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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 7084314" data-attributes="member: 63">Thanks for the comments and questions.The mechanics I have in mind for cannons is that normal ships have an AC of 15, and a normal gunnery crew has an attack bonus of +3, so most shots either miss or hit areas where damage doesn't actually cause any problems for the target.For a cannon volley, you take five cannons and make one roll with a +10 bonus. If you match the AC, one shot hits, plus an extra shot for every 5 you beat the AC by. Since ships have 'damage thresholds' (detailed in the DMG; it's sorta like hardness), this lets volleys of light cannons actually hurt sturdier ships. It speeds up play, which is what 5e is all about.That said, yeah, 5 shots hitting there is slightly above the curve. The Nergal would be making three attack rolls (d20+15 - crew skill +3, +2 for heave to, +10 for volley) vs. AC 20 (15 +5 for three-quarters cover), with disadvantage for range. You can either get a lucky strike with a nat 20 critical hit, or if an officer directs the firing crew, he can take a -5 penalty to aim at a specific location for a single shot or volley. Rigging, however, takes half damage from most attacks (fire and chain shot do full damage), since there's not as much to hit. Yep, though most of that goes in the 'advanced rules' section. I imagine a lot of groups will just end up on a ship for a single session, and not want to trawl through pages of options they probably won't use.Damaged rigging slows a ship. So if there are rough seas, and shoals you need to avoid, and your rigging is damaged, you'd have disadvantage on the piloting check, and if you succeed you might have spent most of your speed just going through one space. And there's always the GM's prerogative that if the rules don't model what could happen, you can just change things on the fly.I've read Fire As She Bears, and while it does a great job of modeling a lot of granularity in sailing, it slows games down more than I'd enjoy.That's a level of simplicity I'm okay with. Between the competing drives of 'scrape for every possible bonus so I win this game,' and 'keep things fast so I enjoy this story,' I lean in the direction of story.By default, cannons take 1 one-minute naval round to reload. So it's often fire, jockey for position, fire, jockey for position. You can use an officer action to try to reload some cannons faster, but there's a risk of mishap that causes one of your cannons to explode. If the crew is depleted (i.e., at or below half its max HP), it takes an extra round to load.</blockquote>

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