D&D 5E SJ Ship to Ship Battles (& Vehicle Rules in General)

[SkidAce]

IMO, on the recent posts...

Ship weapons target ships...
People weapons target people...
Some "weapons" (fireball) could do both.

 

[Undrave]

I ran a Spelljammer session with new players at my LGS on Saturday, and it featured a ship to ship battle (for reference, check out D&D Beyond Spelljammer Academy which AFAIK is free, though you may have had to "claim" it, whatever that means.)

At any rate, there were several things that I had trouble with.

1) Siege weapons. Can you really just (as my players wanted to do), fire a Mangonel at the other ship's Captain? The rules say "targets" and don't specify anything about how that's done. I assume that the Captain can hide below decks, but that doesn't seem very captain-like.
2) The other thing they wanted to do is "target the enemies' weapons" (very Star-Trek-y). Unfortunately, the battle would have raged for several rounds before it would be possible to disable the enemies weapons. HP are designed such that a creature or object is "fine" (fully operational) unless it's at ZERO HP, and then it's destroyed. I made up a "damaged" condition, just so they felt like they were doing something.
3) OTOH, it seemed like it would be possible to fire a Mangonel at the other ship's Mangonel CREW. (See #1 above). At which point, unless they have a backup guy to join the 5-person crew, the Mangonel would then only get to fire every-other round (or so, as it took 5 actions to fire, which could be 5 people using one action each, or one person using 5, or any combo thereof).

I have more to say, but my wife is calling me for dinner. Please comment on that (if you have any understanding of it). I welcome tips on ways you've made it work, if you've run any 5e Vehicle battles at all (I assume that the Decent into Avernus "Road Warrior" cars work similarly. And I know that ships in Saltmarsh do.) Any experiences to share?

I'd break up each ship's profile into a few blocks, each with its own HP, and each block having its own features (like the Captain's station being one, the sails, the mangonel emplacement, etc).

Reduce a chunk’s HP to 0 and it becomes disabled, so none of its feature can be used. Disable more than half of a ship’s chunk and the entire ship is disabled. Disable all the chunks and the ship is destroyed. You can target each chunk individually, but not individual people in those chunks unless you’re in much closer range.

I'm tempted to make siege weapons a tool

That's a good idea, maybe make proficiency allow a person to bark orders so that some of the other unit in the crew can use their reaction as well as their action to make the siege weapon work. With a proficient leader you could end up with 3 activation of the siege weapon every 2 rounds instead of 1 per round.

 

[Negflar2099]

I see what you mean now. The rules do seem to allow you to hit any target, but I don't think that was the intent. I guess it will need clarification though. I appreciate you sharing what happened to you so we can be prepared for it in our own games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Honestly maybe I'm not understanding the issue here but how is this different then when players say they want to shoot someone in the head to them take them out in one hit or slice their legs off so they can't run? To echo what someone else said that is not what D&D does. It's not the system for that. To be honest though I'm not sure ship weapons are accurate enough to hit individual targets like that anyway. Not when they're moving around like crazy. To me that's beyond even disadvantage. Then there's the what's good for the PC goose is good for the DM gander. If individual NPC could be hit by siege level weapons that goes both ways.

All that said I agree that the Spelljammer combat system as written is more bare bones than a skeleton at a nudist colony. I highly suggest looking at the Wildjammer rules someone came up with a while back:


It still doesn't allow the sort of precise targeting you want (unless you level up as a gunner) but it's pretty dang good.

I suggested the Wildjammer rules. Better than anything WotC has put out.