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Okay, my list: 1) Forbidden Planet. Inspired by Shakespeare, inspired Star Trek. The most important SF movie ever. 2) Star Wars (ANH). My favourite, not including multiples in the series. 3) Star Trek: First Contact. Personal favourite, and I'm not including multiples in the same series. 4)...

True for the vast majority of scientists in science fiction*. You start ruling things out on that basis and you throw away 99% of the genre. *Speaking as a scientist, also true in real life.

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...

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

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...

Pirates is an old genre. That's why it features in Peter Pan for example. Treasure Island (and The Coral Island etc) where huge in children's literature in the late 19th and early 20th century. There are a lot more pirate movies made in the 1930s*-1950s than in the last 20 years. Not that the...

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. 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...

Mostly in the 20th century, influenced by Treasure Island, movies. And ship combat is not usually an element. The movies are more treasure hunting with a bit of planet-of-the-week exploration. With no ship combat, and the actual acts of piracy referenced but not depicted in detail. Queen of the...

Has some naval combat does not make it Pirates or not Pirates. Nor does it make it Naval. It's just something that might happen (and can be handwaved around if your ruleset doesn't support it). The Pirates genre stems entirely from Treasure Island, which does not include any naval combat or...

Yeah, this is the main reason I didn't like the 2nd edition boxed set. It treated the setting like a physical world, not a nightmare world where dream logic holds sway. An idea that was firmly established in the second Ravenloft publication, I10 The House on Gryphon Hill. I work hard to subtly...

The issue is Naval campaign =/= Pirate campaign. You are talking about very different things with very different parameters for success. Pirates work fine in D&D, but Naval does not, and is better served by different rulesets.

Quite. Hope Setting: "We don't need to do anything, the gods will sort it out anyway." Despair Setting: "There is no point in doing anything, it won't make things any better." Both of these are harmful ideas. Balanced setting: "Our actions and decisions make the difference between hope and...

Sure, lots of SF isn’t speculative, but exists purely to entertain (just like movies in any other genre). I do think there is a lot of intellectual snobbery going around here. For example, 2001 doesn’t have any sophisticated intellectual message, it just propagates the widely derided Ancient...

Not my experience.

The main features of a pirate campaign are hunting treasure, defying authorities (especially colonials), mutinous crews, speaking with a Westcountry accent, and ham night.

Sure, but Pirates isn’t about ship-to-ship combat, it’s completely unnecessary to include it, which makes it fine for D&D. Just move directly to boarding action. Break it down into a series of small battles (like a dungeon crawl) if there are a lot of crew on the enemy ship. The only RPG I’ve...

I’m aware of this. The novel, which I have read, is also a Balance of Terror rip off. It’s as much a Pirate story as Star Trek is. I’ve also read all the Hornblower novels. “Age of Sail” is its own genre (which Trek often drew upon), with very different tropes to Pirate stories.

You do realise handwaving is inherently something you do yourself, not with external guidance!

I would point out that Master and Commander has nothing to do with pirates, and is Star Trek (ToS, Balance of Terror) transposed to the sea. Definitely Star Fleet, not Pirates.

All RPGs handwave it. There isn't any way to deal with a crew of hundreds that doesn't abstract it in any RPG. Abstraction works just fine. It doesn't matter if there are a thousand crew, because the PCs are never going to fight more than a handful at a time.