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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.

Sure, easily. I played a fair bit of Star Trek RPG with a crew of over 400. They are just a stat that occasionally goes down during ship combat, provides a pool of redshirts, and occasionally replacement PCs. And I boarded Imperial Star Destroyers playing Star Wars d6 too. A ship with a crew of...

Some groups may be happy to have a player be captain. Others might decide to run the ship by committee, or take turns. Rule breaking is what pirates are all about, and that includes standard chain of command. Equally missing out on the essence of a pirate campaign. The trouble with that is the...

This is what I would absolutely avoid in a pirate campaign. Freedom and independence (and from a gameplay perspective player autonomy) are central themes in a pirate story. I would call a campaign where the PCs are crew who are sent on missions a Star Fleet campaign. If the PCs start out as...

Not bothered, haven’t noticed any problems. Having learned to play on 1st edition, I never payed any attention to CR when planning encounters in any case. And I don’t think my players would enjoy a more difficult game.

Which is something I try to avoid. I usually have Indiana Jones style time pressure. The door takes exactly as long to descend as it does for the PCs to get under it, plus time to grab a hat. “Challenge” is not the purpose of playing. The purpose is to give people who hate small talk something...

Quite. I disagree. My players have had enough constant pressure all day at work. They play D&D to relax.

You don’t generally need to clear the area for Diablo clones. Your abilities are on cooldowns that recharge during combat, and your health and mana recovery should match the rate at which you are depleting them. Also, you can run away.

Diablo and it's clones work nothing like that! Pretty much all class abilities recharge in a matter of seconds. The only reason to return to town is to off-load excess loot. Which, because I've played a lot (most?) of them, and I can't think of any based around the idea that you clear a level...

This is a curious one, since the original time restriction was real world time, not in game time. The players had a fixed amount of time (not sure if it was one hour or three hours) then their characters die come what may. And the assumption was that they would almost certainly die, with the...

Your content needs to be appealing to the players. If they want the game to have easy combat, that is their prerogative. You don't have to play with that group though, the most important factor in a successful D&D campaign is finding like-minded players. If this is something that you find with...

That’s back to “the rules are perfect, the problem is the players”. The solution, therefore, is to get rid of the players and the rules will be fine.

Which games? I can't think of any that work quite how you describe. But I came from the era of Pong and Space Invaders, and we always rested whenever we ran low on resources back then.

The narrative of this ability is that it makes your spells more powerful, either by increasing the save DC or making them more likely to hit. I believe that the ability is intended to affect all (or as many as possible) spells cast during the duration. I don’t believe the intent is to exclude...