Our previous effort tested two magazine-published sets of rules for fighting magical flying ships - the 3e adaptation Shadow of the Spider Moon and the 5e Aces High aerial combat rules from Arcadia #3 published by MCDM as well as the original AD&D Spelljammer and the to-be-published OD&D compatible Calidar and the gridless, Theater of the Mind house ruleset for the Spelljamming focused 'Tales from the Glass Guarded World' podcast.
Between running Spelljammer Academy at my local Adventurers League and an online 2-shot mini-campaign - the Interstellar Whaling mentioned on previous posts - I have gotten an unexpected amount of opportunities to test out the new 5e Spelljammer rules - and so how do they stack up? Certainly the sessions themselves were fun but this was no thanks to what came in the 5e Spelljammer: Adventures in Space books. As predicted, I got jack all in terms of mechanics or guidelines on how to run a decent flying ship combat session so while it worked pretty well at the table, it was only because I finessed across a lot of gaps.
If you want to skip the test conditions, jump down to 'Assessment' below.
Scenario 1 - episode 2 of Spelljammer Academy - a Squidship attacks the PCs Hammership. Here we had a low level gang of PC's - L1 barbarian, L2 barbarian, L1 rogue and L4 Cleric + a make-up crew of NPC's using the bandit statblock. The ship-to-ship got going when the PC's get ambushed after salvaging a wreck. Here the antagonists tactics as per the scenario were to close on the PC ship and stand off at 50' and pummel them into submission.
I had my 5e DM's screen with the table for how close the encounter starts so rolled a d6 and it appeared as point blank (250').
There were some exchanges of ballista fire, with hits on both sides, squidship giving as good as it got as it closed. Once it came within distance, things started going wrong for the villains - the players correctly identified that firing at the opposing crew was the easiest path to victory and everyone was standing on open decks firing up at one another. The players further decided to fire a harpoon from one of their ballistae to get a rope over to the other ship at the cost of less damage to the shot. One of the barbarians used this to cross the gap and board (solo, initially).
The scenario had some shadows jump the PC's ship in the middle of the combat which was a complication but while the shadows chewed up one ballista crew and tied up two of the PCs, the other two PCs and the rest of the friendly NPC crew continued to fire on the enemy ship, with the siege weapon fire being moderately helpful. The single barbarian boarding party fought the enemy ballista crews while his colleagues supported with spells and arrows to kill the enemy crew. There was a neat cinematic moment where a barbarian was raging in the ballista emplacements on both ships - on the Hammership, slaying shadows, on the Squidship, slaying the enemy crew.
I used morale checks each round to see if the Squidship crew stayed in the fight and after the second barbarian crossed over and most of the weapon-crews had been slain they decided to run for it but at that point they were down to the Captain and the Spelljammer. There was a tense moment when the Barbarians split up to scour the enemy ship and one of them ran into the Captain and the Spelljammer Helmsman on their own - but once they won initiative it was over bar the shouting.
To make the ship-to-ship feel a bit more interesting, I threw in the critical hit table from the Tales from the Glass Guarded World rules - on a crit hit, roll a for an effect. This was only achievable with the siege weapons and made it feel like there was a bit more of a point to using them; otherwise they were just a means to grind down hull points and as soon as the crew could be attacked, continuing to use the siege weapons was not a good use of actions.
We had a couple of newbies at the table so they acted like the ship mattered even though what won the battle was killing most of the crew with bow-shots and cantrips before boarding and finishing them off.
Scenario 2 - I cooked up a scenario to test the rules-as-written. Nothing that was not in the Spelljammer Adventures book would be used. No critical hit tables, nothing. I also had a quartet of hardy old-school players who correctly recognised that crew-killing at range was the path to success and built characters accordingly. These were L5 characters, a Giff Fighter, Thri-keen Warlock, Astral Elf Sorcerer and Astral Elf Barbarian. We got in two ship-scale combats, first a ship-to-ship, the second a ship-to-monster.
The ship-to-ship was against an opposing fast ship that swooped down on them looking to board with their scary sahaugin crew. They appeared a little further out but the faster enemy ship was impossible for a slower PC ship to escape so it was just a waiting game as they hove into range. With some exchange of ship-weapon fire, the villains got in some solid hits in the first round and unnerved the players. As soon as they got in range to use their powers (ultra-long range eldritch blasts followed by fireballs) the enemy crew started getting wiped out. This started a death-spiral of not having enough crew for the weapons, being unable to return fire at the same rate, and quickly ending up in a place with no chance to recover.
A clutch initiative win gave the PC Spelljammer Helmsman the chance to close the distance on the round where the enemy broke and decided to flee (and would have gotten away as theirs was the faster ship) but the PC's managed to board and fought their way through the hurt remnants of the enemy crew with ease.
The ship-to-monster combat was interesting as they were hunting a mega-nautilus (a cosmic horror without its psychic powers) and despite it having what I thought would be a ludicrous amount of hit-points it was quickly worn down and killed. Here we found the question of ranges was very interesting in some PCs were able to act at much longer range than others, leaving some PCs twiddling their thumbs for a few rounds while the distance was closed. I found giving the ship-weapon roles to those players helped a bit.
Assessment
One thing that became obvious from the RAW interpretation is that the design of the ship has a massive influence on how much fun the Helmsman is going to have. If they are on a Hammership or Squidship then the helm is in a fully enclosed room below decks and the Helmsman can 'perceive' what is happening around them but have no line of sight to cast their spells or do much during combats. In contrast, the ship the second group captured in the ship-to-ship was a reskinned damselfly from the book using the Neogi Mindspider maps - and it has a forward helm with great visibility on the front, giving the Helmsman much more scope to do things since Spelljamming is a concentration effect but they could do other actions if they preferred.
The RAW is 'DM makes it up' - there were more guidelines in how to actually run sessions with Spelljammer combat in the Spelljammer Academy adventure than in the book itself - in SJA they suggest to use Arcana for piloting skill checks if anyone is doing anything interesting or challenging - useful to know! In RAW - they just succeed? Because the helm description says "You can steer the vessel, albeit in a somewhat clumsy fashion, in much the way that a rudder or oars can be used to maneuver a seafaring ship" and "While moving at its flying speed, a spelljamming ship is generally as maneuverable as a seafaring vessel of a similar size" and "On its turn, a ship can be turned and reoriented so that all its weapons can aim and fire at any target within range, regardless of where they’re situated on the deck." So either the thing should act like a Galleon, with heft and inertia or it should act like an attack helicopter, able to spin on a dime to bring rear facing weapons (see the Squidship) to bear on any foe. This is a big, immersion busting mess that is just heaved into my lap as a DM with no suggestions on how to ajudicate this and I do not appreciate that.
Look at the effort put in to many of the other ship combat systems I have tested in this series and compare to this utter lack of mechanics or even guidance from the 100-ton behemoth of the industry. They could have just plundered the back catalog *of 5e* and put a stripped down version of the Saltmarsh rules in - anything more than this giant nothing. I was able to make something resembling a silk purse out of this sows ear because I have been specifically fiddling around with D&D flying ship combat systems for these past two years. The point of a supplement like this should be to help a newcomer to the game, to give them mechanics to form a scaffold and advice on when and how to break those rules so that they can run a fun flying ship combat game *without* the years of trial and error. The dollar they pay is for this guidance, these rules and mechanics, because if they just have to homebrew it anyway what the hell was the point?
I need to find the source but the truism of 'first you have to learn the rules before you can break them' is relevant here - giving people nothing and saying 'just make it up yourself' is dreadful. It is abandonment of a duty of responsibility that I would have perceived a games publisher to have. See any other non-WotC 5e setting book - Brancalonia and Symbaroum being two great examples - where they tell you exactly how to run a campaign and give you mechanics that capture that flavour. They know what anyone putting down their hard cash for a book like this would expect - a setting including some guidance on how to run that setting. Of course, once it hits your table, any setting gets adapted but it is good to have a start point, a frame to modify not just permission to do whatever you want. I had that before hand, I am paying to be able to draw on the ideas of others.
I could have forgiven the near complete lack of mechanics if I got some solid guidance on how to run ship combat in space and make it feel different to ship combat on the high seas or even a fight on a ship tied up at a dock. But no, I had to do it all myself. In short, if you want any guidance or structures to run Spelljamming combat in 5e, you won't find them from WotC. Not in the book you pay for anyway.
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