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

[Hussar]

Me, probably REH, and the other people who made modern pop culture. Pirates of the Caribbean was based on a 1967 Disneyland ride which was based on a 1950 movie version of the 1883 novel Treasure Island. But as I said, apart from having more fantasy it isn't much different. No realistic naval combat. The only recent movie to attempt that was the not-a-pirate-movie Master and Commander. And Greyhound I suppose. The Battle of the River Plate (1956) is a pretty authentic naval engagement movie. It's set in 1939, but a lot of the age of sail parameters were still in place. It was the battle of Midway in 1942 that changed all that.

Why are you insisting on "realistic" naval combat? You appear to be the only one who needs this in order to differentiate from pirate genre movies.

I do seem to recall a rather large number of pirate movies where you have crews fighting other crews on ships. Doesn't need to be realistic. And, as I've been saying all the way along, as soon as you have about 50 combatants, D&D fails hard.

And, as far as Conan goes, there are a LOT more Conan authors than just REH. Like, literally dozens, and hundreds of novels.

 

[GrimCo]

Handle this through narration.

Some players want to play it out. They don't want to talk it out, it diminishes the experience. Some are ok with narrating everything. And there are those in between who want various degrees of direct involvement. That's something that should be discussed during session 0, how hands on they wanna get in that aspect. If they wanna play it all, round by round, i would strongly recomend not using D&D for that. For those that are ok with more abstraction, skill challenges or opposed skill checks work solid enough.

Works fine in D&D if you break it into a series of shorter fights. Ship of Horror has a deck battle.

That's one of the ways to do it for sure.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Why are you insisting on "realistic" naval combat

There isn’t really a mid-point between realistic and hand-waving that is actually fun. Pirates of the Cabbean is completely narrative - let’s have some explosions here and a kraken there. Whereas attempts to gamify it look to reality as it’s basis, which leads to boring AF results. The closest I have seen is the much derided Deadfire minigame.

 

[CreamCloud0]

while sailing, encountering ships and navigating storms and sea creatures are an essential part of making a pirate/naval campaign a pirate/naval campaign i think that perhaps counter-intuitively, it is where you make land that is the most important to making a good campaign of it all, land is always your destination in one form or another, i think of One Piece and Wind Waker, although the sailing is important and how they get to where you're going it is the islands and the continents that the best parts of the adventures happen and people don't think of those media as any less sailing-focused for it.

i think perhaps it may be worthwhile to take some notes from the exploration pillar for your ocean navigation, adventure on land can be played as pretty standard but on the seas i think it is worth having your players try to fill in their own ocean charts by their own hand and make rolls to see they don't drift off course, you of course have the master map behind the screen with everything as it should be, all the islands, ports and shipping routes marked, and the random event tables, but i think exploring the horizon is one of the big draws to the concept of ocean campaigns.

 

[Lanefan]

The OP asked about Pirates, not maritime in general, which makes a huge difference, since one works well in D&D, and the other is terrible.

Where I think both can work, or be made to work, quite well.

Might be edition-dependent, though, to some extent. I know I could make it work in 1e or adjacent, probably in 2e as well. I'd leave it to others to make it work in 3e or 5e. I'm not sure how well 4e could do it given its focus on set-piece battles, as most ship-board battles and all ship-v-ship battles would be too unpredictable to work well with the set-piece format.

And in particular, they asked about adventures, which we have done little to address - I can think of a couple which I don’t think have been mentioned yet, but need to check titles (will edit later).

Were I to run a pirate or maritime campaign I'd expect to likely have to come up with the sea-based adventures myself. It would be easy to throw in a land-based adventure here and there e.g. Isle of Dread or any adventure that takes place near a port (e.g. Bone Hill takes place near Restenford which either is or can easily be made a port town), and the U1-2-3 series might be a good starting-off sequence; maybe the PCs capture the ship in U1 and take it for their own?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

the U1-2-3 series might be a good starting-off sequence; maybe the PCs capture the ship in U1 and take it for their own

I used U1 in my Sky Raiders campaign - hypothetically U2 and 3 were available too, but the party went in a different direction. There is lots of good stuff that can be dropped into a pirate campaign in Ghosts of Saltmarsh (not including the ship combat). But that was mentioned early in the thread.

 

[Zardnaar]

I used U1 in my Sky Raiders campaign - hypothetically U2 and 3 were available too, but the party went in a different direction. There is lots of good stuff that can be dropped into a pirate campaign in Ghosts of Saltmarsh (not including the ship combat). But that was mentioned early in the thread.

I like that book. Its a good jumping off point.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

There isn’t really a mid-point between realistic and hand-waving that is actually fun.

cough Pirate Borg cough

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Oh, a good pirate adventure I forgot to mention previously is Kelsey Dionne's Ghostlight, which features (spoilers) the pirate afterlife as a ghost ship. Like all of her 5E adventures, you can run it without any prep, but it's worth reading it and tweaking a bit to fit your home game.

It's an interesting contrast to Pirate Borg's afterlife, Davy Jones Locker, which is a signature adventure setting in their upcoming big adventure book, Down Among the Dead.

Ghostlight is a lot less grim in tone -- although not too lighthearted, given this is the creator of Shadowdark -- but a nice adventure/mini-setting to have in your back pocket for pirate games.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I’ve been going through the adventure compilation books for things that could be dropped into a pirate campaign. The one I came up with is The Nightsea’s Succour (Radiant Citadel), I haven’t played it though. Surprisingly I didn’t find anything in the Golden Vault.