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<blockquote data-quote="FitzTheRuke" data-source="post: 9015533" data-attributes="member: 59816">Like others have said, those rules, as written, are terrible. They are definitely not meant to be used without a lot of handwaving and personalization.I've managed to make the sessions fun in spite of the rules. I had to modify them on the fly to pull it off. They don't really work.I've done both. Theatre of the mind works better, as mostly you'll just be pushing ship-tokens toward each other until they hit. You can do a lot more dynamic action in TotM.They DID, but again, I had to MAKE SURE OF IT. It was a hard fight (in my head, AGAINST the rules to pull it off).I've run them for multiple (I think three, maybe four?) groups of players, all of whom were playing for the first time. ALL of whom wanted to use siege weapons to target enemies directly. The rules don't say. I tend to let players do what they want to do, so I allowed it. DON'T. Make mangonels and ballista only able to target the enemy ship. If you want more granularity, allow them to target parts of the ship (such as weapons or decks) but after damaging the ship, make the crew damage into a 10ft radius AoE &quot;spell-like&quot; effect and have the creatures in the area roll DEX saving throws (dc=8+ weapon attack) for half damage. It's more cinematic and more fun. Do the same in reverse as well.It's better if you move on to &quot;normal&quot; D&amp;D combat as quickly as possible.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="FitzTheRuke, post: 9015533, member: 59816"] Like others have said, [I]those[/I] rules, as written, are terrible. They are definitely not meant to be used without a lot of handwaving and personalization. I've managed to make the sessions fun in spite of the rules. I had to modify them on the fly to pull it off. They don't really work. I've done both. Theatre of the mind works better, as mostly you'll just be pushing ship-tokens toward each other until they hit. You can do a lot more dynamic action in TotM. They DID, but again, I had to MAKE SURE OF IT. It was a hard fight (in my head, AGAINST the rules to pull it off). I've run them for multiple (I think three, maybe four?) groups of players, all of whom were playing for the first time. ALL of whom wanted to use siege weapons to target enemies directly. The rules don't say. I tend to let players do what they want to do, so I allowed it. DON'T. Make mangonels and ballista only able to target the enemy ship. If you want more granularity, allow them to target [I]parts[/I] of the ship (such as weapons or decks) but after damaging the ship, make the crew damage into a 10ft radius AoE "spell-like" effect and have the creatures in the area roll DEX saving throws (dc=8+ weapon attack) for half damage. It's more cinematic and more fun. Do the same in reverse as well. It's better if you move on to "normal" D&D combat as quickly as possible. [/QUOTE]

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