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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6286892" data-attributes="member: 4937">Usually because the Captain thought he could substitute intimidation for competence.Have you  read much about pirate codes?  Out in the real world pirates wanted to know up front what they could be punished for and how?  Pirate codes constituted a sort of labor contract.  Perhaps counterintuitively, pirates signing up to serve aboard a ship would insist upon stiff punishment for discharging guns in a hold, sleeping on duty, or becoming drunk on duty.  This is because pirates wanted to come back from their adventures alive, and they knew quite well that a poorly run ship with lax discipline would get them killed.  What they however wanted was some agreement before they got aboard that the Captain would be just and fair.In D&D (and I'd argue in the real world), Intimidation puts the relationship between Captain and crew in an irreversible death spiral.  After you use intimidation to force a crew member to do something, his attitude toward you worsens.  This makes him less likely to obey you in the future per RAW, and means that the next time you order him around the situation gets even worse.  Pretty soon your whole crew is Hostile, and the DM is justified in declaring a mutiny.  I find your description all backwards.  If were have decided to play a game that revolves around ships rather than uses then as scene framing devices, then dealing with the ship in game is what you do all the time.  You've elevated the 'routine stuff' of running a ship to what you do in play - whether this is a Firefly game or a Pirates game.Then if what you really wanted to be was an all around compotent skill monkey and that is the concept you envisioned, perhaps you should have chosen to play a skill monkey instead of a brute with apparantly average intelligence.  After all, not only will the Expert have been running rings around you since 2nd level, in terms of competancy he's still going to be running rings around you at 6th or 10th level as well.    Perhaps you should not be surprised that your mean end up more loyal to that competent 2nd level expert than they do to the swaggering brute that always uses the threat of violence to get his way.  Perhaps if your vision of a character is alround competence, your vision is of something like Indiana Jones and not the muscled German NCO that thrashes him.  If you make a game where skills really matter, instead of a game where every problem can be solved by hitting it with a stick, then perhaps you should be willing to trade +1 BAB for lots of useful abilities.  Perhaps what you really wanted to play was a Rogue all along, if in fact NPC classes like Expert and Aristocrat run circles of competency around you.I'll leave without long discussion the fact that I think the Fighter is poorly constructed in RAW, and that the choice here between fighter and rogue should not be as clear cut as it is.</blockquote>

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