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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5197730" data-attributes="member: 4937">For 1e, Dragon introduced a Mariner class which was basically a fighting-sailor.  For 3e, because I was used to treating Mariner's as at minimum an important NPC class, I created a generalized 'Explorer' class which was a full BAB skill monkey.  I've been quite happy with it and it really fills a niche that isn't generally filled in most 3e games I've seen.  As far as ship designs go, I'd recommend a trip to your local college library (if you can get access) to research sailing ships.  You'll likely to find a large number of well illustrated books on the great age of sail, replete with the sort of number rich information that gamers love so much.  You'll also get deck plans and the like.  For our ships, we basically ported real world designs directly into the game, replacing cannons of various weights with ballista and mangonels of various classes.  Thus, for example, a 24 gun schooner or a 32 gun ship was translated pretty directly into a number of ballista and light mangonels while a 74 gun ship turned into a number of light, medium, and heavy mangonels.   Of course, this late era modern style navies need not be what you'd default to.  We mainly chose it because it makes for more interesting naval tactics than anything in the 1500 or so years before it.  From the Roman period to the end of the middle ages, the dominate naval tactic was the boarding plank, and battles were fought as basically land battles with marginally mobile land.  If you don't take age of sail as your inspiration, you'll probably end up with alot smaller number of ship classes and functionally no naval tactics other than close and board.   The second best era IMO would be Greek dominated galley warfare, because the Greeks at least had interesting ship-ship naval tactics.   Generally speaking, D&D seems to default toward this as Gygax seemed happier to include anachronistic galley warfare in his psuedo-middle ages than he seemed including the more modern post-gunpower ships.  Galley dominated sea travel however forces you to miss out on all the rich mythic tradition of the great age of sail that dominates our conception of and literature of sea travel - pirates, Moby Dick, etc.</blockquote>

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