My first problem arose when my players looted a ship and took the minor helm. These things are listed at 100K.
I realized evertime they board a ship they will be making 100K. How do you deal with that ?
I made it so that they sold it for 60K but even that, that´s a lot of money.
Not every local is going to have 100k or even 60k to buy the helm.
Dock fees..... etc.
Now the Arcane are the only ones with the knowledge of how to make a major/minor standard helms if I remember right.
So they would be a good 'bargainer' for the players to deal with. Neogi merchants playing the trading game.
No matter what pirates will learn you have money and you will be targets.
What the others suggested could help but frankly this problem is one of the larger failings of the Spelljammer rules. That it is an issue in the firstplace is certainly rather embarrasing for the designers. Rather than solve it by being even more blunt, forceful and arbitrary, such as by having the Arcane take it away from them or force it to be sold back to them for a pittance, it's FAR, FAR better to simply reduce the GP sale value by a factor of 100 or so.
You are certainly correct that this will be an issue with EVERY ship combat and trying to solve the problem on the back end (after the players already have the highly valued helm) is problematic at best. Solve it up front instead and with reasoning that works FAR better for the long term.
For one thing, although in some places it is suggested that the Arcane are the only ones who know how to make helms that's just unmitigated rules-trashing bunk. There are certainly spells that can be used "temporarily" for a helm and the 2E standard rules regarding the making of magic items pretty much means that if you have access to a temporary helm SPELL you have the knowledge necessary to know how to make a PERMANENT item with it.
And taxes and dock fees and all that simply cannot hope to suck away hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of gold pieces of profit made by selling captured helms without players simply balking at the ludicrous lengths you're stooping to in order to try to keep the money from spinning the game immediately and uncontrollably out of control.
That said, you STILL have a problem with the value of ship hulls if you try to follow the rules as written. Why? Because a captured ship with even a single hull point left can rather handily end up repaired by the PC's or their carpenter hirelings for virtually no cost. And they WILL end up doing repairs themselves because to use the book pricing structure for repairs will mean that a ship just over half damaged can cost THREE TIMES MORE to repair than buying a brand new hull.
Read this:
http://home.earthlink.net/~duanevp/dnd/spelljammer/revisingspelljammer.htm
I don't want to scare away anyone from Spelljammer, on the contrary one of the best, most popular campaigns I ever ran was a Spelljammer game and I LOVE the concept on the whole. I'm just trying to make people unaware of the rather dangerous pitfalls so they can possibly be ready with a way to handle it IF/when things come up.
I do agree though, that helms could have been handled much better, although price was the very least of my problems with them. A really simple change that would keep the setting more or less as written, and still make helm's expensive to buy would be to require an Arcane to install or un-install them. I did find your comment on 2e magic items to be odd, as the rules were rather vague and helms being minor artifacts made them unapplicable anyway.
Have the Helm be part of the ship cost.
Each Helm is specific to a particular ship.
A "NEW" helm installed would be at the 100k mark.
This would prevent your characters from upgrading Minor to Major if they happen to capture another ship, but can only crew their ship.
(i.e. Shirkeship -30 crew and Hammership - 60 crew)
Short of towing it at SR Speed vice Spelljamming Speed (because of the Helm/Gravity body) they would be forced to abandon one or the other.
I decided to give the Arcane a very active role in the continuing use of helms...a helm must be attuned to a ship to function, and only the arcane can do this (they charge 50,000 gp). Ships are more expensive to repair (silver threads are run through the ship's structure to help harness the helm's magic) and need more skilled people and more expensive to effect complete repairs.
Just a couple of ideas that you might consider.
Original Spells: 360 and counting
Original Items: 27 and counting
www.amethyst-dragon.com/Aenea
- All spells, items, and concepts in Aenea use 3.0 rules.
- Spells listing a domain are either domain spells or normal
spells that appear on the spell list of clerics with that domain.
The basic theory using my system is that for a spelljamming vessel to have gravity and breathable air it must have a helm on board, the magic of the helm is what subverts the laws of physics and allows spelljammers to venture into the void. Therefore a ship's helm is always operating at a low level of power even if there is no helmsman operating it. Installing or removing a helm from a vessel is a very complicated process known only to the Arcane and an untrained person who tries could end up killing themselves in a very messy way, or destroying the helm.
Of course, there is nothing to stop someone salvaging the entire vessel (including helm) and selling that, but they then have to tow the ship to somewhere to sell it, and will only be paid a fraction of what it is worth new. Salvaging abandoned or captured vessels is one way to make a living though.
Also 'Community Wealth and Population' found on the same page is also very useful.
Even in a Metropolis (the largest possible community with no upward limit on population)
It would take a tremendous population to support an economy that could deal with such large sums of money being taken out of it.
I also suggest metropolis being uncommon and no where near the size of modern cities.