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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8717389" data-attributes="member: 4937">It certainly did inspire us and send us off in the right direction.  The real innovation I think was validating great age of sail as a D&D setting concept over the more period realistic cogs, galleys, and longships that had dominated D&D thinking about the sea before then.  Prior to adopting Great Age of Sail tech, boats had purely been seen in the campaigns as uninspiring slow and weak means of transportation.  Foy brought to D&D what modern people think of as ships when they think of ships, and in particular this meant Heroic Ships.  D&D had been taking it's land cues from Heroic Ages like the Early Bronze and Middle Ages when a single armored hero could take on a dozen or more less well equipped foes, but had been taking its Naval cues from Democratic naval periods where conscription and mass navies ruled the waters without a single heroic focus like Great Age of Sail brings you with "the Captain on the Bridge".  It was almost like finding a way to bring the Star Trek Enterprise into D&D.  It didn't matter if it technically didn't make sense; from a stand point of mythic resonance it was as perfect as wizard-knights swinging laser swords in a Galactic Empire.We would have been fine with complexity.  What we weren't fine with was poor process simulation.  I'm trying to remember what the original rules were like before we modified a lot of things, but one thing I seem to remember was that whenever a ship lost hull points it had a chance of immediately sinking equal to the percentage of hullpoints it had lost in total compared to the maximum.  Imagine if hit points worked like that and you had 8 hit points and took 2 damage, and therefore acquired a 25% chance of dying no save.  Then you took 2 more damage and had a 50% chance of dying immediately.  The effect on ships was that they would start sinking almost as soon as they took any damage at all.There were a lot of little things like that were if you read over them they don't sound so bad but in play they were just horrendous.</blockquote>

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