D&D 5E Excerpt from a 5e naval supplement I'm writing

[bedir than]

I love fantastical locations and encounters. If I wanted mundane I wouldn't play DnD. Think of Pirates of the Caribbean with ships battling during exploding volcanoes, or while a Kraken or some other sea beast is destroying one of the fleets.* One cannot play a game where encounters regularly feature traps with giant rolling boulders, orcs, wyvern and claim that most are mundane.


* I don't know if any of the Pirates movies have done this.

 

[Derren]

If it makes a difference, the flood was, like, super deep.

When you say you're worried normal naval encounters will be glossed over, what sorts of things are you hoping get covered?

Mainly it is a concern that without fantastical terrain and maybe even access to naval spells there combat, for example on open waters without any special features, will not be interesting enough. Especially as in naval combat the stats of the characters matter less and instead the ship is the deciding factor which will neither level up or even change much at all during a campaign.

And more of a personal peeve, I don't like it if the fantastical is seen as the norm or at least not very detectable. In your example everyone would see that a fire shooting sail is fantastic, but nothing in it sounds like the ability of ships to even go there is fantastic, too. It rather appears that it is a completely normal thing.

One thing the example reminds me off, how "small" can you go with this book. While a schoner vs. a galleon in this setup is very "fantastic", a combat between a launch, maybe with a single small cannon in front, and a daring cutter captain would not (or a lot less). Will the book cover that too?

 

[RangerWickett]

Are we talking a launch with oars? I haven't figured out how to handle rowing, precisely.

If it's rigged with a sail, at the level of granularity I'm working with there's not a ton of difference between a 25-ft. sloop-rigged boat and a 30-ft. boat with a fore-and-aft rig and headsails. Both are going to have 'Perfect' maneuverability, and probably a base speed of 4 for the launch and 5 for the cutter. Each point of speed is worth 100 ft. of movement per 1-minute round, and speed can be improved by crew efforts. A light cannon would have a range of 300/1200 ft., but if it's forward facing it'd be hard for the launch to keep its distance and keep firing, so the cutter would likely want to board as quickly as possible.

Assuming both ships are aware of each other before they're within firing range, they'll probably want to jockey for position. The captains or their navigators would make initiative checks to determine who gets the upper hand in that jockeying, which might take minutes or hours. The loser gets to determine the rough area of the encounter, and the winner gets to choose where they start relative to the loser (since they'll usually want to be upwind, but an island or something might prevent that). They'd generally start at the range of the farthest weapon, so 12 squares, assuming a light cannon with range 3/12 (each square is 100 ft.). From there, a lot would come down to who wins initiative each round. So each round you might have a PC acting as lookout to try to grant the captain advantage on his initiative check, another PC manning the rigging to help the pilot squeeze out more speed, and maybe one PC doing 'engineering' to try to push the ship's limits or quickly repair damage. Then the pilot needs to decide how close to get. I'd still recommend the GM have *some* sort of interesting environmental elements - maybe a nearby island that might be worth fleeing to, or a setting sun that make spotting from a particular angle harder, or even a pod of whales that might function as difficult terrain.

If the launch tends to win initiative, they might let the cutter close in, then wheel around and fire as they 'joust' past. Every time they did this, the cutter - which is faster and equally nimble - would slowly catch up, but they might get a fair number of shots, which could take out a sail or crack the hull.

If the cutter tends to win, they'd just close the distance to be 'adjacent' (i.e., in adjacent 100-ft. spaces). Then it comes down to opposed Piloting checks to see whether the cutter can actually get close enough to board. If successful, you'd transition to normal tactical combat with the ships within 5 to 20 feet of each other. If the cutter pilot failed, the ships would start 40 to 60 feet apart. I'm still working on the 'small scale maneuvers in tactical combat' rules, but with crew this small it's possible the two sides would be too busy fighting to steer. If the two ships ended a round more than 100 feet apart, you'd switch back to naval scale (probably; it's the GM's discretion).

 

[Ancalagon]

On fantastic vs mundane:

There is a limit to how fantastic things can get with ships and boats though. Sailing vessels are *very* mundane things. In some ways not at all (the romance, the daring, the engineering) but they have very strong constraints and limits, very grounded in reality. The sea does not tolerate fools for long, after all.

So a bit of magic would help definitely - the sails could be fortified, a necromancer could kill weed and barnacles trying to grow on the hull, there could be fire putting-out spells, a familiar being used as a long-range look out etc etc. There is all sorts of ways magic could help sailing, it's not just about lobbing a fireball on the enemy...

BUT

there is a limit.

At one point... where magic is plentiful *and* potent, what the heck are we doing in boats? Why aren't we riding on the backs of pegasus, using magical portals or flying castles?

 

[Ancalagon]

Finally, you don't need magic or bizarre locations for exciting combat.

The following is a REAL EVENT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_of_6_May_1801

The Action of 6 May 1801 was a minor naval engagement between the 32-gun xebec-frigate El Gamo of the Spanish Navy under the command of Don Francisco de Torris and the much smaller 14-gun brig HMS Speedy under the command of Thomas, Lord Cochrane. El Gamo was subsequently captured. The skirmish is notable for the large disparity between the size and firepower of El Gamo and Speedy - the former was around four times the size, had much greater firepower and a crew six times the size of Speedy, which had a reduced crew of 54 at the time of the engagement.

So the Speedy, despite having half the guns (and waaay smaller ones), a smaller ship and a mere fraction of the crew, managed to captured the spanish frigate... Now that's epic.

 

[RangerWickett]

One thing I'm trying to decide is whether to have 'basic rules' and 'advanced rules,' or just put it all in one clump.

Like, I could make it so in the basic rules, wind doesn't matter at all, and ships are either perfectly functional or sinking (just like monsters), and ships can start or stop on a dime. But those little bits of extra complexity add a lot to the narrative of the gameplay, and putting them in another part of the book just makes referencing harder. How much time do you really save by cutting them out?

Would anyone be up for reading what I have so far and providing feedback? It's about 13,000 words.

 

[Lanliss]

One thing I'm trying to decide is whether to have 'basic rules' and 'advanced rules,' or just put it all in one clump.

Like, I could make it so in the basic rules, wind doesn't matter at all, and ships are either perfectly functional or sinking (just like monsters), and ships can start or stop on a dime. But those little bits of extra complexity add a lot to the narrative of the gameplay, and putting them in another part of the book just makes referencing harder. How much time do you really save by cutting them out?

Would anyone be up for reading what I have so far and providing feedback? It's about 13,000 words.

I think you would be best off by having them clumped together, but marked. For example, you can have a little green box like you see in a few of the WoTC books labeled as "Advanced Variant", which gives a quick break down of "If you want more granularity, you might use..."

 

[Ancalagon]

Would anyone be up for reading what I have so far and providing feedback? It's about 13,000 words.

I could, but not immediately - a bit busy this weekend.

 

[Derren]

Finally, you don't need magic or bizarre locations for exciting combat.

The following is a REAL EVENT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_of_6_May_1801



So the Speedy, despite having half the guns (and waaay smaller ones), a smaller ship and a mere fraction of the crew, managed to captured the spanish frigate... Now that's epic.

The question is if the rules will allow for such victories or if the size of the ship is the main deciding factor as the rules are not granular enough to allow for such tactical manoeuvring. Only spells can likely drastically affect the outcome. But what does a party without primary spellcaster, or at least without one who has "naval" spells do? How can they affect the outcome of the combat?

Speaking of spells, how are ships healed? In the excerpt the schooner already lost a lot of HP from 2 hits. In fact a single broadside would have nearly been enough to sink the ship. Mundane repairs usually require a lot of time. Spells can of course work, but again this increases the need for the correct type of spellcaster even more.

Are we talking a launch with oars? I haven't figured out how to handle rowing, precisely.

This is in my opinion rather important. Not only for small scale combat or cutting out expedition but also to use galleys and galleasses.

 

[Voi_D_ragon]

One thing I'm trying to decide is whether to have 'basic rules' and 'advanced rules,' or just put it all in one clump.

Like, I could make it so in the basic rules, wind doesn't matter at all, and ships are either perfectly functional or sinking (just like monsters), and ships can start or stop on a dime. But those little bits of extra complexity add a lot to the narrative of the gameplay, and putting them in another part of the book just makes referencing harder. How much time do you really save by cutting them out?

Would anyone be up for reading what I have so far and providing feedback? It's about 13,000 words.

Hand it over