D&D General Ships & spellcasters

[Lanefan]

If you have a 5th level caster, why not think a bit outside the box.

You could set a pursuing enemy's sails on fire....or leave troops submerged beneath the waves with hand drills. Waterbreathing is a 3rd level ritual that affects 10 people and lasts 24 hours. And Mending doesn't work if the drill shavings are discarded in the ocean.

Wall of Force in front of a fast-moving ship is also loads of fun!

You could prepare to grapple.... or lower a gangplank and send out a cavalry charge. Waterwalk is a 3rd level ritual that affects 10 creatures and lasts 1 hour. Nothing like a couple dozen cavalry harassing the enemy with bows while playing peak-a-boo from behind the waves.

If the waves are big enough to hide behind, no way in hell is anyone - man or beast - keeping their footing on a floor that's moving so much.

 

[Shadowdweller00]

It's probably worth mentioning that the real-life range of cannons and ballistae is very significantly greater than that of a Fireball spell. Even using grapeshot. (On the order of like 500 to 1000 yards as opposed to 150 feet). Though I'd imagine that fireball would still be a fairly devastating weapon if one can get close enough to an enemy ship. Maybe more akin to using greek fire, really.

 

[Bohandas]

Yeah. A lot of the ranges in the game are pretty short

 

[GrimCo]

What people already said. Most spells have very short ranges. When cannons enter the picture, best use of spellcasters is for defense, not offense. Wall of force to protect sails/masts, tiny huts to protect deck crew and similar stuff.

Even without cannons, balistae had ranges of 200-300 meter (650-1000 feet) for smaller mobile ones and 400-500 meters (1300-1600 ft) for bigger ones that were mounted on the ships. Also add catapults with ranges 150-300 meters for small ones to 300-500 meters for larger ones like Byzantines and Romans used. Compared to that, your fireball has measly 150 ft (50 meter) range. At best, fireball is more like blunderbuss with longer range ( blunderbuss is most effective at 30-60ft range, it's like early shotgun) and better damage.

 

[Quickleaf]

Next campaign is sea-faring, pirates, swinging from the yardarm, wenches and swains and all that good stuff. I'm looking at verisimilitude - spellcasters vs. ships. It feels...anticlimactic....if every battle is simply "wizard fireballs the sails" or something like that. I want to explain why ships have to close with grapples (gunpowder and cannons are limited to only the wealthiest and most powerful) and why you'd opt for gunpowder in the first place if you could simply hire a wizard.

Has anyone come across this? Would ships in a fantasy setting have any recourse beyond hiring wizards to counterspell, etc.? Would standard ship building come with a blessing from the pirate goddess that protects the ship somehow from being directly affected? Could you buy a figurehead to counter magic?

Been ages since I ran piratical D&D, but the dwarven mage made absolutely awesome use of flaming sphere in the nautical combat and drove off attacking pirates. But to get to that point, they had to survive an arcane gated boarding party (arcane gate comes into range roughly same as regular non-long cannon range) because pirates were trying to threaten "if you resist we'll blow you out of the water" without damaging the PC's ship they wanted to take as a prize. The PCs were able to fend off initial gated boarding party (that took them off guard and was a nifty moment when the "aha" about implications of D&D magic in a pirate game hit them) long enough for captain to lure pirates within 60 feet for dwarf's flaming sphere to end it.

 

[Baron Opal II]

Having spells like gust of wind might make it so your ship never gets into fireball range. Also, the average merchant may not have a mage on crew, but a naval ship carrying gold to the crown or pay to the colonial soldiers probably would. Keels, main masts, and figureheads are likely to be enchanted or blessed by the gods of the sea or travel. Low level clerics with create water to soak more vulnerable parts of the ship or extinguish secondary fires would make sense.

I seem to have read somewhere a bronze age ship tying soaked hides to the hull to protect against fire ships, fire pots, and maybe greek fire.

 

[toucanbuzz]

All good stuff, and if using a product like Fire as She Bears (Pathfinder/3.5 but easily compatible), one area of basic rigging has 75 hp (it's going to take a lot of fireballs to destroy one mast's worth), and cannons (or ballistae or highly inaccurate catapults) outdistance casters by a significant amount.

I'd also wonder if an enemy figures out you have a blaster caster aboard, would they be more likely to sink your ship (rather than risk closing)? Culturally, maybe ship casters are like Wheel of Time, wherein their magic lies in speeding up the ship, detecting weather patterns, etc.

 

[Celebrim]

Next campaign is sea-faring, pirates, swinging from the yardarm, wenches and swains and all that good stuff. I'm looking at verisimilitude - spellcasters vs. ships. It feels...anticlimactic....if every battle is simply "wizard fireballs the sails" or something like that. I want to explain why ships have to close with grapples (gunpowder and cannons are limited to only the wealthiest and most powerful) and why you'd opt for gunpowder in the first place if you could simply hire a wizard.

Has anyone come across this? Would ships in a fantasy setting have any recourse beyond hiring wizards to counterspell, etc.? Would standard ship building come with a blessing from the pirate goddess that protects the ship somehow from being directly affected? Could you buy a figurehead to counter magic?

Played this campaign back in the 1990s.

It becomes necessary to assume that the production of sailcloth warded from fire is profitable and major industry. I presume the existence of a low level (3rd level or below) 'Ward Against Elements' spell that targets objects, is permanent, and has costs similar to the costs of 'Continual Light'.

 

[MarkB]

Played this campaign back in the 1990s.

It becomes necessary to assume that the production of sailcloth warded from fire is profitable and major industry. I presume the existence of a low level (3rd level or below) 'Ward Against Elements' spell that targets objects, is permanent, and has costs similar to the costs of 'Continual Light'.

I'd go with specialised source materials - wool from sheep whose ancestors were native to the the plane of fire, or cotton from plants enhanced via druidic magic.

 

[Horwath]

What people already said. Most spells have very short ranges. When cannons enter the picture, best use of spellcasters is for defense, not offense. Wall of force to protect sails/masts, tiny huts to protect deck crew and similar stuff.

Even without cannons, balistae had ranges of 200-300 meter (650-1000 feet) for smaller mobile ones and 400-500 meters (1300-1600 ft) for bigger ones that were mounted on the ships. Also add catapults with ranges 150-300 meters for small ones to 300-500 meters for larger ones like Byzantines and Romans used. Compared to that, your fireball has measly 150 ft (50 meter) range. At best, fireball is more like blunderbuss with longer range ( blunderbuss is most effective at 30-60ft range, it's like early shotgun) and better damage.

I blame 4E for short ranges and that everything had to fit on a table battlemap.

3.5E, 10th level caster fireball is 10d6 at 800ft, add dirt cheap Lesser metamagic rog(enlarge) for 3x a day, you get fireball at 1600ft