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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Amaroq" data-source="post: 5105142" data-attributes="member: 15470">Love. It !!!Do enjoy that you keep posting your airship ideas, and I hope my DM is reading them. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />You've got six players but your cannons do a metric boatload of damage, more than a typical Daily, which might be 3[W]+10 at that level.Do you want to try consuming a bit more of their actions to run it? Remember how many men it takes to run a cannon on a real sailing ship: Fire, haul back, clean residue, stuff powder in, roll ball in, push back into place, aim, light fuse, wait a moment, fire.Not saying you want to model every aspect of that, but you might actually get a real kick to the action economy by modeling it as: - Push into our out of firing place as a Move action (even, Easy Athletics check?) - Reload as a Standard, only if out of place - Fire as a Standard, only if IN place. - Aim as a Minor - instead of "+2", maybe it gives the cannon a "Crit on a 19 or 20" power?That's bringing the damage-per-Standard back down to a bit more inline, while still retaining the "WOW" factor for your players .. you wind up using two players to fire a cannon once per round, or one player every other round. You may also want to give the cannons an inherent plus to hit, or maybe a "minimum plus to hit"; I know my fighter is so optimized for his longsword that he's +19 to hit with it, and a whopping +9 if he has to revert to his longbow .. which would be, what, +7 with a ranged weapon he doesn't have proficiency for?If he wound up manning a cannon, it might be nice if the cannon had a "minimum plus to hit of level + 2", which pushed him up to a +14 to hit - still not perfect, but not low enough that we'd feel like we were missing too often. You could even target that bonus towards the right "chance of hitting" for the black dragons, e.g., somewhere around "hits on an 8 or higher", or whatever you think is right.Speaking of criticals, do you want to give the cannon an explicit "on crit" power? Maybe it knocks the target prone on crit, so you wind up with the chance of a lucky hit knocking one dragon out of the sky for a round or two, and your players suddenly LOVE their cannons ..  . . . On the ballista, I like "Reload Move" and "Aim Minor", they're cool things for the characters who don't have lots of Minors to use, and somebody running the ballista is probably going to skip their Move anyways. You might want to give it a different range than the cannons - seems to me the cannons might have a disgustingly long range, like 40, while the ballista remains at 20.  . . . Do you want to model "height"? Its a classic feature in old-school aerial combat, the bad guys attacking out of the sun, diving past, strafing, etc. Plus, our gaming group keeps forcing height tracking on our DM, so it may help to have rules in place for flying creatures both good and bad.If so, you could abstract it as a 7-stage system with "Far below", "Well below", "Below", "Deck Level", "Above", "Well above" and "Far Above". A flying creature can increase its level by 1 per turn in which it spends at least one Move action flying. A flying creature can decrease its level by 1 per turn in which it spends at least one Move action flying. A "diving" or "falling" creature decreases its level by 2 per turn, but must continue to dive or fall by 1 more level on its next turn .. if it dives into an enemy 2 levels below it, it gains a +2 to hit and inflicts 3d10 falling damage to both the target and the diving creature.The cannon might be able to target "Above" to "Well below", while the ballista might only target "Deck Level" to "Below".</blockquote>

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