagic effects or boosting the level of the spell cast through it.
These things do so much to add interest to space combat for both NPCs and PCs: mages can now summon monsters onto the decks of the enemy ship, cast hazards like flaming sphere onto the weapons platforms (or helm) of the enemy ship... it essentially re-incorporates all the possibilities that mages provide to D&D combat back into starship combat, which adds a lot more interest.
(And yeah, I know this is spellcaster exclusive stuff and they have a lot of privilages already, but I'm working on that other thing, too)
I like how this keeps the Age of Sail feel! That's my big complaint with the solution in the second half of the video where characters go off in their own smaller ships.
My only concern is over what the martial characters are doing while the spellcasters are using spellcannons. I suppose you could keep conventional cannons and mangonels on board, but that doesn't solve the problem where siege weapons make character abilities irrelevant. I'm leaning towards just making boarding far easier to achieve (spellcannon-augmented teleporting?).
@@WillHerrmann I do think for Martials the best way to handle it is to make extensive use of boarding parties and summoning spells on spellcannons. Ensure that they have *something* to do while the mages blast away.
The trouble with ship's cannons and siege equipment in ship combat is that honestly there's no agency for the gunner: they just get to roll attack rolls... something that could be handled by a pilot character in addition to the maneuvering, so you need something to keep your martial characters occupied elsewhere. Hell, you could steal one from Faster than Light and have teleportation circles on your ship that you can use to teleport your melee martials directly onto the enemy's ship... just something that keeps their agency in the fight and lets them have their own micro decisions to make.
This is absolutely perfect timing! We had a session 0 last weekend where we made characters and came up with roughly how they know each other/meet each other.
I'm preparing to run a Spelljammer campaign right now and we'll prob start in 1 or 2 weeks most so this is perfect since I really.. didn't like how ship combat sounded haha
I'll take some liberties with stuff in the book anyways but this is so helpful. I was just gonna steal ship combat from other 5e ship combat systems but this is really helpful^^
Love this so much cause space jammer was such a fun and cool concept to me and when I got the books it was so bland and disappointing but now with this I feel a lot more confident eventually running this.
This is just perfect! I was just going to do some prep for spelljammer!
This is a great way of handling things because it makes every player directly involved in combat and it gives the players FLIGHT combat too, which is just massively fun.
I LOVE THIS AND I LOVE YOU
i wish I had money to be a channel member, but I don't 😢
I'll make sure to share your channel to everyone I know tho
Thank you. I was so looking for a different way to run vehicle combat
I ain't going into Spelljammer stuff directly, but Spelljammer lore is tied to a decent chunk of my current homebrew work, and somewhere in the far future I had debated a mini Spelljammer-esque combat scenario involving an airship and some old-school Spelljammer units known as Spirit warriors sieging a castle. These rules will be quite useful if I ever reach that part for inspirations I'm sure!
It's an idea so good I can't believe everyone didn't think of it!
HAVE THE CHARACTERS DO THE FIGHTING!!!
(I've been running my own ship rules for a year, with longrange spell cannons and grapple ballista, and the players are kind of INDIFFERENT to ship battles)
THANKYOU I LOVE THIS
Really well done. I appreciate your deep level of insight into how the game works, and the effort you put in to translate your ideas into a clear and high quality video without excess rambling. Thank you for creating something that looks like it may save Spelljammer for my group.
Getting rid of the rambling is the entire reason I have to script my videos xD
Thank you for such a paradigm-shifting take on ship combat! I made some personal tweaks and playtested the result and it worked so much better than my previous attempts at ship to ship combat.
...Huh. This is really cool!
I ran something similar through sheer coincidence in Descent into Avernus - it was preceded by Waterdeep Dragon Heist, and the players were a little invested in the mansion they got, so by shenanigans I had it teleported to hell and converted into a mobile-home-slash-tank for them to find - and yeah, pretty quickly found that big vehicles vs big vehicles gets a bit boring.
I ended up giving both the players and opponents smaller motorcycles to zoom around with, but I didn't think to make the big vehicles _themselves_ more interesting and specialized. I wish I'd had a chance to see this video back then!
Ain't saying no to pretty pictures on my screen!
As a sidenote, I'm glad to see that I've come to pretty much your own conclusions by GM'ing Vulcania sessions at conventions xD
AWESOME Video!! Thank you for the work!
Good stuff! demonstrating again how flexible the 5e system can be. :)
Appreciate this! Was looking at the SpaceFinger rules to replace the Spelljammed rules, and it really is a whole other game system, this is much improved!
Hey, man as a guy who has been playing dnd for years and has been looking in to homebrew and other things since I was a child I wanna say I love your videos, especially this one. I have been looking into ship combat forever and while I always find good videos and content they always have the same issue which you fix putting all the players on one ship takes away player agency instead of adding it. Your idea fixes all those issues and adds I whole lot more fun stuff I love your videos and keep it up. sadly I am moving away from dnd and moving toward Pathfinder 2e I wish you had something like this for pf2e and Starfinder 2e. Anyway keep it up and I want to see your channel grow I've been subscribed for a while I am now saving this video so I can find it later. I originally watched this video a long time ago. but I wanted to find it again to keep for refrence.
Wow thanks for this, I've been pawing over the ship rules for ages try to fix so many issues - I'm going to try this out.
Little did you kniw Trek, i had already liked the video before you asked me to.
I am 100% utilizing the Unjammer, thank you so so much!
I'm definitely using this but reskin for Airships, normal ships, and the like!
This will work amazingly for fun combat when traveling on the hex map of the world I'm making and expanded as I plan on doing lots of traveling, encounters, and whatnot
I was looking at my Spelljammer books yesterday: what timing! Another great video!
I used your supplement when I ran Spelljammer, I really enjoyed it, mainly the additional ship options.
But I most definitely prefer it when Starship combat is like a "game mode" or a "subsystem" that plays around and feels different than a normal combat, I also have experienced that 5e players struggle with subsystems because every challenge seems so insignificant with how DC works that they just want to jump and do stuff themselves, even in a pirate/sea campaign they tried to do that.
The negative part about Starfinder starship combat (which I really like), is that some rules are overcomplicated, some things are a high DC roll for a minor advantage, some other things require you to re-read them on the go if you don't memorize a long wall of text.
Appreciate the video and great work!
That's good feedback, thank you!
The quality of your videos are stunning! Also, thanks for all the advices ^^
The Jeff bit killed me. Great reference to those who know.
Thank you for making what I was working on, only faster and better. You're awesome.
I'm really looking forward to trying this system myself! Thank you!
This is excellent stuff! And I'm not just saying that because it's similar to how I've been trying to improve Spelljammer for my players 😋
I'll def be incorporating some of this into my game. Thank you for all the hard work!
Do you have any more custom ship weapons/upgrades? Would love a longer document!
My first planned change to the main rules is increasing ship and creature speed in Wildspace x10 so the ships actually move about properly on the scaled Battlemat. That way they get proper tactical movement, can duck in and out of cover etc rather than moving half a ships length per turn in a crawl.
Next I want to make the weapon use connected to character abilities. So the player aiming who has good shooting skills with an arrow is good with the weapon. But I want that with the loader too, so each player involved with the weapon makes a roll, strength to load and something undecided (perhaps a choice of Int or Wis) for the one pulling the firing lever for the timing of the shot. A good roll gives advantage to the shot, a bad disadvantage and of course one of each cancels the other out. Though perhaps I’ll make one instead give a refill to damage instead… still considering that. That way the pilot makes the movement choices and everyone on the weapons makes a roll that matters to the attacks success or failure. And each comes from the stats of the character. The barbarian with their high strength is now making a strength roll to lift that boulder onto the mangonel fast or pulling back the powerful string of the ballista, the rogue with their high dex is aiming up that shot etc.
And for bards, well sea shanties have a practical use in keeping timing and coordination with physical tasks and bardic inspiration could be given to help those weapon rolls and maybe I’d have those go into a pool per weapon where any in the weapon crew could use it.
Those are my current thoughts.
This is so good it makes me want to get the spelljammer books now that I can use your supplement to make it functional
It has some good art and battlemaps, but up to you - it's definitely not one of 5e's best setting books
Literally in the middle of a spelljammer campaign atm and this couldn't have come at a better time! Thank you so much!
Thank you for doing this! I’ve been playing Spelljammer for a few weeks now and I’ve found the space combat to be lacking. I’m gonna test out your supplement this afternoon!
What a brilliant solution!! I'll be adapting it to ship combat on the sea for my pirate campaign - using giant sharks with frickin ballistae on their heads as mounts!!
Also - any pirate campaign ideas you're willing to share I'd eat up, I've got one planned in the future!
Hmm, shark-mounted ballistas, yes please. This is just my flavor of nonsense :p
My pirate campaign followed roughly the One Piece formula: the map to the biggest treasure in the world was broken into 4 parts, so you'll need to go find (or steal - this is a pirate campaign after all!) those 4 parts and then go for the big one. And I made sure to hide each of them in a location that would require my players to steal some kind of super-ship to reach: one was at the bottom of the sea so you needed a submarine, another was in the elemental plane of air so you needed an airship, etc.
And along the way, you'll make a lot of friends, and just as many enemies. I designed 6 factions, and each of them came with a conflict which would ask of my players, exactly what kind of pirates do you want to be? Do you want freedom (working for the revolutionaries), or power and influence (working as privateers for a colonial empire)? Do you want to be feared (being part of the pirate council), or to be off of people's radars (working for the pirate council)? etc...
I'm no writer, so my adventure plots are pretty simple, but simple does the job most of the time :p
@@Trekiros Love the player agency granted by the faction politics, thank you!
wow, this is incredible!! Exactly what I was looking for for my next campaign ;)
I am running planescape right now, but one of my players loves the idea of spelljammer. I have been avoiding it because of the sheer amount of work required to make it fun based on the spelljammer books he gave me for my birthday as a hint.
Now he is going to feel like it is his birthday when we go spelljamming between some of the planes!
Thanks for creating this for us!
By the way, would you consider adding prices on the magic items so groups could have a ‘pimp my ride’ spending session where they get to pick and really customise how they want their ship to function. Talk about player buy in!
If not, what would be a good way to gauge prices for this stuff?
That's really cool. I am planning a air world (the party is traveling through an air portal) and they are going to be taking a flying ship to an enemy location. I am expecting they will all remain on the ship so the battle will basically be them trying to fend off enemy as they board but I need something for the cannons and if the party tries to shoot down the incoming fire drakes who will be dropping in the bad guys. I'm gonna have to incorporate this somehow.
You literally released this when I needed it most! 😭😭 Thank you! Now I don't have to rely on the bad spelljammer rules to dictate combat for my players new flying fortress
Fantastic content as always. Keep it up
Great vid! This makes me actually want to play spelljammer now!
Can't wait to combine this with the taming ideas i have for the Star Lancers i found in the free D&D Beyond Monstrous Compendium download
This is so freaking cool. Thank you for sharing it
Love your ideas and the amount of effort you put into your videos/ supplements is humbling. Wonderful work.
You are one of the channels I look forward to seeing on my feed. As someone who DMed their first game in 2006, your videos have taken my games to a whole new level. Thank you so much for the work you put in.
you know, i once had an idea about making an entire rpg system around this, until i learned about starfinder, anyways, i love every thing you do!
I was planning spelljammer adventure even before 5e spelljammer books were announced and i was reading 2E rules. Then it was announced and i was happy like little kid ... and then i found out how incompetently it was done and i was sad like hell
it's good that old sources will never go away since they can be still found online and it's pretty amazing that this has so many community rules DM can piece from
this video single-handedly made me interested in spelljammer ngl
This is... honestly how I thought it worked already, way cool love all of this
Why youtube didn't notify me? You're onr of the best dnd creators out there
I'm amazed at the amount of helpful info and resources in every video! Thank you so much!
This sounds a lot like something I've been looking for! If I'm running D&D I want D&D-adjacent ship combat strongly connected to character stats and roles, and this seems to provide that. For running a campaign based on engaging tactical battles with a strong naval combat feel I'd instead just use a different system altogether.
Finally found a ship combat guide that feels intuitive and sensible, amazing video!
Thank you so much!! It's unpopularity explains why I was able to order the new box set (for my daughter) so cheaply (under $50 including shipping). This saves me sending it back and hunting down old 2e sets cus she and her friends only began playing under 5e, and they seem happy enough with it. (I learned under OAD&D back in 1980.)
I use foundry for my maps, I'm super curious how you got a single map to have different measurement scales.
Thanks man for fixing my campaign
Thanks for the book, my man! Looks great!
Great Video! Love that idea and might adapt it at some point!
This is an insanely well thought out idea. Changing the perspective from star trek to Star Wars is the perfect comparison, and it looks fantastic
Excellent as ever, love your work.
Great video as always! I've always wanted to try this out in my own eventual Spelljammer inspired game, and it's so nice having rules laid out as a foundation. I'm thinking about ever carrying these mechanics over to a more traditional nautical setting, replacing weavers with hippocamps or even sharks. A bit less familiar, but hopefully is sufficient enough to accommodate these rad mechanics
nice. keep up the good work!
Well I'm glad you put this video out before Im about to run my game
Very well done!
Awesome! I wonder what your take on non-space naval combat would be!
I’ll definitely be telling my players to roll space-initiative 😁
Excellent stuff. I have a feeling my next campaign is gonna be pirates, but traditional seafaring as opposed to spacefaring. I look forward to using these same ideas and rules to make some awesome pirate battles!
Would really love a video on advice on running a pirate game from your personal experience?
Your content is so cool, thank you! 💖
This is huge I just bought Spelljammer because I wanted to improve some of the aspects of the modules. This is extremely good for the Space Combat.
Now if only I could find the perfect adventure for levels 1-5 for my players
What about the vehicle combat rules of Avernus? They feel like the midle ground of StarTrek battle and DnD combat.
Yup, Avernus works pretty well out of the box. If anything, I wish we'd gotten more of it :p
Few things a dm can do with the base rules and minimal dm tampering.
Range of battle starts in the AAG is just a reference based on ship weapons, but it notes that a battle could start closer if dm wants. As far as ship weapons go, it seems easy to let players use their relevant bonuses when firing them.
On length of battle rounds to destroy a ship. Correct me if I'm wrong, but 10 rounds is equal to 1 minute in terms of game time, right? So, at least narratively, that doesn't seem very long. And the main thing would be getting combat rounds to go quicker. Or you could always boost the ships weapon damage.
I'm still going to incorporate this vid into what I do however.
Im going to finally be a player(yay) in a nautical campaign.
I havent read any ghost of saltmarsh mechanics as id like the DM to pick and choose what they want to use and rsther learn only for the game rather than read everything.
But with this supplement i definitely want to give a read. Seems phenomenal second tier for the nautical campaign.
Go from pirates on the high seas to planar pirates.
Read through this, actually awesome ty! Pity this wasn't in the main book as I think it would have gone down really quite well :)
I love this idea, and I look forward to running it for my party! Thanks so much for sharing the pdf, too. Question about the Mounts statblocks: I noticed the Phase Squid is a higher CR than the Giant Space Roach (4 vs. 1), even though the squid has lower AC, hit points, and has no attack. Is this correct?
Great video! It would be nice to have a similar one but with normal ships on the sea!
Very good stuff thanks!
You don't explicitly explain how balista to hit values are calculated, but I assume it's like using martial weapons since that's what it says on the Balista - and the stat needed for it is Dex, I assume?
In the official rules or in the supplement I give in this video?
In the official rules: you get +6, period
In the supplement: it's a ranged martial weapon, so you use DEX, and you add your PB if you're proficient with martial weapons
Great video! Looking forward to the next one
This is really cool and I like your method vs the role based ship combat tweaks that are out there. So question. I want to run Light of Xaryxis. Would you just make up stat blocks for all the other ships in this campaign? I'm thinking like the Nautiloid and the Nightspider. Would the Nautiloid just be a space galleon with 4 ballistae a manganel and Grasping Tendrils? Thanks for all your hard work on this!
For that adventure, what I'd suggest is to use the ship stat blocks provided in the document, but then add magic items to match the abilities of the various ships
For example, if you want a living ship, you could do that with a space galleon + arboreal mast. If you want a nautiloid, you could use either a space galleon or giant space hermit crab, plus a psionic nexus to let it teleport around (you can give whichever mind flayer controls the psionic nexus access to the dimension door spell for extra schenanigans) and some grasping tendrils so it can grapple other ships.
Another important thing to consider is, you'll probably want to give the mind flayers and neogi some space mounts, so they can partake in the dogfighting as well. Since they capture a lot of creatures with their psionic abilities, this should be easy to justify in-universe.
After that, it's up to you whether not those those ships, magic items and mounts end up in your players' hands. If you don't want to give your players the psionic nexus, you can just say it's destroyed in the battle, for example. And if you don't want your players to have 5 phase squids, you can say that after being freed from the mind flayers' psionic control, they escape into deep space, never to be seen again.
Cool ideas; I’d love to hear how you’d tweak it for naval combat!
Why is it that everytime you post you bring us some amazing new tool?
Great video. I suggest anyone interested look into the OG spelljammer resources. Mechanics aren't super useful as it's AD&D but the inspiration potential is through the roof