Re: Night Druid's Review of Secret of the Spider Moon part 1.

I finally got around to reading my copy this weekend, and am going to use
your comments as a jumping off point.  Let me start by saying that I really
wanted to like this conversion.  I was excited that a d20 conversion was
coming out, and was willing to overlook minor errors so long as I had
something workable.  Sadly, though a lot of good work was done, the end
product didn't seem all that better than an sj 3e conversion done on the
fly.

>From: Adam Miller <nghtdrud@??????.net>

>Chapter 2: Space and Spelljamming
>         Movement and combat with spelljammers.  Spelljamming speed is now
>Cruising Speed, which seems to be a bit slower than Spelljamming Speed,
>and depends on the helm used (2d6+2 or 1d6+1).  Natural Gravity deserves
>a big 'huh?'.  It's pretty confusing, takes a couple of passes to figure
>it out.  Of course, it doesn't address whether a fleet of spelljammers
>could 'stop' a planet.

Double that big 'huh?' for me, and add an order of fries.  What I couldn't
find was which direction the gravity pointed.  The references in the rules
to out of power ships states that they 'fall' towards the object closest to
them with the greatest gravity.  So, if two ships are traveling parallel to
each other, and one of them loses power, does it swerve over and sideswipe
the other ship or does it start to plunge 'down' as defined by the other
ship.  The rules seem to imply the former.  Similarly, if someone were to
fall off overboard, what would happen?  Do they fall towards the closest
object with greatest gravity (and thus end up standing on the outside of the
hull), or do they fall 'down' as defined by the ship.  Once again, the rules
seem to imply the former.  But that begs the question of why gravity changes
orientation once your on the ship.  Why would it pull you towards the center
of the ship if you were outside of it, but pull you down if you were on it?
If gravity always pulls you 'down', so that if you fall off the ship, you
just keep moving down away from it, how is 'down' defined?  Is it a function
of keel length like in standard SJ, or is it perception like on the planes.

>         Helms now are much weaker than our helms of old.  At most, they
>have a
>speed equal to SR 1.  More likely you'll be moving at walking speed.
>They're less maneuverable, slower, hard to control, and more fragile.
>Ships are much smaller, averaging 30-120'. The rules around them,
>however, are pretty inconsistant.  First off, major helms 'max out' at
>colossal sized ships, yet they have awesome-sized ships with major
>helms.  Secondly, they clean air, but there is absolutely nothing in the
>creation rules that would give this ability.  Thirdly, the prices are
>WAY off in regard to standard 3e magic items.
>         Ships now resemble the standard d20 Vehicle format, except they
>use
>hull points.  However, this is BADLY implemented.  There's no effective
>difference between hull points and hit points.  Seems kinda tacked on.
>Otherwise, combat greatly resembles the vehicle rules from Dragon.

There's also no easy way to tell how powerful a ship is.  In standard SJ,
tonnage was a good rule of thumb for ship power since it determined hull
points.  For monsters (which use similair stat blocks) there's CR's, or if
you don't like those, Hit Dice.  It owuld've been nice to have some
standardized format to differentiate ship power other than size.  Another
problem with the stats is that the crew listings aren't clear (which
granted, was also an issue in 2e SJ.)  Do the crew numbers include the
spelljamming mage/captain?  Is there a benefit to increasing crew size above
the minimum?

>         Hammership, hammership, hammership, what happened?  My first
>thought?
>"Gee mommy, I rode the short bus to school all by myself!".  Gaakk.
>They took one of the most elogant ships in the old SJ and put in a
>compactor until they got it under 120'.  Uggh.

Couldn't agree more.  That thing is one of the ugliest drawings I've ever
seen.  The 2e art made you want to play SJ, the art in Polyhedron makes you
want to keep your hand over the pictures so as not to bias people away from
the game.  It also looks as though the artists didn't talk to the writers at
all.  The Archelon appears to have 5-7 decks.  It looks to be a monster, on
par with a large luxary liner.  I asked my wife how many people she thought
the ship should hold.  She said 1000, which I agreed with.  Actual number?
Around 50.  Even if I use the new format for ship stats, I'll probably use
my old cards for the pictures and deck plans.

Sebastian

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