Recent content by Celebrim

We actually found siege weaponry vastly too powerful under 1e AD&D rules because they assumed AC 10 on all targets with no official penalties for size class or low accuracy (at least that I could find). A broad side of a SOL would murder just about anything in the game short of a castle or...

Cannons definitely have their place and are just as medieval as full plate and rapiers, crows' nests, abundant currency, standing armies, and stable nation state monarchies and republics. I've never seen one true medieval town in all of my time playing the game. In my own campaign it's...

The one I was in that worked used age of sail trappings, right down to the major military powers having "ships of the line". The GM didn't want to introduce gunpower - less because of the worry about cannons and firearms and more about the worry of PC's putting barrels of gunpowder in portable...

D&D is conceptually pegged at Medieval. In practice, Gygaxian D&D is Victorian minus gunpowder. Age of Piracy is actually anachronistic the other way in many cases. It's not really obvious because the medieval era is so far away historically that unless one actually reads primary sources from...

I mean some of this happened but that's not really an accurate description of the mechanism of pirates in the Golden Age of piracy. Those smaller targets generally had to do with the age of criminal pirates post 1730 when pirates couldn't be expected to have safe ports or government backing...

That's a novelist point of view. It's not normally how you write for an RPG. In an RPG the players are invested in the characters but you need to get them invested in and excited about the setting. Of course, the problem Critical Role has is that this is both an RPG and a play with an...

It's an emotional bang, not a dramatic one. It's meaningful to the characters. But as others have noted, this sort of bang works better if you are invested in the man being executed or the characters trying to rescue him. The whole city experiencing a natural disaster, an invasion of...

I think it is probably better for an audience though I think I would probably detest it as a player. I also think from the description he's violating the rule that you start an adventure with a Big Bang, then you lore dump once you have people excited. This is playing out as a slow burn novel...

This and the publication of some Dragon articles about sea faring combined with dissatisfaction at running the PC's across the Sea of Fallen stars in a homebrew adventure to rescue slaves led my college GM to steer the campaign into piracy and naval combat. Of course, we found out after just...

I don't think you have to get as deep in the woods as tracking barrels of fish and depending on the campaign setting you probably don't need to track food and water portions if you can assume stops in ports are pretty frequent the same way you don't track food while the PCs are in town. There...

IIRC correctly, that's because Treasure Island has no actual piracy. It features a mutiny by former pirates against the owner of a merchant vessel who was unwise in hiring his crew. There are only about two dozen crew aboard the schooner, so naturally neither side of the mutiny can have more...

UPDATE: Ooops. Sorry. I thought this was a response to a post about the Skull & Shackles AP. What I wrote isn't actually a response to what you are claiming. So, if you don't have ship to ship combat like people expect when they imagine pirates, and instead you have something more medieval...

We tried to play it. The introductory scenario were you get pressed ganged is awesome and the minigame of being a sailor aboard a terrible ship is a great little minigame that really impresses on you life sucks. I would be more than happy to run the first adventure. But leaving aside some...

So typical pirate movies have ships that correspond to age of sail frigates. They have crews in the range of 240 to 350. So, the moment you start running a game that looks like a pirate movie, you immediately jump from dozens to hundreds. And that's probably going to happen to you as soon as...

I'm not really a professional writer by any stretch, but I do know if I was a former professional writer I'd have enough of an ear to recognize I probably shouldn't be starting off all my posts with that claim. I don't think it means what you think it means. Oh, he's a bandit. Somehow I feel...