D&D 4E Naval battle in 4E

[Wepwawet]

Hi!

I'm planning a naval battle for the upcoming session and I need your help
The ship where the PCs are travelling will be attacked by pirates and I'm not sure how to do this.

It is better to have just one-on-one naval battle, right?
It would be nice to have 2 more ships escorting the main ship, but probably it's too much trouble.

How can this fight go? Ranged attacks until they're close enough to board?
What actions can the players take to make the ship escape the pirates? Or to help protect it?
I don't really know much about naval warfare, much less porting it to D&D...

 

[Davachido]

oohh naval battles, I love battles that go outside the normal abilities, but anyway to answer some of your questions.

It is better to have just one-on-one naval battle, right?
It would be nice to have 2 more ships escorting the main ship, but probably it's too much trouble.

You can have the battle go on in stages, so each battle is defending a different section of the boat without a short rest in between (endurance battles go go). You could also have the encounter split in half say, I.e. Have half the PCs on one side of their boat, half of them on the others and the same for the enemies.

How can this fight go? Ranged attacks until they're close enough to board?
What actions can the players take to make the ship escape the pirates? Or to help protect it?
I don't really know much about naval warfare, much less porting it to D&D...

Ranged attacks sound good, don't forget boarding boats would have cannons or it could be a ramming boat so the enemies could lay and wait till their boat gets a ram onto the PCs boat causing them to make a balance check or get knocked prone as they board.

The PCs can protect their own boat with their own cannons (if they have them), burning arrows or the like in spells. You can also assign one of the PCs to act as the captain to determine how the PCs boat will evade or counter attacks the other boat does.

Don't forget boat damage can have some fun effects for the PCs to contend with, say a hull breach causing members to be slowed if they are in the hull of the ship. (thus someone may want to use the ritual make whole after the battle while the others bail water or something.)

Of course none of what I have said up above are directly from the book, just some ideas you could do and attach some rulings with them, just make sure to stick with whatever ruling you gave them.

 

[Turtlejay]

I played in a similar scenario awhile back, but with airships (and 3.5, if it matters). I also played in an encounter vs a green dragon while we were in a boat.

You will want to use a battlemat. Have the player's boat drawn out, and move the pirates or other attackers move relative to it. One thing I did with wagons once was to cut them out of paper, and move the paper. Saves with tedious redrawing when they move.

Establish how and when the boats change position. Top of the round? Bottom? What is their speed relative to each other? Are the pirates closing in? This really isn't that complicated. Thinking about these things now will save you headache later.

Once that is squared away, try to imagine how pirates in your world might differ from conventional pirates. Magic changes *everything* how might magic change piracy? In the airship battle I played in, the attackers had consumable items that allowed them to fly from ship to ship. Mages with wands blasted the ship as well as cannon.

Your world may differ in a lot of ways from that one, so it is up to you how magic has effected pirate activity. What if the pirates performed a ritual that bound their ship to yours. Rather than having deckhands chopping the grappling hooks away from the rails, you would need arcanists concentrating to disrupt the ritual (or both!). A ritual to kill the winds, stopping sailed ships in the water and allowing their slave powered galleons to row in.

For mechanics I would run a combat/skill challenge combined. The players could repel boarders, or make skill checks to break away. If the skill challenge fails then the pirate captains engage and the fight is more difficult. Or the ship sinks, and the players must capture a pirate vessel. Or they are marooned. Or anything you want.

Jay

 

[the Jester]

A controller with fire powers with a good range can really mess up a sailing vessel's day, simply by burning its sails.

Prepare for this.

 

[Stoat]

I did a simple naval battle several months ago. There were two ships involved: the one the PC's were on and the one the pirates were on. The battle went down in two parts.

Part 1: An Obsidian-style skill challenge. Failure meant the pirates would catch up the players' ship and board it (with some bonuses to their attacks). Success meant the players could choose to escape or board the pirates (with a surprise round and initiative).

The players could use skills like nature (to navigate) spot (to sight in weapons and look for currents) diplomacy and intimidate (to motivate their crew). I also allowed successful attacks against the enemy ship to count as success (the players had a ballista with stats lifted from Trollhaunt.)

This part was, at best, lackluster. We hadn't been playing 4E long and the players had a hard time getting into the spirit of the skill challenge. Frankly, the challenge felt artificial and a little contrived.

The players won the challenge and decided to board the pirates -- moving on to Part 2.

Part 2: A straight up fight between the PC's and two NPC crewmen on one side and a big ole stack of pirates on the other. The battlemat featured the PC's boat adjacent to the pirate ship, which was a gigantic catamaran crewed by goblins. The PC's and their followers slaughtered the goblins over the course of five or six rounds and had a jolly time doing it.

 

[Rel]

Over the course of several campaigns and numerous one-shot games, I've run a crapload of ship to ship battles (sometimes naval vessels and sometimes airships). I developed an entire subsystem for it when I ran my WFRP2 "Pirates of the Warhammer Caribbean" game.

The most important question you want to ask yourself before you start planning this kind of thing is "how thin do I want to slice the baloney?" Combat in any game is an abstraction. And a good thing too because real life naval battles (I'm talking about between 2-4 ships, not line battles) often had LONG periods of boredom involved. Decide how abstract you want it to be. You could just skip to the part where the bad guys are on the deck of the ship or you could do a series of skill challenges and ranged engagements leading up to the boarding action. Pick your level of abstraction and go with that.

When you get right down to it, the first important thing is Speed. If one ship is significantly faster than another then they always get to control whether a battle happens or not. If you want to make sure that your battle happens then you need to make sure the bad guys are faster than the PC's. If your bad guys are pirates then this is easy to explain because they do this all the time and would be in need of a fast ship.

If there is no question that the bad guys are going to catch them then I wouldn't waste time and skill rolls having the PC's attempt to outrun them. On the other hand a "sailing skill challenge" might be useful in determining how the ships are oriented when a boarding action takes place. This is a big deal because the PC's would be better served (in general) to have the bad guys bow to their broadside. This minimizes the number of pirates that can board at once while maximizing the number of defenders who can attack them. Another possible reason for making sailing rolls in advance of the battle would be to determine where the fight happens. For example the PC's might be able to squeeze enough speed out of their ship to get it into treacherous reefs or close to a whirlpool or some other such feature to have on the battlemat.

Once the battle is joined then I'd guess you'll want to include a lot of skill checks for things like leaping or swinging from one deck to another, maintaining balance if the ship is rocking violently and that type of thing. One great thing about 4e in these situations is all the forced movement effects provide plenty of opportunities for people to go overboard. However I do generally allow the whole "make a save to fall prone at the edge rather than get pushed overboard" rule into effect. And I usually give a +2 to the Save if there is a railing along that edge of the ship. It's there for precisely that reason.

You'll also want to decide how to handle the NPC's aboard the PC's ship. My suggestion would be to either have them stay out of the fight by hiding belowdecks in order not to clutter the battlemat and slow things down OR make them minions. I've also done the abstraction of telling the players "their rank and file sailors are fighting your rank and file sailors, but YOU guys are the ones that will be decisive in this battle". I'd go with whatever you think your group will enjoy the most.

Oh and one last thing: I would recommend making some cutouts of your ships (with a battle grid on them). They are fun to have on the battlemat and they let you change the orientation of the ships during the battle for extra tactical fun. And if you need ship minis to represent their proximity and orientation to each other if there is a "chase scene" then those little Pirates of the Spanish Main ships are EXCELLENT for that.

 

[aco175]

After reading some of these ideas, I may want to run a naval fight. I guess it depends on the pc's mission on how many ships are engaged and weather to run or fight. If the party is simply on board as passengers trtaveling from one adventure to the next, one ship on one ship fight would work. The party may be part of a war fleet and a battle between several ships could be cool. After the party defeats their atackers they may need to speed to the aid of another friendly.

You can have several hurried through descriptions of the pc's ship speeding away from the pirates, using several turn tactics and fog, sun whatever to build tension. Finally the pirates catch them, maybe with 2 ships or with the help of underwater monsters. A pirate magic item or spell that allows the kelp to grab the shi?

I also like the idea of having the pc's ship start to sink from the pirate ship ramming it, maybe taking most of the npcs friends away from the fight as they try and save their ship. This clears the DM's plate for focusing on the fight. Have a few groups board the ship and allow the pcs to defend from the group atacking them or trying to go downstairs. After the first fight on the deck, a short rest before taking the fight to the pirate ship or going downstairs to assist saving the ship (skill challenge) or another fight with more pirates or monsters/undead that came through the hole the npc's are trying to fix.

I'm starting to like these ideas, now if my party would come down from the mountains.

 

[Turtlejay]

What Rel said, and read the thread in the General Forum about his campaign, I do remember at one point his PC's in an airship being ambushed by pirates.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...commentary-rels-d-d-4th-edition-campaign.html

Jay