No Naval Rules?

[Aberzanzorax]

Classic Play: The Book of the Sea by Mongoose games

[ame=http://www.amazon.com/Classic-Play-Book-Gareth-Hanrahan/dp/1904577776/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1273752759&sr=1-1]Amazon.com: Classic Play: The Book of the Sea (9781904577775): Gareth Hanrahan: Books[/ame]


Also, Nick Logues' Sinister Adventures Razor Coast is supposed to have this sort of stuff, but it was due out in June 2008 and who knows if it will ever come out (I'm a disgruntled preorderer).

 

[SkidAce]

Loose rules were never the problem. Players and DM's trying to "win" at the expense of everyone else was (and continues to be) the problem. Tighter and more exhaustive rules are no cure for those bent on destroying the fun for everyone else. It can still happen.
By themselves, loose rules allow a playing group to customize the experience of the home game to get exactly what they want.

Quoted for truth...

 

[Achan hiArusa]

Oh, here are my d20 conversions of the Foy articles and Spelljammer ships. I've used a slightly different vehicle building philosophy than the people at Wizards.

 

[The Shaman]

Travel time is presented in miles per day. Tactical movement is given in inches (both on land and in the air). . . . If by "convert" you mean "make something up" — then, yes, you're right. There aren't, however, any actual rules in the DMG for converting miles per hour on the water into inches of tactical movement.

One tabletop inch equals ten yards (1e AD&D PHB, "Distance," p. 39), so 1 mph is about 3 inches per round on the tabletop.

Took me about thirty seconds to write out the conversion factors, and about three seconds to solve it.

Yes, it would've been helpful to have included that information in the DMG, but it's hardly a showstopper if you understand how the rules work together in the first place.

This is a great time to get back to all of those monsters you keep mentioning. Monsters don't have siege attack values.

Actually, they do (1e AD&D DMG, "Siege Attack Values" table, p. 109).

How is damage inflicted by monsters measured in the game? In HPs. So, either Hull Values function like HPs when determining damage from monster attacks or monsters aren't capable of damaging ships. Again, another thing I consider a hallmark of ill considered design.

I'm on my laptop, which means I don't have access to the 1e MM at the moment; I only own it on .pdf, unlike my PHB and DMG which are here next to me. Iirc, however, the rules under animals like giant squid and giant octopus describe how they damage ships, and this is referenced specifically by the DMG (p. 55). Once I get to the .pdf, I can give you a more definitive answer.

Just had a thought. You know how people are always arguing for the return of "loose" rules, where things were more open to individual interpretation, instead of being spelled out in stone? Is this what people have been missing about "loose" rules? Rules-lawyering? If so, I'm not so sure I want "loose" rules to make a comeback.

Or you could just try using the rules as written for the things that are covered and rely on referee intepretation for the things that aren't - provided you actually take the time to understand what the rules cover and how they work in the first place, of course.

 

[Hussar]

There's a few issues with running naval combat in D&D.

• Numbers. This is particularly true in 3e but, it also happens in all editions. Ship combat often features dozens, if not upwards of a hundred combatants. Trying to do that with D&D combat rules is an exercise in dice masterbation. D&D combat is about individuals, or at least pretty small groups. When you start having company sized combats, it takes a really long time to resolve.
  .
• Magic is king. I haven't run 4e, so, I wonder if the 10 square ranges would actually help somewhat here, but, in 3e and earlier, ship combat is entirely dominated by combat. Why would you bother, in 3e for example, to put siege weapons on your ship when a wand of Enlarged Fireball has a range of 1300 feet? It never misses, fires every round and is far, far more devastaing than any ship mounted siege weapon. Never mind what you can do with a Lyre of Building .
  .
• Scale. Ship combat, unlike land based combat, almost always starts at line of sight. We're talking combats starting at a range of miles. It's not difficult to spend a very large amount of time just maneuvering into position and trying to get into range. 5 foot squares are just not going to cut it, nor is 30 foot inches. Not unless you have a REALLY big table.
  .
• What does everyone do? One player is the captain. One is the Pilot. And the other three guys? They sit around and watch the game. Dividing up the responsibilities on a ship is difficult (thought not impossible). It's very easy to fall into the trap of forcing half the players to watch the game for extended periods of time.
  .
• Anachronism. This is one of my own personal bugaboos. So many of the ships depicted in D&D are totally anachronistic. At D&D's presumed level of technology, you're talking caravels, maybe a small carrack like a Nar (what Columbus sailed to the Americas). Crew of maybe twenty, thirty, with enough space for another twenty or thirty people. Fifty is you want to get really, really cozy. Yet, time after time, people are using these Galleons with hundreds of pirates or passengers. Or, as one Scarred Lands supplement had - an English Ship of the Line capable of carrying nearly a thousand (and not out of place during the American Revolution and possibly the Civil War as well). Totally beyond the technology levels D&D is presumed to achieve. Sorry, this one's all me.
  .

I've tried. I really have. I've tried to use 3e and 2e for naval campaigns. It takes a better DM than me to do it.

 

[howandwhy99]

There's a few issues with running naval combat in D&D.

• Numbers. This is particularly true in 3e but, it also happens in all editions. Ship combat often features dozens, if not upwards of a hundred combatants. Trying to do that with D&D combat rules is an exercise in dice masterbation. D&D combat is about individuals, or at least pretty small groups. When you start having company sized combats, it takes a really long time to resolve.

• Mass combat rules pre-AD&D were really quite simple and practically the same as the one-to-one combat rules, so it really doesn't need to be that hard. Just use multiple people per miniature and the PCs' individually, per the actual OD&D rules.
  .
  

  [*]Magic is king. I haven't run 4e, so, I wonder if the 10 square ranges would actually help somewhat here, but, in 3e and earlier, ship combat is entirely dominated by combat. Why would you bother, in 3e for example, to put siege weapons on your ship when a wand of Enlarged Fireball has a range of 1300 feet? It never misses, fires every round and is far, far more devastaing than any ship mounted siege weapon. Never mind what you can do with a Lyre of Building .

  Yeah, 3E was never meant for mass combat or anything but skirmish level encounters and it was too long at that (IMHO).
  
  

  [*]Scale. Ship combat, unlike land based combat, almost always starts at line of sight. We're talking combats starting at a range of miles. It's not difficult to spend a very large amount of time just maneuvering into position and trying to get into range. 5 foot squares are just not going to cut it, nor is 30 foot inches. Not unless you have a REALLY big table.

  I use Wooden Ships & Iron Men and the strategic level is really quite quick. Ramming and boarding is more common than real life with the system, but it helps in bringing the game back to man-to-man encounters. Fun, quick, and has quantifiable resources, so you can balance the encounters with the other things in your game. Like magic, for instance.
  .
  

  [*]What does everyone do? One player is the captain. One is the Pilot. And the other three guys? They sit around and watch the game. Dividing up the responsibilities on a ship is difficult (thought not impossible). It's very easy to fall into the trap of forcing half the players to watch the game for extended periods of time.

  Learning how to work together as a team is one of the most important elements of D&D. So I don't have a problem with this. In terms of NPC rules all of the PCs are the authority, so how the players choose to divvy their order giving up is their task. In terms of player strategies, SOPs work well as do player group appointed sub-roles.
  .
  

  [*]Anachronism. This is one of my own personal bugaboos. So many of the ships depicted in D&D are totally anachronistic. At D&D's presumed level of technology, you're talking caravels, maybe a small carrack like a Nar (what Columbus sailed to the Americas). Crew of maybe twenty, thirty, with enough space for another twenty or thirty people. Fifty is you want to get really, really cozy. Yet, time after time, people are using these Galleons with hundreds of pirates or passengers. Or, as one Scarred Lands supplement had - an English Ship of the Line capable of carrying nearly a thousand (and not out of place during the American Revolution and possibly the Civil War as well). Totally beyond the technology levels D&D is presumed to achieve. Sorry, this one's all me.

  This is a simulationist tendency on your part, I'd say. Sailing ships, like caravels, longships and medieval galleons, were plentiful in the middle ages, but the "age of sailing" wasn't until hundreds of years later. A crew of a hundred or more really didn't exist until ship sizes, designs, and supply holds could manage it. A six-masted ship of the line is right out.
  
  

  I've tried. I really have. I've tried to use 3e and 2e for naval campaigns. It takes a better DM than me to do it.

  I wouldn't use either of those systems. If 4E attempted to make their skirmish game into a naval game, it likely may fail in similar ways. So I agree with you here. But it's possible it could be made to work.

 

[Achan hiArusa]

AD&D had 1 minute rounds so 1" a round would be 1 yard in 6 seconds. There are 1760 yards in a mile and 86,400 seconds in a day (60 x 60 x 24). So it is 1/6 yard/second x 86400 seconds/day x 1/1760 miles/yard = ~8. A ship can travel 24 hours a day.

 

[Silverblade The Ench]

Spelljammer was ok, just needed sime tweaks, see the "War Captain's Companion". if only 2nd ed had "minion" rules, though, sigh

[sblock="My Hammership stat card "]

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[Otterscrubber]

It has always struck me as odd that naval combat (and rules for seafaring in general) tend to be poorly represented in D&D (as well as many other high fantasy RPGs). Maybe it's just because I'm the son of a marine and the grandson of a sailor, hence being raised on many yarns of seafaring adventure, but a lack of good rules for such things always seemed like an extreme oversight to me.

I agree, especially since my group is doing a pirate themed campaign and we have had a few naval fights. So far we have basically been statting out ships like individual creatures: Minions (rowboats with cannons), skirmishers, brutes, controller ships, elites and solos being capital ships or equivalent to ships of the line. This has worked pretty well.

Our DM has allowed out group to search out certain specialized individuals to provide bonuses to our ship stats: Navigator = +1 speed, engineer = Toughness feat for the ship, etc. This has worked reasonably well without having to invent a complicated new system and allowed us to create a "crew" to do some neat stuff with fun roleplay to track down valuable NPCs.

Our ship has leveled with us, and when we needed to make a large leap from a small ship to a big one it was always a cool adventure to make that happen. We are at the end of heroic and in paragon I'm hoping every member of our group will command his own ship and we can run a naval encounter just like a regular one, perhaps do a whole adventure in our ships.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

I do not know which edition of D&D is being alluded to, but once you get into third party publishers there are a lot of choices for naval adventuring in 3.X. Classic Play Book of the Sea can be combined quite nicely with Classic Play Strongholds & Dynasties, giving a fairly quick and well blended combination of land and sea mass combat. When the galleons are reducing the fortifications on land this can be quite useful.

Corsair by Adamant builds on the same rules, and adds quite a bit more detail.

Skull & Bones by Green Ronin is dedicated to piratical plunderin', pillagin, and nefarious deeds.

I never played Twin Crowns by Living Imagination, but it also has naval rules.

Seafarer's Handbook by Fantasy Flight.

Swashbuckling Adventures had Ships & Sea Battles.

While it may have been ignored by the core books naval adventuring was well represented by the third party market - and many of the books I have mentioned were very well done.

The Auld Grump, ships and war seem to be universal themes in my campaigns.