D&D General What's your view on a pirate-driven campaign?

[ECMO3]

One thing I haven’t figured out how to do is make certain kinds of ship-to-ship combat engaging for everyone. If the pc’s ship is in a cannon fight with another ship, it’s going to have an unequal distribution of agency, since the captain (or whoever is deciding where the ship goes) is the only one making real decisions.

There’s a few ways to work around this, but the classic ship-to-ship standoff doesn’t fit well. Some options:

1. Don’t make ranged weapons better than boarding actions. If the best tactics is “get my people on their deck” you can use the full range of DnD options

2. Give everyone their own way of moving around (flying mounts, their own ships, swim speeds) so everyone is free to act as tey like

3. Just don’t do ship-to-ship combat (not very pirate-y)

4. Own it and let one character have the spotlight during these scenes. (Just make sure other pcs get their own scenes)

I do think “ship as bastion” is the way to go if there’s one main ship. Ships almost always become their own character in Age of Sail stories.

Have the PCs essentially be the Marines on the ship. The Captain is driving but the PCs are shooting arrows, manning ballistae and catapults or working on the rigging, until you close and then it is grappling hooks, boarding planks and a massive melee.

There are a couple ways to make this work in my experience - first make it a small ship, so the captain a 1st mate, a cook and the PCs.

The second is to make it a larger ship but only do a part of it once the ships are together and the things the PCs do before that change the odds. So for example your crew of 50 is taking on another ship with a crew of 50. When the two ships finally come together the PCs are supposed to take the Forcastle and other men are taking other parts of the ship "off screen". IF they succeed their allies succeed. How well the PCs do on stuff before the boarding/melee is joined affects how difficult their encounter is.

 

[ECMO3]

He set out on a legally financed and supported privateering mission.

While this is true most beligerents view another countries "privateers" as pirates.

 

[Lanefan]

Heh. Just to echo a few of the problems I've had with this sort of campaign:

1. The players will NOT be willing to help you here. While you might think the day to day running of a ship is interesting and fun, they will do everything in their power to not engage in it. Trade? Nope. Counting barrels of salted pork to ship? Nope. All that stuff that is the day to day running of a ship? Nope. Good luck with that.

2. As @Celebrim rightly pointed out, D&D does not do this scale of combat. it just doesn't. It's FAR too fiddly when you have fifteen or twenty combatants to a side, let alone 30 or 40. It just does not work.

It can be made to work if NPC combatants are batched a little. Say there's a group of five pirates fighting seven defenders on the foredeck while the PCs storm the helm. For that foredeck combat, at the end of each round I'd probably just do one d20 for the pirates as a group, and another for the defenders, to see how things are going in general in that part of the battle.

For bigger battles where each side has dozens of combatants or more, it might be time to break out the Battlesystem rules or something similar.

3. The cinematic rules for ship combat are fine, so long as you make it abundantly clear to the players that they are not going to get any advantages (or disadvantages) for running things this way. You narrate that the ships come together and you start boarding action. You don't bother with anything remotely resembling ship combat because it just doesn't work.

I hesitantly disagree here. I think ship-v-ship combat can work, but it takes some kitbashing (or, in my case, designing a whole new subsystem just for this). I say "I think" because.....

Playing a nautical [...] campaign is my white whale of D&D gaming.

.....this is my situation as well. I've had those ship-v-ship rules in place for over 30 years now and have busted them out exactly once, just last winter, and that only because the PCs had captured a shore battery and were firing on ships in the harbour.

 

[Zardnaar]

It can be made to work if NPC combatants are batched a little. Say there's a group of five pirates fighting seven defenders on the foredeck while the PCs storm the helm. For that foredeck combat, at the end of each round I'd probably just do one d20 for the pirates as a group, and another for the defenders, to see how things are going in general in that part of the battle.

For bigger battles where each side has dozens of combatants or more, it might be time to break out the Battlesystem rules or something similar.

I hesitantly disagree here. I think ship-v-ship combat can work, but it takes some kitbashing (or, in my case, designing a whole new subsystem just for this). I say "I think" because.....

.....this is my situation as well. I've had those ship-v-ship rules in place for over 30 years now and have busted them out exactly once, just last winter, and that only because the PCs had captured a shore battery and were firing on ships in the harbour.

Ship as dungeon works. Ship as naval combat not so much.

 

[Zardnaar]

While this is true most beligerents view another countries "privateers" as pirates.

Random vs getting hung if caught. They might hang you anyway if salty enough.

 

[TheSword]

Pirate campaigns can be awesome fun. I would highly recommend these three.

- Ghosts of Saltmarsh: You know this one, but a really solid campaign. Lots of fun.

- Skull and Shackles : Great adventures with lots of different themes. Stealing a pirate ship, and shipwreck on an island, capture of island fort, search for burried treasure, a pirate yacht race around a hurricane, joining a pirate council etc.

- Razor Coast : Amazing setting in a Carib-Polynesian archepelago that sounds like what you’re driving at.

My advice is to use the Ship as a Bastion and run all piracy as downtime activities. If you really want to do ship to ship combat, check out Fire as She Bears. A supplement for representing ship combat.

 

[TheSword]

I do think it’s funny that folks seem to think a letter of marque transforms an act from evil to good. Privateering was piracy by another name. Legitimizing it in the name of a national flag doesn’t change the nature of the act.

Honesty though I wouldn’t get too hung up on it if your party isn’t. Evil as a game term isn’t very helpful when looking at most real life historical events. Life is far too nuanced for that.

Definitely watch Black Sails if you want the full gamut of pirate motivations! Amazing three season show [Edit Four seasons, thanks @Lanefan ] with a beginning, middle and end. Captain Flint, Callico Jack, Anne Bonney and Charles Vane are excellent.

 

[smetzger]

Surprised no-one has mentioned Freeport. 3.5 excellent source for Pirate based campaign or just a port that pirates control

 

[Zardnaar]

Surprised no-one has mentioned Freeport. 3.5 excellent source for Pirate based campaign or just a port that pirates control

Has Pathfinder Skull and Shackles been mentioned?

Worth mining.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Surprised no-one has mentioned Freeport. 3.5 excellent source for Pirate based campaign or just a port that pirates control

I did.