"Bestest" D20 Rules for Naval Combat

[LoneWolf23]

"Claw and corpuscle" has a pretty good section on detailing what kind of navels different creature types have (Constructs have none, undead have old dried up withered ones, and most aberrations have kind of an anterior nozzle). They've also got rules for combat that takes place in the navels of Gargantuan or larger creatures -- a duel in the bellybutton of a great wyrm is a dangerous thing all by itself -- and some feats and PrC's that allow the navel to improve as a natural weapon, starting with "Outie" and progressing all the way to "Flaming Venomous Fiendish Navel".

Oh, wait... naval... My bad.

Here, take a Laugh Point. You've earned it.

 

[Stormborn]

Mongoose's Ultimate Game Designer's Handbook has rules adapted from, I believe, their Seas of Blood. Salt and Seadogs has shipcombat rules as well,I think. Neither is 3.5 but can easily be adapted.

I have just started a swashbuckling campaign set in a fantasy world of roughly 1700s level technology in which there will eventually be some ship combat. To avoid the problem mentioned by jgsugden, and for other reasons, I have made the world low magic. No PC is going to go throwign fireballs at enemy ships. However, if you are in a standard campaign world you might consider giving the ships a magical quality, perhaps hulls made of a tree with SR? Or some other magical effect so that magic is no more effective than cannon. A world altering possiblity is to say that the mana liens that feed magic don't exist at sea, thus there is no power for big spells. Although that is by far the most complicated alternative.