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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RangerWickett" data-source="post: 7087744" data-attributes="member: 63">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).</blockquote>

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